All posts by Kevin Hearne

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Goodreads

Don’t know if you’ve ever checked out Goodreads.com or not, but I dig it and I’m “there” now as an author if you’d like to click over there and say howdy. You can friend me there or follow me as a fan (I think?) and my blog posts will update there too. I’m not going to attempt to rate all the books I’ve read because that would take a looong time, but I do enjoy putting some things up and comparing my ratings with others, especially my friend Alan, who tends not to like things as much as I do. He’s a bit more critical than I am, and that’s a good thing, believe me, because he’s my alpha reader and I don’t know what I’d do without his insights. Usually I’ll give four or five stars to things or I won’t rate it at all, proceeding on the maxim if you don’t have anything nice to say…you know. The exception to this rule is Charles Dickens. I delight in giving his books one star. I might be the only person in the world who despises Charles Dickens, but I’m grateful to Goodreads for giving me a forum to express my wintry discontent with so little effort.

The other thing that’s really cool about Goodreads is the ability to get some ideas on what to read next…and I’m almost to the point where I’ll need something soon. I’ve been making progress through my pile o’ books and I’m just about caught up. I think I have found a candidate for the next one…it’s called Hunger by Jackie Kessler. It’s about one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Know why I’m going to read it? Because of this picture right here:

That’s Neil Gaiman holding Hunger. That’s all I needed to know. Put that on my TBR pile.

Also, my cover is getting “out there” and I’m very happy to see that people tend to like it. A lot. Here’s a blog where it appeared recently—she got the photos from my Twitter feed, so thanks to Persephone for following my tweets!

And today I will leave you with a gratuitous photo of my Boston Terrier, Sophie:

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Shiny Covers!

They didn’t tell me they would be shiny! I just got what they call sales proofs in the mail—these are what the sales folks take around to bookstores and say, “See, if you’re going to judge a book by its cover, then THIS ONE WINS!”—and the title that was previously white text is now foil stamped and embossed! I had no idea they were going to do that until my editor told me they’d gone ahead and done it. My scan doesn’t do it justice, but you’ll get the idea:

As Patrick Rothfuss would say, click to embiggen

Well, my peeps at Del Rey outdid themselves with these covers. I love ’em! They are going to gleam on the shelves! Ginormous thanks to authors Ari Marmell, Kelly Meding, and Nicole Peeler for reading the book before the awesome cover existed and saying something nice about it. That truly means the most, because they didn’t have to read it or say anything nice, yet they did.

Now here’s a better look at the cover for book two in the series:

I really dig this one because you can see Atticus’s tattoo much better; it wraps five times around his biceps and then falls down the top of his forearm, but you can’t see that in the pose for Hounded. This cover has a couple more touch-ups to go before it’s finalized, but it’s 90% there and they needed to get a proof out for the sales team. I think it looks spectacular as is! Hope you dig ’em too.

Suvudu, writing

Platform Building with a Pug

There’s a pretty cool post over at SFWA by Victoria Strauss about gettin’ published: It’s not a crap shoot. She addresses three assumptions made by grumbling, rejected writers, and while I urge you to click over and read her original post, I’d like to piggyback on those assumptions based on my own recent experience.

1) First assumption: All manuscripts are on equal footing in the marketplace. As she says, that’s completely untrue, and I’m not talking about anyone’s writing but my own. The two books I wrote, submitted, and had rejected before I wrote Hounded were not all that great, though I thought they were okay at the time. Only with experience and hindsight did I see that they deserved to be rejected. Yet I don’t regret writing them; I learned a lot in the process and they got me to a much better place in my craft. If you’re on submission right now, write the next book while you’re waiting; it’ll probably be better than the one you’re shopping around. (It worked for me.)
2) Second assumption: The industry doesn’t want new writers. Not sure how anyone can believe this one. I just read a great debut by Mark Hodder called The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack. And my fellow inductees into The League of Reluctant Adults, Sonya Bateman and K.A. Stewart, came out with their debuts this year. I’m obviously a new writer, and there are plenty more on deck…so I think that one’s wishful thinking, whoever thinks it.
3) Last one: No one wants a writer without a platform. Strauss says this assumption is more true for nonfiction writers than fiction…and she’s right. I’m still trying to build my platform; I wrote and sold my book without knowing what a platform was. In fact, I’m still not sure about the whole platform-building thing, since I’m such a newb to this aspect of the business. What I probably need is some help from my pug, Manley (named after the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins). Come on: How can you not follow a guy who has the devotion of a pug like this?

