#night world

[leche-flandom]

Boosting in hopes anyone can answer because I'm also curious about this pin.

Also, I can't believe that the autographed books were only third place prizes? I'd have valued that way more than a pin or glow in the dark stickers!

Any other Night World historians out there know what the prize gold-plated flower looks like? I don’t believe I’ve ever seen it, and doing a search now didn’t come across it.

[gameraboy2]

Night World (1932)

[moonlightreal]

LJ Smith is back!

Well knock me over with a feather!

Did anybody have “LJ Smith surfaces” on their bingo card for 2024?

The big news is, she’s back!  With a new website, theljsmith.com  It seems to have gone up a month or so ago.  Here’s the news you came here for:

The big news is that I  have recently finished the last two books in the Night World series, Strange Fate: Mystic, and Strange Fate: Apocalypse; as well as an adult book, Lullaby. They are all in final editing with my agent, the esteemed Mr. John Silbersack (john@thebentagency.com).  Lullaby is also with John, and it is my first book for grown-up readers.

So!  Strange Fate is finished!  For the… third time?  Certainly not the first, but it seems to be finished-er than it ever was before and that is very exciting.  I notice she mentions her agent (and his email address, so we can all hire him to promote our books if we want) but she doesn’t mention a publisher so it seems possible that no publisher has decided to buy the books yet.  

My knowledge of publishing is scanty but I think Simon & Schuster gets “right of first refusal” meaning they get dibs on Strange Fate since they published the rest of the series.  If they don’t want to take a chance on it… what?  Will Ms. Smith be free to shop around to other publishers or self-publish?  Or could S&S sit on the book without putting it out?  I don’t know.  Anybody in this fandom work in publishing? We need you!

Anyway, phoning up Simon & Schuster to see if they have anything in their system seems like a not-too-stalkerish thing we might do in the future.

I’m trying not to get my hopes up.  It seems totally possible that publishers will look at Strange Fate and go, “A sequel to this totally forgotten thing from 30 years ago?  That you need to have read all these 90s books to understand?  That is totally non-diverse and not on trend at all?  Written by some old biddy who isn’t in touch with today’s YA readers?  Nah, we don’t want it.”  But dangit, Ms. Smith is closer to getting it out than she’s ever been before and I’m rooting for her so hard… even if I’m not going to really believe it until the books are in my hands.

The website also has contact info for Ms. Smith: lisa@theljsmith.com  We can write to her! I feel like I should, I gotta work out what to say!

The about page includes the factoid that Ms. Smith is an anime nerd.  I wonder what series!  Well her pup is named Arslan, so we know one of them!

The FAQ I believe is questions we have seen before on the old site.  The books and fanart are also familiar.

The Short Stories page is where things get interesting.  Are some of the stories new?  Some are definitely missing.  I never paid as much attention as I should’ve to the short stories, and then the website came and went… there are some stories by “Jessa-lyn Kemp” aka “staff writer Jessica Sherman” that are definitely new.  Secret Circle stuff.  It looks like a fan? Friend? Employee? Of Ms. Smith’s is helping create content. Good!

Someone who’s not about to spend the evening watching British Baking with their mother can pull up the old website and the new one and compare stories.  I think the Strange Fate related stories are gone, because they’ve been incorporated into the books.

And then there’s the blog.

Ms. Smith comin’ in hot, barely back on the internet saying she loves AI art!  Which is, like, one of the top ten ways to get people on the internet to yell at you, so brave choice there!

Please, nobody yell at LJ Smith.  ^^;

Looking at the website Ms. Smith has used AI to clean up pictures of herself and even with the computer’s enhancements we can see that illness did a number on our poor author.  She is gaunt!  This is also the first time we’ve really seen many pictures of her, for years there was only the one.  She’s got gorgeous hair.  The other pictures are of characters from her books, and...

I'm also a writer who can't draw, and when I got a chance to play with picture AI I immediately made it make pictures of my characters and it was a really emotional experience. Like I was getting choked up. So while intellectually I know all the reasons AI is bad and there are a lot of them, that emotional punch of seeing people I knew so well but never thought my eyes would see is really powerful.

AND!  As if this Hogswatch miracle hasn’t given us more than we were ever expecting, there’s a blog post all about Strange Fate with new information and I am just falling out of my chair with excitement… but this post is long enough and Mom and I are up to pastry week on British Baking, so that will be a post for another day.

[doitsushine92]

reading secret vampire again after years and oh my god ash was such a menace. a next level hater. he didn't even have anything to gain from fucking with james and poppy, just doing it for the love of the game

[katrinahays]

here is a list of books I love that everyone should read.

-The folk of the air series by Holly black (cruel prince, wicked king, etc).

-Six of crows duoligy/king of scars by Leigh Bardugo duoligy.

