Book & Blog News

As good-hearted people who read the comments section may already know, I finally managed to trick someone into publishing one of my novels. All that time spent training with Tibetan masters in the shadow arts that cloud men's minds has really paid off. And people say FSU is just a party school.

The novel is titled The Guns Above, and it'll be available from Tor Books sometime next year. And yes, it's that Tor Books. I know, right?

I'll give you more details and excerpts and suchlike in the months to come. For now, let's call it an action-adventure gunpowder fantasy, and tease you with this pitch:

For years, Auxiliary Lieutenant Josette Dupre has served loyally in His Majesty's Royal Aerial Signal Corps, whose fragile airships are the army's eyes on the battlefield. When, by royal decree, she becomes the first woman to command an airship, Josette finds herself caught in a tempest of politics and prejudice. Her crew is skeptical of her abilities, her commander has taken a personal interest in destroying her career, her new airship is an untested deathtrap, and the army has sent an observer to catalog her every moment of weakness and indecision. At this point, she only hopes she can survive long enough to be killed by the enemy.

So it's kind of like Aubrey-Maturin on an airship, which is a book I'd buy in a heartbeat. So, insofar as I'm highly representative of the average American... Shit. Well, Tor has a great marketing department, anyway.

They also have the world's best editor, Diana Pho. This is not me sucking up, by the way. It's an objective fact. I did the math. She also moonlights as the founder of Beyond Victoriana, an award-winning multicultural steampunk blog that challenges the community to recognize a world which extends beyond the suburbs of London.

And of course I have to thank Paul Lucas of Janklow and Nesbit, who would be the world's best agent, except that Justin Beiber's agent must surely have signed a deal with Lucifer or something. Paul's definitely the world's best literary agent, though, and the most patient agent of any sort. Because really, he would have to be, wouldn't he?

That's the book side of things. But you ask, hat and/or heart in hand, (and in the latter case, ew,) what does this mean for the blog?

The blog will still exist, but it may not stay here. My tentative plan is to integrate it into a dedicated website geared towards publicity sometime in the next few months. The current blog just isn't well tuned for tricking you into buying my books. I mean, I'm looking over it now, and I can't even tell what my own name is. (Seriously, though, what the hell is my name? If you know, please send me an e-mail at... umm... Does anyone know my e-mail address?)

In the meantime, I'll be trimming the fat around here. That means, starting within the next few weeks, articles will begin to disappear due to issues of popularity, incongruous theme, relevance, or too-much-cursing-even-for-me-which-is-really-saying-something-let-me-tell-you. So, if your taste is bad enough to want to read a particular article of mine, but not quite so bad that you already have, you might want to go ahead and get that done, because it may disappear at any time.

Sometime in the summer to fall timeframe, I'll start doing regular articles again. They probably won't be weekly, as they were before, because a combination of book stuff, day jobs, and criminal activity doesn't leave me as much spare time as I once had. So we'll aim for monthly at first, with smaller updates in between, and see how that goes.

And finally, let me apologize for the paucity of substantial articles over the past few... [checks archives] holy shit, it's been, like, over a year. Why the hell is anyone still reading this? That's just an irrational level of dedication, right there. In other words: the best level of dedication. So leave a note in the comments, and on the day I finally rule this world, you will be rewarded with land and power.