As promised, something slightly lighter for this month’s Friday Fiction. Inspired by countless small children, including the two I saw last weekend, some innocent fun on a summer’s morning.
Read Duck Food
Happy reading 🙂
Month: March 2022
Music Monday: Round Up
And we’re at the final Music Monday for Valkyrie. This post is going to round up the tracks that didn’t need a whole post dedicated to them…or giving them a full post would give away more spoilers than I wanted to risk!
- Darkness Falls in Florence – Jesper Kyd
From ACII, this belongs to a scene that, ultimately, didn’t make it into Valkyrie but that will (likely) be either a Friday Fiction piece later in the year, or a scene in the final book of the series. It’s moody, it’s spooky, it’s ominous…it’s utterly glorious! - Shores of Inis Fáil – Max Anuj
From Wrath of the Druids (the first AC: Valhalla expansion) this is a fab swoop of music that I listened to quite a lot during the editing process. It helped me shape up a lot of the opening chapter. - The Order of the Ancients – Sarah Schachner
From AC: Origins, it accompanies one particular scene in Valkyrie, but to say much more really would be a spoiler. So enjoy – and imagine! - Manhattan Skyline – a-Ha
A new addition to my walking music - The Wild Boys – Duran Duran
Another walking music track, new for this book
The Elsehere Soundtrack on Spotify has been updated to add this in.
That’s it for Valkyrie, then. Music Monday will take a hiatus for the rest of March while I prepare Cambiante for publication and work on Mistika and will pick up either the week before or the week of publication for Cambiante – and that will be…quite different in feel!
That’s all for now. Happy reading and listening!
Music Monday: Coming Back To Life
We’ve reached the penultimate Music Monday for Valkyrie and it’s a Pink Floyd song to finish the main posting run. Coming Back to Life comes from Pink Floyd’s 1994 album, The Division Bell, and from their 1995 live album, Pulse.
There are two things I absolutely adore about this song. The first is the extended guitar solos. I grew up listening to the likes of Jeff Beck and Mark Knopfler and the moment I heard David Gillmour’s playing on this track, I knew I’d found another great guitarist to listen to and enjoy. To borrow a phrase from a music journalist, he has a very etherial tone to his playing on this track and it was about as far from the at-the-time fashion as you could get. (For context, Grunge was still on-trend, although BritPop was right around the corner.)
The second is the lyrics. There’s something very powerful about the line “killing the past and coming back to life” that always gives me pause when I hear it and the rest of the lyrics are similarly arresting. They never fail to make me think and sometimes I will simply stop what I’m doing and just listen to it.
The overall result is that this whole track is one of my absolute favourites and it does, quite often, find itself on my writing soundtrack, even if it’s not wholly appropriate. In this case, though, it does fit. If Afraid of Sunlight is where Kari is at the start of Valkyrie, Coming Back to Life is where she is at the end. Not totally healed, not totally fixed, but moving in the right direction.
The Elsehere Soundtrack on Spotify has been updated to add this in.
That’s all for now. Happy reading and listening!
March Update
Before I get into this month’s update, I want to note that I was very much in two minds about posting. With what’s going on in the world, this feels a little frivolous, but on the other hand, the way I cope with things going to hell is to write and plenty of other people cope by reading. So, update it is.
And it’s a good one.
First up, the titleless book six is titleless no more. It will be called Maat (with thanks to J!)…and I have to admit at this point, the sheer scale of it is, uh, intimidating. That said, I’m nibbling away at the planning and plotting and by the time I come to actually write it (towards the end of the year, all being well) I should be in a pretty good place with it.
Next, an update on Mistika (which is still in search of a replacement title). It’s been slightly slow going for various reasons (unintended stays in London not the least of them!) but I am making progress and I’ve got the whole thing mapped out. What I don’t yet know is how I’m going to assemble it. (You’d think this would make it harder to write but it’s actually quite freeing to dance around the timeline. [Feel free to remind me of this sometime in August when I’m trying to get the whole thing to tie together…!])
Friday Fiction this month will be out on the 18th (and this time it will actually be the 18th!). This month is going to be a completely new short story. Genre is still up in the air but I know it’s going to be something upbeat and, hopefully, funny. This is a slight change of plan from what I said last month, mainly because the story I was going to post this month is a little too close to real life right now. It will make an appearance later in the year, but (for obvious reasons) I’m not putting a timeline on it.
And finally, it’s cover-reveal time. Cambiante has a cover AND a potential release date.
Designed once more by the fabulous Sabrina of Enchanted Inks, I am incredibly pleased with it and with the book that goes with it.
I’m hoping to release on the 26th April, so pre-order links will be going in a couple of weeks (assuming neither I nor my editor [hi j!] find anything major in our final passes).
And in related news, next month’s Friday Fiction will be an Elsehere short story, which is the link between Valkyrie and Cambiante.
So that’s this month. On to the next.
Stay safe, support Ukraine and happy reading 🙂
Grace and Fiction 