Make a donation

Click the PayPal button to sponsor Kate Milford by making a donation to Clarion West:

Excerpt

There is a right way to do things and a wrong way, if you are going to run a hotel in a smugglers' town.
You shouldn't make it a habit to ask too many questions, for one thing. And you probably shouldn't be in it for the money. Smugglers are always going to be flush with cash tomorrow or next week when they find a buyer for the eight cartons of fountain pen cartridges that write in illegal shades of green, but they never have money today. You should, if you are going to run a smugglers' hotel, get a big account book and assume whatever you write in it, the reality is, you're going to get paid in fountain pen cartridges. Which (if you're lucky—you could just as easily get paid with something even more useless) at least means you'll have ink so you can keep track of all the money you aren't ever going to see.
Milo Pine did not run a smugglers' hotel, but his parents did. It was an inn, actually; a huge, ramshackle mansion called Greenglass House that sat on the side of a hill overlooking an inlet of harbors, a little district built half on the shore and half on the piers that jutted out into the river Skidwrack like the teeth of a comb. It was a long climb up to the inn from the waterfront by foot, or an only slightly-shorter trip by the cable railway that led from the inn's private dock up the steep slope of Whilforber Hill. And of course the inn wasn't only for smugglers, but that's who turned up most often, so that's how Milo thought of it.

Bio

Author of The Boneshaker, The Broken Lands, and The Kairos Mechanism.

Writing Description

Middle grade folklore-based fantasy.

Writing Goals

Please god, help me get a draft done this summer for the book that's due in October.

Website

clockworkfoundry.com

Back to the main Write-a-thon page.