Manley likes laser pens and long walks in the dog park.
My write-up of Baltar vs. The Mountain That Rides is up on Suvudu on Monday! Don’t forget to vote for Baltar! :)
mental flotsam purge

Mental Flotsam Purge #1

I’m currently marveling over the fact that there’s a British actor by the name of Benedict Cumberbatch. I love that name. I think it’s my new favorite, honestly. For many years, my favorite name was Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, but that’s a fictional name courtesy of Douglas Adams. Benedict Cumberbatch is a real dude. He’s now starring as Sherlock Holmes for the BBC.
Here is a silly one-verse parody I made up in the car while driving to work…can you guess the Zeppelin tune?

There’s a barmaid who’s sure

All that she pours is gold
And she’s pulling the next draught
For Kevin.
I’m a fan of old spellings. “Draught” scores about four million style points over “draft.”  Draught beers taste better to me than draft beers because they’re spelled deliciously.
My next write-up of Gaius Baltar’s adventures in the Suvudu Cage Match will appear Monday morning. He’s taking on The Mountain That Rides from George R.R. Martin’s series, A Song of Ice and Fire. I’ll desperately need your help for Baltar to win…the fans of Martin’s series are legion. Round up your kids and all your laptops and vote for Baltar! :)
Benedict F***ing Cumberbatch. That’s a seriously epic name. It’s right up there with Bilbo Baggins.
The sound of my dishwasher is oddly comforting to me. I am wondering if it was designed to mimic the pulsing whoosh and hiss of the womb.
Many folks doing NaNoWriMo, and I wish them the very best; I hope something publishable comes out of it. I cannot yoke myself to that particular plow, because it seems (and I stress the SEEMS because I don’t know, having never done it) to prize quantity over quality. I do recognize its value for those who need to discipline themselves to a course of writing, and I’m absolutely positive that it works extremely well for many people; I’m just not one of them. I write somewhat sporadically while school is in session, but always try to get in a couple thousand words a week at minimum. Once I’m off school, I usually write 2-3K per day. Today I’m very pleased to have surpassed 10,000 words on my fourth book. Getting into five digits feels pretty good. What would feel completely awesome though is coming up with a name like Benedict Cumberbatch. Maybe I should just snag a British phone book…
Suvudu

HOUNDED cover revealed!

Though I suppose I could be accused of bias when I say “I LOVE IT!” it’s true nonetheless. The cover for Hounded is awesome; Del Rey has captured Atticus perfectly!

When Tricia & Mike (my spiffy editors) told me that Advanced Reader’s Editions were on their way, they made one request: have someone take pictures of me opening the box. They know I’ve been waiting to be published a long time, and to see my book bound and printed for the first time would be, in the words of our vice president,  “a big f#%!ing deal.” I agreed readily, not knowing what torture it would be…

The box arrived on Friday; I arrived soon after. BUT NO ONE WAS AROUND TO TAKE PICTURES. I couldn’t open it! I could have gone to a convenience store and made the clerk take pictures—I was thinking such things—but not seriously, because I wanted my family to be around when I opened it; they’ve been waiting a long time to see the book too. I had to wait three hours for my wife to get home, gnawing on my fingers the whole time, staring at the Box of Joy that I could not open.

It taunted me with its Random House return address and its priority overnightness:

Do not be alarmed by my strange expression in the next picture. I’m petting the box and purring, see. Well, okay, be alarmed if you’d like.

Purrrrrr.
The Box of Joy finally surrendered its happy contents to me:

….Words fail. All I can say is that there’s nothing like a dream coming true, and I couldn’t be happier.
   Below is my photo of the ARE cover. I apologize for the wee bit of glare. Also, the icons on the charms aren’t really coming through on this picture—all you see are black squares—but you’ll see them “for reals” with your naked eye, and they’re sublime. I’ll have the cover art file later, but for now enjoy the ARE:

If Atticus looks at you like that and draws his sword, APOLOGIZE. It doesn’t matter for what, just tell him you’re sorry and you’ll never do it again!
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it lots more: Del Rey has been completely lovely to work with. Tricia and the art dept. deserve mad props for this cover, and for the Hexed and Hammered covers as well. They brought Atticus to life and they incorporated my suggestions beautifully; I will build them a shrine and make offerings of gummi worms and beer.
And whoa—Hounded is now available for pre-order on Amazon, Borders.com, and BN.com! They don’t have the cover image up yet, but in case you’re really itching to get a head start on buying the books you need to read in April, now you can!
In other news—yes, I have other news!—my Cage Match write-up of Gaius Baltar vs. Feyd Rautha-Harkonnen should be up sometime today on Suvudu.com, so I’d love it if you went over there and took a gander. And, should you be so inclined, please vote for Baltar! Not only is he a completely awesome villain that you love to hate, as long as he wins, I get to keep writing!
I wish you peace, if you’re into that sort of thing. Otherwise, may you be swept suddenly into a world of intrigue and learn a rune-based magic system in only three days to prevent a demon apocolypse.
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Developments & Shocking News

