Signings and Sightings

Upcoming conventions and conferences include:

• World Science Fiction Convention, Colorado Convention Center, Denver, CO, August 6-10, 2008
• FenCon, Crowne Plaza Hotel, North Dallas-Addison, 14315 Midway Road, Addison, TX, October 3-5, 2008

Now Available!

Blackness Tower
a romantic fantasy
March 2008
Juno Books
ISBN-10: 0809572028
ISBN-13: 978-0809572021

For years Lauren Reay has experienced vivid dreams of a castle keep and a chapel overlooking the sea. Then, while waiting beside her grandfather's deathbed, she sees the exact scene in a calendar photo. It's in Caithness, on the otherworldly coast of northern Scotland, that Lauren finds the restored 16th century Blackness Tower and the ruined 12th century St. Bride's chapel of her dream.

She is armed with no more than a macabre silver-gilt skull watch, a souvenir of her grandfather's mysterious grandmother, only one of Lauren's ancestors who lived at the Tower. Still, Lauren starts asking questions of edgy David Sutherland, who now owns and lives in the Tower, and of scholarly Ewan Calder, the archaeologist who is excavating the cemetery at the chapel. Soon Lauren begins to dream of a Spanish galleon crashing onto cliffs below the castle -- even as one of the men begins dreaming of her.

For Blackness Tower holds strange powers and elemental presences that cannot be rationally explained, but which will change Lauren's life forever.

"Sweep away the illusion of time; compress our threescore years into three minutes...Are we not spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away into air and invisibility? This is no metaphor, it is a simple fact: we start out of Nothingness, take figure and are apparitions...Ghosts! there are a thousand million walking the earth...some half hundred have vanished from it, some half hundred have arisen in it, ere thy watch ticks once...we not only carry each a future ghost within him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts!" —Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

"Lillian Stewart Carl's writing is at once intelligent, captivating, and romantic, caressed by light fingers of poetic description.  In no way am I going to give anything away about the mystery itself except to say that I pride myself on usually being able to figure them out.  This one kept me intrigued and guessing until the end.  In fact, she had so many clues and details involving the present and not, but two times lines from the past, I was a little worried that Carl wouldn't be able to pull off a satisfying ending.  But I worried for nothing, because the ending blew me away." -- Clover Autrey, Paranormal Romance Reviews

November 2007
Juno Books
ISBN 978-0-80957205-2

A city.
A mystery.
An impossible love.

Why would the Head of a great ruling House retrieve a robbed, battered victim left for dead in the streets of the legendary city of Amberlight?

Why would the oracle that guides all House-heads tell her, It matters, if he dies?

What would an outlander stripped of all memory know of cabal and coalition along the River, where Amberlight holds the monopoly of power and wealth?

What threat might he reveal to Amberlight's one, unique possession: the motherlodes of the qherrique; the pearl-rock that gives the River's rulers their most powerful tool?

What could the Head of a great House feel for a nameless stranger, that would make her risk her House and city for his sake?

Is it honor or betrayal that brings war, siege, and the ruin of their every hope?

The answers lie beyond tangles of intrigue and insurrection and brutal warfare, when in the final upheaval they both begin to understand the more-than-human mystery that first brought them together in the streets of Amberlight.

13 original stories about the realities just around the corner...

Movements glimpsed out of the corner of your eye, inexplicable sounds, knowledge for which there is no rational explanation, dreams that seem as real as our own everyday life—products of overactive imaginations, or unexpected glimpses into dimensions beyond our own? Join thirteen intrepid writers as they explore those unknown territories that may be found in any of countless Dimensions Next Door.

From a Celtic knot maze that could trap an unwary archaeologist; to an Internet site that offers to bring karmic balance into one man’s life; to a man bespelled to walk the future in the service of his queen—here are tales of the strange, challenging, and often wondrous worlds just waiting to be discovered by those with the ability to perceive them.

Lois McMaster Bujold

Lillian has co-authored, along with John Helfers, a retrospective on Lois McMaster Bujold's science fiction work titled The Vorkosigan Companion.  It will be published by Baen Books in December of 2008.

"Now where was I going?? Oh, yeah...I was going to curl up with one of Lillian's books!"