Shameless Plug
I hope you all are tucked up somewhere warm with good books and the hot beverage of your choice. The winter storm ended up being fairly mild here, which is good since I’m pet sitting for a friend.
But, that’s not what my shame
less plug is about. I’m plugging my Etsy store today. The reason for this is: I just found out today that my sewer line has collapsed and it’s going to be VERY expensive to fix it. Obviously, I need to raise some extra funds over the next few months while I’m paying that off.
So, in honor of my pluming disaster, you can use the coupon code SEWER to get free shipping on all orders until April. This is good for items currently in the shop or any custom pieces as well.
If you’re not in the market for jewelry right now, feel free to pass the info on. Thanks!
Serial Box
Serial Box is a new form pf publishing that purports to take the concept of a television season and bring it to the book world. The serials are created by an author and then co-written with a team, much like a writers room for a tv show. The episodes come out weekly and the season has a definite end in sight. You can subscribe to a whole serial or just shop a la carte.
The model is not entirely new. Kindle serials have been doing this, with Indexing by Seanan McGuire being a delightful example. And, of course, Charles Dickens’ works, along with those of many other writers, were originally released serially in newspapers or periodicles. The digital age has opened up the option to bring serials back in a very big way. The Serial Box episodes can stand alone, but work better in the network of the whole season. And, which is delightful to me, they are available as print or audio from the start!
Currently, there are two serials running with a new one due to start in a few days.
Tremontaine is a prequel to Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint, which is one of my favorite books ever. We return to Riverside, a fantasy world where the only thing more dangerous than the sword fights are the conversations. The pilot is available for free, so there’s nothing stopping you from picking it up. Also, the cover art by Kathleen Jennings is beautiful!
Book Burners was created by Max Gladstone and can be summed up quickly as Warehouse 13 meets Jim Hines’s Libriomancer. The tagline is “Some books have teeth.”
The slightly more expanded premise is that dangerous magic is trapped in certain books. Very few people survive an encounter with these books, but one of the lucky few is Sal. She ends up joining a group of anti-magic operatives who work for the Vatican in an effort to find and contain the books before anything worse happens.
The Witch Who Came In From the Cold is the next story to get started. It debuts on January 27. It was created by Lindsay Smith and Max Gladstone. It sounds like it’s going to be a Cold War spy novel with magic. So, that sounds awesome. And it’s set in Prague, which is a beautiful city. I’ve already subscribed and I can’t wait for it to get started.
The Human Voicebank Initiative
I was on Habitica a week or so ago looking at challenges. (In case you don’t know, Habitica is a website/app that helps you gamify your life. You get XP and loot drops for checking off daily tasks, completing things on your to-do list, or continuing good habits.) One of the challenges was to donate your voice to the Human Voicebank Initiative. There was a link to a TED Talk. And I thought, well, I’ve got a voice. And I do like to talk so…
Obviously, the talk and the blog post by founder Rupal Patel is much more eloquent than anything I could say, but the gist of it is that the Human Voicebank Initiative is trying to design personalized synthetic voices for people with severe speech impediments so that everyone is not stuck with the same harsh, robotic voice that you might have heard in an interview with Stephen Hawking.
Now, how do you make a personalized voice for anyone who needs one? You get lots and lots and lots of vocal samples. And that’s what the HVI is doing via their site, VocaliDVocaliDVocaliD. At this website you can request a voice or donate your own. In order to donate your voice, you read sentences, which are selected to cover all the basic sounds a synthetic voice might have to formulate. A full set is around 3,500 sentences. That is a great deal of recording, but you can do as many sentences at a time as you like. I’ve been doing a few every day and just hit 500 recorded!
So, if you’ve got a microphone you can hook up to your computer and have a little free time throughout the day, this would be a fantastic way to spend it.
https://embed-ssl.ted.com/talks/rupal_patel_synthetic_voices_as_unique_as_fingerprints.html
New ARCs 1/19/2016
Hello all, I’m late posting today, but that’s ok because I got a huge haul of new ARCs at work, which I can now share. These are from a few different publishers. 
I’m probably starting on Chaos Choreography tonight. I LOVE Seanan’s books and I can’t wait to read it.
The Darkness Knows and A Front Page Affair are both historical mysteries. Leonard is William Shatner’s reminiscences about his friendship with Leonard Nimoy and I expect it to make me cry like a tiny baby.
Does anything here look especially good to you?
