S.K. Dunstall's Blog, page 34

Still more giveaways, and a guest post

Enter the giveaway over at The Qwillery.

Over at The Qwillery they’re giving away a copy of both LINESMAN and ALLIANCE. Even better, it’s open to anyone in the world.

We’ve also got a guest post over there.

If you haven’t been to The Qwillery’s site before, it’s worth a visit, for they feature debut science fiction and fantasy authors. It’s a great place to get an idea of new authors coming into the field, and a feel of whether you think their book sounds like something you read.

 

 

And the giveaways keep coming

Would you like to win a copy of LINESMAN?

SF Signal is giving away three copies of LINESMAN, which is book one in the series. Send an email to win. Pop over to their site to find out what to put into the email.

If you haven’t read LINESMAN yet, here’s your chance

Release day

Yay! Release day.

We’ve been so busy it was actually yesterday, now, but … our book’s out.

Book-related things around the internet

Books and creativity go hand-in-hand.  Here are three creative, book-related things I came across on the internet this week.

Book trailer

Book trailers don’t normally work for me. I can appreciate a well-done book trailer as a short film, but they don’t normally make me want to read a book. This one did.

Which isn’t bad, because I have to say, I’m not fussed about the Titanic. Sure, I’ve seen that movie, and bought the soundtrack. I also bought Robin & RJ Gibb’s Titanic Requiem, but that’s about my limit.

Fiction to fashion

I love it when a book or a movie makes such an impression that people take part of that book out into real life. Fan art. Fan fiction. Cosplay. Fashion and jewellery.

Over at Fiction to Fashion, J and A (Julie, but I don’t know A’s name), take books and design outfits based around the book.

Here’s the video for Illuminae, by Amie Kaufmann and Jay Kristoff.

Or take a look at their outfit based around Noelle Stevenson’s Nimona.

They’ve outfits for Ready Player One (Ernest Kline), Shadow and Bone (Leigh Bardugo), and Steelheart (Brandon Sanderson).

Novels and nail polish

Or what about nail polish based on books?

This image is from the Novels and Nailpolish site. (http://novelsandnailpolish.com)

Check out Novels and Nailpolish.  Here’s one’s for Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl.

 

 

 

 

This image is from the Nitelite Book Reviews site. (http://nitelitebookreviews.com)

And one from Nite Lite Book Reviews. I probably don’t even need to name this one, but it’s Redshirts, by John Scalzi.

Still more giveaways

Enter to win both LINESMAN and ALLIANCE over at Tor.com.

It must be close to book release time.  Tor.com are giving away both Alliance AND Linesman.  Pop over to Tor.com and leave a comment for your chance to win.

 

Giving away copies of Alliance

Our publisher is giving away copies of Alliance over at Goodreads.  Lots of copies.

This is your chance to win a copy.  Head over to Goodreads now and enter.

US only for the moment, sorry. We’ll run a giveaway later for the rest of the world.

Rattling the skeleton

Just for the record, as I write this, I now have a toothache. Psychosomatic?

Teeth are part of your skeleton.  They’re the only part of your skeleton that you actually clean.

Sherylyn went to the dentist the other day and had her teeth cleaned. She said she could feel the vibration of it all the way through her body. It gave her a massive headache, so bad she went to bed for rest of the day in an effort to stave off a migraine.

If you’ve read LINESMAN, you’ll understand that the way she described it later made it sound like a cross between a pneumatic drill and that bit in LINESMAN where Michelle puts her head down and says, “My bones hurt.”

Next day, Sherylyn thought she was better, so off she went to work. But the headache, plus the glare from the computer screen and the concentrated heat/light coming in the window, all combined to bring the migraine on.

Splat, down she went.

Those of you who’ve had migraines, or know people who’ve had migraines, know just how bad that can be. She’s recovered now, but … all from the vibrations of having her teeth cleaned.

The human body is amazing.

In unrelated news

Watch out for more giveaways. After all, we have a new book coming out in nine days.

We keep losing posts

Crazy things have been happening to our website this week. Things keep disappearing. Last week’s blog, included. Unfortunately, I only had an early version, so I’ve cobbled this together from the early version (and pre-dated it back to Sunday, so you’ll know it’s not new).

Fingers crossed, everything has settled now.

I wanted to do another quiz. After all, we haven’t had anything light-hearted for a while. But unfortunately, I got a bit smart with the quiz program. I downloaded a WordPress plugin, and set up my quiz on there. Then I logged out.

Next time I tried to log on, I couldn’t. The login page was blank.

My friend, Google, (Google is always your friend) told me how to fix it. Which I did, except when I logged in next time, all our other customisations on the site had disappeared. It was a fun couple off hours putting them back in. I think it’s all back to normal, but if you see anything missing off the site, drop us a line and we’ll fix it.

So no quiz. Instead, let’s talk about the next project.

Since we sent off CONFLUENCE we’ve taken time to read other people’s books. This is always nice. Finally got to read Fool’s Quest, by Robin Hobb. This is book two of Fitz and the Fool. Hanging out for book three now.

We’re not sure yet what we’ll be working on next. That will depend on our agent and editor. But after we’d read a few books were ready to write again.

We dragged out the draft of a story we had started writing back before we got the contract for LINESMAN. It’s another book set in the Linesman universe (the first of three), but with a different protagonist. We’d written two drafts already, even done a read-through. It was, or so we remembered, pretty good.

We re-read it.

It was a mess.

It needs a lot of re-writing.

Reminder, audio book giveaway

Just a reminder that there are three copies of the audio version of LINESMAN up for grabs over at Goodreads. The narrator is Brian Hutchison.

You have until the 10 February to put your name down.

Keep an eye out for more giveaways as we come close to the release date of ALLIANCE.

Confluence is finished for the moment

Today we mailed off the manuscript for CONFLUENCE to our editor.

It’s finished, but it’s nowhere near finished either.

Our editor will come back with suggestions, we’ll make changes based on those suggestions.  She’ll come back with more, and the whole process will go around and around until we’re all satisfied.

This is the first time our agent, Caitlin, is seeing the story this late. We normally send it to her first, and she gives us feedback before we send it to Anne.  With both the previous books we’ve done big rewrites after Caitlin’s feedback.

As you can imagine, we’re nervous.

We told the story we wanted to tell. We’re happy with how it turned out.

Even so, we’re way too close to it at the moment to know if it’s any good. In an ideal writing world, we’d put it away for a couple of months now, and come back to it after the break, when we have some distance from it.  Given we don’t have the luxury of that time, we’re very grateful for the editor and agent feedback.

What next?

That was the final book we were contracted to write. We don’t know what comes next. We don’t have a book we must write. That will depend on what Caitlin can sell, which in turn, depends a lot on how well the Linesman series is received.

We have lots of stories to tell.

We got into some bad habits while writing this book. We certainly need to exercise more, and to clean house more. A first draft in under three months? That’s the ideal if we want time to put the story away between major drafts.