holy free books, batman!

Big stuff today!

First, I have a guest post up at Kalayna's Price's blog as a part of her blog party! Will there be cake, sadly no. The cake was a lie. But there will be words! Many of them! Tasty ones, go check it out!

Second, to celebrate the official launch of the Spirit Thief tomorrow, I'm doing a 24 hour book give away over at The Magic District. Go and win yourself an autographed copy of The Spirit Thief!

Also, more reviews are up! Fantasy Literature caught the hint of darker things to come, and kudos are in order, because they are right. I will come out and say right now that the series does get more serious as the books go on. After all, Eli can't be irresponsible forever. The repercussions of his lifestyle have to catch up eventually, and I'll just leave it at that ;). Owlcat Mountain calls The Spirit Thief a "bang-up beginning to what promises to be an intriguing and unique tale of magic and mayhem." All I can say is wow, I wish I'd thought of that line! I would have totally used it in my pitch letter! Thanks guys!

Final note: More pictures of Eli on the shelves, this time courtesy of Kalayna Price. Thanks Kalayna!

Eli smirks in the face of the Dark Side!

Eli spotted in the wild!

(Photo courtesy of Matt Albin via Facebook. Thanks Matt!)

I've heard numerous reports of The Spirit Thief being spotted on bookstore shelves, but now we have photographic evidence! Hooray!! Eli looks so handsome next to his bookish brethren! If you happen to be in a bookstore over the next few days, poke your head into the fantasy section. I'd love to know if this is a fluke sighting, or if Eli is truly out for real.

Unfortunately, my husband has been sick as a dog with walking pneumonia since last week, so I haven't gotten a chance to haunt bookstores myself. He has very poor timing! However, as soon as he's not a pathetic creature, I'm going to go to the Athens bookstores and haunt the shelves.

Also! I finally got my act together and go on Twitter (as shown by my nifty new ticker on the sidebar). Come check me out if you're into that kind of thing, I promise I'll try to be interesting.

writing problem of the moment

The baby won't let me get 15 minutes to write on my novel, so here is a quick blog post.

My laptop's N key stopped working (very annoying when so many of your characters have n's in their names - Nico, Slorn, and Miranda, I hate you. (NOT REALLY DON'T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT)), so I've been writing on an old, POS computer with a copy of MSWord that doesn't like putting bookmarks in. You see, normally when I'm working through a section to edit it and I have to stop for the day, I'll just insert a bookmark called "EDIT" wherever I stopped. This way I can jump back to my place with a simple click the next time I get a chance to write. Clever, right?

Well, now that fail computer with its fail copy of Word won't play nice with bookmarks, I've been just typing the word EDIT into my manuscript wherever I stop and using the search function to jump back to my place the next time I open the file. Usually, this works great. I use it when I have to write in OpenOffice too. But this time, not so good. See, I have a character named Gredit who gets mentioned a lot in book 4. Gredit... plus a dumb search feature that refuses to respect "whole words only"...

You see where this is going...

So search hops to every mention of Gredit's name before finding my actual "EDIT" marker. I suppose I could stop being so ghetto and get a better copy of MSWord, but right now all I can think about is how deeply I regret naming Gredit Gredit.

When people ask me what's the hardest part about being a writer, they get stories like this.

GAH x 10^9

Eli in the UK

Got the UK edition of The Spirit Thief in the mail yesterday, and it looks lovely. I have to admit, I love the way the English do books. The paper is so silky, and the book itself is nice and large, a good bit larger than the American version, actually. (This isn't to say I don't love the American version too, I love all versions of my books!)

I'd post pictures, but honestly you probably couldn't tell the difference unless you were holding it, other than the size. So just imagine a trade paper back with the Spirit Thief's cover (seen in the side bar) and you'd be on track.

More reviews are coming in, including this one from Sporadic Book Reviews. I don't think I will ever stop feeling giddy and humbled when people review my books!

Also, there have been reports of people getting their books in the mail from preorder already, 2 weeks from the launch date. Gun jumping? Maybe, but if people are happy, I'm not complaining. I am going to start preordering more books I want, though. Books 2 weeks early? Yes, please!

whew!

As you can tell by the dirth of posts, DragonCon was fun. The costumes, the good weather, the unabashed geekery, the endless walking! ( Ok, some of these things were better than others...) Over all, an excellent time. I handed out my little booklets (over 800 of them), and they seemed well received in general. Whether or not they were a true success is something only time will tell. Still, no one can say I didn't try! (That said, if you got a booklet and it let you here, please let me know!)

