Group Book Launch at When Words Collide

 

 On Friday, August 14 at 2:00pm MDT, Paula Johanson's newest title from Doublejoy Books will be launched at When Words Collide literary festival. Look there for info on Island Views, a short novel with elements of romance and mystery. 

During the coronavirus pandemic, everyone is re-inventing social events like book launches and writers conventions. This August, When Words Collide literary festival is a free and virtual event with all-online activities at no charge. One of these activities is a Group Book Launch, taking place not in a hotel conference hall but as a Zoom meeting with nine different authors and their new books. You can learn about the When Words Collide festival at their website http:whenwordscollide.org On the page's Menu the link What's Happening takes you to the festival program, where the Group Book Launch is listed on Friday August 14 at 2pm Mountain Daylight time.

Among the books being launched at this Group Book Launch is Island Views, the newest title to be released from Doublejoy Books! It's available now as an ebook from many online vendors. Check it out now, and on Friday August 14 we'll see you at the launch.

Group Book Launch during When Words Collide, http://whenwordscollide.org

on Friday August 14 at 2pm MDT

Twitter #GroupBookLaunchWWC

Twitter moment https://twitter.com/i/moments/1292900948319248384

Susan Forest

Flights of Marigold, second in the series Addicted to Heaven, is launching Saturday at 2pm.

http://speculative-fiction.ca

Jane Glatt

Sailors & Spies book 3 of the Intelligencers series

Dagrun and Calder are leading the desperate mission to replenish the food stores of Tarklee before winter sets in. On the journey, they run into Calder’s father, a man with many secrets and knowledge of the plots against the Fair Seas Treaty Alliance.

Meanwhile, Nadez assumes leadership of the remaining Intelligencers. Schemes against the Alliance are still in motion, and her small trusted cadre of Intelligencers are running ragged trying to protect the new Grand Freeholder.

But the forces united against the Alliance are deeply entrenched and have considerable power. To counter the threat, the Intelligencers must forge alliances of their own: with the countries of the Sapphire Seas, with their own citizens, and with each other.

https://tychebooks.com/jane-glatt https://tychebooks.com/sailors-spies

Sandra A. Hunter

Daughter of Earth and Fire, The Fledgling book one of the Dragon's Heir series

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1999102924?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860

Paula Johanson

New this month from Doublejoy Books is a short novel, Plum Tree, a ranobe with time travel. http://books2read.com/b/plumtree

Doublejoy Books is also launching at WWC a short novel of romantic intrigue, Island Views http://books2read.com/b/islandviews This mystery is made lighter with a little sweet romance and a real-life setting on Saltspring Island!

Rounding out the season is Small Rain, a story collection of ecogothic fiction that “Reads like a spec fic Raymond Carver,” according to Ira Nayman. http://books2read.com/b/smallrain

Susan Mayse

winner of the Arthur Ellis Award for True Crime and the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction

re-release of her acclaimed 1990 book, Ginger: The Life and Death of Albert Goodwin

https://harbourpublishing.com/products/9781550178913

Awen (hardcover EWU Press 1997; re-released as an ebook by Holdfast Books, 2020)

https://www.amazon.ca/Awen-Susan-Mayse-ebook/dp/B08DH81W2D/

https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/awen-2

https://susanmayse.ca/books/

Luke R.J. Meynard

The Season of the Plough, Travalaith Saga Book 1

Coming of age as the supposed Chosen One was hard enough for Aewyn when she believed the prophecy checked out. The sleepy frontier town of Widowvale was founded to be a safe haven far from the civil war and the ancient Horrors lurking in the dreamlike woods. It was a wonderfully dull place, and a hard town to grow up in as a fairy-blooded foundling of mysterious birth.

But when her ancient mentor stands accused of treason and his dubious reading of the prophecy begins to fall through, the formerly supposed Chosen One faces a choice of her own: will she flee to fulfill the destiny she's been given, or sacrifice it all for one chance to save her village and her friends?

The Season of the Cerulyn, Travalaith Saga Book 2

The women of the Mages' Uprising were never known to take civil war lying down. But Catrine and her fellow war-widows are determined to do just that, avenging their lost husbands, lives, and innocence by engaging in a sustained campaign of seduction and espionage against the Travalaithi Empire that could change the course of the war.

But when Catrine falls in love with her hapless mark, and both of them are thrown into a deadly conflict involving Aewyn and her roguish band of outriders, the lovestruck spy must choose once and for all where her true allegiance lies—and decide whether her heart belongs to the living or the dead.

http://www.cynehelm.com

Ursula Pflug

Seeds and Other Stories

In these stories seers and vagabonds, addicts and gardeners succeed and sometimes fail at creating new kinds of community against apocalyptic backdrops. They build gardens in the ruins, transport seeds and songs from one world to another and from dreams to waking life. Where do you plant a seed someone gave you in a dream? How do you build a world more free of trauma when it’s all you’ve ever known? Sometimes the seed you wake up holding in your hand is the seed of a new world

http://www.inanna.ca/product/seeds-and-other-stories

Marie Powell

the YA Fantasy series Last of the Gifted. Spirit Sight and Water Sight will be released this summer and fall, thanks to funding from Creative Saskatchewan.

https://mariepowell.ca/young-adult-2/last-of-the-gifted/

L.A. Smith

Bound, second title in The Traveller's Path trilogy

The story begun in Wilding: Book One of The Traveller's Path continues!

