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New eBook Bundles: 4/10/18

Here are the new ebook bundles that went on sale today!

The Complete Instrumentalities of the Night by Glen Cook

Place holder  of - 12In this epic fantasy series from Glen Cook, politics, religion, and kingdoms collide on an earth-shattering scale. As introduced inthe first book, The Tyranny of the Night, imps, demons, and dark gods rule in the spaces surrounding humanity, while a wall of ice at the edge of the world threatens to overtake the land of the Night.

This discounted ebundle includes The Tyranny of the Night, Lord of the Silent Kingdom, Surrender to the Will of the Night, and Working God’s Mischief.

The Jean le Flambeur Trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi

Poster Placeholder of - 70The gentleman rogue Jean de Flambeur is part mind burglar, part confidence artist. He’s known throughout the Heterarchy for his amazing galactic exploits, like breaking into the vast Inner System of Zuesbrains. In the first book of Hannu Rajaniemi’s trilogy, The Quantum Thief, Jean Le Flambeur’s trapped inside the Dilemma Prison, and must wake up every morning to kill himself before his other self can kill him.

This discounted ebundle includes The Quantum Thief, The Fractal Prince, and The Causal Angel.

A Kitty Norville Collection by Carrie Vaughn

Placeholder of  -53This New York Times bestselling urban fantasy series from Carrie Vaughn follows Kitty Norville, everybody’s favorite werewolf DJ and out-of-the-closet supernatural creature. She’s fought evil vampires, were-creatures, and some serious black magic. She’s done it all with a sharp wit and the help of a memorable cast of werewolf hunters, psychics, and if-not-good-then-neutral vampires by her side.

This discounted ebundle includes Kitty Goes to War, Kitty’s Big Trouble, Kitty Steals the Show, Kitty Rocks the House, Kitty in the Underworld, Low Midnight, Kitty Saves the World, and Kitty’s Greatest Hits.

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Tor is at WonderCon 2016!

WonderCon

Tor is at WonderCon in LA this weekend! See the schedule below to find out where you can find your favorite Tor authors.

Friday, March 25, 2016
Getting to the Point
12:00p.m. – 1:00p.m. Room: 151
SF/F authors discuss the pointy strategic bits of weapons and battle tactics as their characters battle for causes from the mundane to the sublime.
Featuring: Carrie Vaughn (The Kitty Norville Series), Brian Staveley (Chronicles of the Unhewn Throne series)
Signing to follow, booth #3000

Futurecasting and Timeline Salad
3:00p.m. – 4:00p.m., Room: 151
Looking at the past, present, and future through different lens and timelines
Featuring: Charlie Jane Anders (All the Birds in the Sky) Greg Van Eekhout (The California Bones series)
Signing to follow, booth #3000

Building Worlds with Words
7:00p.m. – 8:00 p.m , Room: 411
Whether it’s far-flung futures or fantastical stories, the worlds that authors build are complex. How do storytellers create brand new worlds and unexplored universes? What is it like to become an architect for expansive mythos treasured by the masses? What’s the process for developing exciting new protagonists and working with established icons? Join this panel of authors as they discuss how they create their worlds, the process involved in creating nuanced characters and working with licensed properties.
Featuring: V.E. Schwab (A Gathering of Shadows)
Signing to follow, booth #3000

Saturday, March 26, 2016

Mythos Mix-Up
11:00a.m. – 12:00p.m., Room: 151
Centuries of mythology inform our storytelling; how do authors pick and choose what they incorporate and what they alter?
Featuring: Randy Henderson (Arcana Familia series)
Signing to follow, booth #3000

It’s a Horrible Life (or UnLife)
2:00p.m. – 3:00p.m., Room: 151
What is it about grim and gritty, dark and dystopian, that readers crave? And how can humor exist in the midst thereof?
Featuring: R.S. Belcher (Brotherhood of the Wheel), Robert Brockway (The Unnoticeables)
Signing to follow, booth #3000

V.E. Schwab (A Gathering of Shadows) in Conversation with Mark Oshiro
4:30—5:30, Room 152
Signing to follow, booth #3000

Sunday, March 27, 2016

Spotlight on Carrie Vaughn (The Kitty Norville Series)
12-1 pm, Room 515A.
Signing to follow, booth #3000

Unexpected Enemies, Unlikely Friends
2:00p.m. – 3:00p.m., Room: 151
Personal and political alliances make for strange bedfellows
Featuring: V.E. Schwab (A Gathering of Shadows)
Signing to follow, booth #3000

