Narrating is Hard, Who Knew?

It's not like I haven't always had a ton of of respect for narrators.  And I've had reasons enough to listen to them.  For some unaccountable reason, a disproportionate amount of my work has found its way into podcast or audiobook: all four of my novels, novella Patchwerk, and a dozen of my short stories have all had the audio treatment, and to the best of my recollection not once have I been less than thrilled with the results.  I've been really lucky on that front, and maybe that's one of the reasons I quickly started to notice how tough reading fiction out loud was, let alone doing so without stumbling over every other line, let alone while bringing genuine emotion and life to the work.

Still ... when you try it yourself, you discover that narrating is really damn tough, and that the people who do it professionally are really damn talented.  I mean, it's not like I've never had to read stories out loud, and sometimes I've even done so in front of quite large groups of people.  But if you fluff that then you can blunder through or make a joke about it, and really volume tends to be the main thing that matters in those situations, so if any actual subtlety or drama creeps in then I feel like I've done a decent job.  Actually making a recording of a story, though?  That's a whole other thing.  One significant mistake and you've had it and - as I discovered to my cost - just going in without the right amount of joie de vivre is enough to make for a rubbish end result.  Reading for thirty-five minutes without major slip-ups and without letting your energy flag is a heck of a challenge.

About now is when I should explain why I was even trying, right?  Basically, the answer is, because the folks at Great Jones Street asked me to, and those guys are cool enough that I didn't mind giving it a go.  If you haven't downloaded the GJS app by now, you really should; it's a huge library of short fiction by a ton of big name (and not quite so big name!) authors, and it's completely free.  More to the current point, it contains four of my stories: Jenny's Sick, Great Black Wave, and my two tales following master assassin Otranto Onsario, Ill-Met at Midnight and A Killer of Dead Men.  And the folks at GJS decided that it would be neat if their readers could be listeners too, so long as what they were listening to was authors reading out their own fiction.

In fairness, I should admit that I was largely extent imposing my own difficulties: Great Jones Street didn't ask for flawless renditions, and indeed specifically requested the exact opposite, suggesting that their audience would much prefer more warts-and-all renditions.  But, you know, you can tell a perfectionist not to try and get things perfect until you go blue in the face and it won't make a damn bit of difference.  Fortunately for my sanity, what did was sheer lack of time, not to mention a good deal of luck - otherwise I'd have been at this all year.  As it was, I managed to get by with only a few minor hiccups and one fairly major one, too far into A Killer of Dead Men for me to start over yet again.  What can you do, right?  "City" and "roof" sound awfully similar.

Anyway, for anyone who's curious, here's me reading out Great Black Wave, which is perhaps my favourite of the four stories and, not at all coincidentally, probably the one I did the best job with.

And, again, you can find the Great Jones Street app and so listen to all four, as well as lots and lots of other stuff, here.

Unexpected Birthday Presents

One of the nice things about being a writer is that every so often, out of the blue, people send you exciting things in the post.  And statistically I suppose that the longer you go at it, the more of a chance there is that those things are going to arrive on your birthday.  Still, it was a nice surprise when not one but two parcels containing contributor copies arrived just in time for me to pretend that they'd been sent to celebrate my successfully surviving another year.

I've already talked plenty about 01 Publishing's anthology of Lovecraftian Horror Whispers From the Abyss - and rightly so, it's really good - but I tell you, however good it was as an e-book, it's a whole lot better in print.  And this isn't just my weird, old-man affection for books that are made out of dead trees talking, either; in fact, it's got a lot more to do with my weird, old-man affection for additional artwork and sexy formatting and books that are generally really nicely put together.  Honestly, I wish I could show you how great this thing looks on the inside ... and I could, quite easily.  But it would involve taking more photographs, or scanning or something, and honestly, I'm bored with both of those things right now.  You'll just have to take my word for it.

Anyway, as exciting as getting print copies of Whispers From the Abyss was, it wasn't quite so exciting as what Spectral Press head honcho Simon Marshall-Jones sent me.  A little back-story: in 2012 I won a competition with small press Horror publisher Spectral to have a story produced as a chapbook, a competition I only entered because I'd had my eye on them for months as potential publisher for that particular story, The Way of the Leaves.  As well as getting tWotL chapbookised, my prize for winning was a copy of every chapbook Spectral put out henceforward, which was pretty cool because - more so that it has any right to have done for what's still a relatively new imprint - Spectral has become one of the lynchpins of British Horror over the last three years.

Actually it seems an age since I've talked about The Way of the Leaves, and perhaps when it was released it got neglected a little, falling as it did between Crown Thief and Prince Thief coming out.  (Though, that was also partly because it sold out pretty quickly.)  I don't remember even posting any  reviews, and it got some particularly solid ones: Morpheus Tales even reviewed it twice, with J. S. Watts calling it "...haunting, dark and lyrical..." and Stanley Riiks pointing out that it's "...a soul-chilling tale worthy of the Spectral name," that "...builds into a heart-wrenching urban fantasy..."

So, short story long, what Simon sent me was the gorgeous boxed set of the first eight Spectral chapbooks (including my own, obviously) pictured above, which is a pretty great birthday present by any definition.  I mean, look at it!  It's like someone painted the monolith from 2001 red and then it spewed chapbooks.

As a postscript, it would be great to end by mentioning that there were plans in motion that would mean more people got to read The Way of the Leaves, what with it being one of the better things I've written and only having appeared in a limited edition and all.  And maybe there are even plans afoot in that direction.  But if there were then I obviously wouldn't be able to talk about them.  
So I won't.

Help Someone Nice Go Somewhere Horrible

I've met many nice people in this industry since I became a published writer, and many very capable people, but high on either list would be Anne Zanoni, who as anyone who knows her even slightly will attest is both a lovely human being and a highly accomplished Copy Editor, with an understanding of and devotion to her craft that would do credit to anyone in any profession.  I know this at first hand because Anne did the copy edit on Crown Thief, which is notable amongst the three Easie Damasco books for being the only one where horses behave even vaguely like real horses, objects and people act remotely in accordance with the laws of physics and the geography actually makes a degree of sense.  (Actually I tell a lie, these things are largely true of Prince Thief as well, but only because I thought Anne would be copy editing that one too and was scared she'd tell me off.)

Get up close to the screen and you can actually feel the misery.