Seventh century Northumbria is a long way from home for 20-year-old Thomas McCadden. Having travelled through time and discovered that he is a Fey Traveller with wild and untamed powers, Thomas must now deal with an even more unexpected surprise: his father has returned to his life.

http://lasmithwriter.com/books/bound

Suzy Vadori

Wall of Wishes

Save the fountain or risk being erased. Hidden deep in the woods is a fountain that has granted St. Augustus students' wishes for nearly a century, including the wish responsible for Ava's very existence. When she learns that the woods will soon be destroyed to make way for a new road, Ava must do whatever it takes to save the fountain, or risk her own life being erased. New girl Courtney knows more about the school's magic than she's letting on and has something to gain from the fountain's destruction. Joining forces with Courtney seems the only way to stop the road, but Ava and Coutney share a thorny past. Trusting her is impossible, but if she doesn't, Ava could disappear forever.

http://books2read.com/wallofwishes

https://bookmanager.com/1675575/?searchtype=keyword&qs=vadori&qs_file=&q=h.tviewer&using_sb=status&qsb=keyword

Blog Tour -- Flames of Nevyana by Edward Willett

It's always a treat to find a new book by Edward Willett. He's a Canadian writer who can be relied on to put narrative -- story, if you prefer -- before anything else in his books, whether fantasy, or science fiction, or even the nonfiction writing he's done. As a friend of Edward Willett's, I'm pleased to be able to participate in his promotional blog tour this October. I've been a fan of his work since before Andy Nebula: Interstellar Rock Star was first released!

Willett's newest fantasy is Flames of Nevyana, from Rebelight Publishing. Though many YA fantasies are coming-of-age novels, this one is different in that perhaps its time not only for the young protagonists to take on active, responsible roles, but for their communities at large to leave behind old behaviours and interactions. Click here for a link to this book's listing in the publisher's online catalog.
In a few images, Willett presents the differing communities of his protagonists, making these young people and their surroundings distinct and memorable.

One very young woman lives in a community like gypsies or Travelers:

Amlinn might have been imagining it, but it seemed to her that the gathering twilight darkened at the same instant that Samarrind touched the rod to the sigil of the Keystone.
With a crackle, the Fence sprang instantly to life and a wall of glowing blue light surrounded the Freefolk camp. The hair on Amlinn’s head and arms stirred as though alive, and a sharp smell assaulted her nostrils. Some Freefolk claimed to hate it, but she loved that smell. It meant the Fence was working. It meant the Nightdwellers couldn’t get in.
It meant tonight, no children would lose their parents to the monsters of the forest as Amlinn had when she was four.

There's a different barrier, but of a similar magical kind, surrounding the temple Petra is patrolling:

Occasionally, the gloom was lit by distant lightning-like flashes of blue from atop the dark bulk of the Temple. All around City Primaxis, magical Hearths took in that Blue Fire and turned it into the light and heat Petra was currently in such desperately short supply of.
As he and Cort passed each other at the gate, the rain redoubled its efforts to drown them. Even through the tin-roof patter of the drops on his steel helmet, Petra heard the Curtain hiss like a giant teakettle. Vast clouds of blue-tinged steam rose from it into the night.
The icy water poured over Petra’s helmet and down his neck. Useless and sodden, his blue woolen cloak hung heavy as lead from his mail-clad shoulders. His boots squelched with every step. His damp leather trousers chafed his thighs. He couldn’t even feel his fingers: they’d gone numb inside his soaked gloves eleven circuits ago.

And when Jin dares to stand outside his warren for a few moments at sunrise, one of the other boys tells him:

“I thought your head was on fire.”
Jin laughed. “My fur wasn’t even singed.”
The truth was, in the last thirty seconds he had stood under the brilliant glare of the sun filled with both pride and terror, he had felt something—but not the agony Scrollkeepers swore would befall any Nightdweller touched by the unholy rays of Arrica’s sun.
No. All he’d felt had been warmth.
A pleasant touch of warmth.

Anyone who can write with such immediacy about light, rain, and mystic discipline has my attention! If this book is the first in a series, I'm up for reading any book with the same subtitle: A Voltpunk Novel. There are steampunk elements in many kinds of science fiction, but Willett is ringing his own changes on the charm and appeal of the technology of electricity as it is introduced to people of differing cultures.

I've read this book only in e-format, not in print format, but I've got to say how much the cover art pleased me. A lot of books available as e-books have "cover art" that doesn't work for me, either as art or as the cover of a book. There is considerable tradition about how to present information on a book cover, and what to expect from the art elements -- and I am impressed with the design choices for this book cover. Clear lettering for the author's name is a good choice, and imaginative serifs on the lettering for the title told me to expect a fantasy element even in a story subtitled: A Voltpunk Novel.  The interlocking gears of the art reminds me of how technology can seem magical, and how magic is intended to fit together effectively.