Category Archives: writing

League of Reluctant Adults, writing

Go get the male

So, I did an interview thingie last week where I had to differentiate my UF hero, Atticus O’Sullivan, from other UF heroes. The key to the question was the word heroes, not heroines. There are considerably fewer UF heroes on the shelves than there are UF heroines, and if you’re talking about UF heroes written by males, the list gets even smaller.

Aside from being the only Druid lead in UF, Atticus is quite different from other heroes—but I don’t want to re-answer the question right now, especially since the interview hasn’t been published yet. Instead, I’d like to talk about what happened to my brain. Under the intense pressure of the question (GAH! 5 jillion foot-pounds o’ PRESSURE!) I could only think of three male protagonists written by males. I knew there were more—really good ones too!—but only three came to mind. Perhaps that’s my mental max. Here are the ones I didn’t think of at the time but SHOULD have: Harry Connolly’s Ray Lilly, Mike Carey’s Felix Castor, and Jon Levitt’s Mason. (And I know there are more out there but I haven’t read them yet.) The ones I did list were Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden, Ben Aaronovitch’s Peter Grant, and Anton Strout’s Simon Canderous. Everybody’s heard of the first guy. I’d just gotten finished reading Midnight Riot by Aaronovitch, so it’s no wonder I thought of him (good book!). But as I was twitching out my last muscle spasms from the adrenaline high born of INTENSE PRESSURE, I got to thinking how Simon Canderous stuck in my head. I found Dead to Me, the first book in his series while browsing in the bookstore (“Oh, cool!” I said. “There’s actually another dude hanging out here!”) and since I was all caught up on my Butcher and looking for something different, I bought it. Turned out to be quite entertaining—Strout is fond of puns, which makes me fond of him, and Simon Canderous has a really interesting magical power (Psychometry!) with some complicating side effects in his personal life. I found myself smiling as I read it and occasionally laughing out loud. I love it when I run across good reads like that. But why did I have to find this guy by accident?

A bit later on, I got myself invited into the august body of authors known as The League of Reluctant Adults and discovered that Anton Strout was a founding member. This confirmed my strong suspicion that he is cooler than me (but I suspect that of nearly everyone). Indisputably, though, he has a gigantic pair of titanium balls because he is the Sworn Mortal Enemy of Patrick Rothfuss. I mean, if you have THAT on your resume, there’s simply no way people can doubt the capaciousness of your sack. He even survived a concerted effort by Rothfuss to have him assassinated through the powerful medium of fortune cookie suggestion! Behold:

My bowels would liquify if Patrick Rothfuss engineered a fortune cookie campaign like that against me. But not Anton!

I have since traded some amusing emails with Anton and read more of his books—I just got finished with my sneak peek of his latest, Dead Waters (out February 22).

He continues to entertain and poke fun at urban fantasy tropes, and Simon Canderous deserves to be among the top male protagonists in urban fantasy. He is among the top in my mind, clearly. If you’ve never tried him out, there are four Simon Canderous novels to choose from: Dead to Me, Deader Still, Dead Matter, and the above Dead Waters. Time to go get the male!

If you’d recommend any other male protagonists in UF, please do in the comments! Might as well swell the TBR pile!

writing

Coming soon

I have some good news and some good news!

First, congrats to Devon for winning an ARC of Bloodshot and to Nverted for winning an ARC of The Fallen Blade! Email me your addresses [kevin @ kevinhearne.com] and I’ll slap ’em in the mail for ya. Thanks to all who entered. :)

Second, it looks like those who purchase HOUNDED as an e-book will be getting a bonus; wheels are turning in publication land to bundle a free short story with it called “Kaibab Unbound,” a little adventure that takes place two weeks before the events of the novel. From what I understand, this will be a US/Canada-only deal. And since I’ve had some questions, my understanding is that the series will be available on Kindle, Kobo, Nook, and darn near everywhere except the iTunes book store. People who have the iPad can still read my stuff if they have the Kindle app, etc.

Third, I’ve been having a good time this weekend retooling my epic. Hopefully progress will continue in this vein and I’ll be able to settle on a title I like soon—then I can share. :)

Publishing Stuff, writing

Contest-o-Rama

Art thou an aspiring writer? Then my first advice to you is not to use the “art thou” sentence construction. My second piece of advice is to enter the Suvudu Writing Contest, because it’s honestly the only kind o’ writing contest worth entering. The downside is that it’s only open to US writers, but it’s entirely made of win otherwise. The grand prize gets a professional edit from Betsy Mitchell, editor in chief of Del Rey, with the distinct possibility that they might make an offer for it. Since Del Rey/Spectra doesn’t usually accept unagented submissions, this is your one, fleeting chance to catch their eye with an unsolicited submission! And even if they don’t offer for your book, an edit from Betsy will help you whip your submission into the kind of shape publishers will offer on. You have until March 18 to enter, so start polishing that manuscript you have in your drawer!

