The third book in my Inheritance of Magic series, A Judgement of Powers, will be available for $1.99 on Kindle in two days, on the 26th. Apparently it’s a “Goldbox Deal”, whatever that it. (I assume it’s probably nothing to do with the old computer RPGs that I used to play back in the 1990s.)
The price drop hasn’t been confirmed yet, but it’s scheduled for the 26th, so if anyone you know doesn’t have the book but is interested, maybe it might count for something!
Sorry that posting has been a bit thin lately. There have been some problems going on behind the scenes relating to book publication and I’ve been struggling to keep up with everything.
Don’t worry, the books are still getting published, and you’ll still get to read them! However, I can’t really explain all the details just yet since I’m currently still trying to sort things out and would rather not go into the details until I do. Once I have things finalised on my end I’ll make a full announcement and explain everything properly, at which point things will hopefully make a bit more sense.
Next section of Inheritance of Magic #5 is done. It’s currently sitting at 65,000 words; two more sections and we’ll be finished. Judging by the length of past books, I should be about two thirds of the way through.
Still going to try to get the first draft finished by the end of the summer, though that’s starting to look optimistic. On the whole, though, I’m happy with how it’s going. Progress on this book has been quite a lot faster than the last one.
The copy-edited manuscript for Inheritance of Magic #4 arrived this week, and I’ve gotten to work on it. (For those who want an explanation of what copy-edits are, you can look here.) I’m scheduled to send them back July 14th, and so far they’ve been nice and easy, so I should be able to make that deadline with no trouble. Once that’s done, all the major changes will have been made, and the manuscript will be 99.9% identical to the one you guys will be getting come November.
The edits process for this book has been really long, mostly due to factors out of my control, so it’s nice to have it ticking along smoothly again!
The UK edition of A Judgement of Powers is having its paperback release! Release date in a couple of weeks, on July 14th. The author copies just arrived, so I’ve had a chance to have a look at them. They look quite nice, though the spine art is a surprise – instead of making it uniform, as they did with books 1 and 2, they’ve gone with a sort of fading in-and-out look, with a mixture of browns and golds. It does make it stand out, though I wonder if it’ll make it look too different from books 1 and 2 side by side. We’ll see what people think!
Second half of Inheritance of Magic #5 is creeping along. I’m focusing pretty hard on it, since I’d still really like to get the book finished by the end of the summer.
Copy-edits on Inheritance of Magic #4 are scheduled to come in at the end of June. They’ll probably take me a couple of weeks or so, but I doubt they’ll be too much of a distraction. Planned release date of Inheritance of Magic #4 remains November.
Went to an Orbit authors-and-booksellers event in London last night, which I think was the first author event I’ve done in two years. I had a very nice time, so thanks to my publishers for organising and to the booksellers and authors I got to talk with!
I’d say that I’m looking forward to the next one, but at the rate I tend to attend these things, I’m due to go to my next one somewhere around 2028-ish. Was still fun though!
Now that the edits on Inheritance of Magic #4 are done, it’s back to work on Inheritance of Magic #5. I’ve started work on the second half, which I’m hoping to finish by the end of the summer. Don’t know if I’ll make that deadline, but it’s the target I’m shooting for; if I average one page a day for the next few months, I’ll make it. We’ll see how it goes!
Heads, feet, and everything else.
The traditional location for any sigl affecting the wielder’s vision. Sigls are usually worn in this location because you have to, not because you want to – if you want something like a darksight sigl that converts incoming radiation into visible light, it basically has to go on the lower forehead or around the bridge of the nose (you can mount it on a ring and hold your hand to your face whenever you need to use it, but it only takes most drucrafters an hour or two of trying this method to realise that they really don’t want to do it long term).
Outside of necessity, a headband is pretty much the worst possible place to mount a sigl – it’s easier to lose than a necklace, it doesn’t have the flexibility of a ring, you can’t see it without a mirror (so mounting more than one brings its own problems), and it’s incredibly obvious to observers and potential thieves. Still, if you have to, you have to.
A relatively recent replacement for the headband/circlet approach that became popular in the twentieth century. A pair of glasses with a sigl set into the bridge is much less eye-catching than a circlet or a headband, and it can be quite subtle – by choosing a suitable material and design for the glasses, the sigl can be camouflaged so well that most observers won’t notice that the drucrafter is wearing a sigl at all.
The only drawback of glasses vs. a headband is that they’re a bit easier to lose – glasses do slip off or get knocked off, and if the lenses get cracked or broken but you still want to use the sigl, it puts you in a bit of a difficult position. Still, most drucrafters consider the benefits worth the trade-off.
A very rare option. While mounting a sigl near the feet might seem to make a kind of sense given that human beings use their feet just as much as their hands, in practice much of the utility of wearing sigls on the hand comes from the fact that people have so much natural dexterity with their fingers. Take that away, and it isn’t very effective.
The only real application for this location is for certain Motion sigls. Some drucrafters have experimented with using jump and other mobility sigls placed on a foot, but this typically makes the drucrafter massively unbalanced. Using a pair of sigls, one on each foot, works much better, but of course doubles the cost. Aside from this and the equally niche mighty blow sigl, this location typically goes unused.
For drucrafters who don’t want to wear their sigls at all, a handset – where the sigl is set into some sort of grip or other hand-held object – is the natural option. The variety of sigl handsets is huge: some look like the handle of a tool or weapon, others more like the grip on a ski pole or walking stick. The exact design doesn’t matter very much, since all a handset really does is make a sigl bigger (and thus easier to hold onto and keep track of).
There are two reasons to use a handset setting. The first is when you’re only planning to use your sigls one at a time in a controlled environment, where you’ve got time to pick up and set down a handset in between uses. So long as you can spare a few seconds to switch between sigls, then whether the sigl is worn or carried doesn’t really matter. The second, less common reason to use a handset is when you have so many sigls that wearing them all just isn’t practical. Given how expensive sigls can be, this is a bit of a luxury problem for most people, but for some medical drucrafters who might have an collection of fifty different Life sigls, all specialised for treating slightly different conditions, carrying them around in handset form is the most convenient solution.
The drawbacks of handsets are obvious – you have to fish out the right handset before you can use it. This is fine for industrial or medical work, but makes them a bad choice in dangerous situations where every second counts. They’re also very easy to steal.
Edits on Inheritance of Magic #4 are nearly done! As of today, I’m up to Chapter 19; the book is 21 chapters long, so I can reasonably expect to be finished by the end of the weekend.
These kind of rewrite-style edits are always quite stressful to do, since I have to hold the whole book in my mind while making any changes, and it’s very common that adding something in one part of the book requires me to both add and subtract bits elsewhere. For example, I might decide to add in a few paragraphs talking about Stephen making a new sigl in chapter 17, then as a result of that have to go forward and add in some references to the newly-expanded sigl in chapter 19, but also go back and delete the (now obsolete) references to that same sigl that I’d originally had back in chapter 15. It always feels to me rather like fiddling with a giant three-dimensional puzzle where moving one part causes knock-on effects to others, and it’s quite demanding on my memory and concentration.
Still, it’s worth the effort. I always come away from editing a book with the feeling that it’s a much better book now than it was at the first-draft stage, so even if the work is pretty demanding, I always try to do a thorough job. If I didn’t edit my manuscripts (and didn’t have to wait for my publishers) I’d be able to publish them a full year earlier, but they’d be much worse books as a result.
Next week will be the final part of the Sigl Fashion mini-series, covering all the remaining places that drucrafters wear or carry their sigls. By which point, I’ll hopefully be stuck back in to the second half of book #5!
