The Post I Actually Owed You Guys

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Still hard at work on the last Twenty Palaces novel. Here’s a bit of reading I’ve been doing to help me get the right and most realistic tone for this last book. 

The book Scatter, Adapt and Remember by Annalee Newitz

I’m embarrassed to say that I was lying in bed last night a few nights back thinking about a scene I’ve been struggling with, and I suddenly came up with a workable solution. Did I get up right away and jot a note to myself for the morning? I did not. It was chilly and I was about to fall asleep. Plus, I literally thought to myself that this idea was too obvious and good to forget. 

I forgot it anyway. 

I can create it again but it’s a pain in the ass. I just need the space and time to think those thoughts all over again.  

Sorry for missing an August update. I’d say “I’ve been busy” but we’re all busy all the time and I still managed to find time to watch Secret Royal Inspector & Joy, so I have to come clean to you guys and admit that I didn’t have anything interesting to say.

That said: 

My wife and I usually close out the day by collapsing, in pain and exhaustion, in front of the tv for shows or a movie. Back when we had Netflix’s dvd service, it was the rule that any disc they sent got watched that evening and went back out in the morning mail. With that service gone, we’ve had to institute Film Friday. 

But we sort of fell behind on new and old releases, so I made a list and we spent a few evenings crossing off films. 

Here are some mini-reviews of the films we (or sometimes just me) watched, offered in the nearly random order they were added to my list:

I Saw The TV Glow: A beautiful, sad movie about being trapped in a hellish life and being afraid to leave—to be too afraid even to look inside yourself and recognize who you truly are. Also, about finding personal meaning in pop culture. Yeah, the movie flies in the face of traditional expectations, but I loved it and I’ll be looking into that soundtrack. 

La Chimera: This apparently got a standing ovation at Cannes but I’m mystified why. I’d believe the description of the film on Hulu is a copy and paste mistake except the characters’ somewhat unusual names are correct. Premise: an Englishman in Italy uses his dowsing ability to help a bunch of tomb raiders steal cultural artifacts and sell them on the black market. Also, he’s a jerk to everyone, including the beautiful woman who inexplicably finds him fascinating. Everything felt predictable except for the very last moments. Last thing: there are very few movie endings that I find morally objectionable, but this movie proudly sports one of them. 

Marmalade: Fun, mildly twisty cops and robbers story. Joe Keery is obviously having a good time and is charming as hell, but I have no idea why someone with Aldis Hodge’s charisma keeps getting cast as stern hardasses. Light and relaxing.

Kalki 2898 AD: Huge blockbuster out of India with lots of pretty cgi and the obligatory absurd action scenes. Fun to look at and laugh. Corridor Crew should do a segment on the eight-foot-tall old man who dishes out kung fu to the bad guys. Too long and it ends on a cliffhanger, but mostly inoffensive fun.

Dracula (1979): Underrated version of the classic story. I personally thing Frank Langella still holds the crown of “sexiest Dracula ever” but only because Louis Jordan was hobbled by 1970s TV budget production style. Olivier is terrific, as always, and was even willing to slide down a pile of grave dirt even as an actor in his seventies. The version we saw on Peacock was weirdly colorless compared to the trailers. I thought John Badham was being artsy but maybe it was just a bad, desaturated print.

The Imaginary: Solid, enjoyable anime about imaginary friends. The story, characters, plot twists, etc were all well done, but the real appeal of this movie is how beautiful it looks. 

Rebel Ridge: Seeing a lot of responses to this action thriller that complain about the action. Personally, I loved the idea of one black man (as Jamelle Bouie called him: “Black Reacher”) pitted against a group of corrupt cops. The police have to be careful to maintain the fiction that they have cleaned up their corrupt practices after a legal settlement nearly bankrupts the town, but they have a power and freedom to act that a lone civilian, who would go to prison forever if he killed or seriously injured one of these murderous officers, does not. Does it strain belief? Sure, but it’s rare to find a Reacher-style story that doesn’t. 

