Trudi Canavan's Blog, page 10

Just 43 days 1 hour 2 minutes 8 seconds until Thief’s Mag...

Just 43 days 1 hour 2 minutes 8 seconds until Thief’s Magic arrives in bookstores!

(For the Australian release date, minus 2 days. For the US add 5 days.)

Doctor Who: Salt of the Earth

Doctor Who: Salt of the Earth

Part of the Time Trips e-book series to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who. In this adventure, the Third Doctor and Jo Grant head for a well-deserved holiday in Australia, only to have a dangerous encounter with sinister salt “sculptures”.

Heat

After a late beginning, this year’s summer in Melbourne has been hot. I’ve been alternating between hibernating under the air-conditioner during heatwaves and obsessively writing during the breaks between. It doesn’t leave much room for anything else.

But with less than a hundred days until Thief’s Magic is released, I’ve been thinking about ways I might celebrate. Among the ideas I’m considering:

* a quote bookmark and badge

* character sketches and maybe a limited edition bookplate

* blog posts about my Millenium’s Rule playlist and some sources of inspiration

* an ARC competition

There will be exciting things happening over on my Facebook Fan Page, too.

What would you like to see me do here, or elsewhere? (A tour outside Australia isn’t planned, I’m afraid.)

And Thief’s Magic isn’t the only book coming out soon. My Doctor Who enovella, Salt of the Earth, will be out in March. Which is… really, really soon!

Immersion

Lately I’ve been lost in the worlds of the Millennium’s Rule trilogy, writing Angel of Storms. Or rather, rewriting, since these first chapters were once part of a novel I wrote way back when I was looking for a publisher for the Black Magician Trilogy. They are just as exciting to write now as the first time, and it’s only RSI and a bad back that’s stopping me writing obsessively until I drop.

Of course, when I’m not writing my time is taken up with the usual distraction of this time of year and some fun research activities. Blogging has rather fallen by the wayside. I’ll be back next year with my usual list of the best books I read in the last year, and maybe a belated Mini Tour post.

Have a happy and safe holiday season, whatever your plans are!

Win Win!

While I was in the UK I delivered to my publisher some signed bookmarks and sets of badges (made by me!) for them to use as prizes on the Facebook fanpage.

They’re up for grabs now. All you have to do is tell them why you love reading my books in 250 characters or less. (I’m already blushing at some of the lovely entries.)

Thief’s Magic Cover Reveal

I don’t envy the challenge my publishers have faced, coming up with the cover for Thief’s Magic. The new series needed a look that related to my previous covers yet also moved in a new direction.

What they’ve come up with is brilliant:

It connects many of the elements in the story, from the sentient book to the characters ‘walking through fire’ to the sense that they are stepping out of the image as if emerging from one world into another. The familiar hooded figure merges with the new elements beautifully.

Now I’m itching to create bookmarks and badges that will match the look of the covers. I already have a few ideas coming together, I just need to find the time to do some drawing…

Australian & New Zealand Fantasy Writers

Earlier this year, in preparation for a panel at the Austalian National Convention I did a lot of searching around the internet and created a spreadsheet tracking the output of Australia and New Zealand’s published fantasy writers.

Well, most of them. Since I did have a book to write, I kept to writers published by big to middling sized publishers. I also stuck to writers of what I call ‘alternate world’ fantasy – fantasy set mainly in an alternative world to our own – to avoid the complications of deciding where to draw the line between fantasy and urban fantasy/horror/alt history. Then when it came to young adult books, I only included those authors that had published books that had clearly made a mark in the adult market.

My research revealed that, currently, two thirds of Australian fantasy writers are women. This wasn’t a surprise to us Aussies, nor to anyone who has looked at the genre Down Under. I’ve long been asked what is is about my homeland that produces such great female fantasy writers.

But we don’t just produce great female writers, we have some damn fine male ones, too. At World Fantasy Con a few weeks ago I was asked to recommend some Australian writers. While I already have a page of recommendations in the menu above, I keep it to ten so I don’t overwhelm readers with too many choices, and because I don’t recommend books I haven’t read and I simply don’t have the time to read even one book by all the Australian and New Zealand fantasy writers out there.

I figure the list of authors is a great resource to post here for anyone curious to now we Aussie and Kiwi fantasy writers have to offer. I’ve linked to each author’s Goodreads page so you can hop over to see what sort of fantasy they write. I doubt it’s a complete list, and I admit it’s a little fuzzy around the edges of the alternative world fantasy category, and there are always new authors arriving on the scene, so feel free to make more suggestions in the comments.

Jo Anderton

Fletcher Anthony

K J Bishop

Sam Bowring

Simon Brown

Isobelle Carmody

Rowena Cory Daniells

Alison Croggan

Louise Cusack

Jack Dann

Cecilia Dart-Thornton

Sara Douglass

Grace Dugan

Kim Falconer

Jennifer Fallon

Kate Forsyth

Pamela Freeman

Alison Goodman

Traci Harding

Julie Haydon

Lian Hearn

Ian Irvine

Kate Jacoby

Shannah Jay

Russell Kirkpatrick

Jay Kristoff

Margo Lanagan

Glenda Larke

Duncan Lay

Helen Lowe

Beverley MacDonald

Bevan McGuiness

Fiona McIntosh

Juliet Marillier

Martin Middleton

Karen Miller/ K E Mills

Caiseal Mor

Garth Nix

Josephine Pennicott

Tansy Rayner Roberts

Jane Routley/Rebecca Locksley

Joel Shepherd

Tony Shillitoe

Jo Spurrier

Dirk Strasser

K J Taylor

Mary Victoria

Sean Williams

Home!

I’m back from the Mini Tour, holiday and World Fantasy Con. We’re still getting over the jet lag, have a billion photos to sort, lots of email to tackle, bills to pay, lawn to mow, and don’t even mention the ‘C’ word. But hopefully I’ll get a blog post or two up in the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned…

Book Signing Etiquette Update

In preparation for my European Tour of ’11 I wrote a blog post on book signing etiquette that was very popular and hopefully useful, too. I’ve just updated it based on my experiences last time.

Book Signing Etiquette

In particular, I learned that there’s a lot of hauling bags on and off trains during these tours and my back just isn’t up to that. I’ll be travelling with a carry-on sized bag and mailing home anything that doesn’t fit.

Mini Tour: Poland, Germany, UK and WFC

As I’ve been tweeting, I’m going to be at World Fantasy Con in Brighton at the end of next month. It’ll be my first WFC and I’m looking forward to discovering what they are like.

I couldn’t come all that way for a holiday and not take the opportunity to also meet a few fans, so I added ten more days to my trip to offer to publishers for publicity events. I’m calling these ten days my Mini Tour of 2013.

However, I know I need to emphasise that this is an add-on to my holidays, not a fully publisher-financed trip. I don’t have a new book coming out in time for the trip so it’s best to save publicity budgets and my time away from writing for when we’ll get the most benefit from it. And since it’s only a short Mini Tour, publishers have chosen central locations for events.

Poland: Event schedule to come.

Germany: Event schedule here.

United Kingdom: Forbidden Planet signing information here.

World Fantasy Con: website.