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Happy New Year! Happy Book Birthday!
I hope the New Year finds you all well. I write this from the great snowy lands of the Boston area, where winter has decided to finally grant us an appearance. And what better pastime on a snow day than reading?
Just in time to rescue you from the winter doldrums, TIME AND TITHE, my newest novel, will be available on February 10th.
Lydia's victory over the Fae came with a bitter price - her baby sister, Taylor, grew up without her, aging more than a decade in the mere weeks that have passed in Faerie. When Aeon's madness threatens both realms, the sisters, now nearly strangers to one another, are forced to fight the powerful Fae who was once friend to each of them.
TIME AND TITHE is the sequel to THE BETWEEN, but never fear: they can be read independently. And, as a special gift to you, my newsletter subscribers, if you purchase a copy of TIME AND TITHE, but have not yet read THE BETWEEN, I will send you an eBook copy in whatever format you require. (Email your purchase notification to lisa@ljcohen.net, with your preferred reading format - mobi, for kindle or epub, for all other readers.)
A sneak peek of the first 3 chapters of TIME AND TITHE is attached in this newsletter edition as a pdf. You can also download it here. (The first few pages are in the 'mini' sneak peek below.)
Sighted in the Wild
I enjoyed my first Arisia (a Boston SF&F convention) a few weeks ago, and in addition to participating with my fellow 'broads' of Broad Universe in a reading, I was also in the art show. Aside from writing, my other creative endeavor is ceramics. I mainly make functional ware, both on the wheel and by handbuilding. You can see some of my creations here.
I'll also be on panels/readings at Boskone, also in Boston, Feb. 13 - 15th, where I'll be debuting TIME AND TITHE as well as displaying my ceramics at the art show. If you're at Boskone, please come find me!
Future cons include Readercon (Burlington, MA, July 9-12) and World Fantasy (Saratoga Springs, NY Nov. 5-8)
And a very local appearance, and one near and dear to my indie bookstore-loving heart: I'll be doing a reading/signing for TIME AND TITHE at Newtonville Books (Newton Centre, MA) on March 10th at 7 pm.
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Pre-order TIME AND TITHE
While the official publication date is February 10th, you can pre-order TIME AND TITHE at most eBook retailers. You helped make DERELICT a run-away success. (Thank you!!) Please consider boosting the signal for TIME AND TITHE.
Bullet points:
- tell a friend
- pre-release and release week blitz
- the Amazon wishlist
Word of mouth is what helps books get into the hands of readers. If you have read and enjoyed any of my other novels, or know of someone who might, would you please forward this email on or mention TIME AND TITHE on social media?
Discoverability is probably the biggest hurdle for an author today. Books live and die by their Amazon rankings. If this is a book you think you would enjoy and you are planning on purchasing it, would you consider ordering it either during its pre-release phase (From now - February 10th) or in its release week (February 10 -17)? With even a small number of sales clustered together, the book will get noticed and promoted by Amazon's magical data machines.
Even if you aren't planning on purchasing the book, simply putting it on your wishlist can give it a visibility boost. Would you be willing to place TIME AND TITHE on your Amazon (and/or other retailer's) wishlist?
AMAZON
KOBO
Google play
Google books
SmashWords
iTunes/iBooks
Barnes and Noble (Forthcoming, my books listed here.)
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(Mini) Sneak Peek
It wasn’t supposed to end like this. Clive stood in the silence of the battlefield where so many of the Fae had fallen in the war between Oberon, the Bright Court King, and his former consort, Titania, the Shadow Queen. In the months since Lydia had glamoured the monarchs into trees that towered over the scarred ground, decay had come to Faerie.
Moss browned at Clive’s feet. Day by day, color leached from the landscape everywhere except where Lydia chose to spend her power. The oak and elm that had once been the warring rulers glowed against the gloom of their surroundings. Except for them, there was no living green anywhere else in the grove: only winter-dormant trees, their presence a reminder of the ephemeral nature of Mortal existence. A reminder of what Lydia had lost when Clive had persuaded her to join him in Faerie.
