"Dig we must..."
DD's website will be experiencing occasional periods of downtime during February 2012 as the support staff prepare to update its core software and overall look-and-feel.
Thanks for your patience!
"Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South": the audiobook is out!
This is so cool! I didn't know that this was going to be coming out so quickly.
Just this last Friday, Audible popped out the audiobook edition of Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South.
A goddess in the making... or a demon reborn?
In the remote mountain village where she was born, Mariarta dil Alicg lives the untroubled life of a peasant girl - until, soon after a mysterious stranger's arrival, she starts to hear voices in the wind. The voices whisper strange secrets in Mariarta's ears, promising her the power to command the stormwind, hinting at an unknown, magical heritage, and prophesying a fate marvelous past all of Mariarta's imaginings.
Then a curse falls on Mariarta's village, shattering the lives of her family and friends. Mariarta must set out across the mountain realm of Raetia in search of a way to break the curse - while also hunting for the truth about the beautiful and terrible being who Mariarta discovers is trying to possess her soul.
Mariarta's search will lead her into hidden domains of sorcery, both dreadful and wondrous, and will finally embroil the young woman in the growing rebellion against her land's cruel Austriac oppressors - but not before Mariarta comes face to face at last with the immortal Lady of the Storms and challenges her to one final battle for control of her life, her soul, and her destiny....
Out now: The Misadventures of Prince Ivan
Once upon a time, there lived a prince...
But not your ordinary prince with some run-of-the-mill royal destiny. When Ivan's three sisters are married off to enchanted princes and he goes off in search of his own true love, he finds himself matched up with the sorceress and warrior maiden Marya Morevna, fairest princess in all the Russias. Shortly the two of them are navigating the emotional "white water" of one of the world's more traumatic fairy tales -- but not without help, not without high hopes of a happy ending, and not without a lot of funny stuff along the way.
This story was serialized in Eclipse's groundbreaking fantasy comic The Dreamery in the late 1980s, and its parts have now been brought together for the first time in graphic novel format. Featuring artwork by the fabulous Sherlock, the graphic novel also contains a new final section written for this edition -- "Prince Ivan and the Bachelor Parties of Doom."
Order now and start preparing yourself to make the acquaintance of the Little Humpbacked Horse, who just can't get enough junk food... the Raven Prince who knows the ins and outs of the world's strangest military equipment catalog... the terrible secret in the cellar of Marya Morevna's palace... a whole heap of the most opinionated talking animals you'll ever meet... and an final event that starts out with "vodka and strategy games" and ends in the world's biggest fairytale smackdown!
Click below on "Read more" to see a sample page and ordering information.
Now at the Ebooks Direct store: "Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut"
It's been in the works for a good while now, so it's a pleasure to announce that the new revised ebook edition of Stealing the Elf-King's Roses -- which anticipated CSI-style forensic drama and introduced it for the first time into an SF/fantasy setting -- is now available in the Ebooks Direct store. (ETA: to celebrate the release of STEKR's new ebook edition, we're also offering a limited-time 30% discount on the nine-volume complete series package of the Young Wizards International Edition ebooks. See below for more details.)
The new edition of Stealing the Elf-King's Roses comes with an afterword that talks about the evolution of the book, and also with the worldbuilding notes that set up the histories of the sheaf of universes where the story's set.
From the afterword:
As usual, when you look at a work almost ten years after you’ve written it, you find things that the almost-ten-years-on writer really wants to fix. There are little edits all through this edition, and some material that was edited out in the original edition has been restored; but in particular, the last few chapters have been rewritten to try to clarify exactly what the heck is going on.
The new Young Wizards Hallowe'en novelette: read it for UNICEF!
I love Hallowe'en. (Or Halloween. I prefer it with the apostrophe.)
I was always an enthusiastic Trick-or-Treater when I was little. It would have been, I think, the golden age of that cultural phenomenon in the US -- a time before anyone had ever thought of anything like razor blades in apples (or the rumors of them), a time when no one was yet so terrified that you'd be snatched by some stranger that most kids were allowed free run during their play time, and therefore no one was unduly disturbed by the idea that you might be walking around in the dark in ones or twos at age seven or eight or nine; a time when mostly parents hadn't yet learned the art of depriving you of the night's loot, but were content to leave it with you, and let you discover the dubious delight (rarely repeated) of making yourself sick by overindulgence; a time when very few people seeing you wearing a witch costume thought that you were seriously advocating devil worship.
Particularly I remember doing the "Trick or Treat for UNICEF" thing. We were shown how to take the little waxed paper milk containers of the time -- my yearsmates will probably remember them, the ones with the little stapled-on pop tops -- and wrap these in the orange and black paper labels that the UNICEF people sent our school. We would go around collecting pennies and nickels and dimes for UNICEF while we were trick-or-treating, and hand the cash over to our teachers, on November 1st, to be sent back to UNICEF to help children in other countries have things we took for granted in the New York suburbs in the late '50s and early '60's -- like clean water, and vaccination against polio and measles.
DD's new anthology: "Uptown Local and Other Interventions"
This new anthology collects for the first time some of Diane Duane's most popular short work -- stories that range across time and space, with a visit to her best-known milieu, the seminal Young Wizards young adult / urban fantasy series.
Uptown Local features eleven long and short works from the last decade and beyond, including:
- In The Company of Heroes -- A billionaire "living the dream" goes on a desperate quest for the one thing he needs to make his life perfect: a very special comic book...
- The Rizzoli Bag -- A sad young man in a Roman cafe is offered a once-in-a-lifetime bargain...
- Out of the Frying Pan -- The life of a part-time witch working in a shopping mall is turned upside down in a day...
- The Queen and the Thief and the Dragon -- A (fairy) tale of the True West, and a young monarch's solution to a thorny diplomatic problem...
- Bears -- An ancient sorrow (with a modern twist) wanders through the tumult of a pre-Lenten street carnival...
- The Fix -- In the dark guts of Rome's Colosseum, a slave boy with an impossible dream becomes entangled in the machinations of immortals...
- Herself -- In the heart of Dublin, something is killing the People of the Hills -- and it's going to take Ireland's only superhero to stop it...
- Hopper Painting -- Desolation and redemption in a midnight diner, as trapped and desperate characters struggle with the soul of the artist who created them......
- The Back Door -- Two terrorists meet in Zurich to carry out a very unusual heist with a confederate who's more dangerous than they imagine...
...And of course, the title story, beloved and sought after for a quarter century by Young Wizards fans, and finally available in an ebook -- along with the only other Young Wizards short story, Theobroma.
Uptown Local and Other Interventions is available for purchase in DRM-free Kindle / .mobi and Nook / iPad / .ePub formats at the DianeDuane.com Ebooks Direct bookshop for USD $5.99.
