Alia Luria's Blog, page 3

99 Cent / 99 Pence Sale!

Today is the last day to get Compendium on ebook at 99 cents / 99 pence before it starts climbing back up to its usual price.

Click here to get it!

Thanks to everyone who has supported me by buying my book, or by reading and reviewing it!

I appreciate every single one of you!

Compendium Book Trailer!

Winner of the 2015 National Indie Excellence Award in Fantasy.
Lumin is dying. Its only hope is 500 years of darkness.
When they disable the Network, all technology goes dormant.
But will anyone remember how to turn it back on?
An ancient text, lost for centuries, holds the key to Lumin’s past.
And a young woman, who can hear the trees, holds the key to Lumin’s future.

Available onAmazon.com(http://t.co/L0FIxbwkY1) and Kindle Unlimited.

Read Chapter One for free at:
http://www.alialuria.com...

A New Writing Machine

Wow, posts two days in a row… it might be likeold times. Really, it isn’t. I’m just super excited to have received my very new laptop. I’ve been doing most of my writing for the past number of years on a 2011 MacBook Air. It has served me well over during that time, but it has startedto get twitchy. Perhaps it could be made fresh with a total reinstall of the OS, which I’ve never done (not to mention the fact that I’ve done atleast two OS upgrades over the years). It certainly needs to have s...

Close Reading 4 of 12 (Environment as a Character in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation) + National Indie Excellence Award 2015!

Well, the three deals I was working on at work finally closed this week, and my second module of my MFA wrapped up on Sunday, so I finally feel like I can breathe again. I actually had a migraine today. It happens sometimes when I’ve been under massive stress and it suddenly dissipates. My mom explained the chemistry of that to me once, but I don’t remember the specifics. Something about the adrenaline departing after the stress events and the remaining chemicals causing the migraine until th...

Compendium wins 2015 National Indie Excellence Award for Fantasy!

So surprised and delighted for Compendium



CONGRATULATIONS!

It is our great pleasure to inform you that you are a Winner in the 9th Annual National Indie Excellence Awards. Your book truly embodies the excellence that this award was created to celebrate, and we salute you and your fine work.

The lists of winners and finalists will be highlighted on our website. Please go to www.indieexcellence.com to see your name and book cover among those of the other proud winners and finalists.

The entire team at the National Indie Excellence Awards sincerely hope your participation in our contest will serve you well in your ongoing success. You have our deepest congratulations.

Warmly,

Ellen Reid
President & CEO
National Indie Excellence Awards

Close Reading 3 of 12 (Humanity, a Mirror in Octavia E. Butler’s Dawn)

As part of my MFA, I have to complete twelve close readings. This is number three. For this reading, I chose to write about Octavia E. Butler’s Dawn, the first book in her Xenogenesis Trilogy. If you haven’t readDawn yet but you are planning to, this essay may contain some spoilers that you might otherwise wish to avoid. Just an alert!

I wasn’t trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological ston...

Congratulations Giveaway Winners!

Many congratulations to the winners of my Goodreads giveaway for one of 20 signed copies of Compendium. I'm very excited for all of you to receive your copies, and I will be mailing them off in the next couple days. Those of you in Florida (particularly Orlando - I can't believe an Orlando resident won one - I'm sure it would be creepy to do hand delivery, so please expect yours in the mail), will likely receive yours very quickly. For those of you in Great Britain who won, it may take a little longer for them to make their way across the pond, but rest assured, they will be dispatched in the greatest haste.

To all of the lovely people who entered but did not win, I will be posting future giveaways to celebrate the book launch. There will also be opportunities to win a copy by signing up for my e-mail list during the April virtual convention right here on Goodreads. If you can't wait, you can preorder a signed copy for yourself on my website, here.

Close Reading 2 of 12 (Maddaddam Trilogy, Atwood)

Well, I have just finished Module One of my MFA, and I am taking a little time to recover from that and from the final formatting and proofing ofCompendium, which I also finished up this week. I am really excited for howCompendium looks in paperback. The cover looks spectacular, and, although I have read from others that they don’t like the paper Createspace uses, I absolutely love the fact that it’s a nice, heavy paper stock. It gives even a paperback some weight and presence, and it makes y...

The Trip (a short, short fairytale)

I apologize for not updating this blog recently. I have been spending a lot of time on editingCompendium and writingOcularum, as well as my usual work and some unfortunate medical mishaps. Below is a short story that I cal “The Trip.” It was written during my MFA residency in Wroxton. The assignment was to re-tell a fairytale. I decided to do a twist on the storythe “Robber Bridegroom.” I hope you enjoy it!

The Trip

“Come see me,” you said. “It’s not a long distance, and it’s been ages since I’...

Readers' Favorite Reviews and More

I was also incredibly relieved and gratified to receive three reviews this week from Readers’ Favorite. You can check them all out at Readers’ Favorite by clicking here. Two of them were glowing five star reviews, and the third was a positive four star review. Here is an excerpt from Samantha Coville’s 5-star review:

If you have plans for the next few days, do not pick up this book. I repeat: do not start unless you are willing to read for hours on end, gripped by the racing story line and breathtaking intrigue that fills the pages. I cannot wait for the next book to come out and I hope the series continues for many more books after that. I’m bookmarking this author because I know I will fall in love with every word she writes. Wow. -- Readers' Favorite

That quote made me feel excellent! I conceived of the basic idea for Compendium in the summer of 2013 and started writing it in August of that year. After almost two years of work and four revisions, it’s very hard to maintain perspective on my work. I don’t know if this is true for all authors, but I stopped having an emotional reaction when I read a book I’ve revised four times. I still feel that thrill with new material, including the chapters of Ocularum I am working on now, but it’s validating to know that others might read Compendium and enjoy it, especially since my brain is tired of looking at it! I know not everyone will love it or even like it, but knowing that some people do is incredibly motivating as a writer.

In other news... Editing is done! My amazingly awesome editor, Angela Brown, turned back the proofed version of Compendium to me on Tuesday. Having not yet acquired my corneal abrasion and despite my blurry right eye, I incorporated all of her proofed changes and formatted the book for ebook that same night. On Wednesday, despite my newly acquired corneal abrasion, I formatted the book for print. The ebook looks great on my phone in the Kindle app, and it looks great on my Kindle as well (although the cover isn’t showing up on the Kindle, probably because I emailed it to myself instead of downloading it from the Kindle store). I’m REALLY excited for everyone to get to see it. After a proofing mishap with the print version, I have some proofs on preorder for that as well. They should arrive Tuesday of next week. It looks like I might need one more round of print proofing, as Day has expressed dissatisfaction with the amount of bleed on the cover via the online proofing tool. We will see! I will post pictures of the actual book as soon as it’s ready for public consumption!