Day four: Target wordcount: 3000 (on the road). Words written: 2700 (slacking off because I have credit from yesterday, but about 2000 of those were written on the Central Line in and out of Tottenham Court Road so I refuse to feel bad about it)

A chapter and a half-chapter today, in which my erstwhile hero finally gets some decent page-time instead of being usurped by his supporting cast. Or that was what the plan said, but I seem to have a gatecrasher. Some refugee whose existence I’d never even imagined until about three chapters ago is now hanging out with my hero trying valiantly to be interesting enough to last. Give that he (gender TBC) has lasted a chapter and a half and shows no sign of going away, I suspect he’ll succeed.

This is a case of a character spontaneously to fill a hole. My hero was supposed to be travelling with someone else at the moment, with whom he was supposed to have a falling out later. Writing out their first scene together made it clear that any delay was only ever going to look like procrastination and they went and had their falling out right there and then, thus leaving him unexpectedly alone and in need of comapny; and so, like taking a new lover on the rebound, this newcomer jumps in to fill a vacant space and seems a delight of new possibilities. Continuing with the same analogy, I suspect he stands a fair chance of turning out to be a complete disaster who’s soon trying to tell me how to run my plot, demands I stop seeing all my minor characters so I can write more page-time for him, and finally blows everything up in my face about two-thirds of the way through when I’m just starting to steer a course towards the final act.

Still, he’s in. For now. Ever the optimist or ever desperate, I’m really not sure…

Day three: Target wordcount: 3000 (errands to run). Words written: 3300

A chapter and a half done today. All the major characters are now in play and it feels a bit like setting up a position on a chessboard. Like trying to reproduce a famous opening and not quite remembering how it goes and getting somewhere close but not being quite sure and now I’ve played it and it’s not quite how I remembered it, which might mean that it’s a brilliant and startling innovation or else that it has a critical flaw in its defence that’s going to make everything unravel later. And like a game of chess, the only way to know is to play it out and see what happens.

A first draft is not the beginning of a story. I’d hazard there are almost no authors at all who sit down in front of a blank script and start writing with absolutely no idea of genre, character, theme or plot, although it does now sound temptingly zen and also dangerously close to how I write blog posts. From what I’ve seen, we all have our own ways of preparing for the First Draft. Some plan with meticulous precision and copious notes. Some seem to come up with a single idea, and think, Oooh, a story about a Belgian parakeet who talks to the dead and off they go without any idea of anything more, making it up as they go along. Personally I need a little more, although sometimes not very much (Dragon Queen, for example: The Taiytakei steal dragons and, while they’re at it, a dragon-queen. Consequences ensue. Good enough for a novel twice as long as this one, that was, although the first rewrite was colossal). For Chromium, I’ve started from a four-page synopsis, one page with very brief character outlines and three pages that gives a sentence or two to each of the chapters I thought I was going to write. Generally speaking I find the more work I do up front, the better the first draft is, although though that neither always works out nor equates necessarily to a better final product. The idea this time was that a very brief synopsis for each chapter ought to make starting to write each one somewhat easier.

Anyhow, this is about the point in the first draft where all that planning starts to fray at the edges. Ideas that looked fine in a two-page synopsis now appear dull and contrived when put into proper prose. The characters are mostly as they were intended, but one of them is developing more, ah, personality than expected and the main threat has turned out a bit crunchier that intended. This is all to the good, but has mades one of the intended relationships quite different. However, my main no-plan-survives-contact-with-the-enemy thing right now is that the story I’ve written seems to have found a short-cut around the synopsis that eradicates the need for about four planned chapters. At the same time, the lead character finds himself in a situation that wasn’t quite as I’d intended it at this point and a character I didn’t even know existed when I started looks like they might be making a significant part for themselves. So far none of this seems to derail the main storylines and merely weaves them in a different way.

Not that this is at all unusual, but this is where it really hits home that I’m walking into the unknown.

Day two: Target wordcount: 5700 (making up for yesterday). Words written: 5800

Actually a bit surprised to catch up today, but when the muse is in the zone, the muse is in the zone. I take these days when they come and am grateful for them, since there are also days when the muse is all hungover and surly from staying up too late and drinking too much at some all-night muse party and no amount of being flogged with a dead haddock will make her get of her lazy ass and inspire anything more than an intense need for chocolate.

