Category Archives: Links

Being Excellent Literary News

Good news for all the Caroline Stevermer fans out there! A sequel to Sorcery and Cecelia is finally being released after all these years, again co-authored with Patricia Wrede! (And I know there are a few Stevermer fans who read this journal, and might well be more by the time you’ve finished reading this entry. If you enjoy Jane Austen and Martha Wells, you’ll enjoy these, too. When the first book was released, it was described as “Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer have J.R.R. Tolkien to tea–or chocolate,” and “a Regency Romance, with magic.” If you’ve read Patricia Wrede’s Magician’s Ward or Mairelon the Magician, these are set in the same world).

The Grand Tour: Being a Revelation of Matters of High Confidentiality and Greatest Importance, Including Extracts from the Intimate Diary of a Noblewoman and the Sworn Testimony of a Lady of Quality

Kate and Cecy and their new husbands, Thomas and James, are off on a Grand Tour. Their plans? To leisurely travel about the Continent, take in a few antiquities, and–of course–purchase fabulous Parisian wardrobes.

But once they arrive in France, mysterious things start to happen. Cecy receives a package containing a lost coronation treasure, Thomas’s valet is assaulted, and Kate loses a glove. Soon it becomes clear that they have stumbled upon a dastardly, magical plot to take over Europe.

Now the four newlyweds must embark on a daring chase to thwart the evil conspiracy. And there’s no telling the trouble they’ll get into along the way. For when you mix Kate and Cecy and magic, you never know what’s going to happen next!

Cecy and Kate, loose on the Continent with their new spouses? One knows perky, sardonic banter and catatrophe simply must occur. It’s being released in hardcover this September; I know I’ll be reading it. I might even buy the first book in hardcover to match it. (I often graduate my favourite books to hardcover, and my mass-market paperback is pretty tattered, being originally second-hand, passed around several hands, sold by a borrower without my knowledge, and being re-discovered in another second-hand shop with my name still inside.) The title of the first book has been expanded to Sorcery and Cecelia or the Enchanted Chocolate Pot: Being the Correspondence of Two Young Ladies of Quality Regarding Various Magical Scandals in London and the Country, another delightful description.

There’s a co-author web page called, appropriately enough, The Enchanted Chocolate Pot. It says The Grand Tour will be available in December, but it’s a bit out of date.

Autumn, the Human Barometer

Over the past twenty-four hours I have been driven slowly mad by the changing air pressure as mirrored by my sinus cavities.

Dear gods, yes — the pressure outside changes as the mini-fronts come through, an ice-pick suddenly appears digging deep into my cranium from one of the many lovely little sinus chambers. I often don’t realise it until I find myself attempting to curl my fingers through my skin and into said sinus cavity to release the pressure. Yesterday, I moved inside and outside my in-laws’ house a dozen times seeking relief as the pressure subtly shifted by a kPa or two.

They grilled shrimp for my birthday. Wasn’t that a wonderful treat? And they gave me a lovely leatherbound blank book, with a nifty red owl bookmark that will travel with me to Toronto later this week.

My newfound need for naps illustrates how miserable sleeping at night in Montreal has become, now that it’s summer again. HRH put the air conditioner in, but I still seem to sleep better in the afternoons. I also attribute my odd need to sleep so much to a reflection of how mentally exhausted I am after producing a polished book in ten weeks.

I’ve read two books since I finished the manuscript: Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Ancestors of Avalon by Diana Paxson (which was only so-so; I should have waited for the trade paperback), and The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (which was absolutely marvellous magical realism). I’m halfway through Rebecca Wells’ Little Altars Everywhere at the moment, which is possibly even better than Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (although equally disturbing in places). Today I’ll finish two book reviews and send them off to the magazine for which I write them.

Words for thought, from t!‘s interview with the Suffix9 zine:
“Regrets are for people who don’t understand their present beauty.”

Good – I Need the Shelf Space…

Is every book going to be bigger than the previous one?

No, definitely not, or book seven would be around the weight of a baby hippopotamus. According to the plan for book six, it will be quite a bit shorter than ‘Order of the Phoenix’. I am not going to swear on my children’s lives that that is going to be the case, but I am 99% certain of it.

J.K. Rowling has her own official web site, which I’ve never even thought to check out until today.