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Category Archives: Lagrange Books

The Wand that Rocks the Cradle: Interview with Elana Gomel

08 Wednesday May 2019

Posted by Oren Litwin in Lagrange Books, Self-Promotion

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author interview, china mieville, clive barker, Fantasy, horror, Kickstarter, short story anthology

Thanks for supporting The Wand that Rocks the Cradle! Today’s interview is with author Elana Gomel, who contributed the short story “The Dragon Detector.” Enjoy!

 

What attracted you to writing?

When I was five or six years old, I had an incredibly vivid dream about an infinite house. The house went up and down forever and if you fell off a balcony, you’d fly for an eternity. The dream was so compelling that for a while I was sure I was actually living in this house and my everyday life was a dream. Now the infinite house exists in my award-winning story “In the Moment”. I can share my dream with a multitude of people. This is what writing is for me: creating shared worlds out of private imagination.

If you had to tell someone, “If you like this person’s stories, you would like mine too,” who would you pick?

Before I was a writer, I was a reader; and since I am also an academic, writing about other people’s books, I have quite a long list of personal favorites and role models. I love generic hybrids: sci-fi and horror; mystery and fantasy. I appreciate vivid imagination and unsettling details. So if you like Clive Barker, China Mieville, Tim Lebbon and Tony Ballantyne, you might like my writing. My two recent novels, The Cryptids and The Hungry Ones have been compared to Barker and Mieville respectively.

(Read more…)

FIRST LOOK: “Dead in First Grade,” by P.L. Sundeson

07 Tuesday May 2019

Posted by Oren Litwin in Lagrange Books, Self-Promotion

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excerpt, Fantasy, first look, Kickstarter, short story, short story anthology, urban fantasy

Thanks for supporting The Wand that Rocks the Cradle! Today you’re in for a treat: the first of our story excerpts! You’ll be happy to know that the stories are nearly finished with the first round of edits, which let’s us raise the curtain just a little bit. As the days go by, we are going to be periodically posting excerpts from the stories in the anthology to give you a little taste of the full package. Our first excerpt is the beginning of the short story “Dead in First Grade,” by P.L. Sundeson. Enjoy!

 

As an only child who did not play with many other children, Emma Peters had no one to tell her what school was or should be like. She was sure, though, that your teacher was not supposed to be dead.

* * *

Emma knew the days of the week, and she knew Thursday was a Work Day.  So she was startled to see Daddy, in his dark gray suit and tie as always, waiting outside their gate that cool September morning.  She threw herself down the steps and hugged him around his waist. “Daddy!  I’m glad you came.  Mommy said you had work.”

Daddy stroked her head.  “I couldn’t let my little girl go to her first day of school without me.”

(Read more…)

The Wand that Rocks the Cradle: Interview with Marion Deeds

06 Monday May 2019

Posted by Oren Litwin in Lagrange Books, Self-Promotion

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author interview, Fantasy, Kickstarter, Marion Deeds, Seanan McGuire, Tanya Huff

Thanks for supporting the Kickstarter campaign for The Wand that Rocks the Cradle! Today’s interview is with author Marion Deeds, contributor of the short story “Bellwethers Know Best.” Enjoy!

 

If you had to tell someone, “If you like this person’s stories, you’ll like mine,” who would you pick?

What an interesting question! I couldn’t really think of anyone at first, so I asked some friends, and the responses were eye-opening.

People have suggested Seanan McGuire. I assume they mean her contemporary fantasy Incryptid series. I do see some similarities there, and with Tanya Huff, who was another suggestion. Both writers deal with an everyday world that incorporates magic, and characters who struggle, not only with the supernatural, but with universal issues; family, relationships, jobs.

Writers I would love to be compared to? I’d have to say Mary Robinette Kowal, especially in her short fiction. There are two San Francisco Bay Area short story writers whose work I greatly admire. Laura Blackwell has a story called “An Accidental Coven.” Laura Pearlman is published a variety of places, and her work seems light and humorous at first but soon you realize that there is more happening beneath the surface. I think I write in a similar vein.

