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Added another deleted scene from The Painted/Warded Man on the Excisions page. If you’re new to the site, the Excisions page is where I show scenes that were cut from my work, and discuss the process that led me to write them in the first place, and then later discard them.

This scene, entitled One Arm and the Nightwolves, is one of the oldest deletions, getting struck from the manuscript long before any agent or editor saw it, mainly because it is unnecessarily expository, and a little too “wandering monster” (which is the sign of a bad DM… er, author).

Still, it is a nice actiony piece, and gives some worldbuilding details that many readers have shown interest in.

If anyone wants to discuss it, feel free to comment on this post.

Posted on May 2, 2009 at 5:04 pm by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Fans, Interviews, Musings, Writing
7 Comments »

The current draft of The Desert Spear is still with my editors, and I needed a break before diving into The Daylight War, so in addition to updating my website and hand-modeling my cell phone, I’m currently working on another “Arlen: The Lost Years” short story just to keep my mental knife sharp.  The story, tentatively titled The Duke’s Mines, will likely be the back-up story for Deluxe version of The Desert Spear, just as The Great Bazaar will back up the Deluxe of The Painted Man.

So, speaking of The Desert Spear,the print schedule was at last finalized during the London Book Fair last week. The Desert Spear will be available on a worldwide release date of April 2010 for its English editions.

For my Del Rey/Warded Man readers, this will probably come as little or no shock, as that is more or less a year after the US release of book I, The Warded Man.

For my Voyager/Painted Man readers, it means the book is coming out 8 months later than Voyager’s advertising has promised. That’s more my fault more than theirs, and I’m sorry about that.

How did this happen?

Well, the short answer is, ” I didn’t end up writing it as fast as I thought I would.” The long answer I already gave in a previous post, and won’t go into again here.

Predicting how long I will take me to write something is like a freelancer paying estimated taxes on the year to come. Getting it right is, at best, an exercise in fortune telling, and you never hit the number right on. I spent seven years tinkering with The Painted Man before I sold it, and then another half year of editing after that. By way of comparison, I wrote The Desert Spear relative short order at 26 months. But despite that apparent increase in speed, it is way more than I originally guessed it would take. I was off by… you guessed it, 8 months.

Voyager bent over backward to make time for TDS to keep the August date, but by the time it became impossible, it was too late to change the ads in the paperbacks.

So that’s the bad news.

The good news? Desert Spear is going to be chock full of awesome.

Seriously. For starters, check out the Voyager cover by Larry Rostant (above). How friggin’ sweet is that portrait of Jardir?

In addition, The Desert Spear has fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles… and I promise it’s not a “kissing book”. It will call into question a lot of assumptions readers might have made about the events of book one.

Like The Painted Man, The Desert Spear is part epic adventure, and part coming of age tale as Ahmann Jardir and Renna Tanner take center stage after being only glimpsed in the chorus during book I. You’ll see firsthand the struggle and events that lead them to become people who will help shape the destiny of mankind, and I am literally bursting with excitement to introduce them to everyone.

Plus, plenty more action with Arlen, Leesha, and Rojer.

Oh, and all the main characters get laid.

And, uh, some copies will be hollowed out and filled with candy. Delicious, delicious candy.

Posted on May 2, 2009 at 3:22 am by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Desert Spear, Writing
33 Comments »

First things first. This morning, my 9 month old daughter Cassandra waved to me and said “Hi, Daddy,” her first unmistakable confirmed words in the presence of two witnesses. So far as I’m concerned, that’s way more important than any of the other stuff I’ve been blogging about lately.

That said, there have been some other things going on, starting with a pretty stellar review on Fantasy Literature.

Next up is the interview I did with Laptop Magazine, which was published on their website this morning. Not sure when the print piece will come out.

It was, I think, a really good interview. Quite different from the normal fare, as it focused mainly on the tech side of my writing, and the interviewer asked me a number of interesting questions on e-piracy, the Amazon Kindle, why I don’t use an iPhone, and a few other things. I think it’s well worth reading.

