Modern Faerie Tales – Holly Black

So this was fun! I was asked to design a single header for each of Holly Black’s three novels in the Modern Faerie Tales series: Tithe, Valiant, and Ironside, for this omnibus edition.

They are delightful novels — as is the new The Folk of the Air series (The Cruel Prince, The Wicked King, and The Queen of Nothing), which is lightly connected, and for which I did the maps. Holly has a gift for (and works hard at) balancing a rather gritty 21st century mundane with a stunningly wondrous (but cruel) magical world. If you grew up on the urban fantasy of the 80s and 90s, you’ll know the feeling of Holly’s worlds — grit and glitter and death and magic.

Which is to say, I recommend them all, as well as having had a Grand Time drawing in them.

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Note re links: I’m experimenting with affiliate links, which means I might get paid a small commission if someone buys something after clicking a link on my site. This is early days, so I’m really just testing out the program links at this point!

The Queen of Nothing — the map!

The Queen of Nothing, the third in Holly Black’s Folk of the Air trilogy, and sequel to The Cruel Prince and The Wicked King is now out! I’m visiting Massachusetts at the moment and got to ride along to Holly’s first event of her tour, at An Unlikely Story. But now I can also show you the map.

I have loved adjusting the map for this series (although altering wave patterns in ink with each new ocean detail, and splicing them in digitally, was certainly a challenge!).

Under the map (above) are sketches of possible treatments of the corners and new details. But other new pieces came from the little thematic sketches I made along the way (no spoilers).

A few of the little original ink drawings of tiny new details are now available at Book Moon Books in Easthampton, Massachusetts (or will be by tomorrow, when I am sketching there!). Below is the tiniest.

(The cover art is not by me. Sean Freeman has been illustrating those, with design by Karina Granda. BUT I did draw the foil designs under the dust jackets on the hardcovers — and got to meet a girl with the Cruel Prince design tattooed on her arm, which was very exciting!).

Art by Sean Freeman, design by Karina Granda, tiniest fox by me, SNAKE by Holly Black

Lost in Submissionland?

In preparation for Nanowrimo, the ebook of The Writer’s Book of Doubt is on sale for US $4.99. If you haven’t got a copy, now’s the time to get one — with illustrations by me! (And if you are at the World Fantasy Convention in LA this weekend, the original map art will be at the art show).

Amazon: The Writer’s Book of Doubt

Books 2 Read: https://books2read.com/u/bMaoOB 

Gumroad: https://gumroad.com/products/qRNBp 

Note re links: I’m experimenting with affiliate links, which means I might get paid a small commission if someone buys something after clicking a link on my site. This is early days, so I’m really just testing out the program links at this point!

 

October calendar: Cold hands

Fairy tales are famously hard on the feet (per Kelly Link’s “Travels With The Snow Queen”), but they aren’t kind to hands, either.

So here, for Halloween (and with the very excellent support of my patrons) is a collection of specific and general fairy-tale hands: spindle-pricked, scissor wielding, changed to silver, unlocking doors… (I’m including a non-blue-handed version, for those less spookily inclined, but the black-and-blue really does look rather like the colour schemes in Edmund Dulac’s fairy tale illustrations).

I also really like the underlay-colours here. Still want to work up a design like this without lines, but I keep getting distracted by detail. I should start with silhouettes.

I’ve also created a repeating pattern of this design, and it is now up on Redbubble on notebooks, dresses, etc (as part of my Halloween and Fairytale collections) (and if you like fabric by the yard, I’m waiting for test prints from Spoonflower). Incidentally, Girls Running From Houses (from last October) is now a repeating pattern and is on there too.

Edit to add: I’ve added the blue background (pink hand) version to Redbubble, too: Take My Hands.

The files below are for personal use and — as I mentioned — are done with the help of my wonderful supporters on Patreon (who also get sneak-peeks, variant colours, stationery, new Daleks, etc). If you’d like to join as a patron (from $1!) or otherwise throw a few coins in the tip jar to help the calendar keep happening, that would be very welcome — the calendar is fun, but takes a lot of time.

Note re links: I’m experimenting with affiliate links, which means I might get paid a small commission if someone buys something after clicking a link on my site. This is my first attempt, so I’m really just testing out the program links at this point!

Halloween edit

I’ve updated my Redbubble store to include a Halloween category, bringing together (and updating) a few old pieces, with some new bats and skeletons thrown in for good measure.

In particular, I’ve updated Girls Running From Houses to be a repeating pattern and put it on a few more items, including (by request) hardcover journals.

Stray Bats — a chapbook

Dachshund droids, sinister crones, shapeshifting children, a plethora of witches, dragonstalkers, familiars, slithering eels and, of course, bats, flit and fly through these pages, aided and abetted by Kathleen Jennings’s inspired pencil drawings. Stray Bats is a madcap miscellany consisting of fifty vignettes based on poems by Australian women. Lanagan delights in playing with language, rhyme, and rhythm.

This could be the perfect gift for that slightly otherworldly person in your life—or for yourself, when you need a moment of magic, a dip into darkness, a spark of light.

For the reader who would like to explore further, there are a list of poems that inspired the author and notes on where those poems might be found.

Small Beer Press have just announced this new chapbook, which Margo and I have been secretly working on — it’s so exciting that it will be a real book in the world in November! Pre-orders are open now on Small Beer’s website, and Margo and I will both be at World Fantasy in LA.

A Cover for Flyaway

My Australian Gothic novella Flyaway will be released in July next year — but Tor.com has now revealed the cover (fabulous design by Jaya Miceli, from a silhouette by me).

REVEALING THE COVER TO FLYAWAY, AN AUSTRALIAN GOTHIC DARK FANTASY DEBUT FROM KATHLEEN JENNINGS

It comes with some useful links (although I’ll let you know more about pre-orders as that becomes available) and a few lovely words from Kelly Link, Holly Black, C.S.E. Cooney and Brooke Bolander — authors whose way with stories I very much admire.

I am extremely delighted with this cover, for which the designer and art directors should get most of the credit (and I adore the typeface), and I can’t wait (I must wait!) for the book to be a real thing in the world.