The Book of Ballads and Sagas
I'm no longer compiling and posting a calendar; bookstores apparently
prefer to publicize events only through their own websites, and I
don't have time to run around to all of the possible sources and
collect information. I do believe that a central, complete source of
such information is important to readers, but the publicists and
bookstore owners don't seem to agree!
Tor published my first novel, The Well-Favored Man, in
hardcover in October 1993. The paperback is out of print, and has
been since sometime in the fall of 1995. This book, which was my
first applied writing, first sale, and first publication, was popular
enough among the people who care about such things to garner a
Campbell award nomination for me in 1994, which was a wonderful and
encouraging surprise. Thank you.
The title was tacked onto it in a very early draft; it had to be
called something. In rewrites, as the book changed, the
title became detached from the book, thematically, but the Tor
marketing people had bonded to it and wouldn't hear of it being
separated. Thus, if you read the book and put it down saying, ``I
don't get it,'' don't worry. I don't get it either. On this book the
usual case is reversed: the title isn't closely related to
the story, but the cover illustration (thanks, Wayne!) is!
To read the first four chapters of The
Well-Favored Man, click here.
I bought a lot of remaindered hardcovers and I'm selling them off
appallingly cheaply right here via WWW, at no profit to myself! Isn't
the net cool? Now I can not only lose time on it, I can lose money
too---but for a good cause. Click here to learn more about remainders.
Charles Vess has provided the cover illustration. The paperback is
out of print, and Tor still hasn't sent my order of the hardcovers!
Sorry.
When I get remaindered hardcovers of this one, I will be selling them
off for Amnesty.
Book production can take a long time. Authors work on other things
while their books are spasmodically making their way through the
peristalsis of publishing; I wrote most of A Sorcerer and A
Gentleman in the first completed draft during the lag between
selling The Well-Favored Man to Tor and seeing it in
print in 1993. Then I spent a long time revising.
Click here to see the first five chapters of A
Sorcerer and a Gentleman.
Another thick square book, ISBN 0-312-85784-5, with another pretty
Charles Vess cover. This third novel happened accidentally; A
Sorcerer and a Gentleman came out, in its first full finished
draft, very long (~200,000+ words) and with a pretty clear thematic
and plot division. Tor was reluctant to do it as one very large
book---honestly, it would be hard to sell a second novel that big to
readers---and I was concerned that I might not get all of the story in
there, so we agreed to divide it. The first few chapters are
loaded with spoilers for A Sorcerer and a
Gentleman, so I have taken an extract
from the middle of the story instead of the beginning.
This is a comic script I have written for Charles Vess's The Book of Ballads and
Sagas series. He has approached about a dozen writers
and asked each to write a script, based on a traditional English
ballad, for him to illustrate. The story I did is based on Child #89,
for which initial inspiration I am grateful to Greer Gilman.
I'm writing "columns" (which are emailed) and reviews for that big
online bookstore. You know the one. They haven't yet put all my
reviews in one place, nor the columns. So, here are my columns and reviews to date, a
possibly excessive dose of opinion. It's a largish document, so give
it a minute to load. NB: This doesn't include the current month's
work, but it does include work that written simply for the sake of
writing it (the technical term is "venting").
Here are long reviews of Wendy Walker's The Secret Service and
The Sea-Rabbit and an
old one of Prospero's
Books.
Logrolling in our time
Don Keller's April 1991 New York Review of Science
Fiction essay on The Manner of
Fantasy is now available electronically. Since the essay
appeared, it has been the center (Fantasy of Manners has, but also
sometimes the essay itself) of considerable debate and discussion in
auctorial and editorial circles, and I suspect many interested readers
haven't seen it. Read it and join the fray, if you will. You can also
look at my reactionary mannerism quiz and
its successor, the second mannerism
quiz. These were originally posted on GEnie's regrettably-named
"Mannerpunk" topic, in SFRT1 4/4, but as gracious heaven hath provided
that the wider world may be regaled with them, I cannot refuse the
opportunity.
The compleat GEnie discussion on "Mannerpunk" aka Fantasy of Manners
is now available in seventeen .zip-formatted files for anonymous ftp
from ftp.ai.mit.edu. If Keller's essay intrigues you and you'd like
to see trained professionals discussing the same subject, and a
thousand tangential ones, you will enjoy reading these files. The
topic appears to be moribund on GEnie.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden at Tor had
the clever idea of putting a lot of sample chapters online. (He's
also put together a Tor home page, which you can see by clicking on
"Tor" above.) You can go there and look at sample chapters from other
recent Tor books and then wander off among the other pointers.