Everything I Have Out On Audible

It struck me recently that I have an awful lot of books available on Audible, and that maybe people don't realise just how many of my books are on there, since I myself didn't, or indeed that almost everything of any length that I've written is out in at least some kind of audio format, (as is a good chunk of my short fiction, but that's probably another post!)  And what got me thinking about this is that my collection The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories, recently released in a rather nice CD pack by studio Circle of Spears, is also now out there in download format.  But more on that in a minute!  Because there's all this other stuff what I wrote too...

The Bad Neighbour

Honestly, I haven't even received a copy of this one - in fairness, I only got round to asking today! - but I have heard a sample of Paul Tyreman's reading and he's certainly a terrific fit.  I do believe he's from Leeds, if the internets aren't misleading me, and if he isn't then he certainly does a damn fine impression of a Yorkshire accent.  Anyway, what else can I say about The Bad Neighbour?  It's my newest book, my first foray into crime-writing, and I'd love for more people to be experiencing it in whatever manner they see fit.  A recent review that described it as Northern Noir pretty much hit the nail on the head, so if that sounds like your sort of thing, or if you just fancy what that same review described as "a well-written and cleverly imagined crime thriller with a knife-sharp edge" then why not give it a go?

Giant Thief, Crown Thief and Prince Thief

I've often joked that my perfect reader for the Damasco books would have been Inigo Montoya actor Mandy Patinkin, and okay, I wasn't really joking, he would be perfect.  But in the absence of Mandy Patinkin, my second choice would have been James Langton, because that's who I got and he absolutely owned it.  Listening to James elevate Easie Damasco's adventures and make them more witty and charming than my writing alone ever could was my first inkling that I was going to be pretty damn lucky with narrators, and so it's consistently proved.

Patchwerk

There's basically only one occasion when I get to listen to audiobooks, and that's when I go on holiday somewhere in the UK and have a really long drive to get through.  So it was that poor Patchwerk languished for years waiting for a suitable break, and finally got the attention it deserved this summer, when I went kayaking for a friend's birthday.  Anyway, nobody really needed to know that!  But it explains why I didn't get more excited by this at the time, because it really is an exciting adaptation.  Patchwerk's reality-hopping was a heck of a challenge for any narrator, and Tim Gerard Reynolds goes well beyond the call of duty, adopting a fresh (and reliably convincing!) accent for each section.  Honestly, it's so much fun to listen to, and I can't believe I haven't gone on about it more before now.

The Black River Chronicles: Level One

Another one that I haven't had a listen to, though it's entirely my fault this time; in the absence of a CD version, I'm yet to figure out a way to get through it in the car, with it's lovably old-school technology.  But I really do need to figure something out, in part because Alan Ross is my first (and so far last) American reader and that's sort of exciting in itself, but mostly because - and I'm probably not allowed to announce this, but what the heck, right? - there's an adaptation of The Ursvaal Exchange on the way in the not-too-distant future, and you can only get so far behind on listening to your own series.

The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories

And here we are, back to where we started, with The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories and Tracey Norman and Sam Burns of Circle of Spears Productions doing an absolutely splendid job of bringing my first short story collection to life.  I talked about it a fair bit recently here, and there's not a great deal to add, except perhaps that of all my books I think this is the one that's gained the most from the translation into audio.  And, given that it's coming from a smaller outfit rather than the likes of Angry Robot, Tor or Flame Tree, I guess also the most worthy of support!  So despite appearing at the end of the list, maybe this is the place to start?

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.

2016: A is for Andrei Rublev, B is for Babymetal, C is for Cat Sisters

So, I've blogged already about what fiction I had out in 2016 - a novel, a short story collection in both paperback and hardback, a novella and the first issue of a comic book miniseries - and I've got to say, I'm hellaciously proud of all that.  I had some work out last year that I'm seriously pleased with, long, short and in-between, and that's no small thing.  Frankly, if 2016 had just been about the writing I had published then it would have been an infinitely better experience.

