I haven’t been blogging as much as I used to. Part of this is being super-busy, but another part of it is circumspection, out of a desire not to offer any spoilers about The Great Bazaar or The Desert Spear before people get a chance to read those stories for themselves. In the same vein, work on The Daylight War continues to go really well I think, but it is a lonely kind of well. The working file is now 150 pages long, but I’m not ready to show it to anyone, so I have literally no one to talk to about it. It’s kind of depressing, that I have this thing that consumes half my life that I’m unable to talk to anyone about.
Sometimes I love my job, but sometimes I really hate it, too.
But then I love it again, as my readers continue to bombard me with awesomeness. Last week I mentioned that there would soon be more ARCs of The Desert Spear, and so the DSAC contest would live again. Brendon from New Zealand, a serious contender last time around, submitted this series of pictures:
With the second leg of the DSAC give-away live I thought I’d supplement my earlier entry with some more shots. Rather than more “mountain high” photos this time we’re in “valley low” territory, a place called the Waiohine Gorge. So here are a few photos of myself reading in places of tranquility on the Waiohine Gorge track.
I’m travelling north on holiday soon…there might be more to come 😉
Man, is there a single square mile of New Zealand that isn’t gorgeous? It’s kind of ridiculous. I need to go there sometime before I’m too old and rickety to hike ten miles.
Also, my buddy Myke has always wanted to enter the contest, but his status as a beta-reader disqualifies him. Instead, while on a trip to Germany defending freedom or whatever, he found someone to enter in his stead. In his words:
I visited Stangl & Taubald (Buchhandlung, which I think means bookshop) on 14 Worthstrasse in Weiden in der Operfallz, or just Weiden, as we call the city. The clerk there was a young lady who spoke English. They were sold out of both the print and audio versions of Das Leid der Dunkelheit, but she had heard of it and you and knew that a sequel was coming out soon. She was very excited and said that it was a big fantasy over there. She hadn’t read it yet because she said it was gigantic even by German standards, and I did my best to convince her. I asked her to order me a copy, and hopefully I can find time to swing by and buy it. Otherwise, she said she’d put it on the shelf.
The next day, he wrote again:
I headed back to the Bucher in Weiden to check in with the pretty bookseller there. Her name is Verena, and she’s a HUGE fantasy fan.
She had ordered a copy of Das Leid der Dunkelheit because I asked her to yesterday. I bought it and gave it to her as a gift, but made her promise to read it and (if she liked it, which she assures me she will) to recommend it to customers and to her fantasy reading friends. I also directed her to your website and asked her to contact you when she was done.
Lastly, I photographed her for DSAC, holding the book in front of the fantasy section.
Myke is a prince among men.
Two interesting things about Verena’s store: One is that my friend asked them to order a book, and they had it THE NEXT DAY. Unheard of, in my experience.
Also, if you look behind her, I love that Stan Nichols’ book Orcs, the only novel I know sympathetic to the plight of those burly older brothers to goblins, translates into German as DIE Orks, the battle cry of just about anyone who’s ever played D&D or read Tolkien.
Translation is fun.
Posted on January 29, 2010 at 6:47 pm by PeatB
Filed under Contests, Craft, Desert Spear, Fan Art, Fans, Musings, The Daylight War, Writing
14 Comments »
Annie 