My point, lest I start to wander more than I already have, is that Anne is good people.  And she's not been having an easy time of it lately, for various reasons, and right now she has something she really, really would like to do - that being attending the 2014 Worldcon in London.  However, being as freelance Copy Editors are paid about as well as everyone else in this industry, she doesn't have anything like the funds to make that dream a reality.  For this reason she's set up an Indiegogo campaign to try and scrape together the requisite cash.

You can find Anne's campaign page here and her rather more coherent explanation of the whole thing here.  Please take a look and then consider throwing a few quid Anne's way.  Because all else aside, she has some funny ideas about London, and we should all help her to see it for the seamy, noisy, overcrowded hellhole it is.

(Sorry, London.)

Oh, point of trivia: that photo on Anne's Indiegogo page, I took that on my last day of regular work.  Man, I don't miss that city even one little bit.

(Sorry again London.)

To End All Wars: The End of the Beginning

There was something strangely anticlimactic about finishing To End All Wars.

A week (and a wonderfully relaxing week off in the Cotswolds) on, I'm still not sure whether that should have been the case.  It's hard to say that finishing your fifth full novel*, or for that matter your first science fiction novel, or even your first heavily researched historical novel, should be anything other than climatic.  You might even expect it to be one of the most climatic things you could hope to do.

But research aside, it took me five mostly quite pleasant months to write, and when you're used to novel writing being a more traumatic, gut-wrenching experience, that's just very hard to get your head around.  To put it in perspective, the first draft of Giant Thief took me over two years, and while the first drafts of Crown Thief and Prince Thief took a mere six months each, they were six months of pain and borderline terror and thinking I'd never, ever make my deadline - whereas TEAW, by comparison, was pretty much a breeze.  Except for a slight hiccup with the final chapter, which necessitated a last minute wave of extra research, (and let's face it, final chapters aren't supposed to come easily), I never strayed far from the timescale I set down at the start of the year, and even ended up finishing a day early.

It also might just be the best novel I've written.  I'm pretty sure it is.  There are some issues, there are always issues, but I'm pleased with it, and given that To End All Wars was a whole order of magnitude more ambitious than anything I've tried before, that's more than I had any right to expect.  I'm hopeful that, a couple of drafts down the road, it will be something exciting, and also something unique.  When your influences range from The Prisoner to Rogue Male to Regeneration, surely the end result has to be a little unique?

So anticlimactic, it turns out, may not be such a bad thing after all.  If anticlimactic means minimal stress, no last-minute panicking and things working out about how you'd hoped they would then, hey, I'm happy if everything I do from hereon is this much of an anticlimax.

And now I realise, belatedly, that I've done yet another To End All Wars post without talking even slightly about what it's actually about.  Well, maybe next time, when I finish the second draft come November time.  And maybe that time I'll finally break out the champagne too.





* Or possibly fourth, depending where you place War For Funland, currently being radically overhauled as The Novel Formerly Known as War For Funland.

Auditory Self-Indulgence, Part 2

I think I've accumulated enough retrospect by now to say that my favourite thing about the Easie Damasco trilogy and their publication is that they ended up as three wonderful Brilliance Audio audiobooks that I then got to listen to.

Because, yes, I listened to the audiobooks of my own novels.  Wouldn't you?  The thing is, if your books get made into audiobooks then, if you close your eyes, (and admittedly this isn't such a good idea in rough parts of town or while driving in heavy traffic), you get to imagine that someone's made a film of them, or at the very least put on an energetic stage adaptation.  You get to experience them in a whole new way, through new eyes, and in a new voice, a voice that makes the weaker bits seem entirely decent and the good bits seem completely brilliant.

At least, that's my experience.  It may have a lot to do with the fact that I was lucky enough to get James Langton reading, and that James Langton is absolutely marvelous at this sort of thing.  By the end of Prince Thief, I was in awe of the range of accents he'd pulled off over the course of three books, (and the fact that not one of them ended up sounding ridiculous), the fact that he put meat on the bones of even minor characters, made major characters seem like real people, and in particular brought scoundrelly, possibly-just-slightly-loveable rogue Easie Damasco to life in a way I'd never have dreamed possible.

I guess what I'm saying, in a roundabout way, is that what James did wasn't just reading but acting; he literally, single-handedly acted out three books and dozens of characters, and that's just plain astonishing.  I'm very glad I got to be the author of those three books, and that I then got to listen to James's take on them; it was a pleasure from the beginning of Giant Thief to the end of Prince Thief, and I'm not sure I'll ever get quite so lucky with a reader again.  Many thanks to James and to the people at Brilliance who made it happen, not to mention the Angry Robot guys for putting the whole thing together in the first place.

Lastly ... I couldn't possibly pick a favourite character from the trilogy, but I think it would be okay to pick a favourite from the audio adaptations.  And if I did it would surely be Malekrin, the sort-of-star of Prince Thief.  There wasn't a single character I felt James got wrong, but Malekrin would have been awfully easy to mess up and James absolutely didn't: he captured all of Malekrin's early, youthful frustration and - let's face it! - total obnoxiousness, and then conveyed his growing pains across the course of the book, ending in a climatic scene that played out just the way it had in my head and got me a little bit emotional. 

Which would have been all well and good had I not been walking down the high street of my grim northern home town.  Still, I'm sure it's not the first time the good folk of Batley have seen a grown man get a little teary over the audiobook performance of a character he wrote.

2013: Or, Phase IV

I've been a little troubled at the prospect of putting together my end-of-the-year round up, truth be told.  I try to be positive here at Writing on the Moon, because I fervently believe that writing is a thing to be positive about, but the flip side of that is that I've always intended this blog to be an honest account of my career and there are some things that are just very difficult to put a positive spin on.  For me, for the most part, 2013 has been one of those things.

It certainly got off to a difficult start.  Of the three Damasco books, the writing of Prince Thief had been by far the hardest; I've no doubt it's possible to write a book in a year around a regular job without suffering any serious ill-effects, but when that day job involves things like twelve hour night shifts and inordinate amounts of travel it becomes, frankly, pretty tough.  And when you live like that for month after month, working up to seventy hours a week, doing little else and not sleeping anything like enough, after a while your health starts to suffer.  Hell, everything starts to suffer.

What made the experience just shy of impossible, though, was that I had a fair idea of what was in store for Prince Thief.  Giant Thief had performed moderately well, but not well enough for Crown Thief to receive much publisher support or attention from bloggers and reviewers, because sequels don't attract anything like the sort of interest that debuts do.  By the time I started Prince Thief, I'd been reliably informed that I should expect proportionately less again.

