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Posts Tagged ‘pay attention to meeeee’

Baby Got Back

Feeling artistic? And/or entertained by the notion of putting someone’s rear end on the cover of a book?

Check out the “Baby Got Back” contest I’m running over on the “Fangs, Fur, and Fey” community. Short form is, do me one of those urban fantasy covers you’re seeing everywhere these days — you know, the ones with a woman’s butt prominently on display — but with the butt in question buried under a pile of Elizabethan clothing. The most entertaining will win an advance copy of Midnight Never Come.

after-action report

I think I enjoy World Fantasy more every year, as I learn more of how I best operate there. When I first show up, I’m pretty useless: bad at recognizing faces I haven’t seen in a year, bad at worming my way into conversations, bad at social small talk. Warming up takes a while. But I know that now, so I don’t feel stressed by the usual “oh god I can’t find anybody I know and my foot is looking for opportunities to get into my mouth and I’m not having fun yet.” I’ll get there. It just takes time. By Friday I’m doing better, and now I know that my mental list of panels I’d like to see doesn’t even reach the status of guidelines, let alone actual rules; I’ll go if I feel inclined, but if on my way there I get waylaid by a conversation, whatever. I said this weekend, and I really mean it, that I go to WFC for the conversations. For the lunches and dinners and hallways and relatively quiet corners of room parties where I can get into discussions of Mesoamerican kingship, recent TV series, Kit Marlowe’s sexuality, butt-shot urban fantasy covers, gender issues in SFWA, and the abominations of Leviticus, to name a few topics of the last few days.

By Friday night I’m doing pretty good. Saturday’s usually a swimming success. At some point on Sunday I’ll start to hit my limit: I’m ready to put on my headphones and bury my nose in a book for the trip home. And that’s okay, too.

But it isn’t all cookie-cutter routine, either. Every year I expand the circle of people I know. And this year featured the new experience of increased contact with folks from my publisher, specifically members of the publicity departments in the US and UK. I got trotted out for a lunch with some of the book-buyers for Borders, not as the featured attraction, but to smile and make small contributions to the conversation; mostly I learned quite a bit about how the publisher sells the books to the store, before the store sells them to the customer. And I discovered that the publicity guys Have Plans for Midnight Never Come. Not national-tour level plans, but we all agreed that’s not even a good idea for someone at my stage of things. Cool website plans, though, most definitely. I don’t know how much of it will turn out to be pie-in-the-sky, but I love the notions we were batting around.

Speaking of that book, I got anecdotal proof of the quality of its cover: people were very eager to pick it up and look at it, including some total strangers during the autographing session. (And with nearly a dozen people spontaneously approving of the author photo on the back, I am finally reassured I managed to get a non-crappy picture of myself. Readers will expect me to look like that for the next thirty years, I imagine.)

And hey! Amazon has it listed for pre-order. I was going to say “at last,” but really, the book isn’t coming out for seven months. They’re plenty early. So anyway, that’s one benchmark passed. (And apparently that thing I wrote up for my editor back in June was the cover copy. Wish I’d known that then . . . though it holds up okay, despite having been written when less than a third of the book was done.)

Put all that together with a royalty statement that tells me Doppelganger and Warrior and Witch are both still doing bang-up business, and right now? Things are looking pretty good.

Interview me!

So, here’s the deal. My publisher wants to include an interview with me at the back of Midnight Never Come, and I’ve been give the go-ahead to let the interviewer in question be you, Gentle Readers.

They’re looking for me to answer 7-10 questions about writing in general and Midnight Never Come in specific. I figure I’ll solicit questions from everyone, pick out the most popular and/or the most interesting, and send those in; the ones I don’t answer for the book, I may well post on my website as a bonus.

So post your questions in comments! Try to keep it writing- and/or this-book-related (no questions about my secret life as a Cambodian mortuary-worker-turned-spy), and try to post it by next Wednesday (the 17th) at the latest. (I need to send my responses to Orbit by the 19th.)

Here we go . . . .

Updated to clarify: Feel free to ask more than one question, and to repeat other people’s questions (since that’s how I’ll judge the popularity of a given topic).

SF Novelists launch

Okay, I utterly failed to announce this during the day like I was supposed to; I blame the fact that I spent half my day up in Indy. But anyway, today (or rather, Monday, for those of you who have already gone to bed and will see this tomorrow morning) is (was) the launch of the shiny! new! revamped! SF Novelists website.

It started out as a membership-restricted group for professional science fiction and fantasy novelists — a mailing list for people to ask questions, a website for us to share information. There’s plenty of advice out there for getting started in this field, but once you leap those first few hurdles, you’re often dependent on the assistance of more experienced writer-friends. And sometimes the questions you want to ask are of the sort that shouldn’t be asked publicly.

But we’re growing beyond those humble roots. If you follow that link, you will find our brand spanking new group blog. One of the side columns scrapes the RSS feeds of our own personal journals, but what you see on the left there is original content, written specifically for SF Novelists’ public face. I imagine we’ll range all over the place, from craft- or business-specific topics to things of more general interest to the SF/F community. You can also find free samples of members’ work, so if somebody makes a post that really gets your attention, it’s easy to follow up and see if you want to read their journal or fiction more regularly.

It should be fun, in the vein of Deep Genre or similar endeavours. Take a look, see if you find anything you like!

poll time, but not mine

I thought about reposting this poll here on my own journal, since I know people are less likely to click through a link to take a poll elsewhere, but then I’d have to do the work to collate my data with Mindy’s. So instead I will ask all of you to take a minute or so and go fill out Mindy Klasky’s poll about book promotion, and which kinds of things have induced you to buy a book. She put it up because a group of us author-types are discussing how to promote books effectively, so the data will benefit a large number of people, myself included.

odds and ends

First of all, Cat Rambo has done an interview with me over at Suite 101. She asks several nifty questions, both about my novels and my writing in general.

