THE WOODEN MAN in the Worldbuilders Charity Drive

Standard

I haven’t been posting much because I’m really pushing on this new book. I’m fighting my way through the middle. Also, I’m making #LesserDarths jokes on Twitter. But never mind that! I have some cool news.

A couple of weeks back I signed two copies of The Wooden Man, the SFBC omnibus edition of my three Twenty Palaces books and sent them to Pat Rothfuss’s Worldbuilders Charity Fund Drive. The first is now listed right here.

Now, I’ve made some Pat Rothfuss jokes here in the past, but the truth is a) I don’t know the guy at all and b) he seems really really cool. I could never get my shit together enough to run something like this.

So! These are the only two copies of The Wooden Man I intend to sign, ever. One you can win by entering the lottery (Donate a small amount and you get a chance to win one of the many books being offered, at random).

The second copy will be available for auction in the next couple of weeks. I’ll post about it when it goes live.

Guys, it’s a good cause. Help them out if you can.

First lines meme

Standard

Here are the first lines from the first post of each month.

I finally got in from my Amtrak train, only 37.5 hours after the original scheduled arrival time.

I didn’t know Melissa Mia Hall, but I do know this: she didn’t have to die.

So, Random House has switched over to agency pricing for its ebooks.

The back story.

I realize this is naive of me but would rather he’d been captured and put on trial.

today’s my wife’s birthday.

Well, really it’s my not-birthday (ob repetitive explanation: My wife and I share a Bday, which sucks, so I bumped mine back a month).

Last night our elderly neighbor, Dolores Snootheim-Jagger, was visiting to borrow some flour and harangue us about going to her church, the Holy Ministry Of The Unlanced Boil, when she asked me to show her this “internet thing” she’d heard so much about.

Here’s an interview with me at The Quillery, for those who like to read this sort of thing.

I’m going.

Everything I want to say about NaNoWriMo would be a repeat of my advice from last year.

The plugin I was using to sell Twenty Palaces directly from my website wasn’t working correctly, so I’ve switched to something else.

[sings] Typos, self! Typos!

New Years

Standard

Remember NaNoWriMo? As I said at the time, November is a terrible time for a novel sprint. The Christmas season, the (U.S.-based) holiday, it’s just too much.

But you know what would be a great month to start a 50K sprint? January.

No, I’m not going to try it myself (I can’t do it, I’ve never been able to sprint like that and I’m not at the point where I can push myself that far), but maybe you want to.

Which brings me to this: If you have finished a book (or will soon) you will probably want to have someone edit it for you. Well, at the end of 2011, my editor left Random House and hung out her own shingle. Betsy Mitchell was editor-in-chief at Random House, she founded Warner Aspect, she started Del Rey Manga, and she’s edited writers from Michael Chabon to Terry Brooks. She’s also a big reason why the Twenty Palaces books worked as well as they did.

Anyway, I put a permanent link in my sidebar a while ago pointing to her site, but I wanted to write a post, too. It’s a new year, and if you want to make your book as good as it can be, you should talk to her.

Oh, Christ, how many words did I just write that weren’t all about me me me? Let’s fix that: Here’s how I plan to celebrate New Years Eve: Have a quiet dinner at home alone, watch a movie, read a little, go to bed by ten. That’s after I’ve gotten up early and done my pages for the day.

Here’s how I plan to celebrate New Years Day: Write pages, do whatever.

Resolutions for the new year: None. I think resolutions are a bad idea, because everyone treats them as something you do for a couple of weeks and then break. Keeping a resolution is like a miracle. But making a sensible change to your own life? That’s not a big deal at all.

I also don’t have a lot of plans for 2012. I hope to finish A Blessing of Monsters by the end of February, and I have a project that I’ve agreed to sign on to pending further details (and which I can’t really talk about yet). Beyond that it’s all fluid. God, I hope I sell some more books, lemme tell you.

Typing this from the U Village B&N

Standard

For Seattle folks, the B&N in the University Village is closing tomorrow, and I’ve just gone through check out. (Most) Everything is half off, and there is still a shocking amount of good stuff available. Many shelves, naturally, are completely empty, but the SF/F section is still full of award winners and best sellers, as is the mystery and children’s sections.

The DVD section has a huge shelf of Criterion releases, lots of movies and TV shows (including lots of Dr. Who/Buffy/MST3K, and so on), and some Wii/DS games. Their “British TV” section is still pretty full.

