A Blood as Bright as the Moon is one month old! 🧛🏻♂️🦇🌕🩸
The rollercoastery nature of this month makes it very difficult to summarize it, but there's of course much to celebrate and to mark the occasion the wizards at @titanbooks have made a beautiful little booktrailer, at the end of which you can see some endorsements, from @marianaenriquez1973 , @av_wilkes and @eric_larocca .
Writing is a solitary activity, it's often said, but it's also an ecosystem—I strongly believe this. So in the next days/weeks I'll be posting the endorsements we were lucky enough to receive for BLOOD from some writers I love, along with some personal recommendations from these writers' oeuvre. Sharing the love.
In the meantime, if you're reading—or planning to—I hope you'll enjoy some, if not all, of BLOOD's strange vistas.
A BLOOD AS BRIGHT AS THE MOON publishes today! 🧛🏻♂️🦇🌕🩸 I’m feeling as if I’m on a rollercoaster, speeding (and looping) through several different emotions, the most prominent of which are fear and incredulous happiness. But I’m also proud of BLOOD and can’t wait for you to read it or listen to it.
I started writing it in semi-lockdown in January 2021 and I wrapped up I don’t remember which draft in September 2022, with my fierce agent @the_sandra_pareja pushing and pushing me. Then crazy brilliant fellow Whovian @dancarpenter85 came along with @titanbooks and here we are.
I got the news that Daniel was interested in BLOOD as I was boarding a plane to Transylvania, which I took as a very auspicious sign. That’s why you can see featured here with BLOOD a small bronze model of Bran Castle and a lithograph of beautiful, magical Sighișoara. The white rose was grown on our terrace by my very patient husband, @krawat84 .
In the second slide, you can see the three books that are, in a way, the inspirational foundation of BLOOD, the load-bearing walls that hold its architecture in place.
OK, this is it from me for now! You can find the book and the audiobook (published by @recordedbooks and read by an amazing @michael.l.crouch ) wherever books are sold, and if you do, I hope you’ll like the strange pale fruits that grow in BLOOD’s dark undercroft. Only a single shaft of moonlight seeps through, and it’s pink.
On the move, quite literally as we moved into a new house ten days ago, which (partly) accounts for my recent absence from these channels, in case you were wondering—which you probably weren't! But also on the move because I'm going to Kraków today, which makes me happy.
Featured here: new haircut, new glasses, new neighbourhood, which is very leafy, very green, very London-y. Second slide, a sneak peek at my study (yes! I have a study now!) plus the novel I finished yesterday—so late to the party, but this is really an outstanding work, so expansive, so perspective-altering, ultimately so beautiful and moving. Extraordinary.
Third and last slide: the two books I'm taking with me for the long weekend in Kraków—ambitious, I know, as we'll also be seeing lots of friends. But can't wait to read both of them! (Hoping, too, they'll come to inspire and shape somehow the new thing I'm writing, which is very much concerned with time! 🌃 🌠)
A rare instance of being late to one's own party, kind of,* but a couple of weeks ago A BLOOD AS BRIGHT AS THE MOON was longlisted for the Brian Aldiss Award and I couldn't be happier, both because the award specifically recognises efforts in original worldbuilding—which was a very present preoccupation when I was writing BLOOD—and because the company I'm in in this year longlist is jaw-dropping!
So thank you to the @thealdissaward , the British Science Fiction Association and the @britishfantasysociety 🌕
And of course thank you always to @the_sandra_pareja and @dancarpenter85@titanbooks for believing in this in the first place! 🩸
* It's not laziness or forgerfulness, I promise! We're moving to a new house in less than a week, so we're packing packing packing! 📦 (And then falling asleep really early at night.)
So, last week I was in London for the book fair and this means, of course, coming back with my bag stuffed with books. Featured here with one of our last remaining vases (the others are OK, fret not, it's just that we're in the process of moving!) are three books I bought as a gift to myself for surviving fair week + five ARCs I received from generous friends:
THE DISAPPEARERS by @marlonjameswriter , brought to me by my dear friend and enabler @kelfarbs (with an assist from @isaac.fitzgerald );
COUNTRY PEOPLE by Daniel Mason;
EXIT PARTY by @emilystjohnmandel ;
THE VIVISECTORS by @missouriwilliams , an unexpected gift from @kishani ;
THE RED SACRAMENT by @sarahinkley.jpg —I've read this one already and loved it; so much so that I begged @dancarpenter85 for a copy!
