Tag Archive for novel

Wings Unfurled Flies in 2022!

I am so delighted to announce that Wings Unfurled, the sequel to my epic fantasy novel Wings Unseen, will be coming out in 2022! Meerkat Press will publish the sequel, just as they did Wings Unseen. Here’s their official announcement of the upcoming publication.

Some of you may remember that I wrote Wings Unseen as a standalone novel. Or rather, I first dreamed of it as a trilogy in the early 2000s, but by the time I seriously started writing it, in 2009, the going advice was that a first-time novelist couldn’t get a multi-book deal. So I shifted gears, focusing on writing the full story in one book instead. That made for a much tighter narrative, but by the time I began shopping the manuscript around, the collective wisdom in speculative fiction was back to recommending series of books as the best bet for a writer, first-time or established!

Luckily, Meerkat Press took the risk on Wings Unseen as a standalone book, and I’ve always been happy that I could tell people that the story is complete in and of itself.

wings unseen rebecca gomez farrell meerkat press cover fantasy

Such a shiny, pretty debut novel!

But after its release, my publisher, Tricia Meeks, the driving force behind Meerkat, mentioned that she’d be interested in a second book. So of course the wheels of a new story for Janto, Vesperi, and Serra began turning!

My wheels don’t turn very fast. Wings Unseen was published in 2017, and I didn’t begin writing Wings Unfurled in earnest until October 2019. Yet somehow, I managed to send off the manuscript’s third draft for consideration by Meerkat in March 2020, and they purchased it! That’s the fastest I have ever written a book, for sure – faster than I’ve written most short stories, to be honest. I’m definitely someone who puts manuscripts aside for a while, letting time do the solving of plot puzzles before coming back with fresh eyes.

So what’s Wings Unfurled about? Well, I’m not going to spoil it, but it begins about six years after Janto, Vesperi, and Serra have rid Lansera and its formerly Meduan lands of the invisible plague of claren and the thrall of the Guj. I won’t tell you more than that for now – except to tease that there’s a fourth, and briefly a fifth, new point-of-view character in the book. Not a pigeon this time! But rest assured, there are plenty of feathers left to lash in Lansera.

I’ll be dropping hints about Wings Unfurled along the way to its publication, leaving you a tasty trail to follow until then. Maybe I’ll even share a recipe for the lemon cakes that Janto, and another family member, so loves! Waits are always easier to endure when there’s a snack.

grandview bakery, pittsburgh bakeries, cupcakes, lemon cake, almond cupcake, los angeles

That image is of Pittsburgh’s Grandview Bakery’s almond cupcakes – NOT Mar Pina’s lemon cakes in Lansera, but not far off from what I imagine…

WisCon 39 Appearances!

wiscon39Tomorrow, I fly out for my first WisCon experience.

I’m super excited because I’ve heard so many great things about this conference from other writers. It has a heavy concentration on the craft of writing, which is the #1 reason I’m choosing it as my first con in years. I love the speculative fiction genre, but I love writing it more than I love the fannish activities that go along with it. Nothing wrong with going wild, Fandom! It’s just not how I engage with the works that spark my passion.

And I am thrilled that I will get to share some of my passion with you! I am one-third of the superpowered trio in the Triple the Strength! Triple the Power! reading with fellow writers Sally Wiener Grotta and Laura Lis Scott on Sunday at 1:00 pm in Conference Room 2 at the main hotel.

Flyer for our reading small

Thanks to Sally for our flyer! Unfortunately, Laura won’t be with us in the flesh, but I’m delighted to read a selection from her novella, Half the Sky, on her behalf. I’ll also be reading “Thlush-A-Lum”, my most recently published horror short story, and if time allows (it should), the first chapter of my epic fantasy novel, Wings Unseen.

But that’s not all! On Monday morning, in the waning hours of WisCon, I’ll be on the Worldbuilding Through Food panel in Senate B at 10:00 am. Writing about food has been a huge part of my career over the past six years, and food has always been an honored guest in my fiction as well, so this panel’s topic spoke to me on many levels. Ty Blauersouth is our moderator, and my fellow panelists will be Nino Cipri and Amy Thomson. The official description:

The food crops and domestic animals an author uses in a fictional world shape underlying presumptions about where and when a story is set…or “not set,” in the case of not-quite-our-world-but-just-barely worlds. Medievaloid Europeish taverns with potatoes and tomatoes in their stew. Cultures that spice heavily, or lightly, or eat a wide range of animals; even if crops and livestock are all named with new words they often trace back to our-Earth models. How can one thoughtfully use food in your worldbuilding in ways that support themes and characters, without falling into shallow sloppiness? What SFF authors do food description particularly well? What’s good about it?

I’m especially excited to talk about how food choices can reveal character and ways food can be more central to the plot than just a lush description of a feasting table. Turkish delight, anyone?

Of course, I’ll be out and about all over the place during the rest of WisCon 39, but I haven’t had the chance to pick which sessions I’ll attend just yet. I’ll update you all on those plans as I make the decisions! Meanwhile, I always love meeting new people, so if you’d like to join me for coffee or a cocktail or a meal, just drop me a line at becca at thegourmez dot com or through Twitter @thegourmez. I arrive Wednesday evening and leave Monday afternoon.

See you soon, Wisconsin! It’ll be lovely to make your acquaintance.

Fiction Bragging — Interview With Maya Holden

We are still on my first published book, Maya’s Vacation, in this week’s fiction bragging post, and we will be for a few more weeks — I did a number of interviews promoting it when it came out last March, so I plan to point you toward one each week. But this first one is not an interview with me. Instead, it’s an interview I did with the main character in Maya’s Vacation, Maya Holden. Perhaps she can interest you in her story.

Me: Maya, you seem like such a down-to-Earth woman, but tell me, how did you end up with a litter of ferrets?

Maya: Oh, that. [She waves it away with a giggle]. My husband — ex-husband, now, of course, but he was my husband  then — he never let me live that one down. What happened was that Meredith Viera one day on the Today Show had these long, furry animals I’d never seen before. They were so cute, I just had to get one. So I headed to the pet store that very afternoon, and what did I find but a mother ferret with a new litter of four babies! They were all so cute, no longer than my index finger, and I just couldn’t separate them. It felt like the right thing to do, taking them all home! Chuck turned bright red when he saw them, but he never did complain, not really. He’d been married to me too long! You might say I’m a creature of instinct.

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