It's mainly an introduction blog entry, so if you already know me, you probably don't need to see it. If you don't already know me, well, hello!
Here's the blog entry.
Now, I know that it's going to be ages until I've got a cover. The publisher has to hire an artist, work with them on what the cover is going to be, go through revisions, approvals, input from marketing and sales and so on and so on.
Thing is, I can't wait. I just can't.
Every time I take a look on goodreads, that sad blank, grey cover looks back at me, mocking me.
Well, I'm afraid I gave in.
I bought a rather nice image on a stock photo site, cropped it, and slapped some text on.
I was tempted to spend ages making it look like a real cover, but Steph quite sensibly gave me dire warnings about the confusion that it might cause.
So, it doesn't look like a real cover. But at least when I look at goodreads, I don't have that horrible blank giving me the evil eye.
And if you're on goodreads, feel free to add the book: http://www.goodreads.com/book/sho
- Current Music:Just Like Paradise, David Lee Roth
http://patricksamphire.blogspot.com/201
This time for Secrets of the Dragon Tomb tself.
Thanks again to Pulp-O-mizer. (Yes, I could do this all day...)
(Secrets of the Dragon Tomb ill be published by Christy Ottaviano Books (Henry Holt / Macmillan) ... in the future.)
Also check out the cover I did for Steph's middle grade fantasy novel, Renegade Magic Kat, Incorrigible book 2) which is out now in hardcover and in mass market paperback on March 5, 2013.
So, in my upcoming middle grade novel, Secrets of the Dragon Tomb, there are frequent references to a fictional pulp magazine called Thrilling Martian Tales. My protagonist is a bit obsessed with it, and with the British-Martian spy, Captain W A Masters, who stars in it.
When Steph tweeted a link to the incredibly awesome pulp-o-mizer, I thought it was a fantastic chance to mock up a cover for the magazine.
Sadly, you can only order the magazine on Mars in 1816. Get out your clockwork time machines and go buy it!
I've just posted the second in my series of blog posts explaining the entire process over on my other blog:
http://patricksamphire.blogspot.com/2013/0
First entry here http://patricksamphire.blogspot.com/2013/0
The collection consists of nine short stories, eight of which were previously published in places like Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons and Black Static.
You can still buy the .mobi version of this collection via the various Amazon stores, but you can now also get an .epub version at Smashwords. It should filter out to other online stores over the next few weeks. Here are the links to where you can buy it:
Smashwords
Amazon UK
Amazon USA
Here are a few reviews of stories in the collection:
"Marvelous."
- Colin Harvey, Suite101, on 'At the Gates'
"This one kept me turning the page without pause, with its natural pace and flow of words, good characterization, and skillful plot build-up. Samphire's writing skill is matched only by his knowledge of Ancient Egyptian culture and mythology."
- Scott M. Sandridge, Tangent Online, on 'The Land of Reeds'.
"A great coming-of-age story."
David Roy, epinions, on 'When the Dragon Falls".
Enjoy!
For those of you who have Kindles, my short story collection, Bone Roads: Nine Stories of Magic and Wonder ill be free rom Amazon on Christmas day (apparently timed according to PST).I'm not sure if this is just Amazon in the US or all Amazon stores, but check it out if you're looking for some reading on your shiny new (or old) Kindle or Kindle app on Christmas.
There's no DRM, so feel free to convert to other formats if you prefer!
Bone Roads on: Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk
Here's the blurb:
A ghost searches for revenge in ancient Egypt.
A girl risks awakening a dark god to save her dog.
A boy unearths the bones of a dragon…
These fantasy stories were previously published in magazines including Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, and Black Static.
The Nine Stories:
When the Dragon Falls
A Field Guide to Ugly Places
The Frog King
Five Things of Beauty
Dawn, by the Light of a Barrow Fire
The Sea Beyond Thule
The Land of Reeds
The Western Front
At the Gates
Reviews of stories in this collection:
"This is the first story I've read this year that I'd consider a masterpiece. It's rare for a story to move me to tears, but this one did."
- John Dodds, The Fix, on 'The Western Front'.
