Furthermore, DTRPG are matching $5 and $10 donations, if you can’t afford the $20 download donation. The fundraising drive has brought in a mind-boggling $93,500 so far (I don’t know if that includes the matching funds or not, but I’m not sure it matters: it’s a hell of a lot of money), and I’m sort of expecting it’ll break $100K before morning.

If you’re at all inclined to donate through them, let me sweeten the pot just a little: I will send advanced copies of DEMON HUNTS, book 5 of the Walker Papers, to the first dozen people who donate and email me their receipt (to cemurphyauthor@gmail.com).

For a time frame, I expect to get copies of DEMON HUNTS around mid-April, so if that’s correct you’d be getting the book about a month, perhaps slightly more, before it comes out in the bookstores.

Edited to add: A dozen people have now emailed me their receipts for their donations to Doctors Without Borders via Drive Thru RPG. In fact, a few more than a dozen have emailed me, so I will throw in a baker’s dozenth book.

The 13th book will be a name drawn from a hat after DTRPG shut down their fundraising efforts, so if you decide to donate through them, go ahead and email me the receipt and I’ll put your name into the hat.

You guys are all extremely, extremely cool. Thank you for participating in this. *beams*

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Re-visit the world of Deverry, and of Nevyn, with a previously unpublished tale by Katharine Kerr, watch the Norse gods meet their Celtic counterparts with Elaine Cunningham, meet a druid who dances for the dead with C.E. Murphy and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

I’m guest blogging over at Temple Library Reviews about some of the differences between writing comics and novels. Thanks very much to Harry for inviting me to come play at his review site!

As reminded by several persons, THE PRETENDER’S CROWN has been nominated for the 2009 David Gemmell LEGEND Award for Fantasy. It’s on the long list, which is incredibly flattering, and it would be even more flattering to make it to the short list. My understanding is that voting between now and March will winnow the list down, so if you’ve any inclination, here’s the voting page.

And here’s this year’s publication schedule:

February: THE PHANTOM QUEEN AWAKES (anthology with a story of the Morrigan)


May: DRAGON LURE (anthology with a post-Negotiator-trilogy Janx story)


May 29: RUNNING WITH THE PACK (anthology with a Regency werewolf story)


June 1: DEMON HUNTS (book 5 of the Walker Papers. Birthday release date!)


August 31: TRUTHSEEKER (book 1 of the Worldwalker Duology)

In the meantime, a teaser:

There was something weird about crossing the city lines into New Orleans. Not just that the Big Easy was by anybody’s standards–in fiction, anyway–the center of all things supernatural in the States. It was bigger than that, a nasty jolt that wrenched everything a couple steps to the left. Even the city’s aura looked different from inside than it had from a few miles out, and I had absolutely no clue why.

The exciting thing about my life was that I’d probably find out.

For all my traveling around as a kid, I’d never gone through New Orleans. N’awlins, the way the natives said it. I loved that sound, like it was a word to be rolled around in and licked off the skin. So I did what any tourist would do upon arriving in the heartland of American Weird.

I hit the French Quarter.

Three days before Mardi Gras, the Quarter was hopping. It was probably the worst time of year to visit if I actually wanted to see New Orleans, but it was the best time if I wanted to throw myself eyeball-deep into beads, streamers, costumes, half-naked girls–Gary was going to deeply regret not having come along–parades, parties, obscene amounts of incredibly good food, and bourbon. I’d never actually tried bourbon and was kind of looking forward to it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t indulge right away, because the fish-hook sensation in my belly, the one that had been hauling me around ever since my shamanic powers had awakened, was getting tighter and more uncomfortable the deeper I got into the Quarter. I didn’t think my magic would give me an even break–let me heal up from a hangover, in other words–if I ignored it in favor of tying one on.

The city was a veritable teeming mass of humanity. Scent bombarded me from every direction: booze, perfume, pot, food, oh, God, the food, and the pervasive stink of sweat that no amount of deodorant or cologne was going to drown. Voices rose and fell in shrieks of laughter, joy, dismay; shouting was the only way to be heard, even if you were talking to the guy standing next to you. Everyone was beautiful in that flush-of-life way, though here in the heart of the city, so close to Mardi Gras, there were an unnatural number of genuinely beautiful people. They ran the color spectrum from rich blue-black all the way through to translucent white, with me thrown in on the whiter end, though when one of those really white girls stumbled into my arms, the skin tone comparison made me look rich and gold beside her. It was only back in Qualla Boundary, surrounded by others of Cherokee descent, that I felt stand-out pale.

Maybe it was thinking about North Carolina and the life I’d left behind there that made me notice her. There were too many people to explain it otherwise, though the fish-hooks in my gut pulled so hard and sharp that they might’ve been an explanation on their own. It didn’t matter: she was half a block away and visible for about five seconds through a break in the crowd. She wore black leather damned near head to toe, all of it so snug against her body it had to be custom-made. Silver sparkled all over it, zippers and other things I couldn’t identify from the distance. She looked hot, both literally and figuratively, and I thought the reason I’d glimpsed her at all was everybody else thought so too, and was backing up to get a better look at her.

She had to be at least my height, just a hair under six feet tall, even without the shit-stomping motorcycle boots she wore. And speaking of hair, if you took my crop cut and her four foot braid and divvied them out, we would both end up with what society considered a normal amount of hair for a woman. She was even built a lot like I was, rangy long limbs, though I thought I carried more muscle across the chest and shoulder from years of working on my car. Her skin tones were darker than mine, more pure Indian, but if somebody’d told me we were sisters, I’d have been inclined to believe them.

Particularly when she glanced my way and a flash of light caught the color of her amber eyes.

