Benedict Jacka's Blog, page 67
February 14, 2014
Chosen Audio
And fourth and last of the set, Chosen is out in audio format this coming Monday! As with the previous set, it’s published by Tantor, and you can listen to a sample on their website.
(Yes, it’s still US-only. No, I don’t know when the UK audio books will be coming out. I’ll post it up here as soon as I have any news, I promise.)
In other news, Hidden is all edited and sent off for proofing. I’ll probably do a preview post on it some time in the next month or two. Meanwhile, I’m busy on Alex Verus #6 – three chapters in at the moment, and it’s going well so far!
February 7, 2014
Hidden US cover release!
The US cover for Alex Verus #5, Hidden, is finished! Here it is:
They definitely seem to be doing a colours-of-the-rainbow theme with the US covers. I suggested green for this one (given which character the book focuses on, it seemed appropriate) but I guess they preferred red. We’ve already had orange, purple, blue, and yellow, so I’m assuming green’ll be the colour for number 6 . . . or maybe indigo, or pink, or whichever the seventh colour of the rainbow is. I’ve got a feeling it’s pink, but I’m not sure they’d want to use that!
I’m just finishing up the copyedits on Hidden this week. Once they’re done it’ll go in for proofreading, and it should be released this September in both the US and UK. Amazon have the UK release date as 2nd September, but I’ve no idea if that’s accurate or not. I’ll post here when I have a release date confirmed.
January 31, 2014
Audiobook Update: Cursed and Taken
As some of you might remember, the big news last month was that the Alex Verus series was finally being brought out in audio format by Tantor. Since then two more have come out: Cursed was released on January 6th, and Taken just came out this week, on January 27th. That just leaves Chosen, which will be coming out next month on February 17th.
You might notice that the audiobooks are being released an awful lot faster than the print and ebooks were. Apparently it’s a lot faster to get a recording made than it is to have a book edited, copyedited, re-copy-edited, and proofread. Which shouldn’t be a surprise really, but it’s the first time I’ve had audio copies of my books made !
In other news, the Tantor pages have audio samples of all four of the books, so you can have a listen on their pages here:
Oddly enough, I haven’t actually listened to any of the books yet. It’s not because of the publisher or the narrator, it’s just that the idea of listening to somebody else read my books just feels really weird. I have a very specific idea of how all of my characters sound in my head, and listening to someone else’s take on it is incredibly strange for me – it’s kind of like listening to a recording of your own voice. But for those of you who’ve bought the audio versions, I’m curious – do the characters sound like you imagined them, or different?
January 24, 2014
Website Mysteries
Running a website can be weird.
I do all the day-to-day maintenance of this site myself – a friend of mine designed the layout, but the posts and any additions to the pages are all written by me. Generally, it’s worked pretty well, and it mostly just does its job in the background without me needing to keep fixing things. But while I don’t really run into any problems administering the site, I keep tabs on the access stats via a log file analyser, and some of the stuff I find out in the process just makes me scratch my head.
For instance, if anyone tried to guess the most common location that people access this website from, they’d probably guess the USA, and they’d be right. But if they tried to guess the second, third, and fourth countries on the list, they’d almost certainly be way off. It turns out that said countries are China, Thailand, and France, respectively. I have no idea why, but I’m guessing it involves spambots.
Speaking of spambots, before running this site, I never realised just how heavily websites in general get attacked. I haven’t calculated exactly how many spam comments I get per day, but the amount of spam comments this site gets per week is greater than the number of human-generated comments that that this site has had in the past two years. The spam filter catches over 99.9% of them, but the sheer number means that some still get through. (On which subject, don’t put links in your comments. The spam filter does its best, but URLs of any kind in a comment are a major feature of spam mail and . . . well, if your comment isn’t getting posted, that might be why.)
Every now and then, though, you get something that’s just bizarre.
In this case, it’s one of the Encyclopaedia articles I wrote the best part of a year ago, Advanced Divination (Part Three). It’s a fairly standard page, right? Nothing really out of the ordinary. Definitely nothing to make it stand out from all the other posts and articles I’ve written.
Yet for some reason, that one page is viewed more than any other page on this website. In fact, that one article’s been viewed more than all the other sixty Encylopaedia articles put together. Just in the first three weeks of this month alone, it’s had tens of thousands of page views, and for the life of me I have absolutely no idea why. And along with the views comes the spam – I finally turned off comments on that entry just because that page alone was getting triple-digit numbers of spam comments on a daily basis.
I honestly can’t figure out why that page would be accessed more than every other one. I can’t think of any legitimate reason for people to be doing this, so my best guess is that a bunch of bots have locked onto it and are loading and reloading it over and over again, but I have no clue why.
But if any of you guys have any theories, I’d love to hear them.
January 17, 2014
Encyclopaedia Arcana #61: Sound Magic
An odd hybrid of the three families, sound mages don’t fit neatly into any of the standard categories. They have some of the physical spells of elementalists and some of the more subtle abilities of universalists, yet personality-wise the mages they have most in common with are living ones.
