Swan Tower

As in previous years, Patrick Rothfuss is running Worldbuilders, a charity auction/lottery to raise money for Heifer International.

He's been adding prizes in batches, and mine just went live. By donating, your name will go into the lottery, with a chance to win not only copies of Warrior and Witch, but a signed ARC of A Natural History of Dragons. Plus there's, like, a bazillion other awesome prizes -- you can check out the site for more.

Go forth! Donate!

I'll be at a wedding tomorrow, so this is your final heads-up (from me, anyway) that the help_pakistan auctions end tomorrow. Lots of great stuff on offer over there, and a chance to win your own bit of Onyx Court secret history in the name of flood relief. Go forth and do good!

If you've looked at the Onyx Court charity auction, you've seen my note about how I may end up writing a short story from the historical prompt the winner chooses. That was, in fact, the outcome of the original auction, for the Haitian earthquake relief; in writing a summary for the winner, I thought of a way to frame it as a short story. So I wrote it, and I sent it out, and now Beneath Ceaseless Skies has bought it! The story is "Two Pretenders," and I count it as Onyx Court continuity, though it's a bit different in period and tone from the rest of the series. The winner got to read it a while ago, long before the rest of you, so if you want a backstage pass like that (and the pleasure of knowing you were a part of the process), head over there and put your bid in.

Along with that, the last round of book discussion is up over on sirenscon, asking about urban fantasy in a historical context. Previous questions about mortal and faerie love, pov and non-linear time, and the interrelationship of the Onyx Hall with London are still open.

And y'know, yesterday I got this big honkin' box of author copies of A Star Shall Fall, which need to go to good homes. So I'm thinking I might select a random commenter from the sirenscon discussion posts to receive a copy. Add your two cents' worth on one of those four posts (or more, if you feel so inspired), and you might be the lucky winner!

Ten days until A Star Shall Fall hits shelves. The last pre-publication goodie will come in a few days, but I have something else for you: another Onyx Court secret history auction. The help_pakistan community is raising funds for relief after the flooding over there, so I'm offering "authorial fanfic" of the Onyx Court series; you pick the historical person or event, and I tell you what the faeries had to do with it.

(Confidential to CEPetit: if you want an actual story about that thing you mentioned over e-mail, now's the time. <g>)

The auction runs until next Saturday. Unlike previous comms, the offers and bids are entirely conducted as comments to a single post, so I'm currently on page 12; follow the link above to find my offer.

If it goes for the "Buy It Now" price, I may follow up with a second offer. We'll have to see.

Since I know people sometimes miss things posted when they're away from the computer, let me recap: I'm participating in the help_haiti charity auction, offering a bit of Onyx Court history for an event or individual of your choosing. More information here, and bidding here. It's up to $20 already (I'm flattered!), and all going to a very good cause.

1) I mentioned Patrick Rothfuss' "Worldbuilders" charity event for Heifer International before; my own donations went up today, along with a lot of books from some awesome people. For every $10 you donate to the charity, Pat will match $5 and put your name into the drawing at the end. Donate $50, get your name in five times, plus $25 of a matching donation. See other posts on his blog for other great prizes.

2) "The Twa Corbies" is live on Podcastle. I quite enjoyed this reading; Elie Hirschman, who did the voicework for it, is a lot better at the ravens than I am. :-)

3) SF Novelists day again; this time, continuing my discussion of ways authors do female characters wrong, we talk about virgins and whores. Comments for this should be left on the SF Novelists blog; no registration required.

The Mermaid's Madness is out! This is the sequel to The Stepsister Scheme, which was a fun, Charlie's Angels-ish take on the world of fairy tales, with Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White teaming up to save the kingdom. I've been looking forward to seeing the story go on, since I'm a big sucker for that kind of thing. But I'm not allowed to buy the book until I finish my own revisions (which I hope to do before I leave for India next week), so you all should go buy it now to make up for my own delay.

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I posted a while back about Save the Dragons, a crowdfunded novel whose proceeds are going toward paying the quarantine costs for the author's pets, a group of rescue cats and dogs he does not want to abandon when his family emigrates to Australia. That's made good progress so far, but he needs to pull together the remaining money by Christmas, so if you can spare him a few bucks, please do.

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Looks like the Dell Award has a spiffy new webpage! This was the Isaac Asimov Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing back when I won it; the name has changed, but the mission has not. If you're an undergraduate, or a recent graduate (i.e. you left college last spring), you're eligible to submit short stories. If you're neither of these, but you know some college-age SF/F short story writers, pass the word along. It's a great award, and I would recommend it even if I hadn't won.

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A review of the second issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. In discussing "The Waking of Angantyr," the reviewer says "A piece of heroic fantasy starring a woman is a nice surprise." Even after twenty-some-odd Sword and Sorceress anthologies, heroines are still enough of a rarity in that subgenre that they're worthy of comment. I bring this up because it would warm the cockles of my heart to see HFQ get a slew of good stories with female protagonists, so that we can take another little step towards a world where characters like Hervor aren't unexpected.

I forgot to add reasons why you should support Strange Horizons. Let this stand for their worthiness in general:

They publish stories like "Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs."

I meant to post this yesterday: Brenda Novak's Online Auction to Benefit Diabetes Research. It's an annual thing, apparently, and this year they contacted me to see if I'd like to donate. You can find me under Historical Fiction (a signed set of Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie) and Sci Fi and Fantasy (ditto Warrior and Witch), but more to the point, you can also find goodies by lots and lots of people who aren't me. Not all of them are books, either.

The auction is huge, and it all goes to a good cause, so poke your nose on over there and see if you can't find something for you or someone in your life.

I know that now isn't a great time for lots of people to be donating their money to a cause, but I have to give a shout-out to verb_noire, an LJ community dedicated to launching a new small press, one focused on minority characters. So far there's just a comm (I think), but you can donate money to help cover their startup costs, including website design and all the rest. Yes, they've blown past their initial fundraising goal, but I don't imagine more money will go amiss, as it will help them attract attention and hit the ground running.