The Fourteen Stones crowdfunder hit its target this morning. Thank you so much to everyone who helped us across the line! My book goes to print very soon: it’s going to be a real book, out in the world. I might be crying a bit right now. 🙂
It’s going to be a real book! Very soon!
I know I’ve said it before, but I can’t help saying it again: this novel means the world to me. I feel very lucky to have found a publisher who loves it as I do. You can listen here to an interview I did last week with Jax Goss, the “dog’s body,” as she says, of The Patchwork Raven. We talked about the inside scoop on my book’s creation, our favorite things about it, and what makes it a mold-breaker in fantasy writing. When Jax asked me what I’d most like folks to know about it – a tough question, when there’s so much! – what stood out most for me was the joy I felt crafting the fictional world, getting to know its people, and stepping into that space every time I sat down to work. I would love for people to share that with me, to visit my beloved Namora and Lassar, maybe to fall in love with the characters the way I did.
Mountains in Asturias, northwestern Spain; this area inspired my country Namora.
Thank you again to everyone who pledged and preordered and supported me and The Patchwork Raven in making this dream a reality. There’s still time to preorder a copy or e-copy, if you’d like: the crowdfunder runs through tomorrow, Wednesday August 31, at 8 pm EST. You definitely don’t want to miss out on this book. 🙂
An excerpt from Chapter 2, introducing my favorite character.
As always, thank you for visiting the blog. See you next time!
We’re coming up on the end of the Fourteen Stonescrowdfunder: two days and about six hours to go! We’ve made it three-quarters of the way to our target. Thank you so much to everyone who has pledged and preordered! If you haven’t yet, and would like your own copy or e-copy of this rich, unique, character-driven fantasy novel, you can order it (plus some excellent rewards) here.
Today’s bonus post is a partner for Friday’s character portraits. My husband, jazz musician and composer Paul Faatz, wrote a wonderful suite to capture some of the places and people in my novel. He’s a clarinetist and saxophonist, and I’m a pianist, so the two of us were able to perform his music together. We don’t get to do that often; it was a treat!
Please have a listen. The suite has three movements:
Vatiri’s Dream
Sostavi: A Foggy Morning
The Lasska
A few notes with each video (for more, you’ll need to read the novel 😉 ):
Mvt. 1 – Vatiri’s Dream – At the beginning of Fourteen Stones, a tribal people called the Pala Vaia are placed under grave threat by the ruler of Lassar, the country they live in. Vatiri, a Vaia woman, is a Lamp-Carrier whose dreams can show the future and provide guidance for her people.
Mvt. 2– Sostavi: A Foggy Morning – Sostavi is the capital city of Namora, one of the two countries featured in Fourteen Stones (and my favorite fictional place ever). It’s a coastal city modeled on the real town of Cudillero, in Asturias, on the northwestern coast of Spain. Houses and buildings cluster on a long slope that comes down to the city’s harbor. In Sostavi, in the early morning, sea fog swirls through the streets in drifts of cloud-white.
Mvt. 3 – The Lasska – The Pala Vaia live in the country Lassar, across the Senai Mountains from Namora. Lassar’s resident people are the Lasska. Centuries of dictatorial rulers have made them an insular, proud, and warlike people, but change may be coming to their country, sooner than they know and from a quarter they would never expect.
Thanks so much for listening, and for visiting the blog! If you’d like to find out more about the story that inspired this music, check out our crowdfunder and order your copy of Fourteen Stones today!
We’re in the homestretch of the crowdfunder for the launch of my novel Fourteen Stones: only five more days! My publisher has put some cool new rewards up in the PledgeMe campaign, and I’d like to offer a little “bonus” too.
Last night, my publisher and I did a live interview, which was so much fun. We talked about the story, and what makes it a different kind of fantasy; and the characters, and worldbuilding, and favorite scenes and most difficult scenes to write. We also got some wonderful questions from the audience. Check out our talk here!
