Writer's Grove

Suvudu will never run a Cage Match like what I saw tonight. I just watched the Cardinals and the Raiders play one of the worst games EVAH. The Cardinals “won” 24-23. It wasn’t a victory for the Cardinals so much as proof that the Raiders Suck More. The Cardinals still sucked; they just Sucked Less. The whole thing was jaw-droppingly bad, except for that one immensely entertaining play where the Raiders fumbled, picked it up, then the referee got in the way and actually stripped the ball out of the running back’s hand, sailed ass over teakettle, and the Raiders retained possession because the ball went out of bounds. That was all just the Raiders and the Ref. The Cardinals weren’t really in that picture. I hope that play winds up on a highlight reel somewhere, because it was hilarious—an instant classic, actually, but they only did two replays on the broadcast. They need to put that thing on a loop!

Someone at the top of the Raiders’ organization must have done some incredibly naughty stuff to deserve karma like this.

I’m excited to watch other people deal with them, anyway…on TV. AMC’s new series, based on the graphic novels, looks absolutely spectacular. It’s going to be far more character-driven and tragic, methinks, than you’d see in a horror film, and it won’t be anything like the campy fun of Zombieland. You won’t see anybody sayin’, “You got a purty mouth!” before clocking a zombie with a banjo.

If a zombie apocalypse were actually possible, I figure it would look much more like this bleak vision: lots of drama, lots of tension, and a despairing hope for a new world. This Halloween, I’m staying home and enjoying TV…because outside of football games, I haven’t watched anything since Battlestar Galactica ended. Maybe I’ll actually get scared on Halloween for a change!

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to read anything for fun. Now that school’s back in, I tend to have other things to read. Here’s what I have to read this weekend:

•I have publication dates for all three books now:
HOUNDED, April 26, 2011
HEXED, May 24, 2011
HAMMERED, June 28, 2011

•In super-duper-happy-mega-big-jumbo news, I’m getting ultra-spiffy, full-color, finished-art ARE’s (Advanced Reader Editions)! Normally ARE’s are sent out with generic covers on them; they say the author’s name, the title of the book, and then there’s a nice houndstooth pattern or some diamonds or whatnot to look at, nothing more. Full-bore ARE’s are supposed to indicate the publisher is really behind the book, thinks it will do well, etc. so I’m extremely grateful and lucky to have the coolest editor evah. But it also means I’ll get to see some cover art a bit sooner than I thought! If you cannot feel my excitement pouring through the pixels at your eyeballs right now, then you are extraordinarily stable to the point of Stoicism! Squeeee! There. That did it. You’re excited now too!

•Whoa! I got my first fan mail! A relative of my alpha reader wrote me a very nice note after he finished reading HEXED. Completely made my week. Here’s a snippet:

The last fight scene was epic! I could picture it exactly–it was very easy to follow what was happening…I’ve read other books where I just get lost in the various battle sequences and I just end up skipping pages.  Boo to them.  You, sir, know what you’re doing.  Kudos.

Wasn’t that sweet? He said a lot of very nice things, but that bit made me all warm and fuzzy inside because fight scenes are extremely difficult for me to write. I count that as  high praise indeed. Thanks, Mike R!

•Possessed by whimsy, a couple of my friends are doing a parody of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” video with me. We are all giant men. We won’t be wearing spandex or leotards because we’re trying to induce laughter rather than vomiting. Can’t wait to get it all shot and edited…we did the first part today, and it was quite a hoot!

•Getting into The Scarlet Letter with the kids at school. The Romantic writing style is a bear, but the story is first-class soap opera, man. And Roger Chillingworth is the most cold-blooded villain ever. Dude  creeps me out. I’ve had nightmares, because he just never gives up. And it’s funny how some adults have heard we’re reading it and they’re instantly down on it. “HATED IT!” they say. Well, it’s only because they’re still having nightmares about Roger F-ing Chillingworth. I mean, if you give Darth Vader, Freddy Kreuger, and Roger Chillingworth each a planet of people to make miserable, first one to make ’em all go insane wins, Roger F-ing Chillingworth will win. He is a master of mental torture. Puritan Guilt: It’s What’s For Dinner!

Little known fact: I don’t just moonlight as a novelist. I also do play-by-play sports announcing for high school football. All levels—Frosh, JV and Varsity.

I’ve been doing it since the school opened, and I have to tell you it’s a lot more fun now that our football team is a bit better than it used to be. As the immortal Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh said, “I love winnin’, man! Know what I’m sayin’? It’s like, better than losing?”

