SF and Fantasy Writer
Some people have said they want to donate, but don’t want to make a Kickstarter account to do so. Since I’m already funded at Kickstarter, it doesn’t much matter at this point — if you’d rather donate directly to me, I’m happy to accept, and I’ll make sure you get your prizes! (See Grim Tides kickstarter page for the prize list.)
(Click image above to donate by PayPal, or contact me if you’d rather send a check/money order)
Artist (and current Hugo Award nominee) Daniel Dos Santos has given me the go-ahead to post the new artwork he did for the upcoming Audible.com audiobook editions of Bone Shop and Broken Mirrors. (The audiobooks aren’t available for download yet, but rest assured, I will link them vastly once they are.)
Bone Shop:
Broken Mirrors:
That Bone Shop image in particular will haunt my nightmares. In a good way. My thanks to Steve Feldberg of Audible for commissioning this cover art, and to Dan for painting them!
ETA: Dan just wrote to let me know his assistant Lindsey Look helped paint these (they had a short deadline, so collaboration was the only way to get them done). Lindsey is an awesome artist too — check out her work!
This entry is going to have a slightly different tone than I’d anticipated…
Yesterday I launched a Kickstarter fundraiser for Grim Tides, the proposed sixth full-length Marla Mason novel. I didn’t do an entry about it yesterday because I just didn’t have time — I was at the doctor with the kid until early afternoon (he got a checkup for his glaucoma, and everything looks great), then playing catch-up at work. I figured I’d tweet about the fundraiser and write to my mailing list of past donors on the first day, and just do a journal entry on day two.
The fundraising goal was $6,000. (Not an entirely arbitrary number; it’s about what I could get for doing another work-for-hire book or pseudonymous novel, so it was the amount I needed to justify writing a Marla book instead of chasing down another job.)
I got fully funded in just about 13 hours. So the book is definitely happening; I hope to begin serializing chapters very early in the new year.
The fundraiser is running until September 15. (I did not expect to meet my goal in a single day.) I am still happy to accept donations, of course, and there are various neat prizes to be had, as you’ll see if you check out the Kickstarter page. So while I’ll still exhort you to tell your friends, and donate if you can, it doesn’t have quite the sense of urgency I’ve anticipated.
I get to write this book. It will be awesome. Full of monsters and heroism and betrayal and sand and sharks and lava and resort hotels and possessed people and dispossessed gods. Thanks to everyone who made it — who are currently making it! — possible for me to continue this series. I couldn’t be happier.
It’s been a busy year. I’ve written 210,000 words since January 1 — that’s two full novels (City of the Fallen Sky and a pseudonymous book), plus a story or two and some miscellaneous non-fiction. I can take off most of August without needed to feel guilty about it. Though in practice I don’t think I’ll actually be lazy for more than another week at most. I like writing; once my brain is less exhausted, it’ll start generating ideas again, whether I want it to or not.
Let’s see, some things on the horizon. I signed the sig sheets for the limited edition of Briarpatch — the most times I’ve consecutively signed my name in my life. The limited is no longer available, I understand, but the trade paperback is available for pre-order: you can get it at Amazon, or via Powell’s, or from a whole slew of places listed at the publisher’s website.
I also have a story coming out in newish online magazine Basement Stories at the end of the month. “A Void Wrapped in a Smile” is a standalone story, but it’s also sort of a Marla Mason story (though Marla appears in only one scene, and is a very minor character here). It’s a story about the villainous lovetalker Joshua Kindler. “Void” doesn’t necessarily make him seem any less villainous, but it does, I hope, make his villainy more understandable. (This story was originally written for a very generous Broken Mirrors donor who gave me a lot of money in exchange for writing a story about a character of their choice. They got a limited-edition-of-one chapbook containing the story. We were both pretty pleased with how it came out, and I’m glad the rest of you will get to read it soon!)
Being a big slacker continues to satisfy. I haven’t done much with my evenings but play Alice: Madness Returns, watch the new Avengers cartoon on Netflix, and read the new Charles Stross novel Rule 34 lately. (All recommended.) I am beginning to get a distant itchy urge to write, but so far it hasn’t grown overwhelming. I think I needed this time to recharge.
I got some popsicle molds and have become a popsicle fiend. Besides juice pops for the kid, I’ve also made White Russian popsicles for my wife and myself. (Recipe: make a weak White Russian. Freeze it. EAT.) And I made some mocha coffee popsicles last night; yum. Soon I will experiment with margarita popsicles, cherry cream popsicles, and so on. This is preventing me from eating all the ice cream in the world, which is what I usually want to do in the summer, so it’s good. River likes to help me make the popsicles, though he hates waiting for them to freeze. Today we will go to Berkeley Bowl and consider their vast and mighty juice section. I predict pear nectar ice pops in my son’s future…
So, life is pretty good. While I’ve started researching the next book, that “research” so far consists mostly of reading a bunch of novels written in and set in the historical time and place where my book will take place. Not exactly hardcore historical work at this point — I’m just trying to soak up flavor and feel for now.
