The Physicians of Vilnoc -- two sneak peeks
The 8th Penric & Desdemona e-novella, for anyone who missed the prior announcement post.
First, as promised, the opening couple of scenes for Jo Walton's Patreon site The New Decameron. Episode 52, it turns out.
https://www.patreon.com/m/4119564/posts
Those who can, do consider chipping in. I'm donating whatever share would accrue to me to the charity, but some of the contributors are in tougher spots right now.
*
And -- tah dah! -- Ron Miller's promised cover art.
This one was hard -- this is actually our second complete cover idea. The first art-draft, though well put-together and striking, ran off the rails due to what proved to be a misleading initial choice of title. Title and cover and story really have to work together. Ron feels (strongly, and he has some interesting posts on the subject) that a cover should be advertising. I feel that cover and title are the first salvo of the reader's upcoming reading experience, already gating them into a tale in a particular direction and creating particular expectations. These two aims are not actually incompatible; I trust we got them yoked together to pull in the same direction this time.
If all goes smoothly, we're hoping to put the complete novella up in the Kindle, iBooks and Nook stores on Friday or thereabouts. It can be a little random which pops up on the purchaser's end first, but they will all get there in the end.
On Friday I will also create my usual spoiler-discussion post space for those who've already had a crack at the tale to freely discuss it with each other, without worrying about spoiling later readers.
(And, in other news, the 3-novella reprint collection Penric's Travels is printed, and wending its way though the much disrupted book distribution system, no one can predict how fast. But it, too, will get there in the end.)
Ta, L.
First, as promised, the opening couple of scenes for Jo Walton's Patreon site The New Decameron. Episode 52, it turns out.
https://www.patreon.com/m/4119564/posts
Those who can, do consider chipping in. I'm donating whatever share would accrue to me to the charity, but some of the contributors are in tougher spots right now.
*
And -- tah dah! -- Ron Miller's promised cover art.
This one was hard -- this is actually our second complete cover idea. The first art-draft, though well put-together and striking, ran off the rails due to what proved to be a misleading initial choice of title. Title and cover and story really have to work together. Ron feels (strongly, and he has some interesting posts on the subject) that a cover should be advertising. I feel that cover and title are the first salvo of the reader's upcoming reading experience, already gating them into a tale in a particular direction and creating particular expectations. These two aims are not actually incompatible; I trust we got them yoked together to pull in the same direction this time.
If all goes smoothly, we're hoping to put the complete novella up in the Kindle, iBooks and Nook stores on Friday or thereabouts. It can be a little random which pops up on the purchaser's end first, but they will all get there in the end.
On Friday I will also create my usual spoiler-discussion post space for those who've already had a crack at the tale to freely discuss it with each other, without worrying about spoiling later readers.
(And, in other news, the 3-novella reprint collection Penric's Travels is printed, and wending its way though the much disrupted book distribution system, no one can predict how fast. But it, too, will get there in the end.)
Ta, L.
date
newest »
newest »
message 1:
by
Kosigan
(new)
May 06, 2020 12:20PM
Friday? Sooner than I'd hoped. Excellent.
reply
|
flag
I'm too impatient. Raced over to the Patreon to read the first chapters. Format of the second chapter has me quite intrigued...
One guaranteed happy day in quarantine. Thank you!
Counting the minutes till Friday. The sneak peek just whetted my appetite. Thank you
CLEAN THE FLETCHING OFF THAT PEN!!!! You can't write with feathers sticking into your hand. First step to making a pen out of a feather is stripping that stuff off, or at least mostly off.Also, an inkwell is not a pen storage device.
Sorry, pet peeve.
Yeah, Martha's right. :) I hadn't spotted it. And not entirely sure it is a goose feather either.....
Oh, any feather can make a perfectly fine pen, just not while it still looks like a feather. :)
It's half past one pm CST; PHYSICIANS OF VILNOC not up on Amazon yet :-(
Somewhere I own an actual goosefeather quill trimmed properly with just a little tuft on it. Query to Martha - since any feather (assume you mean wing or possibly tail feather of any large enough bird?) why are goose quills so iconic? Tougher?
@ 13 --Two out of three have been uploaded, but it takes some hours (at least) for all the bits and pieces -- such as the "Look Inside" feature -- to seep through the systems even after that. (Kindle usually runs later.)
It will all get there in the end. (And then the speed readers will blast through 5 months of my work in less than an hour, and wonder where the next is. I shall direct them on to other writers, I think.) The story is around 42,000 words, for anyone wondering about such stats.
Back in ye olden days, when vendors were still bothering to have live human beings vet entries before they went up, it used to take 3 or 4 weeks even for ebooks. Paper publishing, typically a year. How quickly the miraculous become the expected norm...
Good day for a walk outdoors, which I should go do.
Ta, L.
@ writing-implement geeks...Yeah, I've been wondering for some time what to call the thing when actual metal-nubbed pens come onstage. (Which they probably already have, in the techier parts of the 5GU.) I suspect "dip pens" only became a term once other more advanced sorts like fountain pens were invented. The clash with my main character's name could get awkward. And I'm not changing that...
Ta, L.
Why oh why does Amazon change Vilnoc to vionic? And give me shoes/sandals instead of a Penric adventure? If anyone managed to find it on Amazon please post a link, and I will if I find it before I see it posted.
I've always called feather based "dip pens" quills, or even writing quills. (There were later dip pens that were wooden handles with a copper nib attached to it that you dipped, so still dip pens - just wouldn't need sharpening/re-shaping as as often as a quill.) And doing a search to see if the copper nib dip pens have another name, not only found that is the formal name, but found they are for sale on Amazon for calligraphy.Nothing yet on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk - I didn't get the Vionic, I did get books about physicians on .co.uk and herbal products including "Moon Juice" on .com. One lives and learns.
I've heard reports from two authors that the delay between upload and the appearance of the book on the Amazon site has been longer in this time of COVID-19, up to a week. I'm crossing my fingers that Vilnoc will not be subject to this delay! :D
On Amazon UK too. Just in time for me to go to bed.
Ah, Amazon's a relief. I wasn't sure, for all the usual reasons plus, if I should have even mentioned potential Friday availability.I've just bought a copy myself, as I usually do, to check if everything came out all right on the far end of this python.
When we get links from the other two vendors, in due course, I'll set up my usual spoiler-discussion-space post. I have an online practice thing for SFWA that will take up a good part of this evening, but you may be sure I'll get back later on.
L.
Talli wrote: "Amazon is up" Thanks so much--just bought my copy.
Yeah, I've been wondering for some time what to call the thing when actual metal-nubbed pens come onstage.According to Wikipedia (s.v. "dip pen"), Daniel Defoe called them steel pens, but he would have probably been talking about all-metal pens (examples of which go well back into the middle ages or even earlier). The Mitchell brothers didn't come up with their mass-produced cheap replaceable-nib-in-wooden-holder pens until a century after Defoe.
The ancient all-metal pens look very much like quill pens, so if you wanted to avoid the word "pen", you could call them "steel quills". We have no evidence that anybody called them that historically, but we're talking about a different universe, so who cares? :)
Also, just bought and finished Vilnoc. More in love with Penric than ever. I'll save further comments for the eventual spoiler thread.
Interesting on the steel quills. I'm a little over half way through - happened to be awake in the middle of the night and so read for a little bit then - and then actually stopped. Loving it.Incidentally, on the subject of books taking a long time to write and being quickly read - you could draw a parallel with a cook spending hours preparing a meal and it being eaten in far less time. However you can infinitely re-read a book, but with a meal you will run out of left-overs. :D
Martha wrote: "CLEAN THE FLETCHING OFF THAT PEN!!!! You can't write with feathers sticking into your hand. First step to making a pen out of a feather is stripping that stuff off, or at least mostly off.Also, a..."
Doctors are obviously notoriously sloppy. Just look at their handwriting!
Martha wrote: "Oh, any feather can make a perfectly fine pen, just not while it still looks like a feather. :)"Well, here is the issue: not every potential reader is going to be so well-versed in the history of quill pens as to immediately recognize a strictly accurate depiction of one for what it is...that is, it needs to be recognized as a quill pen by anyone...and immediacy is what a book cover is all about. It needs to convey an impression at a glance, not necessarily be a either a puzzle for the potential reader to figure out or an historically informative document.
Besides, perhaps this is the way the physicians of Vilnoc do things. ;-)
In any case, I do have some visual precedents to fall back on...
http://andreapenrose.com/wp-content/u...
http://andreapenrose.com/wp-content/u...
By the bye, the idea was not that the pen is being stored in the ink bottle, but was simply placed there during a momentary pause in the creation of the document.
Carro wrote: "Yeah, Martha's right. :) I hadn't spotted it. And not entirely sure it is a goose feather either....."Your first comment kind of underscores the point I made in another reply: You didn't notice until it was pointed out to you.
Martha wrote: "Oh, any feather can make a perfectly fine pen, just not while it still looks like a feather. :)"You are right. Even peacock feathers have been used as pens. Flamboyant ones, but pens nevertheless.
RON MILLER REPLIED TO ME! My day is made. :)I know that people don't recognize quill pens unless they're feathery, but the usual compromise on that is to strip the fletching off only partway - enough so that there's several inches of smooth pen to hold, but leaving the identifying bits, as it were. That's what Woodforde did in that painting of a boy writing a letter. Actual scribes tend to leave less of the fletching, but we do sometimes leave a little tuft for brushing off pounce or sand.
(The feathers, ahem, sorry, quill pens in the photograph you linked to were clearly not meant for actual use. The bottom one won't even fit in an ink bottle, never mind leave room for one's hand.)
I do like how you've used every available weighty object to try to get the @#$%@# parchment to LAY FLAT ALREADY. Been there, done that, will probably need to do it again. :)
I am too flattered for words, but glad I made your day for you!You are absolutely correct about the reason for the objects sitting on the parchment! There would have been one or two more things, but that would have wound up making the picture much too busy and fussy. The main thing was to get the right impression across...which apparently was successful I am glad to learn!
I am not going to worry over-much about the pen. Woodforde was, of course, painting in an age when such a pen was a more or less commonplace and familiar object but there are, I suspect, vanishingly few people today who would notice any small inaccuracies. (As I mentioned in an earlier post, a cover "...needs to convey an impression at a glance, not necessarily be...an historically informative document.") It's a little like, I suppose, all of the astronomical mistakes made in "2001," which annoy me personally but don't subtract in the slightest from the import of the movie...let alone be noticed by 99.99% of its audience.
Now, if I'd put a fountain pen on the cover or a Bic, there would certainly be some cause for pointing a finger and going tsk tsk! ;-)
Besides, maybe the physicians of Vilnoc have been getting their pens from the lowest bidder.
Ay wrote: "Read the first bit. I’m hooked...."Read the rest of it. Most enjoyable.
I am in Australia and waiting eagerly for the iBooks link: Amy idea when that will be up? Apologies for asking, since I know this process is up to the vendor, just keen to read the rest of the story after the sneak peek!
Ruth wrote: "I am in Australia and waiting eagerly for the iBooks link: Amy idea when that will be up? Apologies for asking, since I know this process is up to the vendor, just keen to read the rest of the st..."
Alas, I have no idea. Or control.
It's possible the corrected edition may be along before the first version even goes up. If I don't get any more typos reported by tomorrow morning, I'm sending in the current list to my e-helper.
And then, as Gregor says, we'll see what happens.
Ta, L.