Mockingbird
The most basic spell of sound magic is sound generation. Even novices can put on an impressive ventriloquism act, and sound mages of journeyman rank and higher can easily replicate any voice, noise, or sound effect they’ve ever heard. Giving the sound a convincing ‘feel’ does require a certain level of skill, but it’s a skill sound mages are generally both motivated and naturally inclined to learn. As a side effect of this they tend to be talented musicians and verbal performers outside of their magic, too, although it’s probably more accurate to say that both their magical and nonmagical abilities feed into each other.
In addition to producing sound, mages of this type are very good at detecting it. Even before they develop their magic, one of the telltale signs of a latent sound mage is exceptionally good hearing. Once they start training in earnest, it goes from ‘exceptional’ to ‘supernatural’ – a sound mage can usually figure out your sex, age, nationality, and rough height and weight through a closed door. More skilled sound mages develop this into outright echolocation, allowing them to aurally map an area without even opening their eyes.
Sound magic is also useful for analysing speech. By picking up on tonal changes and voice stress, a sound mage can easily read a speaker’s emotional state, and can usually make a pretty good guess as to whether said person is being honest. Sound mages make effective interrogators, with the additional benefit that they don’t even need to be the ones asking the questions; as long as they can hear the answers, that’s all they need.
Despite its name, sound magic doesn’t require audible sound to function: vibration through almost any medium is enough.
Sound and Fury
Sound magic can also be used as a weapon. At a high enough volume, sound spells can inflict pain or deafen; against inanimate objects, if tuned to the right frequency, they can set up vibrations that crack or shatter. More subtly, sound spells delivered at a very high or very low pitch can be hard to detect, yet still have a variety of unpleasant effects upon living creatures.
However, sound mages are generally not considered battle-mages, for several good reasons. Firstly, while sound magic attacks might be spectacular, they aren’t all that efficient. The nature of sound makes it difficult to focus, meaning that while sound attacks might have a lot of energy, most of that energy usually doesn’t go where it’s wanted. Secondly, while sound spells make for versatile weapons, they don’t necessarily make for effective ones. A sound mage might be able to incapacitate a target in a dozen ways, but none would be guaranteed to work and all would take time. A fire mage, on the other hand, only really has one way of dealing with a problem, namely burning it – but not only can they do that a lot faster than a sound mage, it’s much easier to defend yourself against a subtle ultrasonic attack then it is to deal with someone just dumping a ton of heat on top of where you’re standing.
Finally, while sound magic has a variety of offensive spells, it has almost no defensive ones. High-volume sound waves and sympathetic vibrations might mess up a person or a building, but they don’t do much to stop a fireball or a bullet. For these reasons, sound mages usually stay out of fights.
Singing in the Rain
Sound mages are emotional and sensitive. Both mages or normals tend to find them attractive, but while other people might want to be close to a sound mage, the sound mage isn’t necessarily going to reciprocate the feeling. The core of a sound mage’s personality is introverted rather than extroverted, and they usually have few close friends. Their talents make them popular, but they’re likely to be alone even in a crowd.
It’s rare for a sound mage to become involved in the political struggles of Light and Dark mages. Most have little interest in power, and are more likely to make lives for themselves as artists or performers. This is not without its dangers, however – while detachment from mage politics gives some limited protection against the power games of the magical world, it doesn’t prevent mages from taking an interest for other reasons. Attraction can easily become a desire to possess.
January 10, 2014
New Year, New Book
And it’s 2014. Happy New Year!
With the new year ticking round, the big news for me is that I’ve started the next book in the Alex Verus series, number 6. (Yes, there are going to be at least three more Alex Verus books after Chosen. In case you missed the news, here’s the post.)
Alex Verus #6 had a bit of a delayed start – I’d originally been hoping to have begun two months ago, but the time I’d scheduled in for working on the new book was taken up by the extensive revisions to Alex Verus #5, Hidden. Still, those are all done and dusted now, and my publisher’s happy with Hidden version 2.1, so I can quit worrying about it and focus on number 6.
One thing that’s worked out a little differently this time round is that I’ve ended up planning out the book a lot less extensively. For Taken, Chosen, and Hidden, I had the first third of each book plotted out before I even started writing. This time, for whatever reason, it just hasn’t worked out that way, and despite being nearly ten pages into the new book I only have the vaguest idea of what’s going to happen. The funny thing is, this is actually much closer to how things were when I started the series – back when I began Fated, I really didn’t know where the book was going or how long it’d be. It does mean I have to think on my feet a lot more, but in a weird way it feels a bit like going back to my roots.
Planning or no planning, though, the book’s going well, and if all keeps to schedule it should be finished by summer and released some time next year – exactly when is anybody’s guess, but Hidden is coming out in September, so number 6 should be out no more than a year after that (and hopefully a little less). We’ll see how it goes!
