Stefan Bachmann's Blog, page 4

Announcing . . . DIE LETZTEN HEXEN VON BLACKBIRD CASTLE

Hurray! The German translation of Cinders & Sparrows, called Die Letzten Hexen von Blackbird Castle is on its way, and today I get to show you guys the beautiful cover. It’s dark and magical and a bit gothic, and I love it. Thanks so much to the art director, illustrator, my new editor, Marie Hesse, the translator, Stefanie Schäfer, and everyone who worked on the book.

(To prolong the suspense, I will also show you one of the new - earnestly author-y - author pictures by Maurice Haas. The clothes being color-coordinated with the cover was not planned.)

And here is the cover!

Die Letzten Hexen von Blackbird CastleArriving March 22nd, 2023

What do you think? Isn’t it pretty? Pre-order links are already up wherever books are sold, including Thalia, Orell Füssli, and Weltbild. I hope you guys love it. I’m excited for it to be out in this part of the world.

Halloween Art

“The Pumpkin Saint”

‘Tis the season, Halloween is upon us, my skull-shaped charcuterie boards are ready (we will be doing a party of course, and there will be cucumber snake salads and eyeball punch) and in that spirit, here are my spooky and not-so-spooky pictures from the past few months.

And we’re back to color! I’m still searching for that one style/subject/medium that I want to use for everything. Things still feels very chaotic right now. But I am noticing progress, which is nice. Hopefully in another six months I will have something a bit more consistent and intriguing to show.

“Double Trouble”

“When the Cat’s Away”

“Midnight Snack”

Aughostus Challenge

Below are a few older ones from back in August that I did for an Instagram drawing challenge called “Aughostus”, which was all about ghosts. I’m no longer pleased by them, but in the interest of documenting progress, here they are!

This one was for the prompt “Lock.” It took me eight billion years to finish and now when I look at it, I’m not sure why. But I like the concept, so maybe in a few months I will do it again.

“Makeshift Moon”

(Ok, this one is still cute. I love moons.)

A moneybag ghost on dumpy little legs.

This one is even older and never got a title. I just wanted to draw a melty person.

And finally, a jolly pumpkin ghost, also from a while back.

Next post: book news!

Happy Halloween!

Art Round-up: Black, White, and Red

“No Time for Nonsense”

There is a goodly number of you subscribed to the newsletter now (yay! Hello! Thank you!), so I thought I would start doing the occasional round-up of the art I’ve been making. In the last art post I wrote that I found my pictures a bit too colorful and wanted to go back to black-and-white, and that’s what I did, and I must say, I love doing these sorts of pictures. I find it difficult to choose the proper colors, the right shades and contrasts. Black-and-white is so dependably striking.

“The Haunted Cherry Tree”

“The Devil in the Details”

“The Library Ghost” (The mice are my favorite part of this one.)

Zita vs. the Deathborn Beast from Cinders and Sparrows

“Step in, step in”

THE PECULIAR - 10th Anniversary

The Peculiar, my very first book, was published ten years ago, so here is a tiny thing to commemorate the occasion. Thank you to everyone who has read my books and stories over the years, and recommended them to friends, and let me know that they loved them. I truly appreciate it.

This is how it started. . .

. . . and this is how it’s going. I couldn’t be happier.

(Also, because I found it while looking for old pictures for social media, here is the full version of Thierry Lafontaine’s clockwork bird for the back cover, in all its dainty glory. On the printed version, you only see its feet.)

On Digital Drawing and the Illusion of being “Good Enough”

A few weeks ago I mentioned wanting to try my hand at digital art, and I’m happy to report . . . I am! The hand is being tried. I bought an Apple Pencil. I downloaded Procreate. I bought an iPad. (It was very expensive, but I love it, so I will buy fewer oddly-colored socks and continue not-having-a-car, and it will be fine.)

If you follow me on social media, you may have noticed the results of these purchases already: a sudden deluge of pictures featuring goat-headed people, monsters dangling people over Pits of Poison, and other odd things. Maybe you’re like, “Ah, I see Stefan fancies himself an artist now,” and are wondering what’s going on. Maybe you’re also like, “Stefan still needs a lot of practice.” Whatever the case, let me give you the backstory and REASONS for all of this.

