Holiday gift giving is upon us!

book covers of the crow magic series

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

You lose one, you win one?

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?

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.