I've revealed the full cover art for Amongst the Stars, otherwise known as The Song of Forgotten Stars, book III! It's over at ForgottenStars.net, so go have a look!
The third volume is coming soon, folks!
The personal blog of author Kelly Sedinger, chronicling the adventures of one overalls-clad wanderer.
Showing posts with label Stardancer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stardancer. Show all posts
Friday, April 21, 2017
Tuesday, November 10, 2015
THE WISDOMFOLD PATH is now LIVE!!!
Yes, folks, the day has come: Book II of The Song of Forgotten Stars is now a reality! Details are over on the official site, but the important thing is: THE WISDOMFOLD PATH is a GO!!!
More commentary to come, but for now...WOW!
Sunday, April 19, 2015
A Casting Coincidence
I don't tend to spend a lot of time -- at all -- thinking about what real-life actors might play the roles in the inevitable movies which will be made from my books. First of all, I don't want to get locked down in my head to a single look or voice, and second, well...that's the writer's equivalent of the kid with the bat stepping up to home plate on an empty neighborhood field and saying to himself, "It's the bottom of the ninth. Game seven of the World Series. Timmy steps up...."
But like all rules, I don't follow this one specifically, and there are two roles in the Forgotten Stars books that I have mentally filled with specific actors. One is the stern, business-like, and highly competent Lieutenant Penda Rasharri, who serves as an unplanned mentor to Princess Tariana Osono, giving the Princess her first lessons in what it is to be a Stardancer. I'm not sure why, but the actor I've always had in my mind as playing Rasharri is Taraji P. Henson.
But like all rules, I don't follow this one specifically, and there are two roles in the Forgotten Stars books that I have mentally filled with specific actors. One is the stern, business-like, and highly competent Lieutenant Penda Rasharri, who serves as an unplanned mentor to Princess Tariana Osono, giving the Princess her first lessons in what it is to be a Stardancer. I'm not sure why, but the actor I've always had in my mind as playing Rasharri is Taraji P. Henson.
But here's something weird: via SamuraiFrog's blog, I literally just learned -- after loving Henson's work on Person of Interest for the first three seasons -- that the 'P' in her name stands for Penda.
(And who is the other character for whom I've had a specific face in mind? Hmmmm...any guesses. folks who have read Stardancer?)
Monday, January 12, 2015
Monday, December 22, 2014
You can get STARDANCER for free!
I've been remiss in notifying folks here that I've listed STARDANCER as a Goodreads Giveaway. That's right, I'm giving away two copies, totally for free! Details here. There are three days and change left to enter, if you're a member.
(If anyone's wondering, I don't pick the winners. Goodreads does, and then they e-mail me two addresses to send the books, so there's no way at all for me to put my thumb on the scales, as it were.)
(If anyone's wondering, I don't pick the winners. Goodreads does, and then they e-mail me two addresses to send the books, so there's no way at all for me to put my thumb on the scales, as it were.)
Sunday, December 14, 2014
Where STARDANCER came from!
This post is cross-posted from ForgottenStars.net, and slightly spoilery for the book.
So, where exactly did I get the idea for Stardancer? Easy answer. I got it from a lot of places.
(This is long, but I hope it’s at least a little interesting!)
Like many a writer, my first efforts at fiction writing were fanfiction — Star Wars fanfiction, specifically. I suppose that’s not terribly surprising, huh? Fanfic has been the starting point for many a writer, and Star Wars was one of the biggies.
Now, when I was writing Star Wars fanfic, I wasn’t writing original stories in that universe. Instead I took the basic thrust of the Original Trilogy’s story and rewrote it, with “new” characters and some plot twists along the way. I changed Luke Skywalker from a farmboy to a competitive pilot. My Han Solo character acted the part of a cynical space-rogue, but that was just a front for his own revolutionary activities. Princess Leia? Well, she was the voluptuous space pirate who ended up being a part of the good guys. And instead of rebels versus a Galactic Empire, I had the galaxy basically divided into two “countries”, a democratic republic and a harsh Empire. These two entities had been at war for decades, and now it was coming to a violent head.
I kept some other stuff, of course. I had an Emperor and his Vader figure, although I played up the angle in the Original Trilogy of Darth Vader wanting to kill the Emperor and take over. The thrust of my Episode One (which coincided with Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope) was the necessity of destroying my Empire’s new superweapon; in my Episode II, the freshly defeated Empire — well, it struck back. And so on.
I finished my own version of the Star Wars trilogy, in the first year or two after I graduated college. Then, I started working on the first draft ever of my Arthurian novel, The Promised King (and let me tell you, that draft was an embarrassing mess). I thought I was done with Star Wars fanfic, but I found myself sucked back in, around the time The Phantom Menace came out. Now I was wanting to continue on — but not, as George Lucas was doing, by going backwards; I wanted to write what would have been a putative Star Wars Episode VII.
