Ursula Vernon's Blog, page 13

Several Pages

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Chessiecon!

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Print Orders Closed For The Holidays

PLEASE NOTE: Red Wombat Studio is taking the holidays off! Orders placed after December 5th will be mailed in January. Orders placed before the 5th will be mailed as soon as possible, but we cannot guarantee Christmas delivery on international orders, because the mail is a foe greater than any of us.

Thank you, and have a lovely holiday!

Thanksgiving Redux

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I was so proud of these corgi doodles, crude though they are, I had to share.

New Hound really was very well behaved, very submissive, and then finally was like “Look, I’m five times your size,” and simply put a paw on her. Her owner said she deserved it. After that, everything was fine. Dogs seem to work these things out.

General Journal 11-26

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General Journal 11-23

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As the garden has wound down, I find myself still wanting to do pages like this, so you get to suffer through my life, such as it is!

…wow, I have been shamefully lax about updating here, as opposed to over on Livejournal. (Yes, I’m a dinosaur.) So, the short form!

Got a new dog! Coonhound mix named Lacey, aka New Hound. Good!

Had a minor nervous breakdown! Bad!

Went back on anxiety meds/antidepressants! Good!

Seventh Bride is re-released from Amazon! Good!

…I think that’s the highlights.

Wooden Feathers

I have a new story up at Uncanny Magazine!

http://uncannymagazine.com/article/wooden-feathers/

Fair warning, it has some sad bits to go with the weird bits. It is about duck decoys, sort of.

If you like it, there’s a lot of cool stuff at Uncanny Magazine, all worth reading.

Talking to Socks

Back from tour! Not dead! About to head out to MileHiCon in Denver!

I have achieved nothing creatively since getting home, other than plugging away on hamster illos. Handed the Snow Queen book in to my editor, shooting for a February release. My brain isn’t sure what to work on next. I have any number of half-done projects I could pick up and work on, but nothing is really grabbing me about the head and shoulders, and I have most of a year anyway.

I’ve been writing a lot of short stories lately. (Well, a lot for ME.) There will be two (maybe three?) out in November–I’ll link when it happens–and another in January and another in short order after that.

Lacking inspiration, I cleaned the closet instead. Read the KonMari book on decluttering, which is very…animist. (Author spent a lot of time working at a Shinto shrine, I hear, which may account for that.) There’s a lot written about it and joy and whatnot, but the part I fixated on was that you’re supposed to thank the things you get rid of, partly out of respect, partly because this will get you over the weird emotional attachment most of us have to Stuff. Can’t get rid of a thing you don’t wear because you paid a lot of money for it? Thank it for its help. Then it’s easier. (It is, too. Go figure.)

I am amused by the various angsty responses to this I have read, which range from “No way am I talking to my socks!” to some frankly weird radical Christian stuff that thanking your socks is definitely Wrong and possibly Satanic and you should say a prayer to the Holy Spirit instead for giving you socks. (I admit, my Catholicism is pretty lapsed, but I think God is probably a bit more concerned that we not be awful to each other than with briefly anthropomorphizing one’s socks as one prepares to send them to Goodwill. Honestly, were I running the universe, I’d be like “Whatever gets you to give the socks to the less fortunate, DO THAT.” But there’s a reason they don’t let me run the universe. Several. Not least that we would be hip-deep in axolotls. Well, anyway, the theology seems a little muddled to me. The important thing is that everybody’s got socks going into winter.)

Regardless, whichever way you come at it, the chief source of resistance seems to be in talking to one’s sock drawer. Mostly it seems to be that you will look silly doing it.

Then there’s me. I read this book and went “Lord, I talk to my socks already! Finally, a book for me!” and spent six hours thanking my excess socks, shoes, light jackets, etc, and dragged four large garbage bags off to the thrift store. I have always been a bit of an animist by nature, and I gave up on not looking silly in private many many years ago. (Who am I trying to impress? I know myself too well to believe in my own dignity. I have tripped on perfectly flat ground and choked on my own saliva too many times.)

There is also a whole lot about the proper way to fold one’s clothes so that they will be happy. It is also remarkably space efficient. The closet is cleaner than it has been in eons. I have no idea if I will continue the whole process, but I am surprisingly willing to believe that properly folded socks and underwear can make me happier in some small fashion.

Also, not to bury the lead here, but we met a dog at an adoption event that may be The Dog. Having a home visit after we get back from the con. English Coonhound mix who was dumped, probably for having no hunting instincts whatsoever. Beautiful dog, one of the ones who leeeeeans into you and looks up with a very hopeful expression, good with cats.