The shocking news first: I have discovered that there are some human beings—sharing the planet with us right now, I might add—who don’t like pie. Until today, I was not aware that this was an option. I’m actually thinking that this is an elaborate hoax perpetrated by my students, and those who protested to me that they seriously don’t like pie are being contrary. I am tempted to dismiss it all as teenage rebellion. I mean, how can you look at this…

and react to it like this….?
That’s not right.
But in other news: I have found a neato website designer, thanks to a neato guy named Joe. The neato website designer is Sean; he’ll be getting something together for me soon once my cover art is finalized. I’m going to migrate this whole honkin’ blog over to my website, and it’ll be a WordPress kind of thing because I hear all the cool people are using it (plus I’ll be able to update the site easily, which is its primary attraction). 
Dudes: Six months until Hounded is on the shelves. It’s starting to feel real.
I think (I hope?) Gaius Baltar will beat the White Witch in Round One of Suvudu Cage Match: Villains, and as such I’ll get to write a new throw-down featuring him and whoever wins between the Borg Queen and Feyd Rautha-Harkonnen. (Can I just say how much fun it was to type that sentence? Most people would shuffle away from me and signal a taxi if I said that out loud, but I can let my Nerd off the chain when I blog.) Feyd is winning so far, so I’m having fun imagining that particular scenario. I’ll know the final results tomorrow (Thursday) and then I’ll have a couple o’ days to come up with a lovely violent vision for Gaius. The new write-up will appear on Monday, and of course I’d appreciate your support once again for Baltar…I get to write about him for as long as he lasts!
Progress on book four, Tricked, has been going well this week. I introduced three new characters and gave Oberon his longest speech of the series thus far. But I realize now that Oberon has yet to eat any pie in my fiction—indeed, my books have thus far been pie-free. Perhaps I will soon have occasion to enshrine pie in my series. Any votes on what kind of pie?
Suvudu

A Villain Worth Celebrating

A common complaint about villains in stories and film is that at some point their motivation all boils down to ruling the world. The super-cheesy ones say so plainly with malevolent glee and tack on an evil laugh at the end—“And then I will rule the world! Muah-ha-ha-ha-ha-haa!” Mike Myers mocked this tendency brilliantly in the Austin Powers movies. But why do they want to rule the world? Because it’s there?

They’re power-mad, these villains, and we rarely get any idea of what truly motivates them. Take Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace, for example—what drove him to hate so much? What was his beef with the Jedi? We never find out. He’s one of the flattest characters ever. He had a cool Halloween mask for a face, a neato double light saber and a gliding motorcycle thingie—but he was completely boring. Darth Vader was (and is) a much better villain, because we know what happened to him and we can empathize a bit with what turned him to the Dark Side—namely, the death of his mother.

But even though Darth Vader is one of the greatest villains ever and rightly deserves his top-ten seeding in the Suvudu Cage Match, I think there’s another villain in that particular tournament of evil that deserves a lot more respect: Gaius Baltar from Battlestar Galactica.

The genius of Baltar is that he’s always able to convince himself that he’s doing the right thing, the best thing for everyone—it’s just a coincidence that it’s also the best thing for him personally. Occasionally, he’s able to convince people—and perhaps us, the viewing audience—that he’s actually the victim. Nothing is ever his fault. He doesn’t have an evil bone in his body.

He sure does have a selfish bone, though.

To my mind, Baltar is the best villain ever because any one of us could become him. We couldn’t become Sauron or the White Witch or the Terminator, or many of the others in the Suvudu Cage Match: they’re all one-dimensional bogeymen, a foil for the naïve hero. But we could (and we do) make choices based on our own selfish desires. Like Baltar, we could descend into corruption in our pursuit of power, fame, fortune, and the sensual luxuries that are supposed to attend them. And we could tell ourselves, all the while, that we are the heroes of our own story; we could even pile on great heaping dollops of this faith or that, as Baltar eventually does, and give our actions the hue of religious righteousness.

If you want to see someone truly go to the Dark Side, Baltar is the one to watch. The villains from Star Wars go there and get symbolically cloaked in darkness, but they, like many other fictional villains, are a bit over-the-top, a bit too cartoonish, and thus they are entertaining more than truly horrifying. Baltar, however, is wholly loathsome and terrifying, because I can easily imagine him in our world today; I think there may be a few copies of him running around right now.

Now through Thursday, you can go vote for Baltar in the Suvudu Cage Match. He’s up against the White Witch from Narnia. I wrote up the prediction for how I think it will go—and if Baltar wins, I’ll get to write more. I think he should win the whole tournament, and with your help, he will! Spread the word, please—a vote for Baltar is a vote for well-rounded villains that we love to hate. While you’re at it, vote on the other matches, too—it’s tremendous fun and a chance to geek out about your favorite bad guys.