Also, Talebones #34 is available, containing “But Who Shall Lead the Dance? I haven’t had a chance yet to read the rest of the issue, but Talebones is good folks.

Regarding my default icon: the people have spoken. A custom icon leads the pack, but the Summer Queen is in second place with as many votes as all the other options got together. I will look into possibilities for something custom, and keep the Summer Queen until I find something I like better.

Finally, do please contribute to my recent post looking for suggested readings. I wish I had the time to assemble the list on my own by reading all the YBFH and YBSF anthologies out there, or the entire ouevre of the Hugo Award, but alas, I don’t. I need specific titles to choose from.

Campbell Award deadline

Please pardon a moment of shameless self-promotion.

One of the awards given at WorldCon during the Hugo ceremony (but not a Hugo) is the Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Nominations and voting are based on WorldCon membership, which probably isn’t most of you, but there’s a post on Deep Genre with some timely information, namely, that if you weren’t a member of last year’s WorldCon and aren’t going to this year’s, then you have until the end of the day tomorrow (the 31st) to buy a $50 supporting membership that would allow you to do things like, oh, say, nominating me for the Campbell. ^_^

Given the financial state of a lot of my friends, I don’t expect people to drop $50 on this, nor to be making the pilgrimage to Japan for the upcoming WorldCon. But some of you might have been at last year’s, so I thought I’d toss it out there. And this is information worth spreading regardless, to newsgroups/websites/whatever that might have interested parties.

Normally I don’t shill for awards like this, but the Campbell is kind of a Holy Grail in my mind. Just getting on the list of nominees is a giant boost to a writer’s career, let alone winning, so it’s worth putting my modesty aside for a few minutes. (Fortunately for me, I’m only in my first of two years of eligibility, so I get another chance at this.) Anyway, spread the word, let people who have gone or will be going to WorldCon know.

And if I end up on the list of nominees, I will so totally give you a cookie. ^_^

Order now!

Want to get on an FBI watchlist?

(Those of you who aren’t already, that is. Which might be several of you, for a variety of
reasons.)

There is now a website
for Glorifying Terrorism, Farah Mendlesohn’s anthology of politically provocative
fiction. It’s a British publication, so my USAian friends will have to get it shipped, but
there’s a PayPal button up now, and Farah tells us it’s going to press in the next two
weeks.

And really, it only breaks a British law, not an American one (yet). So you have no reason
not to buy it and support the cause of free speech.

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.)

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.

We have a winner!

Kasi Spyker wins the tuckerization contest, having sent me the following picture:

I think I’ll have to make her one of the senators or representatives that’s on the less shady side; “Spyker” as an antagonist’s name just wouldn’t be subtle. 🙂

For posterity, I will note that hers was not the first picture I received, but I told Kurayami-hime that family were disqualified. Nonetheless, it’s good to see that there are quite a few copies on the shelf in this store, and even one of Doppelganger:

Send me more pictures! I’d love to know where the book has already made it into the wild.

promotional news

I’ve been doing quite a bit of promotional work for Warrior and Witch recently. To begin with, there’s the somewhat unexpected venue of the Romantic Times Book Club; I discovered when they reviewed Doppelganger (and gave it a high rating!) that they apparently cover a far wider range of fiction than their name would suggest. I’ve been interviewed for their October issue, and they’ll also be running a short essay of mine on the website, regarding Warrior and Witch and my experiences writing it.

Separately from that, I’ve also been interviewed by one of the Culture Vultures at Sequential Tart; once again, I don’t fit into the mainstream of what they cover, but they’ve taken an interest in me nevertheless. That one really illustrated to me why Big Name Authors often have to turn down interview requests; answering the questions was a lengthy process, with me tackling a few, wandering away, coming back a few hours later and doing another one, etc. You have to think about, not just your answer, but how to make that answer interesting, and how to do so in a relatively concise manner. I imagine “interview answers” will prove to be its own micro-genre of writing, like “cover copy” and “author bio.”

Then there’s a bit of promotion I didn’t have to do the work for: a nice person named Joana Rodriguez has, with my permission, created a fanlisting for my writing. Fanlistings aren’t something I was aware of before, but they’re basically web-based networks of fans for particular writers/TV shows/whatever. Check out the above link to see the site she put together for it, and to sign up.

That’s it for the moment, I think, though I have a few other promotional schemes in the works. This is, I must admit, the part of the “being a writer” business I’m probably the worst at; I can get myself to conventions and on panels there, but aside from that, I’m not very good at pimping my work. I’m learning, but it’s a slow process.

Updates will, of course, be provided when the aforementioned interviews and such go live.

reading in Chicago

It’s a bit short notice, but if you’re in the Chicago area, I will be at the Twilight Tales reading series next Monday, the 12th. Show starts at 7:30 at the Red Lion Pub; more info is available on the website. I’ll be reading three short stories: “Silence, Before the Horn,” “Centuries of Kings,” and “The Twa Corbies.”

In unrelated news, man, after spending half an hour struggling to come up with Xie Meng-lu’s name (for the lurking short story idea, “Xie Meng-lu Goes on Pilgrimage”), I’m convinced I need to buy a good, comprehensive book on historical Chinese names. I don’t suppose anyone has a recommendation? I want to write a series of these stories, and that’s going to be a nightmare without a good desk reference. The Internets simply do not cut it in this case. (With the result that Xie Meng-lu’s name is subject to change — but I needed something to call him, since his name is half of the title.)