Swan Tower

Novel

• The Market of 100 Fortunes (concluding my Legend of the Five Rings trilogy)
  

Short stories

• *"Embers Burning in the Night" (free to read online)
  
• "Any Rose My Mother Raised, Any Lane My Father Knows" (free to read online)
  
• "Dead Man's Map"
  
• "Legio XVII Inquieta"
  

Flash fiction

• "In the Paradise of the Pure Land" (free to read online)
  
• "Ten Minutes" (free to read online)
  

Poetry

• "Draco Urbis"
  
• "To the Angels Alone" (free to read online)
  
• *"A War of Words" (free to read online)
  

Collection

• A Breviary of Fire (gathers up most of my folklore and mythology-based stories)
  

Nonfiction

• New Worlds, Year Seven (latest Patreon volume)
  

• "Cruel Sisters" at Daily Science Fiction (wherein I deal with a continuity error in a folksong), and
  
• "The City of the Tree" at Uncanny Magazine (wherein I explore a different corner of the world of the Varekai novellas).
  

For those of you who nominate for awards (or just want a reminder of what I’ve been up to lately), herewith my publications in 2019!

Novel
Turning Darkness Into Light

Novella
The Eternal Knot

Novelette
“La Molejera”, Cirsova Magazine

Short stories
“Vīs Dēlendī,” Uncanny Magazine
“On the Impurity of Dragon-kind,” Uncanny Magazine
“This Is How,” Strange Horizons
“Sankalpa,” Beneath Ceaseless Skies

. . . it turns out that writing more short fiction leads to selling more short fiction. Who knew?

Non-fiction
New Worlds, Year Two

I also published two collections, one of which is theoretically eligible for awards, as all but one piece in it is original? But since the total word count of Never After is small enough to fit into the short story category, I suspect that if there are any lower limits on the length of collections for award purposes, it’s fallen well beneath them. And The Nine Lands is all reprints.

(In theory my Legend of the Five Rings short stories are also eligible. But given that they’re part of a larger ongoing story written by many hands, and they’re only published through the game’s website, I figure there’s not much point in listing them. You’re either following the L5R story or not; nobody’s going to get much by dipping in and only reading the bits I’ve done.)

BTW, my impression is that the addition of Turning Darkness Into Light and “On the Impurity of Dragon-kind” is not enough to re-qualify the Memoirs of Lady Trent for the Best Series Hugo. (Someone brought that up at my Borderlands reading.) If I’m wrong about that, though, do let me know!

Those of you who were at Borderlands on Saturday already heard this; now I reveal it to the rest of the world.

Many people have pleaded for the Memoirs of Lady Trent to continue. I have always responded by saying the series was planned to be five books from the start, that I had a set arc in mind that I wanted to tell, and that having brought that to a close, I am done.

That’s still true.

. . . but it doesn’t preclude other stories in that world.

I don’t have a good working title for this yet, but my next novel will be the story of Isabella’s granddaughter, rapacious private art collectors, black market antiquities smugglers, and the translation of a lost epic from the Draconean civilization. The book will be structured like a mosaic novel, interspersing segments of the epic with the lives of the people translating it, as recorded in diary entries, letters, newspaper articles, and more. So it will once again have the intellectual rigor of Lady Trent’s memoirs (this time aimed in a predominantly linguistic direction), the pulpy adventure of its time period (the antiquities market is a lot more colorful than you might think), and the meta-textual setup that lets the heroine’s voice come through so clearly. Plus, the epic will let me put on my folklorist hat with full panoply of ribbons and bells and run cackling down the streets make good use of my folklore background: my research right now consists of reading or re-reading the Mahabharata, Epic of Gilgamesh, Popol Vuh, and more.

This idea is literally less than two months old. At the Tucson Festival of Books in early March, someone asked me a question about other books set in the world of the Memoirs, and inspiration mugged me out of nowhere. Over the next couple of days it morphed around a bit until it arrived in this form, at which point I pitched it to my editor, saying, “I really think this is what I ought to be doing next.” She agreed, so here we are: setting a personal record for shortest time elapsed from “huh, there’s an idea” to “okay, let’s do this!”

So now you know. And now I need to go read the world’s collection of epics to gather material. 😀

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

There are certain kinds of transition scenes I detest writing. One of them is the “holy shit, the supernatural is real!” scene common to so much urban fantasy; it was a source of great pleasure to me that I could more or less skip that scene in Midnight Never Come, on the grounds that the reaction of a sixteenth-century gentleman would not so much be “there are faeries under London?” as “there are faeries under London?” (You’ll note that nearly every pov character for the remainder of the Onyx Court series already knew about the fae by the time they showed up in the story. This was not deliberate, in the sense of being a thing I consciously decided to do . . . but I wouldn’t call it an accident, either. The sole exception that leaps to mind is Jack Ellin, and I had more than enough going on in the story to divert him, and me, while that transition happened.) It’s boring to me because the audience already knows the supernatural is real (or at the very least has no reason to be surprised by this fact), and we’ve seen that conversation so many times, making it fresh is really difficult. Your main hope is to undermine it in some fashion, like the time on Buffy when they told Oz vampires and demons were real. “I know it’s a lot to take in –” “Actually, that explains a lot.”

