-#1 NYT Bestselling author Patrick Rothfuss gave THRONE 5 stars on Goodreads. 

-Scott Lynch, (THE LIES OF LOCKE LAMORA) said unto the people “Read this thing.”

-NYT Bestselling novelist/TIME magazine critic Lev Grossman tweeted that THRONE was “engrossing and utterly original.”

-Perhaps most exciting to me, supreme geek site io9 raved “If you love smart escapism, don’t miss out on this book.”

More important than any of this, though, has been the touching number of emails, tweets, etc., that I’ve received from readers. Writing can be a lonely business. Hearing from those who enjoyed your work is one of the surest cures for that,  at least for this writer.

That reminds me – over at Goodreads I’ve set up a Q&A  forum where I can answer reader questions about THRONE OF THE CRESCENT MOON. Head on over and check it out – but beware spoilers!

The results of the write-a-review contest are in! Tim Hines was selected via random.org as the winner of a signed author copy of THE CRESCENT MOON KINGDOMS, BOOK II. Congrats, Tim! And thanks a *ton* to all who participated!

Upon viewing this cartoon, my kids instantly declared Mouw Awa the Manjackal – an evil spirit that’s made from shadows and jackal-skin and gets off on torture – to be a ‘kitty!’

Also, the wonderful MK Hutchins has come up with a recipe for the cardamom tea served at Yehyeh’s teahouse!

Moments like these are what it’s all about. Lucky author is lucky!

Well, THRONE OF THE CRESCENT MOON has been on store shelves for three weeks now. My Twitter and Facebook feeds have been full of exciting  pictures from bookstores all over the country. And it’s been even more exciting reading the (mostly quite enthusiastic) reactions of professional reviewers, book bloggers, and, most importantly, just-plain-readers.  Thanks to everyone who’s read the book and spread the word!

I’ll be rounding up the reviews in a future post, but for starters: Starred reviews at Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Library Journal (where THRONE was also Debut of the Month in Science Fiction and Fantasy)! Better than a kick in the head, ne?

Also, Scott Lynch says THRONE “buoyantly fails to suck!”

So: I’ve been incredibly lucky in that word of mouth and enthusiastic reviews have brought a lot of attention to my novel. But these be dark and dire days for the poor widdle author struggling to sell his or her wares. More signal boosting is always needed. And so… I propose…

A CONTEST!

Here’s how it shall work:

-Between now and Midnight EST on March 6th, post a review of three sentences or more on THRONE OF THE CRESCENT MOON’s page @ Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Goodreads, or any other major bookseller/book community site.

-Send a link to the review(s), along with your name and mailing address, to saladin.a.ahmed@gmail.com, WITH THE SUBJECT LINE “THRONE REVIEW CONTEST”. I will make note of your review and you will be entered into the drawing. The same review may be submitted to up to 3 sites and thus earn three entries.

-My apologies to those who’ve already posted reviews, but I’m unable to count these toward entry into the drawing. But THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!

-The review needn’t be positive.

-The drawing will be done via an online true random number generator. The results will be announced here and on twitter, etc.

-A year and change from now, I will sign and send to the drawing winner one of my fresh-out-of-the-box, not-yet-in-stores author copies of THE CRESCENT MOON KINGDOMS BOOK II.

-The winner will taunt everyone else with online pictures of his or her prize.

-We will all eat cake

That there’s the plan. The final step may have to be moved up a bit, of course… Otherwise, I think we’re good. So have at it!

Well, this is the biggest day of my writerly life: My debut fantasy novel THRONE OF THE CRESCENT MOON is now on sale! Check out the book page for reviews, a sample, and – most importantly – BUY BUTTONS!!!

I expect I’ll have more reflective stuff to say a bit later, but right now I’m off to NYC for launch events. If you’re in NYC please join me at the THRONE launch party, where I’l have books for sale and signing.

Been a while. Here’s what’s happening with me:

- THRONE OF THE CRESCENT MOON is coming out in audiobook! Brilliance Audio’s production will be released on Feb 7, the same day as the hardcover edition of THRONE!

- The first review of THRONE has hit the stands - a starred review in PUBLISHERS WEEKLY! ‘Wow.’ about covers my reaction to that one…

- Spread the word! From now until January 1st, I’m offering my professional novel critiques at a discounted rate of $500. Follow up on NaNoWriMo! Give a gift to the aspiring writer in your life!

