M.A. Carrick's Blog

If you haven’t seen me Kermit flailing all over social media already — our expedited set of pattern decks have arrived!

The bulk of our order is coming by sea mail, so they won’t be here until late July at the earliest. But we wanted to have some to show off at BayCon, where we will be among the Guests of Honor next weekend! If you’re a Kickstarter backer who ordered a non-gilt-edged deck, let us know and we can probably hand-deliver yours to you at the con.

They are so pretty, y’all. I was ne...

We are just two weeks out from our joint stint as one of the Guests of Honor at BayCon in the San Francisco Bay Area! And according to the shipping update we just received, we should have a few sample pattern decks to show off at the con! The rest are coming by sea mail, which is much slower, but we made a tiny splurge to have a small number expedited to us.

We hope to see you there!

The post BayCon is coming up! appeared first on M.A. Carrick.

Last year I stopped posting to my personal blog about what I’d been reading because it abruptly became All Research, All the Time for The Sea Beyond, and I couldn’t talk yet about what Alyc and I were working on. Then I could talk about it, but it didn’t make good fodder for the usual “here’s what I’ve been reading” posts, and I didn’t have the time or energy to work through the backlog to do the kinds of individualized book reports I did back in my Onyx Court days.

But this book gets a report, ...

The news finally became public today: The Broken Binding, a UK-based special edition publisher, will be putting out an illustrated hardcover edition of the entire Rook and Rose trilogy! New cover art, colored endpaper art, and black-and-white images throughout, with foil on the hard case, the whole shebang. Alyc and I are incredibly excited, and also we signed our names 4,725 in the last month, on tip-in sheets to be bound with the books.

Now, if you’re not already a Broken Binding subscriber, i...

We are incredibly pleased to announce that, having not murdered each other over our first collaboration, we are venturing forth again with a new series: The Sea Beyond, a historical fantasy duology of scholarship, conquest, and faerie magic!

*

[image error]

In an alternate Spanish Golden Age, where the map becomes the territory and mapmakers are the architects of reality, the Council of the Sea Beyond has risen to unrivaled power, exploiting the world’s most precious resources for their own gain.

Determined ...

A world as complex as the setting for the Rook and Rose trilogy contains a lot of information — and when there are two authors involved, you can’t just assume everybody will remember everything the same. That’s why Alyc and I got my husband to set up a private wiki for us, where we could keep track of the details.

It grew to be . . . rather comprehensive, let’s say. (As in, 190K words, which makes it essentially the fourth book of the series — and longer than any non-Rook and Rose novel I’ve eve...

The post Coming soon . . . appeared first on M.A. Carrick.

Remembering what came out when, and which category it falls into, can be hard even for the people involved in writing, so we’ve compiled this list of award-eligible works from the past year for the upcoming season. The biggest one is obviously the completion of the Rook & Rose trilogy, but we think there’s a lot of great short and medium-length fiction as well.

Eligible Series

The recent news about extreme hinkiness in last year’s Hugo Awards (works ruled ineligible without the authors being notified or any reason given; questionable voting numbers; attendees’ voting rights reportedly being reassigned to the convention committee) is deeply disturbing — me, I’m in favor of a Retro Hugo for 2023 in an upcoming year, since we already have that structure in place — but for this upcoming year, the more people who get involved, the better! If you want to nominate, you have ...

The Rook and Rose pattern deck Kickstarter was a complete success. As in, we unlocked every single stretch goal, and raised nearly $3000 beyond the top one — a wonderful margin of safety against things like shipping costs increasing between now and when we deliver the decks.

Not gonna lie: before we launched this project, I was significantly worried that it would fail. I’ve run a successful Kickstarter before, but the goal for that one was a full order of magnitude smaller than this. $31,500 is ...