Mission Cross: Korean comedy action movie about a decorated female homicide detective and her mild-mannered house-husband who used to be a James Bond-level secret agent. Funny fluff with some solid action. 

Officer Black Belt: Speaking of fluff with solid action, there’s this. Winning young heroic lead with a support system of likable pals combines with well-designed fight scenes to make this predictable genre film an enjoyable 90-ish minutes

The Fall Guy: The whole world failed this movie. It’s funny, romantic, and has great stunt set pieces. This movie elevates “having fun” into a religious experience. Just a goddam delight. 

The Boy and the Heron: I don’t really need to recommend a Miyazaki movie, do I? It’s beautiful and heartfelt, and I’m not sure I understand the stuff about the blocks at the end, as though rebuilding and maintaining the world was as easy as stacking blocks as long as your heart is pure, but I don’t need everything to be clearly explained to appreciate this.

Loop Track: In a conversation on Bluesky I said that modern audiences are much more receptive to a slow burn if the movie is modern. In an older movie, a slow burn start just means a film is a creaky entertainment meant for our grandparents. Well, this is a slow burn horror movie from New Zealand about a hiker on a three-day loop track through the wilderness while he undergoes a long, slow nervous breakdown. All he wants is to fall apart in private, but he happens to fall in with others and can’t shake them. And, with all this going on, he begins to suspect that someone (something?) is stalking them. Liked it very much, especially the very end. 

The Dude in Me: There are an awful lot of Korean movies and shows about body-swapping, but this one (as far as I can tell) set off a series of copycats. In this, a cocky, swaggering gangster gets stuffed into the body of an introverted, bullied high school student. There’s some dumb bullshit about fatness, but aside from that I laughed aloud throughout, even at the parts that didn’t make any damn sense. If you can brush off retrograde nonsense about weight, this film is damn funny. 

Hundreds of Beavers: A genuinely hilarious comedy with almost no dialog in it. Made on a modest (but not micro-) budget by funny, intelligent people, willing to do whatever to make you laugh. Best enjoyed if you know as little as possible when you start watching, so don’t even check out the trailer first. Just watch.

Still on the list but not crossed off: Exhuma, Burning, Jules, Gone Girl, Cocaine Bear, Tenebre, Fitzcarraldo, Molli and Max in the Future and several more. 

Progress on Twenty One Palaces is ongoing, although I’ve stumbled on the problematic scene I mentioned above and need to rethink the solution. 

Breaking Ground on Twenty-One Palaces

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TL:DR: On Saturday the 13th, a little more than a week ago, I created a new file in Scrivener called Twenty-One Palaces. Work on the last book in the Twenty Palaces series is ongoing.

Longer version: Earlier this month, I was struggling through my newest effort, a straight horror novel partly inspired by the work of Stephen King, and I hit a sequence in the novel that came alive for me as I wrote it. 

It was a scary scene with a lot of personal consequences and conflicts for the POV character. It had a lot of juice, if you don’t mind me using that phrase. It felt good to be writing it, in fact. 

Then the scene was finished and I moved on to other parts of the story. Writing went back to being a slog. 

It was then that I realized that the whole fucking book was supposed to feel that way. It was supposed to give me goosebumps while I was writing it, as my previous books did. 

Which meant I had to admit that this most recent book didn’t work. I closed the file and tried to figure out what to do. Toss it and start the story over from scratch again? Jump into yet another new book that has been tickling at the back of my mind? Return to a previous half-completed manuscript and get that ready to send out? 

I have a few of those. There’s a book that was meant to be a mix of cosmic horror and conspiracy thriller, except on a very small scale. (Does it sound weird to talk about small scale cosmic horror? To talk about small scale conspiracy thriller? Yes. Yes, it does.) There’s also a straight mystery novel that didn’t quite come together the way I would have liked. And, going way back before I even thought about starting The Great Way trilogy, there was a fantasy/police procedural set in a Rome-like city where humans are second-class citizens under the rule of a coalition of non-human beings. 

None of those choices were right. The mystery novel felt alive in the way I need a book to feel alive, but not in the first few chapters. The others would need even more work.