Two full chapters today, a half-chapter and the start of yet another. Less talking, more fighting. Maybe that’s why. Also I like the bit where I threw someone off a cliff.

A bit about wordcounts then. Being a slave to wordcounts is a dangerous thing. It’s like being on a diet and then being a slave to the scales and waking up in the morning every single day and getting on the scales and seeing that OH MY GOD I PUT ON ANOTHER SIX GRAMS OVERNIGHT HOW IS THIS HAPPINING OH MY GOD MY LIFE IS AT AN END I AM SUCH A TOTAL FAILURE I MIGHT AS WELL EAT ENOUGH CHOCOLATE TO KILL AN ELEPHANT AND… er, I mean it’s easy to get disappointed and depressed and lose motivation. And stuff. Because like what the scales say each morning, the muse can be cultivated and directed but also fluctuates from day to day in a way that is completely out of your control and you might as well get used to it.

However, if you’re going to try and write a novel in a month or do the NaNoWriMo thing then you have a deadline and as soon as you have that, you have a wordcount target whether you like it or not, and as soon as you have that, seems to me you might as well pay some attention to how feasible it is. Especially when that count’s a big one. If you don’t know how fast you can write, it’s probably a good idea to find out. If it takes you six hours to write a thousand words, that’s how long it takes and there’s no point imagining you’re going to write five thousand in a day unless you have some very advanced ideas about space-time. Be realistic about how much time you actually have in a day for writing too. You might have thought I’ve done this sort of thing enough times not to cock up, but I’ve given myself five hours a day for Chromium which it turns out I don’t quite actually have, because there were various basic things like eating food and staring vacantly into space that I forgot to consider. I could, on a really good day, get done in three. On bad day, I’d need a time machine. I’m going for something that experience tells me I ought to manage, most days, to hit. Note also Mark’s comment on the yesterday’s entry. Write words at a rate that suits you, not the one that someone else said might be a good idea or the one that’s necessary to meet some ephemeral target in the three minutes of free time you have every day. If you don’t know what rate that is and you want to set yourself targets, I suggest finding out. Targets are there to help, to motivate, maybe for a bit of goading and definitely for a bit of feelgood when they get hit, not to stress, taunt and demoralise because they’re always out of reach. Choose them with care. Give yourself a day off now and then, too. These are important. They are for playing Skyrim (none today. I was good).

This really is shockingly like diet advice.

a.k.a. My Own Personal Novel Writing Month.

While (a tiny fraction of) the rest of the world observed national Novel Writing Month back in November, I was in the middle of a stack of rewrites for Dragon Queen. It was pretty cool watching lots of people racking up their wordcounts and a bit sad watching the agony for others as they found they simply couldn’t do what they’d hoped they could.

My situation is probably a little different to most of yours. Over the next month, I am aiming to write the first draft of a novel I shall call Chromium for now (working title). This is my day-job, my profession. I have about four weeks to knock up a usable first draft of a 100k word novel (bit of a packed schedule in the first half of this year). To be honest, I expect to fail and be content if it takes six weeks rather than four. Over the next month, I plan to give a day-by-day progress report along with hints, tips and the occasional rant and pulling-out of hair. I hope this might be either vaguely useful, informative or amusing, but I guess I won’t know that until I can look back on it from the other end. So here goes:

Some entries may be rather terse, as there might not be much time left in the day for the blog! Also, checking for typos and other errors may be, ah… minimal.

Day one: Target wordcount: 5000. Words written: 4300

Failure on the first day. During NaNoWriMo, I’ve seen people get despondent about this, when they get behind their wordcount target. Don’t let the wordcount rule your life. Yes, maybe you need one as a guide if you aim to write x-thousand words in Y days. But the muse comes as the muse comes and so does all sorts of other shit. You need to allow for that. I’ll say some more tomorrow about planning and knowing how much time you have in the day and how that translates into words. I had a bad night last night, felt grotty all day and spent an hour playing Skyrim when I could have been writing, and that probably made the different. And I don’t feel bad about it at all :-p

Today’s output: One full chapter and two half-chapters in which the principle characters talk at each other about what’s going on, what happened in the last book and some more about what’s going on. This was a really dialogue heavy day and it’s all pretty bland stuff. Today’s scenes have a fair amount of recapping of the previous book in the series (this being the second of three), too much talking and about as much atmosphere as the inside of a synthetic duvet. In short, they’re a bit crap and if I read this aloud, I’d be bored. I’ll say more about what a first draft is and isn’t and how extensive rewrites can be as this progresses; for now, for the early stages of a first draft, I’m OK with this – more than anything, what I want is for the characters to start having clear voices of their own, and for that a lot of talking is good. When the rewrites come along, I expect the dialogue to be pruned heavily and a great deal more atmosphere to be added to the locations.