(Read more…)

The Wand that Rocks the Cradle: Interview with W.O. Hemsath

03 Friday May 2019

Posted by Oren Litwin in Lagrange Books, Self-Promotion

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anthology, author interview, Fantasy, Kickstarter, magical realism, short story

Thanks for following our campaign as we launch The Hand that Rocks the Cradle! In our quest to help you get to know our authors better, today we will be interviewing W.O. Hemsath, author of the short story “Coffee Break.” Enjoy!

What attracted you to writing?

I don’t have the skills to draw or sketch, and that’s always made me a bit sad. But I loved to read and I loved to talk, so I developed a big vocabulary when I was little. When I learned I could paint with words to create art the way others paint with lines and colors, I realized I had a medium that allowed me to transfer the ideas in my head into someone else’s. From that point on, I was hooked. I’ve been writing stories and telling stories ever since.

How did you get to this point in your writing? Did you take classes, or intensively study particular authors, or simply do a lot of writing and learn as you go? All of the above?

When I was in grade school, I wrote for fun—short stories, poems, song lyrics, choose-your-own-adventure serial pieces for a friend’s on-line magazine, anything I could find. In college, I went to film school and got my degree in screenwriting. After that, I took off about ten years to serve a mission for my church, get married, have kids, etc. I dabbled with writing here and there during that decade, kept a journal of all the story ideas that kept popping up, but didn’t write much. I did start a Master’s program in Creative Writing during that time, but I quit towards the end of the first semester. I wasn’t learning enough from it to justify the commitment at the time.

In late 2016 I got serious about my writing again and was at a point in my life where I could dedicate some time to it. I joined a writing group, went to writing conferences, read various craft books and blogs, watched Brandon Sanderson’s online lectures, listened to podcasts on writing—anything writing related I could get my hands on, really.

Read more…

FREE Anthology Download Today!

02 Thursday May 2019

Posted by Oren Litwin in Lagrange Books, Self-Promotion

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free, Free Ebook, Free Kindle, Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, military fiction, short story anthology

We’re currently in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign for my latest fiction anthology, The Wand that Rocks the Cradle: Magical Stories of Family. If you haven’t checked out our campaign page yet, I strongly recommend it; we have an author interview and an essay from another author posted already, with more to come in the weeks ahead.

But while that’s going on, you can read my first anthology—because for the next three days only, it’s available for free!

My first anthology, The Odds Are Against Us, is a collection of military fiction published by Liberty Island Media. The fine folks at LI told me that The Odds Are Against Us is having a special promotion today through Saturday. For a limited time, the Kindle edition is FREE for download!

So tell all your friends! And all I ask is that if you like the book, please leave a reader review on Amazon to let the world know what you thought of it. As you know, reviews are an important part of a book’s success.

The Wand that Rocks the Cradle—Author Insights from Misha Burnett

01 Wednesday May 2019

Posted by Oren Litwin in Better Fantasy, Lagrange Books, Writing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

anthology, author interview, Fantasy, short story anthology, urban fantasy

Thanks for visiting the campaign for The Wand that Rocks the Cradle: Magical Stories of Family! Today, we’re presenting author Misha Burnett, who will introduce you to his fantasy setting, Dracoheim. Enjoy!

Forget it, Jake, it’s Dracoheim

The publication of The Wand That Rocks The Cradle will include my third story (and fourth, for those of you pledging at the Bonus Stories level!) set in the city of Dracoheim, and I’d like to take a moment to talk about the city and how it came to be.

One thing that it is easy for modern readers of fantasy classics to overlook is that while the settings seem exotic and strange to readers born in the late 20th Century, the writers of those stories chose those settings because they were mundane and prosaic to the readers of the time.