I’ll be sorry to see it vanish, since it was where I bought the Adventures in Fantasy book I blogged about earlier this week, and this is the only store where I met a clerk who had already read and enjoyed my work. (That doesn’t happen every day, lemme tell you).

But there are deals to be had, and plenty of good books left. If you read pbooks, come down and check it out.

Randomness for 12/29

Standard

1) Massive 1,100+ year old Maya site discovered in Georgia’s mountains Or maybe not?

2) Do the FAA’s assertions about ebook reading during take off and landing stand up to scrutiny?

3) Images from one of the most remote and remarkable landscapes on Earth: Dallol Volcanic Crater.

4) Area 51 Alien Travel Center: a soon-to-be-built sci-fi themed brothel in Nevada. Finally, we know what will empty the last few regulars from rec.arts.sf. Anyway, I wonder if building codes will require the vats be installed on the first floor.

5) How to deal with slow walkers. Video.

6) Instead of helping you defeat an alien brood queen, this exoskeleton simulates the effects of old age for young people.

7) What if you were brought on to write a show that no one was watching and no one cared what you did? How weird could it get?

I would, in fact, jump off a bridge if everyone else did

Standard

A lot of bloggers have been posting lists of their most popular posts for 2011, so I thought I’d do it, too. What the hell, right? Google Analytics makes it easy and it beats thinking. So. From least popular to most for 2011, the top five:

5- Patrick Rothfuss lights a cigar with a $20 bill The funny thing about this one is that I found the first episode of HOLMES AND YOYO on YouTube and wow, it’s even worse than I remember. (Okay, I thought that was funny.)

4- My “Judgement Day” Plan for 5/21 Usually I think of jokes when it’s too late to tell them. This one time I came up with something before the actual thing, and it landed in the four spot. Hmph. Anyway, these two are the only humor posts on the list, and I have plenty of other joke posts that never went anywhere, so don’t worry, you won’t be getting a lot more of these.

3- Twenty Palaces The announcement of the prequel’s release, with that great cover.

2- Ten Things Writers Shouldn’t Do Really? Writing advice takes the second spot? I rarely give writing advice on the blog because who am I to be telling people about writing? But this one was linked around quite a bit. Should I write more of this stuff (assuming I have more to say)?

1- It’s Official: The Twenty Palaces Series Has Been Cancelled (long) Not surprising, really, but it’s not a post I particularly want to talk about.

Keep in mind that my little corner of the internet is a quiet place. Actually, it’s practically a hermit’s cave, so these don’t represent huge numbers.

Ten Days

Standard

I’ve just put Lord of Reavers up for sale on B&N and Amazon. It’ll be a while before it’s cleared for sale there, but in the meantime you can still buy it directly from me.

Also, my wife and son are out of town for ten days to visit her family. I’m at home, and I’ve borrowed a number of DVDs from the library; they aren’t great movies, but they’re for grownups, and if you have an account on LiveJournal (they’re free), you can vote for which ones I’ll watch.

In the meantime, here’s my plan for the next week and a half:

1- To bed every night before midnight. Before 11 would be better but lets be realistic.

2- Vegetables every day.

3- Get back on the Livestrong calorie counting, which I set aside during the holiday.

4- A helluva lot of walking

5- Personal hygiene, apartment hygiene.

6- Set Freedom for six hours every night before bed.

7- 2500 words a day at least.

It will take focus, but this is going to be a productive holiday season.

Publishers/Readers/Customers

Standard

I don’t have John Scalzi’s experience in publishing, but what he says here jibes with my experience: It’s silly to say that publishers don’t see readers as their customers.

When I put my three books through the system at Del Rey, I had many, many conversations with my editor about the story/cover/whatever (especially Game of Cages), and never once did we talk about what the stores would like. Everything everything everything was about the reader.

A Special Project

Standard

Today is my son’s tenth birthday. He assures me that this means he’s no longer a child even though he’s still a kid. I’m not entirely convinced by his argument, but what the hell.

Anyway, he and I have been working on a special project for weeks. Actually, lets make that months. See, many of you reading this will have heard that we’re homeschooling my son, but you might not have heard that he hates to write.

Yeah, the writer’s son won’t put a paragraph on a page without an hour of griping and squalling. He won’t let his artist mom teach him to draw, either. Learning science, division, or world history from us? No problem. But when we try to teach him about the things we know best? Hell no. That’s practically an affront to his dignity.

