It will release 1 November and I am COUNTING DAYS GUYS OMG. I am both incredibly excited to show it to the world and nervous for precisely the same reason!
I think of books as a long, time-delayed conversation between authors and readers. You can keep your writing in the back of the wardrobe and never show it to another living soul. This has the advantage of keeping it safe from criticism, but it’s also a lot like talking to yourself. It also means the book is never truly finished, because there’s nothing to stop you fiddling with your wardrobe-book forever.
It’s been a long journey, getting this series ready for release, and part of me still can’t quite believe that book one is really truly actually going to be published IN LESS THAN A MONTH.
Where will the book be available to buy when it releases?
Ebook
In the long run, I plan to make my books available on all ebookseller platforms, but in the short run they will only be available on Amazon. This is due to Amazon’s exclusivity requirements for its subscription programme, Kindle Unlimited, which I plan to enrol my books in initially.
Print
You’ll be able to order books from your preferred bookseller of choice (I can recommend Book Depository for free international shipping). I’ll let you know when and where they’re available.
A sneak peek
I’ve also put the prologue and the first chapter up on the website. You can read it here. I plan to put a few more chapters up before release date, to psych myself up for it!
I’ve been thinking a lot about a certain F word lately. You know the one:
Fairy
Faerie
Faery
Fae
Fey
Feyrie
That one. Or rather, those ones. You see, my current series contains a lot of, um, F-things. And I need to decide which spelling to use.
Now, you might think, given that I’m halfway through writing the fourth and final book in this series, that this decision would long since have been made. Ah, my sweet summer child. I am nothing if not indecisive. Besides, Microsoft Word has a global find-and-replace function, and I haven’t yet published any of the books. This means I’m not committed to any one spelling quite yet.
However, I am going to have to become committed to a specific spelling shortly, mainly because the F-word looks like it’s going to appear in the title of Book 4. Which means it goes on the cover. Which means I need to nail down my spelling preferences before I organise the cover.
So what’s the difference between all these words? To be honest, I’ve seen them all used interchangeably in fiction. Wikipedia has much the same attitude:
And Wikipedia doesn’t even mention the eleventy billion other options. Despite the consensus being, basically, “do what you want”, there are some differences in tone to consider. “Fairy” is more modern and evokes dainty tinkerbells; faerie has an archaic ring. Faery is an interesting mish-mash between the two. Fayrie belongs, I think, in the same category as vampyre and magyck aka who doesn’t love extra y’s in the middle of words? Phaeree? Now it’s just getting silly.
A relatively random selection of book covers; consensus on spelling seems to be You Do You.
I admit I’ve a fondness for “fairy” because mine are definitely not of the tinkerbell-sort, and the dissonance amuses me. But I also enjoy the eldritch connotations of “faerie” and aesthetically I quite like the appearance of “a” and “e” sitting next to each other (I shouldn’t have mocked the vampyres in the last paragraph – I have no high ground here at all, do I?).
In the world of Stariel, I make a distinction between the Faerie Realm and the people who live in it – the fae. However, I haven’t quite been able to let go of the “fairy” spelling entirely – this is what uneducated humans call the fae. Is three different spellings in one novel being greedy?
That said, enjoy an excerpt from the current draft of Book 1: The Lord of Stariel with all three spellings!
“Am I to take it that my family are, in fact, fairies?” Hetta asked, pained.
He burst into startled laughter. The sound filled the small room, warm and touchable, and Hetta gave her heart stern instructions not to soften in response. Remember how he’s lied to you!
“Don’t you dare laugh! This entire tale is so fantastical that I wouldn’t believe a word of it if I hadn’t seen her change with my own eyes. How am I supposed to know what’s a reasonable question to ask? I’ve only known fairies are real for half an hour!”
He wiped at his eyes. “Oh, I am sorry, Hetta. It wasn’t really so unreasonable a suggestion. It was your tone. You’re taking this much better than I’d hoped, despite my addle-brained telling of it.”
“Well, get on with your addle-brained telling then.” Hetta eyed the whisky glasses on her desk, untouched from earlier. No, better not, she decided with regret. A clear head was required for this.
He sobered. “To answer your question: no, the Valstars are not ‘fairies’. Or at least, not anymore. And I should correct your usage of terms. We are the fae; our land is Faerie.”
A few people have asked why they can’t read Book 1: The Lord of Stariel now if I’ve finished writing it. (As an aside, this enthusiasm is awesome. Thanks guys!) The answer is mostly because I’m writing a quartet and at the end of Book 4 it needs to look like I knew where I was heading all the way back in Book 1. This can be achieved in two ways:
(1) Knowing where I was heading all the way back in Book 1.
(2) By returning to Books 1, 2, and 3 after I’ve arrived at the end of Book 4 and changing things to make it look like I 100% planned it this way the whole time. Obviously the overarching plot isn’t still a big foggy mystery to me in any way. Nope. Definitely not. IGNORE THIS ENTIRE PARAGRAPH.
Revision notes on one of my early drafts
There’s another reason why finishing-a-draft ≠ book-being-immediately-available-to-read, and that’s the writing/publishing process. The writing process (for me) looks like this:
Planning: Yes. Ahem. Moving on.
The First Half of the Book: Shiny idea! I’m a genius! Look at all those words!
The Mid-Point of the Book: Oh dear. Where was I going again?
The End of Draft Zero: Whew, I finally figured out how it ends.
The First Edit: Quick, revise the earlier bits of the book so they match the ending!
First Draft Complete: The manuscript and I spend some time apart. A small number of trusted beta readers* read the book.
Revision: I look at the book with fresh eyes + beta reader feedback and make giant lists of things to fix. I fix the things.
Final Draft: OK, there’s generally a few drafts between Draft One and Final Draft, but let’s pretend in this hypothetical novel I fixed all the things in one round of revisions. Woo! Go me!
And now onto the next step in the publishing process… (more on this in a different update)
I had intended to finish the raw draft of Book 3 of The Iron Law before 31 March, all nice and neat and ready to start editing the entire trilogy* for Camp Nanowrimo on 1 April. As it turns out, I’m not quite done with Book 3, so Camp has become a combo of finish-book-3 and editing.
*trilogy…yes…definitely not looking like a fourth one will be in the works. Um.