What’s NOT cool is that the media booth where I do my thing is a metal box without any air conditioning. So it spends all day heating up in the Arizona sun, and then it’s nice and sweltering when I get there. It’s quickly turbo-gross inside, and then for some bizarre reason, at about 7:15 pm without fail, a plague of tiny flying insects chooses to dive to their deaths on top of my player roster, the scoreboard controller, my scalp, etc.

“DIE, laddie!” I scream as I smoosh them to paste between plays. Once I forgot to turn off the microphone before I did this. It was misinterpreted, and I had to explain to a stadium full of people that I tend to talk to insects as I slay them. Sigh.

Tonight’s the first home game, and it’s always a good time. The band kids will be excited. The people who sell nachos will be excited. Heck, the people who eat nachos will be excited. And we have this tradition where someone does pushups on a splintery wooden board held up by fans in body paint. Sometimes these pushups are pretty gnarly. When it gets to be a high-scoring game, you have to wonder who can rip off 52 or so and look good doing it.

What I enjoy about high school games are all the reasons people are there. Some aren’t there to watch the game at all. Some are way too into the game, shouting at the ref and the coaches and yes, the players for doing something they perceive as “stupid.” Some are there to enjoy the atmosphere and people watch, and that’s basically what I’m up to in between plays. That, and wishing one of those cold trains of refreshment would suddenly blow through the stadium like you see in the commercials. None of that refreshment would probably make it up to my metal box, but it would be nice to be reminded that refreshment is possible. Oh, and look, Old Spice Body Wash Guy, I don’t care how awesome you are, you won’t smell that good after spending ten minutes in my booth. You’ll probably still look impossibly handsome, though, damn you. *envy*

Heading out now to be the Man in the Box…hope we win!

It’s been almost a week since my last post…I’ve been busy. School, you know. I’m finishing up The Crucible and about to start The Scarlet Letter. O, the calamities of Puritan drama! They’ll be begging for the Age of Reason soon.

But I was rather productive over the long weekend. The typeset pages of HEXED arrived and I finished a read-through, finding far fewer errors than I did for HOUNDED, so that had me feeling happy. Still, I found a tiny sequence where I wasn’t quite sure what was happening…I almost couldn’t believe I’d written it. Funny how time away from a manuscript can bring out little things like that. So I have some very minor tweaks to make—probably less than 30 words—and then that will be finished.

I also finished outlining book five, which is (at this moment) titled TRAPPED. My earlier idea for that book’s title was TEMPTED, but I decided that made it sound either like a romance novel or some sort of Food Network book about desserts. Romance and desserts are awesome, of course—especially together, isn’t there a subgenre called Calorie Erotica?—but that’s not the vibe I’m going for.

And hey, cheers to my followers in Australia—I think I have a couple, right? You’ll be pleased to hear that I got my contract from Oz today, and the publication dates for all three books are just one month behind the US release, so you’ll get HOUNDED in June, HEXED in July, and HAMMERED in August of 2011! I’m very excited about this and so happy that HarperCollins/Voyager decided to pick up the series!

Must go back to school now to announce the freshman football game. My play-by-play kung fu is the best in the East Valley. ;)

The Iron Druid Chronicles. I got the official word today from my editor at Del Rey!

I love it! It sounds so badass! I have hopes that maybe a tiny dusting of its badassery will accrue to me, since I’m the author. ;)

I’ve waited a long time to know what the series would finally be called—almost a year. The original series title I’d queried with (and got the deal with) was ditched long ago: I’d called it The American Druid Series. But it quickly became apparent that it wasn’t appropriate for several reasons:
1. My Druid is Irish—as in, he’s really from Ireland. (That means he can never be President—is that a spoiler?)
2. It sounded like a vaguely patriotic title, and my Druid cares very little about the interests of any political entity, much less one that’s only been around for 234 years. (He’s 2,100 years old.)
3. The series goes far beyond the boundaries of America after the first couple of books.

What followed was a long journey through rivers of discarded ideas. This one’s my favorite, offered whimsically by my Assistant Editor, Mike Braff: “Druid, where’s my car?”

A large part of the problem was that “Druid” doesn’t scan well with other words. It doesn’t fall trippingly off the tongue, shall we say, when one is trying to formulate a phrase that’s simple and memorable yet captures the essence of multiple books in a series. When we strayed into ideas that didn’t have “Druid” in them, however, we ran into other issues—the titles sounded too sci-fi, or too mystery-ish, or sounded too close to other titles out there. “Iron Druid” came to me yesterday on the way home from the day job, and it was one of those facepalm moments, where you can’t believe you hadn’t thought of it earlier. Especially since I’d written that exact phrase on page six of Hounded. So I sent it off to the big house in NY, and they liked it, and now I imagine they’ll do something logo-ish with it to make it look even cooler than it sounds.

