The Silver Mask

Three things

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Hello,

Apparently it was June the last time I wrote on my blog, and then it was just a quick note on a Goodreads giveaway and two short paragraphs on where I was with writing and editing my works in progress.

This time though, I have a little more news with the promise of more news to come.

The Silver Mask sale

First, to the thing of immediate interest…

US and UK people — you can get The Silver Mask on Kindle for cheap for the next seven days.

UK people, it’s 99p and can be found here.

US people, it’s 99c and can be found here.

It’s a great chance to try out The Vasini Chronicles and find out about the world of Vasini ahead of…

Beasts of the Wildlands: Tales From Vasini II coming soon

The second Tales From Vasini book is finally coming in January 2023.

Beasts of the Wildlands will consist of two novellas — The Hunters and In the Ruins of the Deities.

More details — release date, cover, blurb — will come in the next few weeks.

But, yay! It’s coming and soon.

Looking back through my blog, it looks like I started work on the first of the two novellas back in 2017. So, it’s taken five years to get here.

And then…

Now that Beasts of the Wildlands will soon be out in the world, I’ll be turning my attention to editing Tales From Vasini III. Hopefully there won’t be as a big a gap between Tales From Vasini II and III as there was between A Divided River (Tales From Vasini I – 2017) and Beasts of the Wildlands (Tales From Vasini II – 2023)

Work on the first draft of The Vasini Chronicles III continues. It’s currently around 130,000 words. By my estimate, it will be about 155,000 to 160,000 when the draft is finished so I’m close to the final stretch. But my word count estimates are always wrong, so we’ll see. If all goes well — and fingers crossed it will — I should be done on the first draft by the new year. Fingers crossed.

The Theatre of Shadows out now on Apple Books

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Hi All.

The Theatre of Shadows: The Vasini Chronicles II is out now on Apple Books. It’s available here if you’re in the UK or on your local Apple Books store if you’re not.

It’s still available to buy on Kindle and in paperback. (For those outside of the UK, please try your local Amazon store.)

The adventures of Drs. Marcus Fox & Elizabeth Reid continue…

In the two centuries since the fall of the deities, only a score of city-states have risen from the ashes of their destruction. Foremost amongst them is Vasini — a city divided by politics, class, and philosophies. A city with a threat in every shadow.

Six months have passed since the events of The Silver Mask. Over the winter months, Vasini was plagued by Gareth Miller, the Winter Fayre Killer, who murdered 17 people before he was captured by Lieutenant David Locke. The city now waits for Miller to be hanged. But when Miller escapes gaol, ready to terrorise Vasini’s streets once more, Locke must hunt the murderer again to stop him from claiming more lives.

As Miller flees into Vasini’s streets, Joseph Bastin, ambassador to Vasini for the city-state of Laège, is assassinated in a brothel. With the threat of political repercussions for the death, it is up to Dr. Marcus Fox, newly appointed Commandant of Police, to find the ambassador’s killer.

Fox’s investigation soon leads to a suspect, someone who has been investigating links between the Laège embassy and the worship of the dead deities – his ally, Dr. Elizabeth Reid.

Now, Elizabeth and her friend, Catherine, must act quickly to clear her name before she is found by someone who doesn’t believe her claims of innocence and she’s forced to dance the hangman’s jig.

But these events are only a prelude for what is to come.

The stage is set. The actors are in position. The play can begin.

The Theatre of Shadows is the second part of The Vasini Chronicles, a series of flintlock-and-alchemy fantasy novels set in the city-state of Vasini.

The Silver Mask Giveaway

For those in the US, there’s three days left of my Goodreads giveaway of The Silver Mask: The Vasini Chronicles I. You can enter here for a chance to win one of a hundred Kindle editions. The giveaway ends on 21 April.

The Silver Mask Goodreads Giveaway

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Hello, a quick blog post to let US people know that I’m running a Goodreads Giveaway of my flintlock fantasy The Silver Mask, part 1 of The Vasini Chronicles. You can enter here for a chance to win 1 of 100 Kindle editions. You have until 21 April.

