It’s official now…

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News

Publisher’s Weekly just ran the announcement about my book deal:

OF AMBERGRIS, BLOOD, AND BRANDY a novel of fantasy, suspense, and romance in an alternate turn-of-the-century Portugal in which races of shape-shifters live in secret, and a fantastical underwater work of art and a psychopathic killer become tangled in a string of murders that threaten the stability of the entire nation to Kat Sherbo of Ace, by Lucienne Diver of The Knight Agency.*

I’m really excited about this!!!! I think the editor I’ll be working with is going to be a great match for me, and I’m actually looking forward to working on the edits (feel free to remind me of that come July).

None of this would have happened without the guidance and hard work of my awesome agent, Lucienne Diver. She was my dream agent, and the only one to whom I ever sent these novels. I’m truly lucky she said yes, despite the fact that I sent her novel 2 first**…

The first novel “Of Ambergris, Blood, and Brandy” is tentatively scheduled to come out Fall 2013, with “The Seat of Magic” to follow the next year.

Now I’m gonna go bounce around the kitchen and squee…

_________
*This is actually the version that my agent, my editor, and I agreed upon. The version that PW ran was about 10 words shorter….but seriously, it’s hard to get all that into 140 characters!

**That’s a story for another day.

Free e-book today

I forgot to post that Snowfall is free today for Mother’s Day over at Amazon!

Historical Fudgery

A friend was asking opinions about research for historical fantasy recently, and I thought about one rule I try to apply:

If I can’t find the answer on the internet (or locate a book that will have the answer) after an hour of searching, then it’s likely that very few of my readers will know whether or not I’m wrong.

Let me give you an example. In one of my historical pieces, there’s a building mentioned. Now I know the company was founded in 1901. I know they were founded in that city. What I was never able to determine was when they built the building they’re in.

I scoured books about the city (I own several), hoping to catch a glimpse of the building. I scoured the company’s website. I spent WAY more than an hour stressing about this, but finally decided to take a leap and say it was, indeed, there in 1905.

To this point, no one has called me on it. I’m hoping I got lucky on that one. But it had truly reached the point of diminishing returns.

Do you have any specific rule about how much you’re wlling to research something historical?

Z is for Zhengh Zhuang

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A-Z Challenge

Zhengh Zhuang is a character for whom I’ve never had a picture. He’s actually a pivotal character in all the dragon stories, and yet he barely ever has a spoken line. Like many Asian patriarchs, he ends up in the background of the household.

And that’s it for the A-Z challenge.

Y is for Yun-qi

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A-Z Challenge

In the dragon stories (link to “The Dragon’s Child” on the Publications page), Yun-qi is the son of a rather nasty wizard, a man who uses his abilities for evil. Among other things, he tortures Yun-qi’s mother to force Yun-qi’s capitulation. So Yun-qi, despite the fact that he has inherited some impressive powers, swears never to use them. And he doesn’t, even in the face of some pretty serious trouble. Instead, after he and his mother escape the wizard’s mountain, he becomes a bodyguard to the Emperor.

However when he learns that the wizard has fathered another child, Yun-qi decides to rescue the young girl before their father can destroy her…yeah, he’s that kind of guy. Unfortunately his father recognizes him.

(No picture, since it would just be a pic of Chow Yun Fat.)

X is for…

::shrugs::

I’ve got nothing.

W is for Mrs. Winters

In “Masks of War”, I had a little old lady working in the Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department, the mask painter. The POV character, Lieutenant Grey, likes to picture her painting flowers and landscapes in her cottage by the sea…but along the way, he figures out that her talent is greater than it seems.

This is a publicity still for the Miss Marple series, but I though that Geraldine McEwan was perfect to play Old Mrs. Winters…

V is for Viviana

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A-Z Challenge

Artwork by Stephen Hickman (he did this for me at Conestoga a couple of years ago.)

Viviana Fuentes was my protag in “Taking a Mile” (which you can read free here), a story where she’s a copy (a fax) of a woman who died unexpectedly, leaving her without the normal recourse of being ‘uploaded’. She’s coming to grips with the fact that in a few days, she’ll senesce, leaving no trace that she ever existed, not even in her original’s memories. And she very much wants to live…

The story’s partially about identity, but also partially about patents. It was originally Published in Writers of the Future 24, back in 2008, although it didn’t hit the shelves for about 9 months…

U is for Un-

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A-Z Challenge

I have NO U characters. No Uribe, Ursula, Unique. None.

That means you get a day off from my constant spamming you with pics!

T is for Tavares

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A-Z Challenge

I’m cheating a bit on some of the harder letters, so T is for (Joaquim) Tavares.

Joaquim appears in both the long and short versions of “Of Ambergris, Blood, and Brandy” although in the novelette version he isn’t named and doesn’t actually get any face time. He’s Duilio’s cousin, more or less, a police inspector in the Golden City best known for finding people who are lost, especially cases other inspectors have given up for hopeless. Despite being related to a disgustingly wealthy family, he insists on living on his own pay, which means that compared to Duilio he’s always a bit threadbare.

As a character, Joaquim has a lot in common with Sirien (from Saturday). Sirien had no formal education, though, while Joaquim went to seminary (although he chose not to enter the priesthood in the end), but both are avid readers. Both characters are in serious denial about their abilities and neither one wants to face up to their parentage. Joaquim eventually accepts who he is, Sirien never does. Both live a monkish life (although for different reasons).

As for Joaquim, he becomes the primary character in “The Shores of Spain”….where he’s helping Duilio track down a lost boy.