everyone loves blue dog

Good news revealed

Standard

A week ago (for you guys–I’m writing this the same day) I told you I had some good news that I wasn’t free to talk about yet. Well, I’m told the 29th is the day, so here’s the good news.

The Science Fiction Book Club is going to put out an omnibus edition of Child of Fire, Game of Cages, and Circle of Enemies as a Main Selection for their September catalog. The book will be called The Wooden Man: A Twenty Palaces Omnibus and the catalog will reach book club members in mid-August (although the book itself won’t ship until after 8/30/11… aka, the release date for Circle of Enemies. It’s also going to be offered online through the BOMC2.

It’s also going to be a “Sliver of Night Selection,” which is meant to highlight especially good urban fantasy novels, which means the omnibus will include a black satin ribbon bookmark.

Fancy! Almost too fancy for a scruffy guy like me, but I’m very happy they like the books. I hope their readers like them even more.

Yay!

Reviews, Part 26

Standard

1) Wayne (@skyfall_ranger) liked the Twenty Palaces books quite a bit: “Twenty Palaces is what you get if you take fairly high magic Lovecraft and make an action movie. Swimming in blood. And on fire.”

2) LiveJournaler brooke_hok had a mixed reaction: “Basically they’re fun, fast-paced books that you’ll probably enjoy if you like gritty Urban Fantasy with a mystery element.”

3) Bob Walch at bookideas.com gave Child of Fire four out of five stars: “If you like fantasy grounded in reality with some fascinating twists and turns coupled with edgy characters give this latest Harry Connolly novel a try.”

4) Douglas Justice (aka @TushHog5 — we don’t judge!) liked both books: “Just finished your books – in fact A game of cages last night …and loved ’em!”

5) Author Nicholas Kaufmann liked Game of Cages, but not as much as Child of Fire. “I’m enjoying this series immensely, and can’t wait for the third installment, Circle of Enemies, to come out this summer.” He’s not alone in thinking the cast of characters was too big. Much of the editorial work I did on this book involved identifying and delineating the characters.

6) Tim Gray (aka @timgray101) had this to say about Game of Cages: “A weird beastie and lots of people having bad days. Fun stuff. Kind of” I understand just what he means.

7) LiveJournaler jpsorrow (aka author Joshua Palmatier) liked Child of Fire enough to seek out Game of Cages at some point but he found the first third rough going. “… once the reader was given something to focus in on–a plot thread that was clear and easy to follow–it drew me in and kept me reading.” Folks in the comment section have quite divergent opinions on the quality of the book. He’s not the first reader to be somewhat disengaged by the first part of the book, where Ray and Annalise are not sure what’s going on in Hammer Bay and poke around trying to get to the bottom of things. It’s a pretty common storytelling style in mysteries, but quite a few readers didn’t like it; maybe it’s a matter of execution.

Put in a 22 hour day yesterday

Standard

Ah, the joys of parenting a child with sleep issues.

Without getting into too much detail without his permission, as I mentioned before the time change hit him very hard. Yesterday he couldn’t get up until noon and last night I couldn’t get him to sleep until after 3:30 am. If it were my sleep schedule that went out of control, I’d set my alarm, get up super-early, be tired all day and go to be slightly early. Fixed!

For him, we may be forced to let him stay up all night one night so he can turn himself around that way.

On top of that, we’re squabbling over his assigned reading. I’ve given him a book that’s a second-world medieval-ish fantasy and he’s treating it like a plate of bitter carrots (“It has castles. I don’t like castle books.”)

Aside from the stress of having a fantasy writer’s child refuse to read traditional fantasy [1] there’s also the idea that he doesn’t believe that I, as his homeschooling parent, have the right to assign reading to him (book-length reading, at least). This… doesn’t work for me, as you might expect. If he’s griping about books written for popular readers of the modern era (with fantasy elements, which he loves) how’s he going to respond to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer?

Obediently, if I have anything to say about the matter. Of course, it’ll help if he’s well-rested and has been fed healthy food that he likes. We’ll see.

Finally, I got my royalty statement for the middle part of 2010 and… well, those numbers could be better.