Looking back, that's seems a lot more like common sense than it did at the time: you'll always be preaching to the converted with the third book in a trilogy.  But at the time, the cost seemed just too much; I knew I was making myself unwell and causing distress to the people close to me to write a book that couldn't hope to achieve the sort of things you hope a book will achieve, and it broke my heart a little.

All of that was more of less done with by the end of March, but it cast a long shadow.  Even with my writing efforts dialed down I was still doing at least one and a half jobs, the exhaustion never quite went away, and things continued to be a struggle.  In retrospect, I might have done better to slacken the pace a little more; as it was, I spent the next few months feeling like I was doing far less than I should have been.  I'd have liked to have worked much more to promote the launch of Endangered Weapon B;  I enjoyed coming up with my first novella, insane sci-fantasy oddity Patchwerk, but it cost more in time and effort than I'd been expecting.  It was really only when I put the day job once and for all behind me in October that things began to settle down, and only in the past month that I've felt like everything was more or less back under control.

-oOo-

For all that I've sure as hell done it in this post, I don't like moaning.  I still remember with perfect clarity what it's like to be an unpublished author, as I imagine some of the people who'll read this will be, and I know that I've been very, very fortunate to make it as far as I have, in the ways that I have.  I wanted more than anything to have a book published and now I have five out there, in various shapes and sizes and - regardless of how hard I worked for it, regardless of anything - that is a thing of utter awesomeness.  As is the fact that I've finally achieved my other lifetime goal this year, to make writing my day job.

So, for all of those reasons, and because sometimes it's nice to remind yourself of all the good stuff, here's a list of the things that happened in 2013 that were actually pretty amazing:

• I sold a story to Clarkesworld and, with the year nearly out, to Interzone, two markets I've been chasing ever since I started writing seriously.  It was, in fact, a pretty great year for short fiction sales, all told.

• In the end, I finished one novel, two graphic novels, one novella, a novelette and three short stories. Under the circumstances, that doesn't feel like a bad haul.

• I completed my first trilogy.  The Tales of Easie Damasco are out there now, and I'm very proud of them.  They have stunning Angelo Rinaldi covers.  They're read wonderfully by James Langton in the superb Brilliance Audio audiobook adaptations.  They exist in the world, they're finding readers and listeners, and the more time goes by, the more I appreciate that fact.

• Endangered Weapon B is out there too, after some five or so years of trying to make it a reality, and I love it to pieces.  Of the many things I have to be thankful for, high on the list is that I've been able to work with Bob Molesworth, a great artist who I have no doubt is going to become an extraordinary artist over the next few years.

• I'm now writing full time. It's impossible to exaggerate just how much even typing those words feels like a gigantic weight coming off.  2014 is the year when I get to start writing the way I want, instead of the way I can somehow manage to fit around my day job.  2014 is the year when producing a book a year is suddenly the absolute least I can do, and when I get to put together some of the projects I've had to tread water on these last couple of years.  And, since this is the stage of my career that I've long been referring to as phase 4 in my Stalinesque ten year mental plan, 2014 is also, quite possibly, the year when ants take over the world.

         If that's not something to look forward to then I don't know what is.

Giant Thief ... Closing Thoughs

Ever since I read a piece by Aliette de Bodard analyzing what she felt she got wrong and right in her "Obsidian and Blood" trilogy*, I knew I wanted to do something similar.  In fact, let's be honest, I knew I wanted to shamelessly rip it off.  So now that the Tales of Damasco are complete and out to buy, and now that I've had time for all the emotional dust to settle, here are my thoughts on where I messed up and where I can conceivably claim to have nailed it in my first novel Giant Thief.

Let's get the bad out of the way first, because then I get to finish with all the good stuff:


THE BAD

• There are a couple of overly slow chapters in Giant Thief, a couple of places were the plot doesn't move on as swiftly as it should, and in general the pacing is a bit off.  It was bad planning, basically, and I think it's the one area in which Crown Thief and Prince Thief are unquestionably better books.  That said, I do like how damn fast the thing moves, how little it lets get in its way, how blindly determined I was to throw in action at every opportunity.  I'm glad, on the whole, that I wrote a fast paced, action-packed first novel with a couple of slow patches than the other way round.

• I overestimated the tolerance readers would have for an obnoxious protagonist.  I wanted Easie Damasco to be unconventional, and the convention I had my eye on was the lovable rogue.  Rogues, in my experience, are anything but lovable, and I wanted to write a thief who was every bit as despicable, immoral and self-centered as a real life thief would be.  But while I still feel that that was a worthy intention, I see now that I should have leavened all those flaws with a few more virtues, so as to make Damasco slightly more pleasant company (although, see the successes for more thoughts on this.)

• I should have found a way to get more of my villain Moaradrid's back-story and motivation into Giant Thief.  I knew it, bits of it were implied, and it almost all gets told in Crown Thief and Prince Thief, but that isn't good enough, and it weakened an otherwise strong character.  I like Moaradrid, I think he's an interesting portrait of how good motives can be warped in a moral vacuum and he gets some cracking lines, but I can see how his apparent lack of character logic frustrated a few people.

THE GOOD

• I'm proud of my core cast.  One or two reviews suggested that they're mostly archetypes, and that's not entirely unfair - there's the witty thief, the harsh-but-fair guard captain, the kind-hearted monster, amongst others - but I think that misses the point of what I tried to do with those archetypes.  Every character, even the ostensibly heroic ones like Estrada and Alvantes, have deep flaws, and it's those flaws more than their virtues that define where they go after the first book.  But of everyone, I'm proudest of Castilio Mounteban, a man who does something irredeemable in Giant Thief and then spends Crown Thief and Prince Thief striving to be redeemed anyway, mostly in the worst possible ways and all in the name of love, albeit a deeply warped interpretation of it.  To me, that's one hell of a character arc.

• Following on from that, and perhaps a slight cheat since it doesn't really come to the foreground until Crown Thief, but I like the degree of moral complexity in the Tales, and all the more so because I was writing in a genre that isn't particularly known for moral complexity.  Plenty of people do awful things, and few more so that Easie Damasco himself, but nobody once does anything that they can't justify to their self, (except the once, and I just covered that, above.)  Perhaps more interestingly, characters frequently try to do right and end up doing considerable harm, and no good deed goes unpunished.  It's not easy to do the right thing in real life, so why should it be in fiction?