- Looking forward to ConFusion, which is c. 18 minutes from my house,  in January! Who else will be there?

- Still stupidly broke, but am tentatively planning – if we can swing the finances – a twins-and-wife-and-all excursion to WisCon! Who will be *there*?

- As is probably clear from my bullet-point-ese, I’ve been spending a lot more time on Twitter than here. SOON I SHALL BE ALL MONOSYLLABLES! I kid. It’s just not some people’s thing, though, and that’s cool. But If you’re out there in the twitterverse, you can find me at https://twitter.com/#!/saladinahmed

That’s most of what’s up with me.  There’s way more depressing personal stuff I could get into, but I’ll spare y’all. What’s happening in your world?

FINALLY hand over that novel you keep tinkering with – and get a detailed, professional opinion.

Turn your rough 50K word manuscript from NaNoWriMo into a publishable novel.

Give the ultimate writerly gift to the aspiring novelist in your life.

I’m currently offering my professional novel critiques at a discounted rate. The critique package includes:

• A line-by-line, page-by-page edit of a 50-100K-word novel manuscript.
• A 5-page structural/global ‘edit letter’ discussing larger issues of plot, character, structure, style, etc.
• Publishing/representation advice, including thoughts on specific challenges or advantages the novel might have in the current market, and recommendations for specific publishers and agents.

Why hire me? I hold an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English. I’ve taught creative writing courses (including Basic Creative Writing, Poetry, and Fantasy Fiction) at the University level for over ten years. I also have extensive experience as a private online writing tutor.

I’ve also been a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story and the Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction or Fantasy Writer. My short fiction has appeared in numerous professional magazines and podcasts including Strange Horizons, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, StarShipSofa, and PodCastle, and has been translated into five foreign languages. My fantasy novel THRONE OF THE CRESCENT MOON (DAW), due out in hardcover and audiobook in February, has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus, and I’ve already sold two sequels as well.

My critique packages thus combine the pragmatic insights of a working writer who is navigating the market right now with the careful, constructive attention of an experienced teacher who has had hundreds of students.

For more information, please email saladin.a.ahmed@gmail.com

Chapter 1

Dhamsawaat, King of Cities, Jewel of Abassen

A thousand thousand men pass through and pass in

Packed patchwork of avenues, alleys, and walls

Such bookshops and brothels, such schools and such stalls

I’ve wed all your streets, made your night air my wife

For he who tires of Dhamsawaat tires of life

DOCTOR ADOULLA MAKHSLOOD, the last real ghul hunter in the great city of Dhamsawaat, sighed as he read the lines. His own case, it seemed, was the opposite. He often felt tired of life, but he was not quite done with Dhamsawaat. After threescore and more years on God’s great earth, Adoulla found that his beloved birth city was one of the few things he was not tired of. The poetry of Ismi Shihab was another.

To be reading the familiar lines early in the morning in this newly crafted book made Adoulla feel younger—a welcome feeling. The smallish tome was bound with brown sheepleather, and Ismi Shihab’s Leaves of Palm was etched into the cover with good golden acid. It was a very expensive book, but Hafi the bookbinder had given it to Adoulla free of charge. It had been two years since Adoulla saved the man’s wife from a cruel magus’s water ghuls, but Hafi was still effusively thankful.

Adoulla closed the book gently and set it aside. He sat outside of Yehyeh’s, his favorite teahouse in the world, alone at a long stone table.

His dreams last night had been grisly and vivid—blood-rivers, burning corpses, horrible voices—but the edge of their details had dulled upon waking. Sitting in this favorite place, face over a bowl of cardamom tea, reading Ismi Shihab, Adoulla almost managed to forget his nightmares entirely.

The table was hard against Dhamsawaat’s great Mainway, the broadest and busiest thoroughfare in all the Crescent Moon Kingdoms. Even at this early hour, people half-crowded the Mainway. A few of them glanced at Adoulla’s impossibly white kaftan as they passed, but most took no notice of him. Nor did he pay them much mind. He was focused on something more important.

Tea.

Adoulla leaned his face farther over the small bowl and inhaled deeply, needing its aromatic cure for the fatigue of life. The spicy-sweet cardamom steam enveloped him, moistening his face and his beard, and for the first time that groggy morning he felt truly alive.

