Author Michael J. Sullivan's Official Website

Release Day

2012-01-16T09:23:00.000-05:00

For those of you who started the series early, those that read the first five, the wait for the final book is at last over. Today Percepliquis has been released.

As always seems to happen, shortly after the book becomes available someone, somewhere manages to read it. Well over 500 pages that took me eight months to draft, a reader consumed in a matter of hours. I can’t complain. When I originally published The Crown Conspiracy no one read it. And when I released Avempartha, it was six months before readers took notice.

Those that are buying ebooks, can download them now. Those that are getting the books in paper can order and have them in just a few days.

Those of you reading the Orbit editions and have just completed Rise of Empire, it looks as if Heir of Novron is available in your local store.

At long last the series is over, but until you get your chance to read the book, I suggest you stay away from the Internet as spoilers are popping up like weeds.

First Sighting

2012-01-16T08:53:00.000-05:00

Heir of Novron was first found at a Books-A-Million in Butler, Pennsylvania. It was found and shot by Michael Tynan thus winning him the exclusive Riyria shirt.

Congratulations Mike!

Heir of Novron Available

2012-01-14T11:01:00.000-05:00

Countdown, Day-3

Heir of Novron is no longer listed as a pre-order. Both Barnes and Noble and Amazon are showing the book as "in stock" and purchasable. We're almost there. Still looking for that first sighting.

On Their Way

2012-01-13T09:56:00.000-05:00

Countdown, Day-4

Monday marks the launch of Percepliquis. As you can see we have an inventory ready to ship and will be packaging and shipping them out today for those who preOrdered and hopefully they will get to you on or very near Monday. Those of you buying the ebook version will be able to download them on Monday.

We are still T-18 days away from the Heir of Novron release. I received my shipment of Heir copies on Wednesday, which means that copies could be hitting local book stores in the next few days as well. In the past, books appeared in stores just about a week after I got mine. So watch for them, and remember to snap a picture and send it to me when you see them. The first person who does will win a Riyria t-shirt.

Those wishing an ebook version of Heir of Novron, you still have another 18 days to wait. Why? Because the offical release is the 31st, but only the ebook can be punctually released. Percepliquis is being released two weeks early to account for the good chance that Heir will appear in stores early simply due to shipping realities, and to reward those long-time readers who helped make the series such a success.

So keep a watch on your mail, and in your local stores—the last book is coming.

Using Cerebro

2012-01-10T11:52:00.000-05:00

Countdown, Day-7

In response to someone asking if he had seen a specific comment about his books online, Mark Lawrence, author of Prince of Thorns, remarked on Facebook that no mention of his book slips passed him.

I think that’s the way it is with new authors. Maybe it changes when you have fifty books on the shelves and have made cameo appearances in your own novel-to-film adaptations. For example I doubt Stephen King will take note of his name appearing in this post. Being that this is a line I have yet to cross, at this stage any mention—any comment, no matter how small or trivial—is a treat to discover. The mere fact that people you don’t know are talking about you, is so strange as to be mesmerizing. Days ago you were this invisible entity flitting about the net, now you exist on it in avatar form. I say this, because it isn’t really you. What exists on the net is an idea of you, an impression that people develop, ideas they associate with your name that you have little control over. In many ways it is similar to an online game. Players can’t help but associate your actions in the game to your character, and an impression is developed that is the sum of your words, actions, and even the look of your avatar. This imprint might bear only a distant resemblance to the real person, but it doesn’t matter. The avatar is all that most people ever see, so for them the projection is reality.

This disconnect is what surprises new authors. It surprised me. We forget others don’t know us, and that something fundamental has changed. Normally when aspiring authors meet strangers there is often an immediate sense that whatever the other person is doing with their life is likely more important and more successful. Not only are you only chasing a dream of making stuff up for people’s entertainment, but you haven’t even succeeded. When people asked what I did, I rarely admitted to being a writer. They would most assuredly ask, “Anything I’d know?” I would then have to explain that I’m not yet published and feel ashamed as if I’ve been caught in a lie, like I just claimed to be Winston Churchill and should have known they’d guess I wasn’t telling the truth.

You spend years learning, you are hopeless, clueless, just plain—less. So when after you’ve been published and meet with some level of success, it is utterly bizarre when readers don’t merely treat you as equals, but as something more.

I doubt there is a new author alive that doesn’t use Google Alerts, or some other method of searching the net for any mention of their name, or the name of their book. (Although Mark Lawrence informs me he turned off his alert feed for Prince of Thorns as it became a time sink.) If they are like me, they expect to find conversations discussing how utterly awful their work is and possibly even snide comments about their mother.

My network detector once located a review of my first book on a tiny blog called My World…in Words and Pages, written by Melissa Hayden. She had read it and—thank goodness—liked it. Assuming this was a very quiet, little blog, I broke my rule about reviews and made a comment of thanks. I actually cringed a bit when I hit the submit button. How would she take that? Me coming there and intruding on her conversation? Would she think me rude just barging in? Would she think I was trying to advertise on her site? All the old insecurities of being an eternal aspiring author rushed back. I was published sure—but self-published. That was worse, as to many people it was an admission of failure. Almost as soon as I posted I felt it was a mistake. I checked back the next day bracing myself for an inferno of accusations and insults. Instead I found this:

Wow, Michael! Thank you so much for stopping by, I feel very honored. I am really glad you liked the review. I am really looking forward to Avempartha. I have a few theories on a few people and can not wait to see what you have in store. I do hope the rest of the series does make it to the shelves, now that I am hooked on them. Thank you for the wonderful comment.

Followed by the comments from others:

Wow, Mel! You did such a good review the author stopped by how cool!

