ursulav's avatar

ursulav

Ursula Vernon
36.5K
Watchers
872 Deviations
3M
Pageviews
Woo! Topatoco is now handling all my art prints!

First they're awesome, fast, and high quality, and secondly I can finally remove my Mail Stuff bag from my truck!
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
"Do you have a name?” asked Gerta.
“I do,” said the raven.
Gerta waited.
The raven fluffed its beard. “I am the Sound of Mouse Bones Crunching Under the Hooves of God.”
Gerta blinked a few times. “That’s…quite a name.”
“I made it myself,” said the raven, preening. “I stole the very shiniest words and hoarded them all up until they made something worth having. ‘Sound’ and 'God’ were particularly well-guarded. 'Crunching’ I found in a squirrel nest, though."
— 

The Raven & The Reindeer, T. Kingfisher

My new book is out today! It’s called “The Raven and the Reindeer” and it’s a retelling of the Snow Queen. It’s available on Amazon, Smashwords, and check this page for links to other formats like Kobo, Nook, and iBooks, as they become available.

Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In

Wow, thank you!

1 min read
Thanks to Sylvester71 for the Core Membership gift!

And I hope everybody has a great end of the year. 2016 careens toward us at breakneck pace...
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In

Toad Words

1 min read
So hey, I wrote a book! Another one, anyway!


It's a collection of fairy-tale retellings I've written over the years, plus an all-new never-before-seen novella called "Boar & Apples." (Think Snow White. With talking truffle pigs instead of dwarves.) As always with my stuff that's not for kids, it's under my pen-name, T. Kingfisher, so that parents do not hastily buy kids a book and not realize that this is a book full of weird and occasionally scary dark things.

You can check it out at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Smashwords, etc.

Links to places to buy a copy or read a sample
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
Well, as some of you may recall, way back last year I was fooling around with making a game on the StoryNexus engine, put out by Failbetter Games. (They do Fallen London.)

They announced a few months ago that they're not going to be developing for it any longer, because they're very busy and there's no money in it. And I am entirely sympathetic to this, and understand their reasoning. But--the downside--I probably won't be pursuing this game any longer because once the maker stops supporting it, stuff gets tricky.

But y'know, I put a crapload of work into the world and I love it very much and I would like people to be able to see it.

Act One is playable. It is occasionally buggy--they broke some of the art options--and there are quests that don't wrap up and the Act ends on, not so much a cliff-hanger but with a whole lot of stuff unresolved. And parts of it are dull and grindy and parts of it are probably not at all intuitive and I did not do the best job of design. The art is 99% stock because, as I said, they kinda borked some of the art options, and though I did a few new pieces, I couldn't begin to illustrate all 400+ cards, and even if I had, they wouldn't work right now.

So I am not recommending this as a great gameplay experience, because it's not all that great.

But it is a first effort, and y'know, despite all those caveats, I'm kinda proud of what I managed to accomplish in terms of worldbuilding. I love these guys very much, I love Quippet and Crazy Wool and the Tangerine Rabbit and the Silver Rat and all the rest.

I'd like to someday follow their story. It might be as a book or it might be as a comic or I might just set up a "Random World Website With Stories And Art And Poetry Written By Stuffed Sheep," or I might even find another way to do a game like this.

But if you want to play it, here it is. (Please note: If you find bugs, I can't do much about them anymore, and sometimes art shows up labelled as "Placeholder Image" which, again, that's a new one and kinda them. So tech support is not gonna be great for this However, if you get actually STUCK--as in it's broken, not as in "I don't know what to do next!" then use the support e-mail and I will try to get you unstuck!)

(If you hate games that require some grinding, you will not enjoy this. It's okay, they're not for everybody, no reflection on you! It's cool!)

It can be reached here: Cryptic Stitching

It requires a Failbetter Games account. If you would like to give them money for more turns, that's between them and you--I do get a small cut, but not much, and honestly, I'd prefer you just played it and had fun. At standard browser rates, it'll take a few days or weeks--the actions refresh at the rate of about one every twenty minutes, so it's one of those games that you do a little bit in your browser when you're taking a break from whatever it is you do normally, not one you power straight through.

And you can hopefully spend a little time in the world and maybe see a little of what I was trying to do, even if events have conspired against it.
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
Featured

Prints available! by ursulav, journal

The Raven And The Reindeer by ursulav, journal

Wow, thank you! by ursulav, journal

Toad Words by ursulav, journal

Cryptic Stitching by ursulav, journal