The year of the Yang Water Dragon is upon us. Dragon years are lucky years to be born, to be married, to be, well, anything. Fingers crossed, it’s a good year to publish books with dragons in. We shall see.

Celebrating the year of the dragon, I’m offering readers of my Memory of Flames series a chance to be a dragon themselves. For the next fifteen days, I’ll take suggestions for names for dragons in the comments section to this post. The name I like best will appear in The Black Mausoleum alongside Blackscar.

Dragons have two names, as anyone who’s read the series will know. They have their “common” given to them by the dragon-riders who fly them – names such as Snow, Ash, Onyx, Unmaker, B’Thannan, Silence, Diamond Eye, Vengeance and so forth. Customs and traditions around naming vary from eyrie to eyrie.

Dragons also have the names that were given to them by the Silver Kings, long ago, names that they have forgotten but remember as the awaken from the alchemy of the eyrie masters. These tend to be names intended to capture a feeling or a sensation: Beloved Memory of a Lover Distant and Lost, Crisp Cold Shaft of Winter Sunlight, Black Scar of Sorrow Left Upon the Earth.

I’ll take either. Or even both

So here’s an excerpt of something of a work in progress.  Dragons are noticably lacking, it’s not something my editor has seen yet, and possibly he might never see it, since this is an as-yet-unfinished manuscript. I have quite a lot of those. It feels a bit more heroic than epic, this one, more swords-and-a-little-bit-of-sorcery-but-actually-mostly-axes and was sort of spawned by a visit to last year’s Jorvik festival.

Speaking of axes, the polls for the David Gemmell Legend Award for the best fantasy books of 2011 are now open. And I want an axe. No, really, I do want an axe, so vote for me, damn your eyes, ME! For I think The Order of the Scales really, really deserves it for the best fantasy cover art of 2011

(OK, yes, you’re actually voting for Dominic Harman).

For the best epic/heroic fantasy novel of 2011. And yes, I did mean it about wanting an axe, thanks. I mean, it’s not like there’s anything else of any significance with dragons in on the list…

<sigh>

For the best debut epic/heroic fantasy novel of 2011

Grumpy Jonnic is for someone who indirectly helped with various efforts to burn down Wales years ago. Hello Jon!

Uh, so here we are in 2012 and Santa was kind enough to land a copy of Skyrim on my desk and now I’m quietly watching all my delivery deadlines sail off into the wild blue yonder. Or white and snowy yonder, as the case may be. Ah well.

So what’s up for this year:

February 7th: The Order of the Scales comes out in the US and (I think) in France. The dragons made it to a couple of best-of lists again this year – over at the Ranting Dragon and an honourable mention at the bottom of the Wertzone Awards. You read these two pages, you realise what a lot of great fantasy we had last year.

April: The Warlock’s Shadow comes out in small form. I feel kind of sorry for the thief-taker and his boy – they haven’t taken off quite like the dragons did, but I love them just the same. The third book, The King’s Assassin,has been delivered but there won’t be any more in this series, not directly. However, as the Enormous Crocodile would say, I have secret plans and clever tricks…

May: Not sure of the dates, exactly, but The Black Mausoleum comes out around this time and I’m supposed to be delivering Dragon Queen. Dragon Queen is is going to be a bit different. And a bit bigger. Most of it is set in the world of the Taiytakei, but currently there are parts set in the dragon-realms, a part in Deepwater and some parts in Tethis, the centre of the action in The King’s Assassin. I say currently because it’s still in work, but Skyrim or otherwise, I shall make it my resolutino this year to deliver this one on time. Much more character-focussed than the first three books, this one. I hope.

Summer: Allegedly, all three volumes of the Memory of Flames come out in Germany, one each month. More news on that when I actually know.