As for starting a third brand new book, that seemed like a terrible idea. It would mean starting from scratch and putting the often-promised finale for Ray and Annalise off even longer. 

The most sensible choice was to put everything aside and finish the 20P books before I died. Only problem: I had no idea how to end the series. I knew the enemy Ray and Annalise would have to contend with. I knew the setting. But I had no idea how I was going to defeat that enemy in that setting. 

On the thirteenth, I sat down to try to work out the details. Today, on the 22nd of July, I feel confident enough in the progress of this rough outline that I can announce it. 

The final book in the Twenty Palaces series is underway. 

Thank you all for your patience. 

That includes anyone who is expecting an email from me or whatever. I’m behind on everything. Sorry. 

Audiobook for The Flood Circle available for pre-order, plus a very happy surprise

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On Tuesday, June 20th, the audiobook for The Flood Circle will be available. This is the Amazon/Audible link. Links to other vendors are already in the main post for this book.

If you want to pre-order it, you can do that now.

In other, unrelated news, the next issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction will have  a review of A Key, an Egg, an Unfortunate Remark, which I (self-)published more than eight years ago. Even more surprising is that it’s a positive review, from multi-award winning author Charles de Lint!

I have said a lot about this book over the years, but for once I’m going to let common sense take hold and shut the hell up. I’m extremely pleased to see this review and I refuse to bad mouth myself for a joke that no one will laugh at.

Please check out the review when the next issue drops, on June 27th, and the rest of the issue, too.

Free audiobook codes for The Iron Gate from Audiobooks.com

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Tantor, my audio publisher, has released The Iron Gate as an audiobook, and I have promo codes for Audiobooks.com for the first six people who snap them up.

Here’s how to use them:

HOW TO REDEEM: Your free audiobook(s) can be enjoyed via Audiobooks.com. Existing Audiobooks.com account holders can visit their My Account page to redeem, while new listeners can follow the below instructions. 1 Visit www.audiobooks.com/promo 2 Input your promo code and hit "apply" 3 Continue creating your FREE account and then hit "Start Listening" 4 Download the free Audiobooks.com app for Apple or Android devices (see below for links), or listen on your desktop through Audiobooks.com 5 Login and start listening! Your free audiobook(s) will be waiting for you in the My Books section

And here are the codes:

Z7NS0842UFJY7YDF3CMBKT42G3T1NY2JDKL70RPNE6GYTMZXXQRD4HUZ7W30BMYX46T2N107

Each can only be used once.

Hope you guys enjoy it.

All I ask is that you tell your friends, share this on social media, and/or review it online. Frankly, I could use a little extra word of mouth.

Audiobook for The Iron Gate out March 7, 2023

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What the subject header says.

I’ve added audiobook sales links to the main post for The Iron Gate for convenience’s sake. In my experience, most audiobook listeners are locked in to a specific vendor but I’m happy to include as many options as possible.

Tantor has brought back the same narrator, too, which I’m happy about. Also, with previous releases they offered the book as a compact disc. I haven’t seen those yet, but I’ll add them when I can.

Anyway, you can pre-order right now and…

I don’t really have a lot else to talk about. Take care and please post reviews.

As a Sequel to a Recent Post: One Kay for The Flood Circle

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The Flood Circle reached one thousand copies sold (counting Amazon sales only) as of yesterday, 11/29. The Iron Gate hit this same milestone on in early November, so copies of TFC have moved a little faster.

I’m sure that’s because of the cumulative effect of promoting the previous book.

And while reviews of The Iron Gate have been terrific, I was concerned that some readers would have been dissatisfied with the plot and would just quietly stop buying. That doesn’t seem to be happening.

::dabs brow with hanky::

Also, I’ve posted a note on Twitter about the order of the stories in the Twenty Palaces series. Here it is

With luck, that embed won’t be a dead link in two weeks.

Anyway, the reading order is the order on the front page of my website. The only exception is the novelette “The Homemade Mask”, which is included with my short fiction collection. It comes after Circle of Enemies but before The Twisted Path.