A few other tech sites picked up the Laptop story right away, including boingboing, MobileCrunch, and The Gadgets Weblog. The Daily News story was also picked up on GalleyCat and InformationWeek.

The whole “subway writing” story continues to garner worldwide attention, translating since my last post into German, Dutch (also here and here), French (also here and here), Czech, and Arabic (also here and here), in addition to more articles in Spanish on a site with the best logo ever (also here and here) and Polish (cool pic on this one). That’s ten languages.

Oh, and lest anyone think me unaware that writing books on your phone is old hat in Japan, I point you to this classic Peephole in My Skull post from January 2008.

As a side note, it’s been interesting to see mutations and errors crop up in the story with every degree of separation away from the source material as it filters through the blogosphere. It’s kind of like a game of telephone in some ways, and shows that we still have a little ways to go before blogs can truly replace traditional news as a trusted, verified, and quotable source.

Not that traditional news is perfect in any way…

Posted on April 29, 2009 at 9:24 pm by PeatB
Filed under Cassie, Interviews, Life, Musings, Sales, Tech, Writing
7 Comments »

It’s been quite a week. Seriously. Like a year’s worth of stuff happened in the last 7 days.

I had been planning for last week to be a quiet one where I could get a lot of writing done, but due to an almost slapstick convergence of events, I was forced to put it off again and again.

Sunday: My plans for a peaceful week of writing began to derail when my sister Maritza had her baby over two weeks early (Welcome Freddie! Uncle Peat loves you and is going to inundate you with superhero crap!). Also, Cassie wasn’t sleeping, and was being crazed.

Words written: 0

Monday: Plans to write were further put off by going to the accountant to plan my estimated taxes for the year.

Estimated taxes are an unspoken Hell known only to freelancers, and I wish it on no one. Why? Because it’s a guess. A freelancer has no what they’re actually going to make in a given year to come, but they have to guess anyway, and pay taxes based on that. So you’re left with the winless choice of guessing low and paying less taxes, but risking owing a big chunk of money at year’s end, or overpaying, and feeling broke all year only to find that you didn’t have to and maybe could have afforded that trip to Aruba, after all.

But I digress.

I got home from the accountant to a message on my answering machine from The Daily News. They saw the piece in AM New York two weeks earlier about how I wrote the majority of The Warded Man on my smartphone, and wanted an interview. As I reached for the phone to call them back, it rang, and it was News 12 Brooklyn, asking if they could send over a film correspondent that week. Later that night, something I wrote like two weeks ago on a reviewer’s blog opens a Can of Worms and sparked a big (and kind of fascinating) internet debate.

Words written: 0

Tuesday: The Daily News sent a photographer out to meet me, and we rode the subway taking pictures. The Racy Romance Reviews debate is in full force, and I am joining in. That night, my mother in law and her boyfriend came to visit, stopping for the night on their drive from Boston to North Carolina.

Words written: 0

Wednesday: I was on page three of the Daily News, and on NY1’s “In the Papers” section of the morning news loop. People I hadn’t spoken to in years were suddenly getting in touch, saying they saw me in the paper or on TV. That night, my computer crashed. Sometime after that, Switched.com picks up the story. Traffic on my website spikes. I am oblivious.

Words written: 0

Thursday: Brittany Oat from News 12 shows up at 8:30am to interview me and again film me at the subway stop, writing on my phone, and yes, I am actually writing in those scenes! I’m writing about how friggin’ bizarre it is that I am being interviewed for the news. It’s like I woke up on Bizarro World. Maybe I’ll post exactly what wrote later. I think I also noted that Brittany is pretty.

I get back home and see that a few other blogs like The Gothamist have picked up the story as the News 12 spot airs. (It really was a great piece, but I haven’t been able to find it online to show people. Working on it.) Laptop Magazine asks for an interview.

I then begin the ugly process of backing up urgent files on my computer and preparing for a hard disk wipe/Windows reinstall. Went out for a drink. Came home and pulled the computer off life-support. Began resuscitation.

