In the meantime, I want to tell you about the AMAZING job Graphic Audio has done in bringing The Warded Man to life as an audio dramatization.

I’ve spoken before about my audiobooks, particularly the fantastic work done by Pete Bradbury in his unabridged readings of The Warded Man and The Desert Spear. I love those books and listen to them all the time when I want to refresh myself on story details before writing new sections.

But Graphic Audio has done something completely different, and unlike most anything on the market today. They have produced The Warded Man like an old school radio play, with a narrator, voice actors, sound effects, and music. The result is really amazing. The cast is fantastic, producing some really stellar performances with fabulous accents. Some of the scenes, like those where Leesha and Bruna verbally fence with each other, make me cackle with glee, and Arlen’s performance just soars.

Also wonderful are the sound effects, particularly the individually crafted sounds for each breed of demon, and the way the song lyrics in the book were set to music. You get to actually hear Keerin sing!

You can check out part 1 (0f 2) here:

The Warded Man, Pt. 1 (of 2)

I just received the MP3′s of part 2 for review today, so it should be available shortly! Thanks to everyone who worked so hard on this project!

Production credits:

Directed by: Johann Dettweiler

Starring: Richard Rohan, Terence Aselford, Colleen Delany, Delores King Williams, Elizabeth Jernigan, James Lewis, Christopher Graybill, Nick De Pinto, Thomas Penny, Steven Carpenter, Michael Glenn, Eric Messner, Joe Brack, Mort Shelby, Ken Jackson, Michael John Casey and Joseph Thornhill

Book Adapted for GraphicAudio by: Johann Dettweiler

Dialogue Editor: Johann Dettweiler

Sound Designers: Johann Dettweiler

Additional Redshirts by: The Dead Giveaways

Original Artwork by: Lauren Cannon

Producers: Richard Rohan and Duane Beeman

Executive Producer: Anji Cornette

I know, I know. That makes me seem like a grumpy old man shaking his cane at the world, but it’s really true.

Just discovered a subfolder of my facebook mail called “other”, which has been quietly accruing mail since 2008, unbeknownst to me. Apparently they are messages from pages I have “liked” or ones sent via my author page(s). Just found a crapload of fanmail there, and feel like a total heel that it has gone unanswered. Sigh.

This isn’t the first such occurrence. The same thing happened a couple weeks ago when I logged into goodreads for the first time in a while and discovered a glitch that was holding back a slew of e-mail notifications about fan messages I had received there. Or the once every six months I log into MySpace. Or Deviantart. And hell, I can’t even remember the last time I logged in to LibraryThing or BookArmy. Kinda scared to at this point (update: Bookarmy has apparently since mutated into something called Authonomy). I am pretty good about keeping up with twitter and now google+, and I thought I was decent with facebook, but apparently not.

Social media has become so fractured that it is becoming unwieldy and in many ways defeating its own purpose, which is unity (and as Kaji tells us in the Evejah, “Unity is worth any price in blood.”). Just keeping up with the platforms eats up SO much time that could (and let’s face it, probably SHOULD) be spent writing more books.

Something needs to be done about it. I don’t mind using all these services—any way for me to connect with readers is a wonderful thing I am happy to take advantage of—but I need a single interface for it all, both to send and receive. Whoever invents that app or whatever will be my hero. Otherwise, things will continue to unintentionally get lost in the shuffle, like when I post something to twitterface and forget to put it on google+. Back in the day, the single interface was my email. Then it was this blog, then twitterface, but the advent of so many other forums has changed that, and maybe not for the better. I don’t know.

What I do know is that I need a new assistant to help me keep up. Rebecca was wonderful, but she is now a hotshot at Science Fiction Book Club. I was sorry to see her go, but she, you know, deserves a living wage and health insurance, so I had no choice but to give her the glowing reference she deserved. I need to find someone in or about Brooklyn who can help keep my social net from fracturing further, mail out books and bookplates, run contests, moderate my web forum, update my website and various fan pages, plan my convention travel/calendar, and make sure my wardrobe is appropriately nerd chic.

Been meaning to do a job posting on the appropriate (fractured) employment forums, but… busy.

Got that pesky Daylight War to worry about. I will blog an update on that one of these days.

In the meantime, if you have sent me a message, ever, and not gotten a reply, I am really sorry about that. Honest word.

But I just got this awesome box of Brayan’s Gold samples from Subterranean Press and they are so damn gorgeous I want to give some away. Dani is busy with the baby, so it’s me or nothing. What’s an author to do? Deny his readers the chance to win such a prize plum? Bah. I just need to do something quick.

