The Whitefire Crossing FREE today for Nook!

Checking in briefly from the World Fantasy convention to share a couple bits of exciting news:

• The Whitefire Crossing is today's "Free Friday" selection over at the Barnes and Noble Nook Blog!  Quick, snag a copy and tell your friends to grab one too!
• The Tainted City got an absolutely wonderful review from Kristen Bell of Fantasy Book Cafe. ("I think The Tainted City is one of the most enjoyable, well-executed novels I’ve read this year. After reading it, the third book in the trilogy has moved to the list of forthcoming books I am most excited about.")  Kristen did an interview with me discussing everything from worldbuilding in the Shattered Sigil novels to my goals in writing a character like Ruslan - and she's also holding a worldwide giveaway for signed copies of both Whitefire and The Tainted City.
• And just in case you'd like some free books that aren't mine, Night Shade is offering up free e-copies of Kameron Hurley's God's War and Infidel - don't miss out, these are incredible, intense novels.

And continuing the theme of "free"...check out this haul I got from the bag o' free books provided to every World Fantasy attendee:

I've already read (and greatly enjoyed!) a few of these, like Mazarkis Williams's The Emperor's Knife, Peter Brett's The Warded Man, and Robert V. S. Redick's The Red Wolf Conspiracy.  But I'm looking forward to trying Nick Mamatas's Bullettime, Ekaterina Sedia's Secret History of Moscow, and Adrienne Kress's The Friday Society - and the George R. R. Martin calendar is pretty sweet, too.  I love this con.

Happy Halloween!

Yay for Halloween!  I love Halloween, and not just because these days I get to share in my son's breathless excitement over trick-or-treating.  Candy and costumes and creatures out of our darkest imaginations...what's not to like?

Our freshly-carved pumpkins.  

Though it feels strange to be celebrating, knowing how so many people out east are struggling to recover in Sandy's aftermath.  The monsters of our childhood imaginations may not be real, but plenty of dangers lie in wait, and there's no such thing as perfect safety, for all we like to convince ourselves otherwise.  My heart goes out to those who've lost their homes, and had their lives forever altered.

Here in Colorado, untouched by the storm, life goes on apace.  I've been quiet online these last days, thanks to a looming work deadline.  I'm leaving for World Fantasy on Thursday, and really looking forward to reuniting with writer-friends and enjoying all the con has to offer.  I'm not doing any official programming other than the mass autographing session on Friday night, so it's a rare chance to just relax and hang out.  Well, except for one teensy thing...NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow, and this year I'm taking the plunge once more.  (This'll be my 2nd time doing NaNo; the first time was back in 2007, when I first started The Whitefire Crossing.)

My goal this time is to get a nice big head start on my first draft of The Labyrinth of Flame.  I may not make 50K, but I'd like to reach at least 30K by the end of the month.  I can't wait to dive into the story!  These last two months, I've pretty much been spending all my scant writing time on interviews, guest posts, and other non-fiction writing, so I'm really itching to get back to "real" writing again!  I know how Labyrinth begins, and I know how I want the story to end - the rest, I look forward to discovering along the way.

In the meantime, since I fear I won't have time to prepare a Thursday Adventure post before leaving, here's a link to last year's Night Bazaar post in which I shared my favorite Halloween reads.

And if you've got any burning questions, either about the Shattered Sigil books, or even mountaineering, rock climbing, canyoneering, or figure skating - mark your calendars!  I'm doing an "Ask Me Anything" next Thursday Nov 8 over at Reddit's r/Fantasy: you can leave questions any time during the day, and I'll answer them "live" at 8pm CST.

Thursday Adventure: Cirque of the Unclimbables (Northwest Territory, Canada)

I've had a few readers ask me if the main mountain location featured in The Tainted City, the Cirque of the Knives - a high alpine basin encircled by formidable jagged peaks - was based on any real-life mountain valleys.  The answer is yes!  And I didn't just have one spot in mind, but three, all in different real-world mountain ranges.  One valley I've visited; the other two, I haven't yet, though they are high on my climbing/backpacking wishlist.  I thought I'd do one Thursday Adventure post for each of these three inspirational places, so I can share them with you.

