All The News That’s Fit To Digitally Barf Up Onto A Blog

HELLO, FRANDOS.

Once again I return from the digital void to grant you a scattered, smothered, covered, chunked pile of steaming news food. It’s like a newsletter, if you subscribe, and if you don’t, then it’s just a regular old blog post. Magic.

Off Roadin’

So, if you missed it, and I don’t know how you would have given how often I hollered about it, I went out on a mini-book-tour with amazing author friends Kevin Hearne and Delilah Dawson. It was a goddamn delight. If you came out to see us, thank you for doing so. If you didn’t come out to see us, I totally understand and will apply only the gentlest of mystic curses to you and your home. If you find that there’s a piece of furniture on which you stub your toes a lot, that’s probably my fault, but really, isn’t it your fault?

Anyway! We bopped from NYC to Westerly, RI to Framingham, MA, and we got to see fans and readers, plus we got to hang with authorial cohorts like Marko Kloos and Elizabeth Bear and Julie Hutchings, plus wonderful publishing pals like Lauren Panepinto. Plus we got to hang with our friends at Del Rey? And we met a beluga whale. We did not steal it to ride it around, even though we definitely should have. Alas.

It was great, but also, weird? This was our first larger exposure to the “post-pandemic,” and I put that in quotes because hey, as it turns out, there’s still a pandemic even if we choose to ignore it! NYC had pretty solid mask uptake in places, even outside, though that faded a bit once we left the city. There was something mildly rapture-like about heading into the PRH offices, and seeing calendars on the wall last left at February 2020, and seeing galleys from that same year, a place frozen in time. And also meeting people who, like us, really hadn’t been outside of their caves in two years. It was good, and it was necessary, and it felt invigorating in an essential way. Numbers were low, we took our shot, and it paid off. Plus, we sold books. Which is always nice.

Hopefully this summer or fall I’ll get back out on the road again. Stay tuned!

Speaking Of Selling Books

Now that The Book of Accidents is out in paperback, looking over the numbers from that week it sure looks like people came out to support it, so thank you for that. At a rough estimate, the paperback release of TBOA was 4-5 times what we sold for the paperback of Wanderers, and the latter is a book whose sales were routinely pretty solid, even through the pandemic. Not that sales are a metric of a book’s quality, to be clear, but they certainly are a metric of its success in the market — so, thanks for making both books a success.

Reminder that if you missed our tour and you still want signed, personalized copies of The Book of Accidents (or really any of my books), then click on over to Doylestown Bookshop. They can help facilitate and ship the books to you.

The Words Continue Until Morale Improves

I figure I’m due some updates to you, too, about the other books I have in progress, so here’s what’s up with that:

Wayward is now done with copy-edits, and moves onto page proofs. It’s now officially a slightly bigger book than the first book, by about 5000 words, I think. Like Wanderers, it is authoritatively designated an Official Bison Bludgeoner. But please do not bludgeon any bisons with it. The title is symbolic, not instructive. You can preorder Wayward here. It’s out November this year.

I got edits back on my New Writing Book, and that probably deserves a bit of its own story: so, I pitched a book that was essentially a sequel to Damn Fine Story. It was more genre-focused, meant to drill down into how genre affects narrative. But with Writer’s Digest going away for a minute before getting bought by PRH, and with the pandemic, the book’s future was in question — and then I also felt like, hey, I don’t know if I even have the interest in writing that particular book right now. Never mind the fact that I don’t want to launch internecine genre battles on Twitter, I also just felt like my heart wasn’t in it. But there was a different book I had in mind, so I pitched something else to replace it: a book based off my gentle writing advice threads on Twitter and here at the blog. So I wrote that book, and that’s now the book that should one day exist. I suspect it’ll just be called Gentle Writing Advice? We shall see.

I’m currently writing my new apple horror book, which uhhh, is a horror book involving apples? Yeah. It’s a thing. (I think of it as a vampire novel without any actual vampires in it.) It was once called The Orchard, it may now be called The Apple of Harrow, or it may land on a third title, but I’m like, 30-40k into it, and I’m digging it so far, so I’m hoping y’all will dig it, too. That should be out… ennnh, roughly fall 2023? Good Lord Willing and the Covid Don’t Rise, that is.

Folks have asked about a sequel to Dust & Grim and as yet, there’s no news there — we pitched sequels, and are waiting to hear back. More as I know it.

I miiiiiight have some fresh tasty comic work coming out in the next year.

I have film and TV news that I can’t share, because such is the way.

Ta-da.

Petrified Oranges

Please, if you love excellent things, watch Our Flag Means Death. A deeply earnest, weird, wonderful, empathetic, murderous, pirate-based rom-com.

And Now, Photos

Photos from the trip, below!

Wait One More Thing

Kevin made me partake in something called either a New York System Wiener or a Rhode Island Hot Wiener, the former of which sounds like a thing an artificial intelligence made up, the latter just, y’know, porn.

It is a kind of chili dog unique-ish to Rhode Island — a red hot on a toasty bun covered in yellow mustard, a kind of meaty treacle adjacent to chili (which may or may not be made of beef heart) and raw onions. They were horrible and delicious, as many things of their ilk are. (Spam, f’rex. I love Spam. It’s horrible.)

The hot dogs haunted me for the rest of the day, first as a kind of volcanic heartburn, and later as, uhh, well let’s just go with, “if my bowels were haunted by oniony meat-ghosts.”

Even still: worth it.

OK BYE