I just finished the second draft of The Wizard of Suomen! 😀 😀 😀
I’m going to do a line-edit on paper before sending it to my editor, and then there will definitely be more edits to make, but at least I will feel like I’m sending a decent draft!
…
I’m really excited! 😀
~Ethelinda
(“A book published this year” from the Reading Challenge)
So, this is technically a review of Shadow Scale, but out of necessity it will also talk about the preceding book Seraphina. Expect spoilers for both books!
I loved both Seraphina and Shadow Scale! Seraphina was one of my “grabbed it randomly off the library shelf because it looked interesting” finds that worked out well – I was hooked about ten pages in. They are set in a fantasy world in which two sentient species – humans and dragons – are struggling to coexist. The first book is set entirely in the country of Goredd, where forty years of uneasy peace between the humans and the dragons is teetering. Seraphina herself is a musician in Goredd’s court…and secretly a half-dragon. Continue reading
Cold and damp seeped in around the shutters as the chill winter wind lashed rain harder against the front of the little inn. The few travelers who had not yet sought their beds upstairs huddled well away from the outside wall, hunching over half-empty tankards and pretending that the glow of the fire was enough to ward off the dark and cold that pressed heavily against the worn wooden walls.
Muirne had wrapped herself in a second shawl and eyed the guttering lanterns near the door with resignation as she finished wiping up the bar. It was noticeably colder on that side of the main room, and she was in no hurry to go over even long enough to replace the candles. Still, maybe more light would make the room less dreary than it was, so the innkeeper sighed and moved to fetch spare candles.
The knock that came on the door just as she reached for the first lantern was not expected. Nor was it the desperate pounding she would have anticipated from a traveler still caught out in the storm. Instead, it was firm, assured, steady. Continue reading
This is going to be a series of short stories and novellas that I intend to work on in and amongst other things for the foreseeable future, and that I plan to someday collect into an anthology of sorts.
As a reader of fiction and especially fantasy, I have over the years developed an interest in stories that portray relationships between humans/mortal beings and immortal beings of various sorts. This series will be me as a writer exploring various permutations of this idea. My goal is that there will be a lot of variation between the stories in length and tone, since the imbalances of lifespan and (often) power between a mortal and an immortal being lead to a wide variety of different outcomes: some happy and some sad, some good and some bad, some dark and some light.
Most, if not all, of the stories will have a song that I associate with them, and I’ll link to it at the end of the story. In some cases, I’m finding that a song is direct inspiration for a particular story, but in other cases the story is already in my mind and the song serves more as mood music. I’ll also say here that for the most part, these stories will each take place in a separate “universe,” and the reader can safely assume that they are not related to each other unless I indicate otherwise.
I’ll post many of the stories in full here on my website, though for at least some I will post only an excerpt, and the full story will be included in the final anthology. I can’t say right now exactly how many stories there will be in total; I have ideas for at least fifteen, with seven of those being more solid. One story is written and edited, and I am in the middle of a first draft of the second story.
The first story will be posted sometime this week!
As always, please don’t hesitate if you have comments or questions for me.
~Ethelinda
(“A book with bad reviews” from the Reading Challenge)
[Technically, this book has more good reviews than bad on Goodreads, but the list doesn’t specify “only” bad reviews, so I’m going to go with a couple of bad reviews + I didn’t care for it = good enough to meet this particular criterion.]
[Some spoilers under the cut.]
I wanted to like this book. It was one of my “picked it up randomly whilst browsing at the library” books, and the blurb made it sound interesting. The world that the author creates is very interesting, with a society that has spent centuries recovering from an ancient cataclysm currently on the cusp of a technological revolution. Continue reading
I saw this a couple of weeks back after hearing good things about it from some of my friends. I was not disappointed! I’ll put the rest of this review under a cut for details/spoilers. Continue reading
(Because it’s highly unlikely that I’ll get through all of these this year.[ETA:Or in two years, apparently. >.>] OR EVEN THREE I should probably just call it 2019 at this point, but whatever. I am determined to do this regardless of the timeline.) Here’s my list of books to read for the Reading Challenge. Almost all books that I haven’t read before, with a mix of some that were already on my “to read” list and some that I had never heard of before I looked them up. Will cross them off as I finish them, and I’ll also try and write up a bit of a review for each one.