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Kitty’s Greatest Hits eBook is Now on Sale for $2.99

Kitty's Greatest HitsThe ebook for Kitty’s Greatest Hits by Carrie Vaughn is now on sale for $2.99!*

About Kitty’s Greatest Hits: Kitty Norville, star of a New York Times bestselling series, is everybody’s favorite werewolf DJ and out-of-the-closet supernatural creature. Over the course of eight books she’s fought evil vampires, were-creatures, and some serious black magic. She’s done it all with a sharp wit and the help of a memorable cast of werewolf hunters, psychics, and if-notgood- then-neutral vampires by her side. Kitty’s Greatest Hits not only gives readers some of Kitty’s further adventures, it offers longtime fans a window into the origins of some of their favorite characters.

Buy Kitty’s Greatest Hits today: B&N Nook | eBooks.com | Google Play | iBooks | Kindle | Kobo

Sale ends March 4, 2016.

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Sneak Peek: Kitty Saves the World by Carrie Vaughn

Kitty Saves the World by Carrie VaughnPlease enjoy this excerpt from Kitty Saves the Word, the final book in the beloved Kitty Norville series by Carrie Vaughn.

Chapter 1

MY STUDIO space felt like a favorite pair of jeans, worn and comfortable, maybe disreputable, but while wearing them I was sure I could conquer the world. Here behind my microphone, monitor and status lights glowing, I was invincible.

“Welcome to The Midnight Hour, the show that isn’t afraid of the dark or the creatures who live there. Thanks for joining me this evening. I’m hoping to have a rollicking good time, so let’s get going.”

Over the years since I’d started working at KNOB after college, and since I’d launched my radio show, we’d replaced the chairs, upgraded equipment, updated screening procedures, and syndicated to almost a hundred markets across the country. Details had changed, but this still felt like home. It would always feel like home, I hoped. We still played CCR’s “Bad Moon Rising” as the intro. My sound guy, Matt, still engineered the whole show from his booth. I could see him through the booth window, head bent over the board. A big guy with short black hair and a laid-back attitude, he’d been with me almost from the beginning, as soon as the calls got to be too much for me to handle and we syndicated and suddenly had a mountain of technical issues. The show and I wouldn’t have made it this far without him. I should probably tell him that.

“My guest this evening is a regular on the show, my good friend Dr. Elizabeth Shumacher, who heads up the Center for the Study of Paranatural Biology at the NIH, and my go-to guru for cutting-edge science and research on the conditions we know as vampirism and lycanthropy. Welcome back to the show, Dr. Shumacher.”

(more…)

Tor Books Announces Programming for Phoenix Comic-Con 2014

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Once again Tor (Booth# 646) continues our wildly popular *in-booth signings and giveaways, offering you a chance to meet your favorite authors up close and personal and pick up free books.

Friday, June 6th

Saturday, June 7th

  • 2:00 pm Tor Booth (#646) Signing: John Scalzi, Lock In
  • 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm Creating Your Fantasy World
    Peter Orullian
  • 4:30 pm – 5:30 pm Microsoft XBox Panel
    Peter Orullian

Sunday, June 8th

  • 12:00 pm Tor Booth (#646) Signing: Cathrynne Valente, Deathless
  • 2:00 pm Tor Booth (#646) Signing: Melanie Rawn, Touchstone

Make sure to follow @Torbooks on Twitter for up to date information and last minute events!

All Tor Booth signings are on a first come first serve basis and while supplies lasts. Limit one book per person.

Kitty in the Underworld Sweepstakes

Kitty in the Underworld Sweepstakes

Image Place holder  of - 14 Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty in the Underworld doesn’t hit shelves until July 30, but we have a chance for you to win a copy now!

We have seven copies to give away. Comment below to enter for a chance to win.

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. You must be 18 or older and a legal resident of the 50 United States or D.C. to enter. Promotion begins May 13, 2013 at 10:00 a.m. ET. and ends May 17, 2013 12:00 p.m. ET. Void in Puerto Rico and wherever prohibited by law. Please see full details and official rules go here. Sponsor: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

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How I Learned to Stop Grumbling and Love Vampires

Kitty Rocks the House by Carrie Vaughn

Kitty Rocks the House by Carrie Vaughn

Written by Carrie Vaughn

I’m best known for writing about werewolves. I started writing about werewolves—made the main character of my series a werewolf—because I was far more interested in them than the other usual supernatural critters. They simply hadn’t had a lot of attention paid to them in supernatural fiction, and when I was starting out, few people were writing books that featured werewolves as main characters. Plenty of people were writing about vampires; I didn’t feel a need to throw my hat into that ring. I didn’t have anything to say about vampires that hadn’t already been said. They were, in a word, kinda boring.

