Writer's Grove

I’ve been a busy dude and haven’t blogged in what seems like a very long time but is in truth only eight days. Here’s what’s shakin’:

• Currently working on copy edits for TRICKED. It’s been a month since I’ve looked at the manuscript, and it came back pretty darn clean, so I’m happy and tearing through it. About a third of the way through so far.
• I’ve seen preliminary cover art for TRICKED and it’s going to be awesome. Let’s see, what kind of info can I give you without the Del Rey ninja squad descending uponst my humble abode with shuriken and garrotes? OK, how’s this? The first three books had their own color schemes—red, yellow, and blue. This book won’t be any of those colors. (I know, right? Earth-shattering news.) Atticus will still be on the front, but there may be someone else on the back… :)
• I have a license plate frame that says “Pastafarian” on it and it scared away a couple of missionaries who had targeted my house this weekend. They were coming up my driveway, saw the frame, stopped, and turned around. The Flying Spaghetti Monster is a fearsome god, no doubt. Heh! He must have guided them elsewhere with his noodly appendage.
• I’m going to be at The Poisoned Pen bookstore on Sunday, December 11, along with four other fantasy authors: David Lee Summers, Sam Sykes, Lisa McMann, Jani Lee Simner, and Joseph Nassise. We’ll be there at 2pm to hang out for a few hours, so come on by and get some signed goodies for everyone on your holiday list. :)
• Joy of joys, I’ll be returning to San Diego Comic Con next summer! You should totally wrassle a ticket from someone. It’s so much fun! I’m still laughing at the Chef Vader I saw with Jar Jar Binks’ head on a platter, and then the Hello Kitty/Slave Leia hybrid costume was funny in a very sick way.
• I have a guest blog up at Tynga’s reviews on my model painting hobby, in case you’re a turbonerd like me.
• I also blogged at The League of Reluctant Adults on my current short story problem(s).

And there you have it! The supa-fast bulleted list! Hope you are well and enjoying autumn.

If you’re an aspiring author, perhaps (I hope!) you are already aware that you should never, ever pay an agent or a publisher to be published. The way the business works is, legit publishers pay you; therefore, anyone offering to get you represented, published, or copyrighted “for a small fee” is a Dishonest Hole of an Unsanitary Nature.

Alas! We live in a world full of such Dishonest Holes—people willing to prey on other people’s dreams and laugh about it—or, in one case, get angry about it when they’re called out. Writer Beware and Absolute Write, both excellent resources that I highly recommend, have been targeted by a website called The Write Agenda. (I’m not linking to it because Dishonest Holes deserve no traffic.) Since The Write Agenda is anonymously operated, poorly spelled, and they are attacking/boycotting authors who are legitimately trying to help aspiring writers avoid scam artists, it’s pretty clear that The Write Agenda is a front for those same scam artists. We at The League of Reluctant Adults expressed our outrage that we weren’t boycotted too—because we are all proud to stand beside John Scalzi, Victoria Strauss, Jim Macdonald, et al. in their fight against Anonymous Dishonest Holes. That was on Oct. 7. I pulled out my big guns and called them cockwaffles.

The response of the cockwaffles has been to put me and some other authors on their brand-new “Recommended Authors” list. All of the authors are sci-fi/fantasy, and while I haven’t checked, I’d be willing to bet that all of them either commented on the League post of Oct. 7 or otherwise annoyed the cockwaffles with blog posts of their own. Ha! Aren’t they clever, recommending us instead of boycotting us? Whatever.

Now, part of me wants to respond precisely the way my fellow author Ari Marmell did. But he did it extremely well and I’m not sure I can say it any better. So I will confine myself to saying one obvious thing and one perhaps not-so-obvious thing:

1. Obviously, I do not want to be one of The Write Agenda’s “Recommended Authors,” because I despise everything they stand for.
2. Their use of Amazon sales rankings as if they actually mean anything demonstrates that they a) either don’t know jack about how publishing really works, or b) are assuming you don’t know jack about it, and regardless of which is true, you can’t trust a damned thing they say.

Many thanks to everyone who bought tickets to Atticus & Oberon’s Sausage Fest on April 28! I’ll be sending you some goodies soon—an email from me, and also the tickets, o’ course—and if you’re from out o’ town and haven’t made your hotel reservations yet, hold on a wee bit! I’m going to see if I can get us a special rate at the Tempe Mission Palms, which is right behind Rula Bula. That way you can stagger to your bed and not have to worry about taxis and whether somebody once barfed where you’re sitting.

