Life, Interrupted

...you take time to grin.

(Since this won't be there forever, I will put for my records that Kindred Rites in #1 and Night Calls #19 on the Amazon Best Sellers in Children's Coming of Age Fantasy Books. And Spiral Path is #23.)

It's like this....I made a promise to my fans, and that required overlooking something. We were aiming for Christmas, and almost made it.

Among Life, Interrupted for me, sickness for my tech team and a death in the family for my art team, two mistakes slipped through on the cover of Spiral Path. They aren't big mistakes, but they are enough to annoy me.

They have been fixed, and I can upload the enhanced cover at any time.

So this is your warning. Usually there is no first edition in a Print-On-Demand book, but because of this tiny mistake slipping through, there is a first edition of Spiral Path.

Most people don't care about such things. But some do. So if you do...

There may be a snazzy, limited edition. There may be a version from New York someday.

But this one will always be the first round. (I have a few of them to mail out now, and a few to save for maybe a Kickstarter someday.)

So if you want one? Go order it--CreateSpace, Amazon, Barnes & Noble.

Are you open to reading some short stories of Allie's life out of order? It will give hints of some things, and may tell you that X married Y, but you won't know why or how, etc. Or hints about other adventures. Is that fun, or will it drive you nuts in a bad way?

I ask because this story turned out to be twenty years in the future.

One of sartorias's fans has taken to checking out books that Sherwood has enjoyed. She tried Night Calls and Kindred Rites, and has enjoyed her visit to Allie's world. I am always amused by people who think of the book as Little House on the Prairie with magic. I have to confess--I simply read tons of period books, books about period, and pulled what intrigued me. I was inspired to find out what the women in Manly Wade Wellman's works were thinking about. I also got into Anne of Green Gables as an adult. But other than a few episodes of the TV show, I still haven't gotten around to Little House. I guess I need to read at least the first book.

Over at the blog Dead Houseplants (at a guess, she's much too busy to keep them alive!) the author talks about what she found fun in the first two books. And although I am humbled and sure I am way out of my league with my idol Austen, it's a fun comparison.

"I like frontier America as a fantasy setting: there are so many possibilities to explore. I really enjoyed Patricia C. Wrede's Thirteenth Child series: it's big and adventurous with grand, sparkling magic and fantastic dangerous beasts. Night Calls is the Jane Austen version: it's cozy and quiet with creepy dark demons (okay, pretty sure there were no demons in Jane Austen; ditto werewolves, vampires and witches. But I stand by the comparison.) Kimbriel is all about the characters—great, vivid characters!—and their relationships, about towns and how they function, about families. One of the early dramatic moments is Alfreda's confrontation with the minister about having a service for dead werewolves. It's a credit to Kimbriel's writing that this scene is just as gripping (if a tad less scary) than a later confrontation with a vampire."

I'm glad Kim enjoyed the books, and hope she likes Spiral Path, too. (And the third incarnation of the Night Calls cover.) Also--the Night Calls magic is going to get splashier. I just felt that a child transitioning to adult needed a little time to grow....

Progress: Spiral Path

Now to read through for flow, and then it goes to the artist and copy editor....

I expect this to stay...

I knew most of what was on her sheet. There were a couple of questions about figuring the trajectory of a boulder thrown from a trebuchet, but since I didn’t ever expect to be storming a castle, I wasn’t worried about not knowing that one. I also had no idea how to make a bridge strong enough to hold a wagon of wool and a four-horse team.

I wasn’t planning on building bridges, either. But you never know. Maybe they would teach me that here, too.

---Spiral Path by Katharine Eliska Kimbriel, Copyright 2014