Swan Tower

The recent news about extreme hinkiness in last year's Hugo Awards (works ruled ineligible without the authors being notified or any reason given; questionable voting numbers; attendees' voting rights reportedly being reassigned to the convention committee) is deeply disturbing -- me, I'm in favor of a Retro Hugo for 2023 in an upcoming year, since we already have that structure in place -- but for this upcoming year, the more people who get involved, the better! If you want to nominate, you have until tomorrow to get at least a supporting membership to the Glasgow Worldcon -- you don't have to be planning to attend in person to get involved.

(There are technical difficulties right now with the nominations form, which they are trying to fix, but you can still register.)

I posted about my 2023 publications back in December, but it's rather a long list this time. If you pointed a knife at me and demanded I choose my favorites, I'd give it to "At the Heart of Each Pearl Lies a Grain of Sand" (which is unfortunately paywalled, but SMT is great and you should subscribe to it!) and the Rook and Rose trilogy in toto, now that it's finished up with Labyrinth's Heart being published last year. I genuinely think it's one of the best series I've (co-)written: Alyc and I had a much more complete plan than usual going into it, which meant we were able to play all kinds of long games across the three books, from seeding tiny worldbuilding details that would be load-bearing later, to pacing the arcs of the characters and their relationships, to braiding many strands of plot together into a complex rope. I think it repays re-reading more than anything else I've written, in terms of being able to say ohhhhh, waitasec, I see where that's going now -- -- which is not the only way for a series to be good, but it's certainly one of them!

So yes, register by tomorrow if you want to nominate, whether that's something of mine or anything else you enjoyed from 2023!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/V6qsjk)

I've got two days left at DragonCon and two and a half days left in the pattern deck Kickstarter. Can I survive them both? :-P



We're down to 55 hours and counting, and Alyc has decided to throw one more temptation into the mix. We already had a stretch goal to make digital art for a Rook & Rose "card" (currently just over $500 away), and we decided a while ago that if we get to 400 backers we'll print that in the deck (we're currently at 373), but they announced this morning that if the Rook and the Black Rose get a card, then dammit, Vargo and Peabody should as well. So if you want to see your favorite crime lord and adorable peacock spider on a card, help us get up and over that goal! All backers will receive the digital art, and every backer gets us closer to putting them in the physical deck as jokers, so even backing at the $1 tier helps us toward both goals.

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

You have added
to the funding
that is in
our Kickstarter

and which
I wasn't really
expecting
quite so soon

Thank you
we're almost to goal
$295 away
and so close

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/Hz09WW)

Nearly six years after Alyc and I said "hey, let's write the Rook and Rose trilogy together," the story is complete!



Labyrinth's Heart is out in the world today, in paperback, ebook, and audiobook. Alyc and I will be celebrating with some carpal tunnel syndrome later on as we conduct an AMA over at r/Fantasy -- I'm posting this before I go to bed and Alyc will be setting up the AMA once they wake up, so I don't have a direct link yet, but you'll see it there soon enough. My plan is to offer a one-card draw and its interpretation for every person who asks a question, so if you want to see some pattern-reading in action, here's your chance!

Speaking of pattern, the Kickstarter is 2/3 of the way to goal! And since Alyc and I found a more efficient way of doing the gilding, we've decided to offer a third batch of premium decks; it seemed only fair to have a few available on the day the book comes out. So if you were regretting having missed the previous offerings, hie thee to Kickstarter and get one while they last!

(There are a lot of exclamation marks in this post, aren't there? Six years, yo. It's a long road to walk from "hey, let's do this" to the final book being out.)

I should go to bed. But the book! It's out in the world, for more than just early reviewers! How can I sleep at a time like this?

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

Time for a peek at the second of our artists! As Avery Liell-Kok will be doing the Face and Mask cards in the upcoming pattern deck, the wonderful A.C. Esguerra will be doing the bulk of the deck itself: all the "unaspected" cards in each thread, plus the seven clan cards.

A.C. has a gorgeous style that meshes beautifully with Avery's watercolors. When they sent in their portfolio, my eye was immediately caught by this image:



The vivid colors, the dreamlike feel without sacrificing crisp detail -- it felt absolutely perfect for our deck. You can check out more of A.C.'s work on their website and see the range of styles they practice, but this is absolutely the angle we fell in love with for the project.

One more artist to come!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/ws7tta)

The problem with vacation is how much you have to hustle beforehand to get matters squared away, and then when you come back there's a new pile of things you have to dig out from under.

