everyone loves blue dog

It’s amazing!

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I mention that I want to make a book trailer, and a reader made one for me!

The folks at Random House are going to be so excited!

Something I didn’t know

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I dropped in at my neighborhood bookstore yesterday, where they had just placed their orders for September books from Random House. Even though I didn’t buy anything (they didn’t have the cars issue of Consumer Reports) they were nice enough to let me take the catalog with me.

Not only was I able to see how many copies of Game of Cages they’d ordered (answer: 10), but I had a chance to look at the way RH designs their mailed catalogs. It was mostly just what you’d expect, except for one thing that surprised me (but shouldn’t have): Most of the books had a line for Story Locale and another for Author Residence.

It surprised me, but it makes perfect sense when I think about it: if the story is set in Portland, Powell’s might carry it as local interest. Same for authors.

Five things for a Friday

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1) Important indicator of an improving economy: The line at Starbucks is getting way long. I had to skip my refill this morning to get to day-job on time.

2) Remember that editorial note I mentioned before? The one that’s kicking my ass? I skipped breakfast today to get extra time to work on it, and I’m still losing. I’m doing something wrong, but what I don’t know.

3) Medical and dental insurance costs for my family and me for the year: $23,381.28. One year. Three people. Core plan. And that’s just the insurance–it doesn’t include what we’ll be paying for copays, deductibles and care that’s covered at less than a hundred percent. Outrageous? You bet it is. I hope Obamacare does something to bend the curve, but if it’s not enough, Congress should get back .

4) I’m collecting recipes for the Week of Pizza (aka, the week my wife is out of town). Cream cheese, sugar and fresh fruit? Check. Olive oil, capers, pepperoni, salad fixin’s? Check. Olives, pineapple and ham? Check. Bacon and eggs? Check. It’s going to be an odd week.

5) Currently, the Amazon.com sales ranking of Game of Cages is better than the ranking of Child of Fire by a factor of two. Yeah, I know the rankings “don’t mean anything” but I wonder if it’s time to switch my most prominent user icons from the CoF image to the new book:

Game of Cages

What happened to the day?

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Having gotten in way past bedtime last night (I didn’t get to sleep until almost 1 am) I naturally overslept this morning. By an hour and a half.

Now I keep finding myself looking down at the clock on my computer and thinking “break time already?” “How can it be lunch when I haven’t been uncomfortably hungry for the last 20 minutes?” In fact, I clock out in half an hour. Huh!

More Jim Butcher news. You know he cut off his long hair, right? It’s a big improvement, but I couldn’t find any pictures on flickr. Yet.

Now that his Codex Alera series is done, he’s planning to start a new project with a co-author–set in a world where the plucky band of heroes quested to overthrow a Dark Lord and failed.

Apparently, he pretty much planned out all 20 Dresden Files books when he wrote the first one. I can’t imagine doing that, or even wanting to do that.

Okay, back to me. I spent part of this morning going over the first chapter of Man Bites World for Betsy. Yeah, Game of Cages is going to have another teaser chapter in the back, and wow, I will never get over the fact that, no matter how vigorously I revise, I always miss the most bone-headed errors you can imagine. Jeez, but being edited is a humbling experience.

And now it’s snowing outside. WTH, day?

Right here

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Right here in the room with me is a woman in a sparkling satin dress, with a crumpled sash over her right shoulder and a tiara in her well-sprayed hair. Her face is streaked with tears, and she can’t stop saying Thank you! Thank you!. She has to steady herself by clutching the hand of the friend next to her.

That woman is me.

I just sent Man Bites World to my editor at Del Rey. And it’s only seven months and two days past deadline! Why, that’s practically early!

Okay. Not really. In fact, this book was really difficult to write. Add that the revisions for Game of Cages were extensive and time-consuming and you have me missing my target like a blindfolded man in a gun fight.

But it’s turned in and I’m ready for revisions. How do I feel?

So.
Frigging.
Relieved.

To finish the post, here’s a list of the words that MS Word for Mac did not recognize during that final spell check: hitman, baster, motherfuckers, meh, berm, lynchings.

Now I get to work on the next thing.

Yesterday was supposed to be a day off.

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I was supposed to take all of your advice and spend the day hanging out with my son, playing the new used Wii games I bought (verdict: De Blob=awesome. The Incredible Hulk=WTF were they thinking?) and general relaxing fun.

Instead I received my second round of notes from my agent on Man Bites World and spent about an hour and 15 reviewing the galleys for the last corrections to Game of Cages.

As I mentioned in my picture post yesterday, All the notes (there are only eight) are tweaks to bring out the stakes, fix pacing, or establish context. No prob. The plot and characters are solid (afaict). There’s still one important scene that isn’t quite pulling its weight, but it’s meant to be an oddball. If I can finesse it, I will. Otherwise I’ll just do what my agent suggests and shorten it.

And the Game of Cages galleys just needed straightforward correcting. After the copyedits are entered, a pair of proofreaders will read it, and I’ll have additional fixes to go over. I should have taken some notes about some of the errors they caught; I could have done another self-Thogging post. (For instance, trucks do not “skid on their brakes” omg no, not unless the brakes drop out of the bottom of the vehicle and get wedged beneath the tires.)