If you’re visiting my blog for the first time because you saw my write-up on Suvudu—welcome, and thanks for visiting! Take time to explore the archives, follow me here or on Twitter, and feel free to say howdy in the comments!
League of Reluctant Adults

I’m a Reluctant Adult

No…really! I’ve joined the League of Reluctant Adults at their invitation, and I’m thrilled! What is the League?


Well, it’s a group of 23 authors (including yours truly) who write Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance. We get together during conventions and whatnot to hold group signings, do unspeakable things to action figures, etc. I haven’t met any of my fellow Leaguers in person yet, but I’ve read quite a few of their books and I know from that experience that they’re brilliant. For example, there’s Nicole Peeler, Kelly Meding, Stacia Kane, Cherie Priest, Anton Strout…and more!


Go visit the League here and follow us! Nicole Peeler is introducing/hazing me sometime today on the site, so you’re sure get a laugh or two. You might have to scroll down to find me (depending on when you click over there because two other authors will be introduced), but it’ll be worth it—Nicole is pretty funny.

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A Wee Adventure in Bookman’s

Right now I’m on October break—a week off in between quarters. It’s an excellent time o’ year to be off work in Arizona. The weather is freakin’ perfect.

Today was an especially cool day. I all but finished copy editing Hammered, I got invited into a SUPER! SECRET! club (which won’t be a secret on Monday because I’ll blog about it then), I hung out by the pool at an awesome resort with some friends of mine, hit the comic book store to pick up Chew #14 and Northlanders #33, then walked into a used bookstore out here called Bookman’s.

Here is what happened when I walked into Bookman’s with my daughter:

UNKNOWN FEMALE VOICE: (shock, excitement) Mr. Hearne!

Hearne turns his head to the right. Two students stand agape at the vision of their English teacher existing outside of school.


HEARNE: (shock, bewilderment) Brunnhilde! Megatron! (Names changed to protect the innocent)

BRUNNHILDE: I can’t believe this!

MEGATRON: No WAY!

HEARNE: I know!

It is a magical moment for all concerned. Brunnhilde and Megatron realize that teachers have lives and do not live in coffins, iron maidens, basements, etc. Hearne is filled with hope for the future because he has now witnessed students visiting a bookstore of their own free will during a vacation.

Heh! Honestly, it was great. Those two kids are simply brilliant, and it’s easy to see why, since they weren’t at home watching TV or playing video games. They were in a bookstore. Looking at books. Talking about what they wanted to read! It made me ridiculously happy. Such a very cool day.  
Blog

Still Life with Fantasy and Fruit #8

I’m on my October break—which means a week off from school—and having a WHOLE! WEEK! to read and write and run errands during normal business hours sounds like a swim in milk chocolate right now.

My copy edits for Hammered are going to arrive today, so of course I’ll be diving into that, and I’m hoping to finish up my outline for book six this week, which is currently wearing the tentative title of Hunted.

My outlines are about 10-15 pages. I’m making them longer and more detailed than I used to because I saw the advantage of it while writing Hexed; the detailed notes I’d written on Hexed allowed me to crank it out in five months, and it was also far easier to edit/prettify than Hounded or Hammered, neither of which had detailed outlines. So I’ve learned quite a bit about myself as a writer—I can write as a pantser and as a plotter as well—but wow, the job sure gets done more efficiently when I plot. That doesn’t mean I slavishly follow the outline, either—I change things as I go, especially the order of events. I’ll probably post my Hexed outline after the book comes out so people can compare what I’d planned against what actually got written.

Here’s what I plan to read this week:

Still Life with Fantasy and Fruit #8

We have three miniature fruits here alongside a giant variation of another. Miniature Clementine oranges, a wee watermelon, and a petite pumpkin frame Scott Westerfeld’s dieselpunk Behemoth, while huge table grapes called Pristines nestle against the steampunk succulence of Cherie Priest’s Dreadnought.

I loved both Leviathan (Westerfeld) and Boneshaker (Priest), so these sequels are going to be delightful returns to worlds I enjoyed on my first visit. I especially love that Dreadnought is printed in brown ink like Boneshaker was.

In other news, Suvudu is starting their Villain Cage Match! TODAY! You can go vote now for who should fill in the last few slots in the bracket here.

And when the first round starts, one of the matchups will be introduced by Yours Truly! The bracket is public now, so I’m not going to be spoiling anything with this: I’ve written up the White Witch from the Chronicles of Narnia (Seed #5) vs. Gaius Baltar from Battlestar Galactica (Seed #28)! I hope you’ll follow along and join in the fun by voting! These Cage Matches are the coolest thing ever…it’s a chance to feed the Nerd Inside. So say we all.