By Deb on December 25, 2013
Merry Christmas and best wishes for the upcoming year!
Thanks for the good wishes sent after the last post – they are much appreciated.
If you’re looking for a quick post-holiday read, consider one of the Further Adventures stories – I’m hoping that Barbara will have a new one soon for everyone to enjoy (I’m voting for Antryg and Joanna, but I’ll take whatever comes along).
Take care-
Deb
Posted in Announcements
By Deb on December 2, 2013
Happy Thanksgiving (mostly to the Americans), and hi to everyone else!
I should be catching up with Barbara soon and asking about new stories/upcoming plans. She’s been busy with teaching, and I’ve been…busy with my partner’s cancer. Yep, about when the robot finally was getting less needy, lymphoma entered my love’s life. It’s been a rocky few months, and almost everything (including, at times, eating and sleeping!) has been pushed to one side. It looks like he’s responding well to the chemo. I’ve been a cancer biologist for…oh, a long time now, but this is a very different perspective.
Best wishes for the holidays. I promise I’ll be back. Take care, everyone!
Deb
Posted in Announcements
By Deb on May 19, 2013
Okay…finally, after answering questions over a looooong period of many years, I can say:
YES, THERE ARE AUDIOBOOKS.
Audible has a number of them, including a lot of the older Del Rey fantasies, and at least some of the Benjamin January books. I’ve never understood the appeal of the audiobook, but I sincerely hope that if you’ve been waiting for them, that you enjoy them hugely!
Posted in Announcements
By Deb on May 19, 2013
Hi, all-
I’ve just added the latest two arrivals to the Further Adventures. The latest two stories are Shadowbaby, set in the Winterlands/Dragonsbane universe, and Nanya of the Butterflies, a Sun Wolf and Starhawk story. Both stories are brand-new, never-before-published, and approximately 15 K words in length (I tell you the latter because…people ask). All Further Adventures stories are $5.
For those of you who thought maybe I had died…no, just very busy with a robot. Well, two robots. Really. I work for a small company, we’re doing an automation project, and I’ve had my head stuck in a robot (and then in the code for the robots) since September. We’re neeeeerly done, and then I might be able to get some of my life back. So no, there’s not much updated on the page, although I did try to make the store a little bit easier to navigate. In the meantime, please check out the new stories, and feel free to comment on news in the Hambly-world. As always, up-to-date info on Barbara’a life and writing can be found at her blog (see the link to the right). I will drag the page into the Century of the Fruitbat soon, the robots HAVE to launch soon.
Yours-
Deb
Posted in Announcements
By Deb on July 17, 2012
Hi, all-
Hope you’re having a great summer! The latest Further Adventures story, Plus-One, debuts tonight. If anyone thought that traveling to California meant Joanna and Antryg were going to have a nice peaceful life, unmarred by brushes with alien lifeforms, random Voids, and errant mageborn (not to mention rock stars, ectoplasm, and the intricacies of tending bar)…well, they were wrong. Head on over to the Further Adventures page to read an excerpt (it’s a very silly excerpt) and purchase the story.
The Further Adventures page will be getting an update in the near future, as this site undergoes a complete rearrangement and update. It will take a while – my coding-till-2am college days are long past – but it is coming.
Enjoy-
Deb
Posted in Announcements
By Deb on December 13, 2011
Hi, all-
Barbara just sent the latest, all-new Further Adventures story, Fairest In The Land. This one is a Sun Wolf and Starhawk story…do the Wolf and Hawk get run out of town after their latest adventure? You’ll have to read on to find out! Fairest – as well as any of the other ten Further Adventures stories – can be bought from the Further Adventures page.
Barbara and I are both thrilled by the response to Corridor, the latest story – thank you so much to everyone!
Posted in Announcements
By Deb on November 21, 2011
Yes!
Barbara just finished the brand-new Antryg and Joanna story “Corridor” to join the Further Adventures lineup. Perfect for indulging in after the Thanksgiving feast, or for the plane ride to the feast! Head over to the Further Adventures page to read an excerpt, and to buy “Corridor” or any of the other nine stories on offer.
Thank you all so much for making FA such a success so far. Barbara is working on an all-new Sun Wolf and Starhawk story, and we hope to have that up before Christmas. Happy Thanksgiving (Americans) or Happy End of November (people not looking forward to massive turkey feasts this week).
Deb
Posted in Announcements
By Deb on July 10, 2011
Ready for a light bit of poolside reading? Further Adventures part four is here! Sunrise on Running Water is the latest offering, and Barbara describes it: “This is my vampire-on-the-Titanic story, which appeared in Dark Delicacies II in 2007. I re-read it yesterday and still think it’s pretty funny. Don Simon Ysidro makes a VERY brief cameo appearance.” I never saw this when it came out the first time, but in case you have a copy already, the story is the same.
She also says she’s working on a new Antryg story. Yes!! Write faster!
Sunrise on Running Water (and all the other stories) are available in pdf, epub, and mobi formats. Enjoy!
Posted in Announcements
By Barbara on May 13, 2011
ADVENTURES IN RESEARCH – 2
Kid Gloves ‘n’ Hookers
Barbara Hambly
So, did a hooker cost more than a pair of kid gloves?