Now, we just need to survive the move and I can get to these beauties—and get back to writing because the new book (mysterious hints: 🌃🌠🎭) is knocking insistently on my skull. Coming!
⭐ GIVEAWAY ALERT! ⭐
To celebrate 6 months of A BLOOD AS BRIGHT AS THE MOON by @andreamorstabilini83 , we are giving away five signed copies of the book!
To enter:
🖤 Like this post
🖤 Share to your story
🖤 Tag a friend in the comments
🖤 Make sure you are following both @andreamorstabilini83 & @titanbooks !
Good luck!
Last weekend I did something special. On Sunday, together with four other writers, I was ensconced in a villa in Tuscany to write a ghost story. The villa — Villa Bertini, in Bagni di Lucca — is where, in 1818, during her extensive Italian travels, Mary Shelley supposedly started the second draft of Frankenstein. It was an emotional, mediumistic experience, to inhabit for a day one of her iconic places, and for this I have to thank the Shelley Project and the extraordinary team behind the @halloween_celebration .
📸 2: Villa Bertini, in Bagni di Lucca, where Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley stayed during the summer of 1818. Byron was in the adjacent Villa Webb.
📸 3-4: My desk for the day.
📸 5-6: The exact spot where legend has it Mary Shelley began what became the 1831 version of Frankenstein.
The short story will be published in Spring next year and is, for the moment being, under wraps (visualise it, please, as Jacob Elordi in the GDT movie).
Thank you again to the Shelley Project and to my fellow writer-adventurers, @ariannamortelliti , @silvagentilini , @fabrizio.silei e @lukha.b.kremo .
Already two weeks since I came back from the small BLOOD UK tour in Brighton and London, and I am, of course, feeling slightly melancholic. London, it should come to no surprise whatsoever, is my favourite city in the whole world, home away from home, a piece of my heart and my imagination, and one of the few places in the world where my daily step count skyrockets. Featured here, in this second nostalgic carousel: the Tower of London with a beautiful, rickety-looking towerlet of sorts, the Thames Path (north side), Greenwich (more on this in a bit), Brompton where I took my morning walks, and the last two Magnificent Seven cemeteries I was still missing: West Norwood and Nunhead. I loved them both and now that I've seen them all I can say (though the ranking is definitely subject to changes) that Brompton will always remain *my* London cemetery, but Abney Park and Nunhead are probably the most beautiful ones.
About Greenwich: I was there, as I think I've mentioned already, for research purposes for the new novel I'm writing, which is still wrapped, not in plastic (iykyk) but in mystery! The majority of it is going to be set in Greenwich, at the Observatory, this I can say for sure, and the Altazimuth formula is going to feature rather prominently in it. It's going to be... cosmic, in scale! 🌠🦁 (But yeah, it also features a very hungry lion.)
'Tis the season—award eligibility season, for those who celebrate. So this is a little reminder that A BLOOD AS BRIGHT AS THE MOON 🌕🩸 is eligible for Best Novel at all the SFFH (and beyond!) awards. If you're nominating and you wish to consider, please get in touch and I'll be happy to provide reading materials! They bite, but I'm sure you'll know how to handle them! 🧛🏻♂️🦇
Two weeks in England, London, then Brighton, the London, with a lovely stop in Lewes. I was at the World Fantasy Convention and I did a panel at Waterstones on body horror. I dressed up as a vampire for the Halloween Party thrown by @titanbooks and discovered I'm a wiz at an old Sussex pub game called toad in the hole (which is surprising since I usually lack hand-eye coordination). I saw fireworks in Morden Park for Bonfire Night and some truly amazing shows in the West End. I discovered my occult personality is Celestial Oracle (sounds about right, tbh) and snatched a ghostly picture. I revisited one of the places that inspired BLOOD (the Old Operating Theatre in the garret of St Thomas's church) and roamed around Greenwich for research on the new novel I'm writing. I signed books in some bookshops and met a curious fox while coming back from the publishing event of the decade. Mostly I enjoyed my time with loved ones, friends old and new, and it's been great. But happy now to be home and hibernate—for a little while, at least.
