Tag: time travel

Categories
Uncategorized

Springtime News 🌱

Writing Update

Spring is slowly pulling in into Minnesota and all of our snow has melted (for good? for now? who can say.) Meanwhile, I’ve been working on a prequel to That Murder Feeling. It’s not meant to be a full length novel, more “cookie-sized.” When I sat down to outline it, I wasn’t sure where it might end up length-wise but the word count just crossed from novelette territory into novella (17,500 words or above). So novella it is, a bit more than cookie-sized. It’ll be about 90 pages when it’s finished.

Even with an outline, I tend to do a lot of revision and editing. What I used to do — to give myself some distance from the manuscript and enable me to look at it with fresh eyes — is to tweak the font between revisions. Times New Roman to Palatino to Garamond, that kind of thing. It never worked as well as the universally recommended approach, letting the manuscript sit for a month or longer without looking at it or even thinking about the story. But I’m not a fast writer and adding big pauses between drafts is SLOW.

Green background. Chapter One. The first and only time that I saw Millie Barnhill, she carried a book. I couldn’t tell you what she might have been like on other days or in other settings, but that day—just about a year ago, in spring of 1983—what I saw was a slender woman in her late eighties in a track suit and sneakers. She stood in the checkout line just ahead of me, the single book in hand. We were in the main branch of the public library, centrally located in my small town of Two Lakes, Minnesota. What caught my eye were the mushrooms. Six or seven of them surrounded Millie, knee-high and with lively aqua-blue caps the size of dinner plates. The Mushrooms of Mischief.
The Green Draft

So with the novella, I’ve been trying this new thing where I change the background color in Microsoft Word’s Immersive Reader between drafts. I like the Immersive mode because you can choose column width and set it to be more like a published book. There’s also an option to change text spacing and have Word read the words back to you. And then there’s the page color.

The new approach, turns out, works well.

For one thing, having a specific, named color gives more of a sense of progress. Done with the Yellow Draft, next up: Green. And so on.

There’s also more of a delineation between drafts, encouraging forward progress. No sneaking back to polish previous chapters. Leave that for Blue.

And it’s just plain fun to choose the colors.

I’m limiting myself to four passes, which might be a lot for some authors, but not so much for me. I like to polish and tweak and move stuff around and debate whether Option A or Option B works better for a character or story line… So it’s good to have a framework. The planned sequence is: Yellow, Green, Blue, Orange, where the read-through gets faster and faster each time.

After that I’ll draw a line under the manuscript. Done. Whoosh. Off it goes to my editor. When it comes back, I’ll make any changes and then there’ll be a final read either on paper or my Kindle.

The prequel story take place about a year before the events in That Murder Feeling. No title yet… Stay tuned for more!

The novella will be part of the Soul Garden Mysteries. Just a reminder, as a subscriber to my author newsletter, you have access to bonus content for the series! Click through to the hidden page on my website.

What I’m Reading

If you’ve been following this newsletter for a while, you’ll know that what I write hovers on the border between SFF and the mystery genre, sometimes falling more one side or the other. The same can be said of the books that I read (with a few other genres thrown in.) The last couple of newsletters I’ve had mysteries to recommend. This month, it’s two science fiction novels.

Lost in Time by A.G. Riddle. This one has been on my to-be-read list for a while. Based on the cover, I was anticipating a sci-fi thriller but it’s more of a combo of a thriller and an intricate murder mystery, with plenty of twists and time-travel surprises.

The Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei. An adventurous, imaginative space quest with plenty of likable and interesting characters. I’m about a third into the book and enjoying it very much.

Let me know if there are any novels you’ve enjoyed lately and want to recommend! (Leave a comment on Substack or reply to the newsletter email.)

Books, Lots of Books

March seems to be kind of a bookish month, in that there are spring sales and promotions everywhere you look. Here are a couple that include some of my books.

The first one—the graphic says it all—is geared toward time travel books.

The second is for cozy reads of all kinds — mystery, fantasy, romance. The link takes you to Kobo Plus but all of the books are available on other retailers too.

Hope you’re having a good March! Thanks for reading,

Neve

Categories
Uncategorized

Launch Day: The Bellbottom Incident

The Bellbottom Incident is now available both in paperback and on Kindle! You can find the book here in the US Kindle store, here in the UK store, and here in Canada. I’ve started to get some sales in Australia (*waves hello to Australians*) so I’m going to add that link as well.

Launch days tend to be somewhat of a bittersweet occasion. You’ve done all you can for the book and it’s now time to send it into the world and hope it finds its wings. That’s not quite true, of course, as there is still plenty that can be done and that needs to be done for the book — working on promotions, arranging giveaways, perhaps a book signing, and so forth. But mostly you’ve said good-bye to the characters, to the story.