The project-about-which-I-shall-not-speak is also supposed to be delivered. That’s more of a self-imposed deadline than anything else. More, er… Skyrim prone, that one. Three Sodium Hydride manuscripts before the summer holidays and I’ll be happy.

It’s also possible that The King’s Assassin will come out in August. Or maybe October. It’s delivered, that’s all I can say for sure so far.

Something might happen in Poland at some point. Chances are I’ll heart about it long after the event. In fact, all sorts of things might happen in the last third of the year. I’m hoping for some rather more exciting (for me at least) news for the back end of the year, but it’s an unceratin world and an uncertain profession, this authoring lark. Appearances at conventions and so forth might be a bit thin on the ground this year due to circumstances beyond my control (and not Skyrim, really really) but I’ll do as much as I can.

Anyway, happy new year, and I raise a glass to all you dragon-lovers! Cheers!

In the spirit of the season, have a present – an excerpty thingy.

Being a seson of not doing much real work, this is one of those times of year when I think about what comes next. So on the cards at the moment, we have:

• Heroic fantasy in which a soldier and a scholar chase a demon across the ruins of a once-great empire.
• Time-travelling teenagers
• Minoan steampunk
• A thirties-noir style fantasy in which wizards are madmen locked up in cages and the dead rise from old battlefields.
• A vaguely sensible attempt at some Martian SF
• Something I can’t even begin to describe but involves a magical parakeet from Belgium who speaks deathless wisdom and can defy time.

I’d say let me know here who you fancy, but it’s the parrot, isn’t it…

Here’s the cover for the last of the three Thief-Taker books. A shady fellow with a hood and a swanky sword skulking around a throne-room at night? Could this be the The King’s Assassin, perchance? I think, at last, it could be. Berren, at last, on the cover of one of his books. I want his boots.

Ladies and gentlemen,

It has come to my attention that there may be some people out there who do actually deserve to be eaten by dragons. It has also come to my attention that I have some spare spear-carrier characters in The Black Mausoleum who do, indeed, suffer this fate, but also last long enough to get names.

Suggestions, are welcomed. I was thinking fictional (your favourite game character, the character that the really annoying guy you knew in school used to play who never got his come-uppance, your GM’s favourite NPC Jones (the one who has the +10 Amulet of Plot Immunity and is always one step ahead of everything). However, given that I’m currently toying with “Sepp” or possibly “Blatter” or possibly both, I suppose others may at least amuse me, so go for it. Sadly “Fred Goodwin” doesn’t really fit as the name for an Adamantine Man. I think I may give him a cartoon soon.

Enjoy.

PS: A couple of recent new reviews for The Thief-Taker’s Apprentice: “skilfully crafted” (Quippe) and “realistic, complex characters, with a realistic, complex relationship and adventures to match” Specusphere

There’s some real blogging over here this week (thought I’d deface someone else’s site for a change).

(Updated 22/11)

There’s a whole bunch of stuff that’s almost finished. The last read-through of The King’s Assassin is almost finished. The first structural rewrite of Dragon Queen is almost finished. Here’s a tiny tiny spoiler. It’s a story about a queen and her dragon and the dragon-queen is . . .

Ah no. But who would you want it to be?

The edits for The Black Mausoleum are (still) almost finished (definitely by the end of last week, was it? But I’m not ready for them just yet so that’s OK). The samples chapters for Mystery Project U are almost finished. A pitch for a new YA series is almost ready.

With a bit of luck, they’ll all be finished (except the edits) by the end of the week, in which case I might even have a week off and see how far I can raise my blood pressure by playing some more Dark Souls CoD MW3.

After that, back to Sodium Hydride project, and then back to Dragon Queen in the new year.

This is a brief post about how books get written. My books, at least.

Most of the advice I’ve seen about writing a book, at least about the initial writing of a book, goes along the lines of keep writing. When I was writing my first stories (long before The Adamantine Palace), I think I used to agonise over every sentence before moving on to the next one. Now I’m working in collaboration someone else and I’m watching them do the same, it’s bringing all that back. Every. Single. Word.
Think about it.
Maybe change it.
Two
or
three
times
before
moving
on.
And then rewrite the sentence five minutes later.
And the whole paragraph the next day.
And again the next.