One of the questions we got was about whether/how I used music in the story. While music isn’t mentioned a lot in Fourteen Stones, it definitely supported and inspired the writing process. Yesterday it struck me that some of my favorite piano pieces also work really well as “snapshots” of my four main characters, so I thought I’d share them, for fun. I won’t say too much about the characters (for that, you’ll need to check out the book! 😉 ), but the moods of these pieces fit them well.
My youngest character, a sixteen-year-old girl named Khari, whose unusual skill in reading dreams is both a gift and a great burden.
Valdena Filtraikas, a woman who finds herself in a position of power that she didn’t choose or want, and must choose how she will meet the challenge.
Bereg Orlon, a career soldier on the point of retirement, who is issued orders he knows are wrong; but disobeying them would make him a traitor and would cost him everything he cares about.
My favorite character, Ribas Silvaikas: a priest with an extraordinary skill, great strength and compassion, a chronic illness that presents a constant threat, and a core stubbornness that shapes everything he does.
If you’ve enjoyed these pieces and would like to know more about the story, please do check out the Fourteen Stones crowdfunder. We’ll need all pledges and preorders by Wednesday August 31 at 8 pm EST, so if you’d like to get your book, e-book, or other rewards, please place your order today!
As always, thank you for visiting the blog. See you next time!
Each Wednesday on the blog, I’ll share a small prompt as food for reflection. Maybe you’ll also find it inspires you to make some art.
Today’s post is a photo. What does this scenery inspire or evoke for you?
This photo was taken in northwestern Spain, in the region Asturias. Last week’s Maker’s Day prompt was a piece of music also inspired by this beautiful part of the world, as was my novel Fourteen Stones.
If you’d like, please feel free to share thoughts and responses to the prompt in the comments. On Facebook, I’ve also started a “Maker’s Day Sharing Group” where we can talk about the prompts and support each other’s creativity. New members are always welcome!
You can find all the Maker’s Day prompts together here. If you’d like to receive the prompts weekly, please consider subscribing to the blog. Thanks for visiting!
Today is the beginning of Fourteen Stones‘s Special Launch Week. My publisher is having a week-long online launch party, and we’re also going into the last week of our crowdfunder – which means if you’d like to get your own copy, now is the perfect time. 🙂
That was my little commercial. The rest of this post wants to go in a different direction.
Launching a book is a weird experience. It’s what we hope for and dream about through the long process of writing, and especially submitting the manuscript – but when you get there, you realize it’s also an ending. That part is hard.
Very soon, my project, and the people who inhabit it and whom I’ve come to know and love, won’t be just mine anymore. They will go out into the world and meet other people who will have their own responses to them, put their own spin on this work of my imagination. I don’t know what Fourteen Stones‘s readers will think of the story. I hope they’ll find something to love in it, because I can’t begin to say what it’s meant to me.
At endings, we often look back and think about what we’d like to remember. Here’s what I’ll remember about this particular journey, which started seven years ago.
1 – Visiting Spain in the summer of 2015: crossing the Atlantic for the first time, and once on the other side, feeling as if the ground I stood on wanted to drop out from under my feet. It was so very strange to be on the far side – the “wrong” side – of that ocean. During those first couple of disoriented and yes, panicky days, I didn’t know I’d come home with a story that would reshape things for me.
At Las Fragas de Eume, in Galicia, Spain’s northwest corner
2 – That scenery. Northwestern Spain, its coasts and villages and mountains, provided the foundation for the world of Fourteen Stones. I would never have imagined Namora, my favorite fictional country, without the inspiration of those hikes in Asturias. (“This is the trail? But it goes straight up! And look at all these rocks!!” It was gorgeous, but I will vouch, it put my hiking skills to the test. ;)) I wouldn’t have met my favorite character, a Namoran priest named Ribas Silvaikas, if I hadn’t had the chance to visit churches that dated back a thousand years, where the walls were infused with history and devotion and centuries of prayer. I wouldn’t have imagined a girl whose humanity challenged her world, and laid the foundations of a religious faith, if I hadn’t seen the remnants of Iron Age villages, and felt the most profound sense of home I’ve ever experienced.
