So…

Once upon a time, in a far, far away galaxy, I began working on this odd little project. It had started as a urban fantasy set in 21st century Paris, where families of magicians held the reins of power in every domain from banking to building. Then I couldn’t make it work, because the worldbuilding wasn’t clicking with me. I wrote perhaps three chapters of it before it became painfully clear that my heart wasn’t in it.

So I nuked Paris.

Well, sort of. I made up a Great Magicians’ War, comparable in scale to WWI: a war that devastated Paris, making Notre-Dame an empty shell, the Seine black with ashes and dust; and the gardens and beautiful parks into fields of rubble. I set the action back several decades, to have a technology level equivalent to the Belle Époque with magic; and I added Fallen angels, whose breath and bones and flesh are the living source of magic; and whose power forms the backbone for a network of quasi-feudal Houses who rule over the wreck of Paris. And, hum, because it’s me, I added an extant colonial empire, a press-ganged, angry Vietnamese boy who’s more than he seems; Lucifer Morningstar (because you can’t have a story about Fallen angels without Morningstar); and entirely too many dead bodies.

In short, I mashed so many things together that it started looking a bit like the Frankenstein monster right before the lightning hit; but my fabulous agency (John Berlyne and his partner John Wordsworth) didn’t blink (at least, not too much!), and duly sent out my little novel, called The House of Shattered Wings. And lo and behold, the awesome Gillian Redfearn of Gollancz picked it up, along with a sequel. To say that I’m thrilled is an understatement: Gollancz is a superb publisher, and their list includes many friends of mine—I can’t wait to see where this goes.

Official synopsis:

In HOUSE OF SHATTERED WINGS, Paris’s streets are lined with haunted ruins, Notre-Dame is a burnt-out shell and the Seine runs black with ashes and rubble. De Bodard’s rich storytelling brings three different voices together: a naive but powerful Fallen angel, an alchemist with a self-destructive addiction, and a young man wielding spells from the Far East.

Here is more official info at the Bookseller, here at Zeno Towers; and here at Gollancz.

Release is slated for August 2015. You can pre-order here at amazon or Waterstones if you want a shiny hardcover (I’ll work out other vendors later, promise. I don’t need to tell you how crucial pre-orders are to a book’s success–so get in early, get in strong, and make this a big big success). If you don’t feel like pre-ordering right now, no worries. There’ll be plenty of opportunities :p

ETA: and here‘s a fresh new page devoted to the book, with more detailed copy.

More on the book when I have normal (ha! Who am I kidding) non-zero energy levels.

(picture credits: Kirkstall Abbey by Rick Harrison. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License).

And first draft of novella complete at 32k words. Title “The Citadel of Weeping Pearls”, it’s a loose sequel to On A Red Station, Drifting: set in the Imperial City two emperors and 60 years later, with a cameo from Linh and the Great Virtue Emperor. Featuring 4 POVs, entirely too many characters (I think I’m at 15 named ones plus 23 dead emperors’ ghost simulations), and a sort of complicated structure like a Chinese knot: four threads merged together to fill in the absence of a fifth character (it started out as a sort of meditation on the five elements, so there’s one character per element, and the fifth one is the one in the centre, who never speaks up). It’s out to readers at the moment; guess we’ll know soon how much of an ambitious failure it is… *g*

Snippet:

The Officer

There was a sound, on the edge of sleep: Suu Nuoc wasn’t sure if it was a bell and a drum calling for enlightenment; or the tactics-master sounding the call to arms; in that breathless instant–hanging like a bead of blood from a sword’s blade–that marked the boundary between the stylised life of the court and the confused, lawless fury of the battlefield.

“Book of Heaven, Book of Heaven.”

The soft, reedy voice echoed under the dome of the ceiling; but the room itself had changed–receding, taking on the shape of the mindship–curved metal corridors with scrolling columns of memorial excerpts, the oily sheen of the Mind’s presence spread over the watercolours of starscapes and the carved longevity character at the head of the bed. For a confused, terrible moment as Suu Nuoc woke up, he wasn’t sure if he was still in his bedroom in the Purple City on the First Planet, or hanging, weightless, in the void of space.

Here!

Just a quick post to say that J Damask/Joyce Chng could really use some support right now, as she’s undergoing treatment for a breast disease–in addition to the health issues and the draining side-effects, it doesn’t come cheap. You can buy her books here:
-Rider Trilogy: Young Adult SF. A cross between Dragons of Pern and Chinese culture–Agri-Seer Lifang never expected to ride one of the fabled Quetz; much less the depth of the bond that develops between them… More info here . Book 1: Rider/Book 2: Speaker/Book 3: Chaser (forthcoming)
–Oysters, Pearls and Magic: a novella set on a planet colonised by Asians–and the story of their tumultous relationship with the sea.
–Jan Xu/myriad series: urban fantasy set in Singapore. The MC is a mother-of-two and member of a pack of Chinese werewolves. Wonderful sense of atmosphere and great multiculturalism–plus, how many UFs do you know that are set in Asia? The first two books are a bit hard to get hold of, but book 3 was just released, and you can read it without prior knowledge of either book 1 or 2. (I’m told books 1 and 2 will be reissued in the future, will let you know when more news).

And if you want to read samples, hop on over here and have a look at Starfang: The Rise of the Clan (a space opera with werewolves, politics and intrigue).

Please help and/or signal boost?