When he was outside of Dhamsawaat, stalking bone ghuls through cobwebbed catacombs or sand ghuls across dusty plains, he often had to settle for chewing sweet-tea root. Such campfireless times were hard, but as a ghul hunter Adoulla was used to working within limits. When one faces two ghuls, waste no time wishing for fewer was one of the adages of his antiquated order. But here at home, in civilized Dhamsawaat, he felt he was not really a part of the world until he’d had his cardamom tea.

He raised the bowl to his lips and sipped, relishing the piquant sweetness. He heard Yehyeh’s shuffling approach, smelled the pastries his friend was bringing. This, Adoulla thought, was life as Beneficent God intended it.

Yehyeh set his own teabowl and a plate of pastries on the stone table with two loud clinks, then slid his wiry frame onto the bench beside Adoulla. Adoulla had long marveled that the cross-eyed, limping teahouse owner could whisk and clatter bowls and platters about with such efficiency and so few shatterings. A matter of practice, he supposed. Adoulla knew better than most that habit could train a man to do anything.

Yehyeh smiled broadly, revealing the few teeth left to him.

He gestured at the sweets. “Almond nests—the first of the day, before I’ve even opened my doors. And God save us from fat friends who wake us too early!”

Adoulla waved a hand dismissively. “When men reach our age, my friend, we should wake before the sun. Sleep is too close to death for us.”

Yehyeh grunted. “So says the master of the half-day nap! And why this dire talk again, huh? You’ve been even gloomier than usual since your last adventure.”

Adoulla plucked up an almond nest and bit it in half. He chewed loudly and swallowed, staring into his teabowl while Yehyeh waited for his reply. Finally Adoulla spoke, though he did not look up.

“Gloomy? Hmph. I have cause to be. Adventure, you say? A fortnight ago I was face-to-face with a living bronze statue that was trying to kill me with an axe. An axe, Yehyeh!” He shook his head at his own wavering tea-reflection. “Threescore years old, and still I’m getting involved in such madness. Why?” he asked, looking up.

Yehyeh was baiting him by using the pompous honorifics ascribed to a physician. The ghul hunters had shared the title of “Doctor” but little else with the “Great and Virtuous” menders of the body. No leech-wielding charlatan of a physician could stop the fanged horrors that Adoulla had battled.

“How would you know what I look like, Six Teeth? You whose crossed eyes can see nothing but the bridge of your own nose!” Despite Adoulla’s dark thoughts, trading the familiar insults with Yehyeh felt comfortable, like a pair of old, well made sandals. He brushed almond crumbs from his fingers onto his spotless kaftan. Magically, the crumbs and honey spots slid from his blessedly unstainable garment to the ground.

“You are right, though,” he continued, “I have faced worse. But this . . . this . . .” Adoulla slurped his tea. The battle against the bronze man had unnerved him. The fact that he had needed his assistant Raseed’s sword arm to save him was proof that he was getting old. Even more disturbing was the fact that he’d been daydreaming of death during the fight. He was tired. And when one was hunting monsters, tired was a step away from dead. “The boy saved my fat ass. I’d be dead if not for him.” It wasn’t easy to admit.

“Your young assistant? No shame in that. He’s a dervish of the Order! That’s why you took him in, right? For his forked sword—‘cleaving the right from the wrong’ and all that?”

“It’s happened too many times of late,” Adoulla said. “I ought to be retired. Like Dawoud and his wife.” He sipped and then was quiet for a long moment. “I froze, Yehyeh. Before the boy came to my rescue. I froze. And do you know what I was thinking? I was thinking that I would never get to do this again—sit at this table with my face over a bowl of good cardamom tea.”

Yehyeh bowed his head, and Adoulla thought his friend’s eyes might be moist. “You would have been missed. But the point is that you did make it back here, praise be to God.”

“Aye. And why, Six Teeth, don’t you say to me ‘Now stay home, you old fart?’ That is what a real friend would say to me!”

“There are things you can do, O Buzzard-Beaked Bear, that others can’t. And people need your help. God has called you to this life. What can I say that will change that?” Yehyeh’s mouth tightened and his brows drew down. “Besides, who says home is safe? That madman the Falcon Prince is going to burn this city down around our ears any day now, mark my words.”

They had covered this subject before. Yehyeh had little use for the treasonous theatrics of the mysterious master thief who called himself the Falcon Prince. Adoulla agreed that the “Prince” was likely mad, but he still found himself approving of the would-be usurper. The man had stolen a great deal from the coffers of the Khalif and rich merchants, and much of that money found its way into the hands of Dhamsawaat’s poorest—sometimes hand delivered by the Falcon Prince himself.

