For some reason, whenever I put a YouTube Embed into WordPress, it gets all fucky. Since it was screwing with my entire last post, let’s try it separately.
Here’s a short video of Dani with our new buddy. And no, your speakers aren’t broken, my camera doesn’t record audio.
I’d like to take a moment away from my usual ranting about nonsense to welcome into the world the boy who will hopefully be my unborn daughter’s best friend: Luca Baruch D’Entrone.
Luca wasn’t due to join us out here in the cold, bright world until May 24, but he just couldn’t wait to get started, and shot out into the doctors’ hands at 10:05am this morning, barely an hour after mommy got to the hospital. He’s 5lbs. 15oz, healthy as an ox, and both baby and mommy are doing well.
Luca is a hybrid of two brilliant and amazing people, Craig and Amelia D’Entrone. Even if he takes the worst traits of each, he’s still going to be someone special. Amelia and Dani have been preggo-bonding for the last 7 months, but that’s all over now, as Amelia has moved out of the design phase and into full production.
Here’s a picture of Amelia from 1998. She’s a mother now.
But of course, what you’re really interested in is pictures of the little wonder himself, so without further ado…
Here’s a couple of unflattering pictures of me holding the baby:
Discarded Blog titles:
Lots of things happening on the writing front. Advance read copies for The Painted Man should be going out next week to reviewers and the like. I am very psyched for that. I also broke through my writer’s funk on The Desert Spear by skipping to another section and working on a different character, to what I consider excellent results. I would have kept on, but I just received the copyedits to The Warded Man, so I’ll have to take care of those first. Hopefully I will come back to the sequel with recharged batteries.
Of course, first I need to kick this awful cold I have. I have the person who gave it to me narrowed down to one of the 40,000 people I came within coughing distance of at NY ComicCon. Luckily, at that very meeting, the head of publicity at Del Rey snagged me an advance read copy of Naomi Novik‘s new novel, Victory of Eagles. I am sitting at home reading it while clutching my box of tissues.
Temeraire is better than chicken soup.
Had another MRI today; one of a half dozen in the last couple of years. This one for a (possible) torn rotator cuff. Too many side-planks and wheels in yoga class, I guess. After spending half an hour in a buzzing metal coffin, I headed over to the Brooklyn Diner for lunch, and sat not two feet across from a booth with both Jerry Seinfeld (no, he wasn’t eating cereal) and Colin Quinn.
I was tempted to go to Colin and tell him how much I loved Remote Control while pointedly ignoring Jerry. Sadly, decorum won out and I left them in peace.
Yesterday I posted about how awesome it was to meet Terry Brooks and get him to sign my copy of The Elfstones of Shannara. What I didn’t mention was that just moments later, he brought me face to face with my worst nightmare!
Terry and his editor Betsy Mitchell were sitting a panel at New York Comic Con devoted to his career and the fantasy world in which the vast majority of his books are set in: Shannara.
Here’s the panel blurb:
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM Room 1E07
THE WORLD OF SHANNARA
The Shannara book of Terry Brooks are epic, legendary, and grand. Now, meet the man himself. Terry Brooks will discuss the origin and future of Shannara and Robert Napton, the man behind the upcoming Shannara graphic novel, will speak about adding images to Terry Brooks’ immortal words.
It started off well enough, with the prerequisite A/V problems and snarky comments about them, followed by some banter with the audience. Finally, the lights and screen came on, and things got started.
The first thing I learned was that I had been mispronouncing “Shannara” all my life. I always thought it was “shah-nar-uh”, but it turns out that it’s “shan-uh-ruh”.
That really kinda bummed me out.
But despite my disappointment at learning that a word that meant so much to me over the course of my life was wrong, the real kicker was yet to come.
Terry Brooks has had an amazing career, with over 20 bestsellers under his belt and a huge and loyal fan base. He’s made success seem effortless, with his first book, the Sword of Shannara, becoming the first work of fantasy not only to hit the NY Times Bestseller list, but going on to spend five months there.
With that kind of unprecedented success, his future seemed assured.
Or so you’d think.
After Sword, he quickly got started on his second novel, The Song of Lorelei. Don’t bother googling it. You’ll get nothing. The book doesn’t exist. Why, you ask? Because Lester Del Rey, the man himself, rejected it out of hand. Despite having a hot author with 5 months of bestselling cred behind him, LDR took one look at the book and said it was terrible and unfixable and refused to publish it. He sent it back with a long list of notes saying why it was drek.
Terry described what it was like to read those notes, and worse, to realize that LDR was RIGHT, and the book really was bad. I can only imagine how that felt.
But I can imagine it pretty well, actually. I imagine it just about every day, and sometimes it wakes me up in a cold sweat late at night. Apart from death, disease and dismemberment, that is my worst nightmare.