House Read: Carter & Lovecraft
What I’m Reading: Carter & Lovecraft by Jonathan L. Howard
Published: Thomas Dunne Books, 2015
Cover Art: I need to check a hardcopy to find out
Read This: while dancing by the abyss.
Daniel Carter was a cop in New York who stumbled across a deeply strange case that resulted in his partner and the perpetrator dead and his dreams being haunted by the strangeness of it all.
Emily Lovecraft is the last direct descendant of H.P. Lovecraft and works in her uncle’s bookstore in Providence, RI. There’s no reason these two people should ever meet until a suspiciously high priced lawyer tells Carter that he has inherited said bookstore.
That’s fine and dandy. He doesn’t really need a bookstore, but it’s a nice piece of backup income to supplement his PI business. But then, he gets a call from a man who is afraid for his life. When Carter arrives in the parking lot to meet his new client he finds the police already there and the client dead in his car under impossible circumstances.
The more he looks into it the tighter he and Lovecraft are drawn into a strange web that seems to have come straight out of HPL’s books.
I listened to this one on audio and I’ve got to say, pick up the hardcopy instead. It’s not that the narrator is bad, but I really didn’t care for the way he voiced Lovecraft. It was just weirdly drawling. It just didn’t work for me.
Overall, I enjoyed the book, but I’m hoping it’s the start of a series rather than a standalone. I feel like the ending is a great setup for a second book, but a little unsatisfying if it’s just the end.
It was a little odd to read this so close to Maplecroft. I kept thinking about the way the scary things worked there and mixing them up with the events in this book. Also, Howard confirmed my suspicions about a certain type of grad student…
Geek-A-Long
As some of you may know, when I’m not reading or doing other book-related things, I like to do stuff with my hands. Mostly, I knit and make jewelry, usually while listening to audiobooks, so I suppose that still counts as doing book-related stuff.
At any rate, in addition to working on tons of small knitted items to go with a costume I’m planning in conjunction with the publication of Mary Robinette Kowal’s Ghost Talkers, I have been participating in the Geek-a-Long over on Lattes and Llamas.
The Geek-a-Long is a year long knitting or crochet project, which ultimately results in (hopefully) a blanket. There is a geeky theme every year, and the goal of the project is to raise money for Child’s Play, a charity to help kids in children’s hospitals around the country.
This is the third year that the Geek-a-Long has been running and the theme is Video Games. How could I resist? There have been two squares posted so far, Mario Kart and Tetris.
I opted out of the Tetris square, it just doesn’t strike my fancy, but there is a Portal square from two years ago that I plan to substitute just as soon as my yarn gets here. The square being released today is, I think, Kirby-themed.
I really enjoy knitting and working on a big, group project like this is really fun.
The way Child’s Play comes into it is varied. First, if you buy your yarn from this year’s sponsors, they will donate a small portion of the purchase price to the charity. Next, you can make direct donations through a widget at the L&L site. And third, if you finish all your squares for the year, you should end up with two different blankets. Either or both of which could be sold and the proceeds donated to Child’s Play. Or, you could just get the word out there about the charity.
And what exactly is Child’s Play, you might be asking. Well, Child’s Play is a charity that was started in 2003 to help kids in children’s hospitals. One thing that most people don’t think about is how those kids spend their time. It can be exhausting to be in the hospital, and that’s without taking into account the reason that they’re there to start with. So, anything that can take their minds off things and enrich their time is welcome. So, Child’s Play donates games, toys, and books to partner hospitals. They have also expanded to partner with some domestic violence shelters recently as well. I think it’s a pretty great charity and I’m happy to be able to combine knitting with a good cause.
Company of Liars by Karen Maitland
Hello, Internet.
So, Alan Rickman died and I have, therefore, been watching Sense & Sensibility and crying a bunch today, so I don’t have a ton of focus for other things today, but I didn’t want to make you think I didn’t love you anymore.
So, here is my most recent 6 Second Book Review: https://vine.co/v/iOuBXWIXg5t/embed/simple
Company of Liars is the story of nine strangers who have been thrown together while they try to escape the Black Plague in medieval England. As in The Cantebury Tales, each of the strangers has a story to share, although one of them is hiding a very dangerous secret.
If you’re in the mood of other dark medieval stories, I highly recommend The Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin. This novel focuses on Adelia, a doctor from the University of Salerno, who has been tasked by Henry II to find the person who has been killing children in Cambridge.
I also very much enjoyed the Brother Cadfael series by Ellis Peters.
Are there any books you think I should review for my 6 Second series?
