M.A. Carrick's Blog, page 4

Aaaaand we’re done(ish)

We have officially sent the copy-edited manuscript of Labyrinth’s Heart back to our editor. We’re not done done with the book, because we still have to go through the page proofs — not to mention promotion and such once it comes out — but since the page proofs are the stage where the book has been typeset and therefore they don’t want you making changes other than corrections of outright errors . . . we’re basically done writing the Rook and Rose series.

Which is sad! And also happy! And also sa...

A new Rook and Rose short story!

Happy New Year! We are officially in 2023, which means that the publication of Labyrinth’s Heart suddenly seems so much closer than before: not next year but this year. About seven months from now! We anticipate getting our copy-edited manuscript in the next week or two, so the wheels of production have begun turning . . .

In the meanwhile, we have a new short story for you: “Constant Ivan and Clever Natalya,” written (or if you prefer audio, narrated) by yours truly. Those names may look famili...

To tide y’all over . . .

Alyc and I are celebrating the anniversary of The Liar’s Knot coming out by giving readers a peek at the “annotations” for the book, i.e. an entertaining selection of the comments we left on the doc for each other while drafting. Needless to say — but I’ll say it anyway — spoilers abound!

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This post originally appeared on SwanTower.com.

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Annotations for The Liar’s Knot!

Happy anniversary of the release of The Liar’s Knot! In an ideal world, you all would be about to receive your copies of Labyrinth’s Heart; alas, you must wait some time longer. But we are doing second-round revisions right now, so you can trust it is on its way, just as fast as we can make it go.

To tide you over, and to celebrate the anniversary of the second book, we’ve posted our annotations! If you missed the ones for The Mask of Mirrors, these are a selection of the comments Alyc and I lea...

An update

It’s been quite silent around here, for which we apologize! We do have some updates for you, albeit not quite as detailed as we would like.

As the last post indicated, the draft of the third and final Rook and Rose book is indeed done. After drafting comes revisions, though, and for various reasons outside our control, those got a little delayed. We are hard at work now, so never fear — the book is moving forward to the light of publication!

(. . . wow, you can tell I’m deep in book headspace be...

SFWA Silent Auction is underway!

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association is running a silent auction, and I’m in it! Prizes on offer are a package deal of a signed copy of The Mask of Mirrors and five Rook and Rose-themed tea samples, and a virtual kaffeeklatsch for which the seats are being auctioned separately: one, two, three, four. Bid on one of those + the first package, and you could potentially sip delicious book-themed tea while we chat! Or if those aren’t your cuppa (sorry not sorry), there are oodles of ot...

Rook and Rose Book 3, Chapter 27 et alia — DONE

Despite Alyc’s encouragement, I don’t think I have it in me to make three progress posts today, one for Chapter 27, and one apiece for the prologue and the epilogue. Yes, the prologue to this book was one of the last things we wrote: third from the end, to be precise, followed by the last scene of Chapter 27 and the epilogue. That last being, of course, a thing the previous two books didn’t have, but here it helps a lot to show some longer-term effects that would feel very shoehorned into the f...

Happy Birthday Ren!

An important magical and plot element in our story has to do with when people were born (or, with Ren, the many ways she lies about when she was born), so we designed a whole branch of numinatria around the numerical calendrical significance of people’s birth dates. What you might call ‘astrology’, though a friend commented recently that it’s not actually astrology. While the planetary objects in our setting have associations with these calendrical numbers, it’s the numbers that matter. And now ...

Rook and Rose Book 3, Chapter 26

The climactic chapter!

Unlike the previous two books, we did not write this one in a single day. Which was for the best; neither Alyc nor I have the kind of physical or mental energy for that at the moment, not when what we had to comb through for the final scene was so complex. We finally hit the right notes, and with those in hand, we now know what kinds of hints we need to seed earlier to set that up properly.

. . . everything else I want to say about this would be a spoiler, so I’ll stop the...

Rook and Rose Book 3, Chapter 25

It’s a real progress blog! By which I mean that, after months of me posting well after the fact because I didn’t actually start progress-blogging when we started writing, I am for realz posting right after we finished a chapter!

And we are in the home stretch! Very visibly so, in fact. You see, Google Docs doesn’t always cope well with very large files; much above 50K words, you can start having problems with lag and such. As a result, we’ve always divided our drafts up into multiple files, one ...