The Outfit is Out

 I'm sure there's a pun title there I'm missing, but I'm playing catch-up here, having somehow managed to forget the release date of my own book, so it'll have to do.  Strictly speaking, the e-book and I assume the audiobook are already out as of the first of this month and the UK print edition is released today, which the US print edition should also have been, but mysterious and unforeseen factors have pushed it back a couple of weeks and it'll now be landing on the 16th.  Still, that's only a couple of weeks, right?  With everything that's going on in the world right now, it's hard to begrudge a two week delay!

As for whether or not you ought to grab a copy of The Outfit in whatever format and at whatever time, obviously that's between you and your conscience, and I'm sure there are lots of people out there who have no interest in reading the bizarre ripped-from-true-life tale of how the future Uncle Joe Stalin and his merry band of Bolshevik cutthroats pulled off one of the most outrageous open-air robberies in history, getting away with a small fortune that they then somehow how to smuggle out of a city under total lockdown and find some way to spend when the news of their misdeeds had spread through every corner of Europe.  I admit, that's the kind of cosy, everyday tale that's unlikely to rouse the more thrill-seeking of readers, but hopefully there are at least one or two people out there who can do without the excitement of chases and gunfights and explosions (okay, it has all of those too) and tolerate a few hours of musty history.  Well, if you think that might be you, here's the blurb:

Lies and double-crosses, secret police and explosions, a carriage chase, a mattress stuffed with cash and a one-eyed master of disguise…

In 1907, the revolutionary Joseph Djugashvili – who would later take the name Joseph Stalin – met with an old friend, a clerk at the Tiflis branch of the State Bank of the Russian Empire, for a glass of milk. Over talk of national pride, the spirit of the new century and Djugashvili’s poetry, they agreed the beginnings of a plan.

With the aid of the Outfit, Djugashvili’s hardened crew of “expropriators,” they would pull off the biggest, bloodiest and most daring robbery in Georgia’s history, and ruthlessly change the direction of the Bolshevik revolution forever...

The Outfit is available in e-book, audiobook, UK paperback and very soon US paperback, from all good book retailers.  And probably all bad book retailers, too, I'd imagine, but best not to buy from them, eh?

2021: I Tried to Get Out and They Held the Door

It's not as though, when I admitted around this time last year that I had no choice left except to give up on my lifelong dream of being a professional writer, I expected anyone to step in and magically fix things.  Still, there's not being disappointed and there's being fine with a situation, and I can't say I'm altogether fine with the fact that a handful of people who might, with negligible cost to themselves, have made an enormous difference, chose instead to let a year go by without lifting a finger.  The most obvious of those, of course, being my former publisher, whose inaction and disinterest have kept the fully completed fourth Black River Chronicles novel from getting out into the world, not to mention burying my also-ready-to-be-published novella Graveyard of Titans and leaving my Tales of Damasco trilogy in limbo.  Which is to say that, yes, The Black River Chronicles: Graduate or Die is no closer to ever seeing the light of day.  Not that I've altogether given up, but - especially given that my request for support from the SFWA went ignored for over ten months, and yes, I'm including them in the abovementioned 'small handful' - it's hard to see any reason to be hopeful.

Mind you, there's an argument that my biggest enemy on the writing front in 2021 was myself, since I was the one who thought it was a good idea to try and finish the book I'd begun, The Beasts of Siege City, though the project had already become an act of masochism and clearly wasn't going to get any easier.  Somehow I did indeed make it to the end, and insanely, what I was left with was some 350'000 words of novel, which is, I think, more than all three Tales of Damasco books together.  That one is even less likely to be read by anyone, since it's broken as hell, to the point where I don't know how I'd even begin to go about editing it into shape.  And if I was still writing, I think I'd be quite frustrated by that, since I know there's good stuff in there and that it might have been really good stuff if I'd come at the material when I was in a better state.

