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A new Realm of the Elderlings novella is heading our way

Lucille

This weekend at Epinal was a convention around SFF (imaginary worlds), Les Imaginales. I couldn’t attend because it’s far from where I live but some of the things that were said or announced are starting to be talked about around the internet and I learned something amazing!

My friend Alice sent me a DM and tweeted a tumblr post about a twitter conversation from Robin Hobb and fans that led us to believe a story about Patience was in the work.

THEN another friend who was able to attend let us know that indeed, Robin announced during a conference that she was writing a novella about Patience and Lacey !! Those two awesome characters appear in the Farseer Trilogy ❀

I tried looking for more sources and another person (linked below) told me later on that she found the information on a facebook fan group called Le SeptiÚme Duché, from other people who attended the convention.

may 07 - the wilful princess and

A novella is shorter than a novel but longer than a short story, it has between seventeen thousand five hundred (17,500) and forty thousand (40,000) words (source: the hugo awards categories.) From all the novellas I’ve read before, it can be between 100 and 200 pages depending on the formating.

For example The Wilful Princess and the Piebald Prince (Realms of the Elderlings #0.5) is 160 pages on its most recent re-edition and is called a novella by the publisher.

There’s nothing more than that so far, just that Robin Hobb is writing a novella about Patience and Lacey, but it is enough to make me super excited and try and think about how and what we’ll get. Will it be for an anthology? Will it be published on its own? Will it have illustrations like The Wilfulf Princess.. ? …

Other short fiction from the Realm of the Elderlings in case you missed them:

  • “The Inheritance”, “Homecoming” and “Cat’s Meat” in The Inheritance & Other Stories.
  • “Words Like Coins” in A Fantasy Medley.
  • “Blue Boots” in Songs of Love and Death
  • “Her Father’s Sword” in The Book of Swords

Some gorgeous fanarts of Patience since she doesn’t appear on any book cover:

 

picture 1 from perplexingly.tumblr.com
picture 2 from perplexingly.tumblr.com (all of her hobb fanarts are gorgeous)
picture 3 from the-scary-crow.tumblr.com
picture 4 from colourmeread (also on instagram)

ANYWAY there’s nothing official, no announcement from the publisher or from Hobb herself on the internet, so this is just me rambling and being super excited about one of my favourite character of this amazing fantasy saga! I will update as soon as an official announcement is made.

UPDATE 31/05/18: Robin has posted on her facebook page about this novella.

“I will also note here, with great sadness, that Gardner Dozois died just a few days ago. Throughout my career, he was my editor of choice; my short works always went to him first if they needed a home. He bought some, he rejected some, and he always had solid reasons for both. I admired him greatly. And now he was gone. I was writing my Patience and Lacey story for an anthology he was doing. I need to find the status of that; does that story still have a home? At this point, I know I’ll finish it, as I owe that to the characters. But I’d like to note that without his encouragement, I’d never have even started writing it.”

So we know that we’ll definitely get a story about Patience and Lacey, that it was supposed to be for an anthology edited by Gardner Dozois who sadly passed a few days ago. But when and on what medium, we do not know yet.

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