COVER REVEAL: The Forgotten & The Wandering redesign!

Out with the gloomy, in with the bright and colourful!

For the past few months I've been debating giving the 2 released The Lux Guardians books a little makeover. Their previous covers were dark and you couldn't really tell what was happening in them. I still love The Forgotten's cover, because it was my first, but it could be better.

I still plan to give THE WHOLE SERIES a face-lift to coincide with the release of books 3 and 4, but until then I wanted TF & TW to stand out a little, instead of blending into the crowd. This is just a digital redesign, so the waiting list paperbacks will (and always will) have the same design.

What do you think of the new covers?

~Saruuh

The Lux Guardians is a YA science fiction series taking place in two time periods, with a diverse cast of characters, a totalitarian President, Britain in ruin, and a desperate rebellion.

Find out more about the series.

OCTOBER: Fairy tales and first chapters (including an excerpt of Love In The Gilded Age!)

 The Wandering is now out in the world in shiny paperback form!! It's very pink and, in my opinion, very pretty. If you signed up to the waiting list, your copy is winging its way to you right now. You can find a couple photos of The Wandering over on my instagram (and follow me if you're into books and photos of my cat.)

But this month isn't only the paperback release of The Wandering - it's the month Love In The Gilded Age comes out! It's not actually set in the Gilded Age, rather a fantasy world called Fissure, and is an anthology of fairy tales retold with a focus on diversity. The title is a nod to one of the fairy tales -  Rumplestilskin - in which the protagonist is expected to spin straw into gold. All the main characters of the anthology are people of colour, one of them is a lesbian, and one of them is disabled (a supporting character also has partial hearing.) LITGA explores themes and ideas I think traditional fairy tales lack - ladies saving themselves (and other ladies!), ladies being in charge of their sexuality, and so on.

It's out today, so I hope you'll check it out and buy it. It's just 99 cents/77 pennies and available on Amazon for Kindle. If you want to read the blurb or know more about the anthology, click the other books link on the navigation bar above, or visit my website.

BUY NOW

Want a sneak peek at Love In The Gilded Age?

Read on for the first chapter of A Fortress of Thorns, a retelling of Brier Rose (Sleeping Beauty)

SEPTEMBER: Of wanderers and sequels

It's the 23rd of September and the sequel to The Forgotten is finally released!! You can get it free from Smashwords right now and from B&N and iBooks in a couple days. It's on amazon for $0.99 but if you report the lower price at B&N or Smashwords (please do this!) we should be up and running and $0.00 in a few days! If you've yet to read The Forgotten, you can find that for free in the same online retailers.

I don't have much to talk about this month, other than to say I'm gearing up for the release of Love In The Gilded Age (28/10) and very excited to finally behold The Wandering in print form. And as promised last month, here is a snippet of each of the main six in The Wandering. Some are from their POV, some are not. Enjoy.

Honour

I’ve always believed what the Officials told me. I never questioned them, not even once. I might have thought I did, but deep down I believed everything they said. 

Horatia

Staring at a twisted chair, I think, I can’t tell Tia about what might have happened to her. She’s not a carrier—The Guardians know that much—but States could have done God knows what to her, made her into anything. 

Branwell

I’d like to feel clarity now. Well, what I really want is to be curled up in the window seat in Bennet’s bedroom, her shoulder resting against mine, listening eagerly to whatever cheap paperback I’d picked up that week. But since that’s about as possible as growing wings and flying away from my loss, I’ll accept being in this box room with two girls who are fast becoming my friends. 

Bennet

I have no choice but to remain here, and I won’t waste the rest of my life on moaning and melancholy. Not when this City has so much to offer me.

Yosiah

It’d be a lot easier if I could just let things lie, if I didn’t have to know the truth. But I’ve never been like that. I never could just go along with something without knowing the details and now that I have access to information about Great Britain and the rest of the world, I want to know it all.

Miya

I’m there again—on the train. Another version of myself stands at Yosiah’s side, her life falling apart when she sees the resolute expression on his face. I’m somewhere in the crowd, watching myself. I don’t want to watch. I know what will happen.

I have to stop it.

AUGUST: Of fairy tales and funding

I appear to have totally skipped over July's blog post. Oops. It's probably a good thing I didn't have much to tell.

Now it's August and I have many things. I've already written about the FundTheWandering campaign, so I'll just briefly say it's still ongoing (until the end of August) and there's still plenty of time to claim your book swag rewards (jewellery and bookmarks and books!) and help me give people more free books.

The Wandering, the second book in the Lux Guardians series, comes out next month, and I've been working my ass off on getting it perfect for you all to read. I'm very happy with this book, and I hope you'll love its story and new characters (as well as the direction I took the old characters) as much as I do. The Wandering is the hardest book I've written so far, and a lot of myself has gone into it so I hope it lives up to The Forgotten.

The little breath of laughter that comes from her makes my heart flip in my chest, and I decide right there and then that I’m delirious. I must be coming down with a Strain. It’s the only logical reason for the heat rushing through me.