But hey, at least the pile of things in this case includes author copies of several things! On Spec #124 is out now (and will be available at NASfic, for those of you who are going), with my Greek mythological story "Your Body, My Prison, My Forge." ZNB Presents: Year One has been out for a little bit, but now I have my copy; you can find various buy links for that on the story page for "Crafting Chimera." And the Department of No Really Your Book Is Real sent me my copies of Labyrinth's Heart! So those at least are some bright spots in a sea of emails to be answered and revisions to be completed.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/Gsyb3S)

I was so busy this past weekend that I failed to post on the day of, but Flash Point SF honored me by choosing my story "The Merchant With No Coin" to run on the 24th, which was National Flash Fiction Day! It's a little snippet of folklore from the Rook and Rose setting, very quick to read.

I'm also pleased to say I've sold another story in that world to Scott Andrews at Beneath Ceaseless Skies! This one is a novelette set some years before the novels, a fun little heist that also ties in with some side details in the main narrative. It will be out in August, in time to whet your appetites for Labyrinth's Heart on the fifteenth!

I'll have some more stuff out soon, too, I think -- not Rook and Rose-related, but other short fiction (and even my Very First Poem, whee!). It's busy times around here . . .

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/ayVoT3)

I'm delighted to announce another sale to Beneath Ceaseless Skies: "Constant Ivan and Clever Natalya," which I describe on that page as me going Full Metal Folklore with the Rook and Rose setting. :-D

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/XjwO6h)

Despite Alyc's encouragement, I don't think I have it in me to make three progress posts today, one for Chapter 27, and one apiece for the prologue and the epilogue. :-P Yes, the prologue to this book was one of the last things we wrote: third from the end, to be precise, followed by the last scene of Chapter 27 and the epilogue. That last being, of course, a thing the previous two books didn't have, but here it helps a lot to show some longer-term effects that would feel very shoehorned into the final chapter.

Alyc and I each have a traditional quote associated with having finished a book. Mine comes from The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr. Earbrass Writes a Novel by Edward Gorey: "The next day Mr. Earbrass is conscious, but very little more." Alyc's comes from a Gilbert & Sullivan musical (Patience, I think): "Finished! At last, finished! The book is finished, and my soul has gone out into it. That was all. It was nothing worth mentioning. It occurs three times a day."

We may not do this three times a day, but yeah. Soul gone out. Conscious. Very little more. Ima go flop now.

Word count: 198,360 -- we undershot in our zeal to not go over, and will be fleshing out things we short-changed during revisions.
Authorial sadism: Alyc is right that a certain departure needed to happen . . . but it still hurts. Us as well as the characters.
Authorial amusement: The introduction Ren gets in the epilogue.
BLR quotient: Love is healing the wounds, and the turbulent waters of rhetoric are calming. It won't be smooth sailing from here into eternity, but the storm has passed.

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

It's a real progress blog! By which I mean that, after months of me posting well after the fact because I didn't actually start progress-blogging when we started writing, I am for realz posting right after we finished a chapter!

And we are in the home stretch! Very visibly so, in fact. You see, Google Docs doesn't always cope well with very large files; much above 50K words, you can start having problems with lag and such. As a result, we've always divided our drafts up into multiple files, one per part, to keep them in the safe zone. But because this book is in three parts instead of four or five, that would mean each one is in the 60-70K range, and we didn't want to find out whether Google was going to get stupid about it. In order to keep the feeling that the file divisions are at structurally relevant points, we actually have nine files for this book, each one containing three chapters. (Yes, this will be annoying when we have to collate them all.) With Chapter 25, we have officially created the last file!

(Shhhh, don't tell me if Google has fixed that problem in the years since we started writing The Mask of Mirrors. This is tradition now.)

People who have read the first two books can guess more or less what's going on at this point, not in its specifics, but in its shape. Although things have been building toward these events for a long time, this is when the avalanche starts to roar downhill. Different people each get signs of Something Rather Bad; when they compare notes, it's clear that actually, Something Incredibly Bad is going down. Which they will deal with in the next chapter.

. . . but Alyc and I en't writing that one until next week, because dammit, we get some amount of holiday off. (Please to be disregarding the other work each of us is doing on the book in the interim, because we have a few holes we want to patch before we officially reach the end of the draft.)

Word count: ~182,000
Authorial sadism: . . . honestly, I think the meanest thing in this chapter is what Alyc did to me, suggesting a certain thing to do with pattern.
Authorial amusement: Giving a minor spear-carrier who may not have even had any lines before a crucial role to play.
BLR quotient: They've been bleeding all this time. They only just now realized.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/qPC1Gy)