Next up: I’d really like you to win a free copy of my debut, and my spiffy marketing dude, Joe, has set up a contest on Goodreads to give away 25 copies in February! Thing about that is, you have to be a member of Goodreads to win. He’s also going to give away copies on Facebook through the Del Rey Spectra page—but of course you need a Facebook account for that. I’ve decided to run a contest here so you can get yourself eligible for those contests there. I’m giving away an ARC of Cherie Priest’s Bloodshot and Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s The Fallen Blade. These are both slightly used—I’ve read ’em, loved ’em,  and I think you will too. So we have two separate prizes here.

You get entered once for “Liking” me on Facebook (there’s a convenient place to do so on my home page). You get entered again for either friending me on Goodreads or becoming a fan on Goodreads. Once you’ve done either or both, please comment below and let me know what you did so that I don’t count random “likes” as contest entries. And yeah, if you’ve already “liked” me before this, that will count, just let me know! Open to US only, sorry, and this will run through Sunday.

Two other announcements that have nothing to do with contests:

1.) The Iron Druid Chronicles will be published in the Czech Republic! Very grateful and excited, since part of book three is set there!

2.) I’m going to be at the San Diego Comic Con in July! Nerds of the world, unite! I’ll be doing a signing there at some point, and we’ll see what else comes up. Obviously I’ll have more details closer to the date, but all three books will be out then, so if you are down that way and you wind up liking Atticus, I’d love to see you there! I’m going to see about arranging something at a bookstore offsite too, so that you don’t have to attend the convention to see me. If I’m SOOPER DOOPER lucky, I’ll be able to arrange a joint signing with another author and we can power the store with nothing but the reflected glow of our combined celebrity! ;) <—Irony.

Best o’ luck! Bloodshot is really good, by the way…5 stars from me on Goodreads! :)

writing

Meet Atticus for free!

I’ve been waiting a long time for the world to meet Atticus O’Sullivan, last of the Druids. April 19 (the release date for Hounded) seems sooo far away right now. But just in time for the holidays, Suvudu has posted a free short story called “Clan Rathskeller” that you can enjoy by clicking right here. (And clicking is free, I might add.)

Set ten months before the events of Hounded, the story will introduce you to Atticus and Oberon and give you a little glimpse of their world. I hope you enjoy it, and please tell everyone you know—because everyone you know likes free stuff, right?

Suvudu, writing

Lots o’ lovely news!

Completely, utterly thrilled to announce that The Iron Druid Chronicles will be published by Klett-Cotta in Germany! Not only do they have the coolest griffin logo I’ve ever seen, but they also publish fantasy titans like Tad Williams and—wait a second. I want to try something. Here goes: Klett-Cotta also publishes J.R.R. Tolkien, Patrick Rothfuss, and…me. *eep!*

Whoa. Since a thunderbolt from the literary gods has yet to destroy me for associating myself with Tolkien and Rothfuss in the same sentence, the only possible conclusion I can draw is that the literary gods don’t read my blog. As such, I am completely free to say heinous things like “I can’t stand Charles Dickens!” or “My life would be better if I hadn’t read Dostoevsky at such an impressionable age!”

I’m very grateful to Klett-Cotta, of course, and I am excited for a former exchange student of mine who helped me by translating some passages in Hexed. (You can see and hear her awesome work on the Goodies page; the phrases are read by another German exchange student currently at my school). She was hoping she’d be able to read the books in German, and now her wish will come true. In one of those cosmic coincidences, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the German language lately, because I’ve recently rediscovered Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke himself wasn’t German—he was born in Prague—but he’s one of the premier poets of the German language, and what he has to say about the nature of creativity in Letters is just as inspirational to me today as when I first read it twenty years ago. What I’ve been wondering is what’s been lost in translation. I suspect that German readers will get the best of it, but still, it’s an amazing work in English.

Other news: I have a light little end-of-year thingamabob posted up on Suvudu now. If you click on over and read it, you will be confronted with (among other things) an excessively cute puppy and an excessively drunk miniature dwarf.

The other, other news: Though I still don’t have a date yet, there should be a free short story coming soon on Suvudu. It might be really soon…I’ll let you know.

Tech news I figured out five years or so after everyone else: If you register an email address with Gravatar.com, then use said email in the comment field, you’ll get a cool little avatar to show up alongside your comments! It’s not really important AT ALL, but neither is much of what we do in the name of Cool.

