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New guest blogger: Judith Tarr

Hi! This week, for a change, I'm handing over the soapbox to a new guest blogger—one who's been publishing books almost since I was in high school: Judith Tarr.

Her first fantasy novel, The Isle of Glass, appeared in 1985, and went on to win the Crawford Award. Her space opera, Forgotten Suns, has just been published by Book view Café. In between, she has written historicals and historical fantasies--including World Fantasy Award nominee Lord of the Two Lands—and epic fantasies, some of which have been reborn as ebooks from Book View Café. A short story, "Fool's Errand," a prequel to Forgotten Suns, appeared in the January/February 2015 issue of Analog. She lives in Arizona with three cats, two dogs, and a herd of Lipizzan horses.

7 Comments

1:

Oh excellent. I've been reading Judy's fiction for a long :cough: long time.

2:

Yahbut... where are the cat pictures?

OG.

3:
Yahbut... where are the cat pictures?

Pictures of Cats, attacking the Pope to get at least two popular memes.

4:

Nah, I just want to see a cat grooming a lippizan. Of course, cat dressage would also be very cool.

5:
Nah, I just want to see a cat grooming a lippizan. Of course, cat dressage would also be very cool.

Works for me. Not sure about cat dressage though. My kitten tried to take the legs off Great River delivery Lady not 20 minutes ago. Mind you those Vienna horses might agree about the back leg disembowelment.

6:

An oddity - I'm sure I've never read anything by her, but by all odds I should have (when moving, 21 large packing boxes of SF/F lit went to charity shops and I kept my favorite 8).

Judith Tarr (born 1955) is an American author, best known for her fantasy books. She received her B.A. in Latin and English from Mount Holyoke College in 1976, and has an M.A. in Classics from Cambridge University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from Yale University.

oO

The big preoccupation for the past week and through Solstice is This Year's Kickstarter, aka "Horses of the Moon," which starts as a novella but will add bits as/if the funding grows, all the way up to a full novel. It's set in Tucson and features, of course, horses. And magic. And the Women of the Woo, who are starting to talk in my head.

Sounds like my people. (No snark intended, consider that a compliment). It also only took $8.5k to kickstart fund the novel, which is just shameful considering the nature of the beast (where you can easily pick up $240k for a lazy game idea and then never deliver).

@Host - is this another case of publisher lock? (i.e. American only).

Anyhow, it'll be interesting.

7:

@Host - is this another case of publisher lock? (i.e. American only).

$8.5K would be a small-to-medium midlist book advance, i.e. the author's expectation of income based on selling a few thousand (single digit) copies. For an 8.5K kickstarter target I would not expect a paper novel-length product unless the thing's already written and the per-user sign-up is at least $20. For a novella, with bits to be added along the way and, presumably, electronic delivery, $8.5K is ...

(Check kickstarter). Yeah. $5K to write the second novella -- that's about right. Actual physical print novel kicks in as a for-cost extra at $10K raised, also about right. Remember that once it exists it'll be available for general sale on a profit-making basis: also looks right.

Kickstarter is an interesting way to get new stuff out there. I'm not going there because I have publishing contracts running into the multi-year future, but I'm not dissing it as an option, especially for stuff that the existing publishers have passed over as "non-commercial" (because they've never seen something like it before and don't want to take a risk on it).

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This page contains a single entry by Charlie Stross published on April 27, 2015 11:05 AM.

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