It comes out September 23rd in digital. If you want a paperback, you'll have to wait a little longer (not much), until October when the physical copies will be released. You can sign up to get one here if you haven't already.

But enough about The Lux Guardians. Here's the fairy tales quota of this blog post.

Love In The Gilded Age! I've already spoken a little about it in its announcement, but since it is now close to finished I can tell you the rest. It's part of a series of Diverse short story anthologies, and this anthology is set in a world called Fissure. There will be three stories in Love In The Gilded age, with many more in Fissure to come. Here is the contents of LITGA:

Xanna  - Little Red-Cap
Love In The Gilded Age - Rumplestiltskin
A Fortress of Thorns - Brier Rose

My personal favourite is Rumplestiltskin because I am more than a little in love with the characters, but I hope you'll love them all as I do. I've noticed most of being an author is writing things I love and hoping other people will feel the same. It's a nervy profession. Here's an excerpt from The Red House.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Elder Niesk said abruptly. “I’ve been wanting someone to avenge my death.”
Xanna must have misheard. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“My death, dear. I’ve been wanting someone to avenge it. It was my husband, you see. He stabbed me solid in the back and buried me in the rose garden.”
Xanna shot to her feet, knocking over her umbrella. She bent to retrieve it and held it close to her chest like a shield. “Osseil guide me,” she whispered, invoking the Saint of wisdom and knowledge. “I don’t understand. If you’re dead, how can I see you?”
“I’m a ghost, sweet. You’re seeing the image of my soul.”

Love In The Gilded Age is out October 28th in digital only. It'll be available on all the usual sites - Amazon, Barnes and Noble, iBooks, Smashwords etc. and will cost you less than a dollar!

Lastly, The Beast of Callaire is half price now - $1.54/£0.91 - so if you've been waiting for it to drop, get it now.

That's it for August. I'll have more about The Wandering next month, including a snippet of each of the main six characters.

~Saruuh

#FundTheWandering

YOU CAN FUND THE WANDERING HERE. 

ANY DONATION GETS A REWARD, NO MATTER HOW LITTLE.

With The Wandering’s release date getting ever closer (SEPTEMBER!!) I’ve organised a campaign to raise money for printing and shipping costs so I can get these books out to you ASAP.

The Wandering is the second book in the free Lux Guardians series, sequel to The Forgotten which you can get a paperback of by joining the waiting list online or download from various online retailers. The Wandering picks up the gang’s story right where The Forgotten left it, with a dangerous trek across the country, new locations, new characters, and continuation of the revolution Honour accidentally started in the first book.

I’m yet again going to be offering paperback copies of this book for no charge, which you can get by joining this waiting list.

As you can probably guess, printing these books aint cheap. But you lovely people can help with costs by donating via Paypal, and you get some pretty cool rewards for doing so!! Here’s what you can get:

Donate one single pound for your name in the acknowledgements of The Wandering.

Donate £3 for a charm bracelet. Choose between team good (The Guardians) and team bad (The Olympiae)

Donate £8 for a bookmark. Choose again between Guardians and Olympiae (but choose wisely. You’re a member for life.)

Donate £10 and have a character named after you. Or call a character Clement McClemently. Have fun with it.

Donate £25 and get a Super Rare paperback of A Compilation of Side Stories. You can’t get this anywhere else folks. They’re extremely limited.

Donate £50 and get a paperback of The Wandering when it’s all finished and shiny, plus a handful of other book swag.

Donate more than that and get everything under the sun. Seriously. Everything. You want one of my kidneys? Son, you got it.

My goal for this campaign is £250, which seems reeeeeally high but will in fact only get 15 The Wanderings printed and sent out to my lovely readers. If I happen to reach that goal, and surpass it, you can expect some extra awesome rewards (maybe a fancy Forgotten London map with all the zones on it, who knows? maybe tote bags.) The more money I get, the more books I will get printed :)

So please PLEASE think about donating even a spare dollar. This book, and this series, is really important to me, and I would hate for it to be inaccessible to readers, because that’s the exact opposite of what I wanted for this series. I wanted The Lux Guardians to be for everyone, even people who were penniless and couldn’t afford to buy it. (I just happen to have, predictably and ironically, made myself quite penniless in the process of publishing it.)

If you don’t have even a single pound to spare (and man, do I understand that) please, pretty please, share this post on twitter, facebook, your own blog etc, so your followers can see it. If I see you spreading the word about the campaign with the #FundTheWandering hashtag, I'll send you some stickers as thanks. Promo this campaign extensively, and you might even find a bracelet in your mailbox.

I’ll update the little counter at the top of the campaign page everyday, so you can track how the funding is going. The campaign runs through august, so you have until August 31st to claim your rewards.

Thank you for reading this hugeass post. Have a great day!

~Saruuh

JUNE: The Forgotten second edition, The Wandering progress & a new anthology

I wasn't sure I'd have much to write about this month, but it turns out I had a lot of news piling up, all of which I hope you'll find as exciting as I think it is.