It’s very hard, I think, when you haven’t gone through the whole process a half a dozen times, to just keep going even when you know what you’re writing isn’t your best. I’ve seen it written in probably half a dozen different places (and that’s without actually looking for such advice) that this is what a writer should do, but I’ve never seen anyone say why. So here are some whys:

Blockage: “Frank clenched his fists.” Used clenched two sentences ago? Just plain don’t like it? Feel the need for a different word but can’t think of it? Well you can either just stick with “clenched” and change it in the rewrites later or you can sit around banging your head against a Thesaurus until the right word comes along. I think I spent two days entirely stuck over one word once. Two wasted days. And with hindsight, nine times out of ten, what changes in the rewrite isn’t just the word, it’s the whole sentence. Best to keep going.

Acceptance of the rewrite: I used to think that the first draft was basically it, and so it had to be almost perfect. Rewrites are for sorting out the odd clunky sentence that somehow got away, grammatical errors, typos and the like, right? No. The first draft of Dragon Queen (in work at the moment) came in at 145k words. The second draft is going to be around 200k. One point of view has been removed completely, three have been added and two have been greatly expanded. The whole tone of the story has changed. Elements of plot have been removed, elements of character added and the setting has gone from pencil sketches to a full-colour draft. That’s what a rewrite is – or what it can be. True enough, not all of them are like that. Some first drafts come out better than others, but that’s what they can be like. Personally, I expect to do three or four rewrites before I submit to my editor. The odd clunky sentence, the typos? That’s the last of them. Now it might be that you can get a first draft almost exactly right if your painstaking about every sentence, but for me, putting that effort in to the first draft would make it almost impossible to bring myself to make massive revisions such as those I’m making at the moment. I recommend against giving yourself such an impediment. Accept the rewrite as inevitable, and then be pleased if it turns out to be easy.

And last but definitely not least…

The Plot-With-A-Will-Of-Its-Own: So here’s a situation, one I’m in right now with Volume one of Codename Sodium Hydride: you get to the last act, and you realise that there is a much, much better  denouement than the one you originally had in mind when you gave your editor your synopsis. Trouble is that to do it, you need to go back and make some changes. Maybe not big things, but lots of little things. Changing the focus a little. Bringing a couple of background characters out of the shadows a little, pushing someone you thought was going to be a major character out of focus. In essence, the realisation that there is a much better book than the one you set out to write, and it’s really not the different either. Now you can get there by painstakingly writing five hundred perfect words every day or you can get there by slamming down five thousand and using “clenched” in every other sentence, it really doesn’t matter. Both drafts give you the basic shape of your story, and both will let you know at about the same time that there’s a better one just a rewrite away. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out which way round is the more frustrating.

The vomit draft: Get it out as fast as you can, and it usually stinks. Embrace the joy of rewrites.

So, anyway, this is just begging for a caption competiton.

Dragon: “I’ve told you before and I’ve told you again: No playing Dragon Age: Origins in your room after lights out.

Skjorl: <hands head in shame>

Caption that makes me laugh the most between now and whenever I get bored of the idea wins an “Angry Dragons” T-shirt. I have Large and XL. Sorry, small people.

(PS – if you’re getting this on facebook via RSS, by all means post there but please post here too so I’m certain to see it).

While it’s hard to imagine there are many people who read this blog who don’t already know, my publisher, Gollancz, has recently launched what they call the Science Fiction Gateway. Gollancz have previously kept some classics of Science Fiction in print through their Masterworks series, and the Gateway is the next logical step: Huge back-catalogues of science fiction by authors we all grew up with (or possibly our parents grew up with) available as e-books.

Nice idea. I’m not sure how much of a work-in-progress is is, and whether it only supports titles where Gollancz have the e-book rights or what – certainly my first little exploration found holes (E.E. ‘doc’ Smith but no Lensman books? Eh?) but the site admits to being currently not-quite-ready and presumably more titles will join in time.  Anyway, anyone with an e-book reader and a hankering for old classic SF could do worse that check out http://www.sfgateway.com/

Gollancz also have a blog of their own, although since it doesn’t mention me at all yet, I’m not sure I like it.

Alright, I do like it, but it NEEDS A HOME BUTTON, DARREN.

So I get the kids home form school and there’s this guy in a hi-vis jacket standing outside the house looking a bit lost. Turns out he was here to clean the bins, which would have been all fine with me if I hadn’t already thrown stuff in them again since they were emptied. Anyhow, we get to talking, mostly about where all the rubbish that’s in the bin can go apart from the place it’s supposed to for a bit. For some reason (OK, because of the T-shirt I’m wearing), we get to talking about games and the pros and cons of X-box vs. PS3 vs. PC and I show off how much of a dinosaur (or possibly cheapskate) I am by raising my hand for the PC, my three-year-old version of which continues to kick the X-box’s butt when it comes to graphics and, oh yeah, the games are ten quid cheaper.

So anyway, it gets on to what I do for a living (the wheelie bin guy is, basically, the wheelie bin guy so his side of this conversation is kinda short), and since I practically have a book in my hand through the whole of this conversation (Warlock’s Shadow printed copie arrived today), I get to show off, and then I have my first experience of that conversation. That You-must-be-really-famous-you-must-make-loads-of-money-I’ve-got-a-great-idea-for-a-book-maybe-you’d-like-to-write-it-for-me conversation.

Er, no.

Famous? Well I get to do a panel at Fantasycon (3pm Saturday, but only because I’m fantasy author who’s done some books that happen to have been labelled YA, but it’ll be, er… great. Mostly because of the other panellists). Does that count?

Loaded? Not from writing books any time soon.

But the I’ve-got-a-great-idea-for-a-book-maybe-you’d-like-to-write-it-for-me? It wasn’t a bad idea. Wasn’t fantasy. Wasn’t genre fiction. Wasn’t even fiction. It was quite interesting and we talked about it for a while, but there are so many reasons why something like that wasn’t going to ever work, the primary one being that it wasn’t my story or even remotely related to the stories I like to write.

Everyone has a story in them. I wish Wheelie Bin Guy the best of luck, but he’ll need to do his research. We might talk again and I might even ask a few questions and tell him where to submit to. But no, I will not write your story for you. [1]

[1] Unless you seriously loaded. Or a blood relative. [2]

[2] Oh who am I kidding: If you have enough ice-cream, I have slots free in 2013.

Status update. Haven’t had one of these for a while. Why’s that? Oh, right, because I haven’t been WRITING for a while. Stupid summer holidays. Stupid day-job. Ah well, back to normal soon.

It’s become pretty clear that Dragon Queen is going to need a total rewrite. Which is OK, and for which it will be much improved. Partly this has become clear because of what’s going on with The King’s Assassin, which has made a couple of things obvious, and partly because of the Gazetteer. Mental note: write gazetteer first next time <sigh>

The King’s Assassin is close to being ready to submit. The gazetteer is useable and will come with hyperlinks this time (not that any of you care, but it’s for me, not for you, for MEEEE and some serious shit is about to hit a serious writing fan in a week or so whent he day-job finally goes away FOREVER[1] as I beat Dragon Queen into shape for the end of the year and draft out the first third of … uh … some other thing that we shall call the Sodium Hydride project. More of which later.

And finally, summer saw the publication of what will almost certainly be my best-selling words for a very long time – the introduction to the Gollancz 50th birthday edition of Pat Rothfuss’s Name of the Wind. Rumour has it Pat may be coming to the UK in November. You are all to welcome him in your viking suits.

Er… and then I had a bored moment at some point…

[1] A couple of months

About a year ago, I offered an (unspecified) prize for the person to find the most typos in King of the Crags.  The hands down winner won a small slice of immortality, and ‘uncle’ Silvestre now has a small part in The King’s Assassin (out in late 2012) as a sword-master who teaches Berren a lesson or two.

This month’s competition prize is an opportunity to be an Adamantine Man in The Black Mausoleum. Possibly several opportunities. A fiery death is guaranteed, but you’ll appear for at least a few chapters. As usual with these things, I get to veto names that don’t fit. To win one of these cameos, you have to find typos in The Order of the Scales. The prize is nominally for whoever finds the most. Someone on Goodreads claims to have found eight. There may be further prizes for effort if I get several replies.

You can either reply to this post or mail me. Happy hunting.

The magnificent Stephen Youll strikes again: The cover art for The Black Mausoleum. I particularly like the birds and the Fury River flood plain in the background. Oh, and the dragon.

Note – the UK cover art.