"Marvelous."
- Colin Harvey, Suite101, on 'At the Gates'
"This one kept me turning the page without pause, with its natural pace and flow of words, good characterization, and skillful plot build-up. Samphire's writing skill is matched only by his knowledge of Ancient Egyptian culture and mythology."
- Scott M. Sandridge, Tangent Online, on 'The Land of Reeds'
It's not really a secret that I am not a character-driven writer. When I sit down to write, the story, ideas, and setting come to me before the characters do. Steph is the opposite. When she sits down, its the characters that come to her first and foremost, and she figures out the story afterwards.
Now, I don't think it matters which way around you come up with stuff. Characters, story, setting, idea, whatever. What does matter is that you figure out all the aspects sooner rather than later.
And on and on...
Read, if you dare.
Okay, I've held off on this for most of a week, but that's the extent of my self-discipline, so here goes:
My middle grade novel Secrets of the Dragon Tomb is going to be published by Christy Ottaviano Books (an imprint of Henry Holt / Macmillan) in the US and Canada!!!
My wonderful-fantastic agent, Jenn Laughran, gave me the news last week, and the announcement was in Publishers Marketplace over the weekend.
A few of you might remember Secrets of the Dragon Tomb from when I was writing it a few years ago. It's steampunk! It's a thrilling adventure! It's set in the Regency. On Mars. It's full of despicable villains, deadly clockwork machines, unlikely spies, and terrible peril. And it has pterodactyls. Of course.
If I can be slightly immodest, I absolutely love this world. I don't think I've ever had so much fun coming up with ideas and writing the characters as I did for this, and I'm so excited that I'll get to share it with other people.
I can trace this book all the way back to when I was about 16 years old. (I am now *ahem* 41 years old, so, you know, that's an awful long time...) My parents gave me a fantastic book, called The Illustrated Book of Science Fiction Ideas and Dreams, by David Kyle.
It's a wonderful book. I still own this book (I actually now have two copies), and am known to wave it around frequently, most recently at a steampunk panel at Bristolcon. (I was on the panel, not waving it from the audience. I'm not that crazy...)
The book gives a history of science fiction writing and art from its earliest origins right through to the mid-70s. The bits that really wowed me most of all were the stuff on early pulp, and the stuff on Victorian science fiction, particularly the work of the French artist, Albert Robida, whose fantastic flying machines and elaborate futuristic ideas were an enormous influence on me.
(You can see a bunch more of his work here, or, you know, on the internet...)
Add a touch of Jane Austen, some Indiana Jones, and some sub-Wodehouse humour, and, well, you're probably going to just end up confused. (Yes, I will have to come up with a better elevator pitch than this...)
Right now, I know absolutely no other details about the publication. I don't know when the book will come out. I don't even know if it'll keep the same title. I do know that it's going to have internal illustrations (*faints with excitement*; I love books with illustrations), and that it's part of a two-book deal, but I don't yet know what the second book will be.
But right now, who cares!?! Right???
YAY! *Lies down again in excitement* (This is the lazy person's version of excitement; you may jump up and down in excitement. I lie down. With chocolate. And green tea.)
Friday links (on a feathered T. Rex, writing, publishing, the real origin of vampires, and baby elephant cuteness)
A special bonus for you who are still sticking around on LiveJournal (shh! Don't tell them on Blogger...) A photo of a dynamic, frightening battle between pirates and dinosaurs:
The dinosaurs won. I was playing the pirates.
What I really need is input from writers and readers as to what kind of thing the WordPress theme should include. I've put up some more details over on my other blog. If you've got any suggestions or comments, please do head over and leave your thoughts. I'd really appreciate it.
http://patricksamphire.blogspot.com/201
Not that I don't love you, you understand.
http://patricksamphire.blogspot.com/201
That's all for now.
Luckily, as I have the power to move in and out of fiction at will, we took him to Jurassic Park for the day (luckily leaving before disaster struck and we were eaten by Tyrannosaurs).
Here is the proof:
That's me and MrD. with an Edmontosaurus.