If you didn’t get a ticket but would still like to come out and join the fun, please do! The patio opens to the public and 6 pm and I’ll still be there, along with many other fun-lovin’ urban fantasy readers, and you can come by and join us! You can even order a copy of TRICKED ahead of time from The Poisoned Pen (give ’em a call) and I will sign & personalize it for you, and it will be waiting when you get there. (You can also call them if you’re not coming at all—they’ll ship internationally!)

Things I’m workin’ on:

• A short story called “The Grimoire of the Lamb” set four years before HOUNDED. That means you’ll see the widow MacDonagh but you won’t see Granuaile. I sent a teaser to my editor and she squeed. Then she ran down the hall to my assistant editor and taunted him mercilessly—she teased him by not letting him read the teaser. More details on where & when this will appear once I get them. My belief, however, is that this story will be available before the release of TRICKED.
• TRAPPED, of course.
• Now that we’ve popped the store’s cherry with the ticket sale, I’m going to start putting up a few things people have requested—there won’t be a ton o’ stuff, but I’m definitely going to do some Third Eye Books & Herbs shirts and also some shirts for the Sausage Fest. There will probably be an Iron Druid coffee mug in there because, admit it, most of your coffee mugs aren’t that badass. ;)
• In TurboNerd News, I’m still working on painting my Circle Orboros army. I got the Reeves of Orboros Chieftain and Standard Bearer today. And I’ve decided to switch out Lord of the Feast for the Gorax to see if that works better with my Kromac list. Whoa. That was probably the nerdiest sentence I have written all year.

I hope you’re well and happy and enjoying autumn. For all the pagan peeps out there—Happy Samhain!

P.S. I’ve read lots of good books this year. Check out my Still Life with Fantasy and Fruit posts if you’d like to see. But if you’re jonesin’ for a good read right now, the best book I’ve read this year is Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. It’s been two weeks since I’ve finished it and I’m stilling geeking out. :)

Kevin says: I have made no secret that I am a fan of Kelly Meding’s Dreg City series. She has a new series coming out this week that looks wicked cool—a superhero yarn called the MetaWars. TRANCE comes out on Tuesday—I can’t wait!—and I’m tickled to have Kelly here to say howdy. Please say howdy back n’ whatever else in the comments! Here she is…

Juggling two book series at once is a bit of a crazy-making experience, especially when it comes time to promote the new series and introduce it to readers.  Especially in introducing the MetaWars series to the readers of my Dreg City series.  MetaWars is both similar and different, and I’m very excited to offer it to the world.

It occurred to me that, instead of me introducing the individual new characters to readers, I’d let other characters do that for me. And not just any characters—the Dreg City characters will be doing brief one-on-one interviews of the MetaWars characters.  And if you haven’t read either series yet, or haven’t even heard of me, then I hope these Interviews will at least pique your curiosity.

Today Milo Gant, a Hunter in the Dreg City books, will be interviewing Renee Duvall, supporting heroine of the first MetaWars book TRANCE.  What follows is a transcript of their interaction, which includes five pre-written questions, and then a final statement from Renee.

If you have any questions for either character, feel free to ask them in the comments section!

Enjoy!

Renee: I don’t bite, sweetie.  Relax before you sprain something.

Milo: Sorry, it’s just…I mean, you’re, uh….

R: Tall? Gorgeous? Blue? Stacked?  All of the above?

M: Yeah.  I mean, you’re blue, yeah, and tall.  I mean, I’ve seen gremlins and gargoyles and shi-um, things before, but I’ve never seen a blue person.

R: I get that a lot.  And since you’re being kind of adorable about it, feel free to stare.

M: …..

R: But, you know, talk, too, while you’re staring.

M: Sorry!  So, let’s see…question one, who are you and what do you do?

R: I’m Renee Duvall, but on the job I go by the name Flex. It’s not a super original code name, I guess, but it’s to the point.  As for what I do, I used to be a Vegas dancer, but now I’m a superhero.  What do you do?

M: Me?  I hunt things.  Goblins and vampires and things.

R: Awesome!  Ever been to Vegas?

M: Er, no.  And I think I’m supposed to be asking the questions.

R: Oh, right.  Go for it, honey.

M: *coughs*  So question two, what do your Meta powers do?

R: It’s pretty awesome.  You ever play with Silly Putty?