After another long had day at the office, Skjorl was disheartened, upon leaving, to discover that Blackscar had not forgotten their altercation of the night before.

Given what kicked off last night, I’m not in the mood for talking about books much. I’m half tempted to repeat last week’s cartoon & subsitute “Subjegated disenfranchised drugged underclass” for “Impending Doom” but maybe that’s reaching. So have another Test Card instead.

I promised some sort of amazing prize-thing if ever I had 1007 twitter followers. Then I sort of forgot and then it sort of happened and then I sort of remembered and felt sort of guilty for not having thought about it.

So OK. Every now and then, there will be copies given away to new followers on Twitter. At random times around the start of each month, so there’s no playing silly buggers, but that doesn’t seem like much of a prize, because I’m guessing that most of the people who come and read this will have read The Adamantine Palace already.

Today’s giveaway is a hardcover copy of The Last Dragon. It’s the short story I wrote for Genre for Japan, and if you simply want to read it, it’s available here for free. It’s not long. I’ve made five hardcover copies of the story using Lulu – one for me, one for the cover artist (Su Haddrell), one for the man who comissioned it and two to give away. They are signed and numbered and there are unlikely ever to be any more. I’m giving away copy number five to the first person who can reply to this post with the correct answer to the following question:

The Salt Pool lies in the Mausoleum under Clifftop. How many full-size dragon skeletons hang there?

The answer is somewhere in King of the Crags. No read-ee book-ee, no get-ee prize-ee.

Here’s a picture of The Last Dragon:

This was looking like a test-card week, but hey, look, Gollancz have announced the ten books they’ll be re-issueing for their 50th anniversary. I haven’t read Eric.

There’s a particular reason for bragging about this: I get to introduce Kvothe. MWAHAHAHAHAAAAA.

Also, awesome.

A full first draft of Dragon Queen, the other sequel to The Order of the Scales now exists. Proofing of The Warlock’s Shadow has finished. I shall be at the Debenham Arts Festival on the 23rd of this month. I may be repeating myself. If I am, that’s because it’s a . . .

a . . .

a SLOW NEWS WEEK.

Well it is of your news coverage is confined to the narrow limits of how many words I, specifically, have laid down on various works in progress. Unfortunately this is only going to get worse as, save for the occasional re-drafts of The King’s Assassin and Dragon Queen, the bulk of the next six months will be dedicated to Secret Project G about which little can be said except that it’s secret and involves the letter G. Although thast might be a code-letter. Add to that the demise (for now) of Diamond Cascade, and there could be weeks when I don’t blog at all.  To avoid this horror from beyond imagination, I have made a series of

T E S T      C A R D S

Further may occur when I can’t think of anything useful

So here’s the US cover for the Order of the Scales. Which has been on the internetz elsewhere, so here’s the  underlying art with a little more resolution and without the title box.

Mmmm…. dragons….

I should mention Alt.Fiction in passing. Plenty of other blogs are already singing its praises, so I’ll not go on at length. As a first-timer, I was impressed by the venue, the programme, the organisation and the number of authors in attendance. Thanks to those who put in their time and effort to make this happen, and yet another huge sorry for those who showed up to the reading that got cancelled at short notice. I blame, well, me, mostly. Roll on Fantasycon.

To business then. Kingdom X has conquered kingdom N. Protagonist is an X but settles among people N. Kingdom X develops a bad attitude towards its conquered minions. Protagonist stands up for the N people around him and becomes a reluctant leader within an uprising. It’s not exactly a story you haven’t heard before, although I already changed to X and N from A and B to avoid upsetting anyone who might think that the use of A and B was intended to imply that B is somehow inferior <sigh>.

So here’s a little thought-experiment going: If this was a traditional medieval Europe fantasy setting, then Kingdom A would look like (say) Denmark and Kingdom B would look like (say) some bit of Germany, and everyone would be racially and culturally much the same and pretty familiar. Which would be safe and probably the most commercial thing to do, but perpetuates the whiteness of fantasy and isn’t remotely progressive.

I’m interested in alternatives. Is there a version of this story that’s both progressive and commercially viable? Or has there been?

The King of the Crags is to be published in Poland (probably) next year by Dwojka bez sternika, who recently published The Adamantine Palace. The Thief-Taker’s apprentice, meanwhile has been acquired by Proszynski, who also brought out (are bringing out?) Wolfsangel. I think it would amuse my thief-taker to be in the company of a werewolf. Possibly this is an excuse to visit Poland…

There have been some reviews recently.