My mom is a painter. I grew up watching her work, and traveling with her to artsy places, and wandering around museums in distant lands. When my siblings and I were kids, one of the highlights of the school year was making pictures for the Pentel's International Children's Art Exhibition. We would toil over our drawings for weeks, and send them off to Japan, and then wait for a very long time to hear whether we had won something. We usually did win something. I never got Supreme Gold - that lofty honor was achieved only by my sister - but I won several regular golds, and a number of silvers, and one year my picture was in the Pentel calendar for the month of September, which has been my peak art achievement to this day.

(The calendar probably still exists somewhere, and one day I will find it, and post it here.)

But despite art always being a big part of my life, it was never something I worked at. I pursued music, and then writing, and drawing fell by the wayside, until somewhere around 2020 when I decided to start again for no reason that I can remember. I got a bunch of pencils and some paper. I started drawing by hand. And then some weeks ago I bought the iPad, and here we are!

I’m not as good as I want to be. A few years ago that would have stopped me from posting anything. “I’ll post when I’m really, really good,” I would have said, thinking that if I was really, really good I might be less afraid of people’s judgement. The problem is, being really, really good isn’t quite the concrete thing a lot of us seem to think it is. People will judge you no matter what, and depending on your personality, it can be difficult to ever think you’re really, really good at things. (This is me. I am this personality.) So there’s no point using this as a benchmark.

No doubt some of you also have this inner critic that deems everything you do some shade of mediocre and unworthy of being seen. Sometimes this leads to working hard and making something great. Sometimes—very often, in my experience working with creative people—it leads to talented, lovely folks squirreling their work away and never letting anyone see it.

It’s a big step to tell this inner critic that its opinion isn’t wanted, that you will share your work, and it won’t be perfect, but it will be a catalog of your progress, and it will be a thing you labored over and did your best at—the contents of your brain turned out for all to see—and that’s excellent.

So that’s what I’ve been striving to do. Below are my first attempts at digital art in chronological order of me making them. (The ones above also slot in here somewhere.)

“To be rescued by the horrible bird priest, or dropped into the pit of poison, that is the question.” -Hamlet

Zita and the Butcher King in the lands of the dead - a redraw of a sketch a did a while back for Cinders and Sparrows

“Dream Harvest”

“Deep in the dark of a white birch wood…”

These are mostly very colorful, which I’m not sure is my thing, but it’s been fun trying out all the various brushes and color options on Procreate. I hope to go back to the more detailed, black-and-white style soon, because it’s my favorite sort to look at. Whatever the case, I intend to post several of these picture round-up posts over the coming year, and I hope that in twelve months I’ll be able to come back to this one and see the difference.

And if you are a person with art, or stories, or poems, or music to share, share it, because it’s worthy and good, and through sharing it, it will become better.

(To finish, here is a time-lapse of the goat person’s creation process.)

Vienna Adventures

Labyrinths, treasures, turquoise Medusas, memento mori, blood-red vases full of offal, secret doors, ivy-covered alleyways . . . I saw so many sumptuous, mysterious, occasionally gruesome things in Vienna last week, and it was all just so atmospheric that I’m going to post my favorite pictures here.

The medieval “Greek Alley”, featuring some of the very oldest buildings in the city.

The Hofburg is packed with these semi-hidden “jib doors.” This one was especially interesting, very small, as if for a child. (It might just be a cupboard, but it might also lead to a wondrous secret world . . . They didn’t let me look inside, so I am choosing to believe in the secret world scenario.)

Those gorgeous, curling leaves . . . I’ve been taking lots of pictures of gothic/baroque ornamentation and trying draw them afterwards, and realizing just how complicated all these carvings are. The struggle.

Hedge maze at Schönbrunn Palace

The orangery.