M: Not lately, but I know what it is.

R: You know how you can pull it out and stretch it really long?  That’s me.  My arms and legs and neck, and even my torso can all stretch out really far.  Just not, like, my head or anything.  I can’t flatten out and slide my whole body under a door, but I could probably get an arm under there.  I’m super flexible, too.  It’s awesome to be able to grab something across the room without actually getting up to do it.

M: That sounds very handy.

R: Oh yeah. It can be pretty kinky, too, depending on your taste.

M: *blushes*

R: Do you have any cool powers?

M: I, ah, can throw sarcasm around with the best of them.

R: *giggles*

M: Moving on, question three…oh man.  Okay, do you have a love interest?  If yes, who?  If no, why not?

R: An interest?  Definitely.  I mean, have you met William Hill since he grew up?  He was cute as a teenager, but damn, the man is amazingly gorgeous now.  There is absolutely interest there, but my powers kind of freak him out a little, which is pretty hilarious because he has super-strength.  And yet my Flex powers freak him out.  *giggles*  It’s kind of adorable, actually.  How about you, cutie?  You seeing anyone?

M: No comment.

R: Come on, we’re all friends here.

M: This is not my interview.

R: Party pooper.  What’s the fourth question?

M: If you could be anything other than a superhero, what would you be and why?

R: Believe it or not, I really loved dancing. I’d probably do something a little more high class than a show off the Strip, but it made me happy.  As happy as I could be, I guess.  But this superhero gig?  It’s what I was born to do.  It’s why I’m blue, and it’s why I’m here.  You know?

M: Yeah, I do, actually.  Last question.  Who is the one person you most want to have look at you and say they’re proud?

R: …….

M: Renee?

R: I don’t really have anyone in my life except for my teammates. I never want to let them down, so them.  I want them to be proud of me.  I’m not always the most serious person in the room, but what we do as a team is important, you know?

M: Yeah, I do.

R: Do you have a team?

M: *nods* And I’d give my life for any one of them, so I get it.  You never want to be the weak link.

R: Exactly.

*pause*

M: Do you have anything else to add before we finish up?

R: Nothing fit for delicate ears.

M:  All right then, well—

R: Seriously, why aren’t you seeing anyone?  You’re adorable.

M: Um…

R: Do you need me to knock some sense into somebody for you?

M: Cut!

END

Here’s all the info you’ve been waiting for on the big shindig to celebrate the release of TRICKED next April at Rúla Búla! Though it might seem waaay early to be thinking of it now, I’m trying to be considerate of some folks who might need to make travel plans, think of an excuse to get off work, arrange for cots at their friend’s house, and so on.

It will be held on Saturday, April 28, from 3-6 pm—though you are welcome to stay once the place is opened to the public. Only 100 tickets will be sold. Here’s what ticket holders get for $33:

—A signed, personalized copy of TRICKED.
—Your choice of three entrees: Atticus’s fave, the fish and chips, or Oberon’s fave, the bangers and mash, or a strawberry salad with chicken. (These are all on Rúla Búla’s menu online.)
—A drink ticket good for your choice of iced tea or soda, a pint of a fine draught beer, or a well drink.
—A souvenir pint glass emblazoned with the logo you see to your left.
—A signed, limited-run poster of the event, suitable for hanging in your garage and taunting all your friends.
—Musical entertainment, and I promise it won’t be bagpipes.
—Best of all, time to chill and chat with people who like beer, sausage, urban fantasy, and doggies! There’s no line to stand in. I will come to visit YOU. We can make goofy faces for your camera phone. You can ask what happened to my hair. We can sing loudly and badly and irritate the band. It’ll be awesome.

I love meeting people but I hate lines, so I thought this would be more fun. If I do a regular signing at a bookstore, I can’t do an Irish Car Bomb with you or nurse a glass of Tullamore Dew, or Redbreast, or any other fine Irish whiskey while we chat for a while. Chatting for more than 30 seconds at a bookstore is generally out of the question because of THE LINE. So my solution was to bring a legendary bookstore— The Poisoned Pen—to the legendary Rúla Búla. The people at The Poisoned Pen are completely awesome. They will ship internationally and they’re great about getting personalized stuff taken care of, too. So if you’d like extra copies for friends/family, or if you can’t make it at all but would still like a signed copy, please give ’em a call!

