the Author

Category Archives: Books

February
19
58 Comments

Firstborn Publication Day!

Posted in Books, DAW, Essalieyan.

It’s been three and three quarter years since the publi­ca­tion of Oracle, the sixth book in The House War series in hard­cover. Today, on February 19, 2019, book seven, First­born, has been released into the wild, dressed to go out in style in a cover by Jody Lee. It is avail­able in audio­book format from audible​.com (appar­ently an audible​.com exclu­sive, judging by the banner across the cover). It is avail­able in hard­cover and as an ebook. (It is avail­able as an ebook in Australia.) I am both excited and nervous.

December
5
30 Comments

State of the Writer, December 2018 edition

Posted in Books, Cast, DAW.

This is tech­ni­cally the November edition, but I have been neck-deep in page proofs for First­born. Which were due today. November was actu­ally a really produc­tive writing month (until page proofs). I found the begin­ning of The Black Gauntlet, title entirely tenta­tive, and have one prologue and three chap­ters. I have more of the Severn book, but some changes from novella struc­ture were neces­sary. Not as many as I was afraid there would be – but to be fair, I was afraid I would have to ditch all 30k words, so. I have copy-edits for War incoming today, which will eat some writing time — but War is a June title. So: February 2019 and June 2019 for First­born and War. I made a comment over at Tor​.com, on a review of the new … Continue reading →

October
2
61 Comments

News! And also State of the Author, October 2018 edition (long)

Posted in Elantra, Essalieyan, writing, Mira, Books, DAW.

It’s me, and if I’m warning you that this will be long, well. This is prob­ably going to be long. I did consider split­ting it into two posts, but there doesn’t seem to be a length limit in Word­Press, so. (For the record, my long-suffering husband suggested that I split it into three. Yes, he survived.) So, first: The Sun Sword has been reis­sued in trade paper­back (which is the larger, non-stan­­dard-size paper­back format). Yes, this means they are more expen­sive, sorry =/. This happened in July, but I didn’t find out about it until the end of August. I’ve added the rele­vant infor­ma­tion to the book pages here. I am not, as will become imme­di­ately obvious, much of a photog­ra­pher >.<. As you can see, there’s … Continue reading →

April
11
67 Comments

Update on the House War series

Posted in Books, DAW, Essalieyan, grovelling apology, writing.

I finally have news to report about War. TL;DR (too long; didn’t read, for those who aren’t accus­tomed to this partic­ular Internet short-hand): The book I submitted to DAW is now going to be two books: First­born, which will be published in February 2019 and War, which will be published in June 2019. ______ For those who want the longer details, they are as follows. (I didn’t orig­i­nally intend to have the shorter recap, but — it’s a long post, and I accept that some people don’t actu­ally want author musings or grov­eling; they just want to know when they can read the book they’ve been waiting for. Since I am some­times one of those readers, I’m sympa­thetic.) I mentioned some time back that I had finished and submitted War to … Continue reading →

August
1
61 Comments

State of the Author, August 2017 edition

Posted in DAW, Elantra, Essalieyan, writing, Books, Cast.

I had really hoped to be able to write this yesterday, because I could then tell myself it was still July. But, it’s not July, it’s the begin­ning of August. When I went to Australia, War was at 340k words. I thought it would be 30k words to the end. Where in this case, thought prob­ably means “prayed”. This is not, as you know from the last blog post, what happened. Today, I have typed the figu­ra­tive “THE END” on War. It is, as it currently stands, 430k words. This is too long. Not neces­sarily for readers, but my poor, poor editor. And publisher. So while I have typed “THE END”, my part in that book is not yet over. I have to revise, fix the eight … Continue reading →