First up is one of the locations I haven't yet had the pleasure of seeing in person, though I've drooled over many a photo: the Cirque of the Unclimbables, in the Ragged Range near the border of Canada's Northwest and Yukon territories.  Check it out:

Cirque of the Unclimbables, with major peaks marked.  (Photo courtesy of summitpost.org)

Just the name is enough to spark a climber's imagination!  Though of course the peaks aren't unclimbable, at least with modern techniques.  Ever since Lotus Flower Tower was featured in Steck and Roper's "Fifty Classic Climbs of North America," climbers have been flocking to the cirque to pit themselves against sheer granite walls, despite the difficulty of access.  (Reaching the cirque requires either chartering a float plane, or spending several weeks paddling rivers and hiking strenuous canyons.)  Access isn't the only problem; the weather is notoriously horrendous, even in high summer.  I read one trip report in which torrential freezing rains made climbing impossible for all but 2 of the 25 (25!!!) days the climbers spent in the cirque.  That's a hell of a long time to be stuck in your tent!  But if the trade-off is views like this, it's probably worth it:

Lotus Flower Tower (in background) and the Cirque of the Unclimbables (photo courtesy of travel-visit-places.com)

A few more links to trip reports, pics and pages, for anyone interested:

• This photo of a climber walking a narrow ridge in the Cirque of the Unclimbables helped inspire a certain scene in The Tainted City (along with even sharper knife-edge ridges like that of Colorado's Capitol Peak).
• George Bell's Cirque of the Unclimbables page
• Kluane Airways's Cirque of the Unclimbables access page
• Cirque trip report from a group of climbers who got to the Cirque the hard way (no plane!)
• Climber trip report with great pics: Bombing in the Cirque of the Unclimbables

And lest you think the Cirque is remote...some 15 miles NW of the Cirque of the Unclimbables lie the Vampire Spires.  They are so difficult to reach, hardly anyone has climbed them.  When climbers summit, it makes the news: check out this report from last month of a brand new 5.11 route on Mount Dracula, put up by an expedition funded by the Copp-Dash Inspire Award.  Even pics of the Vampire Peaks are scarce.  But just look at this one:

Vampire Spire (photo from rockclimbing.com)

How awesome is that?  And as a fan of fantasy & horror, how can you resist the allure of a climb named "Lair of the White Worm" on the Vampire Spire?  Of course, I'd have to get a hell of a lot better at climbing before I could tackle a 5.11 A.2+ big wall route...but hey, I can dream.  

MileHiCon and more

MileHiCon was a ton of fun, as always.  My favorite part (as at any con!) was hanging out with fellow SFF enthusiasts and writer-friends, but I had a few authorial highlights.  I survived my reading without choking up from nerves, I had a couple total strangers actually show up at the autograph table wanting me to sign books for them (likely only another newbie author will understand the combination of glee and surprise this provoked), and hey, an audience member even called me "Dr. Schafer" at the particle physics panel, which I am choosing to take as a sign I didn't sound like an utter moron.  (I don't have a doctorate, only a masters.  To quote Big Bang Theory...
Sheldon: This would go a lot faster if you put your trade school diploma to work.  
Howard: I have a Masters degree from M.I.T. 
Sheldon: Yeah, but you've got a can-do attitude and that's what's important.

But now I am buried once again in day jobbery, so today's post is another quickie link round-up:

• Today at the Night Bazaar, I attempt to show why reading historical fiction author Dorothy Dunnett did more for my writing than any official class could've

• Colorado writer John K. Patterson reviews The Whitefire Crossing along with Aaron Ritchey's The Never Prayer.  I heard Aaron read from The Never Prayer at MileHiCon (we were both part of the same fantasy-themed group reading) and the bit of the story I heard sounded great, so between that and reading John's review, I'm gonna have to check it out.

• Fellow Night Shade author (and former Night Bazaar denizen) Brad Beaulieu (The Winds of Khalakovo, The Straits of Galahesh) is doing an AMA tonight over at Reddit at 8pm CST - come help us mock him - er, I mean, ask him questions.   (EDIT: Reddit's having outages today due to Amazon's cloud failures, so the AMA has been postponed - date still TBD.)

Winter is coming...so get your skis on

I'm buried in day job tasks while trying to get ready for MileHiCon this weekend, so no full-on Thursday Adventure post today.  Instead, I'll first give you links to two guest posts I did this week:

• Broaden Your Horizons, in which I share six of my favorite fantasy novels set in non-European locales (they are all awesome books and you should read them!).

• Building Fantasy Worlds One Name at a Time, in which I talk about how I chose names for characters and places in The Whitefire Crossing and The Tainted City.  This is part of a whole series on names in fantasy that Abhinav Jain is running at his blog - make sure and check out the other posts in the series, as some really great authors have weighed in over the past weeks.