Since the first moment long-ago when I sat down with a sheet of blue-lined notebook paper in front of me at the kitchen table to write my first “historical novel” (this was before I learned to type – and slightly before electric typewriters became sufficiently common that they’d be found in ordinary homes), I’ve been in quest of information about what things used to cost.
This is always important in detective fiction, because when your detective thinks, Hmn, he claims he’s just a poor boy from Podunk, so what’s he doing wearing $500 Tony Lama boots? it tells your reader a) that Poorboy from Podunk is lying like a rug and b) that Ms. Detective is the kind of person who notices that kind of thing. Specificity always makes your character sound more intelligent, and puts the reader firmly into the setting.
If we’re in the eighteenth century, that’s a whole nother wrinkle on that puzzle.
So, where do you get this information?
I used to go up to UCLA or UC Riverside libraries and poke around the stacks (which is how I figured out what motorcycle James Asher rides, and whether you could or couldn’t ride one if you happen to have just had your right wrist broken by an irate vampire). These days, I have a collection of books on the subject, though you can find this information about some things on the Net. (For instance, at janeausten.co.uk – an online magazine about the works of Ms. Austen – I gleaned the information that a family of five plus a maid-servant in 1825 could live on £2.11.7d a week, tough doings if Dad was only pulling in 15 shillings a week). (Which is what Scrooge paid Bob Cratchit, the wicked old skinflint, and Bob had six or seven children and no maid-servant in sight).
A History of the Cost of Living, by John Burnett, is a dandy.
So’s Oliver Bernier’s Pleasure and Privilege, for late 18th-century France.
I’ve always loved Paul Johnson’s The Birth of the Modern, for Ben January’s period – 1815-1830s (though Ben is slightly beyond that now). (It also tells what was the strongest patent-medicine opium).
Bernier sourced his book from Mercier’s Tableau de Paris, some of which has been translated: amazing stuff on Paris in the 1780s. Another good one is Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, written in the 1840s-50s. Both of these have been reprinted. Also reprinted are old Sears Catalogs, which give American prices, but estimates can be jiggered with on-line currency converters (how much does Ysidro pay for his shoes?).
Most helpful of all is Liza Picard’s 4-volume series about London: Elizabeth’s London, Restoration London, Dr. Johnson’s London, and Victorian London. All of these can be found on abebooks.com, through which I can often buy these very dry, obscure, specific volumes for only a couple dollars over the cost of postage.
So, which was more expensive? As it is today, of course, that depended on the hooker – and the gloves.
Posted in Announcements
By Barbara on April 17, 2011
Since, apparently, the release of my old vampire series – Those Who Hunt the Night and Traveling with the Dead – on digital last month via Open Road Media (www.openroadmedia.com) qualifies me as a “well-known author of vampire fiction” these days, I guess it’s okay for me to write about my take on vampires and vampire fiction. (The third of the James Asher vampire series, Blood Maidens, is available in print from Severn House, U.K., but not yet in digital).
I’ve always preferred my vampires dangerous. When I was working on Those Who Hunt the Night, I read various novels of vampire fiction which were around at the time (this was long before Twilight – Ms. Meyer might not even have been born then), and I recall one in which the vampires, though eerie and powerful, were rather benign, like a secret society of people who lived forever and only “immortalized” those who really deserved to live forever; who only drank a little bit of human blood from people who knew them: consenting adults, as it were. And I remember thinking, “No. If vampires were really like that, why the horrific legends?”
So I came up with the best reason I could think of, that vampires have to kill. The blood nourishes vampire flesh, and doesn’t necessarily have to be human. (I recall Anne Rice’s Lestat, among others, lived for decades on rats). In my view of vampires, they kill – and kill humans – because the psychic energy released by the human soul at death is what enables vampires to exercise psychic influence on people: to read dreams. To influence dreams. To make themselves appear to the living as overwhelmingly attractive, to cloud human judgement and human perception… Why else would you walk down a dark alley with a total stranger?
Vampires must kill in order to hunt, and in order to survive.
That being established as a base-line – along with total destruction at the first touch of sunlight, something which is in some legends and not in others – what kind of person would survive as a vampire? What kind of person would become a vampire? Not someone anybody in their right mind would want to get close to.
The development of my version of vampires evolved from there.
Another thing about vampires in legend: a lot of them are very snappy dressers. They’re frequently protrayed as sophisticated, and wealthy enough to have all sorts of henchmen and booby-traps for the unwary around their castles. This is because, of course, even a moderate amount of money looted from early victims, if properly invested, yields a quite substantial income over two or three centuries. And if a vampire isn’t smart enough to get himself a good accountant and proper investments, he probably doesn’t survive.
Wealthy, well-dressed, sexually attractive, been everywhere, remember the world centuries ago, utterly selfish and ruthlessly charming – the ultimate power figure. No wonder people are fascinated by the idea. And, an infinitely variable archetype: every writer does them differently.
And that’s what fascinates me.
Posted in Announcements | Tagged Barbara Hambly, vampire fiction, vampires