Words written: 0

Friday: I see that a bunch more sites have picked up the “man writes book on a cellphone during subway commute” story, including Fantasy Book Review, but I don’t have time to explore, because I finally have the chance to meet my nephew. We pack up and head out to my sister’s place, leaving my computer is installing hundreds of updates. Away most of the day. Dinner out with my parents. Cassie is a terror when we get back, and is up until all hours.

Words written: 0

Saturday: Computer more or less fixed, I start exploring the web. My agent has just gotten back from London Book Fair and has posted pix of the awesome Painted Man displays in the UK right now, where the paperback is a bestseller. That is so damn awesome.

I note that the Racy Romance Reviews debate is still going strong (I think I commented a good three times, myself), and the debate has been picked back up off my blog and inspired posts by Tia at FantasyDebut, James at Speculative Horizons, and Ana/Thea at Booksmugglers, which was the site where the whole mess started in the first place. Crazy.

I then see that the smartphone story has been translated into Polish (also here),  Spanish (also here and here), Russian (also here), and Norwegian, in addition to being picked up on windows mobile blogs and other tech blogs like Geek.com, Cellphone Magazine, Flexta, dialaphone, and ixplora. It gets to the point where there are too many links for me to even follow them all to their sources (many of them are pingback comments on my post Page 3 Girl). Suddenly I am “gimmicky cellphone writer guy”, known the world over, and no one is talking about the book itself.

That was weird. I mean, sure, it’s all true. I did write on the subway almost every day during my commute, but it was just a means to an end. The book was what was important. It’s what I was pouring my heart and soul into. The smartphone was just the pitcher. People saw that, right?

I worried people didn’t see that.

I felt like the power of the internet had just bitch-slapped me senseless, or stuck a needle of heroin in my eye. It was heady and addictive and over quickly, leaving me drained and confused.

Near as I can tell, that’s what it feels like to go viral. Even on this flash in the pan scale, it felt like my head had exploded. I can’t even imagine how Susan Boyle feels. By this time it was Saturday afternoon, and I looked up and saw it was sunny out. I  needed a break, so I turned off the computer and went for a walk in the park.

Saturday was a SPECTACULARLY nice day in Brooklyn. Mid 70’s and sunny. The park was gorgeous, and I walked a couple of miles, inhaling deeply, finding my center. Eventually, I plopped down on the grass, feeling the sun’s embrace as it touched parts of my skin that had not known direct sunlight in months. I felt renewed. Relaxed. And I finally had a chance to write.

Good thing I had brought my smartphone.

Words written: 725

Posted on April 27, 2009 at 12:33 am by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Events, Fans, Interviews, Life, Musings, Reviews, Sales, Tech, World Traveler, Writing
6 Comments »

Local readers, take heed! I will be on News 12 Brooklyn at 1 PM today. In a similar story to the Daily News and Am New York pieces, super-nice reporter Brittany Oat came out and interviewed me in my home office about my writing on my phone during my commute, and then filmed me on the street and in the subway while thumb writing.

News 12 is channel 12 on Cablevision, and 156 on Time Warner (1+5+6=12). I’m not sure if anyone can see it outside of Brooklyn, but the piece will be on their website tonight, and I will link to it then as well.

Some other sites have picked up the story as well. You can join in on the snarky comments on The Gothamist, or see more on Switched.com, Deep In The Heart Of Brooklyn, and the Bridge and Tunnel Club. Good times.

Lastly, if you’re a fan and have written me an e-mail but not gotten a reply, it might take a few more days. My main computer is laid up in bed with a thermometer in its mouth after some hard partying out on the internets. I might have to resort to the dreaded “restore to factory settings”. Everything is backed up, but still, it is a pain in the ass and I will lose some software I don’t have the disks/codes to anymore.

Posted on April 23, 2009 at 11:09 am by PeatB
Filed under Events, Fans, Interviews, Life, Musings, Writing
6 Comments »