Swan Tower

After two years out of print, I am delighted to say that A Star Shall Fall is back in print! And I do mean print; at that link you will find both ebook and paperback editions. Faeries, dragons, English history, Halley's Comet . . . I have to say, it's been delightful revisiting my old haunts to prepare this edition.

With Fate Conspire will follow in May, and then the set will be complete once more!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/lvPfvg)

It's 5 p.m. somewhere, right?

A few days ago the Tome and Tankard blog posted their recipe for the "Lady Trent," a mojito-like cocktail inspired by the Memoirs of Lady Trent. Our first attempt at making it here at Swan Tower was not entirely successful; it turns out we need to be a lot more conscientious about mixing the honey into the gin before adding other things, lest we wind up with a glob of honey stuck all over with mint leaves. :-) But the general shape of the cocktail is a great deal like the "Jimi Hendrix" I asked the internet to help me recreate a while back, so even in less-than-entirely-successful form, I give this one an official thumbs-up.

And for those of you who cannot or do not wish to partake of the booze, I thought I could post the recipe a reader designed years ago for the launch party of A Star Shall Fall. It's called the Winged Serpent Philter, and it's made as follows:

• Blueberry juice
  
• Fresh blueberries
  
• Lime
  
• Lime infused sparkling water
  
• Honey
  
• Granulated Sugar
  

In a small bowl, mix two parts water and one part honey. Coat the blueberries (three or four per drink to be served) in the honey water mixture and immediately roll in granulated sugar. Allow to dry. Dip the rim of a martini glass in the honey water mixture and then into granulated sugar to coat the rim. Mix three parts blueberry juice to one part sparking water with a dash of lime juice (all liquids should be chilled). For a sweeter flavor, omit lime juice. Pour into the martini glass. Put three or four sugar coated blueberries on a garnish pick and hang on the rim of the glass. Add a curl of lime peel. Serve promptly.

Enjoy!

Quoting just the key bits:

Brennan explores the power of memory, self-realization, and destiny in this mix of survival story and self-discovery tale. […] Brennan delights readers with this exciting, fast-paced start to a fantasy novella series.

Cold-Forged Flame will be out on September 13th. (As will the UK edition of A Star Shall Fall, as it happens.) I can’t wait!

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Just as a reminder, the "Con or Bust" auctions close this Sunday. Bidding on the double-signed copy of A Natural History of Dragons (autographed by both me and Todd Lockwood, with a bonus sketch from him) is up to $48, while A Star Shall Fall is at $15 and With Fate Conspire is at $20. Proceeds go to a good cause, and the books don't suck either, if I do say so myself. ;-)

I've been very absent from here lately due to busy-ness and illness; KublaCon was last weekend, and kniedzw and I ran our one-shot LARP, which went very well I think, but now I have Con Crud and that isn't much fun. Especially since I have work I need to do.

But! I am breaking radio silence to say that I've gotten the page proofs for the mass-market edition of A Star Shall Fall. This is my chance to correct any errors that made it through me, my editor, me again, my copy-editor, me again, my proofreader, and me yet again in the trade paperback edition -- and believe me, there are some. I know of two instances of a duplicated word ("an an" in both cases), and one place where the line "Galen's mouth gone dry" is missing the word "had," and the arithmetic error on page 171. If you've spotted any others, please let me know!

First: it's the sixteenth, and that means I'm over at SF Novelists again. This time I'm continuing my points from last month, with "Competence is hot, part two."

Second: the same guy who does the Page 69 thing also had me contribute to My Book, the Movie (reposted over here). Long-time readers of this journal may recall that I've been on that blog previously, when I talked about my mental castings for Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie; this time I update it with A Star Shall Fall and With Fate Conspire.

And third: if you're going to be at FOGcon, then a) so am I and b) I'm also going to be one of the critiquers in the writing workshop, along with David Levine and Cassie Alexander. I don't know when signup for that closes, but I believe you still have time to join, if that's your cup of tea.

Since I'm combining things here, I'll leave comments open -- but on the competence thing, please do go leave your thoughts over on the SF Novelists site, rather than here. No login required, but if you're a first-time commenter please give me a little while to fish it out of the moderation queue.

#TorChat on Twitter starts in an hour or so; I'm @swan_tower there, and will be fielding questions about steampunk and With Fate Conspire.

Also, you've got about twelve hours to enter the giveaway for A Star Shall Fall over on GoodReads.

Looks like Tor is doing a giveaway for A Star Shall Fall on their site. All you have to do is leave a comment on that post there. So if you're looking to pick up the book, go forth and comment! (They're actually giving away three copies, it looks like.)

Also, in Fate-related news, this in from the Romantic Time review: "Appealing characters, a fully realized historical setting and more than a touch of steampunk flavoring collide to create a book that is difficult to put down." So that's pretty good.

And now I go back to preparing for my trip.

It occurs to me I never put up an open book thread for A Star Shall Fall. So, as I beat my head against this bloody short story, feel free to comment here with any questions you wanted to ask or observations you wanted to share. Spoilers for this book are, of course, a given; there may also be spoilers for Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie (or for that matter the short stories), so be warned.

(I may also answer questions about With Fate Conspire, but only if I feel like it. No, I won't tell you how it ends. Or whether your favorite character is going to die.)

Tonight I leave on my third trip of the month, this one to World Fantasy. The weird thing is, it's the first time this month I'll be flying on my own dime; the first trip was my GoH gig at Sirens, and the second . . . last weekend, my publisher sent me here:

About a stone's throw from the Kodak Theatre, no less. But it isn't nearly as exciting as you think.

I was not there to meet with a high-powered Hollywood producer about how they want to pay me lots of money to film one of my books. I was there, instead, for the Southern California Independent Booksellers' Association annual meeting. This is an industry event that brings writers in to schmooze over dinner with staff from local independent bookstores. I'd never done one before, so it was interesting; the authors got fed beforehand, so we wouldn't have to choose between talking and eating (or end up talking with our mouths full), and then during everybody else's meal we got shuttled from table to table, chatting up the people there.

Serendipity was my friend at this event. Not on the travel side -- two-hour flight delay on the way there, three-hour on the way back, for a flight that's a little more than an hour long -- but with the new friends I made. I got to the hotel just in time to fling myself into nicer clothing and run downstairs, whereupon I got my registration and stood trying to catch my breath, wondering if I would have anything other than the basics in common with the other writers there. (They come from all corners of publishing, nonfiction as well as fiction, children's picture books to adult.) But lo, I was not standing a full minute before I heard the phrase "historical fiction" come from two women nearby.

I drifted closer.

Then I heard Newton's name.

I drifted closer still.

Ended up with two new friends. One was a writer of historical fiction, Laurel Corona, who's bopped all around the timeline even more than I have; her most recent book, Penelope's Daughter, is set in Homeric Greece, and her next involves an eighteenth-century mathematician, Émilie du Châtelet. The other, Deborah Harkness, is (if memory serves) a professor of history whose debut novel A Discovery of Witches will be coming out soon; it's about a researcher at the Bodleian Library who comes across an alchemical manuscript that gets her into all sorts of trouble. Oh, and Deborah's a giant Tudor geek, too.

Nah, we didn't have anything to talk about.

Best part was, Deborah was at my third table, and so were two women currently reading her novel and loving it. And the table host was a big SF/F fan. So I spent the dessert course geeking about alchemy and how Newton was a complete jackass. Friends, this is what we call success.

Anyway, that was my Hollywood adventure. Now I go off to the much colder environs of Columbus, Ohio. Send me warm thoughts . . . .