Then I bought Adventures in Fantasy by John Gust:

Although I actually bought it from Barnes & Noble–the one in the University Village that’s going out of business. (Although maybe you’d rather see a link to Indiebound.) It’s a lesson plan designed to guide a young person through the process of writing a novel.

So far we’ve had lessons on punctuation, showing vs. telling, alliteration, POV, the hero’s journey, metaphor, simile, and a dozen other subjects, all handled in the fun prep work for a fantasy novel. He did written projects, did an oral presentation, (re-)learned vanishing point as he drew an early scene from the book (a drawing he’s very proud of, btw)–all in all, it sounds like a soft assignment, but he’s been doing a lot of work on this project.

And my son, being who he is, wouldn’t have done all those work sheets [1] without having me right beside him doing them at the same time. So yeah, A Blessing of Monsters has been planned in part through these grade school exercises. No, I will not post the drawings I had to do of all the characters. Hell, I don’t even like to talk about plots ahead of time.

Plus, I had to kick over the book’s recommended plot structure before I wrote it. For elementary school kids, the hero/sidekick/mentor format works just fine[2]–it’s excellent, actually–but for me I needed to really change things up.

But finally, after weeks and weeks, we got through all the exercises. Before he sat down to write the first page, we spent a few days watching the LOTR movies, then it was a go.

He’s a funny kid, and he loves funny books. I knew he would be working on a comedy, but I think he’s really nailing it (for his age group, of course). I’m also a little surprised by how rough some of his punctuation can be. He reads all the time, but apparently that doesn’t give him a model to follow.

His goal is a 100 words a day, and I expect him to do a few thousand words before he reaches the end of this novel. The biggest goad to get him to produce is to know that I’m going to do more words that day; he’s actually a bit of a tyrant. “Dad! Less Twitter, more writing.”

After he reaches the end, we’ll do an edit and–surprise surprise–I intend to offer him a penny a word for it and publish it here on my website.

It’s been fun and I think he’s learning a lot. Best investment I made last year.

[1] If you’re thinking of picking up the book, keep in mind that it’s full of worksheets that need to be copied/printed/filled out, and might not be appropriate for your Kindle.

[2] And would probably sell a million copies if I wrote it myself, but I’m not that commercially-minded.

Story Seeds

Standard

In case there’s anyone out there who doesn’t know what these seed posts are about, I exorcise ideas I like but will never write by giving them away on my blog. I’m timing these for Newtonmass morning as a special gift for anyone who wants them.

1) Occupy Bon Temps

2) Law & Order: Baldur’s Gate

3) Sometimes when I got to bed, late at night, my wife is already asleep. The room is very, very dark, of course, and I can hear her breathing under the covers but can’t see her. And sometimes when I’m lying there in the darkness, I think: That doesn’t sound like her.

4) Title: FOOD APES IN LOVE

5) Minion crowd-sourcing: Wouldn’t super-villains be sick of building these big bases, stocking them with armed guards (are these guys ever worth their paychecks?), and getting overrun by superheroes? Now that governments are using drone technology, it should be simple for a tech-minded villain to set up a private invite-only game where the players unwittingly operate drones. Co-op play! Rob the bank! Kidnap the mayor’s daughter! Look! A superhero is chasing you, and he’s modeled on one of the city’s *real* heroes! Super-fun battle time!

Of course, eventually the truth would come out and gamers would realize they were doing this stuff for real. The in-setting legal ramifications would be complicated, and there would certainly be new minion volunteers. As awful as it seems, you know there would be plenty of assholes on the internet excited to join a flying machine gun squad to hunt down Spider-man.

6) LORD OF THE FIGHT CLUB: The Dark Lord and his hosts have been destroyed, the elves have sailed into the west, and magic has gone from the world. Humans have peace at last, but now they have all become farmers and merchants. They dress well, work hard, and toil to create wealth. What chance does a warrior have to prove himself now that the final victory has come? What great deeds are left to be done for those with the desperate need to prove themselves?

7) Tolkien’s elves (and in many other iterations) are great lovers of music and the arts. Wood elves, high elves, whatever, they’re always described as singing/playing beautiful, ethereal songs and generally being transcendent.

So how do you think polar elves, the ones who live at the North Pole, feel about “Last Christmas”? or “All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth”? or “Wonderful Christmas Time”?