Rugged scenery at Covadonga Lakes, Asturias.
3 – (continuing from the above) The northwestern Spanish coast. I will remember the turquoise water, the pebbly sand, the scatterings of sea glass: blue and green and white. I’ll remember the clear tidal pools with their rainbows of crawling and swimming inhabitants. I’ll remember the fishing boats at Noia and the harbor at Cudillero, a town of brilliantly-colored, clay-roofed houses clustering on the hillsides. Cudillero was the model for Namora’s capital city, Sostavi, and I hope to get back to it someday.
On the hills above San Andres de Teixido, Galicia. That ocean!
4 – The writing. I’ll remember that first (awful) draft, written in a whirlwind of excitement after my husband and I came home from our trip. I thought I knew what I was doing and what the story was meant to be. I was completely wrong, but those few months were full of joy.
5 – The rewriting. After a couple of years, in which I learned a lot more about writing and saw the publication of my first book, I came back to the draft I’d called From the Circle House and gave it another look. This time, I could see the holes and messes, but there was a seed there, too. Another year of brainstorming gave me enough of a foundation to try again. The second time was much harder, but worth every moment. That was when Fourteen Stones took shape.
For the past four years, I’ve kept the maps of my fictional countries Namora and Lassar up over my desk, along with my floor plan for a Circle House, one of the most important places in the story. Now I have artist’s renderings of both the maps and the Circle House, turning those figments of my imagination into real places. It’s astonishing.
My Namora, as a real place…
I can’t wait until I’ll get to hold a copy of the actual book. That’s always the best part, and the scariest too. Now it’s real. Now it’s done. My novel takes flight very soon. I hope it’ll have a beautiful journey, and that its readers will too. Most of all, I hope that some of what I put into it, the love and dreaming, the real-world beauty that inspired the book and the fantasy-world beauty I tried to put into it, will come through on the page for the people who will share the story with me.
As always, thanks so much for visiting the blog. If you’d like to find out more about Fourteen Stones, don’t forget to check out the launch party events and the crowdfunder. Also, if you’d like a midweek creative pick-me-up, stop back tomorrow for a Maker’s Day prompt. See you next time!
My rather imperfect rendering of Isaac Albeniz’s piece “Asturias,” inspired by that region of Spain.
Each Wednesday on the blog, I’ll share a small prompt as food for reflection. Maybe you’ll also find it inspires you to make some art.
Today’s prompt is a musical one: my (slightly rough, with apologies 😉 ) recording of “Asturias,” by Isaac Albeniz.
“Asturias” is a movement from the Spanish Suite by Albeniz, who wanted to capture different areas of his homeland in music. Asturias is a region in northwest Spain. When my husband and I visited there seven years ago, the setting inspired my book Fourteen Stones.
What does this music evoke for you? If you’d like, please feel free to share thoughts and responses to the prompt in the comments. On Facebook, I’ve also started a “Maker’s Day Sharing Group” where we can talk about the prompts and support each other’s creativity. New members are always welcome!
You can find all the Maker’s Day prompts together here. If you’d like to receive the prompts weekly, please consider subscribing to the blog. Thanks for visiting!
Today’s post isn’t the one I meant to write. I’d planned just to post a “musical teaser” about my novel Fourteen Stones, but yesterday I was looking through some old photos, and got a new idea.
I’ve posted here on the blog about my experiences with mental health challenges, especially anxiety and depression. Both of those of course tend to get a lot more active during times of stress. These days, depression has made pretty regular appearances. Professional anxiety usually gets me going: “Am I doing enough?” and “Am I doing the right things?” turns into a litany of reasons why I’m not, and why that translates to my not being enough.
Last night, I pulled out a bunch of half-remembered photos I had in my desk. They’re all of me as a kid, starting when I was about a year old and going up until about age twelve. For a long time, I’ve had it in my head that I was a pretty challenging kid. Smart, but with a big tendency toward daydreaming and spacing out. Always a little out of touch with the world.