News I can use: Almost time for Winter Break. Looking forward to making progress on book four; I’ve had to leave it alone for a week or two because of finals and I need to get back into the groove. The Kid is looking forward to baking cookies with Grandma and the dogs are looking forward to anything that falls on the floor.

writing

Write more

When it comes to writing novels only one thing is easier—knowing I’ll finish. I have a confidence there where there used to be gnawing uncertainty that I might be wasting my time. Now I know that I can probably crank out two a year if I have an outline for them. That’s vastly comforting. But there are other parts to the writing process that will never get easier. 

1. Revising. There aren’t any shortcuts. I revise quite a bit before my agent and editors take a peek, and then revise more after they give me their comments. I don’t think anyone writes the Golden Draft…maybe I’ll produce a copper or bronze one someday. :)
2. Waiting. Once I send work to my agent, he sends it out on submission…and I wait. Sometimes the wait isn’t all that long, but sometimes it’s months. I try to deal with it by writing more. And if there’s a deal, then there’s another wait on the contract (which is where your agent truly earns his money and is worth every penny of his commission). Sometimes that wait is only a month or so, but I’ve also had to wait close to a year because of problems with boilerplate contracts, and my agent had to take on Viking Death Ships full of lawyers. (Luckily, he ate his spinach.) And after the contract is finished and you sign it, there’s another wait for the money to arrive—anywhere from a couple of weeks to three months, depending on where it’s coming from. If there isn’t a deal, well then…
3. Rejection. It still happens. Getting published once isn’t a golden ticket to getting published again, and getting published in the U.S. doesn’t mean other countries are going to hand over bags of money for translation rights. One market will look at my series and say “Gimme!” and another will look at it and say “Meh.” The answer to rejection, like waiting, is to write more, because otherwise I might chew glass. 
4. Fear of #3. Even though I now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I’m capable of writing publishable books, I still look at my writing at times and conclude that it isn’t good enough. “Whine,” I say to my wife, “whine whine this sucks whine whine.” She tells me to shut up, I do, and write more. It’s the only thing that can possibly make the sucking stop, after all.
Right now I’m enjoying coffee with this seasonal creamer in it—it’s called marshmallow mocha. Mmm. Hope you’re taking advantage of the season’s opportunities for warm, comfy drinks. And writing more.
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! :)
writing

Speaking to the APW

A couple months ago, the Rim Country Chapter of Arizona Press Women invited me to speak in Payson about writing genre fiction and how I got my start, and I accepted gladly. I’ve had plenty of practice keeping high school kids entertained for an hour, but could I do the same with adults? It turned out to be two hours. Once I got going I found out I had more to say than I thought. And they paid me a huge compliment—when the organizer asked about halfway (??) through if anyone wanted to stop and take a break, no one wanted to go! So that gave me warm fuzzies and I’m glad it wasn’t a snorefest.

It was held at the East-West Book Exchange, an extremely cool little place with some gift shop goodies and a coffee bar (free wifi!) in addition to books and a lovely room that they rent out for yoga classes and small events like mine. Owners Chip and Lisa Semrau are gracious people and their mochas are fantastically good. Like holy-crap-I-think-Starbucks-sucks-now kind of good.

There were 35 people there, which I thought was fairly decent considering that I haven’t even been published yet. Many of the people I spoke to had already been published in nonfiction markets but were curious about how to break into fiction, so I explained why getting an agent is a Really Good Idea and how one might best accomplish that, and I also spoke about urban fantasy tropes and the glorious fun of steampunk.

I saw some folks in the audience taking notes and they had some great questions afterward, so I hope it turned out to be helpful. I like to think of the market as a giant pie, and everyone should have a slice.

Mmm…pie.
writing

Nom nom nom!

