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Easy Pickings now available on Amazon & B&N!

You now have three very exciting options for buying “Easy Pickings”, the Jane Yellowrock/Joanne Walker crossover novella written by Faith Hunter and myself!

1: You can buy it here on CEMurphy.Net (or on Faith’s site) for $2.99. The download will give you an epub, a mobi, and a PDF file, so any type of e-reader you have will be able to read it. This, frankly, is our favorite way for you to buy it, because we get about $2.75 off that sale, rather than $2 from the other sites. :)

That said, I’m really quite okay with you buying it at one of the following sites, because that raises its profile there, and we need that!

2. You can buy it here on Amazon if you have a Kindle and only want the Kindle file. It’ll still cost you $2.99, though.

3. You can buy it here on B&N.com if you have a Nook and only want the epub file. Still $2.99. :)

(Really, if you’re at my website, I expect you’ll probably buy it here. It’s the folks who don’t hang out here who *really* need it at B&N and Amazon!)

Two heroines. Two magics.

One world.

There’s nowhere in America like the Big Easy. Just ask Jane Yellowrock, shapeshifting vampire killer, whose hunting grounds run the length and breadth of the Bayou.

Just ask Joanne Walker, whose shamanic magic has drawn her to the heart of American Weird.

But it’s not Joanne’s world, and it isn’t Jane’s either. In a New Orleans where Katrina never hit and supposedly-dead vampires stalk the streets, Jane and Jo have to find and defeat the magic that brought them there–or they just might find themselves…

EASY PICKINGS
fan fiction by the authors themselves!

Read the teaser and

PLEASE NOTE: You will be given the option to “return to open at mizkit dot com” once you’ve paid! Click through on that, because that’s what will bring you to the download page! So don’t skip out of Paypal until you do so through that link! Otherwise you won’t get your story, and I won’t know that! I’ll think you’re out there happy as a fish in water, reading all about Jane and Jo’s adventures, when instead you’ll be sniffling in your tea! Don’t let that happen!

We loved you, Dragonlady.

Robert Heinlein’s TUNNEL IN THE SKY. Robin McKinley’s THE BLUE SWORD.

Anne McCaffrey’s DRAGONSONG.

Those are the first three books I specifically remember reading as science fiction and fantasy. They weren’t; I’d been reading SF&F in the guise of children’s books for many years, but they’re the first I recall as genre-specific. I loved them all, but I loved DRAGONSONG and Menolly beyond reason. I had–who are we kidding, still have–a crush on Robinton, on Sebell. I still want a fire lizard. I always will.

I met Anne McCaffrey the first time I came to Ireland, in 1993. Knowing I was coming, I wrote to her and said it was presumptuous but I couldn’t come to Ireland without at least asking if I could meet her, because–well, because she was Anne McCaffrey. Because I loved her books. And she sent a postcard back with her phone number and said “Give me a call when you get here.”

So I did. And she’d had the worst day ever, the transmission had, like, fallen out of her car, the newly-built pool in her house had flooded, there was a ditch dug around the whole house so the foundation wouldn’t get ruined (McCaffrey’s Moat, she called it), and my friend and I got on the wrong public transport service when we went out to Bray (we took the bus, we should’ve taken the train, AKA “Dart”, but I had no idea what a “Dart” was) and she waited until we found her anyway, and she brought us back to Dragonhold and we spent the afternoon with the Great Dame of Science Fiction.

She showed us Robin Wood’s painting of Masterharper Robinton, and told the story of how she’d very nearly been out-bid for it at the convention auction she bought it at. (Somebody apparently finally went and told the other bidder that the woman bidding was Anne Freaking McCaffrey, and not to be an asshole.) She told me how when she saw the painting it was at the art show, and Robin Wood saw *her* and started to blurt “Um look here I did this painting, it’s supposed to be Robinton–” and Anne said, “Yes, yes, of course it’s Robinton, I could see that from across the hall!”

She had at least half a dozen of the other People of Pern paintings–F’Nor and F’lar, Lessa, Menolly, Sebell–all around her custom-built bookcases (“Your books will fit,” the man building them told her confidently. “If you have more than fit on these bookshelves, I’ll build you another one for free!” “This is the one,” she said, showing us a nook bookcase as tall and full as the others, “that he built for free.”), which were also filled with the dragons people had given her over the years. But Robinton was in the dining room, where she could take a meal with him every day.

One wall of her house was filled with Michael Whelan paintings. “I call it my Whelan Wall,” she said slyly, and I burst out laughing and opined it was rather more cheerful than the one in Jerusalem. She’d just gotten the ALL THE WEYRS OF PERN cover painting, and told me how Whelan had done the painting and when she’d seen it she decided she had to write that scene, with the dragons in the trees, into the book.

We met her cats. We met Elizabeth Anne Scarborough, who was there working on the very earliest books of the Acorna series with “Annieone” (and EAS was “Annietwo”). Anne asked if either of us wanted to be writers, and I said that I did. She told me to do anything else if I could, because it was a hard way to make a living. It was a piece of advice I didn’t *really* understand until nearly fifteen years later when I was holding URBAN SHAMAN in my hands for the first time.

Because, well, of *course* I *could* do other things. I did do other things, lots of them, and I was good at those other things and they certainly paid the bills. But there with the first copy of my first book in my hands, I finally really understood that no, actually, it turned out I couldn’t *really* do other things, because while I was doing all those other things they were only a platform to get me to the stage where I could write full time. While I was doing all those other things, I was also writing, because that was more important than going out or sleeping in or getting to the gym or whatever: in the end, I could not, in fact, do anything else and be satisfied, happy, content with what I was doing.