That’s even more the case when it’s the last one in a series, as The Bellbottom Incident is; while there may be at least one short story to go along with the series, the three full length novels are done and it is time to clear the board and get cracking on that next idea.

So here’s hoping The Bellbottom Incident finds its wings. There’s already a nice 5-star review on Amazon to greet the book, and a giveaway happening on Goodreads. More to come!

Categories
Uncategorized

The Bellbottom Incident – paperback available early!

Psst! 

A bit of news just for my mailing list subscribers (well, and for anyone who follows me on Twitter or Facebook, and possibly some places I’ve forgotten my feed goes to…) Anyways, here it is: The Bellbottom Incident paperback has gone up on Amazon TEN DAYS EARLY. The Kindle version is still on track for release at the end of this month, March 31. But as of today, you can find the papeback for sale on Amazon US and on Amazon UK. 

Hope you all like this one and happy reading!


Categories
Uncategorized

Cover Reveal: The Bellbottom Incident

Amazon’s algorithms sent out the “Coming Soon” email this morning, sooner than I expected, so this isn’t exactly a cover unveiling as everyone can already see it on the Kindle preorder page.  But here goes anyway. Ta-da:

The Far Time Incident, the first book in the series, had a cover that was on the light side, off-white and gray. The Runestone Incident cover was mostly black with some red accents. So for this third one we went with lots of color, which also happened to match the time period the book takes place in. That it’s the seventies is pretty clear from the title, I think! TheBookDesigners get the credit for turning my vague word-sketch into a lovely and eye-catching cover.

Here is the back-page description:

Julia Olsen and Nate Kirkland, St. Sunniva University’s time-traveling crime-stoppers, are back and facing their toughest challenge yet in this third and final installment of the series. Sabina, their adopted niece from the lost city of Pompeii, has gone missing—in the bellbottom decade, of all places.  

The situation requires sharp investigative skills of the literary kind, as Sabina has managed to outwit History and disappear into parts unknown, with the only clues to her whereabouts hidden in a Kurt Vonnegut novel. But fiction and reality collide as it soon becomes clear that the consequences may be all too real…and all too high. Can Julia and her teammates rescue the out-of-her-time Sabina before the final, unstoppable showdown with History?  

Continuing where The Far Time Incident and The Runestone Incident leave off, The Bellbottom Incident brings the series to a gripping conclusion in this lively adventure through history, science, and literature.

Though only the Kindle book has gone up for preorder, there will be a print book of course, releasing the same day, March 31. This final book in the series comes to you via Westmarch Publishing, so there are some changes in how things got done, but none that should affect the reading experience itself, which is all that matters.

Thanks for supporting my books and hope you enjoy this one as much as I did writing it!

Categories
Uncategorized

Update on Book 3 of the Incident Series

I’ve had a couple of readers email asking me when the final book in the Incident series will release, so here’s a quick update:

  1. There’s a working title (ta-na!): THE BELLBOTTOM INCIDENT
  2. The book is in the developmental (content) editing stage at the moment.
  3. Depending on how long the editing takes (and obtaining permissions for any quotes I include in the text, cover design, etc) the expected publication date is sometime this winter, that is to say, late 2014 or early 2015. 

Also, this final book in the Incident series may just be my favorite of the three. Just sayin’. Hard to comment further without giving away key plot points, but let’s just say Julia and the others get to go to near-time, meet a famous author… and, oh, all sorts of stuff happens.

Stay tuned. 

Categories
Uncategorized

The Runestone Incident Release Day!

It’s finally here — release day for The Runestone Incident! This is the second book in the Incident series (and my third book in all). You might think that the long wait between the final proofs (mid-October) and release day (today!) would get easier with each successive book… but it doesn’t.
It’s always the same mix of nervous anticipation and itchy impatience. But that’s now over and Book 2 is out and available in these formats: trade paperback, ebook for your Kindle, tablet, or iPad, and audio book, as read by the immensely talented, Hugo-winning author Mary Robinette Kowal. (On a side note, I thought I’d throw Mary a curveball this time around by including a few Old Norse words in Book 2, but no — it turns out she speaks Icelandic, so Old Norse was right up her alley!)

In celebration of the release, 47North is doing a giveaway on Goodreads. Enter by February 24 for a chance to win one of 20 complimentary print copies.

