L.D. Colter's Blog, page 8

A Borrowed Hell Re-Released

Has it really been a month and a half since I posted last?!

Part of my radio silence has been due to my novel, A Borrowed Hell, going dark October 1st when the original publisher decided to close. (The press still exists, but under a different model.) Fortunately, another publisher picked it up very quickly and the book was released in 2nd edition December 16th by Digital Fantasy Fiction, an imprint of Digital Fiction Publishing! The final stages of the re-release are nearly complete now. The new Kindle edition is up with a great new cover and jacket blurb, and the paperback version is due to switch over any moment. If you didn't have a chance to check the book out before, I hope you will now!  Perhaps this will entice you:

Lost in a barren alternative world, July Davish has two options: Confront his hellish past or be trapped there forever.
Fate has dealt July a lifetime of nothings; no happy childhood, no lasting relationships, and now, no job. His mantra of perseverance has gotten him through it all, but faced with losing his home, he finally sets foot on the same road of self-destruction the rest of his family followed.
An accident changes everything. When two colliding cars send him diving from a San Diego sidewalk toward safety, he lands somewhere far from safe—in a bizarrely deserted version of San Francisco. Though he wakes in his own reality, he continues to pass out, dragged back to that strange world each time. July is willing to do anything to end his world-hopping, right up until he learns the price: reliving a past he's tried his whole life to forget. He’s not sure his sanity can take it. Not even to get back to his own world, a woman he’s falling in love with, and a life he finally cares about.

I'm proud to say that the novel was recently nominated to the Nebula Recommended Reading List, and I would appreciate anyone eligible to upvote on the list or who might be voting in any of the fantasy awards coming up over the next 12 months, to please keep A Borrowed Hell in mind. If you're not voting, but did (or do) happen to read and enjoy it, please consider leaving a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads! (Amazon reviews are the most helpful thing you can do in making an author's book visible to others.)

In more good news: I'm thrilled to announce that while waiting for the re-release of A Borrowed Hell, I heard from Kevin J. Anderson that he was acquiring my epic fantasy, The Halfblood War, for WordFire Press! I don't have a release date yet, but I will update here as soon as I know more.

For me, 2017 has had its myriad ups and downs, but 2018 is looking shiny and new. I hope that all of you have had the holiday season celebrations or non-celebrations you most wanted, and I wish you all the best for the coming New Year.
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World Fantasy Awards 2017

The World Fantasy Convention is the event I follow most closely each year during awards season, and the personal Holy Grail that keeps me striving to continually up my game in my own writing goals. Every author I hold up as a personal influence and writing hero has won the award: Neil Gaiman, Tim Powers (one of five authors to have won twice), Gene Wolfe (another two-time winner), China Miéville, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Patricia McKillip (yet another two-time winner). Many, many more past winners and nominees are authors whose work I adore.

It's been a strange and humbling progression in my own career to begin seeing nominees over the past few years that I count as friends and personal acquaintances. I'm thrilled this year to be able to congratulate G.V. Anderson as the winner of the short fiction category, and a host of others for making the prestigious short-list. Here's a run-down of all the nominees and winners this year:

http://wfc2017.org/wfc2017/awards/
And you can read G.V. Anderson's winning short story, DAS STEINGESCHÖPF, for free in Strange Horizons.

Happy Halloween (or Samhain, if you prefer)!

Think you know your spooky creatures? Here's a Halloween quiz from Merriam-Webster worthy of SFF fans:
Here Be Dragons: A Creature Identification Quiz
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​Just released! Killing it Softly 2
A reprint horror anthology containing one of my short stories
has released just in time for Halloween.
Better still, the 500+ page anthology is on sale
for just 99 cents until Nov. 1st!
​ Amazon Wow, has it been a long time since I posted last! A bit of that was due to being busy and a bit of that was intentional while some things shifted around. Here's what's been going on lately:

The New News.

The bad: Shirtsleeve Press, the publisher for A Borrowed Hell, decided to close their doors as of October 1st, meaning that A Borrowed Hell has gone temporarily dark. There are no ebook links that are still live. Currently there's just the Goodreads link, and one print link left on Amazon (which says there's one copy left, but I have my doubts that the sale would go through).

The good: It looks like a new publisher is planning to pick up the book and re-release it, hopefully in the next few months! YAY! I'll update as soon as I know more.

The vague hint: Got some news the other day that's too early to share, but hope to be able to share soon about a brand new book of mine! The Old News (or ​How I Spent My Summer).

I delved into teaching in the past few months. I taught a multi-session seminar on improving prose at Pueblo's main library, gave my first conference presentation at Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers annual September conference, and this past weekend, participated in MileHiCon's Author's Row. Hope to be doing more presentations in the near future and will post scheduled appearances here on the homepage.
Psst - I have a couple of special offers out today for newsletter subscribers only. Interested? The sign-up is HERE

Scholarship Application Period Open Now for Superstars

The Superstars Writing Seminars have opened recently to scholarship applications for the 2018 event held to be held in Colorado Springs, February 1-3. Though Superstars offers an optional "Craft of Writing" day before the regular seminar, and a few of the regular workshop sessions deal with the technique of writing,  the bulk of the seminar is geared more to the business of writing, making this stand out from the usual writer's workshops and conferences.