“The Homemade Mask” isn’t what I’d call “essential” to the series as a whole, but if you’d like to read a story told (partially) from the POV of a predator, that’s the place to go.

I’ve also dropped, for a short time, the price of the first book in the series to 99 cents. At this point, there isn’t a lot of promotional stuff left for me to do, unless I start buying ads or whatever, and that has been a decidedly mixed bag for me. I mean, I have basically one social media platform that I use with any regularity, and there’s only so many times I can tell the same group of followers that I have a new novel out.

Which is why I ask once again that, if you haven’t already, please post reviews on your online spaces, on the sites where you bought the book, and even in face-to-face encounters in the real world, assuming that still happens.

Finally, I’m currently at work on my next book, which I’ve mentioned before will be a stand alone. The story and tone are coming together slowly, but I knew this new project would be challenging, and a new challenge is just what I need.

It’s Black Friday Somewhere

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To help promote the two new Twenty Palaces novels I released this past fall, I’ve dropped the Kindle price for the first book in the series, cleverly titled Twenty Palaces, to only 99 cents.

Want to read a dark contemporary fantasy without the usual trappings, including a distinct lack of romance between the two leads? These are the books for you.

Or they’re the book for your pal, the one who reads fantasy voraciously and is always on the hunt for something a little different.

Anyway, it’s a high-value, low-cost gift for the holidays, so maybe buy a copy for a friend and maybe for yourself, too.

A Milestone, of a Sort: One Kay for The Iron Gate

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Two days ago, sales for The Iron Gate at Amazon crossed the 1000 copies mark. That’s print and ebook combined and it’s just the one vendor.

An ordinary sales run for traditionally published midlist sf/f can be between 2K and 5K, so that puts me on pace to be pretty average. That isn’t a bad goal for me at this stage of my non-career. It also assumes that sales will keep chugging along a pace that will let me pass the “You must sell this many copies to ride this ride” sign. Otherwise, I lose even the pretense of being midlist.

Some other works have done better. The Way into Chaos has sold nearly 14K at Amazon. Those would be respectable numbers at pretty much any publisher, and they don’t count the copies “sold” through the Kickstarter. It makes me wish I could take those numbers back in time to show the editor who rejected that novel because it was a fantasy, had a portal in it, but the protagonists didn’t go through the portal. Only the antagonists did. It was a story about being invaded, not about invading somewhere else. The editor called that “bad worldbuilding.”

Then again, that trilogy came right on the heels of the books Del Rey published, and which they marketed and publicized heavily. As of my last royalty statement, Child of Fire has sold almost forty thousand copies. It would have just earned out its advance if the contract didn’t call for basket accounting for all three books. To this day, those books from Del Rey outsell anything in my backlist that I’ve self-published.

So were the sales for The Way into Chaos so good because of residual effects of all that money and hard work Del Rey put into the Twenty Palaces books? No doubt.

Were sales so good because of that incredible Chris McGrath cover? Absolutely without a doubt. I’ve always known cover art is really important, but I’m thinking I should have put a couple of extra reallys in there.

And then there’s the very real possibility that this is just a slow fading of a career that never really took off. I have readers who enjoy my work, but it seems like there are fewer every year, as later books make readers lose interest without bringing new ones in. I used to think that my creative instincts could appeal to a broad audience, but now that I’ve been writing for a while, it seems not.

Not sure where I’m heading with this, except to say that I’m not going to stop writing and that I will write Twenty-One Palaces at some point. I’m grateful for the readers I’ve got. I’m grateful for the chance to write my books and a system that allows me to publish them in the face of widespread publisher disinterest.

But I still feel that my non-career is aging the same way that I am. Things don’t work as well as they used to. Everything is slower. It hurts more. People fall away, leaving you with a smaller circle. And there’s really nothing to do but work hard to slow the decline while also coming to terms with its inevitability.