Now, it seems petty to grumble about a year when almost everything seemed to go wrong for almost everyone, but boy was that a rotten twelve months, practically from start to finish.  Sickness and surgery, professional setbacks, insurance nightmares, house problems, money worries, family health scares - it was just nonstop.  And even the publishing stuff, which looks impressive on the face of things, wasn't so good in practice.  Almost all of 2016's short story acceptances, for example, actually belonged to submissions made in the tail end of 2015.  Even then, it would have proved a high watermark year for sales had a small publisher by the name of Time Alone Press not reneged on the $300 they owed me, having strung me and sixty or so other folks along for more than a year.

But that's a subject we'll return to when I have more time, and also the extent of my complaining, because in time-honoured tradition (my own, established all of a couple of years ago) I want to take this opportunity to list a few of the good things that happened in what history's probably going to end up calling Year Zero or something equally portentous.

- Thanks to Ian Sales, I got back into world cinema in a big way.  There have been amazing directors making amazing films all around the planet for, like, a century now.  Who knew?  Well, lots of people, obviously, me included, but I'd drifted into some awfully lazy film-watching habits and I'm immensely glad to have drifted back out.  Again, largely thanks to Sales and his pernicious influence (and gifting of surplus DVD box sets) I've been bingeing on works by people like Haneke, Herzog, Kieslowski and Tarkovsky, as well as discovering many a new director I'd never heard of and rediscovering some old favourites from my days as a shut-in cinephile teenager.

- Same goes for music.  This has been something I've been experimenting with ever since I started
writing full-time, really, but 2016 was the year when my tastes got distinctly strange.  From J-Pop to Trance to Post-rock to African Blues, I feel comfortable in saying that my listening over the last twelve months has been on the eclectic side, and that I now have a pretty interesting CD collection - if only in the sense of that ancient Chinese curse, "May you have an interesting CD collection."

- I'm steadily getting back into shape.  I hope to have a crack at a Fells marathon later in the year, because, why not?  Okay, there are plenty of reasons why not, and they all start with "Hey, Tallerman, you do realise that running a marathon over actual wilderness is probably going to kill you?"  But let us not think too much of such reasons, or I'll bottle it before I ever get started.

- The benefit of having non-stop house problems and spending an inordinate amount of money I couldn't afford is that the house I bought five or so years ago as little more than a brick shell - sans heating, carpets, a shower, or much of anything else - is now finished.  Oh, sure, there are jobs I still want to do, it's probably in the nature of a more-than-a-hundred-years-old house that there's eternal scope for improvement, but all told it's a nice home these days.  And somehow the staggering amounts of work that have gone into the place only make it feel more special.

- And, as anyone who's even glanced at the blog will probably have noticed, I've been having a great deal of fun with the nineties anime watching.  That's drawing towards an end now, I think, partly for the reason that I've absolutely exhausted what can be reasonably found and partly because, let's face it, there are limits to the amount of nineties anime that any one human being can watch before they start to expect giant robots and tentacle beasts around every corner.

- And then there's the big - the very big, and the actually book-related - news.  Which is that, as of about a week ago, I've signed a contract for another novel.  If you're following my career even slightly then you can probably guess what it is, but the official announcement will be along very soon.  My promise to myself was that if I didn't have money coming in at the end of this third year of writing full-time then that would be the end of the experiment.  But I do, and it isn't.  This is, on a personal level, one hell of a thing.

Whatever global catastrophes await in 2017, I can't imagine that it's exactly going to be an easy year for me personally.  By no means have I made it, whatever the hell that would mean.  But I get to keep doing the job I like most and think I'm best suited to, and that surely has to count for something.  And I'll have at least one new book out.  This is exciting stuff, and definite forward progress!

Books Out in 2016

So, to clarify, this is most definitely not one of those "stuff eligible for awards" posts that have been kicking about, because I don't do those.  I was raised to believe that if you have to ask for something then that something isn't worth having, which is probably why no one ever gives me anything and I get dirty looks in the queues at sandwich shops.