However, perhaps the MOST fun at DragonCon was getting to meet other authors! This will never, ever get old. Probably the best event was Kalayna Price (whose debut novel Grave Witch comes out in October!) inviting me to come have drinks with her and author A.J. Hartley. Alas, thanks to the DCon crowds, drinks were not to be had unless you were willing to die of old age in the line at the bar. Tragedy was, however, averted as Kalayna, being clairvoyant, or just very prepared, had brought a flask. Such a useful thing did not even cross my mind. I obviously have much to learn about con going!

In other ways Kalayna is more together than I am, she's hosting a blog party right now to celebrate her book's release! I will be doing a post as well towards the end of the month, but don't wait for me. Go check it out now!

And now, back to work on that fourth Eli novel with that pesky December deadline...

DragonCon! For Real!

The con approaches! I will be there handing out real life, 3d, tactile sample chapters of The Spirit Thief! (Thank you again to Devi and Lauren at Orbit for making these look amazing!)




As you can see, they're conveniently pocket sized! I'll be handing these little beauties out all over the con, but mostly at the long lines where people need reading material most of all. If you happen to be at DragonCon, look for this suspicious person:

(Hint, I'll be the one with the handcart full of tiny blue books).

Come find me! I'd love to say hello (and foist some books on you!)

geekery extreme

It is a well known fact that I am not only a fantasy geek, I am also a typography geek. As such, this project made me squee on many levels.

A typography designer updated Tolkien's elvish script for the modern age. It's elivin Helvetica!

Mind: blown.

Reviews!

(30% shamelessly cross-posted from the front page news)

Closer to launch day and more reviews are starting to surface. SciFi Chick says "Full of humor and suspense, this action-packed fantasy adventure is highly enjoyable. If anything, this fast-paced novel was too short, having read it in just a few short hours. Fantasy fans will love this extraordinary new series." Now I'm blushing! Also, Genre Go Round calls The Spirit Thief an "amusing tongue in cheek thriller" which was kind of what I called it in my query. Was I just really right, or is Ms. Klausner reading my mail? The world may never know...

And since there's way more room here than up front, here's the link to Rob's excellent review at Rob Will Review. This one is from about a month ago, but it always makes me giggle like a school girl. I'll stop posting it when it stops making me happy (read: never).

Also! The folks at Good Reads have a lot to say. Some of it good, some of it not as good as I would hope. However, most of the complaints seem to be in the "this is too light for me" vein, to which I say, that's fair. It is a light, funny, fast book, and that's not everyone's flavor. However, I do hope that, even if you tend to like your fantasy on the heavy side, you will give the book a try (I make it so easy! You can read the first two chapters right now, for free, right here!). A little laughter and is good for the soul, you know?

And just a note to anyone wondering how I find these reviews, there is no author network that funnels them to me. I find everything the same way you do, Google! So if you've written a review or read one that I've missed, mea culpa! Let me know by leaving a comment here and I'll post it on the blog and front page.

nothing is sacred any more

Last night my husband pointed out that the muffins I make for breakfast, my delicious cardamom, golden raisin, walnut, orange, carrot and oat muffins made with whole wheat flour, are, in fact, bad for me. DO NOT TELL ME THESE THINGS. The muffins have WHEAT BRAN in them. I put it in MYSELF. Sure they have 2 cups of sugar, but I can't eat cookies, ice cream, chocolate, cake, or ANYTHING I LIKE. DO NOT TAKE MY MUFFINS FROM ME YOU-

*deep breath to prevent murder of spouse*

I've never tried cocaine, and after seeing how I've dealt with the loss of sugar, I don't think I ever will. I obviously can not be mature about these things.

I'm going to go eat a god damn muffin.

My peeps

Orbit, my lovely, lovely publisher, is turning 3! And to celebrate this momentous event, Publisher's Weekly has a pretty neat little article on the ways Orbit is bringing new ideas to the Fantasy/SciFi genre shelves. A very interesting read for anyone who likes to know what goes on behind the scenes of the book publishing world. There was stuff in here even I didn't know.

Of course, Orbit is using their fantastic 1-2-3 publishing strategy for the first 3 books of my series, The Legend of Eli Monpress. I would say that it worked fantastically for Brent Weeks, but Brent also wrote a very awesome series in the Night Angel Trilogy, which certainly didn't hurt. Still, here's hoping the same strategy gets my books out to an equally large pool of readers.

In other "my publisher is so cool" news, Orbit has created a series of amazingly awesome graphs showing trends inside the fantasy genre in typical Orbit mega-style. If you don't understand how graphs can be awesome, you obviously haven't seen these yet.