With Honor Intact

April 24, 2015April 27, 2015 / Cat Amesbury / Leave a comment

It’s always a bittersweet moment when a goal is completed.

I’ve spent so long living, breathing, and dreaming the second tale from my Virtue Inn series that I feel a little wistful seeing it finally move out into the world.

But it’s here.

With Honor Intact, second book in the “Tales from the Virtue Inn series”, is now available on Amazon. When publishing this book, I wanted to thank the people who have supported me and provided me with their thoughts on the series. Therefore, both the first book in the series, The Guests of Honor, and the newly published sequel, With Honor Intact, will be on sale for 99 cents before returning to their regular price of $2.99.

So, thank you.

You can see The Guests of Honor here.

With Honor Intact is now available here.

When the Cat’s away…

Honor Desry hadn’t applied to be the Innkeeper of a sentient Inn with magical guests, but her sisters and her right-hand fox-man are making the job a lot sweeter.

Unfortunately, the supreme Cat God has disappeared on Honor’s watch and Honor’s old life is about to interfere with her new life in a major way.

The Naked Glassblower’s Association has booked a holiday vacation at the Virtue Inn, and Honor’s old boss and his partner are coming along to chaperone. Honor needs to find the Cat, keep the strange guests away from the supernatural guests, and somehow hold family and mind together.

But the Virtue Inn hasn’t revealed all of its secrets and Honor will need to summon every last piece of her courage and cunning to save the day With Honor Intact.

Warning: Contains some violence, profanity, innuendo, and homicidal cardigans.

With Honor Intact is available here. To read the first book in the series, you can find The Guests of Honor here.

Tuesday Tidbits: What We Don’t See

April 21, 2015 / Cat Amesbury / Leave a comment

What we don’t tell in a story is just as important as what we do.

I think of stories as being set in living worlds, thousands of other lives, other adventures, taking place around the main thread of telling.

Although some authors attempt to chase these many threads into madness, most stories pull one or two and leave the other stories to fall to the side.

But what if the stories that aren’t being told are just as important as the ones that are?

I’ve always been interested in the art formed by negative spaces. The ability to use the shadows and the emptiness around a foreground object to create a more interesting picture is something that has always interested me as a writer.

Stories seldom start on the first page of the book.

They are the product of all the events that have happened before and during and after, connecting at the point the narrator observes them. Even avoiding philosophy, we don’t get always get to choose what narrative we’re thrust into in our own lives. When living, we have to take the scene set before us and hope we make our way successfully across the stage.

The main character of With Honor Intact runs into problems because she is missing pieces of other people’s stories. The “Tales from the Virtue Inn” series is a fast-moving modern fable, but it is also fundamentally a mystery. Honor’s decision to cut ties with her home as a teenager means that she is missing the crucial pieces of information she needs to survive in the strange world of the magical Inn she is managing.

Honor’s story is as much as about what she doesn’t know as what she does.

It is not magic to face an unfamiliar world unprepared.

It is not magic to balance our duties and desires on a swiftly changing stage.

The magic is that we make the attempt in the first place.

The magic is that we succeed.

Sometimes we miss the larger picture. Sometimes it’s better that we do.

The idea of a living world that the narrator tells of a small fraction of the activity is something that I have wanted to write for a very long time. “Tales from the Virtue Inn” explores the inevitable consequences of missing pieces of the bigger picture in a dangerous, fantastical setting.

With Honor Intact will be available digitally from all Amazon sites on April 23, 2015. To read the first book in the series, you can find The Guests of Honor here.

Tuesday Tidbits: Singing Without the Music

April 14, 2015 / Cat Amesbury / Leave a comment

I come from a cultural and familial tradition of oral storytelling. Singing without the music is how I thought of it, listening to the rise and fall of the stories of my grandmother.

Within this tradition, there is an understanding that some stories are for sharing and others are private. There is an understanding that to share with the larger world means finding your own stories to play out on the page or the stage.

I took these lessons to heart, found some of the stories I wished to tell-

-And found myself instantly in trouble.

It is not so obvious when writing poetry.

There is an understanding, in traditional and not-so-traditional forms, of rhythm and meter.

There is an understanding of the music beneath the words and the demand to arrange the words to meet the music.

My poetry has always had a direct line to the spoken, is meant to be read and shared as songs without music.

In a longer form, it is easy to lose that rhythm, the heartbeat that sits beneath the flow of a spoken story.

I thought about what I wanted to accomplish, what I was trying to do and say.

I wanted to write a story that was meant to be read.

So I read it.

All 92,000 words of With Honor Intact were read aloud, listening for the tempo, the dynamics, the stuttering of rhythms.

It is not the story my grandmother would have told, but it is my story.

I like to think that she would have enjoyed it.

I hope that you do too.