TICKETS GO ON SALE SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29, at 11 am EST. You can buy them right here on my blog. I will post a blog entry at that time with a link to the “store” where you can buy tickets. Limit 2 per household! It’s through PayPal, which will basically allow you to pay with whatever credit card you like.

What if you can’t get one of the 100 tickets? Well, you should come by anyway at 6 pm! Rúla Búla will be open to the public then and I’ll stick around too, because where else would I want to go besides Rúla Búla on a Saturday night? If you place a pre-order with The Poisoned Pen ahead of time, your book will be waiting for you, and I’d be so pleased to meet you and natter on! I might have some of the pint glasses left, maybe some other stuff too, but there will definitely be books and beer and cool people wherever you look.

If you have a dog, make sure you bring pictures! :)

If you’re thinking of coming from out of state and making it part of a wee vacation, Phoenix Sky Harbor is only about a ten minute drive from Rúla Búla. If you have any questions, ask in the comments and I’ll try to answer quickly. :)

This week I’m hanging out in Scottsdale, my oooooold stompin’ grounds. I’m always amused whenever I visit where I grew up: part of it is nostalgia, but part of it is from noting how much the city has changed.

I’m staying at this resort thingie where my wife and I have a timeshare doodad. We got suckered into it when we were young, but of course you can’t get rid of them. We don’t trade or anything like that; the resort is nice, so we visit often and it’s a very cheap sort of staycation thing.

Of course, since it’s a timeshare joint and people are exchanging their weeks, whenever we go we’re the only locals there. There are people from all over the place, and the resort caters to the idea that everyone is there to play golf or take horseback rides in the desert. But every Monday, they bring out this dude by the pool to play steel drums and sing the same ten songs on top of a drum machine loop. He wears a really loud Hawaiian shirt—in the desert—and he sings a respectable ultra-vanilla karaoke version of several oldies.  His adaptation of “Margaritaville,” for example, isn’t all that bad with the island flavor to it. But I wanted to punch him for what he did to Otis Redding. Heck, Otis Redding would want to punch him. “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” is not a reggae song, but he played it that way. Ears bleeding, I fled the pool to blog.

I’m working on TRAPPED these days. I haven’t updated my word total to the right (yet), but I will soon. I keep getting distracted by stuff. What stuff? Stuff like this amazing kerning game that will complete suck you in if you’re a type nerd. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Thanks to Nicholas Olivo for sending me that link.

Also, I contributed to a massive post at The League of Reluctant Adults on Writer Beware and Absolute Write Water Cooler. My contribution got noticed and Tweeted by none other than Mr. Neil Gaiman, so that completely made my weekend. Thanks to the many people who commented and demanded that they also be boycotted by the cockwaffles at The Write Agenda, the other League authors and I will be donating our dollars to Writer Beware and Absolute Write!

I’m writing this at the Desert Ridge Barnes & Noble in Scottsdale, where an incredibly spiffy person named Lorien works. They have my books on a table behind the info desk there, right next to such amazing novels as The Name of the Wind and The Way of Kings and so on. I signed the series—all they had in stock—so head on up there if you get a chance!

In Indie bookstore news, I just found out that I’ll be at a shindig near the holidays at The Poisoned Pen in south Scottsdale (south siiiiiide!). On Sunday, December 11, at 2 pm, I’ll be showin’ up there with a whole bunch of other local authors. More on that when I hear who else is going to be there, but if you’d like something personalized for the gift-givin’ season, that’s where I’ll be. If you live far, far away, like in Malaysia or the Mongolian steppes, or maybe just Florida, you can also order signed and personalized stuff from The Poisoned Pen now using the info on my books page—they will ship internationally and have me write down whatever you’d like. :)

Rest of this week will be spent writing, except for when I’m kerning online or playing Warhammer with the Confederacy of Nerds. Hope you’re all enjoying October so far. :)

My TBR pile keeps growing! Gaah! Can’t keep up! The real world keeps interfering with the time I’d like to spend in fictional worlds—I’m sure many of you can empathize. But seriously, between all the great books coming from authors I already know and love to all the new debuts I’d like to try, it’s getting difficult to keep pace. Here’s what I’m currently working on:

You will notice a dearth of fruit. One lonely Granny Smith surrounded by all those hot books. This indicates my need to go to the grocery store more than anything else.