Otherwise, apart from writing a book review (Daniel Polansky’s Low Town, a good and bleak noir/fantasy hybrid), I didn’t do a lick of work all weekend. Mostly I played Alice: Madness Returns, which is a ridiculously pretty game. Play gets a bit repetitive sometimes, but it’s worth it for the scenery, and I love how the NPCs all refuse to provide any of the useful exposition you’d expect from such characters. Mostly they just go off on appropriately Wonderland-ish tangents and rambles.
After months of spending my weekends working as much as possible, I was finally able to do a family outing! I went with my wife and kid and sister-in-law and nephew to a pool on the other side of the Caldecott tunnel. (It’s been cool in Berkeley, but was hot over the hill, so we did the drive.) Lots of fun splashing and a bit of lounging and reading. It’s always good when the adults outnumber the children. Nephew did a sleepover, and both kids were pretty good, for the most part, though when they got up at 6 a.m. on Sunday I wasn’t thrilled. Still, that was a good day, too — did a little shopping with the family in the morning, then took the kid to a playground all afternoon so Heather could get some work done. All very pleasant.
Also: I am experimenting with making alcoholic popsicles.
There are so many cool things going on, but most of them are still in the early stages, so I can’t tell you much. But in coming weeks and months I should be able to share news of a couple book deals, and awesome cover art, and other fun things. I’m happy and crackling with excitement about so many things I’d have to make a list to count them all.
One of them that I *can* talk about is my Kickstarter fundraiser for Grim Tides, which I’ll probably launch in a few weeks (I’m thinking it’ll run from mid-August to mid-September). I really hope I get to write this book. I’ve been pacing around my house, talking to myself, and interrupting my wife in the middle of her phone conversations to tell her the ideas I’ve had. It’s like a bubble rising up from the depths of my unconsciousness, ready to burst on the surface and release a shower of awesome-scented awesomeness. (Sorry for that simile. I haven’t had much coffee yet today. The similes in the book will be better.)
Grim Tides will have criminally insane sorcerers, omnicompetent valets, fire dancers, terror snorkeling, occult detecting, a legion of supervillains, wandering genius loci (yes), and the fundamental underlying question of what makes a place your Home… It’s going to be such a cool book.
Late Sunday night, after a weekend consisting largely of marathon editing sessions, I turned in my Pathfinder Tales novel City of the Fallen Sky.
So… I’m done! No novels due for the next six months. No real fiction deadlines in the next few months at all, apart from a couple of short stories. I am faced with unprecedented-in-recent-months amounts of free time. (Naturally I’m tempted to start writing the new Marla novel, Grim Tides, except I think diving into another novel right away would kill me, or at least, damage my tender brain.) I’m thinking I’ll take it easy for a month or so. Read a lot. Hang out with the wife and kid. Play some video games. Try to remember what color the sky is in the real world. Should be good.
I don’t mind deadlines, but this summer has been an unspeakable nexus of deadlines, a configuration of brutal overlapping intensity, and now… the weight is lifted.
Tonight: beer and celebratory Chinese food. Not that I can afford Chinese food, really, but I turned in two novels in the past ten days, and those deliveries will trigger payments, and I signed a contract for another novel this week (can’t tell you about it yet), which will also lead to money in the near-ish future, so, screw it: I can splurge and order in.
Isn’t the writing life glamorous?
[This post is going to be the first thing on the blog for the next ten days or so, because *I* need to be able to see it quickly as my schedule expands…]
Where I may be found at Worldcon in Reno, August 19-20 (I’ll be there on Thursday afternoon, but am only doing programming Friday/Saturday):
[So what should I read from?]
[Maybe it can be a BoozeeKlatsch instead. For me anyway]
[The party actually runs from 5 to 7 pm, but I’ll be there for the last hour.]
[I suspect I will say things on this panel that will annoy people.]
[A selection from my story “Little Better than a Beast.”]
[This should be interesting.]
After much pondering and flipping through a thesaurus and gnashing my teeth and googling around, I’ve decided to call the next Marla Mason novel Grim Tides. So there. Now I can think about actually writing the thing.
The plan is: launch a Kickstarter fundraiser in September. If it gets funded, I’ll actually be able to afford to write the book (instead of finding another work-for-hire job). I’ll write it with an aim toward serializing it online starting next spring. (Beginning April 2012, I suspect, though maybe earlier.) I’m excited! And the characters are starting to mutter at me more and more insistently every day.
