Champagne and Socks

Check out the gorgeous cover (and back!) that Amanda has designed for Showtime (Book 5 in the Twelve Planets) by Narrelle M Harris!

Never ask me which is my favourite – I’ll never be able to decide!

Here’s what the text on the back cover says:

Family drama can be found anywhere: in kitchens, in cafes. Derelict hotels, showground rides. Even dungeons far below ruined Hungarian castles. (Okay, especially in Hungarian dungeons.)

Old family fights can go on forever, especially if you’re undead. If an opportunity came to save someone else’s family, the way you couldn’t save your own, would you take it?

Your family might include ghosts, or zombies, or vampires. Maybe they just have allergies. Nobody’s perfect.

Family history can weigh on the present like a stone.  But the thing about families is, you can’t escape them. Not ever. And mostly, you don’t want to.

 

It’s a beautiful collection of pieces, each one utterly classic and completely new at the same time… In Narrelle’s hands, everything old is new again, and everything new has the weight of age.  There’s magic in that, and in this book. — Seanan McGuire

 

The book went to the printer’s last week so I’m expecting the proofs any day now. Can’t wait to see this one in real life!

We’re expecting the arrival of Bad Power by Deborah Biancotti – Book 4 in the Twelve Planets series – any day now. To whet your appetite in the meantime, enjoy a series of excerpts from and about the book.

Palming the Lady

“She told me my future.”

“What was it?”

“In the words of Dorothy Parker-”

“I know. No one gets a happy ending.”

“You want to hear something really creepy, you should ask her what she sees in her own future.”

Detective Palmer is called to the home of Matthew Webb, an anxious young medical student who claims he’s being stalked by a homeless woman. When Palmer takes the nameless woman in, she finds she has an uncanny ability to tell the future. By the time Palmer unravels the truth about so-called ‘Mad Mary’, Palmer herself must confront the devastating future that Mary has left her – a future where the only forgiveness available to her will be her own.

Preorder your copy of Bad Power here.

We’re expecting the arrival of Bad Power by Deborah Biancotti – Book 4 in the Twelve Planets series – any day now. To whet your appetite in the meantime, enjoy a series of excerpts from and about the book.

Shades of Grey

“There are two kinds of people with lawyers on tap, Mr Grey. The powerful and the corrupt.”

“Thank you.”

“For implying you’re powerful?”

“For imagining those are two different groups.”    

Esser Grey is a rich and powerful man who has discovered, despite the world’s attempts to soften its edges for him, that one power eludes him: he cannot die. He sets out to divert the unwanted miracle through suicide and, when that doesn’t work, through murder. Along the way he meets Detective Palmer, the first person not only to acknowledge his miracle, but also his humanity.

I was trialling the website interface on Twitter yesterday and am told it works! Yay.

We’re in the process of converting all the Twelfth Planet Press books to ebooks and they will soon be available on the website and in various other online stores. Quality ebooks are fiddly and time consuming to produce and I’m very fortunate to have kind designers who have generously given of their time to make TPP electronically available.

The ebook process has been an interesting, and often frustrating one for me. I’m not a designer, I don’t do layout and I haven’t been able to help out on this project. The software to layout ebooks is not the same software as to layout print books and the conversion from one to the other, no matter what people say, is not an easy, simple, straightforward one. You can generate from one to the other but then you get nasty, messy files that are awful to read and people complain about. And the manual layout for a good ebook takes as long as it does to layout a print book. So that’s double the time or two completely different, and time consuming products. And in small press, where most of the people involved are pretty much donating their time and skills, it starts to all get a bit overly demanding.

Still, I am very fortunate. Amanda Rainey does such fantastic layout. She makes my books look like real books and good looking ones at that. And I know she is much of the reason our books are doing so well. And now, the unbelievably awesome Charles Tan has come on board to help out with our ebooks. I’m learning from him what makes a quality ebook and just how much time that takes. And considering how busy Charles is with all the other things he does, I am very lucky he is my friend!

Our very first ebook is now up and available for purchase from the Twelfth Planet Press webstore. Cheryl Morgan finessed this one from Amanda’s files and Charles took it to the finishing line. I’ve even read it on my iPhone and can attest it looks very beautiful. The rest will follow and we’ll make a bigger deal about that then.

Love and Romanpunk Ebook – available for download now for $5.95

And in celebration, Tansy Roberts is Rocking the Romanpunk all this week!

Gwyneth Jones has this to say on the Twelve Planets volumes so far, which she posted about on her personal blog:

I’ve been reading The Twelve Planets’ latest selections, and enjoying them very much, starting with Deborah Biancotti: police procedural with a sinister undertow of the weird, progressing through Tansy Rayner Roberts (Romanpunk), Lucy Sussex (Thief of Lives), and Sue Isle (Nightsiders). These collections, just four stories in a slim paperback, are an excellent idea, a tasting menu of Australasian female genre writers. Romanpunk has an intriguing twist on the noble vampire and mortal girlfriend* story (see, these vampires are really Lamia, they’re Roman in origin, and very well connected, but they find the C21 street has its uses). Ever wondered why pretty-boy Caligula was such an unmitigated horror in private life? Or why Nero was finally forced to kill his mother? Refreshingly, unlike Buffy, the mortal girlfriend is not allergic to education and actually has a life… Lucy Sussex I can safely say needs no introduction: I loved her beautiful story about modern and ancient Babylon, “Alchemy”. Sue Isle has created a daunting, yet not hopeless day after tomorrow Western Australia; linked stories all set in the same moment, the moment, for various characters, when you realise that climate change has won, and civilisation is not coming back. So you stop mourning, and you move on… Made me wish there was a novel.

