The Purist Launch Party and Giveaway

It’s Thursday 2 August 2018, and that means we’re getting closer to The Purist being available for general purchase from www.ninestarpress.com and other vendors. To celebrate (and calm my nerves a bit), I’m setting up a giveaway on this blog.

What is this book? Learn more here.

Rules are simple: From today until 3 September 2018, comment on this post (I might have an AbsoluteWrite and Rafflecopter entry set up, too). Each poster (not each comment) gets one entry. During the first week of September I’ll gather all the entries, assign numbers to each poster, and toss the whole batch into www.random.org.

The legal skinny: I will collect only poster’s names for this raffle. The winners will be notified, and only then privately give me email addresses so I can arrange physical shipping anywhere in the world that UPS or USPS goes, at my expense. Once that’s done, I will not be keeping posters’ information. If you want to follow this blog, I’ve got a button for that in the side menu to the right.

I’m drawing three winners this time! All three of you get your choice of an ePub or Mobi file of The Purist. The Grand Prize winner also gets this necklace.

I didn’t have time to make a beadwork piece, but a jewelry company I do freelance work for has this stunning sterling silver and labradorite pendant. I got to pick out the one with the most blue-green fire, plus a 20″ figure-8 chain that matched. I gave the chain a 4″ extension and a swiveling lobster-claw clasp, and accented the joins with vintage carved rock crystal beads.

Blues and teals are a big deal on Lonhra, the setting of this book: they’re the colors of the native vegetation. (If you want to know what girwood looks like, think iridescent blue labradorite crossed with red oak, but stronger than carbon fiber.) The Sirrithani, one major race of Lonhra, have a bent for over-ornamenting everything, so the cut-out floral paisley designs on the teardrop pendant seemed to fit, too. The necklace can be worn at any length up to 24″, since the clasp will anchor at any point along the figure-8 chain as well as the extension.

If you want to shop my friends at www.plazko.com, here’s the pendant by itself, and here’s the chain. The sterling silver jewelry is a limited-edition lot they purchased some years back, so when it’s gone its gone. But they are always adding amazing new silver, vermeil, or 14Kt gold filled jewelry, finished chains, chains by the foot, charms, and gemstone beads.

If none of you enter, I get to keep a very pretty necklace. I have too much of my own jewelry already, so enter this giveaway!

As for The Purist, I still love this book even though publishing it *terrifies* me.

In the summer of 1983 I doodled this fantasy map, and veered off from my then-current obsessions with Star Wars and The Silmarillion by wondering “What if Morgoth wasn’t such an asshole all the time? What if the Elves were the environmental disaster, and the Orcs were a lot more stable and charismatic?”

I’d also had recent exposure to Diane Duane’s ‘Middle Kingdoms’ fantasy novels, and the late great Tanith Lee’s ‘Flat Earth’ fantasy series. Both of those left their mark on my worldbuilding: I flatly admit to borrowing blue trees from the former, and a certain fountain of red fire from the latter.

Lonhra (under another name back then) was born, and grew with me over the next three decades. The map changed into a galaxy. It was a private worldbuilding hobby, a rich and evolving framework for 120,000 years of in-story history. While Moro’s Price is set in the same universe but much later, The Purist is where I show maybe too much of how deeply the Lonhraverse wove itself into my craft.

Yes, there is a village in India with that name. Due to a disaster in collaboration about two decades ago, I shelved the world’s first name and rebuilt its cosmology. Since I was a Tolkien geek and made a couple of constructed languages for this project, ‘Lonhra’ in these means ‘Hidden Star’…which is a huge-ass series spoiler by itself.

I hope you folks like this book, and this universe.