Linda DeMeulemeester's Grim Hill novels to become an animated TV series.

Toronto-based Wizard Hat Productions is going to turn the Grim Hill book series into a animated series.
The books by Linda DeMeulemeester will be turned into 26 half-hour CG-animated episodes targeted at tweens. From the press release: “Wizard Hat is thrilled to work with Lobster Press and Linda DeMeulemeester to bring these unique and exciting stories to television,” said Pam Slavin, Partner and Executive Producer, Wizard Hat Productions, Inc. “’Grim Hill’ has attracted legions of fans who have been asking for a TV show based on the popular books, and we’re looking forward to bringing the adventures of Cat, Sookie, Jasper and Clive to life on air.” The popular five-book series, first released by Lobster Press in 2007, has received numerous accolades including the Silver Birch Award, voted favorite book of 2008 by kids grades 3-8. The Grim Hill books pit typical teens against powerful, magical creatures in the town of Grim Hill. Each thrilling tale combines celtic myth and dark faerie lore with face-paced action and adventure, and scary moments are diffused with humor.

Late-Breaking News

Matthew Hughes has accepted an offer to write a fantasy adventure novel set in the world of the roleplaying game Pathfinder. The game company is allied with the publisher Paizo, which this summer is bringing out the trade paperback of Matt's standalone Archonate novel Template (originally published in limited editions by PS Publishing.)


 Dave Duncan's  new novel Pock's World (his first SF novel since 1991) was released  October 2010 by Edge Publishing.

Pock’s World, long settled by humankind, is accused of being infected by humanoid aliens. It has been quarantined and may have to be sterilized. Five people are chosen to go there and examine the evidence: saintly but ruthless Father Andre; Ratty Turnsole, a muckraking reporter ripe for romance; ambitious politician Athena Fimble; manipulative bureaucrat Millie Backet; and shady billionaire Linn Lazuline. Some of them carry grudges - all have their own agendas.  Pock’s World surprises them all. Nothing is what they expect. Quickly entangled in love, politics, religion, and deceit, they discover that the clock is already ticking and the fate of humanity itself is at stake.

In Recent News

Dave Duncan's latest, Speak to the Devil, the first book in a new series "The Brothers Magnus" is now available in hardcover from Tor. It received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and Top Pick from Romantic Times. For more see the announcement at Dave's website.

Dave's three short novels published as "The King's Daggers" will be reissued some time this year in print-on-demand format as an omnibus volume entitled, The Monster War, A Tale of the King's Blades. "All the old gang are in there: Durendal, Ambrose, Bandit, Snake, plus a lot of information missing from the main series. I look forward to having three more books published in 2010 (The mass market edition of Ill Met in the Arena was released in January). For estimated release dates, please check the Availabilities page. Forthcoming: A hardcover original fantasy from Tor: Speak to the Devil, Book One, and a trade paperback original Science Fiction from Edge: Pock's World. ("This will be my first Science Fiction since Hero! in 1991.)"

Five of Dave's out-of-print titles are now available in print-on-demand and e-book formats. The first two are Science Fiction standalones, and the other three comprise "The Great Game" trilogy. "If you collect my books or buy them as gifts, you might want to consider the Personalized Print on Demand editions from E-Reads and SharedBook. The Seventh Sword series is currently available. I expect other volumes will follow. Please see the webpage for full details."

As well, Dave's 1988 fantasy series "The Seventh Sword" is now available in Amazon's Kindle store. Dave says, "This was my most successful series ever...I still get fan mail about it." The three titles are The Reluctant Swordsman, The Coming of Wisdom and The Destiny of the Sword.

Grim Hill: the Family Secret, the fourth book in Linda Demeulemeester's popular middle-grade fantasy series from Lobster Press, was recently reviewed by Kirkus Reviews. The reviewer says "the fascinating look at Sweden’s history and culture makes it an entertaining and worthwhile read." Grim Hill: The Family Secret held the number seven spot on the list of the top ten new Canadian children's titles for the week ending June 1st 2010.   
 
The first book in the series,  The Secret of Grim Hill,  was nominated for both Saskatchewan's Diamond Willow Award and Atlantic Canada's Hackmatack Award for 2010. Besides bookstores, the series is now available in Scholastic's Arrow Book Club. The Secret of Grim Hill also won the Ontario Library Association's Silver Birch Award. As well, The Canadian Toy Council named it as one of the "Great Books for Children" for 2008; and  it has been shortlisted for the British Columbia Young Readers' Choice Red Cedar Award. The second book and third books in this popular series, Grim Hill: The Secret Deepens and Grim Hill: The Forgotten Secret are now available. To read more, visit Linda's Grim Hill website. 