January 3, 2014
Ask Luna #23
From: john
How do mages control magical creatures
Mind and charm magic and binding rituals.
From: Ted
Hi Luna,
First of all, thank you so much for taking the time to expertly set up this “Ask Luna”, and for your never-ending patience in responding to the seemingly endless questions we normal people bombard you with. Hopefully that little bit of appreciation and flattery will entice you to answer some of these questions I’ve been holding onto forever, and I apologize if they get long. First of all, how do Light mages know who the Dark mages are, and how do the Light mages keep the Dark mages out of the council? Couldn’t a Dark mage just say that they were a Light mage, or is there some list of all Light mages somewhere? I’m just thinking that since it seems like a lot of Dark mages don’t really advertise their history, they should be able to become part of the Light council without anyone knowing the difference, as long as they acted the part and made some effort toward the politics. And a hopefully quicker last two questions: did you ever find out if the enchantress that you grazed with your curse and that chick that blasted you after you beat her dueling ever got what was coming to them? If so, what happened?
Flattery is always appreciated. Definitely makes me much more likely to answer.
Light mages don’t necessarily know who all the Dark mages are, and there isn’t a register of all the Dark mages. There IS a register of the Light mages, though, and you need to be on the register to join the Council, so that’s how it works. It’s not “you can’t join if you’re a Dark mage”, it’s “you’re only allowed to join if you’re in the club”. But you’re right that they don’t necessarily know that much about who is and isn’t a Dark mage – there’s a blurry line between independent and Dark ones, and the real hardliners on the Council don’t see much of a difference anyway.
As for THOSE two . . . ugh. As far as I know Meredith hasn’t gotten anything like what she deserves, but Natasha did get some delayed payback eventually. After what happened in Fountain Reach Alex had a talk with her master, and ever since then Natasha’s been avoiding me like her life depended on it. That probably would have been the end of it, except that even after everything that had happened she was dumb enough to think it was a good idea to keep trying to bully Anne in her spare time. Eventually she pushed Anne a bit too far, and . . . yeah. Wish I’d been there to see it.
From: Gordon
Hi Luna,
How is Alex viewed overall in the magical community these days? He’s a diviner, but he came up on top or at least survived several major incidents now. It sounds like people taking more notice of him these days, but does the community for the most part still kind of see him as an underdog or is his reputation overcoming that, for better or worse?
More specifically, how do the adepts and sensitives view him now, especially after the Nightstalkers incident? Is there a noticeable drop in the number that stops by the shop for help/advice?
I’d say his reputation’s gone up amongst mages and down amongst adepts, for pretty much the reasons you’ve already guessed. So he gets more apprentices stopping by his shop, and more mages coming with job offers or wanting to trade, but there’s been a definite drop-off in the number of adepts who stop by.
There are still a few mages who don’t take him seriously, but a lot fewer than there used to be. The weird thing is that it actually rubs off on me. I get treated with WAY more respect in the apprentice program than I used to. In my first year I kept getting bitchy comments from other apprentices about how I wasn’t a ‘real’ mage. Then the thing with the Nightstalkers happened, and all of a sudden they shut up real fast. Kind of an extreme way to do it, but whatever works I guess.
From: Dave K
Hi Luna. Big fan of Alex. Quick question for you. Do you know if it’s better for Alex to either purchase the audio book or read his novels in Ebook/paper format?
Thanks much!
Ebook, I think. Paper and audio books have much lower rates. Glad you like ‘em.
December 27, 2013
Merry Christmas!
. . . and a happy New Year from everyone in the Alex Verus world. Hope you’ve had fun with their adventures so far, and here’s to more to come in 2014!
December 20, 2013
Alex Verus Audio Books!
I get a lot of questions via this website, and far and away the most common one is ‘when are the audio books coming out?’ Up until now my answer’s always been ‘no idea’, and I’ve given that same answer enough times that I was seriously considering putting a FAQ on the site for the sole reason of letting people know that I haven’t got any news for them about audio books.
At least, until now!
The first four Alex Verus novels are going to be published in the US in audiobook format by Tantor, and very soon in fact: they’ll be coming out over the next two months. Release dates are as follows:
Fated: 24th December 2013
Cursed: 6th January 2014
Taken: 27th January 2014
Chosen: 2nd February 2014
Tantor are also running a giveaway of the Fated audio on Goodreads, and they’ve got five CDs to hand out: you can find it here.
Oh, and in other news, Fated is getting another US reprinting, which is always nice.
December 13, 2013
Hidden cover is out!
The UK cover for Hidden has just been released! Take a look:
The release date has finally been confirmed, too: it’ll be coming out September 2014. As usual, I’ll post the first chapter here on this site a couple of months or so before release.
I like the cover for this one. The artist included a couple of little details that reference some new things that get introduced in the story. Pity you can’t read it yet . . . though I guess before that can happen I really need to finish editing it!