The Adamantine Palace first: “…fast, furious and action packed…” Vilutheril

And finally, a couple for the Order of the Scales: “Great Stuff” Falcatta Times and “enthusiastic … brilliantly executed … heart-thumping dragon action” from LEC Book reviews.

For the handful of you following the adventures of Diamond Cascade, there will be a large hiatus shortly (we played the last session last week and left everything on a total cliff-hanger – which I guess is what you get when you put the fate of the world into the hands of a bunch of chaotic thieves and wizards, most of whom are carrying negative wisdom modifiers (and believe me, when it comes to party actions, those modifiers do stack).

I had a go at a couple of other projects to replace Diamond Cascade, but they were rubbish. In fact, everything I write at the moment appears to be rubbish, but that’s what rewrites and editors are for, so no worries – yet. There might be some cartoons instead. Which will also be rubbish since I can’t draw. But it’s my blog, so nyer!

I’ve been promising the result of the genre-for-japan auction and the short story that came out of it for a little while, so here it is: The Last Dragon

And now back to work :-!

The Order of the Scales officially became published on Thursday last week. Since there were no ARCs or review copies sent out, much nail-biting continues; but if covers sell books, this one should be a winner. Have I mentioned how good the cover is? Have I mentioned it enough yet? The online pictures simply don’t do it justice. Foil! Flames! Dragons! Complete lack of anything obvious to say it’s the third book in a trilogy… oh, wait, maybe that’s not so great. Ah well.

So apart from the nail-biting, that’s that.I’d post an excerpt, except I already did that. So here’s a tiny tiny snippet of the next book to come out instead: The Warlock’s Shadow.

Sailors swaggered back and forth, some of them bleary-eyed from a sleepless night in one of the drinking holes that filled the darker alleys beyond. A line of burly men had formed a human chain, picking up sacks and crates from boats drawn up against the edge of the harbour and passing them along to a milling cluster of carts. Further along the waterfront, another chain was passing supplies across the dockside from a warehouse out onto a cluster of jetties. A party of black-skinned Taiytakei traders in their rainbow robes and their bright feathers walked serenely out from the Avenue of Emperors, discretely escorted by half a dozen snuffers to keep the worst of the riff-raff at bay. A squad of imperial soldiers lounged around a covered wagon. Yellow and silver robed priests of the sun and the moon walked side by side, the faithful and the desperate following in their wake like the tail of a comet. Gangs of rough men, press-gangs, lurked by the dockside flophouses like sand-spiders waiting to pounce. Boys ran weaving between them all, carrying news and messages, or else simply mischief. Berren smiled to himself. He could never quite shake the feeling of coming home whenever he visited the docks.

In two days, The Order of the Scales is officially published in the UK, although you can probably wander into Waterstones and buy it now. That’s the end of the memory of Flames trilogy, for better or for worse. It’s a series that has tried to dig a little deeper with each book. We started with politics and intrigue, murder, sex and betrayal in The Adamantine Palace. Now it’s a battle for survival, one species against another, and both of them will do terrible things. There was never meant to be a ‘right side’ or a ‘wrong side’ and there are certainly no traditional heroes in either camp (and hopefully by the end, the villains will turn out to be more complex than they initially seemed). What there is is a big fucking great problem and not enough being done about it. For some, it’s simply too difficult, but for most, it’s simply that dealing with it gets in the way of their own ambitions, and frankly, the problem belongs to someone else – it’s what the alchemists are for, dammit.

If you read the book and read the dedication, you’ll probably guess that I, personally, would root for the alchemists. And whether they suceed in the end and somehow put the genie back in the bottle, whether they fail and all burn, whether they manage some sort of ugly compromise, or mysteriously unite into a future of happy co-existence, you can be sure it would have been a lot easier without any of the people with crowns on their heads getting in the way.

By co-incidence, I happened to be at a talk last night given by a a group of people I will describe as contemporary alchemists. Bad Science (Ben Goldacre’s blog – I particularly liked this one) is worthy of your attention. As is this, this (sorry to pick on Canada) and this if only for the mission statement.

Support your neighbourhood alchemist! Or dragons will get you