Wait, that's not true.  Well, maybe the bit about sandwich shops.  Still ... not an awards eligibility post.  More a "2016 was a rough old year and I could do to remind myself that I accomplished a few things" post.  And while, between you and me, it was all down to timing and weird luck and coincidence and I certainly wouldn't have chosen to have four (three and a half?) books come out in one year, it's definitely a thing that's happened.

Patchwerk

The first - but by no means the last - of my longer works to get a bit experimental, Patchwerk was a big old risk, and one that in retrospect I only took because my brain was at that time just as exploded as its reality-skipping, genre-hopping, gender-flipping, rules-ignoring narrative.  It was a tough book to write on any number of levels, born out of a particularly difficult time, and in retrospect it's kind of amazing that, somehow, I not only got it finished but managed to sell it to the impressive Tor.com, as one of first titles in their then fairly new novella line-up.

Sadly, that was as far as the very good news went.  Despite some strong reviews, Patchwerk hasn't altogether found its audience, and Tor.com declined the follow-up novella I wrote for them, which is if anything weirder, wilder and more ambitious.  Here's hoping I can find a home for it elsewhere in 2017, because I do like writing these novella things and I'd hate to have to give up on the format.

The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories

Thanks to the ruptures and shenanigans at Spectral Press that took up such a disproportionate amount of my attention in 2015, I was more or less certain that my much-delayed debut short story collection would never happen - until it did, thanks to Michael Wills and Digital Fiction Publishing.  And Michael proved to be an absolute powerhouse, picking up a stalled project and kicking it into life in what felt like no time at all.

Which was awesome, undoubtedly.  Still, there was no way the deluxe hardback edition I'd dreamed of, the one that would really showcase the fabulous art Duncan Kay had produced, would happen - until Ian Whates and NewCon Press stepped in and suddenly we were talking about the most ridiculously lavish hardback I could have imagined.  That both editions have made it comfortably into profit is the icing on an already icy cake.  Now to figure out how to make the audiobook happen...


The Black River Chronicles: Level One

The jewel in the crown of my 2016, I'm still a little in awe of the fact that Level One is out there and finding readers at a rate of knots; thanks to my collaboration with Michael Wills, this book sprang from nowhere and then snowballed, going from conception to release in somewhat less than a year.

The result is a book I'm terrifically proud of, and one I could never have come up with on my own.  At a point when my own projects were getting increasingly dour, Michael's input and concepts were a handy reminder that books could be cool, fun, exciting things.  And I don't think it's a stretch to say that that's precisely what Level One ended up being: cool, fun and exciting, with the warmest heart of anything I've written and characters I fell in love with almost from the moment we came up with them.  That readers seem to be finding our party of hopeless heroes-in-training pretty lovable as well is a huge relief.


C21st Gods #1

Another book that spent so long in development hell that I'd essentially given up on it by the time it finally shuddered into life, C21st Gods found its artist and publisher pretty much simultaneously - and suddenly my poor, deceased comic book project was alive and kicking.  And not only that but the publisher was Rosarium, one of the boldest, most exciting indy presses out there, and the artist was Anthony Summey, who turned out to be the perfect fit: not many people could nail both the horror and science-fiction elements of a comic that's called C21st Gods for very good reasons.

Those reasons are going to become a great deal more apparent this year, when we get to the second two issues of the mini-series and start drifting further away from Lovecraft pastiche and nearer to - well, talking a little more about the twenty-first century, I suppose, its gods and its horrors.  But in the meantime, issue #1 is definitely the place to start, what with it being the first issue and everything.

-oOo-

I suppose that, while we're hear, it would be remiss not to mention the short stories I had out in 2016 - especially given that, now that I add it all up, 2016 was a heck of a good year for short fiction coming out.  New stories-wise, I had (in no particular order) my Lovecraftian military horror Great Black Wave in Nightmare, dark fantasy tale The Magpie of Souls in Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, weird SF story Team Invasion at Liminal, my crime debut Step Light in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, and more horror in the impressive Mysterion anthology (Golgotha) and the most recent issue of Pantheon magazine (Knock, Knock.)  As for reprints, those were split nearly between Digital Fiction Publishing - Dancing in the Winter Rooms, Passive Resistance and Black Horticulture - and exciting new market Great Jones Street, who took Jenny's Sick, Great Black Wave, Ill-Met at Midnight and A Killer of Dead Men.