• I'm glad that I didn't write about white men running around a thinly veiled misinterpretation of medieval Europe.  We've had that book too many damn times, and I sleep a little easier at night for knowing that, whatever else I got wrong, I didn't add to the Tower of Tolkien.  By Prince Thief, I have an almost entirely non-white cast** and two well-rounded female characters who get to do things like run towns and entire countries without, necessarily, being Strong with a capital 'S'.  None of that necessarily makes it a good book, of course, and I feel a little bad even bringing it up because in a perfect world the art we create would represent the diversity of our species and we wouldn't even have to talk about it ... but, this world not being that one, I'm glad that I get to be one of the tiny handful of authors in 2013 (perhaps the only?) with a black and an Hispanic protagonist sharing their cover.

So those are my thoughts, anyway.  If you strongly disagree, with the good points or the bad or both, then I've love to hear about it.



* Which I now can't find for the life of me.  Anyone remember where it was published?
** The arguable exception being the giants, who are sort of grey.

Full Time, All the Time

Yesterday I left my day job.

Which, considering I'm a contractor and that I'd been there for nearly two years, isn't that big of a deal in and of itself.  The important point is that I did it by choice, that I'd been planning to do it at this point in my life for a very long time, and that I have no plans to look for anything to replace my IT day job with another.

Or, to put it another way, my full time job description for the foreseeable future is "writer".

Obviously there are many ways in which this isn't a sensible or even a very sane thing to do.  We're in the middle of an interminable global recession, the ice caps are melting and punk is almost certainly dead.  Things have been going well for my burgeoning writing career these last couple of years, but with the Angry Robot deal now over, I'd be lying if I said I have much in the way of an income.

Then again, this isn't something I've done lightly.  I've always wanted to be a writer, and I strongly believe that life is too short to spend it not doing the things that are most important to you.  I've been planning for an awfully long time so that one day I'd have the opportunity to do this, and it's become clearer and clearer that I've taken things as far as I can around full time work.  I've completed two novels in the last couple of years, and it's left me hardly any time to do any other writing, let alone have anything as luxurious as a life.  It's been apparent for a long time that something has to give.  And now it has.

What happens now then?  Well, first things first, I'm having a short holiday, while I can still afford such extravagances.  After that, November will be mostly taken up with research, planning and conferencing, which means World Fantasy in Brighton and Thought Bubble in Leeds. Then in December I start my new novel, hopefully get back to the book I drafted before Crown Thief, War For Funland, and perhaps dig into some currently-secret projects that I'm nearly ready to move forward with.

So, hey, full time writing.  It's a thing, all right. 

Deep breath...

Prince Thief Out

Prince Thief, third and final of my Tales of Easie Damasco, came out in the UK today in print, e-book and audiobook, and has been out in the US in all formats for a week or so now.

So that's that.  One trilogy finished.  And honestly, if you'd told me three years ago that I'd be in this place right now, with three novels not only written but published, I'd have gawped at you with wide-eyed incredulity, but there it is.

Here's the blurb:

Altapasaeda, capital of the Castoval, is under siege by its own King - and Easie Damasco is trapped within the city's besieged walls.  Only Mounteban has a solution to offer.  Far to the north, rebels have set a bastard prince up as a figurehead.  If our heroes could kidnap this warlord-in-the-making, he might be used as a bargaining chip to end the war on both fronts.  Yet again, Damasco finds himself roped into a desperate scheme to preserve the Castoval, and events only grow more complicated as Damasco discovers that he and the disgruntled, rebellious teenage Prince have more in common than either of them would like to admit.

But if you've read the first two then hopefully all you really need to know is that Prince Thief wraps up the story that began in Giant Thief and continued in Crown Thief: the final fates of the Castoval, of Saltlick and Estrada and Alvantes and of course the irrepressible Mr Damasco, will be decided once and for all.  It's not going to be an easy ride, not everyone is going to walk away in one piece, and by the end, nothing will ever be the same again.

Oh, and there's an exploding ship.  Just saying.

All That News I Don't Have

I said when I put up my last post that I didn't have any writing news, and then realised straight away that I actually have loads of writing news.  It's just that none of it is really the kind of stuff that I'd normally blog about.  Still, saying I have no news implies I haven't been up to much, and that's the exact opposite of the truth.  So I thought I might as well set the record straight, even if I was the one who unstraightened it in the first place.

First up, there's the novella that I've been working on since around the start of June, and hope to finish soon.  I've never had much desire to write a novella before, but I had an idea that was too small for a novel and way too big for a short story, and I needed a project to sink my teeth into for a few months, to keep myself busy until ... well, until the massive thing that's happening next month, that I should probably keep quiet about until then, in case I jinx it or something.  Anyway, the novella's currently called Patchwerk, and its best described as ... um ... kind of a Moorcockian multidimensional science-fiction / fantasy thing.  Well, maybe that's not how it's best described, but put it this way, the fact that it has about twenty-five people in it but they're all the same five characters should give you a fair idea of what it's like (and what a gigantic headache it's been to write in places!)

So there's that. And there's the second, as-yet-untitled volume of Endangered Weapon B, which I finished a few days ago and now just need to format ready for winging over to Bob.  It's fun stuff, if I do say so; we find out just why the Professor's been so interested in resurrecting the dead, just about everyone from volume 1 returns, mostly in the most absurd ways possible, and - at the risk of giving away crucial plot points - there's a bloody great, ridiculous fight at the end. Oh, and I get to parody a load more stuff, from John Carter to Bride of Frankenstein to Endangered Weapon itself.  (Thinking about it. mainly that last one.)

Then there's the planning.  Oh so much planning!  I just recently wrapped up a synopsis of what I fervently hope will be my next novel, and that's with my agent John Berlyne right now, waiting on his feedback.  There's my ongoing figuring-out of how to nail down War For Funland, the book I wrote a first draft of between Giant Thief and Crown Thief and would really like to write a second draft of one of these days.  There's the third novel that's at the mostly-in-my-head stage.  There's the new comic series that Bob Molesworth and I are hoping to put together, which I'm sketching out bit by bit, with a view to getting a synopsis together in the next month or two.  There are short story ideas piling up, there's the film script I've been plotting for a couple of years now...