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to come up with a contest idea. This blog has such an amazing history of cool and creative contests that I am hesitant to suggest anything that might be lame by comparison, and I’m not ready just yet to retread the classics like Fan Art, Take a Picture with a Book, and Haiku Review just yet.

I was lamenting my struggle on my twitter feed (see also Tweephole, on the top right of this page), when I got a great suggestion:

@darkmobius @PVBrett first one can go to person who comes up with best contest.

Done and done.

So. Come up with the idea for my next contest in the comments section of this blog, and I will send you a signed copy of Brayan’s Gold.

A few parameters:

1. Keep the bar for entry low. The last contest was somewhat labor-intensive, and while that yielded incredibly awesome results, I want this next one to be something as inclusive as possible. Brayan’s Gold is a limited edition book, rare and somewhat pricey, so there should be an even playing field to win a copy. You may be a skilled pottery glazer and think and warded pottery contest would be awesome (and now that I think of it, it would) but I’d like this contest to be something most anyone could participate in with minimal investment of time or money.
2. The contest should encourage creative fun entries I can post on the blog.
3. I reserve the right to use other suggestions for future contests without sending out a book every time.

READYSETGO!

I wanted to do right by those people, but the idea of getting a PO Box so they could send me their books, and then signing them and mailing them back sounded slow, inefficient, and frankly a pain in the ass for all involved. I gave it some thought and decided a nice solution would be to offer free signed bookplates to any of my readers who might want them.

I spent a pretty big chunk of my own time and money working with the immensely talented Lauren K. Cannon to design the plates, calling vendors to print them, making custom return address labels, buying envelopes and postage, etc. I set aside 500 plates for this purpose to ensure I wouldn’t lose my shirt to keep a promise. The rest of the original print run of 2000 plates was used for appearances, signings, and given to close friends who travel a lot to stick in copies at out of the way bookstores in other countries.

The plates were a great success. Lauren’s design came out even better than I had imagined, and readers seemed to genuinely enjoy getting them. I left hundreds stuck in signed paperbacks of The Painted/Warded Man on store shelves all over the world, in case readers decided to go on to read Desert Spear and wanted a signed copy of that, too. With Dani’s help, we kept up with all the requests in a fairly timely manner, and have gotten hundreds of thank you letters from readers who received their plates.

By late October of this year, I was effectively out of plates, with just a handful left to fulfill requests from the site. I printed thousands more so I could continue to have them on hand for touring and the like. I also figured I would keep the freebie promotion going past 500. Sure, international postage and printing costs add up, but no one was abusing the offer, and I didn’t mind the time and expense if it meant I could give something back to those who have supported me. It felt like I was doing a good deed.

But as they say, no good deed goes unpunished.

A couple of days ago, some internet freebie site linked to the page, announcing that I had bookplates ABSOLUTELY FREE. This was picked up by a number of aggregators, and instantly spread far and wide on dozens of sites which basically just do bot searches for free giveaways and then post the results for people looking for a hot deal. One site even had the gall to put up a post pretending to be me, telling people to come and git them free plates! In the last four days, literally hundreds of requests have come pouring in, 90% of them from people who have never read my books and likely never will, but who just want to take advantage of free offers on the internet. Most of them are from countries where my books are not even sold.

Happy New Year.

I’ll be honest, it’s been something of a turd in my soup, and I haven’t been sure what to do about it. The plates were something personal, a special thing between me and my readers. I’m not inclined to spend all my spare time and disposable income shipping them to people all around the world who never heard of me before they found out I was giving away something for free. I’m busy enough as it is. I only promised 500 plates and I have lived up to that, so I am not obligated to keep on, and frankly this seems a good time to stop. I want to do right by people, but not be taken advantage of.

But on the other hand… fuck that. I want to keep the promotion going for my readers who are important to me, and I’m not going to be stop just because I hit some churny waters in the great internet sea and got pulled into a spammy current. So I will figure out a way to make it work.

Dani has been the one who had to wade through the deluge of e-mails, sorting out the “real” requests from the obvious freebie click-throughs. She’s been handling bookplate fulfillment since it started, and says that 99% of the requests from readers have always included a personal note, and not just an address. That let us sort the haystack much quicker and helped ensure that the least requests got lost in the shuffle. If you happened to submit a request with just your name and address and would like to make sure it gets processed, just send us a note.

I’m going to do a little research and see what I can do to the request page dissuade web-bots from flagging it. Hopefully the changes will involve a minimum of “I’m not spam!” steps for my readers.

In the meantime, feel free to keep requesting plates. Just throw up a demon cycle gang sign in your e-mail.

I’ll post the funniest ones on the blog.

Happy New Year!

The Great Bazaar is now available as an eBook from Subterranean Press!