And, of course, me with the Tyrannosaurus, before we were forced to flee when the electric fences came down.
Sigh.
I'm probably showing my age, but after the 1980s, it was never the same. :)
This year I'm aiming for about 40k words, plus some other work, but this time I'm half way through a novel, so I have some momentum. This is actually the first novel that I've outlined in advance, and while there are certainly flaws in my outline (I need to figure out a better way of keeping forward motion and increasing stakes/tension in the outline), it's made writing a far easier proposition. I tend to have very limited writing time and also tend to be pretty brain dead and exhausted when I start, so actually knowing in advance what I'm going to write has made me way more productive.
Unfortunately, right now, I've realised that I kind of skimped the outlining in the middle part of the book, and it's all very vague. Still, I managed just over a thousand words today in a very brief, low-energy period, and without the outline, I probably wouldn't have managed any. So, win!
I'm probably going to post wordcounts here from time to time for accountability, but feel free to ignore those posts.
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Steph and I are also planning to go to BristolCon again this year. BristolCon is a relatively new con (I think this is its third or fourth year), and it's only one day, but it's fast becoming one of my favourites. It's small enough that you don't feel lost or unable to find people, but it has a lot of great writers going, and it's one of the few times each year we get to meet friends like Justina Robson, Tricia Sullivan, Aliette de Bodard, and lots of others.
We still have to figure out whether we can get proper childcare for the day, so it's not 100% certain that I'll be there, but Steph certainly will be.
#
Over on the other blog, I've posted a brief book review of Sarwat Chadda's Ash Mistry and the Savage Fortress (just called the "The Savage Fortress" in the U.S.). It's a middle grade adventure set in contemporary India, with two children caught up in a conflict between demons and gods from Hindu mythology. I'm recommending it.
Here's the blog entry.
Read the blog entry...
The first entry is here: http://patricksamphire.blogspot.com/2012/0
Drop by, leave comments, or just follow along! If you've got anything you'd particularly like me to cover, then let me know.
Today, I listened repeatedly as various newsreaders on the BBC announced that the twelve-year-old leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband, had "admitted" that his party had been wrong on immigration. They should not, he apparently now believed, have allowed so many Eastern European immigrants into the country.
Now, you (and everyone else) are entirely and completely entitled to your own opinion as to whether immigrants are evil blood-sucking demons who will steal your jobs, scrounge off welfare, and eat your babies, or whether immigration is generally a good thing. That's the not the point of this rant.
The point of this rant is the word "admitted". This word was used repeatedly, without attribution to the boy Miliband, by BBC newsreaders.
The word "admitted" implies that the case is beyond debate. That it is a fact that there are too many immigrants, and that the Labour Party had been wrong until now.
This is a perfectly legitimate position to take in a debate on immigration; it is not a legitimate position for a newsreader to take while reading the news.
The thing is, in Britain, broadcasters are required by law to be impartial, politically. There is an even greater moral obligation on the BBC, which the national, state broadcaster, not to take a political position itself.
By using the word "admitted" on this political issue, the newsreaders were showing that either, a) they were unaware of the implication of the word, in which case they were incompetent, and should be fired (or their editors should be fired, if it was a decision made higher up), or, b) they were very well aware of the implication, in which case they should be fired, for failing to meet their obligation of impartiality.
Now, they could easily have gotten around this problem. They could have made it clear that they were quoting Miliband directly. (Ed Miliband has said that he admits..., for example), or they could have used a more neutral word, such as 'claimed' (Ed Miliband has claimed that...). But they didn't. They took a political position, and that is not the job of the BBC.
Ed Miliband: You wouldn't want this clown serving your burger, let alone running your country.
Now, it is of course no surprise that Ed Miliband, who has all the moral fibre and strength of character of one of the soggy, balled-up tissues he deposits at the bottom of his waste paper bin, should have come out and said what he said. It is also true that both major political parties in the UK now have essentially identical anti-immigrant views. Those views may even be shared by a majority of the people in the country. But that does not in any way mean that the BBC is meeting its requirement for political impartiality by creating the framing that they are creating by using the word "admitted".
