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.

“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.

The proof is in the pudding

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.

Dragons with attitude

More Middle-grade adventures

I’ve been spending time reading through the best-selling Wings of Fire series by Tui T. Sutherland. Very entertaining, and great examples of story-telling craft.

Narrative voice and well-defined characters are why these books are so successful. Sutherland clearly lays out “here’s this character’s temperament, attitude, goals” and you know by the end of the story the crises will directly challenge all of those things.

I have enjoyed all of the books so far but I didn’t *like* all the main characters. Some I like a lot more than others, and I suspect the author did too. That, to me, is actually the most interesting aspect of the series, because it tells me what I as a reader wanted from the story. And what makes a successful hero.

I should explain that each book is told from a different character’s point of view. So you may really love one character, but boom, in the next book you have to identify with a new one.

I want courage and heroism and character growth if I am going to identify with the point of view character. If they’re cowardly, betray their friends, refuse to help others in need, then I don’t want to identify with them. And yet some of these characters do just that. I was shaking my head, wondering why we had to go there. Sure, it leaves a lot of room for character development, but it also leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Who gets to be a hero?

And yet my favorite character in the series so far is a mass murderer. There’s a lot of violence in the series, and I am ambivalent about it. But it doesn’t seem to have the same impact as it would if these were human characters. Dragons are naturally violent; or so the dragons invested in the ongoing war claim. Our heroes don’t agree with this familiar human argument.

Peril burns everything she touches; she can’t help it, it was the way she was born. An evil queen uses her as a weapon of punishment. Peril obeys her because she doesn’t know any better, until someone points out she doesn’t have to do this, that she could choose something else. How do you stop being a weapon of mass destruction? Now that’s a moral journey.

This happens in the first book of the series. When we get to Peril’s own book, we see her attempts to change who she is, as she tries to figure out how to be a good, likable dragon, even though most dragons shun her, hating her for what’s she’s done in the past.

Peril says what other people think but would never say out loud. She’s rude, blunt, and funny. She’s also smart. We don’t mind identifying with her — she’s trying, she helps others, she would do anything for the dragon she’s besotted with, and in the end she proves she really has changed, because of the choices she makes.

Peril’s character is transgressive – she doesn’t bother to be socially appropriate and polite, because that’s not going to work for her anyway. She will never be ‘acceptable.’ And we can vicariously enjoy being rude and dangerous and courageous at the same time.

She’s a great hero. I just wish she’d come back in another book.

It’s the end of the world, and I feel fine

Summer is just about over, but we still have some middle-grade adventures to complete!

I wasn’t initially enthusiastic about the concept for City of Ember, because I have read a lot of survival after the end of the world stories. But the author was profiled in the local newspaper and I was intrigued by the story of how she came to write it, and it’s not a dystopia.

I was charmed when I began reading it. The book reminded me of Robinson Crusoe, with that exacting level of detail of how people live, what they eat (potatoes and turnips), and what they wear. For them it’s entirely normal to live with no sky, and with lights that go out at a certain time of night. The emotional heart of the story are the explorations of two young people finding their way in the world, when everything is an adventure, not gloom and doom. Although there’s plenty of gloom when the lights go out. And of course the satisfying middle grade trope of adults in power being a threat, even to themselves.

I wanted to find out how the kids would get out of their predicament, and what had caused it (being of the duck-and-cover generation, I naturally assumed nuclear war) and by the end of the book I still don’t know why the underground city was built, or why they had to stay there for several hundred years. Apparently I must read the next book, The People of Sparks.

Our brains are wired to look for experiences that will help us survive; maybe that’s why we never tire of imagining what we’d do when the apocalypse finally comes. I recommend the book, especially for younger readers, because there’s nothing too scary in it, yet the suspense is satisfying.

Diana Wynne Jones’ Last Book

The next book in my middle-grade adventures is a book that was left unfinished at the time of the author’s death. I was absolutely thrilled to find a new book by Diana Wynne Jones on the shelves of my local library.

It’s sad we won’t have any more adventures from Ms. Jones, a wonderful storyteller, but this last book, finished by her sister, Ursula Jones, is a great read, with all the surprises and inventiveness you’d expect. The afterword, describing how the book was finished was marvelous, too. This reader saw no indication that anyone besides the original author had written any part of it, a great tribute to the care and inspiration of Ursula Jones.