That might sound like a lot, and it probably is, but from my point of view this is no bad thing. For all the love I have for Damasco and his world, one of the hardest aspects of writing Crown Thief and Prince Thief was how much they dominated my writing time, to the exclusion of all else.  I'm always happier with a few different projects on the go, and I'm happiest when those projects are as different from each other as realistically possible.  So, right now, when I have a dozen things in the pipeline and none of them are the least bit similar to each other ... well, that's an okay place to be in.

Crown Thief Out in Audiobook, and Other Listenables

I've been looking forward to the Brilliance Audio adaptation of Crown Thief coming out.

As I've explained before, it would be undeniably weird and inappropriate and self-indulgent to read your own book, but no one ever said you can't listen to it.  Which is a good thing, because it's much more fun anyway, especially when you have the excellent James Langton returning to do his thing and make your book a good bit wittier and more entertaining than it ever was on the page.

I loved James's take on Giant Thief, so much so that I think it might have become the official version in my head; by the time I got to writing Prince Thief, I couldn't help noticing I'd mentally adopted James's accents for some of my major players - Marina Estrada is forever going to have an Irish lilt in my head now - and I can't wait to hear what he's made of some of the new players.  I have a feeling that his take on Synza, and one particular Synza-starring scene in particular (if you've read it, I'm sure you know which I mean*) is going to be a whole lot of fun.

Since I'm being hopelessly unrepentant about how much I enjoy podcasts of my own work, I should admit that I also recently listened to John Rubinstein's totally appropriate reading of The Sign in the Moonlight at Nightmare, and that I've made a start on Kate Baker's elegant, understated take on Across the Terminator, recently posted at the mighty Clarkesworld.


* Or, thinking about it, if you've seen the cover.

Prince Thief Handed In

Wow ... so, yeah, Prince Thief is done.  Done, dusted, and handed it in to Angry Robot and my agents.  Actually, it's been handed in for over a week now, but I'm still getting to grips with that fact; it's going to be a while before my brain accepts that I can go a day without writing about Easie Damasco and not worry that I might blow my deadline.  It's hard to know just how to feel about something like finishing your first novel trilogy.

Who would steal this man?

I mean, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't relieved.  Writing two books in a year apiece around full time work has been about the toughest thing I've ever had to do and, for a variety of reasons, writing Prince Thief has been harder than writing Crown Thief.  (Just for starters, the first draft of Prince Thief was over 10000 words longer than the final draft of Crown Thief.)  It's fair to say that for the last thirteen months, I haven't done a great deal except work, write, eat and sleep - and I haven't done anything like enough of that last one.  In fact, that's basically my plan for the rest of this month.  Asides from brief consciousness breaks to do my day job, I'm going to sleep until May.  And it's going to be brilliant.


But ... I'd be equally lying if I said I wasn't going to miss Damasco.  And Saltlick and Estrada and Alvantes, not to mention the Castoval itself, a setting I've only grown fonder of as the series went on. I've spent over five years with these books, and it's weird to think of that coming to an end.  Five years ago I'd have laughed derisively at any writer daft enough to refer to their characters as if they were real people, to suggest that said characters had come to seem almost as real as their friends and family.  And in fairness, I'd have probably been right to scoff, but there it is; I'm going to miss Damasco, and it's strange to know that where I leave him at the end of Prince Thief is where we go our separate ways for good.

Is no one safe from Damasco?

Not that that's a bad thing, don't get me wrong.  Ever since I began to consider expanding Giant Thief, I thought in terms of a three book arc.  There's no doubt that Prince Thief ties up the wider story that I started all those years ago, and I'm comfortable in saying that there isn't a plot thread or character arc that doesn't get wrapped up by its conclusion.  (I'm sure someone will correct me on this eventually but hey, right at this minute I'm okay with saying it.)  Sure, there are other Tales of Damasco that could be told (and one that I'd have kind of liked to tell) but I'm looking forward to starting the next big thing, to trying something completely and absolutely different and putting all of what I've learned about writing novels into practice without the constrictions I inadvertently set myself with Giant Thief.

But that's a ways off.  In the meantime, I started my next graphic novel today, a sci-fi horror thing called C21st Gods that feels as if it's been gestating forever.  And hey, it's not like I don't still have the copy edit on Prince Thief and my own last check-through to do, at the very least.  I guess I haven't entirely said my goodbye's to that reprobate Damasco yet!

Failing the Bechdel Test

This week I thought I'd draw attention to my recent guest blog post, Giant Thief, Crown, Thief and How to Fail the Bechdel Test, recently up at Fantasy Faction.

In it, I talk about what I hoped to achieve with Giant Thief and Crown Thief, in terms of portraying a strong, believable female character and avoiding some of the classic pitfalls of genre writing, how in the end I got some pretty major things wrong, and how that's gone on to shape my choices in regards to Prince Thief.

I think it's the best of the guest posts I've done; certainly it's the one that most thought and effort went into.  I wrote it - very slowly! - over a period of months, and probably a large part of why it took so long was that I was figuring out my own thoughts and feelings as I went along.  But, if I'm pleased with the final result, I'm also conscious that this is me dipping a toe into a very big ocean.  I have a huge amount still to learn, to figure out, and I'm not even close to having all the answers.

Then again, I'm not sure that anyone has, and isn't that the fun of any discussion?  Because, the truth is, there are two main reasons I'd take time to talk about subjects like gender parity and the Bechdel test.  One I discuss in the article itself, and its that I want to tell good stories and I'm not convinced any more that stories that seriously ignore or diminish one audience in favour of another can reliably be considered good.  But the other is ... and maybe I should whisper this! ... that I really love a good debate.

So it was great to come back to my guest post a few days after it went up and see that that was exactly what had come of it.  In fact, the discussion that followed is arguably much more interesting than my own article.  I was a little sad that I hadn't noticed it in time to take part, until I noticed that my Angry Robot and Zeno stablemate Anne Lyle had said just about everything I'd have liked to say, and far more ably than I would have.

Incidentally, Anne also beat me to the punch on writing about failing the Bechdel test - yet another of the strange parallels between our careers that have led me to suspect that one of us is a figment of the other's imagination, or possibly an evil twin.  Anyway, you can (and should) read Anne's piece over at her blog, right here.

Research Corner #3: Welcome to the Castoval

Marrakesh, just off Dancers Way.

I'm not by nature very good at geography.  In fact, the only thing I learned from geography classes at school is that the land should be coloured green and the sea should be coloured blue.  Get it the wrong way round and bad things happen.

