Archive for the ‘books’ Category

RAVEN CALLS arrives!

This part never gets old. :)

A particularly handsome model displays the new book. :)

I’ll pick 3 random commenters to send a copy of RAVEN CALLS to. That’s 3 on mizkit.com & 3 on mizkit.livejournal.com, just so that’s clear. :) And hell, I’ll be doing this on cemurphy.net, Twitter, Facebook and G+, too, so if you’re very thorough you can have up to 6 chances to win a book, I suppose. :)

And oh, the spot varnish on this one is AWESOME. AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME!

Kickstarter: Success!

The “No Dominion” campaign was successfully funded about four hours ago.

I love the way I said that: “successfully funded”, all casual-like. What I really mean is OH MY HOLY LIVING BEANS, $20,635?!?!!?!??! *520 backers?!?!* You guys cracked the third novella! And the “Gosh, I guess I’m singing for my supper!” level! Oh my, I say, oh my. O.O *laughs* No, really, that’s going to be fun. I haven’t sung in a long time. :)

Jami Nord guessed a closest-to-accurate final dollar amount at $20,675 and has won one commissioned Walker Papers short story–and a bunch of other loot as well. Congratulations, Jami!

I cannot thank you all enough. This has been the most utterly amazing, humbling, exciting, awesome experience, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. And in a lot of ways it’s only just getting started, so yay! We’ve got lots more awesomeness ahead of us!

Thank you *so much*. I’ll be doing one more general Kickstarter post in the next few days, talking about what I learned from this project, but in the meantime, let me also thank you for your patience while I’ve talked about nothing else, and I promise to get back to your regularly scheduled blog now. :)

My parents, who are awesome, got me celebratory flowers. :)

Teaser: HEAVEN CAN WAIT

I have the sudden rash impulse to write a little back-of-book teaser for the book you’d be getting if you Kickstarted the whole “No Dominion” campaign up to the improbably high-end rollover amount of $30K.

Everybody knows Jumbletown isn’t like other cities. Stuff falls through from other places here, and mostly, it can’t leave. Head north to Detroit or south to Tampa Bay and it’s just ordinary world out there, no fae or vampires, no Civil War soldiers or little grey men. A lot of Jumbletown’s new arrivals are dangerous. A lot of them aren’t. Some of them settle down, make families, make a life…but their children can’t leave.

And then there are girls like Cori May, born in Jumbletown and untouched by the magic that’s trickled through. Her friends think she’s lucky: she’ll be able to leave someday. Cori thinks ordinary (or leaving town, for that matter) pales beside girlfriends with rainbow wings or the power to stun with a touch.

But it’s the very ordinariness of Cori’s human soul that draws the fallen angel Mirael and the demon Sebastian to her. For both, capturing Cori’s love–and her soul–offers redemption. For Mirael, plucking a pure mortal soul out of the Jumbletown mire would win her a chance to return to the Heaven from which she fell. For Sebastian, who may know more about Jumbletown’s creation than he’s letting on, seducing that same pure soul would be a one-way ticket up the ranks of demons in his home world of Hell.

But neither demon nor angel imagined falling in love with Cori, and when it comes to the final battle for her soul, perhaps…

…HEAVEN CAN WAIT.

I’ll write the first chapter if the Kickstarter campaign hits $12K. I’ll write two more chapters if it hits $15K. Those’ll be freebies, available for everybody to read. After that, I’ll write another chapter, posted weekly starting after April 15, 2012, for everyone subscribing at $25 or more, for every $1000 dollars past $15K. If the campaign actually breaks the absurd $30K rollover point, I’ll write the whole thing. :)

(And yes, you can up your donation amount if you want to–just go to the campaign page and, um. Okay, well, I know it’s possible because a bunch of people have done it already, okay? I don’t think it’s very hard, even, but I don’t actually know how to do it… :) “and click “Manage Your Pledge.” Enter a new amount in the pledge amount box. Note that you are not adding to your existing pledge; the amount you enter will be the total amount collected if the project is successfully funded.” (via the kickstarter FAQ & Gabriel Who Can Read Instructions :))

(Also, because I appear to be adding a whole lot more stories to this campaign than expected, I’ve upped the high-end rollover stuff–extra novellas, or an extra novel–from $10 to $25. I feel slightly like a git for changing it mid-campaign, but subscribers at $10 will still, without question, get the novella and three short stories, which I think is pretty fair. She said nervously.)