This is . . . not something I would put in my living room, but it was a common motif in olden days, called the “Pelican in her Piety”. A bird piercing her own chest to feed her young was an allusion to religious redemption, charity, etc. Mysteriously, it also pops up a lot in the art of the secret society of the Freemasons.

Proudly headless.

I love how delicately distressed he looks, as if the skull has disappointed him in some way.

Archimboldo!

This lady strikes me as delightfully sinister, I think because of the hellish red background.

And that was Vienna! I’d been several times before, mostly for readings and book stuff, but this trip was purely for exploring, and definitely gave me my favorite version of the city. It really is one of the prettiest capitals in Europe. It often gets overlooked in favor of Paris or Amsterdam, but during this post-COVID travel rush that Europe is experiencing right now, I would take Vienna over the scorching crowds of Paris any day.

Art, News, Books

“The Thoughtful Ghoul”

Clandestine is off to our editor! Release the Wolves is awaiting edits. Two new secret projects that I am very excited about are in the works. (They’re in their early stages, so I will say nothing about them except that they’re both for adults and one is a collab.)

In this brief respite before diving into other projects, I’ve been doodling and drawing, working on picture book ideas, and going to fun places like Estonia and Latvia. I’ve also - finally - been trying to get my drivers’ license. Up until recently I’ve always lived in cities where you could just gad about in Ubers and subways, and now I live in the countryside where Ubers and subways refuse to exist, so. . . it’s time.

Anyway, news. Here is a handy list:

Cinders and Sparrows has sold to Russia and Germany! Eksmo bought foreign rights for Russia, and the lovely folks at Diogenes will be releasing it in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. I’ve been getting questions about the German release for a while now, and I don’t know when it’s coming out, but I did hear it’s in translation now, so possibly sometime in 2023. I’m very happy about this.

I’m on the board of Autillus now, the association of Swiss children’s book authors and illustrators. If you follow me on social media you may start seeing more Swiss stuff than usual. It’s been a great experience so far. I’ve mostly thought of myself as an American author these last ten years, since my main publisher is there, and I write 90% of my stuff in English. But at the same time, I’m Swiss, and I’ve lived far more of my life in Switzerland than in the US. I’m very much looking forward to getting to know the Swiss kidlit scene, and getting some projects off the ground.

Speaking of Autillus, we’re doing a picture book competition for Swiss or Swiss-resident authors and illustrators. The main prize is your picture book or picture book collaboration published by Baeschlin Verlag, one of the premier picture book publishers in Switzerland, which is very cool. Deadline for submissions is October 30th.

I’ve been doing a lot of sketching and drawing. The ones in this post are all done with pencil, paper, pen, and some very DIY digital tweaks, but I just bought an iPad and Procreate, and am going to learn how to use it if it kills me, so expect to see more digital art soon. (Or an obituary, but hopefully digital art.)

“The Sun and the Moon”

“Eight of Coins”

“Haus”

“Splendid Nightmares”

(This one is a whole thing that maybe one day will be something else. We shall see!)

“Right-side Up”

Mexico Adventures

(This photo looks very “I’m-a-bold-and-intrepid-person-doing-bold-and-intrepid-things” but I’m not particularly, and I want you to know that climbing onto that promontory was scary and I did not like it, and that that smile is a rictus grin of fear. Ok.)

This past winter, I escaped the gloom and fog of Northern Germany/Switzerland/Europe for the gloom and fog of northern Mexico, except that there is no gloom and fog in northern Mexico, wheeee! I was there, ostensibly, for writing, to search out some rather obscure secrets for CLANDESTINE. But I was also there to visit friends and experience something completely new to me, and I did. I wandered the screaming lanes of Mexico City, swam in skeleton-infested cenotes in the Yucatan, went to a Mexican wedding that felt rather like the royal nuptuals of a small kindgom, climbed mountains, wandered into caves under Mayan ruins deep in the jungle. . . .

I’m going to post thirty million pictures here, and try to make it more or less chronological, and by order of the city I was in, and I hope you enjoy!