Thus it was that when I started creating a setting for Giant Thief, geographical logic wasn't exactly the first thing on my mind.  I was determined that it wouldn't be yet another thinly veiled Northern European landscape; as a Fantasy reader, I'd grown tired of those.  I also knew I wanted a recognizably real-world setting, not an alien planet or any such completely alternate reality.  Lastly, I didn't want the setting to dominate the story too much; I was more interested in building the characters and keeping the plot rolling than spending page upon page describing trees.

In short, I was after somewhere familiar, but not too familiar.  So rather than take any one country for a model, I decided I'd pick and choose depending on what I needed at any given moment.  My only real limitations were a vague notion of climate - warm, but not tropical - and a desire to keep things simple.  A river valley seemed a safe bet for the latter, and putting it all together allowed me to throw in dense forests, high mountains and even a few stray cacti (cactus? cactuses?*) with abandon.  Mediterranean Europe was a big influence, as was Mexico, and North Africa supplied a lot of my architecture, especially the bigger buildings.

Outside Marrakesh.  Or possibly Muena Palaiya.

It was only after Giant Thief came out that I began to wonder if I'd got it right; I'd spent so much head time in what by then was the Castoval, got so used to its eccentricities, that the question of whether it would be believable for anyone else had largely been pushed out of my mind. Then my marvelous Crown Thief copy editor Anne Zanoni expressed concern at some of my more out-there geographical ideas, particularly the small, random desert that is the Hunch - and I started to worry in earnest whether my patchwork quilt of a setting really made a great deal of sense.

So it's with considerable relief that - thanks to the miracle of my retrospective research trip to Marrakesh, as detailed here - I can reveal that, rubbish though my geography may be, the setting of my Damasco books does just about hang together.  And, if there had been a real-world model for the Castoval, its neighbouring country Pasaeda and the far-northern land of Shoan, (home of a certain invading warlord and set to play a very big part in Prince Thief), it would have been Morocco.

The Atlas mountains, south of Altapasaeda.

To my surprise, just about everything I describe in the Damasco trilogy can be found within a hundred miles of Marrakesh (which itself has a lot in common with both Altapasaeda and Muena Palaiya), up to and including a stunning river valley, high mountains, a coast, numerous cacti, a barren plateau, at least one town built on a hillside and many a dense forest.  So much so, in fact, that there were a few eerie moments when I wondered if I hadn't accidentally booked tickets on some kind of magical, fictional reality-entering plane.

Needless to say, if I'm every asked about any of this, I'll strenuously deny it and claim that the Castoval was based on Morocco all along.



* Strictly speaking, grammatical fact fans, all three are correct!

2012; or, My Damasco Year

At the end of 2011, I wrote about what a tough year it had been on a personal level, what an unexpectedly triumphant year it had been for my writing, and how everything had somehow ended in a weirdly positive place.  So I guess I can't just say the same again this year, right?  No?  Well, okay then.

Anyway, looking back, it feels a lot like stating the obvious.  Any year where you try and write a publishable novel from start to finish around a more-than-full time day job is never going to be easy, and any year where both your first and second novels are released is going to have its moments of pure unadulterated awesomeness.  It's almost impossible to look back at 2012 right now and believe that I managed to cram so much of either into it; that this time twelve months ago I was putting the finishing touches to Crown Thief, waiting for Giant Thief to come out, and getting ready to move to London to start my new job.

Now London is my second home, Giant Thief's release seems an awfully long time ago, even has been out for a while, and all my energy is going into finishing the second draft of Prince Thief and ending a story I started five years ago, with no idea at all of what I was getting myself into.  For me, 2012 has definitely been the year of Easie Damasco, and I'm deeply glad that for every reader who's failed to get on with the despicable reprobate there have been plenty more who've taken him into their hearts.  It's more than he deserves, frankly, but it's still pretty amazing to realise that my books are out there in the world and that Damasco, in however small a way, has broken and entered his way into the minds of complete strangers.  Hard work it may be, but this novel writing lark definitely has its rewards. 

But what's really surprising is all the other stuff that's happened.  I didn't expect to get much else done in 2012, all things considered, and I was reconciled with letting the other strands of my writing - all those many, many strands! - fade into the background for a few months.  What a nice surprise, then, to win my first writing contest, via This is Horror and Spectral Press, and as a result to have my first chapbook published, meaning I ended up with not two but three whole books out in one year.  And how unexpected it was that I managed to get a bit of short fiction out there, and even, just as the year began to expire, to make a few good sales. 

Now I get to look forward to 2013, and to think hard about where I go after Damasco and I finally part ways.  I know I should have at least two new books coming out, in the shape of Prince Thief and, (in some more not-entirely-expected good news), the first Endangered Weapon B trade paperback - not to mention the German edition of Giant Thief and the audiobook of Crown Thief.  But who knows what else might happen?  The same goes for my planned projects; right now, my agenda for the coming year involves finishing Prince Thief and the second volume of Endangered Weapon for the end of March, then writing a science-fiction novella, then writing at least one draft of a new, as-yet-untitled novel while simultaneously rewriting my second book War for Funland more or less from scratch,  plus putting together a short story collection and likely writing a second graphic novel that's been at the drawing board stage for a while now.

But good plans are made to be unplanned, right?  And really, I'm mainly saying this so that I can look back on this post in twelve month's time and feel stupid.  Because, as the bloke from Stingray so famously never said, anything can happen in the next twelve months.

Research Corner #2: More Grossness

Apparently, so I've heard, there are writers out there who do their research before they write their books.

Not as horrible as it might be.

Now, far be it from me to question the techniques of my esteemed colleagues, but I've got to say that this seems a bit wrong-headed to me.  I mean, it seems pretty obvious that if you do all your research once you've nearly finished, it becomes a lot less like work and a lot more like ... well ... a holiday.

Thus it was that I set off to the Medina district of Marrakesh a couple of weeks back, with the firm intention of doing all the research I should conceivably have considered doing before I started writing the Easie Damasco books, (Morocco being one of my main visual influences for the towns and cities of the Castoval, particularly Muena Palaiya.)  Obviously, since I've effectively finished the trilogy, there wasn't quite so much to do as there would have been if I'd gone about things the old-fashioned way.  But that was okay by me, and really, just more evidence of how eminently sensible my approach was.

