Elspeth Cooper

Purveyor of fine fantasy adventures

Everything old is new again

Whilst I was fossicking around in the dusty basement of my website on Friday, I came across a page of links to guest posts and other pieces I’d written for a variety of websites, way back when. Sadly, a couple of them had been lost to time, and even the Wayback Machine couldn’t help me find them. Sic transit gloria mundi, and all that.

Image of the title page of a book, printed on stained vintage paper. Text reads: "Being a memoir of the palaces, cancal and diverse wonders of the White Havens by a lady, with instructivenotes for the independent traveller."

Title page of The Second City, reproduced by kind permission of the University of Yelda

But I tracked down the others, and I thought I’d bring them all back under my roof, as it were, before they suffered the same fate. I wasn’t that careful about archiving these pieces back then, for which I am kicking myself now. You would think that with a career in IT behind me I would understand the value of backups.

Anyway. The question now, of course, is what do I do with them. Some relate to craft, or my road to being published, and at least one of them has aged like milk. Oh dear. I think I’ll find a home for the craft-y pieces here, because someone might be interested in a peek behind the scenes, but the piece I’m most proud of rescuing is the one I should be shot for not having archived way back in 2013 when I wrote it.

The Second City is a little bit of Wild Hunt universe metafiction, an extract from an in-world book. The website I wrote it for is long gone, but I think the text itself stands up. It deserves another airing, so I’ve added it to The World of the Wild Hunt section of my site.

I originally set out to write this piece in the style of a Victorian travel memoir but couldn’t sustain the tone, so it ended up more a love letter to the White Havens from a lady “d’un certain âge”. As for the traveller herself . . . I can’t help but imagine the stories she could tell!

 

Project Read the TBR wrap-up

We’re down to the last few hours of December, so I’m wrapping up my project to read the TBR. Here’s my last few reads for the year, which includes a sort-of cheat: Empire in Black and Gold is my current read I just started on the 27th, and at 600+ pages there is very litle chance I’m going to finish it before we ring in the New Year – even at my best reading speed.

As you can see from the table above, my reading slowed right down over the last few weeks, due to my mum passing away in November.  Nonetheless, Project Read the TBR was a success. I had an informal goal of getting down to under 100 books in the queue, and according to Goodreads, my “Mount TBR” shelf is currently sitting at 98. Yay, me etc. Of course, since I *actually* read a total of 110 books in 2024, clearly I could have read a lot more. A few books also had to be added to/removed from the shelf mid-year because a) I read some series openers that I then decided not to continue with, and b) I am an idiot who cannot be relied upon to maintain my Goodreads shelves accurately.

But on the subject of series openers, in the course of this project I discovered some crackers, many of which I had been sleeping on for a number of years, including:

  • Eternal Sky – Elizabeth Bear
  • The Redwinter Chronicles – Ed McDonald
  • Rook & Rose – MA Carrick
  • The Tower and the Knife – Mazarkis Williams
  • The Divine Cities – Robert Jackson Bennett
  • Memoirs of Lady Trent – Marie Brennan
  • The Craft Sequence – Max Gladstone
  • Planetfall – Emma Newman
  • Shades of Magic – VE Schwab
  • Spellcrackers – Suzanne MacLeod
  • The Bone Season – Samantha Shannon
  • The Laundry Files – Charles Stross
  • Weather Warden – Rachel Caine
  • The Shadow Campaigns – Django Wexler
  • Wolfhound Century – Peter Higgins
  • Winternight Trilogy – Katherine Arden
  • The Greatcoats – Sebastien de Castell
  • Drowning Empire – Andrea Stewart
  • The Blackhart Legacy – Liz de Jager

These were all thoroughly enjoyable, all for different reasons, and I want to read on. As a result,  my list of ongoing series now numbers 48, so 2025’s TBR looks, to use a seasonally-appropriate phrase, somewhere between “Ouch” and “boi-oi-oi-oing”.

There goes my pocket money.

 

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