-Witch haven duoligy by Sasha Payton Smith.

-Nightworld series by L. J. Smith (unfinished series).

-The things she's seen by Ambelin and Ezekiel Kwaymullina.

-Nimona by N. D. Stevenson.

-Lore by Alexandra Bracken.

-Shamaborn series by Lori M. Lee.

-The secret circle series by L. J. Smith.

-Entertwined by Heather Dixon.

-The Guardians series by William Joyce.

-The Forbidden Game by L. J. Smith.

-King Nyx by Kirsten Bakis

-Any books by Flame Tree (mythology/history!!!).

I love all of these books so much, no matter what people say. if anyone wants to know about them, just lmk!

[incorrect-night-world-quotes]

Delos: What does it mean when someone says they're pescatarian and vegan?

Poppy: Land animals are innocent of crimes but The Fish have Sinned.

[bivicennial]

One of the little bits of worldbuilding lore I really appreciate in the NW is how both vampires and witches have very distinct cultures around raising children.

Like, Thea and Blaise lose their parents and are immediately taken in by an increasingly long list of relatives, because witches (especially Harman witches) do not let their children be abandoned. It's a very village-centric society. Everybody pitches in to make sure the kids are looked after and cared for, all 90s matriarchal commune style. Even when Blaise is actively causing like, mayhem and destruction, the Crone of All Witches decides to take her granddaughters on full time despite being ninety years old and running half the goddamn Night World.

Comparatively, the vampires have a very... aloof style of parenting. It's quite business-like, and focused mostly on monetary support rather than emotional care. Vampire kids are expected to teach themselves most of their survival skills basically on the streets. Darwinist, y'know? Because vampire children are given a lot of what humans (and witches, it seems) would consider very adult freedoms, and are treated as functional members of Night World society quite young. It seems to be expected that most vampire kids who aren't kept in an enclave will learn how to defend themselves or they'll get fucked up. And if they can't defend themselves, well. Weakness gets culled, and all that.

There's a lot of examples of it, too. Vampiric parenting is pretty consistent across the books. James's parents support him financially, but he lives in an apartment by himself at the age of, what, sixteen? Probably younger, considering he was living there for a while by the time Secret Vampire starts. And Ash doesn't seem to have any consistency in his life, but he does spend all his time partying in Las Vegas, while it's implied both his parents are living on the east coast in an enclave. He goes to fetch his sisters when his father tells him to, but he never gives the impression that he especially likes his father, and in fact suggests that if Quinn hadn't been around when his father called, he might have ignored him. There doesn't seem to be much love lost there. And we don't even have to get into Delos's relationship with his father, the guy who treats him like a living weapon at best.

Actually, the closest thing to a loving, functional parental vampire relationship seems to be Jez and Bracken, and they only have like one scene together. Even then, he let her run around San Francisco without supervision from the age of five onward, and that's never treated as being especially outside of the norm. He makes sure she has a place to stay and goes to school, but he doesn't seem to keep track of her daily activities at all, or he does and doesn't care what she gets into so long as he doesn't personally have to deal with it.

And unlike the witches, there doesn't seem to be as big of a push to take on extra kids. That's Morgead's whole thing, that he's got a bone to pick with all the elder vampires that just ignored him when he was abandoned by his mom. Even if they do take in the kids without parents (like Bracken does), vampire parents don't provide much attention anyway. With Thea, she sees a whole future surrounded by other witches and continuing her education under the tutelage of her family. She was eighteen and would have continued to be monitored and cared for for years. Whereas Ash got attacked at the age of twelve, killed a much bigger vampire, and every single person who could have watched out for him was like "yep he's good give him a credit card and let him go do whatever" and he just does.

Honestly, I could talk about each of the characters' childhoods in depth individually, but maybe I'll have to save that for later. Or fanfics or something.

[darklinaforever]

L.J Smith, I'm still waiting for the final volume of Nightworld (which she's apparently still working on, so all hope is not lost) and her Evensong fanfiction from TVD books, because I need Bamon book endgame... (even if on the other hand I haven't found any news on this subject...)

[backlistbacklog]

Season 15 LJ Smith pt5 Night World pt2

[couldtheycatchkira]

[iwishyouweretheonewhogotaway]

[ljsmiths-thenightworld]

A New Website?!

Hello, night world! There’s been a lot of development in the last month with L.J. I didn’t immediately get to post about it, because I was sick and wanted to check it over more before doing so but I’m fairly confident it’s real so I’m here to share the update!

LJ is active currently! Shes’s made a new website, with a current photo of her in a blog post to better sooth the worries of if it’s her or not as well.

Her new website is theljsmith.com (her original is LJaneSmith.net)

I also emailed her account, which I learned she has an admin team now for one. I asked a bunch of questions and between her account and the replies I will sum up the important parts below:

Strange Fate is fully written!!!