Still, lest anyone should think I was just sloping off for a week, I should point out that I was determined to visit at least one place I'd written about and witness it with my own eyes.  Because, it's one thing to compose a blog post about how unfeasibly disgusting tanneries are, but what sort of a writer would I be if I didn't take the opportunity to see those horrors for myself?*

Merely quite unpleasant.

After the reading-up I'd done, I was prepared for more or less anything; it would take more than blood, brains or bodily fluids to shock me.  So in fairness, it has to be said that - compared with the mind-bogglingly vile stuff I'd read about - the tannery I went around in Marrakesh really wasn't that bad.

But let me emphasize the qualification: it wasn't that bad.  That isn't to say it wasn't bad.  This was not a place I wanted to hang out in any longer than I had to.  At no point did I think about settling down there.  If ever a time comes when I decide to have children and seek out a safe and reassuring environment in which to raise the little darlings, a Moroccan tannery won't be my first choice.  Or my second.  Heck, it might not even make my top thousand.

Still ... there's no getting around the fact that it could have been a lot worse.  In Marrakesh, for example, they use pigeon crap to bate the hides, rather than some of the more staggeringly horrible alternatives mentioned on Wikipedia.  Pigeon crap doesn't exactly smell nice, but you sort of get used to it after a while, and at least our guide was good enough to provide us with what he called a Berber Gas Mask, (that's a sprig of mint to you and me.)  Once you got past the distinctive odour and the mud and the sight of bits of dead animal in various states of treatment hung about everywhere, it was all quite interesting.  The men working there didn't look exactly happy, but none of them were screaming like damned souls.  I bought a nice rug in the attached shop.  All told, a good day was had by all, and only rarely do I wake up screaming at the memory.

Research, huh?  It's a dirty business, but someone's gotta do it.



* And, needless to say, drag my poor girlfriend along for a little added horror-witnessing.

Tales of Damasco: Update 6

It's a while since I've done one of these Tales of Damasco updates, but that doesn't mean there hasn't been plenty of good stuff happening.   In fact, it had a lot to do with wanting to hang on until I could announce the really big news I've been sitting on for quite a while now...

Which I've pretty much given away with that picture there, so let's just get to it: German publisher Piper Verlag have bought the rights to release Giant Thief in Germany, and will be bringing it out in April next year, behind that rather stunning cover, under the title "Im Schatten Der Giganten" - which, I'm assured by people who understand more German that I, means In the Shadow of Giants. 

My first non English language sale!  And I really do like that cover ... a very different Damasco from the UK / US edition, with a nice anime feel, and awesome, gravity-defying hair!  Plus, let's face it, they came up with a far better title than I did.  I'm looking forward to holding it in my hands and reading the entire book yet again, this time in a language I don't understand even slightly.  And who knows, maybe I'll end up being big in Germany ... just like the Hoff and Blue Oyster Cult?

In the meantime, I can make do with the fact there's been plenty of good stuff happening on the Crown Thief front.  I've done a guest post for Bull Spec, discussing the difficultest part of writing my difficult second novel, an interview with SF Signal's Paul Weimer on a whole host of writing-related subjects, and with SF Signal once again, took part in their "holding out for a hero" mind meld, on the subject of what sets true heroes apart from mere protagonists and whether the concept remains meaningful in this day and age.

Also, the positive reviews have been slowly but steadily arriving.  Elloise Hopkins on the British Fantasy Society blog has lots of nice things to say, not least of which is that Crown Thief is "...above all a fun read," while Fantastical Librarian Mieneke declares it "...a high-octane romp..." and "...a great follow up to Giant Thief."  Alister Davison at Starburst describes it as "...a light and entertaining read, one that can raise a smile or even shed a tear from the most hardened reader," and most glowing of all is probably Keith's commentary at Adventures Fantastic, which is pretty much summed up by its title, "Easie Damasco Pulls Off Another Great Adventure."  In fact, the only real dissenting voice so far has been the mysteriously initialed K. Burtt at Geek Speak Magazine, who was so put off by the fact that Damasco doesn't really steal a great deal of stuff in this one that he found the entire enterprise unspeakably dull.

Ah well.  At least the accolades are continuing to come in for Giant Thief, even months on from its release.  My favourites are the Fantasy Book Review article that lists it in their "Thief in Fantasy Literature" top ten (whether this of the year or all time I'm not entirely clear, but it's still completely awesome to be in there) and the overwhelmingly lovely review by blogger The Writing Mind that begins with the assertion that "Easie Damasco is a name that everyone in the world of light fantasy should become familiar with, " and ends up by declaring Giant Thief as "...hands down the best novel of 2012, (save for perhaps the coming sequel...)"  Got to love that caveat!

Let's finish up, though, with a review from another blogger, Dvarin, which while not quite so positive, made me smile even more.  Dvarin argues - not unfairly, I think - that Giant Thief "...reads a heck of a lot like a one-player D & D campaign where the GM is desperately trying to get some kind of heroic-ness out of a determinedly neutral-selfish character," and concludes that it's "Slightly worse than the Belgariad, significantly better than Xanth."  Pipping out Piers Anthony but not quite matching David Eddings?  There's a ranking I can live with!

Friends in Interesting Places

In the rush of crazy that was the build up to Crown Thief coming out, I managed to write an entire blog post and somehow forget to post it.  It went something like this:

It's always nice when one of your mates who also happens to be a famous and well-respected author happens to say something nice (or even just something interesting) about your book in public places.  And recently, to my slight astonishment, it's happened not once but twice.

First up was Adrian Tchaikovsky towards the back end of August, in his post Love the Bright Sword on the Tor blog. Adrian always has something good to say about the Fantasy genre, which, let's face it, he knows better than most of us, having added to it so dramatically with his Shadows of the Apt series.  But this is my favourite of his posts that I've read, and not just because it mentions Giant Thief (although, there's that!)  Adrian talks about one of the great elephants in the room of Fantasy fiction, our overwhelming reliance on violence as a plot device, and wonders if that's really the best we can do as a genre.

The mention of Giant Thief is in relation to the fact that Damasco would rather do just about anything than get his hands bloody, so it should be clear where I stand on this one.  I've a certain soft spot for heroes who solve their every problem with a sword, gun or whatever, probably because I read far too many G. I. Joe comics in my formative years.  More and more though, I'm drawn towards stories that manage to talk about something other than our inate need to beat the crap out of each other over every little thing. I mean, we've been around for a fair old while as a species.  We've walked on the moon.  We have jetpacks (even if we don't use them much) and phones that tell us where the nearest cash machine is.  So just maybe it's time our heroes stopped solving their every problem by headbutting someone?