Phew!  That turned out to be more of a list than I remembered.  Okay, I feel a little better about 2016 now.

But only a little.

Patchwerk News and Reviews

It's hard to believe that it's been more than a month since Patchwerk came out; it seems like it happened last week.  Mostly for that reason, I've been a bit remiss in talking about it here, and also completely oblivious to just how much me and other people were talking about it elsewhere.

There have, for instance, been quite a lot of reviews.  And the vast majority have been positive, too; all except one, in fact, which - and I swear I'm not making this up - I now can't find.  Anyway, what's perhaps more important is that the general response seems to be varying between quite and very positive.  For example, Publisher's Weekly suggested that Patchwerk "throws open a surreal and suspenseful hall of science fiction mirrors, and readers will enjoy watching Florrian smash through them all."  SF Bluestocking, despite a few reservations, described it as "a complete and mostly pleasant surprise" and an "an interestingly experimental work".  We The Nerdy gave up half way through their first reading and then revisited it, but still felt that Patchwerk was "a pretty fun little scifi story with solid action and a likeable protagonist" and still gave it 7.5 out of 10.

Back on a definitely positive note, SF Signal said that "it’s no small feat to write about the multiverse without confusing the reader, but Tallerman manages to do just that. I love the detailed “worlds” that each iteration inhabits, and not only is it an exciting read, the characters, which could have been two dimensional in order to facilitate the story, are more than that."  Elsewhere, Skiffy and Fanty suggested that "Tallerman does a great job of both narrowing the scope of the conflict ... and ... making it seem that the scope of the conflict is limitless. It’s an excellent balancing act", while Strange Alliances felt that "the story works extremely well but only because of David Tallerman’s competence as an author to keep it all together and continue to intrigue."  (Aw!)  Black Girl Nerds had a couple of issues but nevertheless felt that Patchwerk was "a very interesting read" and The Exploding Spaceship concluded that "Tallerman does an excellent riff on a clichéd plot device by turning it on its head. It is a very cleverly written and plotted story."  Overall, though, my favourite quote has to be from Megan Leigh's in-depth review at Pop-verse - that "...this is what science fiction writing should be."

Although, Andrew Knighton's claim that Patchwerk is the anti-Sliders comes a close second.

Elsewhere, I've been talking a great deal about the book - or in a couple of cases, failing entirely to talk about it.  On that note there were my two Tor.com blog posts, one of which involved praising Ian Sales's splendid conclusion to his Apollo Quartet, All That Outer Space Allows, and the other of which descended into my usual compulsive airing of my obsession with nineties anime!  At least I managed to stay on topic at SF Signal, talking about some of my favourite reality-bending genre fiction in an article titled Teasing the Seams of Reality.  I've also done a few interviews, swapping thoughts with My Bookish Ways about a whole bunch of stuff and settling once and for all with Andy Knighton who would win in a fight between Tolkien and Asimov.  (Hint: it wouldn't be Tolkien.)  I also did one of those old-style talky interviews with Mahvesh Murad of Midnight in Karachi, which once again ending up going spectacularly off-topic and, thanks to my crummy laptop, sounds like I was talking from the bottom of a well.

So if you haven't picked up a copy of Patchwerk yet, there's plenty of information out there to help you decide whether it's worth a look.  (It totally is.)  Or, if you wanted to wait, in a couple of weeks the fourth Tor.com bundle will be out, containing not only Patchwerk but Emily Foster's The Drowning Eyes and Matt Wallace's Lustlocked.  Alternatively, if you're really quick, you can win Patchwerk, along with all three Damasco books, here.  (Admittedly, at time of posting you have all of three hours!)  Lastly, you can always just buy it the old fashioned way - from Amazon UK here or Amazon US here.