Vampire enthusiasts can read about the new Canadian vampire anthology, Evolve, (EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing), edited by award-winning Nancy Kilpatrick, at http://www.vampires-evolve.com/index.htmlhttp://www.vampires-evolve.com/index.html . The site also provides links to information on the contributors, including Mary Choo ,whose short story, "Resonance," appears in the collection, along with Rhea Rose's story "Alia's Angel".

Hespira, the third in the series of Matt Hughes' Henghis Hapthorn novels, is now available from Night Shade Books.Russell Letson, noted Jack Vance critic and aficionado, has placed Matt firmly on the shulders of the master with a review of Hespira in the April Locus. He says, "The voice at the center of this book is quite recognizable, a performance of the Vancean sensibility and prose style. I also found it to be the center of the book's appeal. (There should be no complaints about basing a book's voice on a predecessor – compare the voice of hard-boiled fiction that originates with Hammett and especially Chandler, or the Forester-out-of-Austen prose of Patrick O’Brian.) Hughes's command of the irony, understatement, and detachment of Vancean language is unstrained (an Archonate prison is a 'contemplarium'), as is his grasp of the Vancean-ramble approach to narrative. The various puzzles are allowed to accumulate, theories are proposed and tested, and above all places are visited and savored – hotels, rustic inns, country estates, tourist overlooks, restaurants plain and fancy, ferry boats, space yachts. The puzzles are solved, their connections (or lack thereof) revealed, and a dramatic struggle finishes the whole tale in a satisfactorily gaudy manner.

Eileen Kernaghan's Wild Talent: a Novel of the Supernatural is reviewed by Ursula Pflug in the April 2009 issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction. Pflug writes, "Acclaimed Canadian author Eileen Kernaghan ... is known for her painstaking historical research and her interest in diverse cultural and historical manifestations of spirituality. Wild Talent is no exception." And from Canadian Children's Book News, spring 2009: "Eileen Kernaghan creates a richly atmospheric tale ... The vividly realized setting and quietly appealing protagonist lend this story an irresistible allure, both to readers of historical fiction and those who will be drawn by its more fantastical and otherworldly elements."

A collection of Eileen's speculative poems, Tales from the Holograph Woods, has been released by Wattle & Daub Books . "Blake, Yeats, Thomas, Stevens and Plath – are echoed in her poems, as are the mythologies and philosophies to which she turns in her search for meaning not confined to the corners of present time and space." —Alexander M. Forbes, Canadian Literature.

September 2009, $12.95 ISBN 978-0-9810658-2-3 Wattle and Daub Books, Grandview RPO, PO Box 78038, Vancouver BC V5N 5W1.

In Earlier News

Eileen launched Tales from the Holograph Woods at White Dwarf Books, 3715 West 10th in Vancouver, Saturday September 26, 2 p.m. Also reading: Marcie Tentchoff, award-winning speculative poet and author of Through The Window: A Journey to the Borderlands of Faerie.
Eileen's SF short story "Carpe Diem" will be reprinted in a new anthology, The Aurora Awards -- Thirty Years of Canadian Science Fiction, from the Montreal small press Nanopress.

Mary Choo's short story "Resonance" has been accepted for the upcoming vampire anthology, Evolve, edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and due out next spring. Another of Mary's stories, "The Drowning-Poles", appears in the inaugural issue of the West Coast speculative anthology Escape Clause, edited by Clélie Rich. Mary's horror short story "The Language of Crows" is included in the forthcoming anthology Tesseracts 13. Mary also has three speculative poems out in the current issue of Room Magazine.

Tesseracts Thirteen, which includes Mary Choo's dark fantasy story "The Language of Crows," has just been released. The anthology is edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and David Morrell, and features twenty-three stories of horror and dark fantasy by Canadian authors.
Tesseracts Thirteen, Trade Paperback. ISBN-10: 1-894063-25-2, ISBN-13:
978-1-894063-25-8. Price $19.95 CDN, $16.95 US

Mary's short story, "Killing Daniel," which appeared in the Paranormal Fiction issue of the anthology SNAFU, received an Honourable Mention on the complete online list for The Best Horror of the Year, Volume One, edited by Ellen Datlow. The list is posted on Ellen Datlow's Night Shade Books message board.