I sent Anne McCaffrey a copy of URBAN SHAMAN and a letter telling her that I finally understood what she’d been saying to me when I was twenty years old, and that it had turned out I couldn’t do anything else, and thanking her for her kindness and generosity to a couple of kids from Alaska all those years earlier.

That fall we moved to Ireland. The next October, at Octocon, the Irish National Science Fiction Convention, Anne showed up. I don’t even remember if she was an invited guest or if she just crashed the party, but she was zipping around the place in her electric chair, commanding attention not just with her speed but with her white hair and her big smile and by just being Anne Goddamned McCaffrey, the Dragonlady.

I had no idea if my copy of URBAN SHAMAN had made it to her, so when I got the chance I went to her table and knelt across from her and told her the whole story I’d said in the letter, all the things I said above, and partway through, she said, “Wait, did you write that book about the shaman in Seattle? You sent it to me, didn’t you? I loved it! I’ve gotten the next ones that have come out and I get to read them before anybody else in the house!”

Anne McCaffrey died Monday at the age of 85. It is not an exaggeration to say she helped shape my life, or that I loved her for all that I barely knew her. I’ve already read more than a dozen tributes to her on my friends pages, and I am clearly not the only one who was so affected by Anne, her works, and her worlds.

We loved you, Dragonlady. We always will.

Faith Hunter: the Jane Yellowrock books

I have, over the past couple days, read Faith Hunter‘s Jane Yellowrock books, SKINWALKER and BLOOD CROSS.

They’re the most enjoyable urban fantasy I’ve read since I started writing it myself, so basically they’re the best urban fantasy I’ve read in ten years. This is not *only* because Joanne Walker and Jane Yellowrock would get on like a house on fire, although that doesn’t hurt. It’s not just that they’re wonderfully well-researched–which, given that Jane is a skinwalker (ie, shapeshifter) of Cherokee descent, was exceedingly likely to run up against my own research and my own ideas on how I’d do things and clash, but didn’t. It’s not only that the world is well-developed with hints of interesting things around the corners. It’s not just that the writing style, which is invariably one of my problems with urban fantasy, didn’t once catch me out. It’s not just that Hunter’s knack for description makes me want to weep in despair. It’s all of those things put together to make a couple of really great stories, and this is how much I liked them:

They made me want to write Joanne Walker-Jane Yellowrock crossover fan fiction.

In fact, I may have even started a lil’ story that I sent to Faith, which I will perhaps post if she says it’s okay. :)

Anyway, the point really is that if you like the Walker Papers at all, I cannot imagine that you would not thoroughly enjoy the Jane Yellowrock books. SKINWALKER is out, and BLOOD CROSS is out on January 5th (which surprised me, I had no idea I’d gotten an early copy!), so basically you have exactly enough time to dash out, buy SKINWALKER, read it, and make sure your local bookstore will be ordering BLOOD CROSS for release day when you can buy it and make Faith’s numbers look good so there will be more Jane Yellowrock books. :)

A Christmas Contest!

Over on Magical Words, the group writing blog I’m a part of, we’re running a book give-away contest this week. Head on over to participate in my contest–for which the prize is a signed copy of one of my books, or a copy of “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”, the Old Races novella I wrote this summer which has only been available to subscribers. While the novella will be available again to buy in February, this is your one and only chance to possibly win it for free. (And I’ll also send the winner one of the Ireland 2010 calendars that I did, if you take the “Hot Time” option.)

The contest ends Wednesday, December 30th, and the winner will be announced New Year’s Eve.

Merry Christmas Eve, everybody!

“Hot Time” commission update

I’ve just sent this to the “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” patron mailing list, but there appear to be about a dozen people on it who haven’t actually joined the group (please please check your trash/spam to make sure the email didn’t get eaten!), so I’m reposting it here:

I was hoping I could put this off until Wednesday and not have to write it at all, but it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that that’s not the case.

“Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” is much less interested in being a short story, and far more interested in being a novelette or novella (15-25,000 words) than I had anticipated. I’ve written well over 8,000 words now, and I think it’s going to take that much again, possibly more, to do the story justice.

So I have two choices. I can haul something into shape by Friday, and be dissatisfied with it, or I can miss my deadline and send a much longer, stronger story in two or three more weeks.

I rather hope you’d all prefer the longer story on a slightly delayed timeline. I’m going to set the re-scheduled delivery date as September 1, which I ought to be able to make even if this thing turns out to be forty thousand words long. Which would be silly. >.<

I'm extremely embarrassed and apologetic about this, and will do my best to make the story worth the delay.

For the record, for those who hope to buy the story later, this means it won’t be available until December 1st. Possibly I should delay it until February, in that case, so people have some time to get through Christmas before the story’s up for availability…

A FANTASY MEDLEY nearly sold out

If you haven’t ordered a copy of A FANTASY MEDLEY, which has an Old Races story by me along with stories by Kate Elliott, Robin Hobb and Kelley Armstrong (I still can’t help going ‘one of these things is not like the others’ when I see my name in that lineup), here is an important bit of information from Subterranean Press:

Headed into the out of print realm soon is A Fantasy Medley (edited by Yanni Kuznia), which hasn’t even started shipping yet! As I write this, we’re down to our last couple hundred copies of the trade edition, and the last 35-40 copies of the limited edition. It will only take a few wholesaler/large online retailer order to take care of the trade edition, and we expect the limited to go out of print about the same time.

You can place your order here, if’n you want one.