Samhain Publishing

So, I asked on Twitter what I should blog about today, and Frank Tuttle said aardvarks.  Or hagfish.  Frank Tuttle has a weird, weird mind.  I had to look up hagfish, and I didn't like what I saw one bit.

So I'm not blogging about them.  I'm blogging about words.

When I was growing up I got most of my vocabulary from reading.  Not that no one talked to me, but I liked reading an awful lot more than I liked conversing (no change there…).

Reading gives you an awesome vocabulary.  What it doesn't necessarily give you, however, is an idea of how words are pronounced.  We didn't have a television when I was growing up, and we only went occasionally to the cinema, so new concepts – and words – came to me almost exclusively through books.

For ages I thought Michael (from the boy in Mary Poppins) was pronounced Mitchell, because I just sounded out the syllables and they seemed to divde into "Mich" and "ell".  I knew what "fatigue" meant, but I thought it was pronounced "fatty-gew", and I read "dilapidated" slightly wrong so I ended up saying "diplidated".  Which, to be honest, I still think should be a word.

The more embarrassing mistakes are the ones that somehow never got corrected when I was a child, and that I carried into adult life.  I was eighteen before I found out, via an entire classfull of fellow sixth-form students, that the spy organisation is MI5, not M-fifteen.  And in my late twenties when I discovered that Yosemite is not pronounced Yohz-might. 

My husband (who did grow up with a television): "Yosemite.  Like Yosemite Sam?" 

Me: "Who's Yosemite Sam?"

It's made me kind of nervous since!  I sometimes catch myself on the brink of saying something and do a fast rephrase because I'm not 100% sure I'm going to say it right.  Thank goodness for the audio function at Dictionary.com!

Ciao!

(Not See-ay-oh.)

Today is release day for my newest book, Blood of the Volcano.

Blood of the Volcano is the standalone sequel to my previous Samhain release, Heart of the Volcano, and is set about five years afterwards.

To celebrate release month, I’m running a blog contest until the end of February.  The prizes include Samhain Publishing gift certificates, high-quality (British!) chocolate, and a cute Clippy bag customized with the Blood of the Volcano cover (and completely re-customizable with your own photos or pictures).

The contest is totally easy to enter.  It’s a prize draw, and all you need to do to be entered for it is comment on this post or on the contest post at my blog.  

I’m also offering a free short romance set in the same world.  In the Shadow of the Volcano is available to read on my website now, either online or as a downloadable PDF: http://imogenhowson.com/free-reads/shadow-of-the-volcano.  

Blurb and excerpt link are below the fold.

Happy reading!

Imogen

Website: www.imogenhowson.com

Blog: www.imogenhowson.com/blog

Twitter: twitter.com/imogenhowson

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Ever since I started reading ebooks, I haven’t particularly wanted a dedicated ebook reader. Back in 2006 I bought a little PDA second hand, loaded Mobipocket onto it, and have been happily reading ever since.

I knew it would die eventually, and I always thought I’d replace it with something multifunctional, like an iPod Touch. Something I could read on lying in bed, something small enough to slip into a pocket, something that I could also use to play games, listen to music, get online…

Then the Kindle 3 became available in the UK, complete with a section of the Amazon store just for ebooks. You can only read it in the dark if you have a clip-on light, it doesn’t slip into a pocket (at least, not my pockets!), and although it does have some game/music/browser functionality it’s definitely not an iPod.

And as it turned out, I didn’t really care about any of that.

I bought my Kindle in September, and I love it beyond all reason. It’s not a jack of all trades, it’s a master of one, and that one is reading books. I love the e-ink display, the battery life, the whole seamless experience of using it. I love, too, the way you can browse Amazon on it, reading blurbs and reviews, checking out samples. And I love (more than I should) how easy it is to read the sample and click to buy.

When I first started reading ebooks I was so impressed by the instant gratification of being able to buy a book at midnight, download it to the PC and transfer it to my ereader ready to take up to bed with me. But with the Kindle I can buy it while I’m in bed and be carrying on reading within seconds.

I’ve been working in epublishing for four years. I’ve been an epublished author for over three years. I know how it all works. But something like that still seems like magic to me. And I don’t remotely want an iPod any more.

Heart of the Volcano by Imogen Howson now available
Blood of the Volcano by Imogen Howson coming February 2011
www.imogenhowson.com
Imogen’s Amazon.com page
Imogen’s Amazon.uk page

Two days ago I wasn’t sure what I was going to blog about today. I’m on vacation, in a rather luxurious static caravan in Devon in the southwest of England, and my brain has slowed so that choosing to go to the beach or the swimming pool, or which coffee to have at Starbucks, is about the extent of my decision-making abilities.

I do have Erica the red laptop with me, and with the help of Bingle the mobile broadband modem I’ve been keeping up with a few vital work-related emails. I did this last year when I was away for a week, and it worked like a charm. Bingle, bless him, was not fast, but he chugged away (I picture him like a little tortoise crawling over the Internet) and connected me to my webmail account efficiently enough.