So I grew up reading Conan comic books, but I could only find a few of Robert E. Howard’s original stories here and there when I was a lad. I now have his complete works on Conan—there are a few more collections like this one put out by Del Rey, following Conan’s career from the beginning to this particular collection, The Bloody Crown of Conan, where he’s king of Aquilonia. If you like sword n’ sorcery, it’s a good idea to get lost in the world of the master—it’s a world full of mighty thews and flagons of ale. (I confess that I giggle a little bit every time he talks about mighty thews.)

Next book is a debut called Sins of the Angels by Linda Poitevin. We chatted a bit on Twitter and she was kind enough to send this to me. Normally I’m not one for angel stories, because both the heavenly and fallen ones strike me as rather flat characters,  you know? White ones good, black ones evil, yeah, we got it. But Linda’s done something different here, cramming the angels into a police procedural, and there’s some mythology (or theology?) that I’m unfamiliar with too, so though I haven’t finished it yet, I’m digging it so far.

Um. I’m a Cherie Priest fanboy, so of course I’m reading her latest Clockwork Century novel, Ganymede.

I got a collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories selected and edited by Joyce Carol Oates because, well, it’s H.P. Lovecraft and Joyce Carol Oates. I’m thinking this will be a felicitous combination like peanut butter and jelly, or peanut butter and chocolate, or peanut butter and bananas, or maybe I should just go make myself a peanut butter sandwich now. Yeesh.

Wayfinder is C.E. Murphy’s follow-up to Truthseeker, a complex world of the Fae and a really mysterious bad guy I gotta know more about. Lots of plot twists in this.

Jenn Bennett’s debut, Kindling the Moon, uses some Greek-based terms for magic that have intrigued me so far (I’m on chapter 3), and I really enjoyed how she made fun of Ghost Hunters. She’s gotten some outstanding reviews for this book; it’s witches and demons, not vamps and werewolves, so if you’re looking for something/someone new, this is probably a safe bet. Also in Jenn’s favor: she has a couple of pugs! This means she’s spiffy. I have a pug too. :)

Last but not least is Phoenix Rising by Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris. I’m hoping it’s good; I like steampunk (see Cherie Priest above) and this is clearly a steampunk adventure thingie. But honestly, you need to just spend some time figuring out what’s going on with this crazy cover. (And remember that the cover is often not up to the author at all, and may have very little to do with the actual contents of the book.) Both characters are wearing obligatory goggles in an cobblestone alley (maybe a street?), as if they were going to hop a passing dirigible at any moment, and as if their Victorian attire wouldn’t advertise that this was a steampunk book otherwise. The woman is holding a really large gun of some kind, and there’s actually a piece on it with a smiley face (right underneath her chin). It’s truly huge and there’s no visible holster, so you are left to conclude that she pulled that monster out from under her dress. I mean, why else would she be standing like that with her dress all hiked up? She has another weapon of some sort tucked into the fishnet on her left thigh. I’m unsure how she managed not to rip the fishnet when she stuffed that thing in there, nor am I confident that a heavy, metal weapon wouldn’t shift around in that elastic as she walks, but whatever. This lady carries dangerous weapons underneath her skirt, AND SHE WANTS YOU TO KNOW. But, um, Miss? If you want us to know you’re carrying weapons, why not just wear them outside the skirt? Do we have to look at your legs as you do a little Captain Morgan pose? I think perhaps we’re supposed to conclude this is a woman of action? All kinds of action, hence the spread thighs? The man, meanwhile, is definitely not up for any action. He’s drinking tea with his pinky raised and one leg crossed in front of the other while his companion is busy flashing her goodies at us. Is he a voyeur? A pimp? Lost? Why is he carrying a cup of tea and a saucer around with him in a dark alley, for crying out loud? Now let’s look at the type for a second. The title, Phoenix Rising, is at the very top in a lurid green sans serif. The color is so offensive and the font so plain that you almost don’t want to read it. It’s like they designed it so you wouldn’t read it—anything so small and ugly must be unimportant. But the series title, A Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences Novel, takes up perhaps four times as much space, gets fancy little descenders here and there, and it’s a kind of vermillion, I think, a really bright orange-red. Hovering over the woman who looks like she’s working in the red-light district, albeit with more weaponry than you might expect. I think perhaps that they wanted to make the titles pop out from the fog of the cover illustration—and they succeeded!—but it’s a clashing effect more than anything else. On the back you get the cover copy in the same radioactive green as the title. It honestly sounds like a fun book, and I stress that you really can’t judge books by their covers (even though we do it all the time). I’m sure the words inside are infinitely better chosen than the color and font for the title, and I’m looking forward to it.