The Flood Circle

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Buy links:

Ebook:  Amazon  |  Apple Books  | Barnes & Noble  |  Kobo  |  Smashwords

Print:  Amazon  |  Barnes & Noble

Audiobook: Amazon  |  Apple Books  |  Barnes & Noble  |  Bookshop.org  |  Kobo

Audiobook cd:  Bookshop.org  | Indiebound  |  Mysterious Galaxy

I have already described the origin of The Flood Circle in my post about The Iron Gate. Kickstarter. Backers. Fulfillment. Novel. A few people have expressed surprise that I am releasing another book so soon after the previous one. Well, I wrote both together, sort of. First draft and revision for The Iron Gate. First draft and revision for this one. Second revision then second revision. Beta read and then beta read, and so on. The real question is why has the delay between books been so long?

But when I sat down to work out the story, I had to ask myself: Is this the last Twenty Palaces novel?

I could have cut things short. Definitely. I could have tried to arrange the story so that the finale of this book was the midpoint of another, very different book. Then I could have wrapped everything up in a single novel.

It was tempting. I recently discovered that I am not, in fact, growing younger as the years go by. In addition, I like a fast-moving story. Why not put Ray and Annalise through the ringer? Why not… I don’t know… turn my final idea for a novel into a ten thousand word epilogue or something?

It wouldn’t work, though. There was still too much story to tell. There was too much I wanted to get done, and the danger of rushing a story is that it loses its emotional impact.

So there’s going to be one more book after this one, called Twenty-One Palaces. I know the general setting but I have zero plot beats figured out. The stakes, the tone, the supporting cast are all a mystery.

But that’s for the future. For now: The Flood Circle

The Flood Circle Cover

Here’s the synopsis:

The three original spellbooks, source of all magic in the world, have been found, and Ray Lilly has already “acquired” one. Now he and Annalise are on a historic mission to get the other two and they’re ready to kill anyone who gets in their way.

If they succeed, the Twenty Palace Society will become more powerful than it has ever been and could truly safeguard humanity from both extra-dimensional predators and the people who summon them.

But this time their enemies are more formidable than any they’ve ever faced before. What starts as a covert mission to hunt sorcerers quickly collapses into a desperate—and very public—struggle to survive. Can Ray and Annalise track down and kill these sorcerers before they execute a plan to drive the human race to the edge of extinction?

As usual, I’ll be turning the buy links below into actual links as the book appears on each site.

Tantor is still doing the audiobooks, and they’re planning to keep the narrator from previous editions of Twenty Palaces. I’ll add those links as they appear.

You may have noticed fewer options for a print copy this time around. Normally, I set up a print version within Amazon and through Lightning Source’s Ingram Spark system. Ingram’s distribution system is very wide, allowing you to walk into pretty much any bookstore in the English-speaking world and say “Can you order a copy of The Flood Circle for me?”

It also gave readers a lot of choices (for print) that were not Amazon. Bookshop.org and Indiebound both explicitly support independent bookstores. And while the markup at those two shops can be intense, supporting indie stores is a worthwhile goal.

Except it mostly never happens. My most recent bestselling book through LSIS has been Twenty Palaces, and that book sold only twenty copies. Over two years.

What’s more, LSIS wanted to charge me eighty dollars to put the book up for sale.

The POD print editions are already too expensive for readers, and the system is too expensive for me. It’s weird to think of a $80 fee as a negative advance that I’ll never recoup, but I’m sitting here facing facts and accepting it for what it is.

I’m also thinking that they set the price that high to discourage long-tail idiots like myself, and I’m a guy who can take a hint.

So this time around, the only print options will be Amazon and B&N. Sorry about that.

And please, if you like my books, please tell your friends. In person, on social media, posting a review somewhere. Anything. Please spread the word.

 

Buy links:

Ebook:  Amazon  |  Apple Books  | Barnes & Noble  |  Kobo  |  Smashwords

Print:  Amazon  |  Barnes & Noble

Audiobook:  Amazon  |  Apple Books  |  Barnes & Noble  |  Bookshop.org  |  Kobo

Audiobook cd:  Bookshop.org  | Indiebound  |  Mysterious Galaxy

The Iron Gate

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Buy links:

Ebook:  Amazon  |  Apple Books  | Barnes & Noble  |  Kobo  |  Smashwords

Print:  Amazon  |  Barnes & Noble  |  Bookshop.org  |  Indiebound  |  Mysterious Galaxy  |  Powell’s

Audiobook download:  Apple Books |  Audible  |  Barnes & Noble  |  Indiebound  |  Kobo

Audiobook cd:  Bookshop.org  | Indiebound  |  Mysterious Galaxy

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Some time ago I started wondering how much actual interest there was in a continuation of the Twenty Palaces series. I’d tried the novella route with The Twisted Path, but sales were unremarkable. When I first started publishing with Del Rey, I’d thought I was a mid list writer. Later, it seemed I’d become a writer with a small following, then maybe not even that.

What was the point of trying to plan a career when my choices kept sending me in the wrong direction?

When Kickstarter got around to their brief “Break Kickstarter” idea, I had a really dumb idea: What if I started taking pledges for new Twenty Palaces fiction, but instead of offering a specific goal, I let the backers choose it. Break Kickstarter was meant to encourage people to use the service in a new way, so I set a rate of five cents a word and promised to revisit the series at whatever level of enthusiasm readers chose. No stretch goals. No pledge tiers. For every dollar a backer pledged, they could pick twenty words to call their own.

So, if I made a fifty dollars in pledges, I’d write a thousand-word short story. If pledges were higher, I’d write more, with a cap at two complete novels because I really had no idea how much or how little interest there was.

Well, pledges did hit that cap, and I owed my backers two full novels of at least a hundred thousand words each. The first, called The Iron Gate, is out now.

Cover for The Iron Gate

The Iron Gate

Here’s a description of the story:

Stormy Bay is a dying town nestled against an eerily placid ocean, and Ray Lilly is trapped in it. He can barely remember his name let alone his mission for the Twenty Palace society. Worse, he realizes that for some time now he’s been living as a puppet, his body and mind under the complete domination of an unknown power.

And that power can still seize control of Ray’s body at any time, forcing him and the people around him to playact in nonsense stories that center around a mysterious boy and his monster dog.

The town and its people shift and change, but only Ray seems to notice. He has no idea what sort of magic has imprisoned all these ordinary folks in Stormy Bay, but he does know he needs to get them, and himself, out.

But that might mean crossing a line he has never crossed before. While Ray has certainly taken lives in his work for the society, it was always in self-defense or in the desperate moments before impending calamity. Can he bring himself to commit cold-blooded murder, even to save dozens of lives?

Next up, after The Iron Gate, will be The Flood Circle, hopefully released sometime next month.

After that, I’ll be writing something else to let the creative energies renew. At some point later, finally, I’ll be ready to write Twenty-One Palaces, the final Twenty Palaces novel, The one that wraps up the series.

In the meantime, here are buy links to online vendors below. I’ve hit a few glitches here and there, and will connect to the books as they appear on the various sites. Apple Books is being Apple.

If you want a print edition, options are limited for the moment. I’m waiting for other vendors to connect their catalogs to Lightning Source before I can add them.

As for audio, Tantor will be creating an audiobook that combines The Iron Gate with The Twisted Path, since the latter is a novella and is too small to be on its own. I don’t know when that will be available but I will let you guys know.

And I can’t wait for the book to be fully out, so I can edit these last four paragraphs out of this post.

In the meantime, if you read the book, please write a review.

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Buy links:

Ebook:  Amazon  |  Apple Books  | Barnes & Noble  |  Kobo  |  Smashwords

Print:  Amazon  |  Barnes & Noble  |  Bookshop.org  |  Indiebound  |  Mysterious Galaxy  |  Powell’s

Audiobook download:  Apple Books |  Audible  |  Barnes & Noble  |  Indiebound  |  Kobo

Audiobook cd:  Bookshop.org  | Indiebound  |  Mysterious Galaxy