Daughter Of Blood Is Out In The World -- And I'm Having Fun With That!

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US cover

A book launch is an edge of the seat, don't hold your breath, wild ride of a time, with interviews and guest posts, reviews and reader feedback all a-happening.

When I posted last month, Daughter of Blood (The Wall of Night Book Three) had just been published and everything was very new. So this month, I thought I'd share some of my highlights from the book launch journey between then and now.

Very early on, I did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit Fantasy. I was a tad nervous, since the subjects I know nothing at all about include quantum physics, crochet, and the rules of croquet. (Just to name a few!) Luckily for me, none of those subjects came up -- but one Redditeer did ask me:

"What was your favorite part to write in Daughter of Blood? Was there a particular scene..."

And yes, there was. As I replied then:

"There are many favorite scenes, but one that I very much enjoyed but also seemed to be greatly enjoyed by my beta readers is a glorious charge against rather large, if not overwhelming odds--I did say above, that this is epic fantasy, right? At any rate, the charge is, like the character who leads it, glorious but when I was thinking of paring DAUGHTER back, I did wonder if I could delete both that character and therefore that scene. But my beta readers said, pretty much as one, "No, you can't!" And who am I to deny such conviction from my beta readers? So the scene is still in there and I hope readers may also enjoy it."

UK/AU/NZ cover

Meanwhile, in an interview on The Qwillery, I was thrown a real curved ball:

"Describe Daughter of Blood in 140 characters or less. /like a tweet/"

Like a tweet, thought, OMG -- this is like the dreaded elevator pitch only a kerzillion times worse! However, once I stopped hyperventilating and put my thinking cap on, I did manage this:

“Intrigue, war, & friendship in the face of darkness as two heroes race against time to find a lost shield and solve a 400 year-old mystery.”

Sound OK? I thought it would probably past muster. ;-)

About the same time, I also had a guest post on TOR.com,  Aikido: The Art of Falling. (AKA "Helen -- the Martial Arts Years.") I had a lot of fun writing this post, although it also contained a thread of seriousness:

 "Some moments are magic and you remember them forever—which pretty much sums up the very first time I ventured into an aikido dojo ... Aikido just clicked for me and although I drove home with a reasonable complement of aches and bruises (the first of many over the years to come) I also had this huge sense of wellbeing. I felt as if I was the right person in the right place at the right time—and doing absolutely the right thing. .."

To find out more about "how" and "why" click on through to TOR.com and:

Aikido: The Art of Falling


Just a grab-bag of highlights from this rollercoaster ride of book launch fun! Some of the other highlights include:

• A guest post on SF Signal: Writing Heroines: Malian, Myr, and DAUGHTER OF BLOOD
• An interview with Sharon Stogner on the ismellsheep genre site
• Write & Take Flight guest post: The Road To Story 
•  Functional Nerds podcast, Episode 264: a conversation with John Anealio and Patrick Hester
•  Fantasy Faction guest post: Five Legendary Swords of Fantasy Fiction

I hope you have as much fun checking them out as I had doing them all. :-)

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Helen Lowe is a novelist, poet, interviewer and blogger whose first novel, Thornspell (Knopf), was published to critical praise in 2008. Her second, The Heir of Night (The Wall Of Night Series, Book One) won the Gemmell Morningstar Award 2012. The sequel, The Gathering Of The Lost, was shortlisted for the Gemmell Legend Award in 2013. Daughter Of Blood, (The Wall Of Night, Book Three) was published on January 26, 2016. Helen posts regularly on her “…on Anything, Really” blog, occasionally on SF Signal, and is also on Twitter: @helenl0we