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.
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:
Thank you all. Deep bow.
I am in the middle of trying to pull together all the editions needed to publish the next Suli book, The Cursed Amulet.
The ARC version is ready to go, but naturally that means PGE will shut off my power for a couple of days (again), so if I want to actually send out newsletters and emails, I have to figure out some other place to be.
This is a better option than death by wildfire, but so far it seems wildfires start just as easily in the areas where the power is off as it does anywhere else. The last outage here (two weeks ago) we had a grass fire on the hills not that far from where I live (see photo above), but because the power was out, no one got a phone notification from the FD or PD or from Calfire.
Including me and I signed up my landline for precisely this reason — so if the cell towers were down I thought I’d still get a phone call. Nuh uh.
Luckily someone in that neighborhood noticed, and folks started knocking on doors in the dark, and blowing car horns.
But there’s not much point in my grumbling when most of the state is in the same fix, and people are losing their homes in Sonoma and SoCal. It’s eerie here because so many folks have left. The smoke is getting pretty oppressive, too, and that may be what forces me to leave if the power isn’t back on within 24 hours. No power = no HVAC filters (and no hot water for coffee. Must acquire camping equipment.)
The final final version of the book attends the proofreader’s leisure, but if you’d like a fairly well edited advanced reader copy in exchange for a review, let me know.
I’ll be excited about it again when I’ve survived natural disasters and software I use so rarely I’ve forgotten how.
I discovered recently that my book, which is available to libraries as an ebook through Overdrive, is now part of the collection at Oakland (CA) public library. This makes me so happy. I have been a patron of the OPL libraries for most of my adult life. Also, for reasons I don’t fully understand, it seems to be having a positive effect on sales.
So thank you, anonymous librarian who added me to the collection! Maybe I met you at a conference and don’t remember. Drop me a note if you see this so I can aim my gratitude to the right person.
I also love bringing my used books to the Bookmark Bookstore, run by Friends of the Oakland Public Library, because I know they will find good homes, AND that those sorting through them will recognize good stuff to add to the collection (not always a sure thing.) You can contact the Bookmark Bookstore at 510-444-0473 or visit them at www.fopl.org. Donations support library collections!
I first moved to Oakland when I was an UG at Bezerkeley, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. I’ve lived there off and on, but always seem to return. I love Lake Merritt, and the amazing wildlife, human and animal, that hangs out there.
Did you know Lake Merritt is the oldest wildlife refuge in California (1869)? Amazing birds. And bonsai garden. And a sensory garden, And a Japanese garden. And a palm garden. And gondolas. And…geese.
So yes, I am familiar with the less savory attributes of geese, dear readers.
Amazon took down one of my reviews for reasons known only to them. The more I interact with their services, the more random and irrational their algorithms appear to be. I’d say this was a good argument for postponing the advent of our robot masters as long as possible. Life is random enough just dealing with humans.
But it balances out, because a great reviewer of kids’ books has just posted a review of my book on her blog, Cover2Cover, where you can check it out. Thank you, Stephanie!
Update July 21, 2018: As far as I can tell, the review was taken down because that review was written by someone I had a link to from my FB professional author page (which I don’t use, BTW.) Really, is FB anything other than a way for tech giants to spy on us and collect our data?
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.
Mary Robinette Kowal is very kindly hosting my essay about my favorite bit in The Third Kind of Magic on her website. The essay is about how certain essays in Le Guin’s Cheek by Jowl helped me understand what I was trying to do, enabling me to finish it.
The only time I had a conversation with Ms. Le Guin, at a book signing, we coincidentally talked about dragons. It was after a panel at a Book Expo in SF and for reasons I can’t precisely remember, the audience was not best pleased by what she had said about dragons in other books. (I suspect she was implying Smaug had barely scratched the surface of what dragons could be, which would hardly be controversial nowadays, so it was probably just the idea of criticizing the Master…)
The full essay is here.
Let me know what you think.
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.)
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!”
It’s been a long haul, but after a thorough copy-edit by the illustrious speculative fiction writer and hardcore editor, Laura Blackwell, or She Who Requires Commas, as I shall call her henceforth, this baby is ready to spread her wings and fly.
Which is appropriate because the book is about a 12 year-old girl who talks to crows…and learns to fly.
I just had to crow a little myself, that it was finally done.