In my world, yellow eyes meant magic user. I should know: my own eyes were probably gold as sunrise just then, as the Sight kicked in to study one of the most complex, gorgeous auras I’d ever seen. Earthy colors tangled with something absolutely inhuman: dark, sleek, sentient and dangerous. A hunter, sharing body and soul with a human, and just ever so slightly bubbling with resentment over it.

I sure as hell knew what had brought me to New Orleans, now.

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. :)

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

Merry Christmas Eve, everybody!

I know that some authors find rewriting easier (in some ways) than the initial creative process. Me, I can whip something out of nothing without breaking a sweat. But whenever I try to approach the highly necessary rewrite of my recent novella, I get almost immediately overwhelmed by the minutiae of things that need tending to. I am pulled this way and that, trying to keep track of the myriad of details that need to hover simultaneously in my forebrain–and I end up just fiddling with the niggling little grammar nits, polishing word choice, questioning whether that adverb is really necessary, and reassuring myself that all the independent clauses are safely sequestered within their parenthetical commas.

Consequently, the real work–that is, deleting scenes and rewriting the whole cloth of large sections–goes undone because of these distractions of questionable value. Sometimes, I think I might be better off deleting the damned thing and starting over from scratch.

So, my question: In your subsequent drafts, how do you keep the story from getting in the way of your rewriting?

Answer behind the cut.

I know writers who do, in fact, just start their second draft from scratch. I don’t personally, but sometimes I can see the appeal. I also am not one of those writers who finds the revision process vastly more rewarding than the initial writing process, although I do like the end result of all that flipping work. But the actual revision work is exhausting, because I’m trying to hold three different versions of the story in my head at once: the story as it was, the story as it is in process of being revised, and the story as it needs to be.

From the lead-in to the question, it sounds like it’s the second stage where it’s falling apart for the writer, which makes sense to me, because it’s the second part *I* find really headache-inducing. Knowing what you have to do, knowing what the story should look like on the other end, is a hell of a lot easier than figuring out how to do it. And I hate to say it, but on some level, it’s just a matter of practice. It’s also a hell of a lot easier if a third party (like an editor) has said, “This is a part that doesn’t work. Make it work,” or, “I need to see some motivation for this action,” or “I need more sense of setting here,” because that gives me something to work off of.

Okay. *rubs brain* This is hard to think about, actually, or at least hard to explain, because so much of it for me is just grim damned determination to get it done. But one thing I do is start with a hard copy. I _have_ to start with a hard copy. If I just try to work on screen my brain dribbles out my ear and I lose all will to live. More importantly, my brain is extremely consistent: if I start doing revisions on screen, what happens is I think, “Oh! This is a place to insert a clever line!” and I revise to insert it, then discover that a page and a half later, I already had that clever line in place. Hard copy prevents me from doing that, and believe me, after about the fifteenth time *of* doing it, I’m very happy to have read the bloody book all the way through and made myself aware of where my brain is likely to come up with clevernesses that it has already come up with. :)

Having a hard copy also means I can physically strike sections out, even if all I leave myself with beyond that is a note in big letters saying “MAKE THIS MORE BETTER” (which, yes, is usually exactly what I write). It is, one way or another, a visual cue that this part needs *work*.

I usually start at the beginning of the story, but I don’t think there’s any compelling reason to do it that way. Another advantage of hard copy for me is that when I’m further into the book and I’ve found something that needs setup earlier on, I can go back and leave myself a note on the paper that says “Joanne’s facing Wile E. Coyote on page 235, there needs to be some kind of foreshadowing *here*, in this scene where I can stuff in a Looney Toons reference without it being too gratuitous.” Then when I get to that in the on-screen revisions I can go “oh yeah” and take care of it immediately instead of having to flip back and forth.

Trust yourself–and when I say ‘trust yourself’, I also mean ‘forbid yourself to nitpick’–on the sentence structure level, by and large. There will, yes, be times and places where the sentences need work, but put that into a different mental space. That’s copy-editing, not revising. It comes *after* revisions.

I will very frequently cut and paste the sections that need work out of the manuscript. So if I need to strike seven pages out of chapter three and just rewrite them wholesale, I’ll take a version of chapter 3, save it into the Second Draft folder, and then delete everything that needs to go in one big chunk. It’s completely psychological for me: somehow it’s less awful to gut chapter three by itself than it is to take it out of the manuscript and watch the whole page count of the manuscript collapse by eight pages. It also gives me a place (or usually more than one) where the original version of the chapter or scene is saved, so if I need to go back and rescue a sentence, I can snag it out of the original.

I use a lot of white space when I’m working on screen. If I’m working on a specific part of a scene and I know there’s still shitloads to do further down, I just hit carriage return until I can’t see the later material. Again, it’s pure psychology. It’s a matter of being able to *face* one page of revisions at a time, but having new text that needs work continually scrolling up to face me is just disenheartening.

Focus on one major problem/storyline/thread/whatever at a time. This year an editor asked me to do a major revision on a book. M.A.J.O.R. revision. What ended up happening was I rewrote the first half of the book heavily and the second half less so, and then in the second round of revisions, ended up rewriting the second half of the book heavily. I *knew*, when I submitted it the second time, that there were still problems facing the manuscript, but I had just run out of steam. I needed someone else’s feedback to say “these are the things that can be punched up”. Basically what I did was face one set of problems the first time through, and an almost completely different set the second time around (they had been touched on in the first revision, but it was sort of an emotional storyline revision vs an action storyline revision, and I didn’t have the mental capacity to manage both at once to the degree they both needed work).

All right. If I have any more thoughts I’ll add them later, but right now this is all I can come up with. I hope it’s at least of a little use.