I spent years working on The Painted Man, pretty much in a vacuum. I had test readers, sure, but they were also all friends of mine, and they brought their own biases to their comments based on that. I never really knew what a truly objective reader would say or do, and I honestly didn’t know what was going to happen when I put the book out into the hard, cruel world for evaluation. I put it off for a long time out of fear.
But the response has been amazing. A major literary agent picked it up right away. Before long, several US publishers were bidding not only on it, but on two unwritten sequels to boot. Not long after that, there was similar bidding for three books in the UK, even though my agent had never sold a book internationally before it saw press in the US and press time was a LONG way off. Then there was an all-out auction in Germany. A publisher in France snapped the series up, saying he would have been “devastated” if he hadn’t gotten the rights to it. A publisher in Japan put the book on his PDA before boarding a plane, and bought it right after the flight. A publisher in Greece wined and dined me on the beautiful Greek Isle of Kos before buying the Greek print rights. And other markets are still showing interest all the time.
It’s a dream come true in every way. Writing fantasy professionally has been my dream ever since I was a kid, and I keep pinching myself when I think about how this is my job now.
But what if it’s a fluke? What if I’m the fantasy equivalent of Tommy Tutone and this is my 867-5309? What if I accidentally stumbled upon some magic formula that captured a capricious and momentary public zeitgeist like a literary one hit wonder? What if I can’t replicate the success and no one likes my next book? What if people realize I’m just some chump from Westchester who’s making up a bunch of shit?
I know it’s crazy in a lot of ways. I worked really hard to learn to tell stories, and deep down, I have a lot of stories left to tell. But I still get wracked with anxiety whenever a little doubt creeps in.
But I take comfort that after Lorelei was canned, Terry Brooks went on to write The Elfstones of Shannara.
And we all know how that turned out.
Went to the New York Comic Con this weekend. Ostensibly, it was to network and meet people to help my career, and in that regard it was very helpful.
But I won’t lie. I was going to Comic Con, both in it’s New York and San Diego incarnations, long before I got a book deal and if my dream career as a fantasy writer somehow fizzles out, I will keep on going. Why? Because I am a goddamn nerd, and proud of it!
For instance, my publisher, Del Rey Books, also publishes books by two of my favorite authors, Naomi Novik and Terry Brooks. I’ve been reading Brooks since I was a pre-teen, and Novik since she blazed onto the scene a few years ago. Both are NYTimes bestsellers with major motion pictures of their work being developed. Peter Jackson is doing Novik’s Temeraire films, and that is a recipe for awesome. They are also working on Brook’s Elfstones of Shannara, which is his best work in my opinion, and a book that changed my life when I read it as a child.
Since we share a publisher, both of these authors are prime candidates to solicit for quotes. My editors have sent them copies of my manuscript, and asked them to read them. If they agree, they can then offer up a blurb for the book jacket if they so desire. Of course, authors, especially big ones like these, are very busy, have little free time, and get solicited for this kind of thing all the time. As a result, they can refuse without dishonor, and frequently do.
I didn’t realize that Naomi Novik was heading up the panel discussion on Women Authors in Fantasy when I attended it, but I was excited to see it was so, and went gushing over to her after it was over, telling her (honestly) how much my wife and I love her work. While I was at it, I gave her my card and mentioned that a manuscript might be coming her way. She was amazingly nice and friendly, and we had a very pleasant chat. I don’t know if it will make any difference in her reading my book or not, but at least I put a face to the name when she gets the advance read copy in the mail.
I’ve written before about how much I love Terry Brooks, so I won’t get into it again. Suffice it to say that if not for him, it is very likely that I would not be writing fantasy today (or maybe writing at all), and I CERTAINLY wouldn’t be writing a fantasy series about demons. The Elfstones of Shannara is a story about demons coming back to ravage the land after millennia of banishment, and that image stuck with me for over twenty years before I tried my own hand a a demon story. As you can tell, it’s done fairly well so far.
So I was kind of star struck when I was introduced to Terry, even though he was super-nice. He was the first author ever published by Del Rey Books (and the one of the main reasons I chose Del Rey as my own publisher when there were other publishers offering similar money for my work), and that book, the Sword of Shannara, was also the first work of fantasy ever to make the NYTimes Bestseller list, paving the way for many authors to follow. For me, it was like meeting the Pope.
After I was introduced and gushed a while, I told him that we were sending him a manuscript, and hoped he would give a quote for the book jacket. He said, “Oh, right! My editor gave me that today! I know I’d better read it right away, or she will hound me incessantly until I do!”
Awesome.
So while I can technically claim that I met with him to help my career, it wasn’t all business by any stretch. Especially since I brought my (first edition) copy of Elfstones to the con with me for him to sign. I was geeking the Hell out when I read what he wrote:
