what I’ve been up to
Some of you may have noticed that I abruptly stopped book-blogging in April. That’s not because I stopped reading anything; rather, it’s that my reading list suddenly looked like this:
The Spanish Inquisition, Joseph Pérez, trans. Janet Lloyd.
Golden Age Spain, H. Kamen.
Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World, María M. Portuondo.
Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain, Scott K. Taylor.
Spain: The Centre of the World 1519-1682, Robert Goodwin.
Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain, William A. Christian, Jr.
Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II, Geoffrey Parker.
. . . and that’s just a sampler. It would have been a giant red flag that I was Up To Something — but I couldn’t yet talk about what.
Today, that changes! I can fiiiiiiiiiiiinally announce that Alyc Helms and I are hard at work on another M.A. Carrick collaboration, a historical fantasy duology called The Sea Beyond. From the formal announcement:
In an alternate Spanish Golden Age, where the map becomes the territory and mapmakers are the architects of reality, the Council of the Sea Beyond has risen to unrivaled power, exploiting the world’s most precious resources for their own gain.
Determined to discover how cosmographers pin down the islands of the Otherworld, Estevan seeks power with the Council of the Sea Beyond – but he risks the exposure of his own secrets, too. For he is a changeling, a faerie masquerading as a mortal. And for a faerie to enter the mortal world like that, a child must go the other way . . .
The Hungry Girl, the nameless human daughter whose place he took, has grown up opposite her “brother.” Lost among the fae and desperate to find some purpose for her existence, she leaps at the chance to help a group of Spanish explorers in the Sea Beyond . . . only to be horrified at the atrocities they commit.
Soon the unlikely siblings will need to overcome their rivalry — because only together can they bring down Spain’s worlds-spanning empire and save the homes they have come to love.
Though you’d be justified in wondering, this is 100% unconnected to the Onyx Court books: same general time period as Midnight Never Come, yes, and with faeries in, but a completely different version of events — starting with the fact that this is an “open” historical fantasy, where everybody knows and has always known about faerie matters (we’ve been having fun working out some alternate Catholic theology around that), instead of a secret history where the public face of events looks like it did in our world.
So that’s what I’ve been up to this year! I’m not going to backtrack to report on all my reading in the last seven months, but if I have the energy, I may return to a practice from my Onyx Court days, making “book reports” on at least a selection of the titles. We’ll see — right now most of my energy is going to, y’know, the book itself. (And things like finishing up Year Eight of the New Worlds Patreon, and and and.) But it’s public and official at last!
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