Ahhhh, it’s finally here, it’s here! And with it, my dream feels one more step closer to reality.
io9 did the honors with an exclusive cover reveal, plus an excerpt. You can see the full cover (and read the excerpt), here:
The Bone Shard Daughter is also up for preorder on all the relevant sites!
Barnes & Noble
Hardcover and Nook
Preorder from a Local Indy Bookstore
Hardcover
Mass market paperbacks to follow Spring 2021!
So, the news is out! My trilogy, beginning with Bone Shard Daughter, will be out starting Fall 2020 with Orbit Books! I couldn't be more thrilled (understatement).
https://www.tor.com/2019/12/05/orbit-books-acquires-debut-fantasy-trilogy-from-author-andrea-stewart
Those friends who know me know this has been a really long road. I commandeered one of my dad's old computers and started writing in WordPerfect for DOS when I was in fifth grade. I submitted my first story to a magazine in high school. I joined...just about every writing group I could find, online and in-person. I'm 37 now. I've had a lot of setbacks and failures. After talking about my latest rejections, I always used to laugh and tell my friends, "Hey, at least when it finally happens, I'll have an inspiring story to tell, right?"
Yes. I am one of THOSE annoying, relentlessly cheerful people.
But I'll be honest. I did give up hope.
I've written seven completed manuscripts, queried three, went out on sub with three. I sold short stories, I stopped writing short stories, I focused on novels. For a long time, I sold nothing, and I felt a lot like a fake writer. I stopped asking to be put on panels at cons or to do readings, because who was I, anyways?
I think it became a lot like this: I took up long-distance swimming recently. Miles in the pool, lap after lap of the same two walls, nothing but me and my breathing. At first I'd be excited about being in the pool, after a while I'd start to be annoyed with myself that I'd taken on such a long swim, and eventually I'd just drift into that space where I'd accepted that I was doing this, that it hurt, and that I'd be doing it for a long time still.
Except there was no clear endpoint with the novels. I was writing book after book and not knowing where land was, or even if there was land at all. It was maddening. But eventually, by the time we sent Bone Shard Daughter on submission, I'd accepted that I was doing this, that sometimes it hurt, and that I'd be doing it for as long as it took to find land. I started writing yet another book. I didn’t have hope that Bone Shard Daughter would sell.
This doesn't mean I was just doing things by rote. People told me it was just bad luck, or bad timing. That publishing is not a meritocracy, and that good books fail to make it all the time. And this is so, so true! There's a lot you can't control. At the same time, I thought--if I could just keep getting better...I'd be giving myself the best shot I could. From a logical standpoint, if I kept writing better books, I'd eventually reach a point where it would be harder and harder for people to say "no."
After my second book on submission failed to sell, I took a long, hard look at my writing. I sussed out the places where I thought I was weak and figured out how to stop making the same mistakes. I did a lot of reading and analyzing other people's work (if there's one piece of advice I have, it's to read and critique widely! If you can articulate what you like/don't like and why, you can apply that to your own writing.). I thought about the books I loved and what things really tickled me. How was that done?
And I did my best to put all those lessons to practical use in Bone Shard Daughter.
So. Here it is.
I can't wait to share this world with you.
Happy International Women's Day! I happened to read a romance scene in an epic fantasy novel today that was terrible. Terrible as in--roll my eyes when the characters confessed their feelings and the sex scene was about as titillating as watching two people trying to figure out the rules to a board game.
Can we stop devaluing the romance genre?
Is it because shit rolls downhill? The literary folks look down on the genre folks and the genre folks say, "Well, I know romance is considered genre, but at least we're not them." I've heard, multiple times from multiple people, "Maybe I should crank out a bunch of romance novels. That's where the money is." I've heard how romance is formulaic and thus, it must be easy to write.
Is it? Is it really, actually easy to write?
There are a lot of terrible romance books out there. But then, there are a lot of terrible thriller books out there. There are a lot of terrible books of any genre (yes, fantasy and sci-fi too, let's not pretend).
I used to make fun of the romance genre. I read a few romance novels and couldn't stand them. But it's a little like trying tofu once and then proclaiming that you don't like tofu. It comes in so many different forms and textures--how can you know you hate it, just like that?
I tried to write romantic scenes into my novels and my stories and wow, they were terrible. Insert Tab A into Slot B--is that good for you? No?
Do you know what romance writers do well? Romance. I got recommendations from Tina Gower (who writes romance and is brilliant), and I read some really, really good romance novels. The authors built a spark between the characters, the banter was biting and witty, the books were funny, they were sad, they grew a relationship between two people that was maybe a little larger than life, but they made me feel something--and isn't that what good writing is supposed to do? I tried to analyze how it was done and I think it made my writing better. A good deal of fantasy and sci-fi novels have a romantic subplot. And many times the author pays much less attention to this aspect than to the rest of the story, to the whole book's detriment. Who wants to read a romantic subplot where the characters have zero chemistry?
Writers of romance are primarily women. Readers of romance are primarily women.
Let's take another genre, geared towards men: the military thriller. If a woman was reading a military thriller on a train, and a man was reading a romance...what kind of reaction do you think each would receive?
Read widely and read often: it's advice I've heard given to writers many times. What part of "read widely" says "except romance, that genre is lame"?
So please, at least stop and think twice the next time you want to disparage romance, or place yourself somehow above it, or feel like you already have all the answers on how to write one.
After all, for you writers who speak of bringing something new and exciting to your chosen genre--how much easier is it to build something different when you're unpacking more than one set of Legos?