“Are you hound people?” asked the rescue people.

“Well,” I said. “Better the devil you know.”

They laughed. It was rueful laughter, with a slightly hysterical edge, but there it was. (We know all the hound problems and can deal with them. But never another beagle. There are limits.)

I have been worse than usual…

…about reposting things over here. Dear me. Practically everything recently has been garden stuff! But uh…let’s see what else…

 

Hamster Princess is out!

You can buy it! On Amazon! In bookstores! Wherever your heart desires! IT HAS SO MUCH GLITTER YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE HOW MUCH GLITTER THIS THING HAS!

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I’ll be doing signings and occasional school thingies next month in the Triangle area, and the big book tour goes in October! I’ll post more details when I got ‘em!

And I won an Alfie, from the lovely George RR Martin, which is…related to a big kerfluffle around the Hugos, but let’s not rehash that here, and here’s a picture of my buddy Mur Lafferty picking up my Alfie from GRRM.

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My Tumblr name is now Tkingfisher, because I need to keep the non-kid stuff separate from the kid stuff. Here is a picture of a Cute Morlock that you can use to find the new Tumblr.

Here is the cover reveal for the re-release of Seventh Bride by Amazon’s 47North!

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To forestall the questions!

This is a re-release of Seventh Bride, by Amazon’s 47North publishing house. This one is the same story, plus about eight thousand words, as the one I put out last November. You are not missing huge swaths if you do not buy it twice, there are no hidden explanations or big reveals, but you get a couple bonus scenes here and there.

It will have a physical copy available through Amazon, and possibly in bookstores. So if you wanted that print copy, it’s on its way and will be available!

It will have an audiobook version. (In fact, now’s probably a good time to mention that Bryony & Roses is also getting an audiobook version, from Tantor Media! Audio for everybody!)

The ebook version currently available will no longer be available at all, anywhere, in October. This new version will only be available through Amazon. If you’ve already bought Bride in e-book form, you won’t lose it or anything awful like that (I checked!) but if you want to buy a copy for some other species of e-reader, you gotta do it in the next month.

They have purchased, at the time of this writing, no other T. Kingfisher books, and I have no current plans to go Amazon-exclusive with any existing titles. If they wish to buy others, then, y’know, case-by-case basis. This is an experiment for me, and I do not have the least idea if I will sell a million copies or five. I certainly hope that it sells very well!

(I will note that they have been really, really good to work with, very fast, very responsive, and they didn’t whitewash the cover. They are hyper-efficient, and they specifically requested to include my Alfie in the list of awards on the bio, so they are also…let’s say, genre-savvy. If they came back for another book and sales are solid, I would absolutely work with them again.)

I have no plans to stop writing kid books as Ursula Vernon. (On the contrary, I’m on the hook for five more hamster books and another stand-alone middle-grade novel!) But if the Amazon marketing machine gets behind T. Kingfisher and pushes, you certainly may see more T. Kingfisher books getting higher priority in the future, as opposed to “The very last thing I do if I have any energy left whatsoever.” I think that’d be pretty cool.

And also we sold Bulgarian rights for the first few Dragonbreath books, which I think is pretty awesome.

And that’s more or less everything going on with my life right now.

Here is a picture of a bee with pollen stuck to him.

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African Jacana & Hippos

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I couldn’t resist one more. (Tomorrow, hamsters. Really!)

I decided to try to do something similar to the other two woodblock-homages, this time with animals instead of a landscape (or maybe with hippos, the trick is that animals ARE the landscape.) This is an African Jacana, which I really did see standing on top of the hippos at Chobe. (Hippos don’t care if things walk on them, apparently.)

So the trick to doing these is actually similar to the Art Deco travel posters I was doing earlier–instead of drawing the oulines, I block the whole shape out in flat colors, and use about ten thousand layers, putting thin black outlines around the big blocks of color and then drawing very thin weird lines on other multiply layers to shape the whole thing, and using gradients madly to make the flat colors work.

It is a seriously weirdass way to work. I am having to think much farther ahead than I usually do. Once everything is blocked out, fixing little dings requires sorting through dozens of layers to find out where something is.

But I really like how it all comes out. The thin lines are basically the same kind of black lines I draw on everything, only more useful.

Mad gratitude to Kevin–he took about a hundred photos of hippo piles which were invaluable for making it work. (Hippos have really messed up heads, incidentally. Their eye lumps do things no other mammal does.)

 

Prints available!