Hat-tip to Trent, who asked if the “Jumbletown” he kept seeing on my to-do list was a story idea (it wasn’t, Jumbletown is a freecycle site in Ireland), and to Corin, who suggested the angelic storyline. :)

IMMORTAL BELOVED

A friend of mine finally helped me join the 21st century and has made a PDF and an .epub of IMMORTAL BELOVED, the Highlander novel I wrote back in 1998 when…somebody, I forget who, was publishing them. I even submitted it, but they’d just cancelled the line, so my Methos story has been relegated to the status of fan fiction. Now it’s easier-to-read fan fiction! :)

IMMORTAL BELOVED: An archaeologist’s claim to have found Atlantis brings five thousand years of memories and missed chances back to Methos’ doorstep. PDF version || EPub version || HTML version

Enjoy. :)

SPIRIT DANCES release day!

As of today, bold explorers of bookstores everywhere should be able to find copies of SPIRIT DANCES in its native habitat (pending, of course, their purchase so they can go to loving homes). Just in case you’ve missed the earlier posts and don’t know what you should be looking for, here it is:

Read an excerpt!

Tomorrow I will post a couple of Walker-Papers-related goodies, including an interview with Joanne done by Jane Yellowrock of the eponymous Jane Yellowrock novels. If I hadn’t been busy trying to finish writing a novel, I’d be posting them today, but I sorta fell behind on that because, well, trying to finish a novel.

But lo! I have finished the novel! RAVEN CALLS, book *seven* of the Walker Papers, has just been wrapped up. And no, I don’t know when it’ll be out

Right Angles to Fairyland

The RIGHT ANGLES TO FAERYLAND revision project is now closed. Thank you for your interest!!

There is a book I’ve been trying to write since I was twelve years old. It’s called RIGHT ANGLES TO FAIRYLAND, and it’s a traditional YA fantasy novel: Five children discover a fairy circle on Midsummer’s Day, and make their way into a Fairyland torn apart by centuries of strife–on one side is Fairy, caught in Winter, and on the other side, Goblin, bound to endless Summer. The five make allies on opposite sides of the conflict, and individually go on quests that will help to bring the shattered land back together–or destroy it forever.

I wrote the rough draft in 2002. It was the best thing I’d ever written. It probably still is the best thing I’ve ever written. But it has languished unrevised for most of a decade now, for the simple and rather pragmatic reason that people keep paying me to write other things. I literally haven’t been able to afford to revise this book which is closest to my heart.

Last week I was dumbstruck by the idea of making the Angles revisions a crowdfunded project. It gives me a deadline, it gives those readers who want to participate by buying in an opportunity to read a full novel, and it gets it done. So that’s what I’m going to do.

The Angles commission will probably run for six months, as I’m setting a delivery deadline of July 1, 2011, but there’s a catch:

I may close the commission as early as April 14, 3 months from now, if I get it done by then. I may give 24 hours’ notice about it closing, or I may not. I’ll post about this monthly or so, in order to remind people, but I won’t ride it any harder than that. So if you want in, don’t faff about too long. :) (I know I’ve just put up the short stories commissions, too, which is why there’s a 3-month window on this–a bunch of people who may not have much spare cash have already bought in to the short stories, so I don’t want to double-tap them in January.)

Given that this is an actual novel, not just a novella or short stories, I’m going to go ahead and set a $15 buy-in, since my novels tend to be trade paperbacks with approximately that price tag.

And, because this is a revision project, I can for once give you a really decent teaser: Here are the first three unrevised chapters of RIGHT ANGLES TO FAIRYLAND. (Do bear in mind I wrote this almost ten years ago, and don’t judge me too harshly. :))

As usual, the finished story will be delivered via email as a PDF (and *maybe* in ebook format–leave a note in the Paypal transaction if there’s an e-format you’d like to have it delivered as) on or before July 1, 2011.

How to Write Magical Words

Editor and writer Edmund Schubert has put together a writing how-to book gleaned from the posts my fellow bloggers and I have done at Magical Words. It’s called HOW TO WRITE MAGICAL WORDS, and it is frankly awesome.

Seriously, that sounds all tooting our own horn (and it is), but the only thing I had to do with it at all was page proofs for my essays, so I hardly have a horse in this race. I did, though, end up skimming through everybody’s essays and information, and holy moly, we have some really, really good advice in there. I mean, really truly good stuff. Things that I wished I’d known when I was getting started. Things that are still insanely useful to learn now. I mean, like, I have a copy of this book and I want a copy of this book. That’s how awesome it is.

