quaad snippet: kit and ty

“You hated the Shadow Market in London,” Kit said. “It really bothered you. The noises, and the crowd —“

Ty’s gaze flicked down to Kit. “I’ll wear my headphones. I’ll be all right.”

“…and I don’t know if we should go again so soon,” Kit added. “What if Helen and Aline get suspicious?”

Ty’s gaze darkened. “Julian told me once,” he said, “that when people keep coming up with reasons not do something, it’s because they don’t want to do it. Do you not want to do this?”

Ty’s voice sounded tight. The thrumming wire again, sharp with tension. Under the cotton of his shirt, his too-thin shoulders had tightened as well. The neck of his shirt was loose, the delicate line of his collarbones just visible.

Kit felt a rush of tenderness toward Ty, mixed with near-panic. In other circumstances, he thought, he would just have lied. But he couldn’t lie to Ty.

The young musician’s violin floated in the water as the mermaid reached down to save him from the shipwreck… Tessa and Jem’s fairytale/Shadowhunters @cassiejp mashup. #shadowhunters #tsc #cassandrajean #jessa Stay tuned for more news about this project!

Happy Valentine’s Day!

books. schedule. books!

I’ve noticed some confusion about my publication schedule, which makes total sense, since it’s pretty complicated right now! Here’s a bit of description to clarify the projects I have going on and when they will be coming out.

Ghosts of the Shadow Market

This is a series of short stories that focus on Jem/Brother Zachariah. They will be published serially as ebooks, with one story coming out each month between April-November 2018. Like The Bane Chronicles and Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy, these short stories are collaborations between me and a talented group of writers, in this case Sarah Rees Brennan, Maureen Johnson, Robin Wasserman, and Kelly Link!

(All of the Ghost of the Shadow Market stories will be collected in a print edition along with two bonus stories, likely coming out in the summer of 2019.)

The stories:

April 2018: Son of the Dawn, with Sarah Rees Brennan. Set in 2000. Jace meets the Lightwoods for the first time!

May 2018: Cast Long Shadows, with Sarah Rees Brennan. Set in 1901. A visit to the Shadow Market changes Matthew Fairchild’s life forever.

June 2018: Every Exquisite Thing, with Maureen Johnson. Set in the early 1900s. The story of Anna Lightwood’s first love!

July 2018: Learn about Loss, with Kelly Link. Set in the 1930s. Brother Zachariah visits a dark carnival and dabbles in demon-summoning.

August 2018: A Deeper Love, with Maureen Johnson. Set in the 1940s. Tessa Gray and Catarina Loss pose as nurses in order to aid suffering mundane humans during WW2.

September 2018: The Wicked Ones, with Robin Wasserman. Set in 1989/90. Celine Montclaire encounters Valentine Morgenstern for the first time.

October 2018: The Land I Lost, with Sarah Rees Brennan. Set in 2012. Alec Lightwood and Lily Chen go to Buenos Aires to help rebuild in the wake of the Dark War, and Alec meets an orphaned Shadowhunter child.

November 2018: Through Blood, Through Fire, with Robin Wasserman. Set in 2012. A dark threat is looming over a child of the Shadow Market, and Jem Carstairs and Tessa Gray may be the only ones who can save him.

Upcoming books:

The Golden Tower (Magisterium 5)

September 11, 2018

This is it! The final book in the series! Callum Hunt’s destiny is sealed.

Queen of Air and Darkness (The Dark Artifices 3)

December 4, 2018

The last book of the trilogy sets in motion events that will change the Shadow World forever.

The Red Scrolls of Magic (The Eldest Curses 1, with Wesley Chu)

March 2019

Magnus and Alec planned to go on a nice peaceful vacation after the Dark War. They weren’t planning on encountering stolen memories, dark secrets, vicious demons, and murderous cultists. Suddenly their European tour looks a lot more like work, but both are still determined to enjoy it!

Ghosts of the Shadow Market print edition

No exact date yet, probably Summer 2019

Chain of Gold (The Last Hours 1)

No exact date yet, likely sometime between September-November 2019

This is the beginning of a new Shadowhunter trilogy set during the Edwardian Era! The children of Tessa, Will, and the other characters from the Infernal Devices have grown up in a far less frightening world than their parents did. But trouble is brewing amid their boating parties and balls. Revenge, prejudice, and obsession lie hidden beneath the surface of their world, and a mysterious illness has begun to strike Shadowhunters down…

The Lost Book of the White (The Eldest Curses 2)

Likely March 2020

Magnus and Alec thought the adventures of their far-too-eventful vacation were long past. But old friends and old enemies linger, and the story continues…

Chain of Iron (The Last Hours 2)

Once again, likely to come out in Fall (September-November) 2020

The story of James, Lucie, Cordelia and their friends continues.