On a final note ... it may seem like a small thing, but reviews in places like Amazon and Goodreads can make all the difference between a book's success or failure, and whether I get to keep writing for a living depends in great part upon how well this little book does.  So if you've read and enjoyed Patchwerk then please think about taking a minute to slap up a review somewhere.  Trust me, every bit helps.

Patchwerk is Out! Reality Explodes!

Patchwerk is finally out!  Woo!

I mean, it will be tomorrow - that is, Tuesday the 19th of January.  My first novella, my first time working with the mighty Tor.com - fingers crossed it won't be the last - and, now that I think about it, my first published long-form work of science fiction.  Not that science fiction is precisely what Patchwerk is.  But it's certainly what it starts as.  Or is that saying too much?

An admission: it's very hard to talk about Patchwerk even slightly without spoilering it.  The thing is, it starts out as one thing and ... but, no, better if you don't know that.  You might just have to take my word on this one.

Or - hey! - here's the blurb, with actual information in it:

Fleeing the city of New York on the TransContinental atmospheric transport, Dran Florrian is traveling with Palimpsest - the ultimate proof of a lifetime of scientific theorizing.

When a rogue organization attempts to steal the device, however, Dran takes drastic action.

But his invention threatens to destroy the very fabric of this and all other possible universes, unless Dran - or someone very much like him-can shut down the machine and reverse the process.

So, basically, all of reality is at stake, and it's up to scientist / super-spy Dran Florrian (or, as the cover points out, a potential infinitude of people an awful lot like him) to put things back together again, before a revolutionary invention with a mind of its own and the keys to all of creation does something that everyone might regret.

Is that any clearer?

If not then perhaps some of the interviews, articles and whatnot that are out or coming up will shed some useful light.  Though, I fear, probably not, because I've been being purposefully vague there too.  In fact, I largely used the first of my articles with Tor.com to witter on about nineties anime some more, and managed not to mention Patchwerk once.  My article on my favourite works that deal with plastic and alternate realities, up at SF Signal,  is a lot more revealing, but even then only if you read between the lines a little.  Perhaps the interviews I have coming up will prove more enlightening.  Or hopefully all of this vagueness will somehow persuade you that you should a) pick up a copy of Patchwerk and find out what's going on for yourself and b) that you should come to it with as little foreknowledge as possible.  And to end on a serious note, if you are planning to buy a copy then those early sales are absolutely crucial, so please, don't delay!  I mean, who knows if reality will still be here tomorrow...

2015: Lukewarm Catastrophe, Moderate Triumph

Well, I've left this rather late, haven't I?  But part of the reason for that, I think, is that I hate being vague and there's a disproportionate amount of news this year that I can't, for one reason and another, share here.

So, for example, all I can say about the beginning of the year is that something very bad indeed happened, something that threw all of my plans into chaos and had (has) the potential to end my writing career for good.  Many of those reading this, I imagine, will already know what I'm talking about, but my instinct is to not discuss a problem of such magnitude until I've managed to solve it once and for all - as, frustratingly, I still haven't almost a year later.

It seems like the rest of 2015 has been a struggle to crawl out from the shadow of that one event - if only due to the vast amount of extra work it's generated.  Nor did it help that the two projects I'd hoped to have out this year, my debut collection The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories and C21st Gods, both ran into problems outside of my control that left them drastically delayed.   Things even dried up on the short fiction sales front for a long spell in the first half of the year, and by the summer the situation was looking bleak indeed.

Which is about all of the bad news, because since then things have picked up dramatically.  Certainly those short story sales finally materialized, and in a veritable flood; 2015 turned out to be my most profitable year for short fiction yet, and by quite a margin.  There were return sales to Nightmare and Beneath Ceaseless Skies (A Killer of Dead Men, out now!), a couple of Digital Science Fiction anthologies, and that gorgeous collection from Flame Tree Publishing, amongst numerous other highlights.

As for work done, I'm about on schedule, and although it doesn't feel like it somehow, I've definitely produced more than in 2014 by quite some margin.  My medieval detective fantasy White Thorne is finished in first draft, and post-apocalyptic superhero noir The Uplifted is a couple of weeks off being at the same stage.  Between those two I managed to wedge in another sci-fi novella, Graveyard of Titans, and a handful of short stories, to a total count of somewhere around 300'000 words.  I also did considerably more editing, with the final draft of To End All Wars completed way back in January, and Degenerates and my first attempt at a crime novel The Bad Neighbour both going through their second and third drafts.

