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The day I’ve waited my whole life for has finally come. Tomorrow, March 10, 2009, The Warded Man goes on sale.

I can distinctly remember writing stories as a child, dreaming of one day becoming a published author. While this dream technically came true last September when my first book came out in the UK, it is one thing to have your work publish on the other side of the ocean, and quite another to have it happen in your hometown. Even the Journal News is in on the excitement, running the teaser to the left for a larger article they are running tomorrow to coincide with the launch.

I have a large number of reviews to post, but I won’t have time to get to all of them today. However, there are a couple too good to hold back, along with some other tasty tidbits:

Two new interviews are up today. The first is for The World’s Biggest Bookstore. No, not Amazon.com. This is an actual, physical store in Toronto, where SF bookseller Jessica Strider arranged an interview to be put on their endcap displays of the book. You can see the interview here on her blog, as well.

In addition, Jay Tomio at Bookspot Central has just posted what I consider my best and most in-depth interview to date. Bookspot is having a contest to give away 5 free signed copies of The Warded Man, as well. See here for details.

In the review department, Rebecca Chastain wrote a great review of The Warded Man on her blog, as did Matt at Robots and Vamps. I will try to post more reviews tomorrow night or Wednesday at the latest.

Last but not least, Scribd.com has posted an extensive free excerpt of The Warded Man for anyone on the fence about buying it. The excerpt includes the introductory chapters for all three main POV characters in the story: Arlen, Leesha, and Rojer; chapters 1, 4, and 7, respectively.

Check it out.

As for me, I will be spending launch day visiting every major bookstore in Brooklyn and Manhattan possible from dawn till dusk (when the demons come out), signing shelf stock and meeting sellers. If you’re interested in signed copies and work in Manhattan, you might want to keep that in mind.

I am so psyched, I can’t even tell you!

Whoot!

Posted on March 9, 2009 at 6:48 pm by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Events, Interviews, Life, Musings, Reviews, Sales, Uncategorized, World Traveler, Writing
10 Comments »

Been trying to catch up on all the projects that have been piling up on my desk over the last few weeks while I’ve had my head down trying to plow through the final 20,000 words of The Desert Spear. There are still weeks and possibly months of editing to come, but getting the first draft out is always the hardest and most stressful thing.

I’ve done a number of interviews recently, which should be popping up all over the interwebs over the next week, and in one case, print. If you are a reader of The Journal News, the not-so-local paper that services New York’s Lower Hudson Valley, be on the lookout this week, probably on Tuesday, for a piece on me by reporter Heather Salerno.

In the meantime, check out The Old Bat’s Belfry, to see the interview I did there. Shari, who runs the site, does a different kind of interview. She’s less interested in my path to publication or where I get my ideas from, and more interested in what kind of magic power I would want to have and what I had for breakfast. Maybe it’s self-indulgent of me, but I enjoyed that interview more than a lot of ones I’ve done lately.

I have a shitload of reviews of The Warded Man (on sale this Tuesday, March 10, throughout the US & Canada at long fucking last!!!) that have accumulated in my Firefox bookmarks. Maybe I’ll do a mass posting of them tomorrow. The VAST majority of them have been glowing, which gives me great hope for the book launch.

Of course, the most important bit of catching up I need to do is family time. Dani and Cassie have been very patient and put up with all my stress and insanity as I tried to untangle the Christmas light wire of my plot and get it properly strung around the house. Now, with the weather warming, we’ve managed to all get out of the house together a few times, and it’s been really… healthy. I need more of that.

Posted on March 8, 2009 at 11:59 pm by PeatB
Filed under Cassie, Interviews, Reviews, Writing
5 Comments »

Patrick Rothfuss had a recent blog post about the status of his second book, The Wise Man’s Fear. It was a post that really touched me, because while I do not know Mr. Rothfuss personally, his story in many ways felt like my story.  I don’t have a legion of fanatics harassing me, but I know well the stress of suddenly having your hobby become your life, and how it can knock your feet out from under you, even as you put immense pressure on yourself to measure up against a successful first novel.

But Pat wrote a long post about the status of his book, and I think it lifted some of the weight off him. George RR Martin did something similar a few weeks ago.

So in that tradition, I would like to take a moment to update everyone on the status of The Desert Spear.

It’s done.

Sort of.

I woke up this morning knowing I was going to finish the book. I went to sleep at 3am last night, my eyes practically closing by themselves, knowing that I only had a little bit left to write, and that there would be no real obstacles left in doing so. Dani knew it, too, and packed up the baby to go to her parents’ house, so I could finish up in peace.