I attended in 2017 as a scholarship recipient, and was immediately struck by the friendliness and inclusiveness of the group--the 'tribe' as they say--from multi-year attendees to faculty. The faculty includes luminaries in SFF--in my year: Kevin J Anderson and Rebecca Moesta, who founded and anchor the event, Jim Butcher, Dave Farland, Todd McCaffrey, Jody Lynn Nye, James A Owen, and more, as well as Kristin Nelson (founder of the Nelson Literary Agency), Claire Eddy (senior editor at Tor), Steve Feldberg from Audible, Lisa Magnum (Deseret Book), and others. The approachability of the faculty was evident throughout the multiple days of the seminar, unlike some conferences where guests are seen at presentations, signings, and possibly meals, then vanish into thin air the rest of the time, or spend BarCon (if there is one) in close conversation with peers.

As a past winner of Writers of the Future, I'd met Kevin, Rebecca, Dave, and Todd previously. Here, as at WotF, I found them extraordinarily generous in sharing both their knowledge and their time. At the time I attended, I was conflicted about a career decision I needed to make. I approached Dave Farland with my dilemma--his response, let's sit down and talk about it. And we did. I've paid for entire seminars for the opportunity of a one-on-one like that. I'm not saying that to imply that the faculty can or will spend a chunk of individual time with each of the 130 or so attendees, but to emphasize the spirit of giving that pervades at Superstars.

If you'd like to attend but can't afford the registration, consider applying now for a scholarship. The application period closes Sept. 10th. Conversely, if you'd like to donate to the scholarship fund, there's a donate button at the website. Better still, get something back and buy one of the anthologies listed on the scholarship page (plus be sure to watch for the new one out early next year, Undercurrents: An Anthology of What Lies Beneath, 'cause, well, I have a story in it).

Pre-Lovecraft Weird - a Goodreads Review of The House on the Borderland

Click to set custom HTML The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I rarely review books I consider less than 4 or 5 star reads (though some of my unrated ones may just be books I didn't have time to review when I finished them), but will give this a shot as it's considered foundation work for weird fiction. **Some spoilers ahead**

I can easily see why Lovecraft was taken with this, and certainly some of the things I see as flaws may be a product of the time period (a liberal use of adverbs would be an understatement). I'll try not to reveal too much, but a fair chunk of the book is given over to a multi-chapter description of eons passing. Granted, it includes some interesting images and concepts - whether purely imaginary or ahead of their time scientifically (the sun dying, a new ice age, etc) - that must have been pretty mind-blowing to people when the book came out. Unfortunately, the description of eons passing reads nearly in real-time, or at least, felt like it to me. The pacing in much of the book is like watching an Orson Wells movie in super slow-motion. Add to that the lack of character building - the main character is little more than a sketch, and WHY is the sister included in the book? She lives in the house, but the poor thing doesn't get a single line of dialogue and spends most of her brief on-stage time fainting, swooning, trembling, running away, or locking herself in her room.

Though completely different sorts of books, older novels like Lud-in-the-Mist, written in 1926 by Hope Mirrlees, or Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis (written later still, in the 1950s, which maybe makes the comparison too unfair) have pacing, characterization, and story that Hodgson's book can't begin to compare to for me. The House on the Borderland was an interesting read for reasons of looking at an early rendition of weird, but didn't do a lot for me otherwise. 3 stars - innovation and originality in the fiction elements, atmosphere, and what it tried to accomplish, but a tedious read for me in places.

View all my reviews

A Borrowed Hell Reviewed At Unreliable Narrators

"Don’t overlook this book. It’s a hidden gem."  Unreliable Narrators

Book Suggestions From The Folks At Unbound Worlds

A nice selection of book suggestions listed by sub-genre can be found at the Unbound Worlds site. This is featured on the current page, though the original post date is from early 2017. I don't know if it gets updated, but a book recommended in their weird section got added to my reading list.
http://www.unboundworlds.com/2017/02/so-you-want-to-read-guide-to-sci-fi-and-fantasy-sub-genres/

Cool Archeological Stuff 3 - How Did I Not Know This?

I've read The Once and Future King and Mists of Avalon, watched Excalibur countless times, read and watched the Tristan and Isolde tale in many forms (a story that predated and may have influenced the Arthurian tales). I've been to places in England where historical evidence of the stories can still be seen. I've even written a retelling of one of the Arthurian Romance Tales - The Lady of the Fountain - as The Deaths of All We Are in the most recent issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. So how did I not know that a real Sword in the Stone existed? According to the article, though, this sword found its way into the stone around 1180CE, while tales of King Arthur (or at least a famous military commander - Artur, Arturo, etc) began in oral tales probably centuries before a 9th century monk recorded written references in his Historia Brittonum, and they referred to a man who lived around the late 5th and early 6th century CE. It would seem that the stories probably influenced the knight's action, and not the other way around, but still, cool beans to learn about this.
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Sword in the Stone at the Monte Siepi Chapel

Cool Archeological Stuff 2 - Evidence of a 14,000-Year-Old Settlement Found in Canada

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/one-oldest-north-american-settlements-found-180962750/​

Cool Archeological Stuff 1 - Church Foundation Found Under Lake

Archaeologists in Turkey suspect the church may have been built in the year 325, following the First Council of Nicaea. Article at Aleteia.com HERE