Blog

So yesterday I accepted an offer from esteemed Portuguese publisher Edições Gailivro for Portuguese language rights to The Painted Man and two sequels. This makes the number of languages the work will appear in an even ten.

Ye gods! Ten languages! I don’t even know how to process it. Two years ago, the thought of it even being published in English was just a pipe dream.

I used to listen to my high school girlfriend talk to her grandmother in Portuguese, feeling entirely left out of the conversation and wondering if she was telling my girlfriend that I wasn’t good enough for her. Who could have imagined that 17 years later I’d be publishing in that language? Amazing.

I feel so blessed with good fortune these days, I don’t know what to do with myself. After years of untreatable chronic pain, jobs that made The Office seem like a documentary, and horrible loss, suddenly I have things like this in my life:

I mean really. What else can compare?

In other news, an interview I did for SFsite.com was posted yesterday, as well, in Sandy Auden’s genre news spotlight column. You can find the interview here, but you have to scroll down the page a bit to get to it; there is no direct link. There are some other great bits in the column, as well. I’ve heard good things about Stan Nichols, who is interviewed just above me.

Also, The Painted Man now has a Wikipedia entry! I dunno who created it, but that is awesome. You haven’t arrived until you’re wikied. It’s a bare bones entry now, but hopefully readers will add to it over time.

I would also like to note that acclaimed ward-designer and Arlen portraiter Lauren Cannon, aka Navate, was interviewed recently on Dark Wolf’s Fantasy Review site. Check it out. Lauren is awesome.

Okay, that’s it for now. My next post will actually be about the writing process, if I ever get around to finishing it. I guess that says something about my writing process right there…

Posted on October 3, 2008 at 2:24 pm by PeatB
Filed under Interviews, Sales, World Traveler, Writing
4 Comments »

Some nice updates to the News page today, a little appetizer before the major site overhaul that is coming… sometime in the next 1-365 days, depending on my social butterfly of a webmaster.

Exciting news just in from Poland. The Painted Man, which translates into Polish as Malowany Czlowiek, will be published there on November 28th, 2008 from Fabryka Slow. If you’re excited to read the book and were waiting for it to come out in Polish, here’s your chance!

Fabryka has my world conquest map up on their main page now, and made a nice design out of the wards and cover art for their author and book pages.

It’s a very strange feeling, seeing my work translated into different languages and looking at what the designers in different countries/cultures take from it and how they interpret the work visually. Fabryka used the UK cover by Larry Rostant, but their site design is very different and I really dig it, just like I love the Japanese version. I can’t wait to see what some of the other markets do!

So it’s looking now like the US release of the book in March of 2009 will be the fourth market the book comes out in, which is ironic since they are my home market and were the first to buy. I guess what they say is true: No man becomes a prophet in his own land…

Posted on October 2, 2008 at 1:01 pm by PeatB
Filed under Events, Sales, World Traveler, Writing
3 Comments »

So exciting! I’ve just learned that The Painted Man has been nominated for its first award, the David Gemmell Legend Award! According to the site: “The DGLA will be presented for the very first time in 2009 for the best Fantasy novel of 2008. The award will be given to a work written in the ‘spirit’ of the late, great David Gemmell, a true Master of Heroic Fantasy.”

I have no idea who nominated me, but bless their little heart. My book is one of 28 nominees this year, and I am unfamiliar with many of the entries, so I have no idea what my odds of winning are. However, it looks as if the voting is free and open to the general public. Let the internets decide!

Voting begins December 26, but if you’ve read and enjoyed The Painted Man and would like to show some love in the meantime, please head on over to their Painted Man Discussion Forum and tell others why they should vote Arlen this December! Registering with the site takes only seconds and requires no personal information other than a valid e-mail address, and you can request that they send you no bulletins if you prefer. You dont even need to register to vote, just to comment on the forums.

I’ll post another announcement when actual voting opens up.

More exciting news to come later this week! One thing at a time…

Posted on October 1, 2008 at 4:24 pm by PeatB
Filed under Events, Reviews, Writing
10 Comments »

I notice Graeme Flory over at Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review is giving away 5 free signed 1st edition hardback copies of The Painted Man on his website. They may well be all gone by now, but it can’t hurt to check. Graeme wrote a great review of the book on his site a few weeks ago.

Also, a review of the book came out in Black Magazine, an Australian publication covering the darker side of pop culture. I’ve pasted it below:

Posted on September 28, 2008 at 9:00 am by PeatB
Filed under Events, Reviews, Writing
3 Comments »

So my once-a-day posting streak is over. It was inevitable, of course. Even the most devoted blogger will fall off eventually. When you first start a blog, you write a few posts and it seems so easy that you can’t see any reason why you couldn’t do it every day. After all, you have SO much to say!

But then reality sets in, and you are faced with the cold hard reality that there is more to life than sitting at the computer ranting about nonsense, and frankly, you don’t have as much to say as you thought you did.

So I am going back to my old ways of only posting when I actually DO have something to say, or to promote, or to show the world.

Like today.

Did you know that The Painted Man, which has been on the Amazon UK fantasy bestseller chart for like 2 weeks, is available in Japanese?

What? You didn’t? Well as of today, it is! Hayakawa publishing in Japan has finished their translation and released the book for a mere 777 yen, which by my currency converter is only $7.34! A steal! And did I mention the awesome cover featuring Arlen and One-Arm? Bad ass.

So if you speak Japanese and have the yen to spare, why not buy a copy? Heck, buy a bunch and give them out as stocking stuffers this holiday season. You can find the book page here. For a laugh, ask google to translate it for you.

**UPDATE: Also find it here on Amazon.jp. There’s no picture, but I checked the ISBN and they match.**

In other news, here’s a screen shot of my web traffic from this morning. Notice how I left two armies in Australia (always key), and then cut across the Middle East to conquer Europe. Then I sent my armies across to America to begin their conquest there.

It’s funny how I can’t look at a map of the world without thinking in RISK terms anymore…

Posted on September 25, 2008 at 9:38 am by PeatB
Filed under Events, Sales, World Traveler, Writing
13 Comments »