As you may know, TGB is the small, limited edition novella I published in January of this year with Subterranean. There were only 2,200 copies printed (2K trade and 200 limited), and they quickly sold out. Before long, they were selling on eBay for hundreds of dollars (if you can find it at all), and I get daily messages from readers asking how they can get their hands on one.

This is more than a little surreal to me, because The Great Bazaar, like the Demon Cycle itself, started as a labor of love with little hope for publication—even after I had sold the first three demon books. For a long while, I couldn’t even give it away for free.

There are three gaps in The Warded Man (AKA The Painted Man in the UK), where several years pass for the characters with the turn of the page. This was a deliberate choice, allowing me so show the defining and formative periods in the childhood of my protagonists, and then move quickly ahead to their adventures as adults, so when they make the decisions they make, you understand why. For the most part, knowing what happened in those gaps is unnecessary, and would only have slowed the pace of the story.

But there was one gap I regretted. It came during the three years when Arlen is working as a Messenger traveling throughout the Free Cities. This was an exciting, adventure-filled period in Arlen’s life where he travels from town to town, touching the lives of different people living behind the wards.

I had a LOT of story ideas for those three years, but there wasn’t space to include even a fraction of them in The Warded Man, and even if there had been, it would have robbed Arlen’s race towards destiny of all its immediacy. So I decided to skip those side stories and get to them some other time, putting Arlen, at the beginning of Chapter 17 (Ruins), at the end of a long series of adventures, lightly sketched for the reader, wherein he became worldly, and culminating in him relic hunting in the lost city of Anoch Sun, the next true turning point in his life.

But the road to Anoch Sun was a difficult one, and even FINDING it was moreso. The Great Bazaar tells part of that tale. It is essentially chapter 16.5 of The Warded Man, taking place a few weeks before Chapter 17 picks up the story.

The novella started out as a backup story I essentially wrote for free for a special UK limited edition hardcover of The Painted Man for Voyager. I turned the story in on time, but the special edition was delayed again and again, and was eventually shelved.

I was really bummed about that. I had worked very hard on TGB, and was immensely proud of it. I thought it worked both as a stand-alone introduction to the Demon Cycle as well as a great addition for lovers of the series. I tried to sell it for a song to Del Rey, perhaps as a promotional chapbook to hand out at ComicCon, but they weren’t interested in doing novellas, especially from an unknown author (The Warded Man had yet to be published in the US at that point).

So it sat for months. I made another press to sell it after I turned in The Desert Spear, as the story takes place in Fort Krasia and is a fantastic appetizer for that book, but my options were limited. The big publishers still didn’t want it, and it was rejected from the few fantasy short story markets I submitted it to. I was afraid it was destined to be a lost tale.

But then, unsolicited, I got an e-mail from Bill Schafer at Subterranean Press. He had read and enjoyed The Painted Man, and asked if I would be interested in writing a special, limited edition novella for him.

So I sent him The Great Bazaar. He read it. In days we had a book deal. In less than a month, we had printer proofs. The amazing cover was a piece of art I had commissioned from Lauren K. Cannon for my website, but Bill loved it so much he licensed it from her for the book. A few months later I had a book in my hands, and was glad that at least SOMEone would get to read it. I certainly wasn’t expecting it to be a collector’s item.

But as my readership grows, more and more people have expressed an interest in reading it, and were frustrated at its lack of availability. One reader even wrote to scold me over it, saying “It’s like you’re holding a part of the Demon Cycle hostage for only the people with tons of disposable income to enjoy”.

Yow. That was certainly not my intent. Subterranean isn’t in the business of doing multiple printings of their books, though, so I spoke to Bill to see what we could work out. The eBook option seemed the next logical step.

So now, at long last, the story is available for everyone. So far it is only up on the Amazon Kindle store for download or reading online, but it has been submitted to the iBook store, the B&N Nook store, etc., so it will soon be on an eReader near you. The same will go for my upcoming Subterranean book, Brayan’s Gold, still available for pre-order! It will go up as an eBook some time next year, probably a few months after publication.

And that’s not all! I just inked a deal with Recorded Books, who have made incredible audiobooks of The Warded Man and The Desert Spear with narrator Pete Bradbury, whose silken rumble of a voice could charm the panties from a marble statue. They will be doing audio versions of The Great Bazaar and Brayan’s Gold as well, so whatever your format, print, digital, or audio, the novellas will be available to you.

There are a few other gaps in the series that are… juicy. Fertile ground for adventure. The years Leesha spends training in Angiers, for instance, or the ones Rojer spends playing the hamlets. Jardir earning his stripes as a kai’Sharum. The years of solitude where the Warded Man loses himself as he shuns human contact and lives like an animal, killing and eating demons.

We’ll get to them, I promise.