Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Thief's Coin awakes at midnght hour

Welcome, Thief’s Coin, to the World of Publishing.

Today Wings launched its September stable of new books and Thief’s Coin is one of them.

It was a harried birth. Thief’s Coin was targeted for an October birth, but the Wings people decided to push it up to September.

In mid-August they forwarded an email request for me to submit 10 questions to a fellow author that will appear as a new novel interview on the Wings’ website. In turn, another author would submit questions to me.

But there was a bit of a snag. I’m embarrassed to say I accidentally deleted the email. Knew nothing about it until another email arrived in my In Box asking why I was late. I pulled it off, though. A few hours later 10 questions went to H.L. Chandler for her soon-to-be-published novel Lost in Fear.

A few days later a set of interview questions came to me from author Laura Burke. I set my mind to answering them and soon had the finished interview flying back to Wings. Go to wings-press.com and check out the interview. You’ll find the four newly published novels, including Thief’s Coin, on Wings’ home page. Just click on the cover of my novel. After reading the interview, think about purchasing Thief’s Coin. And since it’s the second book of the Larenia’s Shadow trilogy, you’ll want to purchase the first book, The Emperor’s Mistress. They really should be read in sequence.

By the way, what do you think of Thief’s Coin’s cover? Artist Richard Stroud created the scene, which depicts the young thief Stealth as she eyes the tower that may hold a prisoner, Prince Derrius Hextor, the boy she loves.

Richard also did the cover for The Emperor’s Mistress. He’s very good at capturing action. The scene of Stealth stabbing at the dragon with her long dagger can’t help but pique the interest of any reader who loves fantasy and Dungeons & Dragons style adventure.

Getting to this point with Thief’s Coin wasn’t easy. The galley was sent to me a week ago with Hurricane Irene lurking off the Florida coast and headed up toward where I live – Wilmington, North Carolina. The publisher wanted the galley proofed and back to Wings as soon as possible. The hurricane didn’t cooperate. High winds starting Friday evening and continuing into Saturday afternoon sent limbs tumbling onto electrical lines. It’s difficult to proof a galley when there are brownouts every ten or fifteen minutes and finally an outage.

When the lights went dark in the house at about 2 p.m. Saturday, I expected we’d be without electricity for perhaps a day or longer. During Hurricane Fran in ’96, we ran the generator for nearly a week, powering just the refrigerator, one light and the TV. But Fran was a far more powerful hurricane. During Irene, the electricity came back on in less than two hours.

That was fortuitous for Wings. I was able to get the corrections back to the publisher on Wednesday.

Now I need to focus on the third novel, Assassins’ Lair. It has been started with the first fifty-five pages, or seven chapters, written. But I put the project on hiatus in December to concentrate on edits to Thief’s Coin. My job as a weekly newspaper reporter takes up an exorbitant amount of my time, but I’ll need to figure out how to set aside some time to work on book three. Wish me luck.