Writer's Grove

While large swaths of the country are buried in snow, in Arizona the orange blossoms are filling the air with localized walls of fragrance; drive by a grove with the windows down and WHAM, you are punched in the nose with pollen. Unfortunately, I don’t have a picture of orange blossoms to share with you. Instead I will give you a kinda blurry picture of my Boston terrier, Sophie, who doesn’t smell or look like orange blossoms at all but is really cute and makes me happy like spring does.

I’m at 30K words on SHATTERED and really enjoying some new characters and their interactions with the old ones. One character who has been around since HOUNDED but hasn’t been developed very much will finally get a backstory and a more significant role going forward.

Much ink devoted recently to an ongoing snit between Barnes & Noble and Simon & Schuster. B&N wants more pie and S&S says no, we can’t afford it. So Barnes & Noble has dramatically cut its orders of Simon & Schuster’s books as a negotiation tactic. AUUGH! Losers include: readers and writers.

I’m not a business guru by any means and I can’t speak to whether this is really awesome business kung fu on the part of B&N, but I am a dude who likes books and who likes to browse to discover new writers. For me, the appeal of a B&N is that I have a huge selection of authors in a wide range of genres to discover. I love walking into a B&N and wondering what cool little gem I will unearth on that visit. And I freakin’ LOVE the booksellers at the two B&Ns I visit most frequently out here, the Dana Park and SanTan locations. But recently, the B&N corporate heads have made some moves that appear to me to be damaging the basis of their appeal—which is browsing. They said they needed fewer books and more games and toys because…I don’t know.  Are people really going to a bookseller to buy games instead of books? Again, their retail kung fu is probably much better than mine, but on its face a new and improved bookstore NOW WITH FEWER BOOKS doesn’t add up the way I do math. I am hoping they change their minds. And I certainly hope we see more S&S titles on their shelves soon.

But!! Maybe there’s a reason. I can conceive of a thought stream that would get us to the conclusion that maybe providing a huge selection to browse isn’t as important as it used to be. I’ve noticed it in my own behavior. I often hear about books now online through Twitter or Facebook—my readers are awesome about sharing what they’re digging (thanks you guys!) and I can go to a B&N or an indie store to get precisely what I want. If they don’t have it in stock they can usually get it in after a couple of days. (And of course people with e-readers can download anything they hear about instantly.) If that’s not just me shopping that way, maybe that justifies the shift; I don’t know. But in general I don’t think any of these adjustments means DOOM! NOBODY READS ANYMORE! Book sales overall are doing fine; it’s where people buy them and in what format that’s changing. The true danger of reducing selection and taking away our ability to browse expansively is that some authors are going to find it difficult to get discovered and develop a following (and thus a career), and many readers are going to have to choose from either carrots or celery when they’d really go for some kohlrabi if it was available.

Reminder: I’ll be heading to Madison, Wisconsin soon for Odyssey Con, April 12-14. It looks like it’s going to be fun and honestly I probably won’t make it to Wisconsin again for quite some time, so if you can come say hi, please do!

And I also hope to be able to give you some publishing dates soon besides the June 25 date for HUNTED and July 23 for CARNIEPUNK. I will have other stuff coming out. :)

I’ve been getting some questions about an email sent out by Goodreads about the release of a novella called THE GRIMOIRE OF THE LAMB. People are understandably confused when Goodreads says “It’s out!” and then they go to Amazon or Audible or wherever and can’t find it. The short answer is: Goodreads is wrong. THE GRIMOIRE OF THE LAMB hasn’t been released yet. But it will be!

I should be able to give you a release date and a US cover soon—the cover Goodreads has is the UK cover—but until I’m allowed to show and tell, I can tell you this:

1) Atticus & Oberon go to Egypt, and heck yes they get into trouble.
2) It’s a bit longer than TWO RAVENS AND ONE CROW.