I didn’t want to leave vampires out of my stories entirely. I certainly wasn’t going to pass up a chance to mock them. Or at least mock the usual current vein of stereotypes about them. (No pun intended, I’m sure.) I’m writing supernatural stories, I wanted the full complement of the supernatural world at my beck and call.

But in creating my vampire characters, Alette and Roman and especially Rick, I discovered something. Something that vampires bring to the table that other supernatural creatures don’t: history. One of the first things I do when I create a vampire character is figure out their history. How old are they? Where did they come from? How does their background affect them? Have their values and outlooks changed over the decades, or centuries? That aspect, making vampires these walking repositories of “living” history, finally made vampires interesting to me. If vampires seem strange to my mortal human and werewolf characters, it isn’t so much because they’re bloodsucking monsters—it’s because they often come from entirely different places and times. They’re historical aliens.

One of Kitty’s best friends and closest allies in Denver’s supernatural underworld is the vampire Rick. Rick—Ricardo de Avila—was born in sixteenth-century Spain and came to North American as a young conquistador. He didn’t quite find what he was looking for, though, and was made a vampire instead. This is someone who was raised to be a devout Catholic in a world where Catholicism and the Spanish colonial empire were the dominant powers in Europe. These things were part of his identity. They still are, even though he lives and functions seamlessly in the modern world.

The idea that after all this time as a vampire, unable to go into churches and unable to take part in any of the rituals or symbols of Catholicism, Rick still considers himself a devout Catholic has always intrigued me. I touched on it a bit in his origin story, “Conquistador de la Noche,” found in Kitty’s Greatest Hits. But I’ve always known there was more to his story to that, and that far from being outlandish, I could turn that idea into something wider-reaching than one character’s backstory.

In Kitty Rocks the House, Rick doesn’t just get validation for his spiritual identity as a Catholic—an identity that he believes has kept him sane and ethical for five centuries. He learns of the existence of an entire order of vampire priests. He’s not alone, and that changes everything.

And this is why I love my job. Over the course of writing the eleven novels of the Kitty series, I’ve gone from not really wanting to write about vampires, to having vampires become some of the most intriguing supporting players in my books, to creating an entire order of vampire priests. And that just blows the story wide open, doesn’t it?

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From the Tor/Forge April newsletter. Sign up to receive our newsletter via email.

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London: The Ideal Setting

Tor/Forge Blog

Kitty Steals the Show by Carrie Vaughn

Written by Carrie Vaughn

Another one of those questions authors get asked a lot: Do you travel to the places where you set your books for research? For me, the answer is yes, if I can. I always discover great information and details when I visit a place, things I could never get from a book or website.

At which point I should say, I didn’t decide to set Kitty Steals the Show in London just to give myself an excuse to visit one of my favorite cities in the world. I had lots of great reasons for setting the story in London. The event the novel focuses on is the First International Conference on Paranatural Studies. What better way to explore the paranormal in the rest of the world than to go to one of the great international cities? People from all over the world come to London, and have been coming to London for hundreds of years—thousands, really. Celts, Romans, Saxons, Normans, all the way down to the time when Britain ruled the seas and built a global Empire, and London was the center of it all. There may not be a British Empire anymore, but London is still a crossroads, still a global capital.

And London is recognizable. Someone who’s never been to London, but has maybe read a lot of British novels and watched a lot of BBC America, would recognize London if they suddenly landed in the middle of it. Visiting it for the first time is to experience déjà vu—does that row of townhouses look like something out of Sherlock Holmes? Is that the same Canary Wharf from Doctor Who? Why yes, yes it is. It’s not just the big landmarks that are instantly recognizable—Big Ben, Trafalgar Square and the rest. It’s the whole feel of the city. It might be a hundred-plus years on, but walk down Oxford Street and you know this is the same Oxford Street Charles Dickens walked down, back in his day.

By setting my conference, and my novel, in London, I could give my supernatural world a sense history and diversity that I haven’t been able to delve into before in the Kitty novels. I could tell stories, like the one about London’s vampires and werewolves working together to save the city during the Blitz, that I couldn’t tell anywhere else. I suppose I could have picked any major city to host my fictional conference. But London seemed such an obvious choice.

