To celebrate, YA Bound Book Tours helped me set up a blog tour and giveaways, and here's the schedule:
And some of the tour stops are sharing my artwork from A Compendium of the Faer Folke, and if you're not familiar with it, it's a book Avery uses in Crow's Rest to learn about the Fae and how to protect herself against them. The pages being shared have an odd history and origin story:
"Specimen #1132 was a wholly unremarkable
geode, one of a dozen donated geological samples that made their way from a
private collection in Cornwall to a university in the United States. About the
size and shape of a sleeping cat, the stone’s secrets abided until a research
student detected the shifting of an object inside.
With the aid of the latest imaging
devices, she was able to peer past the tabby-colored crust and into the
interior of the geode. A nebulous form, one with edges too regular to be
anything but manmade, intrigued her enough to flout protocol and cut open the
specimen. The hollowed interior contained a remarkable array of sphalarite and
ferruginous quartz crystals—along with the remnants of a peculiar tome.
The spine still attached to the
hand-painted, leather cover suggested a much thicker volume, but only a
fraction of loose pages were extant. Inked on various types of unknown skins,
the pages contained drawings and descriptions of fantastical creatures:
mythological beings and faeries treated
as genuine subjects for field study. The title, A Compendium of the Faer Folke, could not be found in any database
of historical or contemporary books, however.
Suspecting a prank, the student used
radiometric dating methods on the geode, and radiocarbon dating for the book.
Test results showed an age of approximately nine million years ago for the
geode’s creation, and two hundred years for the book’s materials. It was
obvious that the specimen exhibited no signs of tampering, other than the cut
she herself made.
Before she could publish her findings,
the student herself, plus all her notes and samples, disappeared from her
locked basement office. Fortunately, before their loss, she invited a local
photographer to document the find, and they were able to post images of the
now-lost remnants of A Compendium of the
Faer Folke to relevant websites.
