I had no idea that the Mouse House was going to buy Lucasfilm Ltd. when I started carving this bad boy. Had I known, I might have carved some mouse ears on it.
Yep, it’s big news. George Lucas gets to set a course for Easy Street strapped to a serious hyperdrive, in the form of $4 billion in cash and Disney stock.
But for everyone freaked out about the corporate takeover of a beloved icon…dude, you saw The Avengers, right?
The Daedalus Incident is a very English novel, given its fantastical take on His Majesty’s Royal Navy during the late 18th Century; the works of C.S. Forester and Patrick O’Brian were a huge influence on me. Thus, I’m pleased to report that the book is available for pre-order on Amazon.co.uk. If you’re in the U.K., give it a look!
As more pre-order sites go live, wherever they may be, I’ll be adding them here. For those of you not in the U.K., the book is available via Amazon and Barnes & Noble. If you see the book available on other sites, feel free to add comments here on the blog or flag me over on Twitter. And always remember to ask for The Daedalus Incident at your local independent bookstore!
OK, that was some excitement yesterday, what with The Daedalus Incident now available for pre-order and the unveiling of the cover and all. You know what’s distracting? Amazon sales rankings. The book doesn’t come out for another six months, but there I am, looking and going, wow, someone is actually BUYING MY BOOK.
Now that the shock and awe have worn off, I’m back to reality, which includes revising a short story, considering revisions for a second, and pondering just when I’m going to get the sequel to The Daedalus Incident off the back burner. These are, of course, good problems to have, considering that I’m a soon-to-be published novelist. Someone wants to read my fiction, and that’s a beautiful thing.
I’ve also been spending time becoming better immersed in geek culture and getting myself up to speed on what’s happening and who’s doing what. Yes, I’m a proud geek, but I also have limited time in which to geek out. I’ve had to do some refreshing. So without further ado, here are some of the sites I use to keep up to date on all things SF/F and geek, particularly those things with a literary bent.
OK…now this is getting real.
The Daedalus Incident is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble! That’s right, the book is now a Real Thing that you can purchase today. I mean, it won’t be delivered until May 7, but you can purchase it today. Be an early adopter! Tell all your friends that, yes, you were among the first. When everyone starts talking up this crazy book they heard about, the one where a sailing ship crashes into Mars, you can nonchalantly lean back and say, “Yeah, I pre-ordered it.” You are instantly cool.
I’ll be updating the blog with other vendors offering The Daedalus Incident for pre-order as I hear about them, and I also expect that the book will be available in a variety of e-book formats and, yes, audiobook as well. I would also urge you to ask about The Daedalus Incident at your local independent bookseller. Let’s keep those indie bookstores going!
Of course, all this means that we now have a final cover. Here’s a nice big version of it:
Just a quick note to tell folks that I’m participating in a “mind meld” over on SFSignal today. (Better that than the neck pinch, I say.) The topic is science fiction and fantasy on television, and there’s five of us opining on what’s good and what’s not.
I’m a big fan of SFSignal, so I’m pretty excited to have been included. They’re a great fanzine — so much so they won a Hugo Award for it. So go check out the mind meld and everything else they have to offer. It’s good stuff.
And yes, I mentioned Firefly. Someone had to.
Nestled in Harry’s Bar in the storied Helmsley Park Lane Hotel, a 21st century version of the Algonquin Round Table took place Friday afternoon. Except for the fact that it was far more geeky than the original.
A number of my fellow genre writers descended on New York this past weekend for New York Comic Con, and a few of us met at Harry’s to celebrate our recent successes. We shared a common love of science fiction and fantasy, an inordinate ability to dissect writing processes at length, and a single literary agent — the inestimable Sara Megibow — who found each of our works a creative and commercial publishing home.
Our little bubbly-fueled chat-fest included fellow scribes Mike Underwood, Steve Vera and all the way from Europe, Stefan Bachmann, among other convivial souls. We all agreed that The Phantom Menace was unworthy, that the covers of our forthcoming books were all quite exciting — and that writing short stories is a lot harder than it seems.
Will the real Mr. Sherlock Holmes please stand up? You know, the one with the deerstalker hat and the pipe?
Actually, while the hat has become iconic, it’s actually a later addition to the Holmes canon. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made Holmes a pipe smoker, an eccentric, a recreational drug user and an occasional lout, but the hat and the cloak-cape-thing were practically all Hollywood. Indeed, throughout the history of the character, he has changed and adapted with the times. And for anyone who’s writing fiction based on already established characters — historical or fictional — a look at Holmes can be instructive. It also helps that I’m something of a Holmes aficionado. So settle in for this post, dear reader.
Not exactly rockin’ it out on a Saturday night, but that’s fine. It’s raining, it’s getting colder. I just put down another thousand-plus words on the sequel to The Daedalus Incident that, admittedly, weren’t great words. However, I’m OK with that because, in writing those words, I hit on some ideas and themes that just snapped into place brilliantly.
As you likely discerned from the title, first drafts are indeed allowed to suck. That’s because the book, as a total entity, doesn’t exist yet. There’s no real basis for comparison, because that particular story hasn’t been written until the first draft is done. How do you measure the worth of something before it’s even finished?
R.J. Ellory is a British author of crime thrillers. He’s written ten novels that have sold a combined million copies, which qualifies as a major success. He’s won any number of awards, large and small, in his genre.
He also created multiple fake accounts so he could give his own books five-star reviews on Amazon.com. That, of course, would constitute a major lapse of ethical judgment. The fact that he also went on to give other crime writers one-star reviews on the same site is absolutely unforgivable.
I have a background in business journalism, and I’ve learned a lot about publishing over the last year and a half. One of my biggest takeaways is this:
Authors don’t have “rivals.”
If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll already know that I went out west for work (and some vacation time) over the past few weeks. I went with the best of writing intentions, and even pounded out two scenes and 4,000 words on the cross-country flight. Super proud of myself. After that? Nada.
Given that this was the first real vacation/work trip I’ve taken after my novel sold — and thus increasing the pressure to produce more worthy prose — I quickly discovered that writing, while a joy and a major raison d’être, is still work. And thus after a long day at the mothership office, or out seeing sights, the last thing I want to do is plug-in and pound out words.
I thought I’d take a stab at writing on the flight back, but darn it if United didn’t put us on a plane with free Video-On-Demand. Combined with the 5 a.m. wake-up call to catch the flight, The Avengers were too tempting to resist. And after that, I decided to give John Carter a whirl to see what all the (largely negative) fuss was about. I hadn’t seen either before the flight.
The verdict? The Avengers was a paint-by-numbers summer blockbuster, but the people who did the painting had Picasso-level skill. John Carter struck me as a film that wanted to be far more than typical sci-fi fare, but fell short of that lofty goal on a number of fronts. And as a writer in the middle of the follow-up to his debut novel, it got me thinking about what makes a story click, and what makes it miss.