The gods and goddesses are dead, killed two hundred years ago.

With their destruction the moon split apart, the sun dwindled and the land was devastated. Civilisation has re-emerged from the carnage, but twisted creatures still prowl the savage Wildlands between the city-states.

In the skies above the city of Vasini, a falling star, a fragment of the dead moon goddess Serindra, heads to earth. In the Palace district, Dame Vittoria Emerson, darling of the city, has been found dead, lying amongst her own vomit.

As Captain Marcus Fox of the Inspectorate hunts the killer, Dr. Elizabeth Reid searches for the remnants of Serindra determined to make sure the poisonous quicksilver it contains is not used. With Vittoria’s death threatening to draw the city’s political elite into a war of assassins, Fox and Reid must rush to expose the secrets that lie within Vasini before they tear the city-state apart.

The Silver Mask is the opening part of The Vasini Chronicles, a series of flintlock-and-alchemy fantasy novels set in the city-state of Vasini.

A little way in the right direction

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We’re now over three months in to 2019, so time to check how far along I am with my To Do List.

Edit and publish The Theatre of Shadows: The Vasini Chronicles II.

Back when I made my To Do List, The Theatre of Shadows was sitting in a virtual draw while others took a look at it, with the thought that I might start work on the next draft in February. In actuality I’ve only just started on the latest draft. I’m a little way in, but what I’ve gone through so far is looking better than I thought it would, which is promising. More importantly, I’m enjoying it.

Assuming there aren’t any surprises on the way, The Silver Mask should have it’s sequel out in the world by the end of the year.

Given that I may refer to it a bit, I’m just going to call The Theatre of Shadows ToS for the rest of the post. Hope you don’t mind.

Edit a novella.

I had thought that I’d get round to editing The Signal (working title) at some point before I got to ToS. That didn’t happen. It’ll sit in the virtual draw a little longer — until I’ve finished the next draft of ToS at least — based on feedback I’ve received, hopefully there shouldn’t be too much to get it into shape for publishing.

Edit Tales From Vasini II.

According to my To Do List, I was planning on editing this at the same time as ToS, but that’s been put on hold. I don’t want to distract myself from work on ToS and I know there’ll be a lot of wok to do on the two novellas that make up Tales From Vasini II, so they can wait for a bit.

Write The Vasini Chronicles III.

I’ve outlined the third Vasini Chronicles novel. There’s still some more in-depth outlining (and maybe a bit more research to do). Given that I need to work on ToS and that I need to write Tales From Vasini III first, I won’t be getting to this anytime soon.

Write Tales From Vasini III.

I’ve started writing it. I’m only a few thousands words into the first of the three novellas that will make up the book, but I’m already enjoying being with the main character and writing something new about Vasini, which makes the writing easier. (You could ask why the hell you’d write something you didn’t enjoy writing, but that doesn’t seem to be the way the writing compulsion works at times — there’s a difference between wanting to tell and enjoying a story and the process of actually writing it.)

Edit and try to work out how to publish a long novel.

This was what was delaying work on ToS.

The draft is done. It’ll go to someone to look and sense check some of the changes I made, then it’ll have to wait in line for its next draft.

I’m missing it already.

Read at least 48 books and cut down my backlog of unread books to less than 270.

According to Goodreads, I’ve read 18 out 48 books, which isn’t bad going. Unfortunately my backlog is still at 306 books. It should be down to 296, but between presents and me buying more books, I seem to be maintaining the status quo with the size of my To Be Read pile.

One thing that may help is that I’m planning to read/play my collection of Lone Wolf adventure game books over the next few months (you can read about my attempts to complete the set over the past twenty years here – as an update to that blog, I’ve managed to get my hands on Book Seventeen, so I’ll be reading Books One to Eighteen). That alone will drop my backlog to 289 books.

Blog more.

