Garment of Shadows
The medina
Leave a comment on today’s post, over at Mutterings,and you have a chance at winning a copy of the Garment of Shadows ARC. Russell wanders the Fez medina: And the wares on offer! One street held shops displaying tall cones of varicoloured powder, from the deep red of paprika to brilliant yellow turmeric, interspersed with vendors…
Read MoreZellij
Leave a comment on today’s post, and you have a chance at winning a copy of the Garment of Shadows ARC. Today’s photo is a bit of a cheat, since it’s not a place Russell actually enters in the story, although it is mentioned. She is following a trio of English women through the medina,…
Read MoreCountdown!
Eight weeks until Garment of Shadows! That’s right, the countdown has begun, the newsletter is going out, the contests are continuing, and people are champing at bits. Are you one of them? Well, stop please, it’s hard on your teeth. Instead, why don’t you post a comment here? If you do that, you might be…
Read MoreGarment of Shadows giveaway
Random House did a fabulous giveaway over at Goodreads last month. (Sorry, everyone who won and is now writing me to say they stayed up until 3 in the morning. And sorry, too, everyone who didn’t win, and got a full night’s sleep instead.) Now they’ve set aside another dozen Advanced Reading Copies to give…
Read MoreGarment of Shadows: Booklist love
A writer with a book on the brink of publication always holds her breath until the first shoe drops: will reviewers like the new book? Or will this be the one that exposes me for a fraud and a wastrel? Instead of the shoe dropping, will its owner come pounding down the stairs and stomp…
Read MoreGarment of Shadows
As I crawl out of the post-travel state of fuzzy-brain, I begin to make my way through three weeks of unanswered emails and un-posted blog entries. Among which is showing you the cover for Garment of Shadows. This was one cover the publisher and I wrestled over, since their initial version had the figure standing…
Read MoreGarment of Shadows
March 4, 2012. I open a FedEx envelope from my publishers and find this: It is accompanied by a letter, giving a deadline: So I get to work, reading the manuscript aloud, using a red pen to correct spelling errors, change punctuation oddities, and make small corrections to smooth and clarify the story. I find…
Read MoreCartographer King
A writer’s life is not all words on a page. A working writer finds herself doing an extraordinary number of odd jobs, such as the day I spent tracking down the identity of an insect the publisher intended to use as the illustration for a new edition of Beekeeper’s Apprentice: No, I said firmly, that…
Read MoreLaurie’s busy year: an annual report
2011 has been a busy year. A ridiculously busy year. A year so nuts, it has forced me to declare 2012 The Year of No. Meaning that if you’re about to ask me to write a short story, participate in a seminar, or show up at your festival, I can only say that if you’re…
Read MoreSearch, and Re-search
Maybe the problem is, I need to embrace my inner A. S. Byatt. Her 2009 Booker Prize shortlisted novel Children’s Story is, in addition to being a gorgeously written book, a huge information dump of Life Among the Fabians at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Fairy tale publishing, politics, sexual mores, pedagogy, the chemistry…
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