Sorry about the confusion. I didn’t realize Goodreads would be doing stuff like that. I think at one time March 1 might have been a release date, but it’s shifted around quite a bit the way things will in the publishing business. Don’t have any more information I can share right now, but I promise to tell you ALL THE THINGS when I can. Pinky swear!

Kevin’s Note: Welcome Amalia Dillin to the blog with a guest post! Amalia is a mythology buff who’s let me bounce some ideas off her in the past, and she has a new book out today! Here we go—Amalia begins:

If you read Forged by Fate, the first book in my Fate of the Gods trilogy, you’ll realize pretty quickly that I *love* Thor. Not to say that the good and honorable Mr. Hearne does not! But our books definitely stand on different sides of the ThorLove fence.

Now, my interpretation of Thor isn’t exactly in line with the Eddas – he’s smarter for one thing – but when it comes to the heart of his character, even in the myths, Thor is loyal, almost to a fault.

In the myths, Thor trusts Loki, and lets him lead him around by the nose when it comes to adventuring in the East. He even gets dressed up as a woman and pretends to be Freya, sent to marry a giant in exchange for his hammer, because Loki assures him it will bring success. Thor defends the gods in Asgard from the Frost Giants, even when they’re in the wrong, even killing the aggrieved party, when necessary – and it seems, it is *often* necessary. And no matter how many times Loki betrays him, or leads him into trouble, Thor is still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. No matter how many times Odin uses him to enforce the rights of the Aesir (in a flagrant abuse of justice), Thor does not fail to rise to Asgard’s defense.

It might be argued that most of this is because he’s rather slow on the uptake. Maybe he doesn’t put the pieces together the way a brighter god might. Or maybe he just looks at things from a more simplistic perspective: Aesir good, Jotuns bad. Maybe he just likes a good fight, and as such, he overlooks Loki’s betrayals, because the Trickster is providing him with the entertainment he wants – and the same with his father, Odin. Then again, maybe he *does* see what’s happening, and maybe, just maybe, as the pieces fall into place, he’s starting to realize he doesn’t like it.

In the myths, there’s a defining moment where we see the gods finally turn against Loki: the death of Baldur. Loki could fix the mess he made, held in his power the return of Baldur to life, but because Loki is a Trickster, undependable in the best of circumstances, he betrays Odin and the Aesir, and dooms Baldur to death. It’s a wrong that none of the Aesir can forgive. But even before that, there are moments when Thor’s patience with Loki slips. In one story, Thor allows the dwarves to sew Loki’s lips closed after the Trickster tricks them out of the prize of his head, after all. And in another myth, when Thor is told that Loki is leading him to his death at the hands of a giant, Thor believes the warning, and takes action for his own defense, regarding Loki with suspicion.

There are a lot of ways to interpret Thor’s character, when you’re reading the myths – Kevin’s use of him as a brute enforcer in IDC isn’t far from the mark in some circumstances – but if you love Thor, like I do, you might give Forged by Fate a read!

***

After Adam fell, God made Eve to protect the world. — Adam has pursued Eve since the dawn of creation, intent on using her power to create a new world and make himself its God. Throughout history, Eve has thwarted him, determined to protect the world and all of creation. Unknown to her, the Norse god Thor has been sent by the Council of Gods to keep her from Adam’s influence, and more, to protect the interests of the gods themselves. But this time, Adam is after something more than just Eve’s power — he desires her too, body and soul, even if it means the destruction of the world. Eve cannot allow it, but as one generation melds into the next, she begins to wonder if Adam might be a man she could love. 

So excited to tell you about this! I’ve had a party for fans during release week for the past couple of books because parties are fun, so I want to have another one for HUNTED. Things will be a bit different this time but I has REASONS for the changes, Precious!

I’ll be on tour during my release week at the end of June and for a while afterward, and then San Diego Comic Con rolls around. After that I have an anthology coming out, so I don’t really have time for a party thingie until the end of July. So the date for this shindig is Wednesday, July 31!