The oak rustled in the absence of any breeze. Clive bowed to his former lord. “I tried to warn you. She was not the biddable child you thought you’d hidden away for your convenience.” Acorns thudded down at Clive’s feet. He picked one up and crushed it in his hand. “Even you will not survive if she lets Faerie wither.”
He had wasted enough time here. Lydia was elsewhere, and he needed to find her and make her understand. Unless she chose to rule or broke her compact with Faerie so another could take her place, the realm would fade. And without glamour to sustain the Fae, they, too, would learn what it meant to be ephemeral.
Turning his back on the trapped rulers, Clive stepped from the grove toward the maze once cared for by Aeon, Oberon’s twisted gardener. Both the gardener and the garden at the heart of the maze were casualties of the war that had nearly killed Clive as well as so many others.
He had survived because of Lydia. And he had to repay her sacrifice with a harsh truth.
It should have been the work of a single stride to shift from one place to another. But the entrance to the maze wavered in Clive’s mind. The image of thick walls twined with flowering vines kept slipping away. When he opened his eyes, there was only a featureless gray haze.
He struggled to draw a breath. Nothingness deadened his senses. His heart thudded in his chest, a dull, hollow sound he could feel more than hear. Was this how Mortals drowned? Was this death? “Lydia!” The shout emerged thin and frayed, like his connection to Faerie.
A thin tendril looped around his wrist. Clive tried to jerk away. It brightened into the green of a living vine, vivid and lurid against the gray and as unbreakable as a vow thrice sworn. Something pulled, hard, and Clive hit the ground, rolling to a stop against a wall of bracken, the sound of cracking wood like breaking bones.
He stood, panting, pulling dead twigs and dried thorns from his hair and clothes. Where the vine had circled his wrist, a red welt faded into a thin, white scar.
“I heard you call,” Lydia said.
She appeared in front of him, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, as he had first seen her at her school in the Mortal world. But the clothes shimmered with Fae glamour. Each thread glowed with the magic that permeated all of Faerie. Like her clothes, Lydia was and wasn’t the same as the changeling Oberon had tasked him to retrieve. Her outward looks hadn’t transformed. She still wore her long, dark hair in a neat tail down the middle of her back and her hazel eyes still shone with the gold that betrayed her Bright Court bloodline. It was the expression in them that had changed.
Something of Titania’s anguish and loss looked out from those eyes and Clive shivered, wondering if the Shadow Queen’s madness had touched Lydia as well.
He no longer knew how to reach her. She was no longer the girl he’d befriended, sworn himself to aid, and nearly died for in the battle that deposed the monarchs. And Clive was no longer Oberon’s errand boy. Rubbing the scar circling his wrist, he struggled to find the right words, a kind of glamour that would make her listen, make her understand.
A rustling in the maze startled him and he glanced up. A trail of fresh green ended at Lydia’s feet. Dark moss thickened the ground and large trumpet-shaped flowers bloomed in the brown hedge walls.
“Why do you waste your power so?” he asked. Faerie was dying, just as the maze had died. She had to know. Even had she merely been an unexceptional Mortal stumbling across a thin place in the barrier, Lydia had been in Faerie long enough to feel its anguish. But she was a Trueborn, and even though she’d been raised as an ephemeral, she was as Fae as Clive was.
“Aeon was my friend.”
More than once, Oberon’s mad gardener had risked his safety to protect her. Clive didn’t understand why, but he knew enough about Aeon to know he never planted a seed without knowing what would take root. Until his path tangled with Lydia’s. “Don’t spend glamour on a dead garden. Even he would chide you for it.”
Lydia shook off Clive’s warning and gestured to the parched ground. In the hedges that ringed them, new shoots of tender green pushed out from dry branches. Faerie drank her in eagerly.
“This isn’t what the realm needs. Let the dead rest, Lydia. Please.”
She plucked a ruffled pink rose from a blooming bush, wincing as the thorn bit into her finger. “I don’t know how.”
You can read more in the attached pdf, which contains the first three chapters of TIME AND TITHE.
Thank you for your support!
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
(This means you can share the newsletter and/or the story with a link back to http://www.ljcohen.net, Lisa Janice (LJ) Cohen, but please do not place it for sale or change it.) |
Past issues of Blue Musings archived here. |
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