This was me at the beginning of first grade:
Age six. Looking pretty happy about school photos.
I was cuter than I’d thought. The one thing I don’t like about this picture is that it doesn’t show my glasses, which I started wearing in kindergarten. At that time, I was the only kid at school who wore them. That’s undoubtedly part of the reason my mother told me to take them off for every picture. These days, I’d much rather have the memory of how I really looked.
This little girl, six-year-old me, undoubtedly was pretty “spacey” and “dreamy.” I remember, though, that she was also the one who wrote her first original story. It was called “The River,” about a king who essentially “stole” water from his subjects by damming the river in his kingdom. I don’t remember how things got resolved, but everyone did live happily ever after. I also remember that I was inspired to write the story because of the way the bathtub faucet dripped. (Inspiration comes from everywhere. 😉 )
A few years later, here’s fourth-grade me:
Age nine. Same smile.
Again, I should have glasses in this photo. When I look at this girl, though, I notice how pretty she was. I remember, too, that she was the one who fell in love with Tolkien. That was the year I discovered The Hobbit. I remember taking the time to memorize that wonderful “Far O’er the Misty Mountains Cold” poem, getting chills every time I got to the line “The mountain smoked beneath the moon…”
That little girl also wrote a lot. Some of her stories were “fan fic” imitations of favorite writers, but some were originals, start to finish. She wrote poetry too. She loved words, the way they tasted, the way they sang. I remember what that was like. I remember, too, how that little girl decided she would be a writer when she grew up.
Nine-year-old me didn’t have the best situation at home. Much later, in my twenties and thirties, I came to understand why, for instance, I used to feel scared most days on the way home from school. I’m still tangling with and figuring out a lot of things, but I know that younger-me didn’t have the family a child deserves. I also have a better sense of why, these days, forty-something-me always struggles to think well of herself, or believe in what she can do.
Which brings me back to that professional anxiety thing, and depression thing, I mentioned a few paragraphs ago. Last night, I looked at my old pictures, especially the one of my fourth-grade self who decided to be a writer, and thought how proud she would be of how I turned out.
Those of us who grew up in unhealthy environments often learn, as adults, about self-parenting. I’ve had a lot of trouble with that idea, what with my ingrained sense that I was a “difficult” kid, but when I look at the girl in these pictures, I realize she wasn’t the challenge I always believed she was. Sure, she had her moments, but she was smart and creative, imaginative and kind. She always marched to her own beat, even when the people closest to her made that risky and unsafe. She was pretty cool. If I could reach into the past now, I’d tell her so. I’d tell her to hang in there, she and I will make it through together.
I have a feeling she would tell me I’m pretty cool too. You really write books? Wow!! Taking the self-parenting idea a step farther, I who don’t have kids (except feline ones): I would say that if she were my daughter, she’d think her mom was awesome. And if she were my daughter, I would be awfully proud of her.
My husband and me. Still the same smile, no?
This post has felt pretty personal and pretty risky, but it’s been good to write. Thank you for reading.
Since I can’t leave without plugging my book a little, please do remember to check out the Fourteen Stonescrowdfunder campaign – link below – if you’d like to preorder a print or e-book. If you have a bookstore, or book groups, etc., and would like multiple copies, we do have a wholesale option. You can also choose to pledge other amounts to the crowdfunder. We can only take preorders and pledges until August 31!
Each Wednesday on the blog, I’ll share a small prompt as food for reflection. Maybe you’ll also find it inspires you to make some art.
Today’s prompt is a word:
What images, sounds, feelings, etc. might this word evoke? In what ways or contexts do you experience surprise? Is the idea of it overall positive, to you, or is it more complicated?
If you’d like, please feel free to share thoughts and responses to the prompt in the comments. On Facebook, I’ve also started a “Maker’s Day Sharing Group” where we can talk about the prompts and support each other’s creativity. New members are always welcome!