Here, I’d kind of like to take a moment to ponder the unbelievable way technology has advanced in the last few years. Home broadband was incredible enough, goodness knows, yet now we have mobile broadband too? And tiny sleek laptops that can do everything a desktop computer can do. And the wonders of Google Mail. And that’s without even getting onto the capabilities of my partner’s iPhone, or my daughter’s cute little iPod Touch.

Yeah, it’s all amazing. That is, when it works.

This week has been…not so smooth when it comes to technology. I’ll spare you the details of the failed connection attempts, the times when my laptop claimed my signal was “Very Good” but when Google Mail refused to load, the times when I’d just typed a reply to have the page go blank and Firefox ask me if I’d typed the address correctly…

The day before yesterday, cut off from email for a full twenty-four hours and wondering what vital tasks I’d failed to pick up in time, I resorted to the following steps:

Opening the laptop in order to access my work-related spreadsheets.
Going online using Safari on my partner’s iPhone (which, miraculously, had a signal when Bingle didn’t).
Accessing my Google Mail on the iPhone.
Scrolling through all my emails on page after tiny page on the iPhone’s screen to find the ones that needed dealing with now.
Entering relevant details on my spreadsheets on the laptop.
Replying to emails without the ability to touch type, which meant that I resorted to what, for me, felt like text speak (no capitalization, minimal punctuation, oh the horror!), including manually typing in the details I normally copy & paste across from my spreadsheets.
And finally, going outside our caravan and holding the iPhone up to the sky so the email would send.

After repeating this process far more times than I wanted, I came back inside the caravan and said to my daughter that a) that had to be the most low-tech way of doing something technological, and b) smoke signals would be easier.

Heart of the Volcano – available now.
Blood of the Volcano – releasing February 2011.

www.imogenhowson.com

Repetitive Strain Injury.
Writer’s Bottom.
Feline-inflicted Injuries Due to Smacking Her When She Walks Across Keyboard.
Falling Asleep at Laptop and Accidentally Typing fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff For Six Hundred Lines.
Slowly Solidifying in Chair Due to Extreme Cold of Unheated House.

The alleviation of many of these conditions is a little tricky (I’m currently experimenting with a mix of pen and tablet, vertical mouse, mini keyboard, exercise DVD and water pistol).

I have, however, found what is, in my opinion, the Ultimate Cure for the last condition. I present it to you below.

This is me wrapped in my Slanket (TheSlanket.com), staying toasty warm even halfway through the day when everyone else is out and the heating’s been off for hours. My hands are free to type, but every other bit of me, including my feet and the cold drafty bit around my neck, is snuggled up and cosy. The only thing that makes me sad is I couldn’t get a grey version. I was planning on accessorising with a staff and marching round the house declaring, “You shall not pass!” to any family members (or Balrogs) I might meet.

But for warmth and comfort, as opposed to duelling with Balrogs, the Slanket, any colour, is the answer.

Heart of the Volcano by Imogen Howson
www.imogenhowson.com
http://imogenhowson.blogspot.com
http://twitter.com/imogenhowson

Lying in bed one night, thinking about what I’d do if my computer corner were destroyed by flood, fire or plague of electronics-eating locusts—is it just me whose imagination tends to the paranoid?—I found myself making a shopping list of the things I’d have to replace as soon as the desk, chair and computer were back in situ.
And I realized it’s actually quite a useful shopping list for any writer—or anyone who works from home. So I’m sharing it, together with the offer to join in my late-night paranoia.

First, the program that means I can imagine the destruction of my computer without breaking into a cold sweat. Carbonite. Backing-up for the careless, the lazy and the forgetful.
Carbonite is a program no writer should be without. For an annual fee of $54.95, you can install it on your computer and it will run unobtrusively in the background, constantly backing up your files onto a remote server. If you have a hard-drive crash (or a burglary) and lose everything, you can simply restore all your files back onto your new computer. Carbonite also keeps deleted files for a period of about a month, so if you accidentally delete your manuscript it’s okay—you can go and grab it off the remote server, and within a few minutes you’ll have it all safe on your hard drive again.

Second, Dropbox. This can work as another backup (remember, we’re in paranoid land here—we’re not happy with just one backup!), but it’s more useful in another way.
Dropbox is a “cloud computing” program—basically it’s a remote server that your computer “sees” as a folder in “My Documents”, so you can move or copy files, or save work directly, into it.
The folder on your computer then automatically synchronizes with the remote server to make further copies of all your files, so you now have a folder on your computer and an exact mirror-copy at the Dropbox site. If you accidentally delete a file, you can restore it from the Dropbox site. If you accidentally save over a file (which is much worse, take it from someone who once saved a blank document over an entire 130k manuscript) you can get the original back by choosing to restore an earlier version of that file.
As well as accessing your work from the Dropbox website, you can choose to sync it with other computers. I have all my work files in a Dropbox folder which syncs between my desktop, my Dropbox account, and my laptop. It’s the best thing ever—it means I can seamlessly transfer working from the desktop to the laptop and vice versa without fiddling around making sure I’ve got all the files I need.
As a nice extra point, Carbonite recognizes the files in My Dropbox folder, so not only are they saved across three different machines, they’re also auto-backed-up on Carbonite.