Yehyeh sipped his tea and went on. “He killed another of the Khalif’s headsmen last week, you know. That’s two now.” He shook his head. “Two agents of the Khalif’s justice, murdered.”

Adoulla snorted. “ ‘Khalif’s justice’? Now there are two words that refuse to share a tent! That piece of shit isn’t half as smart a ruler as his father was, but he’s twice as cruel. Is it justice to let half the city starve while that greedy son of a whore sits on his brocaded cushions eating peeled grapes? Is it justice to—”

Yehyeh rolled his crossed eyes, a grotesque sight. “No speeches, please. No wonder you like the villain—you’ve both got big mouths! But I tell you, my friend, I’m serious. This city can’t hold a man like that and one like the new Khalif at the same time. We are heading for battle in the streets. Another civil war.”

Adoulla scowled. “May it please God to forbid it.”

Yehyeh stood up, stretched, and clapped Adoulla on the back. “Aye. May All-Merciful God put old men like us quietly in our graves before this storm hits.” The cross-eyed man did not look particularly hopeful of this. He squeezed Adoulla’s shoulder. “Well. I’ll let you get back to your book, O Gamal of the Golden Glasses.”

Adoulla groaned. Back when he’d been a street brawling youth on Dead Donkey Lane, he himself had used the folktale hero’s name to tease boys who read. He’d learned better in the decades since. He placed a hand protectively over his book. “You should not contemn poetry, my friend. There’s wisdom in these lines. About life, death, one’s own fate.”

“No doubt!” Yehyeh aped the act of reading a nonexistent book in the air before him, running a finger over the imaginary words and speaking in a grumble that was an imitation of Adoulla’s own. “O, how hard it is to be so fat! O, how hard it is to have so large a nose! O Beneficent God, why do the children run a-screaming when I come a-walking?”

Before Adoulla could come up with a rejoinder on the fear Yehyeh’s own crossed eyes inspired in children, the teahouse owner limped off, chuckling obscenities to himself.

His friend was right about one thing: Adoulla was, praise God, alive and back home—back in the Jewel of Abassen, the city with the best tea in the world. Alone again at the long stone table, he sat and sipped and watched early morning Dhamsawaat come to life and roll by. A thick necked cobbler walked past, two long poles strung with shoes over his shoulder. A woman from Rughal-ba strode by, a bouquet in her hands, and the long trail of her veil flapping behind. A lanky young man with a large book in his arms and patches in his kaftan moved idly eastward.

As he stared out onto the street, Adoulla’s nightmare suddenly reasserted itself with such force that he could not move or speak. He was walking—wading—through Dhamsawaat’s streets, waist high in a river of blood. His kaftan was soiled with gore and filth. Everything was tinted red—the color of the Traitorous Angel. An unseen voice, like a jackal howling human words, clawed at his mind. And all about him the people of Dhamsawaat lay dead and disemboweled.

Name of God!

He forced himself to breathe. He watched the men and women on the Mainway, very much alive and going about their business. There were no rivers of blood. No jackal howls. His kaftan was clean.

Adoulla took another deep breath. Just a dream. The world of sleep invading my days, he told himself. I need a nap.

He took a second-to-last slurp of tea, savoring all of the subtle spices that Yehyeh layered beneath the cardamom. He shook off his grim thoughts as best he could and stretched his legs for the long walk home.

He was still stretching when he saw his assistant, Raseed, emerge from the alley on the teahouse’s left. Raseed strode toward him, dressed as always in the impeccable blue silk habit of the Order of Dervishes. The holy warrior pulled a large parcel behind him, something wrapped in gray rags.

No, not something. Someone. A long-haired little boy of perhaps eight years. With blood on his clothes. O please, no. Adoulla’s stomach clenched up. Merciful God help me, what now? Adoulla reached deep and somehow found the strength to set down his teabowl and rise to his feet.

#

If you enjoyed this excerpt, you can preorder Throne of the Crescent Moon at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Powell’s!

Wowie wowie wowie wowie wowie!

::jumps up and down and claps like a buffoon in motley::

Well, uh… It’s a bit…Ur-, but…

!!!A (34% off!) preorder button for THRONE OF THE CRESCENT MOON now lives on Amazon!!!

::faints::