an update to the Clockwork Phoenix e-book

I should have procrastinated just a bit longer before posting this. ;-) If you can't or don't want to go the Kindle route, you can now buy the Clockwork Phoenix e-book from Weightless Books, in epub or mobi formats, at the same price.

The DWJ Project: Cart and Cwidder

This is the first book of the Dalemark Quartet, which I know I read many years ago, but out of order and sufficiently spaced out that I don't think I realized at the time the books made up a set.

In part, this is because -- although I've afterwards thought of them as a Proper Series -- these books are no more closely linked than, say, Howl's Moving Castle and Castle in the Air. They take place in the same setting, and maybe once I get further on (I'm in the process of re-reading Drowned Ammet right now) there will be more immediate linkages, but so far there's no sense in which any of these books is a direct sequel to one before. (The exception may come in The Crown of Dalemark, which I want to say builds on all three of its predecessors. Then again, I haven't read the thing in probably twenty years, so my instinct is not what you'd call reliable.)

The other reason I didn't notice, the first (and I think only) time I read these books, that they belonged together, was because . . . they never really made an impression on me. I know some people love the Dalemark series; there are a number of Yuletide requests for it this year. Glancing at them, though, they all seem to be for later books: I didn't see a single one for Cart and Cwidder, though I might have overlooked it. I think it's entirely possible I'll like the later ones better -- Drowned Ammet is already off to a better start -- but yeah, this one didn't do a lot for me. It's one of the earlier books, published in 1975, and it feels like it never quite hit its stride.

Before I get to unpacking that, though, a plot summary. The title refers to the fact that the protagonist, Moril, belongs to a family of traveling singers; they travel in a cart, and he and his father both play the cwidder, which is (as near as I can tell) a made-up stringed instrument, or maybe just a made-up name for a stringed instrument. ("Cwidder" is a reasonably plausible morph of "guitar," to my eye, though the image on my book cover looks more like a lute.) They're traveling in the South Dales, which suffer under a repressive set of earls, and trying to make their way to the North Dales, where Moril and the other children were born, and people can live free.

Now we can move on to the spoilers.

( And the LJ-cut to hide them. )

. . . I can tell I'm starting to tire out on this project; it's been eight months and thirty-one books, and I still have a little way to go. But I'm near enough to the end that I want to finish by the anniversary of her death. I'll do the rest of Dalemark this month, and then there will be only ten more books left (eight novels and the remainder of two short story collections). And I've saved a few of my second-tier favorites for nearly last. :-)