With this post I’ve managed to exceed the six blog posts I made last year. I had intended to blog at least once a fortnight. Based on that, I’ve missed two posts. But, much like everything else, although I may not be quite as far along as I would hope (we are, as species, always far too optimistic with what we think we can achieve with the time we have, that’s why all those public infrastructure projects run late and go over budget), I am at least going in the right directions. In another few months I’ll be a few more steps along, a few months after that a few more steps, and I’ll keep on going until I get to where I need to be.

Blog offs and hidden books

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It’s been over a month since my last blog. I had intended to blog sooner, but with new parenthood, writing, editing, a day job and so on and so on and so on, things got away from me a little.

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SPFBO

A little while ago The Silver Mask became a semi-finalist in the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-off (SPFBO).

For those who, like me until a few months ago, have never heard of the SPFBO, it’s a competition for self-published fantasy authors run by Mark Lawrence (author of The Broken Empire trilogy amongst other things).

300 books are divided up amongst 10 bloggers, who whittle their selection of 30 down through whichever method they decide to one book. This one book is put through to the final. The 10 finalists are then read by the 10 bloggers who together decide on the winner.

The Silver Mask was sorted into Fantasy Book Review’s group, who are whittling their group down to a set of semi-finalists from which they’ll select their finalist. You can read more about Fantasy Book Review’s approach here.

You can find out more about SPFBO, see what other books have been entered and follow the contest on Mark Lawrence’s blog here.

So why, if this started back in May, am I talking about it now? Partly because there hasn’t been much to talk about from The Silver Mask’s perspective, but, to be honest, mostly because I didn’t want to encourage the inevitable irony of me talking a lot about the competition and then The Silver Mask being cut immediately afterward. Of course, irony could now strike and I could be cut at the semi-final stage. So lets just say, if I never talk about the SPFBO again it’s because things didn’t go so well.

Hide a Book Day

Yesterday was Hide a Book Day, a joint event between Goodreads and The Book Fairies.

I’ve always been tempted by the idea of leaving copies of my books around the place for people to find and this provided the perfect excuse.

Three copies of The Silver Mask have been left around the place:

In Lakeside, Thurrock:

 

The Spectrum Centre, Belfast:

 

And Manchester Piccadilly:

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I can’t promise they’re still there if you go searching for them.

Thank you to my two ‘book fairies’ – Alison and Claudia – who helped deposit the books and possibly made it look like I was travelling around the country.

Ellingsen’s Third State of the To Do List

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Given that we’re now over a month into the second half of the year, and quite a bit has happened in the past seven weeks or so, I thought it was time for a ‘To do list’ update.

Edit and publish a novella and short story

A Divided River: Tales From Vasini I has been out for three weeks now. The handful of reviews that have appeared on Goodreads have been really positive.

Should you be interested in having a read yourself, you can find it on Kindle, iBooks and in paperback.

Edit and try to work out how to publish a long novel

With everything else that has been going on, not much has happened with this. Hopefully, I’ll get some time to work on it in the coming months.

Finish writing and then edit The Vasini Chronicles II

If you’ve already A Divided River, you’ll know that the next The Vasini Chronicles book is called The Theatre of Shadows and you will have seen a couple of clues about what it will be about.

I’m deep into editing the first draft and have lots of notes about what needs to change for the second draft. A lot of it at this stage is shuffling around events into a more coherent order and getting rid of sections that blatantly don’t add anything to the story. I’m tempted to make some of these deleted scenes available on my website at some point in the future, but we’ll have to see.

The Theatre of Shadows is the second longest story I’ve ever written (the longest in the long novel mentioned above). Overall, I’m quite happy with it. There’s a lot of work still to do on it, but, for the moment, I’m feeling positive.

Write some more things (not all of them Vasini related)

I’m coming towards the end of a Vasini-based story that was originally going to be a long story, but is now hitting novella territory.

Beyond that there’s a non-Vasini related novella that I’m looking forward to writing more and more.

After that will be another Vasini-based novella and then I’ll probably start work on The Vasini Chronicles III.