[1] IT READS THE HOBBIT BEFORE BEDTIME. IT DOES THIS WHENEVER IT’S TOLD

Reviews, part 25

Standard

1) Josh Albritton (@CapnIndigo on Twitter) liked the first book a little: “Holy shit that was an amazing wild ride! Can’t wait to read the rest!”

2) On his “lackluster blog,” Gary Furash really liked Child of Fire: “… another urban dark fantasy novel and, surprisingly, even darker and more noir than [Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim].”

3) On Twitter, Thadeous Cooper says he tore through Child of Fire. “Great book, needs more long term characters though.”

4) On Strange Horizons, William Mingin has many, many, (many) criticisms of Game of Cages, but ultimately calls it compelling, stating: “Besides the pull of sheer event, story, or vicarious identification with risk and triumph, there’s an ineffable quality of style in page-turners, a quality of compulsiveness that some writers evoke—unpredictable, hard to pin down, and unfairly distributed. Anyone experienced in reading the fiction of event knows there’s “good stuff” and not so good, even if the difference between the two isn’t always easy to pinpoint. Connolly writes the good stuff.” That’s sort of good, I guess. Anyway, I knew the big cast of characters would be difficult for a lot of readers. I learn and move on.

5) There have been several kind words from comments in my last thread on Charles Stross’s blog. No quote, but there are quite a few nice ones. See?

6) On Twitter, @timgray101 (aka Tim Gray) liked it enough to read more: “CoF goes from location to location uncovering stuff and having action/peril scenes. 80s action paperback/Call of Cthulhu scenario/car chase.”

7) Noel Rappin put both Child of Fire and Game of Cages on his “Best of the rest, 2010” list: “The first book, I think, works very well. It’s creepy — a town’s children are dying one by one, and as they do, everybody forgets they ever existed. I get kind of creeped out just typing that.” He’s less fond of book two (although it still makes the list) and of Ray’s nicknames for characters whose names he doesn’t know.

Reviews, part 24

Standard

1) Chris at the King of Elfland’s Second Cousin liked Child of Fire and Game of Cages enough to write a three-part series on his blog to examine the various characteristics of episodic novel series. Part one is on characters. Part two is on plots. Part three is on the hero’s emotional journey. Pretty cool.

2) K. Bird Lincoln at St. Helen’s Bookshop give Game of Cages four stars out of five; she liked it even though it’s not her usual favorite. “This Book’s Food Designation Rating: Chips and salsa, for the way that you start eating them, and then look up a moment later and realize you’ve eaten the whole bag and your mouth is smarting from the spicy salsa.” I love chips and salsa.

3) DJ Weaver likes Game of Cages enough to award it four “spiders”: “Ray Lilly is an unlikely protagonist in this all-out battle to control or kill the strange predator and he does it with all the finesse of a ne’er-do-well James Bond.”

4) On Twitter, @karmamule liked both books very much: “Look forward to more!

5) Vicki Brown, also on Twitter, said “Intense. I enjoy reading about that world, but wouldn’t want to live in it!”

6) Three stars from Rich Braselle, who calls Game of Cages “Pretty decent stuff.”

7) Ronronia Adramelek at Science-Fantasiction didn’t care for the books one bit: “No character development, no plot, no background, no rithm.[sic] Boring.“

Waddayano. I’m a Google ebooks author

Standard

Apparently Child of Fire is available in the Google ebook store. They even have sample pages from the beginning of the book. If you look at it as “scanned pages” (iow, laid out the way the printed book is) you can read up to page 37. If you set the sample to “flowing text” you can read a little farther, and can change the font, font sizes, and line spacing too. It’s pretty nice. I haven’t had the opportunity to read a book on an ereader; is this what it looks like, usually?

Interestingly, Game of Cages isn’t available for sale there. I’m not sure why. Maybe it just takes time to load the books in.

Reviews, part 23

Standard

1) Charles Stross gives both Child of Fire and Game of Cages a thumbs up. “More, dammit!”

2) LiveJournaler Zornhau liked Child of Fire very much. “Imagine James Elroy characters on a fast-paced, shit-kicking mission in a Stephen King small town horror scenario, underpinned by a cosmology so coldly alien that by comparison the Lovecraft Mythos seems anthropomorphic and anthropocentric…”

3) LiveJournaler Spartezda enjoyed Game of Cages a great deal. “Urban fantasy with smart interesting opposition for the MC, fast-paced action, a clear-eyed take on the issues it raises, and an intriguing magic system that we’re slowly learning more about.”