Someone said, recently, the Finnish sf community gives me hope for the future of the genre… These Australians give me hope for the future of female, and even feminist, writers in sf.

I couldn’t hope for better feedback.

If you haven’t yet donated to the World SF Travel Fund – to help send Charles Tan to World Fantasy Con and then other fans in years to come – now’s your chance!

We have teamed up to offer the next five people who donate $50 or more a signed copy of Marianne de Pierres’s Glitter Rose! This is in addition to the regular reward. De Pierres is the very successful author of the Parrish Plessis books from Orbit and the SF series Sentients of Orion.

We are also offering copies of Twelfth Planet Press books Nightsiders and Love and Romanpunk to anyone donating just $25 or more!

Please help us raise more money for the fund, towards a third year of operations!

To claim the offer, make a donation through the peerbackers project, then e-mail worldsftravelfund@gmail.com with your name, the amount of your donation and your choice of reward. Remember these rewards are in addition to the regular ones you’ll receive!

The second season of the Twelve Planets is now available for preorder. The three books will be out before the end of November and are:

Bad Power by Deborah Biancotti

Showtime by Narrelle M Harris

Through the Splintered Walls by Kaaron Warren

The season most definitely has a dark bent. Biancotti explores use & abuse of power. You’ll find yourself wondering just what your own bad power is. Harris brings her quick sense of humour & talent for the quirky to her collection. You’ll laugh but you’ll also be deeply discomforted. Warren will take you on a journey through the back roads of Australian towns and leave you feeling uneasy and more than a little creeped out.

Preorders for the season can ber mde over at the Twelfth Planet Press store where you can also upgrade your subscription from a single or two book purchase to a subscription to the full series.

It’s really exciting watching people start reading the Twelve Planets and hearing what they think about it. I’ve been working on these in isolation, with the authors, for ages but it’s so cool to see people reading the books for the first time.

Ben Payne has a great review of Love and Romanpunk in which he sums up with:

I have been thinking for a while about how to best sum up Love and Romanpunk. In some ways it delivered what I expected, but in others it surprised me. I expected this book to be smart, to know its history, to have a sense of fun, and some laughs, and some steamy romance. Those things are almost Tansy trademarks. And it does have all those things, but in the end, all of those things felt almost peripheral to the things I liked most about the collection.

What’s not often talked about, with Tansy’s writing,  is the fact that there is a real emotional courage to her best works, a sense that she is ready to get into her gumboots and rubber gloves and muck about in the messiest, ugliest, most confusing of human emotions and relationships, and to try to find a path through them. It’s that depth of emotion, sometimes sweet, but just as often brutal and painful, that drives the best of these stories into being something a cut above the majority of works out there. The fact that they are also smart, and fun, is just the icing on the cake.

Recommended.

Purchase Love and Romanpunk on its own or as part of The Twelve Planets series or buy the first three in a season’s pass.

Love and Romanpunk by Tansy Rayner Roberts has been released into the wilds. I can’t believe the second volume of The Twelve Planets project is already out. This year is speeding by!

I have a couple of copies up on Goodreads as a Giveaway and the widget below to show off the lovely cover by Amanda Rainey (of course!)

And here’s what the back of the book says:

Thousands of years ago, Julia Agrippina wrote the true history of her family, the Caesars. The document was lost, or destroyed, almost immediately.
(It included more monsters than you might think.)

Hundreds of years ago, Fanny and Mary ran away from London with a debauched poet and his sister.
(If it was the poet you are thinking of, the story would have ended far more happily, and with fewer people having their throats bitten out.)

Sometime in the near future, a community will live in a replica Roman city built in the Australian bush. It’s a sight to behold.
(Shame about the manticores.)

Further in the future, the last man who guards the secret history of the world will discover that the past has a way of coming around to bite you.
(He didn’t even know she had a thing for pointy teeth.)

The world is in greater danger than you ever suspected. Women named Julia are stronger than they appear. Don’t let your little brother make out with silver-eyed blondes. Immortal heroes really don’t fancy teenage girls. When love dies, there’s still opera. Family is everything. Monsters are everywhere. Yes, you do have to wear the damned toga.

History is not what you think it is.

LOVE AND ROMANPUNK.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
Julia Agrippina’s Secret Family Bestiary
Lamia Victoriana
The Patrician
Last of the Romanpunks
Afterword

Love and Romanpunk is available for purchase at twelfthplanetpress.com

And subscriptions to the Twelve Planets can be bought and upgraded at any time.