2021: After this everything gets a little fuzzy. Publications aren’t scheduled this far out, but we’ve still got The Last Hours 3, The Eldest Curses 3, and Sword Catcher on the horizon!

I heard a rumor that Sherrilyn Kenyon is no longer suing you for plagiarism or copyright infringement or whatever. Is that true? Is the court case over? I keep thinking that if it was, it would have been covered more in news outlets. -[redacted]

Okay. Let’s walk through this.

Are you being sued for plagiarism?

I am not, no.

I heard Sherrilyn Kenyon accused you of copyright infringement/plagiarism?

She did initially, yes, but then she dropped those claims.

When did she drop them?

Almost two years ago. May 31, 2016.

Why did she drop the claims?

You’d have to ask her. I would guess it was because almost all of her specific claims referred to material in books she hadn’t published yet at the time my books were published. Claims about things happening to characters in books she published in 2010 that I supposedly ripped off in City of Bones in 2007. That kind of thing.

 In most cases copyright infringement is kind of muddy and the merit of the claims has to go before a judge to be decided, but there are a couple of exceptions to that. One of them is the question of “access” – did the alleged infringer have access to the material they allegedly infringed: i.e. could they have read it/seen it/heard it? In this case, since I only move forward in time like everyone else, I didn’t have access to books published in 2009 or 2010 when I was writing City of Bones in 2005. That’s straightforward business with no complicated judgment call needed. So before anything had happened with this lawsuit in an actual court, Kenyon’s team withdrew the entire copyright claim in full, leaving only a complicated trademark complaint regarding the title of the TV show and the design of my covers.

That’s weird. 

I go into detail below. Read on! Keep in mind 2007 is a significant date here because all three of the first TMI books had been turned in to my publisher by then.

So, wait, if Kenyon dropped the copyright claim isn’t that the big deal thing? The plagiarism thing?

Yes, I’d like to think so. Trademark claims are about branding and packaging, which by and large isn’t even up to me as regards my books. (Publishers do that.) There’s nothing in this lawsuit anymore that even slightly refers to the contents of my books, and I care about my reputation for integrity as a writer far more than I care about my publisher’s branding strategy.

That said, it is of course horrible to be sued — it is a horrendous process that upends your entire life; it is destructive to your work, your family, your finances, your friends, and your sanity. 

Have you read Kenyon’s books or met her?

I have never read any of her books. I have never met her or communicated directly with her in any way. 

So what’s the problem?

The problem is no one knows that the copyright infringement claims were dropped, and when I see it mentioned, it’s always stated as a fact that I’m being sued for plagiarism or copyright infringement. And I am not. This hasn’t been anything but a trademark lawsuit for a year and a half now. And this doesn’t just turn up in Internet gossip — it turned up in a poorly researched article in Forbes, for instance. This is an accusation I have to live with despite the claim having been withdrawn.

Why didn’t I hear about this?

Because of the way the copyright claim was withdrawn. Let me walk you through this.

When Kenyon filed her initial complaint/suit, it included an “Exhibit” that broke down a long list of elements, characters, and ideas in her books that she claimed had been copied in my books, and what material from my books was supposedly “the same” as her material.

(First of all, let me point out that while this document was riddled with inaccuracies and errors, it never, at any point, claimed that any direct text from Kenyon’s books was copied into my own. Kenyon has never claimed that — to do so would require providing examples of the plagiarism, and there are none. Whereas claiming copyright infringement is much muddier. The claim merely requires that you feel you have been copied. For instance, a woman once sued Stephen King claiming he had broken into her house and stolen her diaries so he could base a character on her. Her evidence was that she felt that that was true, and nothing prevented her from filing that suit. Anyway, though many people are confused between the two, the Kenyon complaint did not levy an accusation of “plagiarism” — she claimed “copyright infringement” because plagiarism refers to the copying of exact passages of words and nothing else. A claim of plagiarism requires proof to file a suit; a claim of copyright infringement requires proof to win a suit but not to file it. They are not the same.)