4) Game of Cages received a terrific review from Colleen R. Cahill for the Fast Forward Contemporary Science Fiction video podcast. “Fans of Jim Butcher and Dean Knootz will find Game of Cages a great book, with plenty of excitement and thrills; this is one worth ignoring the cover and diving in.” That’s a link to the direct transcript of the review, but there’s no video to watch. Apparently, this is from October, but I didn’t know about it until Google Alerts found the blog post announcing it last week. They do have an interview with Jane Linskold still, which is pretty cool.

5) Priscilla at Cult of Lincoln really enjoyed Child of Fire. “Superb. I love the costliness of the magic system–it brings a freshness into the urban fantasy genre.” But I had to turn to Google to find out who Kristin Chenowith is.

6) Former SFBC editor and current book-a-day blogger (among other things) Andrew Wheeler gave Game of Cages an excellent review a short while ago, and now, in his end-of-year roundup, he’s named that book best of September over some pretty stiff competition: “… an urban fantasy that short-circuts miles of the standard justifications and romanticizations of the genre.”

7) Rich Brassell calls Game of Cages “pretty decent stuff.” It’s another instance of a reader looking forward to the next book in a series when they only gave it three out of five stars. I wouldn’t follow any series that got fewer than four stars, but there you go.

“If every other writer jumped off a bridge, would you?” (repost after WP problems)

Standard

Don’t mind me. I’m just hanging up this dirty laundry. It needs airing.

You know how I discover that the Hugo and Nebula nomination season has opened? Dozens of writers start listing their yearly sales to say “Here’s my eligible stuff!”

Which is fine. It’s important to them and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. And really, Pikachu forbid that I or anyone else tell people what they write on their own blogs, which I choose to read without paying a penny.

But I’m not going to do that, not this year or any, because the sort of books I write don’t win those awards. And that’s cool. I think of Hugo and Nebula awards as things of importance within the science fiction community and I’ve never really been part of that. [1] It’s like seeing the BAFTA winners, I guess; I’m happy for those people in that foreign country.

It does prompt me to look back over the year, though. Game of Cages came out at the end of August, of course, and it’s been doing pretty well. I also took part in A Glimpse of Darkness. But that’s it.

Many of the other writers I see out there had a couple of novels come out in 2010 along with a string of short stories. I envy them their productivity. Me, I had a tab open on this computer for three days which held an article about being productive and getting things done, but I couldn’t find time to read it, so I just closed it. (Not kidding).

So, my 2010? It’s been a frustrating year for me, writing-wise. The publishing end of things has been great–Del Rey has been doing a terrific job with my books, and I was glad that Child of Fire got a second printing.

But the first third of the year was spent finishing up Circle of Enemies, seven months past deadline. Yikes. I did not want to be that writer, and yet, there I was. I think it’s a solid book, maybe the best thing I’ve ever written, but it took so much time…

After that I spent months working on a proposal for The Buried King, a Harry-Bosch-in-fantasyland rhino killer, done my way. But there was something wrong with it–I’m not even sure what. I knew it would be difficult to translate a procedural to a second-world setting (a major part of the appeal of a police procedural is iron clad research and a glimpse into a privileged world, but how does that work when the author is making it all up?) but I guess I didn’t the the solutions in place. It didn’t get very far.

Then I went to work on A Key, An Egg, An Unfortunate Remark and… Jesus, what am I thinking here? Do people really want an urban fantasy with a 65-ish year old heroine? Who’s a committed pacifist?

I took a whack at the story once already, but none of it held together. right now I have, here beside me at the coffee shop, nearly 200 pages of manuscript for The Auntie Mame Files, about 30K words. I’m about to drop it into the mail for my agent.

If she can’t sell it, 2010 will have been a total wash, writing wise, except for the short chapter I wrote for A Glimpse of Darkness.

What the hell, right? It’s what I did. Hopefully, when the end of 2011 rolls around, I’ll be able to look back on a more productive year.

[1] That’s not meant as a condemnation. I’m just not much of a socializer