When you present the Cookie Monster with a cookie, he’s going to love it because he’s the frickin’ Cookie Monster. He’ll eat it and say, “Nom nom nom!” even if it’s kind of bland and stale. But if you present the Cookie Monster with a kind of cookie he’s never had before —a rich, moist, warm one, say, plus a glass of milk—the Cookie Monster will probably have a sugargasm and he’ll say, “Nomnomnomnomnom!” There will be crumbs and blue fur everywhere, and slightly alarmed innocent bystanders will cover their children’s eyes in the name of decency.
Urban Fantasy readers (like me, anyway) are kinda like the Cookie Monster when it comes to novels in the genre. Give me a UF novel and I’ll devour it happily, saying “Nom nom nom!” all the while. But I think I’m about ready for that book that sends me into unchained fits of turbo-nomming. I need a more varied diet in my UF reading, but I need other writers to help me out a bit here—and maybe some suggestions from readers who can point me in the direction of something I haven’t seen yet.
What I’d like to read are more stories told from the point of view of characters who aren’t your everyday UF hero(in)es. Instead of a shifter, vamp, faery, demon, or a half-version of any of the above, can we get a story told from the point of view of a wight who’s a mite misunderstood? How about a dude who escapes from a mad gene-splicing scientist with the head of a cuttlefish? I want to get inside the head of a half-mad half-squid, you see, and hear about his struggle to hold on to his humanity while he pursues vengeance against the butcher who replaced his whiskers with tentacles, and weep with him as he tries to reconnect with his wife and daughter, both of whom happen to be allergic to seafood.
Gnomes, trolls, goblins, kobolds—I don’t think anybody’s written the definitive work (correct me if I’m wrong!). I’ve seen some mermaid stuff in YA fiction—I’m thinking Emily Windsnap—and I might be missing a whole lot more because I don’t read much YA. There’s probably a centaur book or two out there, maybe a hipster hippogriff. But I definitely haven’t seen any attempts to write these sorts of characters in the adult UF market. Then again, I might be the only guy demanding such stuff, which would explain the short supply.
I don’t know how much demand there is out there to hear stories about Druids—I guess I’ll find out next year when my books hit the shelves!—but one reason I chose a Druid to be my main character was to attempt to introduce something new-ish to all the Cookie Monsters out there. I know that vampire/shifter/magic-girl love stories are popular—I completely understand because I like them too—but I can’t believe that’s all people want to read. I think there are vast opportunities in UF to tell some fresh tales, from the harrowing to the humorous, but somehow the genre has worn itself into a few distinct ruts already, and instead of treading new ground, people are throwing themselves into the same few grooves. If you think it’s too risky to try something a bit “out there,” well, I can always point to my publisher (Del Rey) and say look, there are editors in the biz willing to take a chance on an unorthodox hero, because they’ve taken a chance with Atticus O’Sullivan. (Harry Connolly’s hero, Ray Lilly, is not your average bear, and neither is Stacia Kane’s Chess Putnam—and look! They’re both with Del Rey! ;))
I hope to try some new cookies soon. If you’re a writer, I hope you’ll find time to experiment in the kitchen of your word processor. And if you know of any unusual UF narrators out there now, please let me know in the comments! Nom nom nom!
writing

Playin’ Taps for Sci-Fi

All right, before we get down to what I have to say, this blog post about the withering of sci-fi is a must-read. Go there, absorb like a sponge, maybe do a shot (or two) for courage, and then come on back. :)

I lament the slow, painful death of sci-fi, but I must acknowledge my role in its decline. I haven’t bought but maybe two or three sci-fi books in years—even though I used to devour them when I was younger and didn’t get into fantasy until later.

I think the sentiments expressed in that blog post by both Mr. Allen and Mr. Martin are correct—we’ve become less optimistic about the future, we might be thinking things are getting worse instead of better, and so the already large suspension of disbelief we’d need for lots of sci-fi grows exponentially with our worries. It’s like, “DUDE, not only can you not travel faster than light, but you can’t seriously think there’d be a worldwide human government in the future when all we’ve been doing for the last few decades is splintering into ever-smaller tribal factions even as we’re joining the ‘global village.’”

But I think there’s even more to it than that: I can’t keep up with the science anymore, and perhaps (??) that’s a large part of the decline as well. We know so much more about the costs and realities of space travel than we did in the 50’s and 60’s, and so it’s tougher on those grounds to suspend our disbelief for spacefaring shenanigans. If I’m reading about this nanotech idea or that idea for an FTL drive, part of me will think it’s cool and part of me will think, “this idea will be completely exploded in ten years.”

The last sci-fi I was really into was cyberpunk. The dystopian futures laid out so clearly in William Gibson’s novels and Stephenson’s Snow Crash now seem quite spookily prescient: we have multinational corporations running things and an urban planet on the way where everyone is plugged into the net. Hmm. Maybe that’s why I stopped; the fiction is becoming reality, and I read fiction to get away from reality.

I think the reason fantasy has become ascendant—besides fulfilling the need for escape—is that it’s filling another need: the need to examine social structures from a safe distance and figure out where we went wrong. Sci-fi often looks at alternate social structures that we can’t possibly hope to achieve anytime soon; these days the social issues raised in fantasy allow us to wonder if there’s some way to make things better now, to hell with the future on other planets. The struggles that urban fantasy heroes face, in particular, permit us to say “Okay, I know modern life can be shit, but look at what THAT guy/girl has to deal with on top of everything else,” and we feel a bit better. It’s nice to think that someone can deal with everything we deal with plus paranormal issues.

The sci-fi I’d like to read now is that which convincingly envisions a way through these times. I’d buy a book like that and read it over and over and buy copies for all my friends. I’d like to be optimistic again; I’d like to see a rebirth of sci-fi because it would mean that optimism is widely shared. Until then, I’ll read and write fantasy.