Throne of Jade excerpt
I have spent the last week in jury duty (and am not yet done). I may write about it a bit when it is all over; it has been an inconvenient and yet powerful experience. But I can say right now that words cannot adequately express how devoutly grateful I am for a career that does not require me to get up at 8am on a regular basis.
I have been staggering home every night afterwards and indulging in Oblivion (aptly named at present), without the mental capacity to do much of anything else. However, it is now just two weeks until Throne of Jade comes out, so I have celebrated by putting up a fresh excerpt from the book. Since the beginning of the first chapter is already included at the end of His Majesty's Dragon (and also is a bit spoilery for HMD), I have instead put up a bit of the night battle scene from Chapter 4, which takes place aboard the Allegiance, a dragon transport --
The Allegiance was a wallowing behemoth of a ship: just over four hundred feet in length and oddly narrow in proportion, except for the outsize dragondeck that flared out at the front of the ship, stretching from the foremast forward to the bow. Seen from above, she looked very strange, almost fan-shaped. But below the wide lip of the dragondeck, her hull narrowed quickly; the keel was fashioned out of steel rather than elm, and thickly covered with white paint against rust: the long white stripe running down her middle gave her an almost rakish appearance.
To give her the stability which she required to meet storms, she had a draft of more than twenty feet and was too large to come into the harbor proper, but had to be moored to enormous pillars sunk far out in the deep water and her supplies ferried to and fro by smaller vessels: a great lady surrounded by scurrying attendants. This was not the first transport which Laurence and Temeraire had traveled on, but she would be the first true ocean-going one; a poky three-dragon ship running from Gibraltar to Plymouth with barely a few planks in increased width could offer no comparison.
( Read the excerpt from Chapter 4 )
And to round out the post, this morning I received the spectacular cover art for the UK hardcover edition of
Throne of Jade from Dominic Harman -- it's even more beautiful than the cover for
Temeraire, I think, and they have done something nifty with the background color for the image -- lovely work.
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naominovik) wrote,