The initial complaint was a shock to me, since I’d never read any of her books (and still haven’t), and have no familiarity with their characters or world or anything about them. Upon reading the complaint, however, I noted that a number of claims about what happened in my own books were inaccurate. For instance, the exhibit claimed that  Valentine was a demon, that Amatis was a shape-shifter who was in trouble for breaking “shape-shifter code”, that the Shadowhunters were a highly technological society (while true in the TV show, in the books, the Shadowhunters are specifically anti-technology), that Isabelle’s eyes were hazel. And so on. Because of this, my legal team started early in going through, in detail, the claims in Kenyon’s document. 

What we found was stunning — that (a) the claims in Kenyon’s filed exhibit were often totally inaccurate as to the contents of my book/s. Her claims are on the left, rebuttals are on the right.

Claims regarding Clary:

(b) quite a lot of the plaintiff’s claims suggested that she had invented common and ancient storytelling tropes, e.g. “A sword having a name,” and stated that those tropes’ presence in my books could only have come from her books and not, say, the entire literary and folkloric tradition of tropes that all authors draw on:

and, most importantly, C) a huge number of her claims were impossible due to the chronology of publication — that is, when she was comparing material in our books, her material had been published *after* my material. Copying does not work that way, since time does not work that way.

So my legal team wrote all of that up — a point-by-point, line-by-line refutation of Kenyon’s claims, and filed it as our own exhibit. You can read it right here. If you’d rather hit up twitter, you can see some of it here.

In response, Kenyon filed what is called an Amended Complaint.

The court allows her side to take on board anything from our response and, if necessary, file a new version of the lawsuit making changes based on anything they’ve learned.

And in the Amended Complaint, the whole copyright claim just…disappeared.

Like, gone. Not there at all.

What was left?

Trademark issues. They are more specifically about what the covers of my books are allowed to look like, branding strategies, and the title of the television show. I cannot go into the details of this, or why it would come up suddenly thirteen years after my first Shadowhunters book was published, because that is part of an ongoing case, and one cannot comment on ongoing cases. The copyright thing however is not ongoing. Again, it was dropped in May, 2016.

If Kenyon won her case would the TV show be cancelled?

Yes. 

Interesting.

Well, we’ve all learned something today. Primarily, we have learned that I am not being sued for copyright infringement or plagiarism or anything like it, and also that people are really interested in negative gossip and controversy, but not particularly interested in exoneration. I cannot tell you how much it sucks to be accused of something awful that you did not do, in public (however used to it you may be); I cannot express how humiliating and horrible it is, or how depressing it is to realize that basically nobody cares if it isn’t true. Many, many news outlets reported on Kenyon suing me; only one that reported on the original claim reported that she had dropped the copyright claims.

I have done my best here to provide 100% factual information for anyone who was confused or believed false reports about this situation. I am under no illusions that this will prevent people from saying I am being sued for plagiarism, because it gives them pleasure to be cruel. I can only hope that for those people who are actually interested in what is true, this will serve as a useful link.

Another prize from my follower giveaway. This one for the sweet sweet @janecampbellgansey! Always an absolute pleasure to draw THE OT3!! It had a been a while and let me tell you it was quite an experience. 

(Click to enlarge (it´s huge))

aw

The Mortal Instruments GN volume 1 will be out SOON!! So very soon!!! 

October 31! 

Here are some previews of my fav panels! I hope you guys will LOVE IT! I worked so hard ahhhhh! 

And she did an AMAZING job!

snippet

Will Herondale sat in the window of his new bedroom and looked out at a London frozen under a chilly winter sky. Snow dusted the tops of houses reaching away toward the pale ribbon of the Thames, giving the view the feeling of a fairy-tale.

Though at the moment, Will was not feeling very friendly toward fairytales.

He ought to be happy, he knew that much — after all, it was his wedding day.

*Art by Cassandra Jean.

*clears throat* The most requested thing in my inbox has been the extended NSFW version of the cottage scene with Emma and Julian in Lord of Shadows. I usually write romantic scenes much longer than they actually are and then cut them down (it’s just how I do it) so these are the “unedited” versions. As such they do sometimes contain typos, word repeats, etc. I’m hoping you can enjoy them anyway. ;) The first version of this scene was in Julian’s POV, so here are all his insecure, complicated, desirous thoughts. ;)

Keep reading

Schedule of ‘The Shadowhunter Chronicles’ and other Cassandra Clare books

2017

2018

2019

2020

2021

After 2021

* co-written with Holly Black ** other volumes to follow *** co-written with Wesley Chu

Cassie is also working on a secret high fantasy novel (or trilogy) that’s not related to The Shadowhunter Chronicles.

THE SCHEDULE!! (subject to change as always)

hp fancast • marauders era • sirius black by gaspard menier

send me a book, ship or character: heline // requested by @helenpenhallxw