And then I'll leave you with a few pictures from my favorite winter activity: skiing.  Every year when that first storm kisses the high peaks with white, I start to dream of deep powder.  (Powder skiing is practically a religion in the west, and for good reason.  Skis float in deep snow, letting you turn and bank like an airplane.  Between the speed of descent and the sheer freedom of movement, it's the closest most people ever get to flying.  The rush is incredible.)  Right now as I drive to work, I eye the newly white peaks and salivate...soon, soon my husband and I will spend more days like this:

Me enjoying a powder day at Alta, Utah.  (They really do have the greatest snow on Earth.  Every skier should make a pilgrimage to Alta at least once in their lifetime.)

Or if we're really lucky, like this...

Our friend Jim needs a snorkel 

If it's been a few days since a storm, we can still amuse ourselves by cornice jumping:

Robert jumps a cornice at Aspen

Or if we're really brave, couloir skiing:

Who's got enough guts to take the leap?  Our friends Jeanne, Khurrum, and Gary scope out the infamous Corbet's Couloir at Jackson Hole.   

No matter what, I'll have a grin this big on my face:

Skiing rules.

News Round-up

Today's just going to be a quick news round-up and not any book recs, mostly because I spent all my blog-writing time this weekend working on a guest post sharing a bunch of my favorite books for the Stumptown Book Blog series on "Non-European Fantasy by Women."  The post should go live soon over at Stumptown Books - I'll link when it does, because the books I talk about are all awesome and everyone should read them. :) In the meantime, here's what I've been doing online this last week:

• Want to know which significant character wasn't at all in the original draft of The Whitefire Crossing, and how I took the book from just okay to publishable quality?  Head on over to the Night Bazaar, where I talk about the most valuable feedback I ever received.  

• A transcript of the SF Writers' Chat I did on Twitter is available here, in which I answer questions about my novels, my writing process, and talk about plans for the future.

• All three parts of my interview at Stumptown Books are now live: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3.  Here I talk about everything from narrative choices for the Shattered Sigil series to my favorite climbs, and even give a sneak peak of what readers can expect from The Labyrinth of Flame.

• Paul Weimer reviewed The Tainted City over at SF Signal, saying: "I truly enjoyed The Whitefire Crossing, and I approached sequel with that peculiar mix of anticipation and dread that I often have when returning to a new author whose first book I enjoyed. Will this second book meet my expectations and response to the first? Has the author grown and developed since their initial effort? Is the magic still there? Happily, for me, The Tainted City lived up to my expectations..."

  

Thursday Adventure: Mt. Whitney via the Mountaineers Route (Sierra Nevada, CA)

I've made no secret of the fact that the Whitefire Mountains in the Shattered Sigil books are based on California's Sierra Nevada. The eastern Sierra are the mountains of my heart: rugged, starkly beautiful, challenging for the climber yet blessed with inordinately good weather during the summer months. Today I'll share pictures from one of my favorite trips in the Sierra: an ascent I did of Mt. Whitney via the Mountaineer's Route with my husband-to-be, way back in 1999.

Mt. Whitney from the Owens Valley (picture courtesy of owensvalleyhistory.com)

At 14,505 ft. Mt. Whitney is the highest peak in the contiguous US, looming high over the sagebrush desert of the 3,000-ft Owens Valley.  The standard route climbs a steep, long, but carefully maintained trail that's so popular the Forest Service allots permits for both dayhikers and backpackers by lottery.  (50 backpacking permits per day, 150 dayhiking permits per day.)  But for the more adventurous hiker, there's a different, better way to reach the summit: the Mountaineers Route.  This ascends a different, more direct canyon to a basin just beneath Whitney's sheer east face.  From there, you scramble up a class 2 couloir to a notch on Whitney's north ridge (see picture below), then either climb class 3 rock straight up to the summit or traverse across alternating snowfields and talus on Whitney's west slope to reach the broad summit plateau.

Annoted picture courtesy of whitneyzone.com.  The Mountaineers Route travels the canyon visible at the picture's far right, up past the Ebersbacher ledges to Upper Boy Scout Lake.  The Notch at the top of the Mountaineer's Route couloir is marked on the right side of the peak.

For extra fun, Robert and I ascended the route and then spent a night camped right on Whitney's summit, so we could stargaze and enjoy the incredible sights of sunset and sunrise from such a high elevation.  (It truly is spectacular.  The shadow of the mountain extends for what appears to be a hundred miles; and the rainbow of colors in the sky, from deepest crimson to indigo, is breathtaking.  Not to mention the stars after sunset - they really do look close enough to touch, and you've never seen so many.)

Years ago I wrote an extremely detailed trip report (non-climbers will find it too much so, no doubt!), so I won't repeat that here.  The trip was also in my pre-digital-camera days, so my pictures don't do it justice...but here are the few that turned out reasonably well.