Hope you’re all reading something spiffy. Feel free to share in the comments! :)

After doing a little inventory thingie in the GIANT! WAREHOUSE! of my wee closet, I’ve decided I could stand to give away three copies each of the audiobooks for HEXED and HAMMERED. US only, no previous winners, leave a comment, I’ll pick ya randomly on Saturday. :)

I just began to enjoy audiobooks this summer. While I of course prefer to read myself, sometimes you simply don’t have the time, or you’re in a situation where it’s illegal to read, like when you’re driving. I listened to The Hunger Games in June while I was driving around Colorado on the Book & Beer Tour, and I loved it. Kind of expensive, though, for all those CDs. There is good news if you’re not used to the audiobook thing and maybe not so anxious to plop down a wad o’ cash on a big package of CDs: there’s a fairly newish service (new to me, anyway) that works on the subscription model—but it’s a subscription you can cancel anytime, and you get to listen to stuff on whatever device you want (iPods, etc.). It’s called Audible.com, and they have this deal where the first three months are $7.49, which includes one free audiobook download per month. Naturally, from the Shameless Plug Department, I would like to point out this means that you can listen to all three of my books for $22.47. That’s more than 28 hours of entertainment for less than a buck an hour! Aw, yeah! That’s way cheaper than movies. It’s cheaper than the soda and popcorn too! Plus you can listen on the treadmill or something and maybe lose a couple pounds! Woohoo!

Methinks that there are many other services similar to Audible out there. Feel free to share your faves in the comments—I’m very new to the audiobook scene and could stand the education. One of the cool things about Audible is that it lets you rate every audiobook on an overall basis, and then separately for story and performance. Huge kudos to Luke Daniels, the reader for my books, who consistently gets better ratings for his work than I do for mine! :) He seriously does a great job with all the accents in the series, and his voice for Oberon is hilarious. So yeah, there you go—a cheap way to try audiobooks.

Right now I want to feel that I have cleverly mixed a public service announcement with wholly self-serving promotion. It’s sort of like a yin-yang thing. Balance achieved! Except that I don’t think I was very clever about it. If I have achieved balance in the Tao, I should feel calm and at peace, but instead I feel that mild revulsion yet strange attraction you always get when you realize you have a bad case of Cheeto fingers. But wait! I’m giving stuff away for free! Ahh, that’s what I needed: a small salve for my conscience. :)

Yet perhaps there is no hope for my conscience, because I’ve been hiding this secret for years: I don’t even know what a nerfherder is or if they indeed have ears. I think they must, because how else would they hear the lowing of the nerfs at night? Still, this lack of knowledge has not prevented me from brazenly claiming a Nerfherding Award. I present these facts to a candid world and beg mercy.

Went to Rúla Búla today for lunch with the incredibly spiffy Chelsea from Vampire Book Club. If you’ve never visited her particular blog, it’s one o’ the better ones out there (that I’ve read, anyway), and that probably has a bit to do with the fact that Chelsea’s a journalist as well as an avid reader. Though she’s now based in Texas, Chelsea went to ASU and recognized the neighborhood in HOUNDED, and so we got to gabbing a bit back and forth via Twitter. (Twitter is cool like that.) She’s visiting family and friends for a week, so she and her husband were able to squeeze in some time to visit at everyone’s favorite Irish pub on Mill Avenue. Here’s what it looks like—I snapped a photo before I went in to meet Chelsea:

If you ever do find yourself in Tempe (or the Phoenix area), now you’ll know what to look for. :) I’m hoping to see plenty of  you there on April 28, because that’s when we’re holding Atticus n’ Oberon’s Sausage Fest to celebrate the release of TRICKED. We have most of the details worked out now, I’m just waiting on the art; I’ll do a full post on it once it’s ready to go!

Anyway, some slightly blurry proof (eek, sorry!) that we had a convivial meeting:

We shared our geekouts over meeting our favorite authors. We discussed tattoos, because both Chelsea and her husband have some really impressive ones. I found out that there’s a pretty cool indie bookstore in Fairview, Texas (nearish Dallas) called A Real Bookstore, where, gods willing, I’ll be able to visit next summer. (I’m going to try to visit a few places in the south next summer because, dang it, I want to, and I haven’t been to the south since the mid-90s; so far I’ve pencilled in Lexington, KY; Nashville, TN; Atlanta, GA; maybe somewhere in NC? And Dallas.) We also got to chat with Steve, the owner of Rúla Búla, for a little while. He gave me some hints about where to visit when I finally get myself across the Atlantic to visit Ireland—cannot wait to go!