I did start that project, but I never finished it, choosing instead to eventually leave fanfic behind for good, as I started working on that Arthurian novel a lot and writing short fiction for attempted publication. Problem was, my space opera story for my own Episode IV was sticking in my head. The central idea was the discovery of a planet that has been literally sequestered from the rest of the Galaxy for centuries, a planet that was once a part of a vast Empire that has been gone for so long it’s almost completely forgotten — but its descendants are still lurking out there somewhere. I liked that idea, and filed it away in the back of my head. I knew I’d get back to that strange planet, whose inhabitants were forbidden to travel to the stars, but I knew it wasn’t going to be my re-worked Luke, Han, and Leia who went there.
So who would?
I had no idea.
I wasn’t worried about it. I wasn’t even consciously thinking about this, much. When I get ideas, I almost never jump on them as soon as they pop into my head. I let them marinate a bit. Or percolate. Or simmer for years and years and years — and I’m not kidding about that. This whole thought process, beginning with this little lost planet? That’s from 1999 or 2000. A long way back.
Meanwhile, at some point in 2001, I got a movie on a VHS tape that I had heard was very good, an animated film from Japan that would be suitable for The Daughter, was was only 2 at the time. The film? Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro.
If you’ve seen that film, you know that it’s about two young sisters, one of whom is roughly 13 or 14 and the other of whom is around 6 or 7. They move with their father to a small village, out near a hospital where their mother has had an extended stay, and here they have adventures, some of which are supernatural and involve the giant furry beast who lives in the nearby enormous tree. (Yes, it sounds heavier and more depressing here than it really is — the film is utterly delightful and magical and you should see it if you haven’t.)
I didn’t watch My Neighbor Totoro and immediately conclude that I should have two sisters go to my little lost planet. But that notion came along not very long after I saw the movie, and it’s clear to me that this is where that part of the puzzle came from. Now, I did make my two Princesses older than the ones in the film, but I liked the idea of the dynamic between two sisters. Brother-and-sister has been done a lot, but sister-and-sister, not quite so much.
From there, it sat in my mind. For years. I wrote a couple of pages, over ten years ago, just to see what it might feel like. I considered serializing the story online, in blog form, writing one chapter at a time. I kicked around a lot of options, through the last half of the 2000s, always kicking this idea of these two Princesses (because obviously they were Princesses!) and the odd planet they found, but never quite getting ’round to writing it.
I’m not sure what I was waiting for, but finally, sometime in 2011, I decided that it was time to stop waiting for the story to be “ready”. There is never a “ready”, when it comes to stories. I believed in this idea, more than any other I had (and I have quite a few), and I wanted to write it, more than any other. The question was, What was I waiting for?
And thus, it was off to the races.
Three years later, here we are!
So, where exactly did I get the idea for Stardancer? Easy answer. I got it from a lot of places.
(This is long, but I hope it’s at least a little interesting!)
Like many a writer, my first efforts at fiction writing were fanfiction — Star Wars fanfiction, specifically. I suppose that’s not terribly surprising, huh? Fanfic has been the starting point for many a writer, and Star Wars was one of the biggies.
Now, when I was writing Star Wars fanfic, I wasn’t writing original stories in that universe. Instead I took the basic thrust of the Original Trilogy’s story and rewrote it, with “new” characters and some plot twists along the way. I changed Luke Skywalker from a farmboy to a competitive pilot. My Han Solo character acted the part of a cynical space-rogue, but that was just a front for his own revolutionary activities. Princess Leia? Well, she was the voluptuous space pirate who ended up being a part of the good guys. And instead of rebels versus a Galactic Empire, I had the galaxy basically divided into two “countries”, a democratic republic and a harsh Empire. These two entities had been at war for decades, and now it was coming to a violent head.
I kept some other stuff, of course. I had an Emperor and his Vader figure, although I played up the angle in the Original Trilogy of Darth Vader wanting to kill the Emperor and take over. The thrust of my Episode One (which coincided with Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope) was the necessity of destroying my Empire’s new superweapon; in my Episode II, the freshly defeated Empire — well, it struck back. And so on.
I finished my own version of the Star Wars trilogy, in the first year or two after I graduated college. Then, I started working on the first draft ever of my Arthurian novel, The Promised King (and let me tell you, that draft was an embarrassing mess). I thought I was done with Star Wars fanfic, but I found myself sucked back in, around the time The Phantom Menace came out. Now I was wanting to continue on — but not, as George Lucas was doing, by going backwards; I wanted to write what would have been a putative Star Wars Episode VII.
I did start that project, but I never finished it, choosing instead to eventually leave fanfic behind for good, as I started working on that Arthurian novel a lot and writing short fiction for attempted publication. Problem was, my space opera story for my own Episode IV was sticking in my head. The central idea was the discovery of a planet that has been literally sequestered from the rest of the Galaxy for centuries, a planet that was once a part of a vast Empire that has been gone for so long it’s almost completely forgotten — but its descendants are still lurking out there somewhere. I liked that idea, and filed it away in the back of my head. I knew I’d get back to that strange planet, whose inhabitants were forbidden to travel to the stars, but I knew it wasn’t going to be my re-worked Luke, Han, and Leia who went there.
So who would?
I had no idea.
