Holiday gift giving is upon us!

Don’t know about you, but I tend to ignore most of the marketing in my inbox, most of the time.

So here’s a blog post for intrepid souls who have ventured this far into my lair.

This week is marketing week, to get the word out before the supply chain for printing books is overwhelmed. Here’s your reminder (for anyone new to my site or my newsletter) that I have 3 kid-appropriate books available that would make great gifts.

The Crow Magic series follows the adventures of a young girl who discovers that not only does she have magical powers she must learn to control, she inherited the ability to shape shift as well. During her second adventure, she is joined by a young girl who has abilities Suli has never heard of, but which are key to restoring the magic to their world.

The third book, The Wharf Rat Guild,is appropriate for slightly older teens and adults, with a fifteen-year-old protagonist who also has unusual abilities. It’s based on the true history of the Restoration period in England, a time when “surplus labor” and radical ideas of liberty, freedom, and democracy were the cargo exported to the new world.

Russian readers?

Cover of The Third Kind of Magic with Russian title

I am thrilled to announce that The Third Kind of Magic is now available from the largest Russian publisher of children’s books, EKSMO. The second Crow Magic book, The Cursed Amulet will be published in Russian soon! It was a long process, and I learned a lot about publishing (and auto-translation of emails) along the way.

If you read Russian, or know someone who does, visit the link below.

Book 24 website

“Oh, just one more thing…”

Lately my life has been a Columbo episode. Just one d### thing after the other.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back the water, just when you thought that pesky morphing alien was dead, just when you were sure that the vampire had a stake through its heart, just when you thought Gojira had sunk to the bottom of the ocean…something gruesome lifts its slimy head and…the to-do list gets longer. Again.

I am talking about getting a book out the door, and the pesky tasks that happen in its wake. I think I’ve swept all the broken glass from the floor, but be careful where you step.

I need to say a big sparkly heroic THANK YOU to all the folks who’ve helped me on the way. Here’s the list:

For services above and beyond the call of duty, my beta reader extraordinaire, Bryan-Kirk Reinhardt. Not only did he read more than one draft, he cheerfully said he’d do it again.
Laura Blackwell, the copy-editor on The Third Kind of Magic, who didn’t work on this last book but whose suggestions I absolutely took to heart for the second. (All extra commas and British spellings are my own.)
Julie Dillon, the cover illustrator, who brought older Suli and her gang of friends to life and accepted my passion for purple without a murmur.
Mary Auxier, the copy-editor who turned around the copy edit on The Cursed Amulet well before the promised date, and pointed out where logic was missing or stuff just didn’t work. Painful, but much appreciated.
Robin J. Samuels, who did the final proofread and made my revisions so much better.
David Blatner, who doesn’t know me from Adam, but whose lynda.com tutorial on book covers in InDesign has saved my life a couple of times. Thank you for making life-saving videos free, David!
I have to thank my Russian publisher, EKSMO, because if they hadn’t insisted I provide them with a sequel,”and when can we have it?”, I probably wouldn’t have prioritized the half-finished ms.
The crows in the local park who have advised me on questions of Crow protocol and laws.
And last but never least, all the fans and reviewers of the first book who posted reviews and emailed me to tell me they liked the first book and why. Words can’t express how much it meant to me to receive that encouragement.

Thank you all. Deep bow.

My book just received a wonderful review

Okay, normally boasting about a positive review is not good form, right? And this person is someone I know, so you could argue she’s biased. But…. she’s also a well-known, professional reviewer in the SF/F community and she wouldn’t risk her rep by saying she liked something if she didn’t.

Brief quote:

“All in all I thought this was a delightful read and I think kids of both sexes between eleven and fourteen would be immersed in it.”

Read more on her blog, which happens to be a great place to learn about books, stories, tv shows, and more importantly, the place to read her stories. That’s how I first met her — at a writing conference where I got to read a story she wrote that blew me away. She’s indefatigable.

Crow Lore # 3

Spring has sprung, and around here, the crows are busy gathering materials for their nests. It’s fun to watch them maneuver on the ground and in the air with their mouths stuffed full of grass or twigs or whatever else looks useful to them. They have that,’don’t bother me, I’m busy’ air about them, and don’t fly away so quickly when approached by clumsier, land-bound bipeds.

Like many social animals, crow offspring stay with their parents for a few years and help raise their younger siblings. Even when they move on and are no longer living with them, they will come back for visits and help out with finding food and predator defense.

Crow parents mate for life, and their families stick together too, especially during the breeding season and summer months. In the winter, large groups of crows forage for food and roost together at night. Seems like the best of both worlds: having a community to help with food finding and defense in the winter when times are harder, and then breaking up into families to provide more devoted attention to offspring when food is easier and the weather’s not so great a threat.

Kevin McGowan studies crows in the Ithaca area around Cornell in upstate New York (where the winters are brutal) and despite years of observation and banding, he’s still not certain how far crow offspring travel away to create new territories for themselves. It’s hard to study animals that can fly when you can’t.

Go outside and look around. If you pay attention, I bet you’ll find crows and other birds busy getting ready for their new families.

Crow Lore #2

At least two of the definitions used to separate humans from other animals that were common when I was a baby anthropology major have since fallen by the wayside.

The first to go was the idea that our species was the only tool-using species. Of course, research on chimpanzees, dolphins, even dung beetles, suggested maybe that was too easy a definition. Meanwhile, the crows were sitting back and laughing at us.

The other rubric, which seemed even more persuasive, was our effortless, embedded capacity for language. But there’s growing evidence that other species have something very like language, and in fact it may be our own lack of precise observations that led us to that conclusion (also the difficulty of observing animals who swim and fly).

Crows speak in dialects, and they change their pronunciations when they move to join a new group so they’ll fit in. According to ornithologist John M. Marzluff and author Tony Angell (In the Company of Crows and Ravens) their calls “vary regionally, like human dialects that can vary from valley to valley,” and “When crows join a new flock,” they wrote, “they learn the flock’s dialect by mimicking the calls of dominant flock members.” Crows have popular kids, too.

Listen to crow calls here.
What do they mean?

(Thank you Cornell ornithology lab.)

Crow Lore #1

In honor of Coalfeather and Kaark, two characters in The Third Kind of Magic,
I will be posting about crows today. Because you can never know too much about crows.

Crows routinely take on hawks, vultures, raptors of all kinds.
I’ve seen them attack the local hawks around nesting time several times, especially on the high power lines where there seems to be some jockeying for territory.

It’s T-minus 11 hours and counting

The Crow book launches in about 11 hours, at least for the Pacific Coast. It will be earlier/later in other time zones, (I think Australia will actually go on sale later today) but this is the one I’ll track, because it’s all moonshine anyway until there’s a sale somewhere, and it’s all I can do to keep track of GMT with silly daylight savings putting us back on a war footing for no good reason.

All I can think about is all the stuff that was supposed to be done by now and isn’t, since I’ve had to scramble to find someone else to do my taxes this year after the first guy unexpectedly bowed out. But we shall perservere.

And that’s incentive to get everything done this weekend, right? The rain will help.
I will be doing a little bit of tweeting and FB posts, and will try to be as un-annoying as possible.
I know how that can boomerang – (“I don’t know you but I dislike you because you keep tweeting about your &^$# book!”)

We’ll see how tasteful I can be while saying “look at my book!”