The Alchemist's Pursuit, the third of Dave Duncan's historical-mystery-fantasies set in Renaissance Venice was released by Tor in March 2009, and received a starrred review in a recent issue of Publishers Weekly. The first two books in the series, The Alchemist's Apprentice and The Alchemist's Code, are now available for download from Audible.com.

Now available: Ill Met in the Arena : A gripping adventure of revenge, political machination, and thwarted love. "Complicated politics and family scandals twist through this tale of courtly intrigue from prolific fantasist Dave Duncan...." -- Publishers Weekly. Read a chapter sample at Dave's website

Matt Hughes' story "Mastermindless" will appear in a SF-in-translation magazine in China. A Chinese fan living in America, Ruhan Zhao, did the translation. Matt recently made his nineteenth sale to F&SF – a 16,000 words story entitled "Hell of a Fix. It's about a nerdish actuary who accidentally causes Hell to go on strike.

Matt has also sold a story called "Timmy, Come Home" to an anthology titled Is Anybody Out There? edited for DAW by Nick Gevers and Marty Halpern. Matt says, "All the stories have something to do with the Fermi Paradox (the apparent contradiction between the high probability of extraterrestrial civiliations being out there somewhere, and the fact that we don't see any alien visitors or pick up radio signals." Release date is June 2010.


Heyne (Random House Germany) recently published the first of Janine Cross's Dragon Temple Trilogy, Touched by Venom, under the German title Auf dunklen Schwingen and is slated to soon bring out the second book, Shadowed by Wings, (German translation as yet unknown). According to a German blogger who recently interviewed Janine for Literatur-community.de, the Random House Germany CV states that she is a '"big hope in the new/modern fantasy genre.'


Hello Summer, Goodbye, the late Michael Coney's novel of love, civil war and climate change on an alien world, and its previously unpublished sequel, I Remember Pallahaxi, have been released by PS Publishing as limited edition, slipcased hardcovers. Hello Summer, Goodbye was first published in 1975, and reprinted in Canada in 1990 as Pallahaxi Tide. Both titles are reviewed in the January 2008 issue of Locus. Reviewer Rich Horton says of Hello Summer, Goodbye, "It is quite a beautiful, bittersweet book" and adds "I am thrilled to see both novels in print."

The new edition of Eileen Kernaghan's historical fantasy The Sarsen Witch, set in early bronze-age Britain, has been released by the Juno Books imprint of Wildside Press. You can order it from amazon.com, amazon.ca, or other online bookstores, or directly from Juno Books. Brick & mortar shops can order from Ingram, or from Juno Books. Read a review at Eileen's blog. Eileen was interviewed by Kevin McKay for the Dec-Jan 08/09 issue of Senior Living Magazine.


Matthew Hughes has a new, stand-alone Archonate novel Template, from PS Publishing. It's published in two limited-edition hardcover versions.

From Robert Sawyer: "Hughes has been the best-kept secret in SF for far too long: he's a towering talent, and Template is his best work to date."

Publishers Weekly says of Matt's The Spiral Labyrinth: "The superior melding of fantasy, humor and detection seen in Majestrum (2006) is displayed to even better advantage in Hughes's second chronicle of Henghis Hapthorn, a "discriminator" (or consulting detective) on an alternate Earth. ... Hapthorn's wry first-person narration recalls Bertie Wooster, and Hughes effortlessly renders fantastic worlds and beings believable. News that a third adventure is in the works will surely please fans of many genres." And from Nick Gevers' review in the September 2007 issue of Locus: "Deliciously bizarre exoticism, in colourful, elegant language; the textures of The Spiral Labyrinth are something to savor."

Matt is has contributed a story "Grolion of Almery" to a tribute anthology of stories set in Jack Vance's Dying Earth universe, edited by Gardner Dozois and George R.R. Martin. The anthology will be coming out from Tor in the US and HarperCollins Voyager in the UK, as well as in limited editions from Subterranean Press. In recent news, Matt has collaborated on a medical thriller, Transplant, with John Elefteriades, MD, chief of cardiothoracic surgery at Yale's School of Medicine. Read more at Robot Binaries Press. Transplant is now available at amazon.ca

As well, Matt will be writing three Imbry novellas over the next three years, each to be released as a limited edition chapbook by PS Publishing. "For those who haven't come across him, Luff Imbry is my master criminal (mainly in art theft and forgery) in the decadent world of Old Earth's penultimate age. Think of Sydney Greenstreet in the Maltese Falcon crossed with Peter Ustinov in any of his caper films."

