Tag Archives: historical fiction

Wow! Keeping Time Kickstarter Funds 330%!

Stillpoint Digital Press’s Kickstarter campaign to complete Heather Albano’s steampunk time-travel adventure trilogy Keeping Time finished on December 20 with $3,325 in backing from 91 backers.

This enthusiastic response was over three times the amount Stillpoint and Albano’s goal.

Publisher David Kudler sent this message to the backers:

Thank you!
Thank you!

 We crossed the finish line at 330% of our minimum goal.

Thanks to all of our backers — not only for supporting this project, which was a wonderful act of giving (that we look forward to rewarding!), but for sharing it with your friends.

We’ll be in touch in the coming days to get information so that we can send you your rewards. If you have any thoughts or questions, please do comment here.

Happy solstice, and happy holidays!

David Kudler & Heather Albano

PS If you missed out, worry not! You can still pre-order your copies of all three books at StillpointDigitalPress.com/Keeping-Time

About Keeping Time

You only THINK you know
what happened at Waterloo.

The real story involved more monsters.
And a lot more time travel.

“Waterloo and time travel are made for each other and Heather Albano has done a wonderful job of giving us a delightful cast of characters, tasked with stitching together the proper nineteenth century while fending off several monstrous alternatives. Propulsive adventure with historical insight.” – Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars and 2312

Keeping Time: A Steampunk Time Travel Adventure Trilogy by Heather Albano

It’s 1815, and Wellington’s badly-outnumbered army stares across the field of Waterloo at Napoleon’s forces. Desperate to hold until reinforcements arrive, Wellington calls upon a race of monsters created by a mad Genevese scientist 25 years before.

It’s 1815, and a discontented young lady sitting in a rose garden receives a mysterious gift: a pocket watch that, when opened, displays scenes from all eras of history. Past…and future.

It’s 1885, and a small band of resistance fighters are resorting to increasingly extreme methods in their efforts to overthrow a steampunk Empire whose clockwork gears are slick with its subjects’ blood.

Are these events connected?

Oh, come now. That would be telling.

About Heather Albano

Keeping Time Kickstarter - Heather AlbanoHeather Albano is a storyteller, history geek, and lover of both time-travel tropes and re-imaginings of older stories. You most likely know her from her game design work (which most recently included A Study In Steampunk, produced by Choice of Games, and contributions to TimeWatch and The Dracula Dossier, both published by Pelgrane Press)—but she writes non-interactive fiction too. Like the Keeping Time trilogy.

 

Kenneth Schneyer on Timepiece: Savor every bite

Foreword to Timepiece by Heather Albano

Kenneth Schneyer

We asked author Kenneth Schneyer to write a foreword to Heather Albano‘s forthcoming time-travel adventure novel Timepiece, which comes out January 3, 2017. What he wrote was so delightful, we thought we’d share it ahead of time!

Keeping Time Kickstarter - A Time Travel Trilogy by Heather Albano Support Keeping Time Kickstarter!

Of course time travel represents an inversion of the way we experience the world. The arrow of entropy is reversed.  People gain knowledge of the consequences of their actions before they take them.  In this, it resembles both the prophecy story and the flashback: more than one author has imagined Tiresias and Cassandra as time travelers. Continue reading Kenneth Schneyer on Timepiece: Savor every bite

Signing: Risuko Author David Kudler to Read at Book Passage

david-kudler-headshot-cropped-off-center-_EHP85271-150x15011.jpgOn Monday, October 3, author/publisher David Kudler will read from his new teen novel Risuko: A Kunoichi Tale at the Left Coast Writers monthly salonIn addition to sharing sections of the book, he will discuss the process of publishing his first novel. The salon takes place at Book Passage in Corte Madera. Copies of the book will available, and he will be signing as well. Continue reading Signing: Risuko Author David Kudler to Read at Book Passage

Help Launch Risuko — Kickstarter Campaign

Help launch Risuko — support us on Kickstarter!

You can reserve your copy of Risuko: A Kunoichi Tale now and help support Stillpoint Digital Press’s publication of this exciting new teen historical adventure novel!

Author David Kudler has launched a crowdfunding campaign to help make Risuko the best book it can possibly be.  

Continue reading Help Launch Risuko — Kickstarter Campaign

Goodreads Risuko Giveaway!

This week, you have the opportunity to win a free copy of Risuko on Goodreads! Author David Kudler has made a paperback ARC (advance review copy) available on the world’s biggest book review site:

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Risuko by David Kudler

Risuko

by David Kudler

Giveaway ends December 18, 2015. See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

Sign up now to win your free copy!

Continue reading Goodreads Risuko Giveaway!

Lavinia: The Aeneiad Brought to Life

Many of us are familiar at this point with what is known as fanfiction, a largely internet-based genre in which writers of every level of ability apply their skills to worlds and characters created by others. At worst, they offer amateurs a chance to allow their imaginations to play in fields plowed by more skilled craftsmen. At best, they create a fractal lens to the original work, expanding the reader’s understanding of the original book and its themes, turning the perspective offered by the original author inside-out and upside-down.

Of late, this genre has gone mainstream. Gregory Maguire’s Wicked recast the Wicked Witch of the West as the protagonist of Frank Baum’s Oz books. Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad tells of the hardships suffered by Odysseus’ abandoned queen.

In Lavinia, master fantasist Ursula K. Le Guin takes a minor character who appears late the Aeneiad–Aeneas’ second (or perhaps third, but certainly last) wife, and tells a rich story around her, properly epic in scope and detail.

The book starts with a breath-taking descent into the point of view of Lavinia, princess of a minor Latin kingdom. She is a seer, and the subject of numerous prophecies–the most powerful and closely guarded imparted to her by the dying poet Virgil, who lived hundreds of years in Lavinia’s future.

The narrative continually seems to loop back on itself, as Lavinia’s knowledge as the point of view character looking back on the events about which she is telling, the knowledge imparted to her by Virgil, and the urgency of the crises through which she lived seem to cross and overlap.

As the book reaches its halfway point, several things begin to weigh it down: Lavinia’s own passivity as a character, which is quite profound, and the author’s desire to tell the story fully. The final chapters are rushed, whole decades sailing by in the space of paragraphs.

Nevertheless, this wonderful storyteller’s ability to weave a fantastic tale out of the material of everyday life (even the everyday life of the Latium of some 2500 or 3000 years ago), and the compelling philosophical questions that Le Guin raises and Lavinia considers–together they make this a worthwhile and original glimpse into Virgil’s world.