Announcing Love Shines Through

Hooray! It took a ton of work, but Love Shines Through: A Fractured World Anthology is now available!

Here’s the blurb:

The world was whole before the war.

But war is a terrible thing, and terrible things are done in the name of defense and protection. And this war tore the world apart, fractured it, separated families and lives and dreams. The reasons why no longer matter, but the effects still linger. They cause pain, though the war is over.

But despite the monsters and the poisons and the despair, there is a glimmer of light. And hope and love are not gone from the world.

These four stories, set in the Fractured World, explore how light can make it through the darkness. How hope can conquer fear. And most of all, how love can still flourish, even when the world is bleak.

A young woman braves monsters to see the sky.
A reluctant man chooses forgiveness over suffering.
Lovers reunite to save a child and their community.
Best friends risk everything for each other.

Come see the light for yourselves.

I’m so glad to see this done and out! Love Shines Through is available through Amazon in paperback or ebook form, or in your favorite format through Smashwords (and hopefully soon through your favorite ebook distributor).

I had a great time writing my story for this anthology–it was fun looking at Briony’s ancestors and thinking about what could have led them to the point they’re at in City of Hope and Ruin. (Oh yeah, this anthology takes place about 400 years ahead of CoHaR.) And I’m glad to see it come to fruition. The Fractured World was always supposed to be a shared world, so it was great to have some new authors write in it.

I hope you guys have a chance to check it out!

Hooray for July!

Oh man, squiders, you have no idea how happy I was when Monday rolled around. All the craziness of May and June are finally behind me and I feel like I can breathe again.

It is lovely.

Now that all the sundries are taken care of, summer can finally begin.

(The relaxing part. It’s already ungodly hot. Booooooo.)

Here’s how July looks from a writing standpoint:

• Still working on the space dinosaur story. Now that the madness is done, I hope to actually get some decent wordage going on it. I am having a bit of an issue where my Google Drive isn’t syncing on one computer, which is frustrating. Oh well. Old fashioned way it is until I have time to figure that madness out.
• In theory, it should be my turn on the sequel to CoHaR’s draft next week. The sequel is gooooing slowly but the good news is that the publication schedule has moved out by a few months, so we should still be okay.
• My scifi serial continues. I thought I was almost to The End but then there was a rogue plot twist.
• I have the itch to write a short, but I don’t actually have any ideas floating about. I wrote that one back in April/May and then promptly forgot to do anything about it, so I should probably edit it and find it a home.
• We have a Fractured World-related anthology coming out at the end of the year, and I suspect I need an outline if not a partially written story by the end of the month. So that’s pretty high on the to-do list. I have characters, premise, and setting, but am sadly lacking in plot. I will have to poke it fairly actively to get something percolating.

That ought to keep me extra busy. It’s probably too ambitious, especially since the small, mobile ones are home and bored, but hey, one can dream.

Any fun plans for July, squiders? Aside from writing, we’ve got a couple festivals planned (uuugh, nothing like wandering around outside when it’s 100 degrees) and are apparently climbing the second-tallest mountain in the continental United States next Friday.

Re-Learning How to Co-Write

Siri and I have officially broken ground on the sequel for City of Hope and Ruin! It’s just a couple thousand words, but we’re going, and so far it feels good.

It’s already interesting from a process standpoint, however. For City of Hope and Ruin, we each essentially had our own worlds, with our own characters and our own plots, that occasionally overlapped (or a lot overlapped, at the end). But for all intents and purposes, we could go and work on our own parts for a week or a month, then meet up and check in and go over each other’s parts, and then go back to our own stuff.

It worked pretty well. But it won’t work for this book.

Our characters are in the same place, now wrapped up in the same part of the plot. At least for now, there will be a lot more overlap between what the characters are doing (they very well might split up for a while later, but they’ll probably still be working on the same plotline). So we can’t go off and write independently. Each new section will need to be discussed beforehand and looked at after the fact.

So that will be new. It will be interesting to see how it goes.

Does anyone have examples of novels (preferably fantasy or scifi) where two authors wrote different characters interacting in the same place? Most of the dual author books I can think of either do what we did with CoHaR and separate the characters so they don’t overlap much, or both authors work on the whole book (which I don’t honestly understand how that works, unless people are doing different parts of the process).

Anyway, long story short, we’re here, we’re moving, so far so good, and we’ll see how it goes. Every book is different and has its own challenges, whether it’s your first or your fiftieth, so I guess we shall see what problems pop up on the way. At least we have more time for this book before it’s due, and the world/characters are already established.

How’s your Tuesday going, Squiders? Anything new and interesting?

(I’m down to four books, by the way.)