Mary Choo's short story, "Killing Daniel," appears in the Paranormal Fiction issue of the new genre anthology, SNAFU*, launched by Objective Press and Ravine Screenprinting on June 9, 2008 in Montreal. SNAFU is a 5 by 8 inch soft-cover publication, bound with brass Boston Bolts. The book has a striking scarlet cover, and features text embellished by eighteenth-century style text fonts and ornaments. This is the first issue of this ambitious anthology, with a foreword by writer and former Books in Canada editor Peter Such. [SNAFU Anthology, Paranormal Fiction, Issue One; Objective Press and Ravine Screenprinting, Montreal, Canada 2008. ISSN 1916-0909. Price $12.95 Cdn.]*Limited, numbered edition.

Mary's introduction, "Bruce Taylor : A Passion For His Art," will appear in Magic Realist writer Bruce Taylor's new book, The Tails of Alleymanderous and Other Odd Tales," to be published by Subatomic Press of Oregon in 2009. Meanwhile, Mary's story "The Language of Crows," is now available from Pseudopod on CD. Order it at the Pseudopod website.

We"re pleased to introduce fantasy writers Janine Cross and Linda DeMeulemeester as the latest members of The Lonely Cry.

Janine Cross is the author of the critically acclaimed Dragon Temple Saga: Touched by Venom, Shadowed by Wings, and Forged by Fire. Writing as Paulette Crosse, she also published the mainstream literary novel The Footstop Cafe (Dundurn Press, March 2007)

German rights to the Dragon Temple trilogy have just sold to Heyne (part of Random House Germany).

Linda DeMeulemeester's contemporary young adult fantasy The Secret of Grim Hill was released in May by Lobster Press. It received a featured review in the March 31, 2007 issue of The Globe & Mail, and is a Books for Everybody 2007 selection.


Dave Duncan's The Alchemist's Apprentice, a historical fantasy set in Venice around 1600 and featuring Nostradamus, has received praise in Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Kirkus Reviews, and made the trade paperback bestseller list in the June 2007 issue of Locus. . Twenty-two of Dave's current and back-list titles are now available as e-books.


Mary Choo's poem "Jig (from Grannie's Garden)", which was published in ChiZine #30, and Rhea Rose's story "Summer Silk", from Tesseracts 10, both received honourable mention in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2007. Mary Choo's short story "Killing Daniel" appears in the just-released Paranormal Fiction Issue of the SNAFU Anthology;and her short story "The Language of Crows" ,which appeared on the World Fantasy Convention 2001 CD-ROM, sold to PSEUDOPOD: the Horror Podcast Magazine.


Matthew Hughes' second Henghis Hapthorn novel, The Spiral Labyrinth, was published by Night Shade Books in limited and trade hardcover editions in September 07. You can read the first chapter on Matt's web page: http://www.archonate.com/spiral-labyrinth; and there is a review at http://trashotron.com/agony/news/2007/06-25-07.htm . The trade paperback edition of Majestrum was out in August; Matt has posted the first 15,000 words on his web site.

The Commons, the Guth Bandar novel that has been appearing in episodes in F&SF, was published in June by Robert J. Sawyer's imprint at Fitzhenry & Whiteside; also in June, a chapbook version of The Farouchessemblage, a Luff Imbry novelette, was published by the Seattle small press Payseur & Schmidt. As well, Matt has sold a new stand-alone Archonate novel, Template, to PS Publishing for February 2008 publication; and has turned in Wolverine: Lifeblood, a novel about Marvel's Canadian X-Man, to Pocket Books. A short story, "Go Tell the Phoenicians" appears in Tesseracts 10. Matt's 1999 hardboiled suspense story"One More Kill" is now a podcast on the Well Told Tales site.

Matt was profiled as one of ten Canadian science fiction writers to watch in the May 2007 issue of Quill & Quire. "Hughes' dryly comic style is complemented by an impressive vocabulary, both which underscore the adventurous nature of his work."