Kinuko Craft Master Post
Today, I met with my Harper Collins sales rep at work. And I got to see an ARC of the forthcoming book from Kinuko Craft and Mahlon Craft, Beauty and the Beast. I cannot even tell you how beautiful it is. The book comes out in July and there are very few images available yet, so I don’t want to gush about it too much. But, it reminded me of how much I love Craft’s illustrations, so I thought I would share some of my favorites.
The first book I remember finding with her illustrations was Cupid and Psyche. I picked it up from the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, MA while I was in college.
I’ve picked up every picture book she’s done since. She’s also an amazing cover artist. I actually started reading Patricia McKillip because she had cover art by Kinuko Craft.
There aren’t very many artists that I feel that way about. Yoshitaka Amano is another one like that. I’ll at least look into any project that he does art for. I love several other artists, but they don’t typically have as much crossover into the book world.
When I went to DragonCon the first or second time, Kinuko Craft had some art on display. I stood in front of one of the paintings for almost twenty minutes. It was a large oil painting, I was familiar with the image because it was on a book that I had read. That was probably the first time I had seen the original of a book cover for a book I knew. That was amazing. I’ve been to museums on multiple continents. And these paintings deserve to be in any of them. 
This is the cover art for The Tower at Stony Wood by Patricia McKillip. It’s a novel based on the Lady of Shallot, but set in a secondary fantasy world, which is what McKillip excels in. The painting captures the feeling of the story perfectly. Its beautiful and intricate and everywhere you look there is something else to see.
Here are a few more of my favorite book covers:
This on is for Ombria in Shadow by Patricia McKillip. 
Biting the Sun by Tanith Lee
House Read: Page by Paige
What I’m Reading: Page by Paige by Laura Lee Gulledge
Published: Amulet, 2011
Illustrated by: Laura Lee Gulledge
Read This: while applying to art school
To give you an idea of how bad my book situation is, I’ve had an ARC of this on the shelf since 2010 and never gotten around to reading it. So, I grabbed it off the shelf today and sat down with it for a bit.
Paige Turner (her parents are authors who think they’re clever) has recently moved from Virginia to New York. She had to leave behind her friends, her school, and her easy access to nature in favor of a brownstone in Brooklyn and a school full of strangers.
In order to help find herself, she buys a sketchbook and tries to commit to her art. She’s a little geeky, very shy, and has “Little Mermaid hair” she can hide behind. As these things go, she finds friends, a little romance, and starts to develop her sense of self.
Paige has the same sort of worries that most kids have experienced at some point. She’s afraid of being too much in her own head, of being a bad friend, fighting with her mom, doubting her talent and her focus.
The story is the sort of thing I probably would have loved a while ago, but I think I’m coming to it when I’m a little too old and cynical and also too close on the heels of I Am Princess X. I liked it, but I didn’t love it. It felt… light. Not trivial, not empty. The story is about a teenage girl figuring herself out. That’s valuable. It just wasn’t compelling for me.
The illustrations are all black and white and alternate between glimpses of the sort of surreal life inside Paige’s brain/sketchbook, and the crisper work indicating external reality. Gulledge’s art is definitely worth picking the book up.
Dragonbreath: The Frozen Menace
What I’m Reading: Dragonbreath: The Frozen Menace by Ursula Vernon
Published By: Dial Books, 2016
Read This: while eating ice cream in winter
The Frozen Menace, the last of the Dragonbreath books comes out today! Which is very exciting.
In this adventure, Danny’s fire has gone out and he, Wendell, and Christina must travel to the Farthest North to find a phoenix eggshell to reignite Danny’s fire before he turns into a dragon-cicle.
As always, Ursula has provided us with a delightful story about a dragon who is a little too impetuous to see the danger he’s in and the very, very, very loyal friends who go along to help him. The challenges they face along the way are scary, but not so scary that you’ll get nightmares. The illustrations are charming and rendered in a sort of icy green that makes one feel chilly just looking at them. A few of the pages have an all black background and they’re just lovely!
This is a great close to the series and it leaves Danny and his friends in a really good place. I’m ok with letting them continue on to have their adventures in Mythical Japan, or under the ocean, or in bat caves in South America without me looking in on them anymore.
But, if you’re upset about the thought of this series ending, I would like to remind you that I’m doing a giveaway for a SIGNED copy of Hamster Princess: Harriet the Invincible, the first book in Ursula’s new illustrated, middle-grade series. You can find all the details at this post.
Medusa's Library 