Plus, you know—I got to visit my favorite city in the world and call it work. There I was, strolling through Hyde Park at sunset, taking notes for the major scene I wanted to set there. Totally work. Ducking into the National Gallery the hour before closing just because I could, then sitting on the steps to watch Trafalgar Square at evening rush hour? Yup, that was work. The West End ghost tour with a stop in a pub for a pint at the end of it? Work, I tell you!

You see the sacrifices I make for my art.

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From the Tor/Forge August newsletter. Sign up to receive our newsletter via email.

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Roots and Story

Discord's Apple by Carrie VaughnBy Carrie Vaughn

I used to not think too much about setting, about how a strongly anchored setting—and an author’s personal connection to a setting—could contribute to a story. Sure, there were isolated examples of writers who are so strongly linked to a setting that their writing has come to define a place and time: Dickens’ Victorian London, for example. But since I grew up as an Air Force brat, I had a pretty rootless childhood, never identifying very strongly with any one place. I figured that aspect of writing would never really be available to me.

Turned out I was wrong. In 2002, I lost two relatives—my grandfather and my great aunt Rose—from different sides of the family within a week of each other. I learned a lot about my family that year. We visited the house in rural Alabama where my paternal grandfather grew up, and later that summer I asked my maternal grandmother to take me on a tour of the very small town in Colorado where she and her four siblings spent their childhoods in the 1930’s. I heard many family stories for the first time and was able to picture my grandparents as children, with grandparents of their own, and so on, stretching back through time. And I discovered that I do have roots—in rural America, in turn-of-the century farmsteads and clapboard houses. My family photo album is filled with pictures of men in overalls and women in cotton prairie dresses standing on front porches, squinting into the sun, wind blowing hair into their faces. This discovery of a family heritage, however unassuming, formed the seed that became Discord’s Apple, in which my main character Evie returns home to rural Colorado and uncovers something magical.

Kitty Goes to War by Carrie VaughnSetting ended up playing an unexpected part in the Kitty novels as well. I set the first book in Denver because that was the big city I knew best. However, it turned out to be a perfect place to base a series of novels about werewolves. Some of the most famous pictures of Denver feature skyscrapers against a backdrop of towering, snow-capped mountains. That’s a hell of an image, and very telling. Denver has a little bit of a split personality. It started as a cow town and a silver-rush boom town, and it’s still fiercely proud of that western pioneer heritage. It’s within sight of the Rocky Mountains and lays claim to that wild, rugged world. But it’s also a real, genuine, urban center—with world-class universities, museums, restaurants, sports, concerts, and so on—longing to take its place among the country’s great cities (ranked number 24 in the U.S. by population, between Milwaukee and Seattle). But some visitors seem vaguely surprised to discover that Denver has paved streets and sidewalks. What better place to set a story about a supernatural creature caught between her wild wolf nature and her urban lifestyle?

So, despite my nomadic childhood, I’ve learned to embrace setting. And I’ve discovered that I have roots after all, and I’m very happy to be able to celebrate that in my stories.

Both Discord’s Apple (0-7653-2554-3 / $23.99) and Kitty Goes to War (0-7653-6561-8 / $7.99) will be available from Tor in July.

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From the Tor/Forge July newsletter. To receive our newsletter via email, sign up here.

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Tor Books is excited to welcome author Carrie Vaughn to our list!

Place holder  of - 87Carrie Vaughn, author of the best selling Kitty Norville novels, has joined Tor. Carrie was previously published by Grand Central, and has written a heartfelt blog post about why she chose to leave.

We’re very excited to be publishing Carrie. Many of us are huge fans of her Kitty novels—how can you not love a werewolf named Kitty? Especially one who has a radio talk show as entertaining as The Midnight Hour? The next novel in the series, Kitty Goes to War, will be available this July, and it more than lives up to the promise of her previous books.

Beyond that, however, we’re particularly excited to be helping Carrie spread her wings and work on novels outside Kitty’s world. The first of these novels, Discord’s Apple, will be published in July. In it, a woman returns home to her dying father, and discovers that the creaky old house in Hope’s Fort, Colorado, is not the only thing she’s inheriting. Along with it, she gains a magical legacy that has the potential to destroy—or remake—the world.

Stay tuned for more information about Carrie’s upcoming books, and please join us in welcoming her to Tor Books!

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