Third, virus protection. And no, I’m not patronizing you by telling you you need that on your computer! I’m talking about the invisible yuckies lingering on your keyboard. Just looking down at my keyboard now, I can see dust, fluff, greasy fingerprints and mysterious drip-marks. I know there’ll be invisible dead skin cells on there, and bacteria, and viruses. Which is when I grab my squishy, gooey pot of Cyberclean. This is like a blob of fluorescent Playdough that you squidge over your keyboard and mouse (and phone), picking up dust and fluff and killing germs as it goes. As well as being useful, it’s kind of fun.

Fourth, as all home-workers know, it’s horribly easy to look after the computer more than you look after yourself. RSI and writer’s bottom, anyone? Here, I find an exercise DVD really useful. The one I have is divided so that you can do the whole hour’s workout, or you can do just the warm-up, cool-down and twenty minutes of proper exercise in the middle, taking just half an hour out of your working day. Of course I can spare an hour, but with the competing demands of work, writing, children’s home time and housework (where does all that cat hair come from?) it often feels as if I can’t. Whereas I can always (note to self: really, always) fit half an hour in somewhere.
I’ve also just changed over to a vertical mouse, designed to keep your hand and arm in a natural position and to reduce the symptoms of RSI—or stop them appearing in the first place. I use both that and a pen and tablet, with a mini keyboard so my mouse hand doesn’t have to stretch so far.

So, that’s me. What are your must-replace writing and work items?

Shopping-list links and details:
Carbonite ($54.95 for a year)
Dropbox (2GB is free (and it’s plenty, honest), a further 50GB is $99.00 a year)
Cyberclean ($7.99 plus p&p)
Evoluent Vertical Mouse ($80 for a wired right-hand-use mouse, more for left-hand and wireless)
Exercise DVDs

~ www.ImogenHowson.com ~
Heart of the Volcano out now

See all those pretty covers on the front page of the Samhain site. And, ooh, look, for the first time one of them belongs to me!
Can we take a moment to worship Scott Carpenter, god of cover art?

I started writing Heart of the Volcano in late 2008. I’d won the Romantic Novelists’ Association Elizabeth Goudge Award with the first chapter of an as-yet-unwritten faery book, A Stolen Cloak of Feathers, and I was determinedly trying to write the rest of it. It stalled horribly at 37,000 words (I know, ugh) and I shoved it aside and decided to write something short, fun and shapeshifty instead.

Heart of the Volcano wasn’t quite as easy to write as I’d intended it to be. I had to ask people some actual science questions, which is always alarming (research, seriously?). But I worked it out in the end, and sent it off to my then-boss, Angie James. Who, in a spirit of pure evil, didn’t send me a formal acceptance letter, but just marked it as “accepted” on the submissions-tracking spreadsheet (which I manage) and left me to find it. At which point I may have screamed a little.

And now here it is, fresh and shiny and for sale today!

Caught between love and duty, can she make an impossible choice?

Five years ago, Aera was called away from everything she had ever known: her home, family, and Coram, the boy she was growing to love. She was given no choice. As the only living lava-shifter—able to transform her body into molten rock—she is destined to serve the volcano god as his fire priestess. Now, before she takes her ordained role, she must face her final test. Execute a criminal sentenced to death for the most unforgivable of all sins. Blasphemy.

She’s shocked to discover it’s no anonymous law-breaker waiting chained at the center of the labyrinth. It’s Coram. For the crime of being a gargoyle, a winged stone-shifter. A gift akin to hers…except his gift is unsanctioned by the temple, his powers proclaimed unholy.

If she refuses the test she will betray her god and condemn her family to dishonor. To pass it she must kill the boy she used to love…the man she still does.

Warning: Contains violence, tears, self-sacrifice, a little bit of I-can’t-bear-to-leave-you-but-I-have-to sex, and a heroine whose touch melts the hero—um, literally.

To read an excerpt click here

And to enter my release-day Spot the Handwavium Contest, email me at imogen AT imogenhowson.com and let me know which thing in the excerpt could have been equally well named “handwavium”. I’ll draw a random winner tomorrow, and send them an e-copy of Heart of the Volcano. Plus, in honour of the chemical dependency that makes me able to write at all, a delicious coffee-and-chocolate package.

The contest is open to anyone anywhere in the world, and the prize will be posted anywhere as well. Unless you live in a country where coffee and chocolate are illegal, I suppose, in which case you can’t have that part of the prize and will have to accept my sincere sympathy instead.

www.imogenhowson.com
imogenhowson.blogspot.com
twitter.com/imogenhowson