Now here we are and it's a whole new year.  Looking back, I enjoyed 2015 rather a lot; it may have seen only mixed success on the writing front, but in general my life got substantively better, as I settled into my new existence back in the north of England and starting putting down some roots.  Which, ugh, sounds kind of weird now that I read over it ... but what I mean to say is, I made new friends and got back in touch with old ones, whilst also finally finishing off my house and finding time to expand my hobbies and social life a little.  None of which probably sounds like a big deal, but when you've spent more than half a decade of your life knowing you'd likely be moving to yet another part of the country within a few months, a little stability goes a long way.

And at least a few definitely positive things are going to happen in 2016.  I'm already thrilled for the release of my debut novella Patchwerk from Tor.com in a little under two weeks from now - especially since the early reception has been strong.  The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories should be out from Spectral at around the same time, and if it isn't then I have plans in place that will hopefully ensure that it still sees the light of day sooner rather than later.  C21st Gods has a new artist tenuously attached, and there's a good chance there'll be at least an issue or two of that out before year's end.  And then there's my biggest bit of news - and the other major thing I can't talk about.  I suppose I can safely so that I've sold a new novel on pitch, that I'm going to be writing it between now and May, and that there's a solid likelihood it will be out before the end of the year.  Needless to say, this is hugely exciting for any number of reasons, but the one that I keep coming back to is that it's relaxed some of the financial strain I'm under; I now have actual income, at least for a while, and that fact alone is enough to make 2016 a much more hopeful place than 2015 ever was.

Patchwerk Covered

As is the way, my going on holiday was an excuse for all of the news to happen all at the same time, and it'll be a while before I get up to date on everything that's been going on.  But let's start with the big - nay, huge! - announcement: Patchwerk, my Tor.com novella due out in January of next year, finally has a cover, and it's a sight to behold.

So here, behold!

Gorgeous, right?  That's by the remarkable Mr Tommy Arnold, and you can find more of Tommy's artwork here ... trust me, your eyes will thank you, and then giggle to each other in a hugely disconcerting fashion.

While I won't say too much about what's actually going on in that cover, because we're still the better part of three months away from release, I will point out that those five characters there have one thing in common other than their snazzy matching white jackets.  Which is that they're all the same person.  Because - yes! - sometimes all you need is an infinite number of heroes.  And sometimes all you have to hand is one person and all of space and time.

I trust that's cleared things up?  Either way, you can find the official Tor.com announcement, with details of the rest of their January release line-up and a couple more absolutely stunning covers, here.  And before I go, here's the text-free version, since - as galling as it is to admit - sometimes things do look more awesome without my name on them:

Patchwerk Sold to Tor.com

As is the way of publishing, I've been dancing around some big news for the last few weeks, until stars were sufficiently in alignment and ducks were appropriately in rows; but now the official announcement has been made, and I'm in the clear to say that Tor.com have picked up my debut novella, Patchwerk.  Which is all sorts of brilliant news, because - well, because Tor.com, for crying out loud.  Another one of my dream publishers ticked off the list, is what I'm saying.

It also means I get to work with my Angry Robot editor Lee Harris again, and to be part of a line-up that includes - as you would expect from Tor.com - some of the best authors writing today.  I'm particularly geeking out to have my name in a list that also includes Mr Paul Cornell, one of my absolutely favourite creators, not to mention writer of brilliant graphic novel introductions.  And on a personal level, it means a lot to me for a whole host of other reasons too.  It's my first sale of a longer work since the Damasco novels, and since I went full time; in that sense, it's huge reassurance for the future.  By the same measure, Patchwerk was the fruit of a tough year, and as such absorbed that bit more blood, sweat and tears than it's slender thirty thousand words might suggest.  Writing Patchwerk also pushed me well outside my comfort zone, and I had to up my game accordingly; so that it's been picked up by my first choice of publisher feels like a vindication.  Once I invent time travel I now know that I can go back to my self of two years ago and let me know that it will all be worth it - whilst at the same time, of course, passing on a few choice lottery numbers and the secret of time travel, so that I can share it will all of my earlier selves too...