Anyway, my agent takes a little vacay starting tomorrow. I have a week to finish the revisions and prep the pages for Key/Egg/Remark. I suspect K/E/R has stalled out because I went off the rails. I’ll need to come up with a way to skim over the unpleasant scenes I’ve been trying to write to get to the fun stuff.

In unrelated news, my wife brought home her CPAP machine last night. I fully expect her to say it was too uncomfortable to sleep in, but I hold out hope that she had a good night.

Off to start the day.

Five Things Make a Friday Post

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And today it’s all about me me me!

* As of last Monday, I am officially six months overdue on delivering Man Bites World. My agent has given me firm instructions: Do not panic. The deadline for production is August, but I’m going to be turning it in that late. I’m just about finished with a round of revisions for my agent (she had a couple little notes) and once she reads and approves them, I’ll turn the book in.

Looking back, I can see it was damn smart of my editor to hold off the publication of Child of Fire for as long as she did. And I’m sorry that Game of Cages was switched from May of this year to August. Hopefully, the path in the future will be more smooth.

* In MS Word for Mac (I know. You don’t have to say it), the word count appears at the bottom of the window… unless the count goes into six figures, at which point it disappears. I hate that. I like maps, clocks, WYSIWYG, and word counts. I like to know where I am. That’s why I feel a certain joyful satisfaction when I trim a manuscript below the 100,000 word mark and the total count suddenly appears onscreen.

Yesterday, I was tempted to stop revising ten minutes early so I could write “I’m at 99,999 words now!” in this post, but I resisted. See point one.

* Am I going to Norwescon? I don’t know! I received an invitation around Christmastime, filled it out and sent it in, but I haven’t heard back. It’s less than a month away and my name isn’t on the long list of “panel participants.” Now, I’ve never been to a convention before, so maybe it’s commonplace for a confirmation to arrive less than a month before the event. Maybe it’s common for an invitation to be rescinded (which would be understandable, since I can only go one day) without notifying the attendee. I dunno, but I’ve sent an email to registration to inquire.

I’m half-hoping they’ll tell me I’ve been struck from the list. Saturdays are supposed to be family time for me, but revisions have been eating all my time, and then there’d be a convention, and the following week…

* I’m going to have a signing at the Tukwila Barnes & Noble on April 10th at 1 pm. It won’t be a reading (Ixnay on the Eadingray!), just a signing and talk with four authors: Gayle Ann Williams (Tsunami Blue), Jessa Slade (Seducing the Shadows), Mark Henry (Battle of the Network Zombies), and little ole me. If you live in the Puget Sound area, swing on by.

* You know what amazes me? I can revise a book three times and, on the fourth runthrough, discover an incredible number of word echoes, clumsy sentence constructions, responses to sensory input before the sensory input, and dialog that would register as “eyeroll” on a Turing test. It still astonishes me that my own errors can be so difficult to see.

* Only two entries so far in the Child of Fire giveaway contest (Here’s the LiveJournal version). Just sayin’. This is the last giveaway I’m going to do for a while. I have a small stack of books I’m going to save for late summer, in case CoF isn’t available in stores when Game of Cages comes out.

Foreign rights

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The announcement just went up on Publisher’s Marketplace, so I guess I can announce it here: My agency has sold French language rights for Child of Fire and Game of Cages to Bibliothèque Interdite! Whoo-hoo! That makes two foreign language sales (so far) Russian and French.

Profitez des bons moments!

It can finally be announced, Part 2!

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My franchise agreement with the Lego Corporation continues to be a fruitful source of revenue for both of us. The Child of Fire Lego set sold well beyond expectations, and they’re coming back for another round (naturally).

Here’s the cover for the new novel, coming out in August:

Game of Cages

And here, revealed to you for the first time ever, is the early concept art for the box the Game of Cages Lego Set will ship in:

Game of Cages Lego Cover

I like how they made the lightning shoot sideways, like it’s coming out of the house, although I *told* their designers last time that they had Ray’s hair color wrong, but did they remember to change it?

Ah well.

The good news is, this deal is making me filthy rich, and pretty soon I’m going take of from rainy, miserable Seattle and settle down with my family in an Italian vila. Mediterranean, here I come!
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Once again, just joshin’. This image was created with Lego Digital Designer, a CAD program (of sorts) that lets you design a Lego model virtually, then upload it to their site and have the pieces mailed to you. The nice thing about the LDD joke for this second book is that I’m such a big cheese writer now that I can offshore the actual creation of the image to South Korea my 8-year-old son. He did a great job, and it would have taken me hours to do it myself.

Things that aren’t a secret

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It’s no great secret that Man Bites World is way past deadline. What startled me though was that I looked through my “goof” file for this project, and I realized I started writing it over a year ago. A quick glance at my LJ from that time shows that I was struggling with the outline back in early Jan. ’09.

Now, the revisions for Game of Cages took up a bunch of last year, but reviewing my progress notes suggest that it didn’t take that much time. I’ve just been struggling with this story.

::shakes fist at Word document::