The job of the BBC news is to present the news in as neutral a way as possible, to provide the facts, so that listeners can make up their own minds.
Words matter, and journalists are paid to use those words well. Here, they have failed to.
/End rant.
Okay, my latest cover is for a short story by YA author Karen Mahoney. The story is a prequel to her brilliant novel The Iron Witch and stars Xan, one of the main characters from The Iron Witch, but the story does stand alone if you haven't read the books yet.
Here's the cover:
Best of all, this short story, The Lost Boy, is absolutely free if you sign up to Karen's (also free) newsletter via her website. If you like YA urban fantasy, definitely check this out.
Now, this isn't a book review. I haven't got my copy yet, but I can't wait until I do.
You see, back in 2007 I think it was I was at Wiscon, the science fiction and fantasy convention, and everyone seemed to be talking about this astonishing book, Flora Segunda. Being a tad contrary and far more grumpy than my age justifies, I humphed and didn't take much notice, proving not for the first time that I am my own worst enemy.
Anyway, not so long after, my wife, Stephanie Burgis, pressed a copy of Flora Segunda into my hands, and I actually read it, and I realized that everyone had been right. It really was an astonishing book.
Here's the goodreads description of Flora Segunda:
Flora knows better than to take shortcuts in her family home, Crackpot Hall--the house has eleven thousand rooms, and ever since her mother banished the magickal butler, those rooms move around at random. But Flora is late for school, so she takes the unpredictable elevator anyway. Huge mistake. Lost in her own house, she stumbles upon the long-banished butler--and into a mind-blowing muddle of intrigue and betrayal that changes her world forever.But it really doesn't do justice to the fantastic, alternate-world version of California that Wilce created, nor the incredible adventures that engulf Flora.
Full of wildly clever plot twists, this extraordinary first novel establishes Ysabeau Wilce as a compelling new voice in teen fantasy.
The second book, Flora's Dare, came out in 2008, and it was just as good. And then ...
Well, publishing has its own reality, and it's not for the likes of you or me to explain or even understand them, and for some reason, the publisher then sat on the final book in the trilogy. Until yesterday.
Yesterday, the final Flora book was released. Flora's Fury: How a Girl of Spirit and a Red Dog Confound Their Friends, Astound Their Enemies, and Learn the Importance of Packing Light is now out.
You can find out more about the book, and the other two books in the series, at Ysabeau's website, www.yswilce.com.
I will declare an interest here (other than the fact that I am an enormous fan of Ysabeau's work). A few days ago, Ysabeau contacted me because she needed her old website updating. Unfortunately, the website is old and cranky, and we've decided that it really needs an overhaul from scratch. So, I've put up a new, temporary homepage with links to where you can buy the book and where you can find out more about Ysabeau and her books.
Hopefully, over the next few days we'll have more stuff up there (including, with permission of her publisher, the opening of the novel). But, in the meantime, here's a screengrab of the temporary front page I've put up.
Enough of that. Now go and buy this awesome book! You won't regret it.
The truth is, I would have been a terrible teacher. I'm a bit of a control freak, and really, that's not exactly a great qualification for dealing with a room of 30 bored teenagers. Oh yeah. Believe me.
Anyway, I was bored and I was flailing around for something more meaningful in my life. And, completely by accident, I found it. I'd finally got back to writing after many years (the benefits of a profoundly tedious job...), and I was spending a fairly high proportion of my 'work' day on Critters, the online writing workshop, critiquing other people's work and having mine torn to bits in return.
Sometime in that period, I heard of Clarion West, the actual, real, live, in-person, face-to-face, six-week, bootcamp of a writer's workshop which was held in Seattle each year. I didn't have much expectation of success, but I fired off an application anyway, and pretty much forgot about it.
Then, suddenly, out of the blue, I got a phone call from one of the administrators of the workshop saying that I'd been accepted. Wow. I don't think I came off very well in that phone call. When I'm surprised or shocked I tend to revert to a very neutral, calm, unemotional facade. Here I was, getting incredible, exciting news, and I reacted like I was being told I was due a eye appointment.