Firstly, the second edition of The Forgotten has now gone to press, which means everyone who signed up for the waiting list last year (especially those in the first block of 20) will either be in possession of the book, or much closer to getting it, by the end of next month. There's been small design changes to the book jacket, but the content remains the same as always. There is, however, a small sneak preview of The Wandering in the back of it, which will, I hope, answer the question of what the heck happened to Bennet.

Here's the new jacket:

(click to make bigger)

My second bout of news is about The Forgotten's sequel, The Wandering. I've made considerable progress since I last wrote of it, and if you follow my tumblr you might have seen a few unedited snippets. My tentative release for The Wandering is September 23rd, though it may be pushed back to October 7th (though no later) should any delays with betas arise.

The blurb is as follows:

Honour Frie has escaped Forgotten London, but he’s not happy and he’s not safe yet. His sister is mute with grief, what remains of his family is suffering, and when The Guardians lose faith in their purpose, Honour is tasked with restoring it. But inciting the rebellion isn’t something that comes easily to Honour, and with every burden weighing on him, cracks appear in his sanity.

Branwell Ravel will do anything to reunite with his missing sister, but with no word of her for months he’s lost hope of saving her. Bennet Ravel doesn’t want or need to be saved. She has a purpose. She will avenge her father—she will kill the President of States—no matter the cost.

Miya and Yosiah have fought everything together—Officials, Strains, starvation, and even their own feelings for each other—but will they stay together when the secrets between them grow too vast to stay hidden? Or will they fight each other?

With a dangerous journey to Bharat and a plot to overthrow States’s Ordering Body, the second instalment of the Lux Guardians series will wrench everyone to their breaking points.

You can sign up to the waiting list for a free copy here. Same policies apply as to The Forgotten: it's a first come, first served basis, please enter your address correctly or you won't receive it, and though I hope to get books sent out ASAP, delays are inevitable and I hope you'll forgive those.

I have a limited number of review copies available for The Wandering (there are only 5 places left) so if you're looking to review it, get your name down now.

Thirdly, I have a new anthology due for release this October. It's called Love In The Gilded Age, and is a collection of fairy tale reimaginings, and like all my other works, LITGA has a focus on diverse heroes and heroines. It will be available in ebook only for the time being, and is the first installment in a series of diverse anthologies called Fissure Chronicles.

The very brief summary is this: 

In an original epic fantasy world, Love In The Gilded Age reimagines the heroes and heroines of Grimm fairy tales as ethnically diverse, LGBT, disabled, and gender flipped. 

Here's a snippet to tide you over until October:

There is an ocean: In the infinite distance, between one hidden world and the next, is an unmeasurable expanse of twenty seas. One sprawling edge of the world to another is filled with waters as beautiful as they are deadly, as miraculous as they are fraught. Treasure and treachery litter their ocean beds, sleeping side by side with adventurers whose travels ended abruptly, lives caught and held under a wave until all breaths fled.

Seas shallow and deep, wide and thin as shards, transparent as glass and dark as pitch. The black sea, the silver sea, the sea of hidden wealth. The bright sea, the far sea, the star gem sea—bright and depthless as the most precious stone.

There is a land: Tucked into a corner where four oceans fold together, land rises up illustrious in a jagged slash of mountains and forests, with secrets and wonders as plentiful as any water.

In the far south blustering winds sear brown grass, and a only rocky line of mountains can withstand the vicious heat that cripples men. In the far north cold has formed cities of frost; towns are littered with snowflakes and buried under a sheet of emptiness. And betwixt the two, a realm spread out like the curve of a body, perfectly temperate, perfectly formed, with plains flat and vast, mountains short and gentle, forests as abundant as Crown Fish in the rivers that snake into all three realms, and life—life in every crease of every hill, farm, and town.

There are chronicles: Not of the twenty savage seas but of the fissure of land and the people who sigh life into it.

~Saruuh

The Lux Guardians update!

Do you want the good news or the good news?

I'll start with slightly-not-good news: The Revelation won't be released until Spring 2015. But - good news: The Revelation isn't book two in The Lux Guardians series.

I realised recently that the reason The Revelation wasn't happening, why its plot wasn't moving fast enough, why all the important things weren't happening, was because the characters and the series just wasn't ready for it yet. When I knew that, I could go forward with writing book two, and since then I've got a considerable amount of it fixed. Not that it needed fixing, I was just too dumb to realise what it was - the book that needed to be written, needed to happen, before The Revelation could. I hope that makes sense.

Either way, if it doesn't, just know that everything is going according to plan now.

The second good news: because of this realisation, and because I know exactly what this second book needs to accomplish and how to get it there, it will be released in time for the original release date October 7th. But better than that - it will be released ahead of the original release date. I'm thinking August but don't hold me to that. I still have schedules to plan and work around other books I'm writing.

To put it simply: you will have the second book of The Lux Guardians this Autumn. This also means the series will be four books now, instead of three.

Anyway, here's the cover. It doesn't match the alleyway scene of the other two covers, but since it fits the feel of the book, I'm not too bothered by it.

What do you think? Would you rather it matched the alleyway covers for The Forgotten and The Revelation? Let me know your thoughts.

~Saruuh