Chelsea n’ Matt were completely lovely people and I’m glad I got to hang out with them for a while. The wife n’ I hit Mill Avenue afterward and enjoyed the shops there. Woohoo! Sunday afternoons are cool. Hope you had a good one too. :)

TRICKED got accepted today, so that gave me an excuse—if I needed one—to bust open some cider and quaff a proper flagon. This particular book was a tougher one to write and revise than the other three, from outline to end product, and I think it had quite a bit to do with the fact that it’s a “bridge book” as the good Dr. Nicole Peeler calls it: A book that ties off all the loose ends of one particular story arc while launching a completely new, batshit insane one. (That definition is mine, not hers, by the way. Hers would sound much more academic yet leave you feeling inexplicably titillated.)

This may inspire some of you to say, “Great! Ship it tomorrow, dude!” But oh, no. You don’t really want that.

I’m going to write a joint post on the revision process with my editor and post it in a couple/few weeks, because lots of people are probably unaware of how much revision goes into a book before it hits the shelves. And that brings me to the “sort of” part: “Accepted” doesn’t mean the book is finished and can be shipped tomorrow. There are still copy edits and then galley proofs to go through, and then there will be at least one, maybe two “cold” proofreads to do before they finally greenlight the text as approved for printing. And then, yeah. There’s OTHER STUFF. Like, the cover. I haven’t seen any sketches for the cover yet, though there’s still plenty of time. There is a completely über-nice lady at Random House who gets books ready for NetGalley and Amazon and Barnes & Noble and other electronic retailers. There are sales people who talk to buyer people over lunches drizzled in pork fat and they laugh heartily together and then decide how many copies they’re going to buy for their stores…which impacts visibility and sell-through numbers. (Is there a formula correlating the ratio of pork fat in these lunches with sales numbers? Only the mysterious people in Accounting know the truth.) There are people who smell of ink and paper and glue who print the books and pack them into boxes. Their fingers have fine white scars on them from years of paper cuts and for some reason, in my imagination, they all have mutton chop whiskers on their faces and tattoos high on their right shoulders. Anyway. There’s a lot of stuff to do still. And because there’s a lot of stuff, you’ll have to wait until April 24 to read this bad boy.

To make the wait happy: You will also get to read Chapter 1 of TRAPPED when you’ve finished TRICKED. Also, if I can manage it (emphasis on IF), there will be bonus content for the e-book version of TRICKED, just like there was for HOUNDED and HAMMERED.

Why can’t we print bonus stuff in the paperback version too? Excellent question! Well, it’s because getting stuff ready for print takes MONTHS, which is why you won’t see TRICKED until April 24 even though it’s close to being spiffy here in September. And it’s because I haven’t written the bonus stuff yet. :) I have, however, finished chapter 1 of TRAPPED, so it can be included.

That bonus story for HAMMERED, “A Test of Mettle,” told from Granuaile’s point of view while Atticus was in Asgard, wasn’t written until April of this year. I hadn’t even thought of it until then. By that time the book had been completely typeset, and there was no way I could include it in the print version. But the flexibility to include it electronically was so cool I couldn’t stand not including it, and the peeps at Del Rey were helpful with editing and formatting it for me. (I’ll include that story for free on my website in December, by the way.)

Someone asked me on Twitter why the bonus stuff wasn’t included in the audio versions—another great question! Again, it’s a question of timing, but also pesky things like money and contracts. When I slip that bonus stuff into the e-book versions, it’s truly a bonus for readers. I haven’t been paid diddly squat for those stories, and I’m cool with that because I just want to share some goodies about the Iron Druid world that wouldn’t get published otherwise. But if the audio company wants to include those stories in their releases, you can bet they won’t be able to get their reader to read it for free or get the studio to donate the studio time. That’s basically what it boils down to: e-books allow me to give stories away, but various realities of print and audio don’t.

Anyway—want to thank you for all the comments on the previous post regarding the store! I will be getting to work on those ideas soon. :) Thank you, too, for your patience waiting for the book! I’ve already started work on TRAPPED. You’ll notice the word meter over on the right-hand side.

Cheers!