Let’s start with…

Monterrey

Monterrey is a huge, industrial city in the north of the country with brightly-painted slums standing shoulder to shoulder with glittering skyscrapers, lively family parks right next door to the abandoned mansions of vanquished drug lords, and all of it nestled in the midst of some truly beautiful mountains.

The view at the top of my favorite hike, a trail to an abandoned cable car station high above the city. (If you follow me on Instagram you probably saw this view about seven thousand times.)

COATI.

I was informed that this is a table full of hands belonging to the Virgin Mary.

Mexico City

I loved Mexico City. It has a big expat community, and lots of lovely bookstores and museums and parks. I bought The Razor’s Edge at one particularly enchanting used bookstore, and found a note inside from the year I was born, thanking a schoolteacher for teaching the writer of the note how to read.

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One of the bookstores in Centro was absolutely scrambling with cats. Perhaps they were the owners.

Puebla

My favorite city I visited in Mexico. Sort of a cross between the sleepiness of Merida and the bustle of Mexico City, and packed with interesting corners to discover.

This beetle looks like it’s plotting adorable vengeance.

The Yucatan Peninsula

Ruins, jungles, colorful cities, blue, blue water. . . .

Guadalajara

Great food, and lots of artsy things and people. Also, the wedding capital of Mexico, the birthplace of tequila, and the location of the wedding mentioned at the beginning of this post, which could be a whole twenty blog posts on its own but which I save for a book.

And that was Mexico! It was a wonderful trip to a wonderful country, and I will definitely be back.

RELEASE THE WOLVES - New publication date

I have newwwwws! Good news and bad news.

The bad news - Because the publishing industry is currently dealing with pandemic-related supply chain issues (paper shortages, labor shortages, all the shortages) a lot of books that were scheduled to release in 2022 are being pushed back. Alas, that includes RELEASE THE WOLVES. Instead of hitting shelves in the fall of this year, as was originally announced, it's been tentatively scheduled for Spring 2023.

The good news - The cover is being illustrated by my absolute dream artist. I can’t say who yet, but my editor sent me three concept sketches a few weeks ago, and they're incredible. I can't wait to show you guys the finished product.

(The picture above is not the cover, but I love it. I asked my mom to paint me a hand floating mysteriously in the water, and she most obligingly did so. The hand is deliberately dead and creepy-looking for reasons that will remain secret.)

So! In summary, the wolves are being a bit tardy and will not be released this year after all. Instead I might have two books releasing in 2023 (CLANDESTINE is also scheduled for then), which is exciting. In the meantime, add RELEASE THE WOLVES on Goodreads, and stay tuned for the cover reveal and an official synopsis in the coming months.

(Also, I have a newsletter now! You can sign up for it at the bottom of this page, and will get a handy email 3-4 times a year with all the good stuff about upcoming books, giveaways, blog posts, travelogues, etc.)

*runs back to writing cave*

EXTRAMUNDANA - The New Fantasy Writing Group

Thrilled to announce that starting in March of 2022, I’ll be coaching a new writing group organized by the Junges Literaturlabor Zürich (JULL), a literacy foundation supported by the city of Zürich and, in this particular case, by the foundation of Nobel Prize-winning Swiss Poet Carl Spitteler. (Hence the writing group’s lovely name Extramundana, which is the title of one of Spitteler’s poems, and which means ‘beyond the physical realm’, though it also looks a bit like ‘very extremely mundane’. Tricky. I like it.)

The writing group will meet regularly in Zürich, in JULL’s lovely 17th century headquarters in the downtown area. It will be a place where writers can get feedback from each other and from the coaches, or just write and brainstorm in a creative and supportive environment. I’ll be joining fellow Swiss authors and all-around lovely people, Jyoti Guptara and Bettina Bellmont.

So! If you are a fantasy writer between the ages 16-30, and are looking to find like-minded folk, while also honing your craft and learning some tricks of the trade from writers who have been doing this for a long time, you can sign up by following the directions on JULL’s flyer below.

The flyer is in German, but I know there are a lot of English-language fantasy writers out there, and you are very welcome, too!

Deadline for application is January 24th.

We’re super excited to meet all of you!