-The Booksmugglers have started publishing fiction on their blog. They’re focusing on fairy tale retellings: the two I’ve read so far have been very good indeed, original and striking. S.L Huang’s “The Monster Hunters” mashes together a lot of fairytale tropes while tackling hard subjects of abuse and female agency.
The other story, which has just published, is Yukimi Ogawa’s “In Her Head, in Her Eyes”, a creepy SF/horror retelling of the Japanese story “Hachikaduki” (Girl with a Bowl on her Head”).
-Alyssa Wong’s “Santos de Sampaguita” over at Strange Horizons is a tale of dead gods, aswangs and weddings–it’s the visceral and heartbreaking tale of a woman coming into her power.
-And finally, J. Damask’s Heart of Fire, the third in her Myriad/Jan Xu cycle of werewolves in Singapore and how they uneasily coexist with Chinese dragons, jiangshi (reanimated corpses) and European fairies, has recently published. I love the mingling of influences in those, and the sense of real place evoked by someone who is a native of Singapore, as well as the strong focus on families and the bonds that make or break them.

In related news: there will be a print edition of On a Red Station, Drifting, published through Createspace. I haven’t publicised it because I’ve been sorting out admin stuff, but here’s the cover, courtesy of Rhiannon Rasmussen-Silverstein (and many many thanks to Colin F Barnes, who in addition to giving me tons of advice on self-publishing, covers and print publishing, also did my interior design).

Hopefully by MIRCon I can sign copies of it ^^

ETA: it’s live! Go buy it from amazon [US|UK|Fr].

Couple of plugs:
-Fundraiser for Accessing the Future, an anthology of disability-themed SF. Co-edited by Kathryn Allan and Djibril al-Ayad, to be published by Futurefire.net Publishing. Djibril already brought the wonderful (and under appreciated) We See a Different Frontier into being, this looks also awesome.
-In a rather different vein, a wonderful short story by Alter S. Reiss, over at Beneath Ceaseless Skies: racial tensions, immigration and murder in the kitchen of a large restaurant: “By Appointment to the Throne”

So, I’m back from Brittany, where we had a fantastic time with Kari Sperring, Kate Elliott, Rhiannon Rasmussen-Silverstein  and Rochita Loenen-Ruiz. Much good time was had–even though there was more snakelet-minding than I expected. I had time to ponder a few pieces, as well as eat ice cream, buckwheat crepes, and try to grab some sleep.

We visited Carnac, which was lovely–I had forgotten how impressive it was: a broken 4km of standing stones, which they think is part of a larger alignment of 40km between Quiberon and Vannes. And had a lovely buckwheat crepe in a restaurant overlooking the harbour at La Trinité-sur-Mer. Ham and cheese and egg is the best (the bit where you pierce the egg with the point of a knife and watch the egg yolk ooze across the crepe? the best!).

Now am back in the saddle, and busy snakelet-minding. Time to get back to work, methinks…

Heading to the Rainy Writers’ Retreat in Brittany II with Kari Sperring, Kate Elliott, Rochita Loenen-Luiz and Rhiannon Rasmussen-Silverstein (and the snakelet). Internet access will be present but I expect not much to happen on that front; so email, twitter etc. will be slow.Expect to be back Wednesday.

Composed of Cold Magic, Cold Fire and Cold Steel. Set in an alternate version of Europe where Carthage never fell; where a sheet of ice covers everything north of England and Belgium; and where the Taino Empire still rules in the Caribbean, Kate Elliott’s most recent trilogy is a thing of beauty. It’s a very tightly focused fantasy: the narrator if Catherine (Cat) Hassi Barahal, born into a family of Phoenicians couriers and spies–who finds herself, quite unexpectedly, married to a cold mage from one of the most powerful Houses in Europe, and thurst in the midst of intrigues both political and supernatural.

In the world of Spiritwalker, magic comes in two flavours: cold mages can spread a cold strong enough to douse fires and shatter steel; whereas fire mages channel flames and conflagrations, often to disastrous results. But magic users must take care not to become too powerful; for once a night on Hallow’s Eve, the Wild Hunt comes from the spirit world, and kills and dismembers a powerful magic user. The cold mages are thus powerful, but not overly so; and they govern Europe in a loose alliance with the princes who wield temporal power. But radicals are agitating for equal rights, and the infamous general Camjiata (this storyline’s version of Napoleon), has recently come back from his exile and is busy raising another army to conquer Europe… Cat and her beloved cousin Beatrice (Bee), who both find they have more abilities than they suspect, flee as every faction attempts to lay hands on them and use them for their own purposes.

It’s hard to do justice to the worldbuilding in this: one of Kate Elliott’s great strengths is her ability to create a universe that truly feels lived in–that gives you the impression that it doesn’t solely exist for the plot, and that everyone and everything has an existence that goes beyond the narration of the trilogy. The magical system is also fantastic (magic based on thermodynamics! Entropy between the spirit world and the mortal world!). And the characters really shine: from impulsive and kind-hearted Cat to theatrical and pragmatic Bee; from the arrogant and magnificent cold mage Andevai to the canny and manipulative Camjiata, they all leap off the page–you might not always agree with what they do, but they’re all thoughtfully depicted; and I really loved that the story went unexpected places, and explored issues of consent, equality and power, and how revolutions might or might not be the best way to grant these. And special props to the Master of the Wild Hunt, who’s in a class of his own for manipulative bastard.  Also, the salt plague is one of the awesomest, most refreshing ways of doing zombies in speculative fiction ever (and I say this as someone who’s a bit burnt on the subject of zombies).

There’s a few extras, too: The Secret Journal of Beatrice Hassi Barahal features Bee’s POV, and lovely art by Hugo Award winner Julie Dillon; and “The Courtship” takes up the story a few days after the end of Cold Steel from the POV of another character.

Highly recommended, in case you had doubts.