updatery

World Fantasy was good. Got to see (read: stay with) Khet; got to socialize with many
friends from previous cons and make some new ones. The con itself wasn’t the best I’ve ever
been to — thin programming, too heavily focused on the topic du jour (the Robert E. Howard
Centennial), and most of the panels I went to were okay at best — but that’s only one of the
reasons I go, and not even the most important one, so I’m not upset.

Voted this afternoon. Most of my time was spent waiting for them to figure out what to do
with the two women in front of me who had both moved and therefore needed to jump through
administrative hoops. Link of interest: the Vote
by Mail Project is pushing the model of voting Oregon uses, which appears to be vastly
preferable on every front you can imagine. Worth taking a look at.

Also, started wading through my school e-mail that had built up over the weekend, and found
I’ve made it through the first round of cuts for my Collins course proposal. Now I have a
half-hour interview/presentation to go through, with some adjustments to be made to my
syllabus. Not sure when I’ll have the time to prep for that between now and Thursday, but I’d
better find some, as it appears I stand an actual chance of getting this through.

packy packy

After a week or so of fighting myself into a stalemate against the forces of entropy in my
life (read: trying to clean, trying to finish projects, trying to catch up on e-mail, feeling
generally like a hamster on a treadmill), I’m abandoning the battle and flying off to warmer
climes for a few days.

See some of y’all at World Fantasy.

Sprechen sie Deutsch?

Woke up to the delightful news that Luebbe, a German publisher, has made an offer for both
Doppelganger and Warrior and Witch. I’ve always been tickled by the idea of a
German translation of Doppelganger — all they have to do is slap an umlaut back on the
title and it’s good to go! (The title is, anyway. The rest of the book would need some
actual translation.)

This also highlights two interesting facts about the Life of the Writer. First, foreign
sales are your friends, because then people give you more money without you having to write
more books. It isn’t much, but by such things do writers make their livings. Second, this is
why one acquires an agent. Every so often you get new writers kvetching over the way agents
take a cut off the money their clients earn, but they absolutely deserve it; I wouldn’t have
the first clue how to start marketing translation rights to my novels. (Let alone all the
other useful things an agent does.)

So, life is pretty good.

Now back to work, I suppose.

wiki-me

Got a delightful e-mail from a reader today, alerting me that he has made a page on Wikipedia for Doppelganger.

It’s odd little things like this that convince me, yes, I really am a published author. (Not that I thought the boxes of books were hallucinations or anything, but ya know. It can use reinforcement.)

hah!

I had to get up early this morning to help the boy take his car to the shop, and when I got
home, I couldn’t go back to sleep. I’m sure I’ll crash out in the early afternoon to make up
for it, but in the meantime, I’m awake, and I decided I should be productive (if not on the
things I really should focus on). So there’s now the usual page for “Nine Sketches,
in Charcoal and Blood,” and more to the point, I’ve finally caught up on recommendations! (I
know I’ve been deluging you all with them over the last few days; I apologize for that.) This
time around, in honor of the time of year, it’s Sergei Lukyanenko’s Russian fantasy Night Watch. I’m
fairly certain that’s the first translated fantasy novel I’ve ever finished reading; there’s a
dearth of the stuff in our genre anyway. And that puts me back on track, finally, for the
recommendations, after months of being very, very bad about posting them. (Now all I have to
do is be vaguely disciplined for two more months, and I’ll finish out the year on
schedule.)

another one finds a home

As a writer, of course, I love all my children equally, but I love some more equally than
others. One of the special ones found a home this morning: “Nine Sketches in Charcoal and
Blood,” the story that ambushed me out of nowhere a little less than two years ago, wrote half
of itself in no time at all, spent months not writing the other half of itself (and not
letting me do it, either), grew an ending, went out into the world, went to the Canadian
magazine On Spec back in March, and sold to them just now. I’m very pleased by this,
as I like it a great deal. (Which is not to say I don’t love my other children, too. The
ones I don’t love get buried in the backyard and never seen again.) It’ll be out some
time in 2007.

two at once

Somehow the month of October slipped mostly by without me making any progress in catching up on my book recommendations. So this afternoon I bit the bullet and did two at once, meaning that for the moment I’m technically not behind at all, and if I can do another by midnight on Tuesday, I’ll be back on track. (Don’t hold your breath.) In the meantime, though, you can entertain yourself with one from way back in August — an overview of the Odyssey — and last month’s novel, Keith Roberts’ alternate history Pavane.

Project Eat My Head

Ongoing endeavours with immediate deadlines on them:

  • AFS paper (status: 90% complete)
  • Collins course proposal (status: 80% complete)
  • C.V. revision (status: 95% complete)
  • midterm grading (status: 0% complete)
  • novel proposal (status: ??? complete)

For the first time in a while, my academic commitments are winning their ongoing war with
my writing to eat my head. One week from today, when the first three items are done with and
the fourth is (hopefully) mostly done, I’ll be able to breathe and look at other things. In
the meantime, I need to push them all toward completion. The status percentages looked a lot
scarier at the beginning of this weekend, though; say what else you will about the last few
days, but at least I managed to be productive with them.

Now I think I need some sleep.

a window into my life

There’s nothing quite like curling up on a cold, grey Sunday afternoon to read Maoist tracts on guerrilla warfare for the fantasy novel proposal you’re working on.

*^_^*

paper binge

Zokutou word meterZokutou word meterZokutou word meter
3,064 /
4,000
(76.0%)

This is often how it works. In three hours or so, I go from having something that is only
barely recognizable as a fragment of the paper I’m supposed to be presenting at a
conference/turning in to a professor, to having very nearly a complete paper. Which goes a
long way toward reducing my stress level right now, since I’m supposed to be presenting this
thing in just over a week.

Yeah, I woke up a few days ago remembering with a very unpleasant jolt that I had forgotten
about, y’know, writing the damn thing. How could you tell?

Not done yet, but much closer, and it’s coming in at about the right length, too. Much of
it’s morphological summary of Stardust, which unfortunately makes it not my most
thrilling paper ever, but I try to sneak in some analysis/elucidation with the summary. And,
fortunately, it turns out to work, which I was kind of worried about when I got
started. I mean, it would suck to send in the abstract out of your ass, then find out months
later (mere weeks before the conference) that your central argument is flawed into
nonexistence.

But that hasn’t happened. So we can just pretend that fear never hit me.

back to press!

Here’s some good news I do understand: Doppelganger is going back to press!

It’s fantastic to have this happen to my first novel. This means that, while probably not every single copy of the first print run has been sold yet, it’s come close enough that they’re making more. In other words, it’s selling better than expected, by a lot.

I believe the word is “wah-hootie!”

I haven’t the faintest idea what this means, but it sounds good.

According to my editor, Warrior and Witch hit the Barnes & Noble mass market bestseller list at #37. Bookscan, the program that tracks point-of-sale at many stores, puts me at #10 on the fantasy bestseller list, and #4 for mass-market fantasy.

I am completely lacking in the experience needed to translate those facts into something meaningful, but damn, they sound good. And if my editor’s e-mailing me about them, they’re probably good enough to be worth taking note of.

So yay!

Happy Street Date Day!

Today is the official street date for Warrior and Witch. Not that this means all that much, since bookstores are rarely rigorous about enforcing such things, but y’know. Go buy the book. ^_^

Also today — since they put up their new issue on the first of the month — you can go read my interview with Sequential Tart. Mostly they do comics stuff, but the Culture Vultures cover other material, and one of them was kind enough to get in touch with me. Writing, gaming, academic life — the interview covers it all.