I’m dealing with a similar kind of thing in the fifth Memoir right now. The scene isn’t about the supernatural being real; it’s a different kind of transition, one I don’t really have a name for. And of course I can’t get into specifics, but it’s one of those deals where something very complicated is going on, only the complication is of a type that doesn’t actually make for great narrative. After the initial drama of the moment is over, there’s a lot of explaining that needs to happen, and a lot of very tedious suspicion that can’t be laid to rest with the right words or a single decisive action. Inside the story, the whole thing is going to drag on for days — probably for weeks. Making the reader sit through all of that would be dire, starting with the fact that I would have to write all of that.

It’s at moments like these when I love the retrospective, consciously-framed first person viewpoint of this series. Because I can 100% get away with Isabella saying “what followed was very tedious and dragged on for weeks, because there was nothing I could do that would resolve it with a single decisive action. But X, Y, and Z got settled — not without a great deal of wrangling and suspicion, but settled all the same, and now let’s move on to the next interesting bit.” Any viewpoint can skip over things, but this one gives me greater latitude to summarize what I’m skipping, without making it seem like the elided material is simple to deal with in real life. Isabella can acknowledge all the complications without getting bogged down in them.

I had no idea, when I started writing this series, all the advantages that would come with framing the entire thing as a series of memoirs. It just seemed like a period- and subject-appropriate way to approach the whole thing. But my god . . . it’s probably the best craft decision I’ve made all series long.

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

. . . or any other time of year, actually. I’ll be adding this information to my website soon.

If you would like a book signed by me, you can get one! All you have to do is contact Borderlands Books by phone (toll free 888-893-4008) or email (office at borderlands-books dot com). They’ll make the arrangements with you — which book(s) you want, whether they should be personalized to a certain recipient, etc — and then notify me to come by and sign. If you want the books by a particular date, you have to order them AT LEAST two weeks in advance, in order to give me time to arrange the signing visit and them to ship the books to you. (Going to Borderlands is a multi-hour enterprise for me, so I can’t do it at the drop of a hat.)

It’s as simple as that!

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

I’m delighted to announce that Titan Books, publishers of the Memoirs of Lady Trent in the UK, will also be bringing the Onyx Court to its homeland!

Long-time readers may recall that the first two books of the series were published there by Orbit UK back in the day, but the mid-series publisher shift meant the latter two never saw UK shelves. Titan have picked up the entire series and, as you can see from the above, are reissuing them with splendid new covers — not to mention UK spelling and date formatting, like God and the Queen intended. ;-) My understanding is that they’ll be coming out in rapid succession, on a three-month cycle, so by early 2017 you’ll have the whole set. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to hold ’em in my hands!

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

As some of you know or have guessed, I’m writing a book on spec this summer — a Sekrit Projekt. It’s going pretty well, though right now I’m kind of wondering if I can fit the remaining plot into my remaining projected wordcount.

Earlier today, I was freaking out a bit because I didn’t have remotely enough plot to fill out the wordcount, and the book was going to run short.

Now, if you’re a normal person, you probably assume this means I thought up some additional plot in between then and now. You would be wrong. Before I freaked out about insufficient plot, I was convinced I had too much plot. And before that, I knew I didn’t have enough, not by a long shot. Because I’m at That Stage of the process: the Traditional Mid-Book Yo-Yo.

It happens every time. This is the seventeenth novel I’ve written, and so I know quite well that because I am not the sort of person who outlines rigorously, I have to eyeball the amount of material necessary to get from where I am to the target length. (The only time I can think of when this didn’t happen to me was with In Ashes Lie. I knew a quarter of the way into that book that there was no way in hell it would fit into 110K: I emailed my editor, and she gave me permission to run over, so long as I warned her if it was headed north of 180K. So that one didn’t have a target; it was as long as it needed to be, which turned out to be 143K.) As I draw near, I have to keep checking in with my brain and gauging whether any adjustments are necessary. And I’m constantly changing my mind.

But at least I know that. Which means I can take the yo-yo in stride, trusting that I’ll be able to tell if I’m really going to miss my mark in either direction. And since this book is a spec project, it isn’t the end of the world if I do miss: the worst that happens is I have to look for ways to flesh the book out during revision, or I don’t manage to complete it before my self-imposed deadline. Either of which is fine, if annoying.

I think I’ll be in the target range, though. I usually manage.

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