The book has also gone up on NetGalley, where professional reviewers can request a digital copy. Near as I can tell (since I’m not really involved in the process), that includes book bloggers and also readers who regularly post Goodreads reviews, so if you fall into one of those two categories, it might be worth looking into.

Cheers,
Neve

Categories
Uncategorized

News This Second Week of August

A heads-up about a new feature on my blog – starting September first I’m going to have once-a-month guest posts from fellow 47North authors, which should be fun. They’ll talk about their books and so on, and maybe reveal some things I’m curious about (such as whether they read their Amazon reviews). Since 47North publishes a wide variety of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, expect an equally wide variety of personalities and opinions. (I mean that in a good way.)

In other news, since it’s gone up on Amazon, I can now reveal the cover of The Runestone Incident, due out in February of next year! I really like the color flip to the cover of Book 1 in the series — for The Far Time Incident we had a near-white background and black lettering and falling figures, while Book 2 has a black background and white text and figures, as you can see below. And then there’s that lovely touch of orange, which just pulls it all together.

This time everyone is falling into the North America part of the globe, which fits the story well. As an aside (I don’t remember if I commented on this with Book 1 or not), it’s really nice that the people on the cover are actually people-shaped, as opposed to being video-game bodied and totally unrealistic. I like to think Julia is the one near the top, but I suppose she could be any of the three.

Hope everyone is having a good August!

Categories
Uncategorized

News This Third Week of June

Hope everyone is enjoying their summer (or winter, depending on which part of the world you’re in). Lots of rain, green, and mosquitoes here.

Over on Chris Henderson’s blog, TheWriteChris, I talk about Writing Sci-Fi and Making it Real. Chris sent me a list of insightful questions, such as What’s the best advice about writing you want to pass along? Spoiler alert — I quote Neil Gaiman in the answer.


The sequel to The Far Time Incident has gone into the developmental edit and I’ve been reworking the draft based on feedback from my editor, Angela Polidoro. Angela is fantastic at her job, somehow managing to zero in on small, sentence-scale issues while simultaneously keeping her finger on the big-picture pulse of the story. This stage of things is both fun and stressful, as I’m making any last major changes to the story and watching it (hopefully!) all come together. 

Book 2 in the Incident series is slated for publication sometime in early 2014, which seems really far away, but there is a lot to be done between now and then for the book via the trusty hands of everyone at 47North. After the developmental edit, there’s the copyedit, the proofread, cover design and promo text, Advance Reader Copies to be printed and sent out, and whatever else I might have forgotten to put on the list! Rolling up sleeves and getting back to work…

Categories
Uncategorized

News on This First Week of May

Today’s news is that the big May snowstorm veered off at the last minute and just missed us — towns just south of us got 8+ inches, but our lawn stayed green. Also that I was invited to write a guest post for the Kindle Daily Post. The topic suggested was What are your five favorite time travel novels? Had I thought about it really deeply, it would have been hard to choose from all the great time travel novels out there, so instead I went with the more straightforward method of listing the first five books that popped into my head (figuring that was a sure-fire way of guaranteeing they were my favorites). Read my guest post here and let me know what your favorite time travel novels are!

In other news, I’m doing a giveaway on Goodreads for both the new book and my first one. If you’re a Goodreads member, you can enter to win a signed copy of The Far Time Incident or Regarding Ducks and Universes (or both!). The giveaway runs until May 13.

Finally, The Far Time Incident has been picked by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Kindle editors for their list of books “no self-respecting geek should go without,” which is, of course, unbelievably cool. I don’t know how often they change or update these lists, but for now you can spot the book there, nestled between Flatland and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Like I said, very cool stuff.

Categories
Uncategorized

Launch Day – The Far Time Incident

It’s here! The Far Time Incident releases today in trade paperback, Kindle, and audiobook formats. Am I excited? Yes. Am I nervous? Yes. I feel I should say something deep and profound to mark the occasion, like that writing a book is like building a boat and that I’ve done the best job I could with hammer and nail, hoisted the mast and sail, carefully painted the name on the prow, and all I can hope for at this point are a calm sea and a good tailwind. 

Not for nothing is it called a book launch. 

The point, I think, is this — that publishing means letting the book sail where it will, releasing it into the sometimes murky, sometimes stagnant, and sometimes wonderfully blue publishing waters. Yes, the publisher and you do what you can to help it along by sending out copies to reviewers and spreading the word via social media and other means, and hope that book finds a home in readers’ hearts. But ultimately it means that the time has come to focus your efforts on building that next boat, and I have — the sequel to the Far Time Incident is well in the works, with a nice solid draft sitting in my computer.

But today I’m here to watch a boat sail away. Here’s to a great launch!