A book with more than 500 pages: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
A classic romance: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A book that became a movie: Shogun by James Clavell
A book published this year: Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman (Review here)
A book with a number in the title: Life of Pi by Yann Martel
A book written by someone under 30: Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A book with nonhuman characters: The Orc of Many Questions by Shane Michael Murray
A funny book: Next of Kin by Eric Frank Russell (Going to cheat a little bit on this one because I really want to reread it.)
A book by a female author: Conjured by Sarah Beth Durst
A mystery or thriller: Living Proof by Kira Peikoff
A book with a one-word title: Runemarks by Joanne Harris
A book of short stories: Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman
A book set in a different country: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
A nonfiction book: Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin (Review here)
A popular author’s first book: Jonah’s Gourd Vine by Zora Neale Hurston
A book from an author you love that you haven’t read yet: League of Dragons by Naomi Novik
A book a friend recommended: The Martian by Andy Weir (Review here)
A Pulitzer Prize-winning book: The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
A book based on a true story: Chinese Cinderella by Adeline Yen Mah
A book at the bottom of your to-read list: Prudence by Gail Carriger
A book your mom loves: Hard Magic by Larry Correia
A book that scares you: The Greenland Diaries: Days 1-100 by Patrick W. Marsh (Review here)
A book more than 100 years old: The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
A book based entirely on its cover: The Archived by Victoria Schwab
A book you were supposed to read in school but didn’t: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
A memoir: Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
A book you can finish in a day: Viscountess by Taversia
A book with antonyms in the title: Bittersweet by Nevada Barr
A book set somewhere you’ve always wanted to visit: The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan
A book that came out the year you were born: The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice
A book with bad reviews: Unwrapped Sky by Rjurik Davidson (Review here)
A trilogy: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
A book from your childhood: Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder (Also cheating a little on this one, because it’s high time I reread these.)
A book with a love triangle: Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
A book set in the future: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
A book set in high school: The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot
A book with a color in the title: The Last Kashmiri Rose by Barbara Cleverly
A book that made you cry: A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 by William R. Trotter
A book with magic: The Sword-Edged Blonde by Alex Bledsoe
A graphic novel: Princess Retribution by Elaine Tipping (Review here)
A book by an author you’ve never read before: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley
A book you own but have never read: Emma by Jane Austen
A book that takes place in your hometown: Undead and Unwed by MaryJanice Davidson
A book that was originally written in a different language: The Kalevala
A book set during Christmas: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
A book written by an author with your same initials: Is Sex Necessary? or Why You Feel the Way You Do by E. B. White and James Thurber
A play: Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee
A banned book: The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
A book based on or turned into a TV show: Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
A book you started but never finished: We the Living by Ayn Rand
The planet that Suomen is a part of has a slightly shorter orbit around its sun than Earth around our Sun, making their year about 355 days long. The Suomilen people divide this up into eleven months of 32 days each, with a “leap year” every fourth year adding a day to the first month.
(Yes, I spent time figuring this out. Because I could. More fiction soon.)
~Ethelinda
The first draft of The Wizard of Suomen was officially finished at 1:48am on January 23, 2015. It was 148,259 words, totaling 324 pages in a Microsoft Word document.
(Thought I’d post some writing stats/world-building tidbits here and there, in case anyone is interested.)
~Ethelinda
Late Afternoon Storm
The gulls turn overhead, their feathers picked out in stark white against the deepening grey of the clouds beginning to cover the sky. In the failing light, the wheeling birds seem almost to flash in warning of the coming storm: “Turn back!”
But home lies ahead and not behind, where the afternoon sun and blue sky still hold. Home lies ahead, ever closer to the swift-running dark, the clouds broken and boiling like the waves of an oncoming sea. Wind comes first, a herald, gusting high and whipping with it the first of autumn’s fallen leaves. Next the rain, just a few drops, a last admonition to seek shelter. Flickers of lightning, white and distant, light the clouds.
Then the wind comes rushing back, stronger than before, and at last the black sky opens to let the rain pour down. It drenches all the earth, pushed into waves by the gusting wind, edged by lightning and accompanied by thunder. The world soaks…and then slowly, slowly, the storm is swept east by the ever-hurrying wind, and eventually the rain falls away into a gentler, softer pattern.
The storm passes on, leaving a quiet, grey evening in its wake.
(Just a descriptive short I wrote a couple of years ago, and the weather yesterday reminded me of it.)
Copyright (c) 2013 by Ethelinda Webb
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