Tag: the fey duology

Proof of Spring

Friday. Cloudy, damp, temps forecast to rise into the mid-60sF.

A thunderstorm rolled into town at bedtime last night. I got up from the couch, moved to the comfy chair in my office, opened the curtains, cracked one of the windows, and watched the storm for an hour. We don’t get nearly enough thunderstorms at this location, so we need to celebrate those we do get.

House has been picked up and Sarah’s due in at 9ish. I’m about to retreat to Steve’s office and start working on getting the Fey Duology ready for prime time.

What’re you doing today?

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Out to the post office and back. Lunch prepared and et. I have done some research and it may be — that is may be — possible to offer a softcover edition of the Fey Duology through Draft2Digital that does not involve Amazon’s marketing arm. I’ve always found D2D … kinder than Amazon. I will continue exploring.

Perusing the reviews for Duainfey and Longeye (I’m looking for a — one — glowingish professional pull quote, and it’s being tough going — I’m again struck by things like the reviewer complaining about made-up words, and I’ve gotten the distinct feeling that some had decided what the books were going to be about, and then were thrown off by them being, err, different.

There are also the odd reviewers who remark — back to back — on the fact that the two books have different voices (yes?  this would be why there were two books), and complaining that they were forced to buy two books when a “rigorous editing” could have pared the entire tale into one book.

And then there are the reviewers who found Our Heroine Useless and Too Stupid to Live because she managed to survive a completely alien situation, learn the workings of said alien situation, make her way through trauma and fear back to love and morality — a lengthy road that I believe rightly passes through Anger. Those folks remind me of the people who found it Unbelievable that a woman as brilliant as Aelliana Caylon was “supposed to be” would have allowed herself to be abused.

That said, I’ve been sitting for some time with the problem of how I’m going to survive, going forward, especially as a writer, because I can’t simply just bear down and do everything that both of us did (ref Useless and Too Stupid to Live, above) without becoming a Rolanni-sized ember. Sarah’s visit this morning illuminated my situation. When I needed help cleaning the house, I hired somebody to help me. When it became clear that I couldn’t cope with the website that Steve had maintained, I hired somebody to help me.

So, it will be no shame to hire somebody to help me with PR, and possibly other administrative tasks, so I can write, meet my deadlines, interact with my readers, and Have A Life. You wouldn’t have thought that coming to this realizaton would have taken this long, but here we are.

It’s a pretty day outside. I have all the windows that will open, opened, and now it’s time to go back to Steve’s office and format me some more manuscript.
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So! I’m a third of the way through the Easy Part of the job. Tomorrow I may not be so speedy, as I do fully intend to spend at least an hour in The! Studio! with my glasswork.

Fans of Rookie will be interested to know that he conned me out of a tidbit of hardboiled egg at lunchtime and snabbled it right down.

Tali, offered her own bit of egg was — confused.

Everybody have a good evening. Stay safe. I’ll check in tomorrow.

Proof of spring:

And she’ll tell you she’s an orphan

And I have finished reading Longeye.

I’m so angry, I’m weeping.

There is nothing wrong with these books, and I refuse to put a trigger warning on them that says, What? These are so well-written that they may make you feel that over-riding someone’s will is wrong?

Weren’t we just having a conversation about how wrong it is to subjugate another person?

I’m going to go break things, now.
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This is the cover art for the e-omnibus including the reprints of Duainfey and Longeye, with an Explanatory Foreword from the surviving author.  This e-omnibus will be coming out from Pinbeam Books (aka, the Sharon Lee & Steve Miller Publishing Empire) RealSoonNow. I’ll tell you when.

I went back through the professional reviews for Duainfey and Longeye, and am kind of struck by the confusion of the reviewers — even the reviewers who liked them. It reminds me in a way of the reviews for Ondine (which I adore, predictably), in which the biggest complaint was that the filmmakers “couldn’t decide” if they wanted to tell a fantasy or a present day story. When in fact what the filmmakers did (I have no idea, obviously, if they intended this) very well was to juxtapose fantasy and present day, which I think? is pretty common, and I never did figure out why none of the pros could figure that out.

Anyhoots! I have a cover for The Fey Duology (including Duainfey and Longeye in one! convenient! package!), and now all I have to do now is edit the manuscript, reformat it 18 times, write cover copy, and a preface, and all like that. As before, I don’t dare try to sell this through Amazon, because I really can’t depend on them understanding stuff like “rights reverted,” and “I wrote them.” Amazon has had trouble with these concepts before, and I can’t risk the dozens of Pinbeam Books books that are already on sale at Amazon for one title.

And now! I need to go do my duty to the cats.

Blog title . . . Yeah, still with The Black Crowes.  Been that kind of a day.

The pain gonna make everything all right

Thursday?

. . . let’s go with Thursday. Damp and cool, but by no means cold.

Breakfast was rice crackers, cream cheese, and grapes. Lunch will probably be fried potatoes and onions and a protein to be named later. The to-do list is everything I didn’t do yesterday.

I am three-quarters of the way through Longeye and There. Is. Not. ONE. THING. Wrong. with these books. I’m actually quite angry with the people who made me ashamed of my own work and very nearly caused me to abandon my art. And while Steve said all the right things — one of Steve’s many talents lying in the direction of selling sno cones to penguins. At a profit. — I doubt he would have given up writing, and I’m not sure the partnership would have survived my withdrawal.

Side story: We had friends who were musicians, a duo, who played gigs in the neighborhood. One day, one of the duo called and asked to meet us for a drink; she had something she wanted to talk out. So, we met her, and it turned out that she had met another musician whose art ignited her own in a way that playing with the other half of the current duo, also her partner, did not. She really wanted to play with this other person, and expand her art. I can still hear the raw anguish in her voice when she said, “And the problem is, I never made a distinction between being with [partner], and playing with [partner].”

Sometime after that, the original duo vanished from the local scene, and we heard, eventually, that they had split and she had left the area.
The moral of this story being that the partnership Steve and I shared was fluid, and informed everything we did. I lost track of how many times we were asked: “You’re married? And you write together? How does that even work?” It worked because we were together.

*deep breath*

Going back to the Fey Duology — I will, indeed, be reissuing these books. Proudly reissuing these books.  Under our names.

And now? I b’lieve it’s time to go to work.

How’s everybody doing?

Today’s blog post title comes courtesy of The Black Crowes, “She talks to angels“