Read at least 26 books and cut down my backlog of unread books (now over 300 thanks to Christmas presents)

At my last ‘To do list’ update, according to my Goodreads page, I’d read 32 books. In the 14 weeks or so since then, I’ve managed to finish another 13 for a grand total of 45 books read this year. I’ve pushed my target up to 52 books.

Unofficially, though, I’ve already read 55 books as I’ve slipped in some books for research purposes.

Hope that the bad decision making the world seemed prone to last year doesn’t have as much of an impact as it could and try to play my part in counteracting said bad decision making

No comment.

Become a father (at which point my to do list will likely be much longer and quite different from the above)

Parenthood achieved. My daughter was born in June. Some things may be taking a little longer to do, but I have an awesome daughter.

Inside Vasini 5: Rasah, Goddess of Obligations, Promises and Contracts

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Before the fall of the deities, Rasah was the goddess associated with obligations, promises and contracts. The youngest daughter of Shen-ak-Vhah, she was depicted as a young girl made of brilliant white marble with contracts and obligations carved into her. In honour of her form, and as part of their worship of her, followers of Rasah would tattoo contracts with the goddess onto their own bodies.

Since the fall, some city-states, including Vasini, have outlawed tattooing certain body parts (none have outlawed it entirely), to ensure that it isn’t the “covert” worship of the goddess.

Law on Tatoos stage 2

A Divided River giveaway

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As I write this on Tuesday, I have still yet to enter the realms of parenthood. By the time the post is actually published on Thursday morning (UK time), who knows what the situation will be.

Anyway, UK-based people, I’m running a Goodreads giveaway for the chance for you to win one of five signed paperback copies of A Divided River: Tales From Vasini I ahead of its release on 21 July. You can enter the giveaway here. You have until 6 July to enter.

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And here’s the copies of The Silver Mask from the last Goodreads giveaway just before they were posted on Tuesday.

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Gone Quiet

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Any moment now I’m going to become a father.

I say any moment now, it will be any time within the next few weeks, but after nearly nine months of waiting it feels like any moment.

Although you may not notice, at some point I’ll go silent for a while as I finally get to look after and play with my child (I’ve already been reading to it).

Before that though…

My Goodreads giveaway for The Silver Mask has now finished. Thank you to everyone who entered. I’ll be sending out the copies to the lucky five within the next few days.

Ahead of its publication on 21 July, I’ll be running a Goodreads giveaway (open to UK-based people) of five signed paperback copies of A Divided River. It’ll start this Thursday and end on 6 July.

For those outside of the UK or who don’t do the Goodreads thing or those who prefer their books on electronic devices, you can pre-order A Divided River on Kindle and iBooks.

Catch you all after I enter the land of parenthood.

Tales From Vasini

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Back in February I talked about how some people had assumed that The Vasini Chronicles was going to be a trilogy, but it was likely going to take six novels to tell the story of Doctors Marcus Fox and Elizabeth Reid.

As I said then, early on when I was developing the ideas for Vasini, I realised that there would be scope for more stories than just The Silver Mask. Although most of those stories focused on the exploits of the good doctors, I kept on wanting to explore other aspects of Vasini, the bits where they either didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t go. Vasini, after all, is a city of a million people, there’s more going on there than what an ex-alchemist now inspector and an apothecary/adherent-to-a-philosophical-path would experience.

That’s where Tales From Vasini comes in. It’s a chance to explore the wider world and travel through those city streets and places outside of the city where Marcus and Elizabeth don’t go. To meet some of the people who may not play a big role in the story of The Vasini Chronicles but are still facing their own challenges and having their own adventures.

So, in truth, although the story of the good doctors is six novels long, the story of Vasini itself is much, much bigger.

A Divided River: Tales From Vasini I is now available for pre-order on Kindle and iBooks. It’ll be available in paperback as well, and will be published on 21 July.

(As always, for those outside of the UK, please try your local US, Australian, New Zealand or EU-based Amazon or iBooks store.)

You can read more about it here.