Tolkien wrote about the Shire because that’s where he grew up. The name of Bilbo’s home, Bag End, was taken from the name of his aunt’s house in Africa. L. Frank Baum put a magical scarecrow in The Wizard Of Oz because scarecrows were such ordinary objects for his readers, something that children of his era would routinely pass by on their walk home from school. C. S. Lewis put Narnia in a wardrobe because he had one in his bedroom growing up…

Read more…

The Wand that Rocks the Cradle—Author Interview with Joanna Hoyt

29 Monday Apr 2019

Posted by Oren Litwin in Lagrange Books, Self-Promotion

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author interview, interview, Kickstarter, short story anthology

Thanks for checking out The Wand that Rocks the Cradle! Periodically, we will be publishing author interviews or essays to help you get to know them better. Today, we are joined by author Joanna Hoyt, who contributed the short story “Legacy.'”

***

If you had to tell someone, “If you like this person’s stories, you would like mine too,” who would you pick?

That’s a hard question.  I think my short stories share some common features with the writings of Elizabeth Goudge, Edith Pargeter, and Ursula Le Guin…but when I say this, a rather loud voice in the back of my mind says “Well! Giving ourselves airs, aren’t we?” and a quieter voice suggests that Le Guin and Goudge might not have approved of each other, though I am not at all sure they might not have liked each other.  But if someone liked all three of those authors, I think they’d find something to like in my stories as well.

What attracted you to writing?

The same thing that attracted me to breathing, I think.  I craved stories as far back as I can remember—I wanted to hear them, read them, tell them. I wrote my first story when I was three. After illustrating the first page I realized I had completely misunderstood my main character…

(Read more…)

The Wand that Rocks the Cradle: a Kickstarter Campaign

28 Sunday Apr 2019

Posted by Oren Litwin in Lagrange Books, Self-Promotion

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anthology, Kickstarter, publishing, short story anthology

Families are full of magic. To celebrate that magic, Lagrange Books is proud to present The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, our forthcoming anthology of fantasy short stories from a fantastic group of authors.

Pre-order with our Kickstarter campaign to access exclusive rewards, including five bonus stories only available to Kickstarter backers! You can even get your own story critiqued by the anthology’s editor, get a full edit from anthology author Joanna Hoyt, or a custom flash fiction from anthology author WO Hemsath!

Check out all this and more!

Coming this Sunday: First Look at “The Wand that Rocks the Cradle”!

24 Wednesday Apr 2019

Posted by Oren Litwin in Lagrange Books, Self-Promotion

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Family, Fantasy, Kickstarter, pre-order, short stories, short story anthology

I’m so excited, I can hardly wait—the Kickstarter for The Wand that Rocks the Cradle: Magical Stories of Family is going live this Sunday!

We’re going to have all kinds of great content over the next month: interviews with contributing authors, dramatic readings of story excerpts, and more.

If you enjoy fantasy, and you also enjoy stories exploring family, and you definitely enjoy fantasy stories exploring family… then don’t miss The Wand that Rocks the Cradle! You can pre-order starting on Sunday, and get all kinds of cool backer rewards too.

Looking forward!

Coming Soon: “The Wand that Rocks the Cradle”

14 Sunday Apr 2019

Posted by Oren Litwin in Lagrange Books, Self-Promotion

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

anthology, coming soon, Family, Fantasy, Kickstarter

Sorry for the radio silence recently! You’ll be happy to know that it’s because:

  1. I’ve been mailing out the paperback books to Kickstarter backers of The Odds Are Against Us,  and, of more general interest,
  2. We’re getting ready to launch another Kickstarter for the next anthology!

This one is the “Family” fantasy anthology which we announced back in December. I am pleased to reveal that the anthology’s title will be The Wand that Rocks the Cradle: Magical Stories of Family.

We have a great lineup of authors for you, and the stories will take your breath away. You’ll be able to pre-order your copy soon, along with all kinds of fun bonuses; so if you want to know when the Kickstarter goes live, sign up here and be sure to check “Fantasy Fiction.”

Editing this collection is so much fun! I can’t wait to get it into your hands.

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