The Islands of Chaldea tells the tale of Aileen, a twelve-year-old girl who thinks she hasn’t inherited any magical powers, causing inevitable disappointment to her magical family. Her aunt Beck, the Wise Woman of Skarr, has been raising her and its about time for those powers to manifest. Aileen’s island and her life have been disrupted by a magical barrier that keeps anyone from approaching one of the islands of the title. Unfortunately, her father and her country’s prince in waiting were both taken hostage and hidden behind the barrier. Aileen and her aunt set out on a quest to free the hostages and lower the barrier, traveling from island to island and meeting interesting characters and magical figures along the way. With magic a common occurrence, nothing is ever as it seems, and as usual in one of Diana Wynne Jones’ books, you can’t anticipate what will happen, although you know in the end Aileen will make a difference, and the hostages will be freed.

I thoroughly enjoyed this lovely tale about a girl reclaiming her family and claiming her power by seeing through the intrigue and lies of the adults around her. Highly recommended.

Egyptian curses and a very smart girl

First up in my middle-grade adventures is the first book in the Theodosia series by R.L. La Fevers, titled Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos. The settings alternate between Victorian London and Egypt, and the author clearly knows her ancient Egyptian history and magic (with some liberties taken to create scary situations).

I’ve actually read all four books in the series now (can I get a sticker?) and am a little disappointed there aren’t more, although the last book did provide satisfying closure for secrets and questions revealed in the earlier books.

Our feisty heroine, Theodosia, has several secrets she’s trying to keep from her not terribly attentive parents, all the while hoping to gain their attention and approval. Luckily she’s resourceful, brave, and takes matters into her own hands to protect the people around her when they clearly can’t do it for themselves.

Her father runs a Museum in London, its collections in competition with those of the British Museum. Her mother is absent at the start of the first book; as a professional archaeologist, she’s off on a dig in Egypt and is sending back artifacts for the museum. Unfortunately, only Theodosia can tell when an artifact has a curse on it, and she’s devised several ways to test for this, and to counteract such spells.

She can’t explain her abilities to her parents because they simply don’t believe her and worry that she’s “peculiar.”

So when she finds she’s the target of an evil secret society (the Serpents of Chaos) bent on using magic to throw the world into Chaos and start another world war, she must hide her skills, her meetings with allies, and the real reason strange things are happening around her.

It’s left to Theodosia, and her friend Sticky Will to meet the threat of these sinister forces, since the adults have trouble believing what they see, and never quite grasp the dangers that threaten the children.

What I love most about these books is the narrative voice of Theodosia. She’s smart, assertive, and has strong opinions without that snarkiness that seems to be the bane of contemporary kidlit. LaFevers also convinces me that the narrator is British, and her word choice is appropriate for the period, with nary an anachronism. I enjoyed spending time with this smart, unappreciated child who has rollicking adventures while employing ancient magic.

Highly recommended. A girl-centered world of magic with fast pacing and suspense. My candidate for a great adventure movie for girls.

(Image Credit: A wedjat eye of Horus, an amulet of protection from the Metropolitan Museum of NY. The wedjat eye is important throughout all the Theodosia books.)

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.

My essay is up at “My Favorite Bit”

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.

Something to cheer us all up

Last week was really, really hard. I am not even sure why, except for a horrible confluence of problems with getting my taxes done (other people) and work (other people) and suddenly the phone ringing off the hook with people wanting stuff (other people)! There may be a pattern here.

I still feel a bit peaky this week and need cheering up. Here’s a link to a lovely essay by Ms. Ursula K. LeGuin, one of my favorite writers, wherein she explains why she is a man. This is something all of us of a certain age understand.

So when I was born, there actually were only men. People were men. They all had one pronoun, his pronoun; so that’s who I am. I am him, as in “If anybody needs to throw up he will have to do it in his hat,” or “A writer knows which side his bread is buttered on.” That’s me, the writer, him. I am a man.

Introducing Myself (pdf) by U.K. Le Guin.

Available in The Wave in the Mind, Shambhala, 2004.

Please breathe deeply and enjoy.

(Photo Dan Tuffs/Getty)