The 2024 Roundup

This looks like a slow year only because the couple of years before it were bonkers. Asterisks mark the things in each category that I’m the most proud of (unless there’s only one thing in the category, in which case, well, it wins by default).

    Collection

  • A Breviary of Fire (gathers up most of my folklore and mythology-based stories)

I need to write more short fiction again if I want to have much coming out in 2025 or 2026 . . .

Rook and Rose gets a special edition!

The news finally became public today: The Broken Binding, a UK-based special edition publisher, will be putting out an illustrated hardcover edition of the entire Rook and Rose trilogy! New cover art, colored endpaper art, and black-and-white images throughout, with foil on the hard case, the whole shebang. Alyc and I are incredibly excited, and also we signed our names 4,725 in the last month, on tip-in sheets to be bound with the books.

Now, if you’re not already a Broken Binding subscriber, it’s still possible to get a copy . . . but I have to warn you, it’ll be a little bit complicated. Numbers are capped, and according to what I’ve been told, becoming a Tier 2 subscriber (for non-signed books) has a waiting list months long — well after these will have come out, which will be in the first three months of the upcoming year. As for Tier 1 (signed books), the requirement for that is that you already be a Tier 2 subscriber.

But! First of all, The Broken Binding will be selling overstock at some point in the future, after the subscriptions have been fulfilled. According to their social media, that’s likely to be some time in the second half of 2025. Or if you don’t want to wait/don’t want to risk missing your chance, there are always subscribers who decide to resell their copies at or near cost. The Broken Binding’s Facebook group is the hub for arranging these deals . . . though apparently they had some big problems with scammers a while ago, so you have to be invited to join the group now. If you want to go that route, let me know, and I should be able to put you in touch with someone who can invite you.

So yes, that’s a bit of a hassle. But you can check out their Bluesky post to see a preview of the art — no Labyrinth’s Heart there only because that hasn’t yet been finished! The Broken Binding regularly produces lovely, durable books, so if you want a special copy, this is absolutely the time to do it.

an error with last week’s New Worlds link

As my patrons know, I made a last-minute swap of the theory essay this past Friday. And I remembered to update the notification sent to them! . . . but I didn’t update my post here. So 1) y’all know what a future theory essay will be about, and 2) the correct link is to “The Setting Bible, Part 1.” (The swap happened because what was supposed to be an upcoming essay turned out to span two, and I moved the first part up so as to get both into the same annual collection, rather than splitting them across volumes.)

the Onyx Court effect

Around 2019, I realized that my reading had become somewhat sporadic — or rather, that it had been somewhat sporadic for quite some time. And when I considered why, I was able to trace it back to a specific root cause:

The Onyx Court.

When I started writing a historical fantasy series, I dove headfirst into research. And as a result, when it came time to set work aside and do something else, “read more” was not high on my list, even if what I would be reading was fun novels instead of history books. Then I finished the Onyx Court series and continued onward into the Memoirs of Lady Trent, which weren’t so research-intensive, but did involve periodic dips into that mode as I oriented myself in a new region for each book. And I just . . . kind of drifted away from regular reading. Until I noticed the lack and made a conscious decision to go back.

Well, here we are in 2024, I’m writing a historical fantasy series again — and I’ve read almost no novels since March.

I binged a few in July when I was on vacation, so I’m sure the impulse isn’t dead. (It’s only pining for the fjords. (Don’t throw things at me. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition” has been stuck in my head since March.)) Every so often I slip in something along the way, especially light, quick reads — W.E. Johns’ Worrals books have been good for that. But my TBR shelf, which I was making very steady progress through, has completely stalled out.

The good news is, although I think this particular dive may be even deeper than before — driven by the fact that I started with much less of a grounding in the first place — unlike the Onyx Court series, when we’re done drafting the first book, I don’t have to start all over again in a new century for the second. So I anticipate getting back to more normal reading habits early next year.

But man, I miss wanting to read in my spare time.

cui dono lepidum novum libellum

Last week, on a Tuesday when absolutely nothing else was happening at all, I put out a little book — and I do mean little. It’s right there in the title: The Writer’s Little Book of Naming, an 11K-ish headfirst dive into the sociocultural side of naming — particularly for people, but also a bit for places and things. It looks less at the conlang questions of phonetics and such, more at the ways names can reflect culture and, in so doing, help reinforce and deepen other aspects of worldbuilding.