Oh, and speaking of irresponsibly mad science, Patchwerk has a whole lot of that going on.  My protagonist Dran Florrian is exactly the kind of guy who would invent a time machine to tip himself off about his own future, with all the inevitable awfulness that would involve.  Only what he's actually done is to create a reality-emulating machine called Palimpsest, which as it turns out is probably that bit worse.  Creating a device that copies aspects of other multiversal realities onto your own is, in fact, about as bad as an idea can be, however many safety checks you might build into it.  At least it is if said device has a mind of its own, and especially so if you let it fall into the wrong hands...

Which, I should mention, is only the beginning of Patchwerk, and from there things get much, much stranger.  And that's all I'm going to say for the moment, because spoilers of course, but also because it's tentatively due out some time early in 2016 and I'll no doubt be talking about it a whole lot more between now and then.

2014: Year One

I'm pretty certain I've never put as much weight of expectation on a year as I did 2014.

I mean, as the year when I gave up my old, safe career in IT for my new, hazardous career in professional Authoring, the pressure on these last twelve months has been absurd.  Almost all of it self-imposed, it has to be said, because everyone I know without exception has been completely supportive; but for my own sanity, I needed to know for sure that I had a chance of making this thing work and that I hadn't just driven my life off a cliff in some fit of self-delusion.  Not only that but my health, social life, home and pretty much everything else were in shabby condition indeed at the start of the year, and I wasn't about to let them stay that way for a day longer than I had to.

That basically left me fighting on three fronts.  I had to produce enough work, and enough of an increase over what I'd been able to do around a full-time day job, to feel like I'd done the right thing; I needed to try and sell some stuff if at all possible, since otherwise I'd be that bit closer to running out of money; and somewhere amidst all of that I needed to sort out basically all of the rest of my life.

I won't dwell too much on that last one, except to say that things are vastly better now than they were twelve months ago.  And number two, that's kind of tricky to quantify, so we'll come back to it.  But as for getting the work done, yeah, that's definitely been a success.  Frankly, I even shocked myself a bit.  After years of making grand plans only to have them sabotaged by cold, hard reality, it was easy to assume I was expecting far too much.  I wanted to get drafts down of three novels: World War One-set Sci-Fi novel To End All Wars, post-apocalyptic thriller (and part-rewrite of earlier project War For Funland) Degenerates and my first hesitant step into Crime writing, The Bad Neighbour.  On top of that, I wanted to finish a few short stories, comics and such, and I had a great deal of research to get through.  With all of that ahead, and however much it looked doable on paper, I couldn't but go in with the assumption that I was basically doomed to failure.

So to be sitting here with everything I wanted done done is a strange feeling.  Beyond the fact of having it all finished, and given that Degenerates ended up being such a strange hybrid of revamping and reinventing my unfinished second novel War For Funland, it's difficult to put an exact number on how much I wrote in 2014; but guesstimating that half of Degenerates was essentially new work, I'd say I've produced about 260'000 words of new novels, plus some 55'000 of shorter work over seven short stories, one comic and a novelette.  With the second draft of To End All Wars, two redrafts of my first novella Patchwerk and much polishing work on some of some older stories, I'd be surprised if I've done less than 200'000 words of editing on top of that.  All of which is heartening, because it means I can comfortably write and edit two novels a year, plus a few other bits and pieces, and I figure - based on little real evidence - that that's about what I need to be doing to make some kind of a living.

Which brings us neatly to the topic of selling things.  On that front, things were going appallingly until late in the year, and though I hadn't expected much (I had no novels to pitch, after all) I'd still hoped to do much better off short fiction than I did.  That never entirely turned around, but a few other things - arguably much more exciting things - did come together in the eleventh hour.