HOW TO WRITE MAGICAL WORDS is now available for pre-order through the publishers, and *believe* me, the writer in your life wants a copy. Plus, if you order it now, the publisher will ship it to you for a nickel, so the total cost of the book, including shipping, is $18.00 even.

They believe orders placed now *should* get to you by Christmas, and if not by Christmas by New Year’s at the latest, and what better gift for a writer than some brilliant and inspiring advice to usher in the new year and all those resolutions with? :)

TRUTHSEEKER excerpt!

There’s something screwy with the font sizes on my websites. I’m vaguely assuming this has to do with the need to upgrade to WP 3.0, which I haven’t done yet. I am, though, aware of the problem and I’ll try to get it fixed this week.

In the meantime, have an excerpt from TRUTHSEEKER, out in September 2010!

“–once upon a time, not so long ago, it was driven by a little old lady I know personally. She drove it to the store weekly, that’s it, so its four thousand miles are gentle ones, ladies. It’s just two years old and has all the extras. You won’t find a better deal than this here or anywhere else. Now, I know the sticker price is eighteen five and you’re not looking to spend quite that much.” The salesman leaned out from beneath his umbrella to get a better look at the V of Kelly Richards’ T-shirt, and smiled. “It’s cutting my own throat, but I think I can knock it down to seventeen flat. It’s a bargain, ladies, a real bargain.”

“Lara?” Kelly folded her arms beneath her breasts.

For a moment Lara found herself studying her friend’s cleavage, though less avidly than the salesman had. Kelly had a lifetime’s experience in using her assets to distract and command, whereas Lara’s own figure had been described as more of a pirate’s treasure: a sunken chest. Clinical curiosity made her wonder what it would be like to take control of a situation just by inhaling deeply.

“Earth to Lara, hello?” Kelly snapped her fingers under Lara’s nose. “Are you in there?”

“Of course I am.” Lara turned her attention back to the yellow Mazda Miata the salesman hawked. Or, rather, to the patter he’d shared, the quick flow of words meant to distract and impress in the same way Kelly’s T-shirt was. Lara thought Kelly had taken the upper hand in dedication to distraction, though. It was too cold, with too much promise of serious rain, to be out without a coat, and the salesman’s gaze kept wandering to Kelly’s chest instead of the vehicle lot. “And he’s lying.”

Read more »

The Five Year Shelf

On June 1, 2005, my first novel, URBAN SHAMAN, hit the shelves.

On June 1, 2010, my 13th novel and 19th published work, DEMON HUNTS, hit the shelves.

If anybody asks what I was doing during the Oughts, this is mostly the answer:

Go me. :)

THE PHANTOM QUEEN AWAKES pre-order

Love, death and war…

The Morrigan goddess represented all three to the ancient Celts. Journey with our authors as they tell stories of love, war, hatred, revenge and mortality – each featuring the Morrigan in her many guises.

Re-visit the world of Deverry, and of Nevyn, with a previously unpublished tale by Katharine Kerr, watch the Norse gods meet their Celtic counterparts with Elaine Cunningham, meet a druid who dances for the dead with C.E. Murphy and follow the path of a Roman centurion with Anya Bast.

These are but a few offerings from the stories collection in The Phantom Queen Awakes. If you are searching for a rich blend of dark fantasy, then this is a collection perfect for you.

The Phantom Queen Awakes stories:
Rising Tide: Ruth Shelton
Kiss of the Morrigan: Anya Bast
I Guard Your Death: Lynne Lumsden Green
Gifts of the Morrigan: Donald Jacob Uitvlugt
Cairn Dancer: C. E. Murphy
Washerwoman: Jennifer Lawrence
The Raven’s Curse: Sharon Kae Reamer
Ravens: Mari Ness
The Lass from Far Away: Katharine Kerr
The Trinket: Peter Bell
The Dying Gaul: Michael Bailey
The Children of Badb Catha: James Lecky
The Plain of Pillars: L. J. Hayward
The Silver Branch: Linda Donahue
The Good and Faithful Servant: Martyn Taylor
The White Heifer of Fearchair: T. A. Moore
She Who is Becoming: Elaine Cunningham

N.B.: The Phantom Queen Awakes will be released 14th February 2010 in the US.

UK, Australian and European release dates to follow.

US: $20 + shipping

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