This is actually the first installment of what I intend to be an irregular series, because it occurred to me one day that ebooks make it possible to assemble works on fairly specialized topics of craft — the kinds of topics that can’t really support an entire print volume, and which appeal to a niche market of writers, but dammit, I want to write about them, so here goes. I’ve got about six of these in mind thus far, so I’ll update as they make it out into the world!

(FYI, it is currently available only through Book View Cafe, the publisher.)

what I’ve been up to

Some of you may have noticed that I abruptly stopped book-blogging in April. That’s not because I stopped reading anything; rather, it’s that my reading list suddenly looked like this:

The Spanish Inquisition, Joseph Pérez, trans. Janet Lloyd.
Golden Age Spain, H. Kamen.
Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World, María M. Portuondo.
Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain, Scott K. Taylor.
Spain: The Centre of the World 1519-1682, Robert Goodwin.
Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain, William A. Christian, Jr.
Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II, Geoffrey Parker.

. . . and that’s just a sampler. It would have been a giant red flag that I was Up To Something — but I couldn’t yet talk about what.

Today, that changes! I can fiiiiiiiiiiiinally announce that Alyc Helms and I are hard at work on another M.A. Carrick collaboration, a historical fantasy duology called The Sea Beyond. From the formal announcement:

In an alternate Spanish Golden Age, where the map becomes the territory and mapmakers are the architects of reality, the Council of the Sea Beyond has risen to unrivaled power, exploiting the world’s most precious resources for their own gain.

Determined to discover how cosmographers pin down the islands of the Otherworld, Estevan seeks power with the Council of the Sea Beyond – but he risks the exposure of his own secrets, too. For he is a changeling, a faerie masquerading as a mortal. And for a faerie to enter the mortal world like that, a child must go the other way . . .

The Hungry Girl, the nameless human daughter whose place he took, has grown up opposite her “brother.” Lost among the fae and desperate to find some purpose for her existence, she leaps at the chance to help a group of Spanish explorers in the Sea Beyond . . . only to be horrified at the atrocities they commit.

Soon the unlikely siblings will need to overcome their rivalry — because only together can they bring down Spain’s worlds-spanning empire and save the homes they have come to love.

Though you’d be justified in wondering, this is 100% unconnected to the Onyx Court books: same general time period as Midnight Never Come, yes, and with faeries in, but a completely different version of events — starting with the fact that this is an “open” historical fantasy, where everybody knows and has always known about faerie matters (we’ve been having fun working out some alternate Catholic theology around that), instead of a secret history where the public face of events looks like it did in our world.

So that’s what I’ve been up to this year! I’m not going to backtrack to report on all my reading in the last seven months, but if I have the energy, I may return to a practice from my Onyx Court days, making “book reports” on at least a selection of the titles. We’ll see — right now most of my energy is going to, y’know, the book itself. (And things like finishing up Year Eight of the New Worlds Patreon, and and and.) But it’s public and official at last!

Behold: the Rook and Rose wiki!

This has been in the works for quite some time.

The roots of it go all the way back to when Alyc and I started writing The Mask of Mirrors. We knew there was going to be a lot of worldbuilding information and so forth to keep track of, so my husband very kindly set us up with a privately-hosted wiki we could use for that. And then, well . . . I don’t believe in astrology at all, and also I am such a goddamned Virgo. Which led to me meticulously documenting basically everything.

Having done so, it seemed a pity for all that effort to be locked away where only Alyc could see it.

Behold, the Rook and Rose wiki! We were recently approached by a fan who works at wiki.gg, who helped us export the private mediawiki and set it up over on their site. It has had some art added (check it out in dark mode; the background numinat gets super pretty then), and a fancier front page, and there are all kinds of things we can do now that I didn’t bother with before — like hiding spoilers. (There was no point in hiding those when the only people who could see the wiki were the authors.) Also, thanks to the wiki.gg folks, I now know that the total content of the wiki is a hundred and ninety thousand words, which makes it longer than any novel I’ve written that isn’t part of the Rook and Rose trilogy, and very nearly on par with those.

So if there’s anything you ever wanted to know about the world, our characters, the plot, or anything else, go check it out! It contains mentions of deleted bits, details of the setting that never made it into the story — all kinds of stuff. There’s only one specific tidbit of information we removed before making this public, as it’s a reveal we might want to deploy if we write some future work in this setting. (It is, however, an aspect of the world that a reader could potentially deduce, so have fun guessing what that might be.) Other than that, if you read this, you will know basically everything we know about the world and this story!