turning darkness into light Archives

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Introducing . . . Lady Trent’s Field Journal!

I was busy enough yesterday that this went out on Bluesky, but not yet here on my own site!

I am teaming up again with Avery Liell-Kok (one of the artists from the pattern deck) to make Lady Trent’s Field Journal: A Dragon Coloring Book. Ten images of dragons in the wild, accompanied by excerpts from Lady Trent’s scholarly writings — my way of answering a question I’ve gotten with surprising frequency, which is “Will you ever publish any of her scientific work?” I have yet to come up with any complete ideas in that regard that would be interesting enough to pass as a short story, but as pairings for her drawings from the field? Sure!

The dragons featured here are a deliberate mix of old favorites you’ve seen before, dragons which got mentioned but never depicted, and new beasts created entirely for this project. The Kickstarter campaign will offer the writings and images in three formats: a file pack you can print at home or color in digitally, a loose-leaf pack to facilitate sharing around or hanging on the wall, and a paperback book — that last coming in both a regular and a Scholar’s Edition, which will be signed and have an additional quick sketch from Avery. I’m also including add-ons for bookplates and signed paperbacks of the novels in the series!

Right now we’re in the pre-launch phase. If you’d like to be notified when it goes live (or you just want to support the project in the eyes of the algorithm gods), just click the “notify me” button here. It won’t be long!

More like a joke on myself?

The other day I commented on Twitter that I’d written 6000 words that day: 2500 words of what I needed to be working on (Night Parade), and 3500 of surprise!fanfic for one of my own damn novels.

And I do mean fanfic, in the sense that the story I produced isn’t trying to do the things an independent short story would do. It will mean very little if you haven’t read the novel (and contain egregious spoilers to boot), and the conflict it’s resolving — at least in part — starts well outside the bounds of the story itself. So it’s not the kind of thing I could ever attempt to sell.

Ergo, the natural thing to do is post it online as a freebie.

And if I’m going to do that, I might as well post it on April Fool’s Day. Not because it’s some kind of bait-and-switch on you guys, but because what better day to share Oops, Accidental Fanfic?

So in congratulations for surviving March, and to provide a bit of entertainment as we go into April, I give you “The Long Fall,” a post-canon fic for Turning Darkness Into Light. WARNING: CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS.

(Also, side question for people who know fannish etiquette better than I do: would it be weird for me to post this to AO3? I haven’t made any secret of the connection between my pseud there and my professional identity, and I don’t know whether having me show up in my own fandom would feel out of place. It might be one thing if there were a hundred fics for the Memoirs, but as of now, there’s a whopping eighteen.)

Let’s turn some darkness into light!

Let’s sweeten the pot a little for the RAICES fundraiser.

I just got my author copies for the UK edition of Turning Darkness Into Light. Normally I price trade paperbacks at $12, but this is a month before the book comes out, and it’s for a good cause. So if you donate $25 to RAICES, you can get a signed copy ahead of time.

First come, first served. Drop me a line.

UK cover art for TURNING DARKNESS INTO LIGHT

Read an excerpt from TURNING DARKNESS INTO LIGHT!

The release of Turning Darkness Into Light feels like it’s forever away — by which I mean, August 20th — but Tor.com is tiding us over with an excerpt!

(Be warned that it does contain spoilers for the later Memoirs, particularly Within the Sanctuary of Wings. I did my best to minimize how much those appear in the first few scenes, but ultimately this is a story that takes place around the time Isabella is writing her memoirs, i.e. several decades after the events in question; it just wasn’t possible — or rather, plausible — to write in a fashion that completely bypasses the effects of what happened in the series.)

TURNING DARKNESS INTO LIGHT

I’ve been cagy in talking about the standalone sequel to the Memoirs of Lady Trent because I realized a short way into the draft that the title I’d initially given it wasn’t really working for me, and it took me quite some time to decide what to replace it with. But I found something, and it has gotten official approval:

Turning Darkness into Light

I’ve wanted to use that as a title for nearly twenty years, ever since I encountered the source during my trip to Ireland in 2000 — but the book it was originally earmarked for honestly may never get written, and the phrase fits far too well here for me not to use it. Some of you may recognize it as the ending of Robin Flowers’ loose translation of the “Pangur Bán” poem. That is, in turn, taken from Psalms 18:28, and the layering of connections there — scribes, religion, the imagery of the early parts of Psalm 18 — makes it truly ideal for this book.

So there you have it! Turning Darkness into Light will be out some time next spring; I’ll of course announce a more specific date as soon as I have it.