The whirlwind paces continue! DragonCon and Space Coast Comic Con were really wonderful across the board, amazing panels and audiences! I signed tons of books and sold a great deal of art! The rest of the month has seen me busy restocking and working on a few short stories, with Eterna Files book 2 edits up ahead.
This month, as you all should know, it is Halloween Awareness Month! And I'm all over New York City and the surrounding environs in really amazing capacities, whether giving ghost talks at local libraries (Hoboken, East Meadow) or signing books and selling art at amazing festivals in incredible historic, haunted locations (Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Morris Jumel Mansion) check out the upcoming APPEARANCES here on the website and come get a signed book and some one of a kind jewelry and art!
In spectacular Industry review news: I'm honoured that in the September issue of Asimov's Magazine I was given this truly incredible review for Eterna Files, I'm so humbled and in awe of the beautiful things said:
Eterna Moonshine of the Spotted Mind
The alert book-shopper will find an advance-publication quote from me adorning the front cover of Leanna Renee Hieber’s novel The Eterna Files (Tor, hardcover, $24.99, 320 pages, ISBN 978-
0-7653-5674-5). Without much real acquaintance with the author, I was motivated to provide a quote based sheerly on the high quality of the book. So I thought I would use a small amount of this column to explicate my admiration further.
The novel falls squarely into the steampunk genre, but exhibits a richer helping of metaphysics than is common in that game, and a bit more gravitas. Hieber’s MacGuffin is the quest for immortality,
surely a subject that can bear the symbolic weight. In the wake of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, a small group of eccentric talents are given the assignment of learning how to defeat death. Chief among these is our heroine, Clara Templeton, a psychic. We pick up her tale when the project is at a crisis point after many years. Several of the researchers have been brutally murdered, including Clara’s lover. Is the project doomed, or so close to success that it has aroused great powers?
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the British government has learned of the Eterna project and decided to steal or preempt it. They have assigned London detective Harold Spire to the case, and given him the assistance of the redoubtable Rose Everhart. Needless to say, presented with such a formidable array of allies and antagonists, many sparks, supernatural and otherwise, are going to fly. Hieber’s approach to the “science” of anti-death protocols is fascinating. (She even gets in a nod to Clarke’s Third Law: “All sciences, at their zenith, create what is tantamount to sorcery.”) Blending a kind of alchemy with unique “patriotic magic,” the pursuit assumes epistemological magnitude.
Says Louis, Clara’s lover (who continues to play a role as a ghost), “The key of Eterna, ma cherie, is to determine the boundaries of meaning. Nothing that may have meaning in terms of life can be overlooked.” This is a wide remit, and eventually Clara comes to wonder if they have bitten off more than they can chew. “Eterna was full of the restless living and the restless dead. It needed to die once and for all.”
Rich in conceits as anything from Alan Moore, Hieber’s novel mixes action and the emotional lives of its characters into a fascinating stew. Anyone who enjoyed Paul Cornell’s London Falling and The
Severed Streets will certainly cozy up to Hieber’s parallel depiction of questioning savants and heroes versus the forces of anarchy and despair." Asimov’s Magazine - September 2015 - Paul Di Filippo
(More about The Eterna Files here)
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In GENRE news: I was also really psyched to be a part of the first ever DREADPUNK panel at DragonCon, "Dreadpunk" being a new word to talk about some of the great things happening in the Gothic Genre today, and to talk about those trends in new ways. Considering I exist under similar parasols as Steampunk and other retro-futurist genres, "Dreadpunk" helps me express the Gothic Horror underpinnings of a lot of my work and inspiration, without being beholden to the traditional feminine issues represented it traditional Gothics. The Daily Dot did an incredible article about the Dreadpunk panel and I was fortunate enough to be very featured. Check it out here.
Book Stuffs: THE DARK NEST CHRONICLES are now out across the boards; digitally, each as separate novellas 1-3, Dark Nest, Dark Nest: Reckoning and Dark Nest: Song of Saire or in the compilation The Dark Nest Chronicles, AND they have all been collected in a paperback edition available via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, so if you haven't taken a turn to this lesser-known Space Opera series of mine, go forth! These are action-packed quick reads with inspiring psychic characters you'll fall in love with and root for as they try to save their people from genocide.
O Ye Lovecraftian Devotees! I'm also quite pleased to have been asked to contribute a chilling and very strange (even for me, so that's saying something) piece for THE BOOK OF STARRY WISDOM, an amazing new high-end and very artistic Lovecraft volume currently funding HERE. The book features newly edited editions of the main cult of Cthulhu stories as well as original fiction from a slew of talents. I'm really thrilled to be in amazing company of artists and authors here, it's going to be a must-have volume for any Lovecraft fan. If you get a copy, everyone wins as the stretch goals will also be amazing!
Lots of new things up on the Etsy store! Tons of new Poe pieces honouring my favourite author and foremost inspiration (my best selling items!). Everything is one of a kind and original, never are two pieces alike so if you see something you like, pick it up before it's gone and never made again! (Commissions are welcome). BLOG10 is a coupon code for you fine folks, so don't forget to use it!
October will see the re-issue of my short story "Sea-Found" in Fantasy Scroll magazine, there will be an audio edition starring yours truly that will accompany the reissue as well!
As always, there's a lot going on in the Hieberverse so I shall try to keep you all updated here as best I can, thanks for being a part of these worlds! Happy Haunting!
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