Writer's Grove

Three Slices

Oh, do I have a treat for you guys. I’ve been cooking something up with Super Mega Spiffy Authors Delilah S. Dawson and Chuck Wendig. It’s a tight anthology of novellas called Three Slices and it’ll be on sale in ebook and audio on May 5 (pre-order links below). It features a cover and interior illustrations by Hugo-award winning artist Galen Dara. Wanna see?

Ye gods, Galen is good. I love this illustration. I mean, Atticus is PRETTY. And lookit, that’s Oberon on the cover for the first time! The other distinguished person there is Mekera, who you’ll meet in my novella, A Prelude to War. The story picks up right after the end of Shattered: Atticus wants to strike back at Werner Drasche for what he did and he goes to ask his old friend, Mekera, for some help, but discovers she’s being watched. Meanwhile, Granuaile is ready for round 2 with Loki and cares nothing about the consequences that picking such a fight might bring. It’s absolutely vital to the series and it’ll whet your appetite for book 8, Staked, which I’m working on now. Consider this IDC 7.5!

And yes, the audio version of A Prelude to War will be narrated by Luke Daniels, never fear, and it’ll be out the same day as the ebook (Pre-order link below)!

But you’re getting a lot more than just an Iron Druid novella here. You’re getting two more awesome stories by authors who make me squee, and with whom I dearly wished to collaborate.

Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys by Delilah S. Dawson will introduce you to her Blud world (or return you to it if you’re already a fan) and basically convince you that you should read all the things she writes. And holy horses, Batman, the illustration for her story is so damn awesome I nearly shat kine when I saw it:

Last but certainly not least, we have a Miriam Black story by Chuck Wendig called Interlude: Swallow. Like mine, it’s a nice piece to chew on in between his full novels, and this one is set in between The Cormorant (book 3) and Thunderbird (book 4). Miriam Black is so hardcore—if you haven’t begun that series, it kicks off with Blackbirds and I highly recommend it!

There are two additional illustrations in Three Slices—one of Granuaile vs. Loki and another of Miriam Black—that you’ll get to purr over and say, ooooh, how gorgeous!

And honestly that’s the main reason we’re putting this together the way we are. Chuck, Delilah, and I are huge fans of Galen Dara as well as fans of each other, but the likelihood that we’d all get to work together via traditional means was pretty slim. Especially considering that these stories, while set in very different worlds, are tied together by a secret, semi-batshit theme. It’s not a theme we could sell to a major house, but it’s a mountain we all wanted to climb and we did it. We hope you’ll be as entertained reading them as we were writing them.

Three Slices is available for preorder now in ebook and audio.* If you have a smartphone or tablet rather than an e-reader, you’ll get the glorious full-color illustrations. They’ll still be glorious on an e-reader, mind, just black and white. Links below:

Pre-order the Ebook: Kindle or  iTunes/iBooks
I’d give you a link to the Nook pre-order but they don’t offer pre-orders for some inexplicable reason. It should be available on May 5 though, so if you’re a Nook reader please check for it and keep checking until it’s live!

Pre-order the audiobook: Audible

And if you’d like to buy a print of Galen’s art, she sells ’em—not just these but many more! (She did the cover of “The Chapel Perilous” for me and also an Oberon illustration featuring a quote from Shattered.) Support Galen and prettify your life here.

Happy reading (or listening)!

*It’s not in print and if that’s your preferred method of reading, I’m very sorry. The fact is publishers very rarely print novellas (I can think of only one in recent memory) and when they do they don’t print them with full-color illustrations. Ebook and audio are basically the only viable platforms for stories of this length (too long for a short story and not long enough for a novel), and in truth it’s a blessing. Before ebook and digital audio, these stories would simply never have been written because writers could never get taco money for writing a novella. Publishers paid for short stories or novels and almost nothing in between (and still do). So while the lack of print is kind of a bummer on the one hand, the opportunity to tell these stories at all is turbo spiffy for writers. Thank you, as always, for giving our stories a try!