You can find all the Maker’s Day prompts together here. If you’d like to receive the prompts weekly, please consider subscribing to the blog. Thanks for visiting!
It’s getting real! Preorders are available now for my new novel Fourteen Stones, and I’m thrilled to share the cover. Will Thompson, the artist with my publisher The Patchwork Raven, did an incredible job turning a product of my imagination into a beautiful design.
Cover reveal!
The building in this picture is a Circle House. Circle Houses have tremendous significance in Namora, one of the two countries featured in the novel. They’re places of worship, and equally importantly, places for communities to gather and for people to find rest, strength, and hope. My favorite character, Ribas Silvaikas, is a priest who serves in the Circle House of his home village, Lida. From Fourteen Stones:
Back in the square [of Lida village], one building made of gray stone stood out in the cluster of white-painted shops and houses. Its shape made it unusual too: it was perfectly round, with a conical wooden roof whose point reached higher into the sky than any of the peaked tiled roofs around it.
This was Lida’s Circle House. Here, on Pirdina, the First Day of every week, all the villagers came together to worship the goddess Kenavi. No one able to leave their house would miss that tribute. Throughout the week, the House’s doors stood open from morning to night. Anyone in need of the Goddess’s guidance, or quiet time alone in the cool circle of the stone walls, might go in and set down, for a while, whatever burdens they had brought with them.
When my publisher asked if I had thoughts for the cover design, my first thought was I’m no visual artist. 😉 Then I thought it would be awesome if we could feature a Circle House, but I knew I’d never manage to draw one myself. Will Thompson was brilliant at turning the image I’ve carried in my head for years into a real depiction of the place.
This is a sketch that Will worked from: my rough drawing of Lida’s Circle House complex. The blue box shows the relevant part. Like I said, I’m no visual artist.
The Patchwork Raven is a small indie press that handles all its own production and distribution. When I first spoke with Jax Goss, who runs the press, she said she would completely understand if signing my book over to her felt “too rebellious” to me, too far away from the traditional publishing model that a lot of us writers think we have to pursue. I’ll admit, it did feel a bit like going out on a limb. But what mattered most to me was Jax’s complete support for and delight in Fourteen Stones. I couldn’t ask for a better partner in this venture.
Which brings me to the “getting real” part of this post: as mentioned, preorders are now available! The Patchwork Raven is having a PledgeMe crowdfunder to support the first print run. When you pledge to the campaign, you can choose your rewards: an e-book, a print book, a package that includes artwork, and other rewards which we’ll be adding as we go. When you pledge the cost of a print or e-book, you’re preordering your copy of the book, and you’ll receive it in October.
By pledging, you’re supporting me, Fourteen Stones, and The Patchwork Raven. Indie presses are wonderful about championing their writers, giving us fair contracts, and respecting our work. They’re also an essential voice in the publishing world, where traditional presses so often go with “safe” commercial options. Indies give more voices and stories a place at the table.
Interested? Please check out the link below to visit the crowdfunder and make a pledge if you’d like. If you need a little more convincing, I’ve also included a vid of my top five reasons (only a little tongue-in-cheek 😉 ) to read this particular book. Please note: we’ll need all pledges by August 31, to hit our crowdfunder target!
As always, thanks so much for visiting the blog. If you’d like to receive weekly updates, as well as Maker’s Day prompts every Wednesday, please consider subscribing. See you next time!
Each Wednesday on the blog, I’ll share a small prompt as food for reflection. Maybe you’ll also find it inspires you to make some art.
Today’s prompt is a musical one: Prelude in D Minor, from Book 2 of The Well-Tempered Clavier, by J.S. Bach. What does it inspire for you?
If you’d like, please feel free to share thoughts and responses to the prompt in the comments. On Facebook, I’ve also started a “Maker’s Day Sharing Group” where we can talk about the prompts and support each other’s creativity. New members are always welcome!
You can find all the Maker’s Day prompts together here. If you’d like to receive the prompts weekly, please consider subscribing to the blog. Thanks for visiting!
Kris Faatz 