I translate to the page the rhythm of the telling and hope you hear it beneath the words

The joining of the oral and the written has been a major piece of my work with the Virtue Inn series. I can only hope that I have succeeded.

With Honor Intact will be available digitally from all Amazon sites on April 23, 2015. To read the first book in the series, you can find The Guests of Honor here.

Tuesday Tidbits: A Shared Humour

April 7, 2015 / Cat Amesbury / 2 Comments

All jokes are in-jokes. The humour that appeals the most to me is the humour that makes sure that everyone is in on the joke.

As I draw closer to the release of my second novel, With Honor Intact, I’ve decided to do a series of weekly posts about some of my thoughts about writing this novel and its larger series, “Tales from the Virtue Inn” (spoilers will be minimal to non-existent). This week, I want to touch on one of the fundamental aspects of this series – humour and how it is written.

Humour can be wielded as a sledgehammer or a stiletto, but the direction it aims can do more to bring people in or push them away than the jokes themselves. While there is a lot of strange humour in With Honor Intact, the core motivation behind most of its jokes is that life itself can be ridiculous. The fantasy world that the Virtue Inn inhabits often seems wildly over the top, although it has its own internal logic. The humour in the story is meant to be grounding, a reminder that even the most awe-inspiring or madly strange things can have roots in the familiar, in a shared experience of a ridiculous world.

It would be easy, I think, to make my heroine, Honor Desry, the butt of the jokes. She doesn’t understand the world she has entered and is frequently at the center of situations that should make it easy to mock her. Instead, I have tried to allow those experiencing her adventures to laugh with her – at the perils of doing laundry, at having awkward conversations with family members, at discovering that, grand cosmic power or not, cats will still be cats.

Above all else, I tried to root the humour of With Honour Intact in empathy. We may not be able to meet the supernatural Guests of the Virtue Inn in our day to day lives, but I hope that shared moments of laughter will bring understanding and commonalities to even the strangest and most fantastical of characters.

I value humour as a celebration of our shared humanity, our shared experiences of the often ridiculous business of living.

I hope that the humour of With Honor Intact will not only amuse but also bring shared moments of understanding, of brief glimpses of other worlds through foreign eyes.

Coming April Twenty-Third!

Honor Desry hadn’t applied to be the Innkeeper of a magical Inn with magical guests, but her sisters and her right-hand fox-man are making the job a lot sweeter.

Unfortunately, the supreme Cat God has disappeared on Honor’s watch and Honor’s old life is about to interfere with her new life in a major way.

But the Virtue Inn hasn’t revealed all of its secrets and Honor will need to summon every last piece of her courage and cunning to save the day With Honor Intact.

Warning: Contains some violence, profanity, innuendo, and homicidal cardigans.

With Honor Intact will be available digitally from all Amazon sites on April 23, 2015. To read the first book in the series, you can find The Guests of Honor here.

Cover Reveal for “With Honor Intact”

June 24, 2014 / Cat Amesbury / 6 Comments

It’s no secret to those of you who have been following my discussion of my influences that I love a particular style of old-school whimsical fantasy, with or without darker undertones. When I set out to get covers for my series, I wanted a style that reflected that kind of content. While there are many beautiful covers using striking photo-manipulation or typography, none of them had that John Tenniel taste I was looking for – fun, clean but with a vague air of mystery and menace. I am also someone who loves Art Deco and the incredible posters and marquees that were produced in the Twenties and Thirties. I thought that their use of optical illusions was an excellent fit for the theme of my series, “Tales from the Virtue Inn”.

Combining both of those styles has given me something that I think really captures the tale I am trying to write. I am very happy with the story that the covers tell and look forward to unveiling them for each of the five books in the series.

So it gives me a great deal of pleasure to present the cover for the second book of the “Tales from the Virtue Inn” series, With Honor Intact.

I hope that you are as drawn into the world of Virtue as I have been, through my writing and through these illustrations.

The Games have only just begun…

Honor Desry hadn’t applied to be the Innkeeper of a semi-sentient Inn with magical guests, but her sisters and her right-hand fox-man are making the job a lot sweeter. Unfortunately, the supreme Cat God has disappeared on Honor’s watch, and Honor’s old life is about to clash with her new life in a major way.

The Naked Glassblower’s Association has booked a Valentine’s special at the Virtue Inn, and Honor’s old boss and his partner are coming along to chaperone. Honor needs to find the Cat, keep the strange guests away from the supernatural guests, and somehow hold family and mind together.

But the Virtue Inn still hasn’t revealed all of its secrets and Honor will need to summon every last piece of her courage and cunning to save the day With Honor Intact.

Warning: Contains some violence, profanity, innuendo, and semi-sentient household objects.

If you’d like to be alerted when With Honor Intact comes out, you can sign up for my mailing list here. To read the first book in the series, you can find The Guests of Honor here. A huge thank-you to Kat’s Indie Book Blog who did a lovely writeup over here as well.