For a while now, we’ve been offering the first “Raetian Tales” book, A Wind from the South, as a downloadable e-book via the book’s web page. Now, though, after a lot of requests from various folks, at last there’s a paperback edition.
Here’s the blurb as a reminder:
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 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, and 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…
And here’s a link to the first two chapters as an Adobe .PDF file, if you want to sample a little more of the book than is available on the Lulu site. Also, some reader comments are here.
...Want a copy of the paperback? Use this link, or punch the button below.
Bethesda Softworks announced today that Dorothy “D.C.” Fontana and Derek Chester have partnered up to write the scripts for Star Trek: Legacy and Star Trek: Tactical Assault.
Woo hoo!
[tags]Dorothy Fontana, D.C. Fontana,Star Trek, Star Trek: Legacy, Star Trek: tactical assault[/tags]
Some of the people who’ve subscribed to The Big Meow (that’s the final book in the “Feline Wizardry” sequence, in case this is the first you’ve heard about the project) have been asking about the possibility of hardcover editions being made available when we go to press in early ’07. I’ve done the costings, and the price isn’t too horrible, so I’ve put up buttons on the main “Big Meow” page so that people can purchase hardcovers if they prefer them to the paperback edition presently being made available.
A first-time subscription to the hardcover edition of the novel, without a dustcover, will cost USD $32.50: with a dustcover, you pay $33.50. If you click here, the link will take you right to the subscription buttons.
Also, if you already have a subscription but would like to upgrade, there are buttons here for you to do that too. A plain hardcover will cost you USD $10.00 extra: one with a dustcover will cost you USD $11.00.
The cover artwork will be by Ursula Vernon. I hope to have some sketches sometime late in September.
[tags]The Big Meow, Diane Duane, online novel, self-publishing, hardcover[/tags]
Hit the Fly (if you’re a guy)
Must go to this place when we’re next in Paris. Is this where I had that beer once while waiting for the train? Possible. (ETA: Yes it was. And they had a great heap of freshly cooked crayfish on ice outside. They were fabulous.) Click on the menu image to get a version big enough to read. Yum.
Took them long enough. (eyeroll)
Of course, the real joke is that the fries are actually Belgian in origin. (The WWI US “doughboys” who discovered them had simply wound up in a French-speaking part of Belgium.) The best evidence of this provenance — not concrete, granted: the dish is too old for that — can be found in the fact that every other language assigning fries a national origin associates them with either the Belgians or the Dutch. Only US English calls fries “French”.
Much more on the subject here.
(Argh, I wish I was standing in the main square in Brugge right now, outside that little frietkot that sits down by the door of the Bell Tower, with a paper box of fries. Or down at that frituur around the corner from the apartments we stay in when we’re visiting there. [BTW, I agree with the photographer: this guy unnerves me somewhat.] …Oh well: back to work)
[tags]France, French fries, French, freedom fries, freedom, Congress[/tags]
They’re singing it in the streets of Paris…and nearly everywhere else in France, apparently.
A song parodying soccer star Zinedine Zidane’s head butt in the World Cup final has soared to the top of the music charts in France.
“Coup de Boule” (“Head-Butt”) pokes fun at Zidane for ramming his head into the chest of Italy defender Marco Materazzi during the match July 9. Zidane was thrown out of the game, and Italy won on penalty kicks.
Lyrics warn listeners to “Watch out: it’s the head butt dance,” while a chorus of “Zidane, he hit him” plays over a repetitive African tune. “We lost the World Cup but we still laughed a lot,” the lyrics say.
Two French producers from La Plage records composed the song in 30 minutes after watching Zidane’s pique on television. Nine days later, the record had sold 60,000 copies in France, according to a spokesman for Warner Music, which is working on an English-language version. Spanish and Italian versions of the song already exist.
And an amusing detail: the song got its start on the Net. The writers (who work writing advertising music) wrote it as “therapy” to get over the disappointment of France’s lost. they emailed it to fifty of their friends…and after that, it got loose on the Web. Now music publishers are lined up at these guys’ door to buy the rights…
Apparently the best version of the music video has been taken down because the footage of Zidane’s header was used without permission. But it can still be found here and there: look quick before it vanishes. A version without the action (not as interesting or funny…) is here.
Catchy tune, anyway. Those of you who have trouble with “earworms” might want to avoid it. BTW, a translation is here, at Etienne Marcel’s weblog. Another translation of the chorus has it as “Zidane hit ‘im, Zidane the hit man!”
(…and the writer boom-chikka-booms off to get her tea… Damn, that thing does get into your head. But then the composers are ad music writers…)
[tags]Coup de Boule, Zinedine Zidane, France, World Cup[/tags]
After 16-year-old Jacqueline Cossairt of Markle lost control of a sport utility vehicle on gravel-covered Wells County Road 1050 North about 4:30 p.m., it struck an old hollow tree, rousting 80,000 to 100,000 honeybees inside.
By the time Ossian Volunteer Fire Chief Kent Gilbert arrived he found a black cloud of the insects swarming around the GMC Envoy.
“Those bees were mad,” he said. “I’ve never seen bees, especially honeybees, attack like that.”
And those angry bees turned what Gilbert said should have been a 10-minute extrication of the teen who was pinned inside her truck into 45 agonizing minutes as firefighters tried to figure out a way to safely work among the bees.
Cripes, what a nightmare.
[tags]Fort Wayne, Indiana, bees, accident[/tags]
I had a mail from a nice lady who said she wanted to subscribe to The Big Meow, but was having trouble. I suggested she click on the button at the top of the sidebar, and she wrote back, “What button?”
This is extremely weird, as the button displays perfectly on every browser I’ve got. Would those of you who have a moment please look at the “Big Meow” website’s index page and tell me whether you can see the “Buy Now” button or not? And if you can’t see it, please let me know what browser you’re using.
Thanks!
(BTW, for those of you who might be interested — now that Lulu.com is offering hardcovers [with dustjackets even!], I’m going to do a costing on how much an “upgrade” to hardcover would cost for those who’ve already subscribed to the paperback. Stay tuned.)
(If you are interested, you might drop the contact email on the TBM page a mail with just the word HARDCOVER in the subject, so I can get a sense of the numbers.)
…in Belfast this weekend.
For those of who who might not have been following Peter’s LJ lately, over the previous weekend a horsefly bit him. He normally doesn’t react well to such things (physically, I mean: forget the verbal response, it gets rather old after about five minutes…), but this time he swelled up far more spectacularly than usual. A visit to the doctor after a few days (as his arm continued to increase in size as if he’d sublet it from the Incredible Hulk) revealed that not only was he having an aggravated version of his traditional reaction to this kind of bug bite, but the bite was also infected and the infection was spreading.
The doctor stuck him full of antibiotics and cortisone and sent him home. Unfortunately the arm just kept on swelling, and when the swelling started happening elsewhere as well, we headed straight back to the doctor and discovered that he was probably having a reaction to the cortisone too, and the infection wasn’t responding. What joy…!
So now he’s home on painkillers and different antibiotics and whatnot, and the doctor has told him to just stay right where he is — in bed — and not act like a crazy person and try to go anywhere. Which is what P. would have done: he wanted to go up north and “show off his arm.” (eyeroll)
My apologies to those of you who were hoping to see us in Belfast. But it’s as they say: sometimes Stuff Happens.
Oh, well, there’s always next year…
[tags]Mecon, Belfast, Peter Morwood[/tags]