Then there's the really weird thing, which is that, for all that it was most definitely the death knell of my decade-long career as a novelist, 2021 somehow turned out to be a bloody good year for short fiction sales - arguably the best I've ever had, depending on how you juggle the numbers.  Is there some moral here?  I'd like to think it's that the short fiction side of things might be worth persevering with, except that short fiction is a bitterly awful way to make money and the prospect of going back to writing as effectively a second job isn't something I can contemplate right at the minute.  (Not that I exactly have a first job right at the minute; boy was 2021 awful in just about every conceivable way!)  Still, if all that can be said is that this short spurt of sales was a last huzzah then, whatever, I'll take that, especially since it meant getting to return to some of my favourite markets and to work once more with some of my favourite editors.

Even nicer, two of those stories would probably have been sunk if they hadn't made it into the venues I'd effectively written them for.  Where else but Mysterion would have considered the lengthy magic-realist meditation on religion and isolation that was An Exchange of Values Conducted in Good Faith?  Where else would my experimental fantasy action story Fall to Rise have fit but in Beneath Ceaseless Skies?  And while it's possible to imagine the strange little horror fable A Cold Yesterday in Late July elsewhere, there was no more perfect home for it than The Dark.  Add getting a story I'd come to suspect was unsaleable, my warped spy pastiche M.A.T.E.R Knows Best, into Distant Shore Publishing and a late-in-the-day acceptance from On Spec for my Compassion Fatigue - a personal-favourite piece that I spent years trying to shift finding a place in a 'zine I've been trying to break into for roughly as long - and then top it all off with a couple of anthology reprints and, on that single narrow front, 2021 was a total win.

And of course there's one other bit of good news, in that my delayed Rebellion novella The Outfit is out at the beginning of March, which I realise only now is all of about a month away.  So that's exciting, and something I imagine I'll be talking about quite a bit in the coming weeks, so I won't say much here besides - Joseph Stalin!  Pulling one of the biggest bank robberies in history!  To fund the Russian Revolution!  And it all really actually happened!!! 

Announcing The Outfit

 So, that bit of news I've been dropping hints on for quite some time now?  Well, today's the day I finally get to stop hinting!

Toward the back end of 2019, Rebellion editor David Thomas Moore got in touch to ask how I felt about the possibility of writing a fictionalisation of the Tiflis bank robbery.  Clearly, my first step was to learn what the heck a Tiflis bank robbery was, for which, being only human, I went straight to Wikipedia.  Roughly five seconds later, having discovered that the Tiflis bank robbery was one of the most wildly insane events ever to occur in human history, positively gawking at the fact that nobody had yet written about it and that I might conceivably get to be the one who did, I was already trying to think of ways to reword "Seriously though, when I can I start?" into something a business-savvy professional writer sort might say.

For those who didn't follow that Wikipedia link: the Tiflis bank robbery is the occasion when, on the instructions of Lenin and other high-ups in the Bolshevik command, a young Joseph Stalin led the gang of career revolutionaries he was at the time in charge of in one of the most outrageous, profitable, and bloody crimes in history.  And yes, I do mean that Joseph Stalin.  This a real thing that really happened in actual history, and when you dig beneath the surface, it only gets weirder and less plausible.  One example off the top of my head: there's a scene in the book in which Stalin recruits someone to his cause using their passion for his, Stalin's, youthful poetry.  Oh, and it takes place over a glass of milk, because milk bars were a thing in early twentieth-century Georgia.  Did I mention that this all really happened?!

The Outfit is still quite a way from release, having been put back a couple of times for the same reason that every damn thing's been put back over this last year and change, but at least, as of today, it's public knowledge and has a definite landing date.  It also has a press release, which you can read here - if you're not sold at "The Russian Revolution meets Reservoir Dogs" then I'm not sure I can help you! - and I wouldn't be surprised if there's an unveiling of the cover in the not terribly distant future.  And meanwhile, I, obviously, will be rattling on about it at every possible opportunity!