I want a T-shirt that says The Iron Druid Chronicles on it. I want the mug. The sheet set. And the limited edition Monopoly® game (I get to be Oberon!).

As if that news weren’t spiffy enough, Tricia (my editor) told me the typeset pages for HEXED are on the way! Woohoo! This is a very cool Wednesday.

I think there’s probably this preconceived notion out there that miniature dwarfs only defend meat and beer. But that’s a vicious lie—probably spread by miniature elves. Dwarfs acknowledge that consuming the occasional vegetable fends off scurvy and aids digestion. Hence the following:

My good friend Sigurd Kneecapper is guarding my Greek salad and a delectable brew called Easy Street Wheat in an Ommegang Witte glass.

The Greek salad is simple stuff: Roma tomatoes and cucumber, chopped basil, sprinkled with feta cheese, olive oil, and fresh-ground black pepper. Easy Street Wheat is from Odell Brewing in Ft. Collins, CO, and it was recommended to me a couple weeks ago by Anonymous in the comments after I sampled 90 Shilling Ale from the same brewer (in Still Life with Dwarfs and Beer #3). Best Anonymous tip I’ve ever received—this beer has won five medals, including two golds, so you don’t really need me to tell you it’s freakin’ good! It’s exponentially more drinkable than that mass-produced beer that makes claims to drinkability, and it has just a whisper of sharpness to its taste that keeps it refreshing. Ommegang is a brewery in upstate NY near Cooperstown, and their Witte is very good. Their Three Philosophers Ale makes a guest appearance in my third book.

And now let’s take a closer look at the stout sentinel, Sigurd:

If you try to score some of my Easy Street, Sigurd isn’t going to make it easy for you. He aims low, you see—and I don’t mean because he’s a dwarf. He’s swingin’ for the knees first, and then when you’re down and screaming, he’ll leisurely swing that hammer at your squishy parts. You won’t be thinking about my awesome beer at that point.

I pay Sigurd very well to guard my grub. That’s why his (pick one) gromril/mithril/yourmomril armor is gold-kissed, from the chain to the plate to the spectacle helmet.

Remember to come back on Tuesday, when I’ll have my 3:2 Interview with Gail Carriger!

Not sure if there’s some sort of numerological significance to this, but today marks my one hundredth blog post and my third novel accepted by Del Rey!

I have been smiling so much about that last bit that people have begun to fear me. They swerve out of my path and refuse to make eye contact, frightened that I might be happy at them.

I’m incapable of turning down the wattage, however, because at this time last year I didn’t even have a book deal yet (The deal happened on Sep. 25, 2009), and now—11 months later—Del Rey has accepted HOUNDED, HEXED, and HAMMERED!

And starting about eight months from now—April 26, 2011—people will finally get to read my books! The trick, I am told, is to make them aware of my existence between now and then. I hope I can manage somehow.

My release schedule—April, May, and June of next year—means readers will get to sink their mental teeth deep into the series right away. It also means I’m in a really weird place right now…the sort of place they never tell you about, and by they I mean all those people who write about the writing life…you know: writers. I’ve written three urban fantasies, but I’m still a few months away from having a cover or early reviews or any of those other shiny things writers like to gush about. And don’t get me wrong—I’m going to gush about my cover(s) and my (hopefully kind) early reviews, etc.—but in the meantime I’m a writer without any books to point at. It’s a funky state of being; I should probably take notes.

The reason they never told me about this place is that there truly aren’t many writers who have debuted in this fashion. From what I understand, I’m only the third to do so for Del Rey. I don’t know if other publishers do this or not…so maybe I’m the third, period. Naomi Novik began her wonderful Temeraire series this way, and Stacia Kane just got finished releasing her first three Downside novels last month.

I’ve been told my blog posts will start poppin’ up on Suvudu. Maybe it will even be this one—if so, hello there, nice person who clicked on a curious link! I should probably warn you that I will not simply be writing about my books. I tend to write about beer and miniature dwarfs and things of importance to nerds, and I do my best to post twice a week. I also like to interview other authors because I’m sort of a fanboy and easily impressed by smart people (my interview with Gail Carriger will go live a week from today, August 31). Browse through my archives to get a sense for it—I have 99 other posts here to enjoy! And if you say hi in the comments to let me know that you’re now aware of my existence, I’ll repay you by introducing you to Sigurd Kneecapper on Saturday—plus an awesome microbrew! :)