BUT GUESS WHAT! That means you can party with TWO authors this time, because that’s when THE DARWIN ELEVATOR by Jason Hough will debut! Hence the name of this party, Atticus & Oberon’s Elevator Ride! I’m so jazzed for it—mostly because of the old saying: “Double the authors and double your fun!” Okay, I admit that might not be a saying YET. But it will be a saying after this hootenanny, I’m tellin’ ya! And if you’re wondering if I’m going to add “Hootenanny Planning” to my résumé, the answer is HECK YES.

Jason’s the next big thing in sci-fi, folks. The publisher says his books are like Firefly meets Scalzi. Here’s what I say, because I blurbed him: “The best part about alien stories is their mystery, and Jason M. Hough understands that like no other. Full of compelling characters and thick with tension, THE DARWIN ELEVATOR delivers both despair and hope along with a gigantic dose of wonder. It’s a brilliant debut and Hough can take my money whenever he writes anything from now on.”

The Disclaimer Paragraph: Jason not only shares the same publisher as me, we share an editor too—Viking Mike Braff. But it’s not Del Rey’s idea to do this, or Jason’s, or Mike’s. It’s all mine, just like the Sausage Fest and the Beer Bonanza was mine. In truth, I don’t think publishers would suggest something like this too often since there’s a high risk of setting an author’s hair on fire. (Author hair is infamously flammable. They could tell you stories.) I’m doing this because 1) I like to hang out with people  2) I genuinely dig Jason’s work and think you will too, and  3) Tacos and tequila are a bloody good time. Del Rey is overjoyed, of course, that Jason and I get along, because it’s kind of like discovering your kid can play nicely with others in the sandbox, but they don’t try to arrange hootenannies with tacos. THAT’S TOO DAMN WILD FOR THE MAN.

So here’s what you get if you come to Atticus & Oberon’s Elevator Ride:

1) A signed, personalized copy of HUNTED
2) A signed, personalized copy of THE DARWIN ELEVATOR
3) All-you-can-eat tacos & a beverage to slake your thirst. The beverage is bottomless but, alas, non-alcoholic. There will be a bar out there if you wanna get your drank on though
4) A pint glass with the Elevator Ride logo on it
5) A fun little swag bag to carry everything, printed up with Iron Druid and Dire Earth stuff for extra nerd cred
6) Probably some wee things like bookmarks and stuff
7) The chance to hang out with 99 other people who like sci-fi and fantasy

And because Arizona has all the charm of a sweaty goat sack at the end of July, we’re going to have the party in SAN DIEGO instead! Or a little ways up the road, anyway, in Encinitas, at this spiffy joint called El Callejon. They have a large patio in the back where we can chill and a well-stocked bar where we can buy things with ice in it. Jason and I will come around and chat with you and it will be simply smashing. OH, DID I MENTION IT’S ALSO A TEQUILA MUSEUM? AWWW YEAAAAH. So who’s in?

Tickets are $45 and go on sale Saturday, March 2, at 1pm EST (10 am Pacific) on my website. There will be a button on the top that says “Store” and you’ll be able to pay through PayPal (which accepts credit cards). Again, that’s for an event on July 31, from 4pm to whenever we can’t drink anymore, and your ticket buys you the books, food, a glass, and some other wee goodies. Comic Con will be over and hotel prices will be merely “oh-my-goodness” instead of “oh-my-effing-god-I-need-a-second-mortgage.” Only two tickets per household, please, and we’re only selling 100 total. Sounds like the start to a great summer getaway to me… :)

Hope you can join us! I’ve had so much fun hanging out with peeps at these things! And by the way, besides being brilliant, Jason is turbo friendly. You can say hi to him on Twitter @JasonMHough and express your eagerness to hobnob with him at the taco hootenanny. :)

The excellent people running Odyssey Con in Madison, Wisconsin, have invited me to be a Guest of Honor and I said HECK YES because that was DARN nice of them and who doesn’t want to hang out with nice people? Fantasy author Alex Bledsoe will be there too and some other luminaries, so if you are semi-local and can make it out there to see me that would be five kinds of spiffy! It’s April 12-14.