I'd wanted to be a writer since I was 14 years old. At 14, I'd been absolutely sure I would sell and publish a novel by the time I was 18 (ha!). Every day after school I scribbled away in pencil in my notebook, blatantly ripping off Terry Pratchett and thinking how awesome I was. Then I went to university, and other things took over, but I never stopped wanting to be a writer. Now, here was my chance.
But there was one problem. The workshop began two weeks before the end of the teacher training course I was doing, and there was absolutely no way they were going to let me leave early. (I still have issues with this: I had finished and passed all the assignments and the teaching practice, and the last two weeks had no formal classes; I'm sure we could have figured something out to make up the attendance requirements. Still.)
I decided to Clarion West anyway, and screw the teaching qualification. So I did.
It really was the best decision I ever made. Not only did I meet my future wife, Stephanie Burgis, there, but I learned more about being a writer than I did in all the years before or since. And two of the stories I wrote in those six weeks were subsequently published. I loved it there. I loved the writing and critiquing late into the night. I loved hanging out in people's rooms chatting and laughing and throwing ideas back and forth. I loved wandering Seattle.
I even loved the class's trip to see AI, possibly the worst SF movie I've ever seen.
Most of all, I loved my classmates and our instructors. In our very first week, we were taught by the great Octavia Butler (and she even like my story!) Yeah, we had our tensions and our bust-ups. We ripped into each other's stories, and gritted our teeth when others ripped into ours. But despite it, we stayed friends. We went through that fire together.
Almost eleven years later, most of us are still in touch.
And today, we are launching an anthology of stories from eleven of the participants in Clarion West 2001. Best of all, right now it's free to download from Amazon!
Here's the table of contents:
Under the Needle's Eye
The Worry Doctor by Linda DeMeulemeester
Angelfall (novel excerpt from Book 1) by Susan Ee
Selling Short by Raymund Eich
Everyone Gets Scared Sometimes by Ari Goelman
Ruined Spa Day by Samantha Ling
Coyote Discovers Mars by Emily Mah
The Guy Who Worked for Money by Benjamin Rosenbaum
Everybody Stops at Boston's by Allan Rousselle
Rosamojo by Kiini Ibura Salaam
Lavender's Blue, Lavender's Green by Patrick Samphire
The Fire in Your Sky by Ibi Zoboi
The anthology was organized by the enormously energetic Emily Mah with Raymund Eich (equally energetic, no doubt, but in a much more manly way). My story is a reprint of a story that I published in Realms of Fantasy in 2005.
Download Under the Needle's Eye from Amazon.com
Download Under the Needle's Eye from Amazon.co.uk
Under the Needle's Eye is free for just two days, so go get it! Even though it's from Amazon, you don't actually need a Kindle to read it; there are free Kindle apps for computers, tablets, etc.
Here's the book trailer, again made by the I-don't-know-where-she-gets-the-energy-f
The anthology cover is a joint effort by Raymund Eich and Emily Mah.
Go get it while it's free!
Today is the day for my very exciting (for me!) announcement:
I'm starting to offer ebook cover design services, alongside my existing web design services. I've blogged about designing covers before, and I've blogged some of my own covers, but now that I've caught up on my backlog of covers, I'm throwing open my design services to anyone who wants them!
Incidentally, here are the last couple of covers I've completed, both for re-issues of previously-published short stories by Stephanie Burgis.
(Some Girlfriends Can is available on Amazon now, and Undead Philosophy 101 will be available tomorrow; both will turn up on Smashwords and other retailers fairly soon.)
You can see more cover examples and find the full details of my service on my ebook cover design website, but in short, I'm charging $200 for an ebook cover. This gives you an eye-catching, high-resolution, optimized jpeg cover, suitable for inclusion in any ebook.
These covers are ideal for authors re-issuing their back-catalogs and for those who are publishing independently and are looking for a professional cover.
I'm also offering ebook conversion services, and print cover design to go with your ebook. Basically, if you want it, I can do it! :)
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psamphire- Patrick Samphire
- Patrick Samphire
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