First up, I have a buyer agreed for Patchwerk.  I can't say who yet, but I can say that they were my absolutely first choice and are a publisher I'm hugely excited to be working with.  Both of which are also true for my graphic novel C21st Gods, which went from a long-talked about dream project between myself and artist Duncan Kay to a concrete reality, by such a bizarre chain of events that it's a story in itself, and one I'll probably share here in the not-too-distant future.  Then lastly - and the one thing I can officially announce - there came the contract signing on my long-gestating short story collection The War of the Rats and Other Tales, which will be coming out from my absolutely favourite Horror small press, Spectral, in August of this year.

With three major projects and a ton of short fiction scheduled for the next twelve months, I'm starting 2015 in a stronger position than I ever anticipated.  And as if that wasn't enough, the belated discovery that Working Tax Credit is a thing has put my financial situation on a less tenuous footing than I expected it would be at this point.  With To End All Wars almost ready to go out and both Degenerates and The Bad Neighbour hopefully to be finished before the end of the year, the question now becomes, can I sell novels too?  And, perhaps the even bigger question, can I do it for enough money to live off?

Well, who the hell knows, right?  But at least I'm looking forward to trying, and twelve months ago I never thought I'd be saying that.

Six Months In

I've actually been working permanently as a writer for about seven and a half months now ... but I tend to discount that first month and a half before Christmas since I mostly spent it allowing myself some slack and addressed some lingering health problems, so by my reckoning it's basically been six months since I began writing full time.

Sadly this is not a cake I made myself to celebrate.

It's been, on the whole, a good six months.  But for a tough relationship break-up and a vicious bought of flu and the fact that you don't go from being physically and emotionally wrecked to joyously happy and Zenishly calm overnight, it might even have been a great six months.  But you know what, good is okay.  Good is, in fact, pretty good.  And I'm glad to say that the personal stuff is much improved: I've finally finished the interminable-seeming work on my sort-of-recently-purchased house; I've been learning and relearning all those life skills that working two jobs pushed to the sidelines; I've been repairing my health, rediscovering neglected friends, even starting to think about actual hobbies.  And most importantly, I've been writing five days a week, writing and editing and researching and blogging and submitting and keeping on top of e-mail, doing all those jobs that fall under the banner of Writer and being able to enjoy it all again.  Like any job it's had its off days, but the good ones have been by far the majority, and given what I gave up and gambled to do this it would have been pretty devastating if that weren't the case.

The upshot of all that is that I've written one and a half new books.  Almost exactly, in fact: To End All Wars is finished in first draft and The Novel Formerly Known as "War For Funland" is well past the fifty thousand word mark.  Add to that a comic and half a dozen short stories and I've produced nigh on 200'000 words, which is somewhere around three times my output of last year or just under twice that of the year before.  At the six month mark.  And most of it, I think, is as good as or better than anything I've done up until now.  I've also redrafted my first novella Patchwerk, thirty thousand words worth, and worked through about the same in short fiction.  And research-wise I've plowed through some twenty books, something I could never have even conceived of when writing was a second job.  I've done everything I'd hoped to get done and maybe a touch more, and while I'm definitely keeping busy it's rarely felt like a slog.

So that's it for the first six months.  Between now and Christmas I'd like to finish The Novel Formerly Known as "War For Funland" - god I'm so bored of calling it that, it's called Degenerates now, okay there I've said it!  I'd also like to get most of the way through an initial draft of my first Crime novel, currently under the working title of The Bad Neighbour.  At the same time I need a chapter plan of novel number seven ready by the end of December, which means figuring out an actual plot, which means a hell of a lot of research into both witchcraft and the Middle Ages.  Then there's the second draft of To End All Wars, a few more short stories, and ... well, whatever else comes up.  Even us obsessive planners can only obsessively plan so much.

The conclusion, if it isn't obvious by now, is that I'm not regretting my hazardous leap out of full time employment and into full time writing.  Right now I feel that even if it fails I still won't regret it.  I've wanted to do this since I was a kid, I understand now how badly I needed to do it, and now I am, and as I think I mentioned somewhere up there, it's good.

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.

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.