Just as an FYI, I won’t be going elsewhere in Wisconsin or neighboring states; I’m staying at OddCon and doing panels and all that good stuff. Looking forward to it very much and hope I’ll be able to meet you if you’re close by!

A more detailed schedule of events will be forthcoming soon!

So I gotta give mad props to Murder By the Book in Houston. I have heard nothing but awesome things about this indie bookstore and knew that someday I’d get out there when the right opportunity came along. Well, it’s come along.

They contacted my homie Jaye Wells (author of the Sabina Kane series and the forthcoming Prospero’s War series coming next year) and said, hey, Jaye, wanna come down to sign the CARNIEPUNK anthology when it comes out in July? We’d love to have you. Jaye relayed the invitation to everyone else involved in the anthology and SOME OF US SAID YES, including me! So I will be in Houston to sign CARNIEPUNK on July 27 with Jaye Wells and quite possibly some of the other authors in the anthology. Those that can’t be there will probably send along bookmarks or bookplates or nineteenth-century handmade Amish swimwear. It will be something of a shindig, methinks.

Understand that it makes absolutely no practical sense for me to do this. Royalties from the anthology are going to be split thirteen ways or something like that so I will make maybe nine cents per copy. (For more on why it makes no sense for authors to tour, please see this post that goes into numbers a bit.) But I have many impractical reasons for wanting to do this. I can make a list!

1) The last time I did a joint signing with Jaye—that was in Dallas last summer—we had a great time. Lots of completely awesome people showed up and I got to sign a pregnant woman’s belleh. (The kid has since been born and is named Oliver, I hear tell. Hi, Oliver!) I am fond of great times and would like to have another one. I feel certain that the people of Houston are as capable (maybe MORE???) of having a great time as the people in Dallas. It is a hypothesis, anyway, and I am anxious to test it.
2) Authors like to hang out with other authors every once in a while because otherwise we spend our lives alone talking to ourselves and wondering if we need to be medicated.
3) I have heard that Houston is a fairly spiffy city but one cannot take such assertions at face value. I must judge for myself. I’ve never been there and neither has my wife, so we’re going to explore a wee bit. Where should we go?
4) Someone will probably throw BBQ at me and I’M GOING TO LET THEM.
5) I’ve had a few readers ask me to come to Houston and I do like to make people happy if I can.
6) J.J. Watt. I had a dream in which he and I went on a cattle raid together and I was sure glad he was on my side. On the other side were cattle wearing Tom Brady jerseys. He sacked them all and I gave him a high five. It dislocated my elbow. I’m sure I won’t meet J.J. while I’m there, and it’s probably best for my metacarpals that we don’t because he would utterly crush them in a handshake, but I will feel more manly just knowing that we’re looking at the same sunset.
7) My brilliant, awesome friend Hillary Jacques and I came up with this anthology idea one night on Twitter. (Her story is in the anthology too!) We worked for a while to make this happen and as such it’s kind of a sentimental thing for me.
8) I’m going to get Jaye Wells to sign my copy because HECK YES I’m a fanboy. She knows this and still tolerates me. If Mark Henry or Nicole Peeler or any of the other authors make it down there too then OMG asdf;lkj!!!

Though this appearance is primarily to promote CARNIEPUNK—a finer collection of urban fantasy authors you shan’t find!—I will of course happily sign anything from the Iron Druid Chronicles too. I will also sign foreheads and forearms and pregnant bellehs and if you bring a cat we will tape bacon to it and take a picture and send it to John Scalzi because he LOVES that shit.

Kids, please don’t tape bacon to your cat at home. Do it in an independent bookstore.*

Again, huge thanks to Murder by the Book in Houston for extending the invitation and for supporting urban fantasy. They are entirely responsible for making it happen. Please support them and/or your local indie bookstore. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone in Houston! If there’s someplace that I simply SHOULDN’T MISS while I’m in town, let me know!

*I’m kidding. Don’t do that.

Let’s have some fun, shall we? I ran this contest once way back when I was a newbie author and I think I got less than twenty entries. But it was less than twenty entries of AWESOME, so I think it deserves another go!

A nerdscape is a still life in which you let your geek flag fly. While there may be any number of goodies featured in it, there are three base requirements to every nerdscape:

1) A book. Or books!!! They may be comic books, textbooks, whatever. If you have only an e-reader, then it must be turned on and the cover image of a book must be plainly visible. But come on. BOOKS.
2) Junk food.
3) An action figure or figures. These may be fully articulated figures, statuettes, Heroclix, miniatures from your WarMachine games…you know. We basically need sculpted, painted plastic or metal shaped like a fictional character from comics, movies, or games. Stuffed animals, while cute, do not count as action figures. They’re allowed to be in your nerdscape in addition to your action figure, though!

Again, you’re welcome to put other stuff in your nerdscape. Cell phones. Video games. Your motherboard. Your mother. It doesn’t matter, so long as there is also a book, an action figure, and some junk food in there.

I did a couple super-fast to give you an idea. I’m sure you’ll be *much* more creative. First one:

See there? Good times. My first nerdscape contains hardcover editions of Alan Dean Foster’s Taken trilogy, Cherry Darling from Planet Terror, and a box of Samoas. Since I like baseball I put in my D-backs hat too. It is a shrine to my geekery. Let’s do another!

I have a bag of Cheetos and a can of Coke for junk food; an action figure of the Ted Kord Blue Beetle; and a copy of Ganymede by Cherie Priest. I also threw in Atticus the otter and a mini-statue of Ganesha, because they are my constant companions while I write.

Neither of these are going to win me any points in photography school; I just threw these together on my kitchen table and didn’t do much in the way of extra staging and bonus goodies. Yet they both show off stuff I love to geek out about. We should all document this, right? This is the still life form of our time! I will endeavor to create a much better one and post it later.

So that’s how you enter the contest. Send me YOUR nerdscape. Have fun trying to cram everything you love into one picture—or artfully arranging the minimalist essence of your geekery. Email a jpeg of your nerdscape to kevin (at thingie) kevinhearne dot com.

What You Can Win

1) One awesome winner will see their name in book seven of the Iron Druid Chronicles! That’s right, I will name a character after you in SHATTERED if you kick all kinds of ass with your nerdscape. You must understand that the character will bear absolutely no resemblance to you apart from your name and gender and will most likely die a horrible death. But I can guarantee that Atticus will have a sad when he hears that the character with your name has snuffed it, so there’s that. This prize can be won by anyone, anywhere. All other prizes, which involve shipping heavy things through the mail, will be US only.
2) I’ll send one winner of my choice a signed set of the series so far, books 1-5.
3) There may be additional prizes from my spiffy peeps at Del Rey because they love their nerdscapes in New York. These prizes will be of a bookish nature. I do not know how many there will be or what they will be, but I am fairly certain they will be good books because that’s what Del Rey publishes. You might even get an ARC of something coming soon. When I know more about what these prizes might be, I’ll let you know exactly what they are and how winners will be chosen. Check back for updates.
4) I’m going to send somebody sausage. Why? Mostly because it amuses me to think of someone checking their email, finding a note from me, and then shouting “I WON SAUSAGE!” in their home or workplace. This will be someone chosen at random.

The primary goal here is to geek out on stuff and share the nerdery we love, so you have until Valentine’s Day to enter. I’ll post all entries in albums on both my Facebook author page and Google Plus, and after Valentine’s Day we’ll find out who won. HAVE FUN! Can’t wait to see your nerdscapes!

A bunch of neato little things have happened, so in the interest of keeping people informed, here we go:

1) I sent my Star Wars outline off and I’m waiting to hear back before drafting. But I’m now allowed to say that my book is part of the REBELS series (the other two are being written by Martha Wells and James S.A. Corey), Classic-era standalone adventures featuring all the biggies, not just Luke Skywalker. So yeah—Leia, Han, and Chewie too!

2) Finished up my copy edits on HUNTED and sent them back to NY. That doesn’t mean the book is finished…but it does mean that it’s closer. We still have typesetting, galley proofs and then another round of proofreading after that.

3) Today I completed the outline for book seven of IDC, SHATTERED. I’ll actually begin writing that tomorrow if I don’t hear back from the Star Wars peeps. My editor got back to me super fast and said DO EEEET, so I guess I will. :)

4) The publication date of CARNIEPUNK has moved up a week to July 23! Also, it’s going to be a trade paperback now instead of a mass market, owing to its humongo size. It’s 440+ pages now or something like that. It’s gonna be so awesome—can’t wait to read the other stories in that anthology! My story is called “The Demon Barker of Wheat Street” and is set two weeks after the events of TWO RAVENS AND ONE CROW.

5) I’ll be holding a contest thingie soon. The winner’s name will be used for a character in book seven of the Iron Druid Chronicles! I think there will be some free books given away too. Stay tuned.

6) Since the release parties for TRICKED and TRAPPED were so much fun, I’m going to have a release party in the San Diego area for HUNTED. More details on that coming soon as well, but no worries, it won’t be during Comic Con.

7) In news that would only interest like-minded gamers, I’ve begun to paint my WarMachine army. I’m building the Protectorate of Menoth because my friends already have Cygnar and Cryx going on. Rather than go with the standard red-and-white color scheme, I’m going with a brown-and-white thing with gold accents. I started my Choir of Menoth last night and got some base stuff down. More highlights, details, and cleanup to come, but you can see the general scheme pretty well here:

I have five of these guys holding up the scrolls. They’re supposed to be proclamations of doom and stuff but you know I’m going to have a good time writing silly things on those scrolls, right?

As I promised late in 2012, I’m relocating my social self a wee bit to Stick It to the Man. That is, I’m hanging out on Google Plus because Facebook continues to chap my hide. (If you missed the reasons why, I wrote two blog posts on the subject, here and here.) After thinking it over, however, I’ve arrived at something of a compromise, because I want to Stick It to the Man but not stick it to my readers. So here’s the deal:

I’m going to be posting on Google Plus and responding to comments just like I’ve done up to now on Facebook. If you want to chat with me, that’s the place to do it. BUT I’m not abandoning my Facebook page. I’ll still post on Facebook and respond to private messages there. However, I won’t be responding to comments on my posts or to stuff that people post on my Wall—I simply don’t have the time to maintain three social media channels (Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter) if I want to get any writing done. So I’ll have a moderator who will respond on Facebook—a moderator who is fabulously cool and who you can’t possibly confuse with me. ‘Tis time to introduce ye, one and all, to Moderator Joe. Or, as I know him, MoJoe.

MoJoe works for my publisher, Del Rey, and his comments & likes will appear on my page under the name Del Rey Spectra. It’ll look like this, in fact:

Note that as a moderator, MoJoe can’t post content on my page. Only I can do that—and again, I’ll continue to do that. But he will respond to your comments and wall goodies two or three times a week. MoJoe is a super cool guy and can answer most anything, but if he can’t answer something specific, then you know where to find me: Google Plus, Twitter, or email. I still wish to be as available as possible, but I also want to write. :)

Condensed version: Hope to see you over on Google Plus, but MoJoe will take good care of you on Facebook, and of course I will keep posting there. And thank you for reading!

A year-end post of sorts…

I’m about to engage in some serious plotting. I have two books to finish by next December—Star Wars and SHATTERED, so that’s my plan for 2013. I will disappear for a wee bit and greet you again in the New Year. I hope your Winter Solstice is a happy one, along with any other holiday you choose to celebrate around this time. May you find harmony and peace with your family and marshmallows in your hot chocolate.