It’s so big it became 2 books in general, as well as Lullaby which originally was split from it as well. All 3 appear to be finished, and are currently with her agent.

The names for Strange Fate are now Strange Fate: Mystic and Strange Fate: Apocalypse. LJ also does have a news letter as well, which you can sign up for to keep up with Strange Fate as well as the Strange Fate contest that is coming up in January!

She also no longer has access to the original website, but if she manages to get this going again she will post on it to direct original fans to the new site.

How are all you incredibly patient people feeling about this news?

[gameraboy2]

Night World (1932)

[moonlightreal]

How close is Strange Fate?

So where in the process of publication is Strange Fate? How confident can we be that we’ll really see it and can we make a ballpark guess at how long it could take?

And bonus question, how do we all sign up to get ARCs (Advance Reading Copies) from whatever publisher picks it up?

With these questions in my mind I set about my googling…

TLDR: it is far. Not close.

Thanks to my awesome comrade in the quest, @ljsmiths-thenightworld asking Ms. Smith, we know the books are finished. Really, actually finished. Or at least they SAY… and they’ve said it before… no. I’m gonna have faith, they’re really finished!

The manuscripts are with the literary agent who as far as I can tell does a whole bunch of things. He edits the book, makes recommendations how the book should be changed to better suit the market, and gets it shipshape to be presented to publishers. This seems to be the step Strange Fate is in now.

But it might also be in the next step: shopping the book around to the editors who work for different publishing companies. As the publisher for the rest of the series, Simon & Schuster has “right of first refusal” aka “dibs.” If S&S doesn’t want it, Ms. Smith’s agent should(?) be free to approach other publishers or self publish. Assuming she doesn’t have some kind of contract with S&S that is still valid after twenty years.

Google tells me it is possible for a publisher to buy the rights but never release the book, but that is not done very often because there would be no monetary gain for the publisher in it. It seems unlikely that any publisher would do this with Strange Fate.

If (strange) fate favors us, a publisher will want the book and there will be a contract drawn up. Another round of major edits might happen here since the publisher also has ideas about what kind of book they want to print and Ms. Smith will have to do rewrites to accommodate this.

This step is a bit worrying since the Night World books are so very nineties and if Strange Fate comes out vibing 2024 it’d be kind of a shame. Also Strange Fate is two books now, we don’t know how long they are but there might be a lot to re-edit.

Once a publisher buys the book they have to get the book print-shipshape, plan the release, design the cover, and pitch the book to bookstores to sell. They also have to print the physical books, starting with the Advance Reader Copies and then do a final edit for typos. Then there’s marketing. I wonder if S&S might do a new edition of the whole series as a way to build up hype, find new readers and remind everybody else what they’re getting-- but that would really stretch the timeline so let’s hope they don’t.

And at last the book will appear. The internet tells me “12 to 24 months or even longer” from the publishing contract to the release date. So when are we looking at seeing Strange Fate? Not anytime soon!

I’m thinking LJ Smith maybe should have waited until she had a publisher on the hook before she returned to public life and gave us this exciting news. It could be a long wait, and if I’m reading my results of googling right it could all still fall apart. If no publisher wants the book we’re all in the soup!

But LJ Smith and her team know much more about the situation than I do and they are confidant enough that things will go well that they decided now was a good time to appear on the internet and start some buzz. So maybe I should shake off my pessimism and trust that Ms. Smith’s team knows what they’re doing!

Oh, and those Advance Reader Copies? Here’s a nice blog post about how to get them. There doesn’t seem to be a really surefire way and your chances are better if you have a book blog, write a lot of reviews, or are some kind of influencer. And much as I love our tumblrs, I don’t think we count lol! So we’ve got 12-24 months to do lots of favors for some influencers so we can call them in at the right moment!

Another thing I was thinking of: contact Simon and Schuster and ask about Strange Fate. Say you’re excited about it. If they keep records of the subject of every call, at least they’d know a nonzero number of people are interested. I called the “Mail Toll Free Line” years ago when asking about Strange Fate. (I assume it’s supposed to be ‘main’ and that typo has been there since, what, 2017?)

So the results of my googling say we’re at least a year or two out from reading Strange Fate. What gloomy news! But the light in the darkness is that we’re still closer to Strange Fate than we’ve ever been. The books exist. If things fall through with the fist publisher, there are other publishers. There’s self-publishing. If LJ Smith isn’t able to manage it, her heirs might, much as we hope it doesn't come to that. If the books become lost media, at least they’re out there to be found.

[yibeimolihuacha]

Shoutout to my biggest book!crush from my teenage years Ash Redfern.

I believe, you are the reason I ocassionaly read dramione fanfiction even though I haven't read a single hp book.

I still love you, babe

And I still love your wife