Dust and Light - In the Wild!

Out today, Dust and Light, the first novel of Sanctuary.

How much must one pay for an hour of youthful folly? The Pureblood Registry accused Lucian de Remeni-Masson of “unseemly involvement with ordinaries,” which meant only that he spoke with a young woman not of his own kind, allowed her to see his face unmasked, worked a bit of magic for her....After that one mistake, Lucian’s grandsire excised half his magic and savage Harrowers massacred his family. Now the Registry has contracted his art to a common coroner. His extraordinary gift for portraiture is restricted to dead ordinaries—beggars or starvelings hauled from the streets.

But sketching the truth of dead men’s souls brings unforeseen consequences. Sensations not his own. Truths he cannot possibly know and dares not believe. The coroner calls him a cheat and says he is trying to weasel out of a humiliating contract. The Registry will call him mad—and mad sorcerers are very dangerous....

You can find Dust and Light at
    Your local Independent Bookstore
Or online at
    Amazon

    Barnes and Noble
    Powells  
    Audible


For an autographed copy, contact my good friends Nina and Ron Else at the Broadway Book Mall - 303-744-BOOK - in Denver.

Read the starred review from  Publisher's Weekly
Read an excerpt
Read more of this post!

Launching Dust and Light!

August is going to be a busy month.

Any month where you give birth is busy - though I hope to get more sleep than in those human baby days! I'll be all sort of places online in August and do a little traveling, too. A book's legs are established in its first month out.  And an author's career teeters on those legs.  So I'm off to the races.

I'm going to kick things off this Friday.  Yes, the book isn't quite  out yet.  August 5th is the official date.  But I had an opportunity to share an evening of talk and reading with E.C. Ambrose.  Back when E.C. Ambrose was writing as Elaine Isaak, a very cruel dark-fantasy writer, I shared a  couple of panels with her at conventions.  We had fun comparing our wicked ways with our heroes.  The word?  She makes me look like a pansy!  And so does her alter ego, EC.

Anyway she is in town launching her own new book, and she couldn't make it in August.  So we'll have our little soiree on Friday evening, July 25th at 7:00pm at Old Firehouse Books in Fort Collins.

Next up will be Bubonicon, August 1-3 in Albuquerque.  The book won't officially be out then, either, but my good friends at the Broadway Book Mall are in charge of the bookstore at the con and have gotten early release permission from my publisher.  So if you want it early, come visit us in Albuquerque.

Then it's off to California and a Sunday, August 10th, 2pm event at the flagship sff bookstore Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego.

Saturday, August 23, at 2pm, I'll be back in Denver for my Colorado launch at the wonderful, friendly Broadway Book Mall.  And I'll be reading, and parlaying with Laurey Patten, longtime writing partner, who has just released her excellent sword-and-sorcery adventure The Talent Sinistral.

And then there are the online appearances.  Here's where you'll be able to find me online in August:

Thursday August 7:

John Scalzi's Big Idea;

Magical Words: Guest Author on Dust and Light;

Thursday August 14:

Reddit Fantasy AMA (Ask Me Anything) Real Time starting at 7pm Central;

Magical Words: Guest Author on Characters;

Thursday August 21:

Magical Words: Guest Author on Blowing Up the Dam;

Thursday August 21:

Magical Words: Guest Author on The Writing Life;

Join me so I'm not sitting lonely at my keyboard. You can ask me anything at any of these stops (not just the Ask Me Anything).  And Stay Tuned for a few more stops!

What about autumn, you might say...

In September I'll be thrashing and burning, trying to finish off Ash and Silver. The forecast is cloudy. But I will also be appearing at the Colorado Gold Writers Conference and teaching some workshops on worldbuilding and NOT outlining. Later in the fall I'll be at MileHiCon in Denver and then at the World Fantasy Convention in Washington DC in early November.  More on those later. Read more of this post!

Same World, New Story

How easy is it to go back to a world you've created?  Lots of authors do it.  Sometimes with sequels, sometimes with prequels.  Sometimes with time jumps.  Often with wholly a wholly new cast of characters.  When I finished the novels of the Collegia Magica, I realized that I had created five fairly complete worlds, all of which I loved.

I try very hard to make my series have a good resolution.  I want readers to believe that the mysteries and dilemmas of the plot have been untangled and finished off in a satisfactory - and believable - way.  And that the characters live on in the new directions they've taken, with love, magic, companionship, hope, grief, whatever I've left with them. I have always sworn not to go back to a previous cast of characters or world unless I had a new story to tell.

That's why I picked Navronne - the world of the Lighthouse Duet, Flesh and Spirit and Breath and Bone.  Not only was the world - with its mythic underpinnings and rich history - one I enjoyed, I felt a nagging sense that I had left a lot of interesting story on the table.  Valen, the hero of the Lighthouse books, was a rebel, a wanderer, and the path of his life took him to a most unexpected place.  While the part of the world that he had spent his life running from - the families of pureblood sorcerers with their strange culture, their strict discipline, and their unique position in the world - was left almost entirely unexplored.  Valen hated the life his birth condemned him to - and he discovered the life he was meant to have.  What would life be like for a man of similar age and similar status who embraced the role he was born to?  Who had a family that appreciated his talents and loved him dearly.  That man is Lucian de Remeni-Masson, a very wealthy, privileged sorcerer, born not with one, but two strong magical talents - most unusual, as it happens - and who believes that his magic is a divine gift.  Lucian embraces the strict life that Valen abhorred.   And then, of course, because he is my hero...

  ...everything goes wrong.

That is the story begun in Dust and Light (Roc Books, August 2014). More next time on the peculiar difficulties of going back - not only to the world but to a parallel timeframe, so that the civil war, the environmental collapse, and the rampaging Harrowers that were so much fun in the first series, could set up problems for Lucian as well.  Just very different problems. Read more of this post!