But then an interesting thing happened. I had an anxiety attack. A pretty bad one, as these things are measured. Usually these came when I was despairing that the book would never be finished, but I never imagined I would have one at the idea of writing “the end”.

Of course, it was the first time in my life I ever wrote the words “the end” knowing there was a paycheck on the other side of them.  Not to mention the crippling fear that people won’t like Desert Spear because I didn’t just re-use the proven-successful template of The Painted Man/The Warded Man.

When Kermit the Frog was nervous before his movie audition in The Muppet Movie, Dr. Teeth gave him a valuable piece of advice: “Ain’t nothin’ to it, but to do it,” he said.

Despite the fact that it came from a gold-toothed drug addict made of felt, I never forgot that advice, and I cling to it whenever fear or anxiety or nerves try to stop me from doing something. It’s gotten me through some difficult times.

So I pushed forward and did it. It’s done.

Sort of.

By “done”, I mean I have a complete first draft, beginning to end, that I finished mere minutes ago, and will shortly be sending to my editors at Del Rey and Voyager.

It does NOT mean the book is finalized, or that it will be out anytime soon, which includes the entirely arbitrary dates you see on Amazon.co.uk, where it is currently listed to publish in August/September. It may yet be out by then, or not. I don’t know and no one else does, either.

Why? Because there will be edits. Rewrites. More edits. More rewrites. Typesetting. Copyediting. Proofreading. It may be many months before the manuscript meets everyone’s standards, and don’t think I am exaggerating when I say my own standards will be twice as high as anyone else’s. Thrice as high. It’s my name on the damn thing, not to mention my grandfather’s name, and that is something I take very seriously. I will scrutinize every sentence, every word, every piece of punctuation in that massive 231,000 word file until I am convinced it is fit to stay. I daresay the final version released into the world will be a good deal shorter, and much better for it.

What I will say now, though, is that despite all the anxiety I have had (and will have in the future) over this manuscript, I look back at what I’ve done, and I am damn proud of it.

Can you picture that?

Posted on March 5, 2009 at 12:53 am by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Events, Musings, Sales, Writing
105 Comments »

I always lament the lack of emphasis in American schools on foreign language skills. I enjoyed a very good public education, and it has allowed me to go far (and others even farther), but there were still many things lacking, like computer education and foreign languages. Language classes weren’t even an option for students until 7th grade, and even then the choices were few, and the enthusiasm for them low. Foreign language wasn’t a REQUIREMENT until high school, and even then It was made clear to students that so long  as they passed the New York State Regents Exam for foreign language, nothing more was needed.

Some people still managed to excel and learn to speak other languages very well in that time, but I wasn’t really one of them. I acheived a bare proficiency in French, and, having no opportunities to continue using it, promptly lost what little skill I had.

Of course, I live in America, so being monolingual is no problem, and even when I travel, English speakers are seldom hard to find.

Why? Because other countries, especially those sharing a common border with people who speak another language,  put much greater emphasis on language skills at an early age when, by all accounts, the language center of the brain is still forming and can better grasp and hold the information.

So I often lament not speaking other languages, especially now that my work is being translated into so many tongues (11 and counting!). I wish I could speak and read them all, to interact with my readers, read my reviews, and understand how my work has been adapted.

This has never been more true than today, when I saw this Polish review by Marcin Mortka, which purports to be a feminist perspective on my work. I REALLY wanted to read this review, but when I ran it through google translate, the results were disappointing to the point where it’s unreadable. This is a great example of how far translation software, which will NEVER, in my opinion, replace human translators, has to go. A good 30% of the text doesn’t translate at all, and what does is frequently unintelligible.

I’m really intrigued by the topic, and would love to know what the article says. Can any of my bilingual Polish readers out there hook an author up?

Posted on February 27, 2009 at 3:38 pm by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Musings, Reviews, World Traveler, Writing
17 Comments »

Okay, I mentioned this during my ComicCon Day II posting, but it took a while for the video folks to get it ready. There was an SF Author Roundtable at ComicCon where nine other authors and I all got to talk for… about five minutes each. Maybe. Admittedly, I am a loudmouth, so I might have stolen an extra minute in there somewhere.

Some things to note on the ComicCon roundtable:

1. The table is not round
2. We do not discuss comics, except in passing
3. I am the only author on the stage who doesn’t actually have a book out on the shelves in the US

You can check out the video, cut into seven YouTube clips, here on the Suvudu website.

See if you think I am picking a fight with Tamora Pierce at the end. I don’t think I was, but a lot of people told me afterwards that that’s what it looked like to them.

Posted on February 23, 2009 at 11:40 am by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Events, Interviews, Musings, Writing
1 Comment »