I wasn’t worried about it. I wasn’t even consciously thinking about this, much. When I get ideas, I almost never jump on them as soon as they pop into my head. I let them marinate a bit. Or percolate. Or simmer for years and years and years — and I’m not kidding about that. This whole thought process, beginning with this little lost planet? That’s from 1999 or 2000. A long way back.
Meanwhile, at some point in 2001, I got a movie on a VHS tape that I had heard was very good, an animated film from Japan that would be suitable for The Daughter, was was only 2 at the time. The film? Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro.
If you’ve seen that film, you know that it’s about two young sisters, one of whom is roughly 13 or 14 and the other of whom is around 6 or 7. They move with their father to a small village, out near a hospital where their mother has had an extended stay, and here they have adventures, some of which are supernatural and involve the giant furry beast who lives in the nearby enormous tree. (Yes, it sounds heavier and more depressing here than it really is — the film is utterly delightful and magical and you should see it if you haven’t.)
I didn’t watch My Neighbor Totoro and immediately conclude that I should have two sisters go to my little lost planet. But that notion came along not very long after I saw the movie, and it’s clear to me that this is where that part of the puzzle came from. Now, I did make my two Princesses older than the ones in the film, but I liked the idea of the dynamic between two sisters. Brother-and-sister has been done a lot, but sister-and-sister, not quite so much.
From there, it sat in my mind. For years. I wrote a couple of pages, over ten years ago, just to see what it might feel like. I considered serializing the story online, in blog form, writing one chapter at a time. I kicked around a lot of options, through the last half of the 2000s, always kicking this idea of these two Princesses (because obviously they were Princesses!) and the odd planet they found, but never quite getting ’round to writing it.
I’m not sure what I was waiting for, but finally, sometime in 2011, I decided that it was time to stop waiting for the story to be “ready”. There is never a “ready”, when it comes to stories. I believed in this idea, more than any other I had (and I have quite a few), and I wanted to write it, more than any other. The question was, What was I waiting for?
And thus, it was off to the races.
Three years later, here we are!
Thursday, November 20, 2014
Now for Kindle!!!
As you can see, Stardancer is now available for Kindle! It is exclusive to Kindle right now, but I did enroll it for Kindle Unlimited, so if you're partaking of that service, you can read it for free. (Just make sure you read at least 10 percent of the book, so I get the credit for it, money-wise!) And if you don't have a Kindle, get the Kindle app for whatever device you do have!
The paperback is still available, if that's your preference.
Enjoy!
(And yes, I will be getting back to less book-and-writing posting at some point. This month has been exciting, though!)
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
Those three little words....
AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE!
Yes, today is the day. I'll have more to say later on, but for now: Stardancer is now available for purchase on Amazon.com.
Currently the book is available in print only, but the Kindle e-version will follow in two or three weeks (more likely two), with other platforms to follow once any exclusivity periods run out.
As I say, more later.
For now, STARDANCER is available for purchase!!!
Yes, today is the day. I'll have more to say later on, but for now: Stardancer is now available for purchase on Amazon.com.
Currently the book is available in print only, but the Kindle e-version will follow in two or three weeks (more likely two), with other platforms to follow once any exclusivity periods run out.
As I say, more later.
For now, STARDANCER is available for purchase!!!
Saturday, November 08, 2014
I gotta buy some blue Sharpies
Yesterday I got home to a box from UPS. Here's what was inside:
Oh yeah, babe. This thing is happening.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to buy the Sharpies. (And a bunch of groceries, because the family's gotta eat.)
Oh yeah, babe. This thing is happening.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to buy the Sharpies. (And a bunch of groceries, because the family's gotta eat.)
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
Chapter 3!!!
I've just posted the third, and final, sample chapter from Stardancer. Go check it out! In two weeks, the book itself will be available. I can't believe it's this close!
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
And on the twenty-second day, the second chapter did he post....
That's right, folks! Chapter 2 of Stardancer is now up at the official site, ForgottenStars.net. Go read it! Next week I'll post Chapter 3, and then, after that, the only way to find out what happens next is to buy the book starting November 12!
(What are you reading this for? Go! Click that link and get caught up!)
(Seriously, you need to go. Now.)
(My, you are the stubborn one, aren't you? Here's another link. Will that make you go read Chapter 2?)
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Chapter the First! And so it begins!
OK, folks, want to actually meet those lovely Princesses? Now you can! It's Chapter One at ForgottenStars.net! They're not in SPACE!!! yet, but they soon will be....
Saturday, October 11, 2014
Don't take MY word for it! (Again)
Another of my beta-readers weighs in. Getting SamuraiFrog's approval was really huge to me. His tastes and mine intersect frequently, but we have enough areas of disagreement that I knew he wasn't a sure thing, and he's whip-smart, so if he doesn't like something, he can tell you exactly why, with often brutal force and surgical precision. That he responded to the book as warmly as he did (while still making some useful observations along the way) is a definite boost in the confidence I feel for my own story.
And if you haven't seen them yet, check out the book trailer and the cover art at ForgottenStars.net! This coming Wednesday I will post the complete Chapter One.
And if you haven't seen them yet, check out the book trailer and the cover art at ForgottenStars.net! This coming Wednesday I will post the complete Chapter One.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)