Osama, of course, is now out.  Here's proof.

[Listening to the audio of Giant Thief, and having always been proud of the fact that Damasco never saw a fight he didn't try to run away from, I was actually a little shocked by how scrappy he is in the first chapter.  In fairness, he's just been hanged, he's half starved and has every reason to be in a lousy mood. Still, he's really agressive for a while there.  It's a good job he meets Saltlick when he does, or he might have done something we'd both have regretted.]

Anyway, barely had I gotten through thinking about that one when Lavie Tidhar - whose astonishing and many-award-nominated novel Osama comes out in paperback directly after Crown Thief - wrote an entire blog article on Giant Thief.  I won't spoil it by preempting it too much, because it's a fascinating piece in its own right, but the gist is that - based on the fact that Easie Damasco does very little to further his own story and in fact spends most of his own novel running away from it - I've inadvertently invented a new subgenre, which Lavie labels "slacker fantasy."

I am deeply in love with that term.  Expect it see it cropping up with preposterous regularity in future posts.

Fantasycon 2012, Part 2: The Good

Crown Thief in all its glorious glory.

I wrote up some general impressions of this year's Fantasycon at the start of the week, most of them less than positive - but in fairness to the weekend, it has to be said that I had a pretty good time all told.  If I wasn't overwhelmed with the Con itself, there were still some terrific people there; one thing Fantasycon can always be relied on for is an opportunity to catch up with old friends and make new ones, mostly with the involvement of much reasonably priced liquor.

This time, though, with Crown Thief launching over the weekend, I was determined to prioritise work over propping up the bar into the ludicrous hours - at least a little.  I got to see Crown Thief in the paper for the first time on the Friday afternoon, a few days in advance of its official release date, and was blown away by the job Angry Robot have done.  Giant Thief was a great looking book, but I think Crown Thief is even prettier.  I hardly let a copy out of my sight for the rest of the weekend, and thrust it under the nose of anyone who didn't manage to run away fast enough.

Gav Thorpe, Adam Christopher, Me, Mike Shevdon

My actual official promotional duties were fairly light, however.  First up was a mass Angry Robot signing on the Saturday afternoon, where I got to catch up with Adam Christopher and Gav Thorpe, and to meet Mike Shevdon for the first time.  Unfortunately, we found ourselves up against a much bigger signing, not to mention hidden in the hotel's least accessible conference room, so attendance was more slender than it might have been.  Still, it was fun, and worth it to meet Ros Jackson from Warpcore SF - who, if my memory was a little better, I'd have realised had written an extremely positive review of Giant Thief - and who was nice enough to stop by and share some thoughts on promotion with me.

Mr Jonathan Green, rightly enthroned.

My only other scheduleded appearance was a reading on the Sunday morning, which I was a little nervous about since a) who goes to those things on a Sunday morning? and b) I've somehow managed to go this long without ever actually having to do a solo reading.  Mind filled with images of an audience consisting entirely of Jobeda, I decided to read a short story I'd recently finished instead of an extract from Crown Thief.  That proved a slight mistake, since it wasn't quite as finished as I'd thought, and nothing trips you up quite like trying to read around your own typos.  On the other hand, the attendance turned out better than I'd dared hope - mainly because most of Jonathan Green's audience, not to mention Jonathan himself, were nice enough (or maybe tired and hungover enough) to hang around for mine.  And despite my occasional stumblings, my nerves and a few technical difficulties, everyone seemed to have a good time, me included.

There ended my Fantasycon "work".  Elsewhere, though, I got to have lunch with my comic collaborator mate Bob Molesworth and to celebrate the tremendously exciting thing that we have to celebrate that I can't talk about just yet. I caught up with Stephen Theaker - who published so many of my short stories back in the day - for the first time in a couple of years, met his mysterious alter ego John Greenwood for the first time ever, and teamed up with them to win the quiz on the Friday night (okay, there might have been one or two other people on our team too.)  I briefly met Spectral Press publisher and editor Simon Marshall Jones to chat about my forthcoming chapbook The Way of the Leaves and try and peak his interest in another, grander project.  I managed to briefly smuggle in my friend Dan Scrivener and introduce him to Strange Chemistry editor Amanda Rutter to talk up his recently finished YA Fantasy novel.  I was approached by Cavan Scott to see if I'd be up for writing something for the BFS magazine (I would, and will be.)  And I met many, many other brilliant people, some new, some industry acquaintances ... people I rarely see outside of Cons but that I'm starting to think of as friends, and to consider catching up with in the "real" world.

And I guess that paragraph illustrates the good about even a disappointing Fantasycon.  Being that bit smaller, it's also that bit more intimate, making for a fantastic venue to just chill out and meet with lots of like-minded folks that would never normally be in the same place at the same time. If the committee could only find a way to combine those elements with a more ambitious, inspiring programme, here's hoping we might yet see a brilliant FCon 2014.

(On the way to) Fantasycon 2012

Perhaps a little late to be mentioning this, but I'm going to be at Fantasycon 2012 in sunny Brighton (or, touch wood, at least not torrentially rainy Brighton) this weekend - in about, oh, thirty minutes to be exact.  I'll be there in a work capacity, of course, because despite what some people will try and have you believe, writers and editors and publishers all getting drunk together at the seaside is most definitely work.  But asides from all that professional networking, I have a couple of official things doing:

Firstly, and most exciting, there's the UK launch of Crown Thief at 4 PM on the Saturday.  I'll be signing with other Angry Robot authors Adam Christopher, Mike Shevdon and Gav Thorpe, and since Crown Thief isn't actually out in this country until the 4th October, it will be an opportunity to pick up an advance copy.  These will probably be worth more on e-bay in twenty years or something, so you'd be mad to miss the opportunity to pick up such a unique piece of Tallermanalia*.

Secondly, and most intimidating, I have my first solo reading at 11 AM on the Sunday morning.  This, of course, is extremely early for something like that, so it's hard to say how coherent I'll be.  I'm either going to read a new short story or an extract from Crown Thief, depending on who turns up and in what quantities they do it, so there's an exciting element of randomness there.  I might even put it to a vote if there are enough people to formulate a properly democratic decision ... so why not come along and have a say?



* A word I may have just invented.