… I think it's the coolest thing you stopping by to comment on her review! I would love an author to do that with my blog! … Okay, so I think authors are like movie stars! At least in my eyes you are!...

Then the next day Melissa wrote:

Michael,
If you are still around, I was wondering if I could ask you some questions...

It was strange, as if I was this mystical creature that she hoped not to offend, and wasn’t sure could hear her. I happily did an interview for Melissa and found out later that she is actually well-known and respected in the book blogging circles. Who knew? I just found it so odd that I would receive such a reception. I’m nobody, but apparently not to her.

That was fun and I made a friend of Melissa who recently became one of the select few to receive an advanced copy of Percepliquis which she recently reviewed.

So this idea of being Xavier plugged into Cerebro and reaching out into the Interwebz to read the minds of everyone who thinks about my books is sadly addictive but often exciting, like recently when I discovered author Beverly Jenkins mentioned me in a USA Today interview concerning three authors she reads, admires, and has met or would like to meet. She pointed out two New York Times Best Selling authors, Jim Butcher, and Ilona Andrews. She was likely pressured for time on the final name as the last person she mentioned was…me.

Now yesterday, Robin and I went out to lunch and she brought her iPad and hockey puck. The hockey puck is what she calls this little black mobile wifi hub that indeed looks a good deal like a hockey puck. As we were having lunch we checked Twitter and discovered that authors Mazarkis Williams, and Douglas Hulick had found my blog post A Digital Feast. I knew they would—I mentioned them and I know the superpower of new authors to locate all reverence to their books. We had a running dialog that probably had something to do with forming a league to combat evil in the universe, when a new twitter post popped up. It read:

Bezig met discussie van De Gesloten Universiteit (Natalie Koch) en Theft of Swords (Michael J Sullivan) op het forum.

How odd. Looking at it we saw what appeared to be the word university, my book, my name, and the word forum. What language, we had no idea. Was some foreign university discussing the literary merits of Theft of Swords? Perhaps I was now being taught as a classic? Okay, I didn’t believe that one either.

“Robin to the bat cave!” I love being able to say that. I’m not so sure my wife does.

Getting home we began digging using the Google translator and deciphered the message as:

Engaged in discussion of The Unseen University (Natalie Koch) and Theft of Swords (Michael J Sullivan) on the forum. # ff-reading group

Turns out this is a Dutch book club’s forum who had selected Theft of Swords for their January 2012 selection. Previous choices had been Brent Weeks, Brandon Sanderson, and Orson Scott Card.

Also listed—and let’s see how long it takes for them to see this—Tee Morris and Philippa Ballentine’s Phoenix Rising. Tee lives near me and we’ve known each other for a few years. I’ve even strained a few muscles helping him move furniture in his house. Phoenix Rising is a steampunk novel that just came out last year—Tee’s first Big Six publication.

With the positive experience Melissa provided me, I tried to log on to the Dutch site, but it required a registration. This has stopped me before, but I was intrigued and submitted. By early evening I was admitted and logged in. It was nearly midnight in Amsterdam.

I located an About the Author section under my book’s name and there I found a post which I Google translated to:

Following my last twitter message that we are reading his book this month, follows the writer (the book club) is now on Twitter ... If you want to pass something genius you can.

This was immediately followed by:

En hij zit hier nu ook!!!!! or And he's here now !!!!!

Using a translator program I composed what I hoped was a message that said:

I’m using Google translator. Not sure if what I write will be readable. I want to thank you for selecting my book. If you can leave questions in English. I will try to answer in that language. By the way, a Dutch translation in the works.

This began a night of eavesdropping on Dutch conversations that was a bit like listening to a really distant station on an AM radio.

“This is also ever come sounds quite enjoyable”

“Mmm, I've just started and it's already very good. Although both the story and the characters are really different from me seem Eddings has it there is something of road. Happy fantasy perhaps?”

“That genre appeals to me to do. This has become very top of my virtual ntl. You have me very, curious consolation!”

“Okay, okay, you got me enthusiastic stories hot run for this book and after some covert actions on the Internet, is the book with me at the e-reader and I'm so start.”

So this is going to be trickier than I expected.

In case you are interested in discussing Theft with fellow readers, there’s an easier way. Goodreads has a group who just started reading the entire series, so you can come over there and chat with others. I even stop in from time to time.

And as of today, we are officially one week away from launch.

The Indies

2012-01-09T19:28:00.001-05:00

Countdown, Day-8

The indies is where I used to live and I’m not talking about a place in southeast Asia.

For me the publishing landscape is analogous to the way things were in the eighteenth century. My story would be that of a man born in a small monarchy, Lichtenstein perhaps, who failed to make the heads of Europe turn and due to economic reasons set sail to the New World to make my fortune. It was rough, but I did well, and I made a name for myself. Then I was offered a royal appointment in London. London isn’t the sin city I was led to believe by all the talk in the colonies and of course I know the “rebels” aren’t backward, feral heathens either.

Having sailed the sea between, I don’t see the need for war. There are good and bad indie books just as the same can be said of traditionals. Too much is based on opinion to be definitive. The Big Six have a huge navy and control the seas, but the cost of living in England is high. You can make a fine living on a small farm in Virginia, but where is the theater? Both are fine choices and many people of means cross the Atlantic back and forth as the mood suits them.

So it would be remiss of me to ignore the many fine writers back in my old neighborhood, a fresh, and exciting world of inventors and entrepreneurs and finding quality indie fantasy books is really quite simple. Amazon is a great place for “author discoverability” and provides lists for Bestselling, Top Rated, Most Wished For, and Hot New Releases. The number of sales it takes to rank onto these lists ensures that a lot of people have purchased the books, so high sales + lots of reviews = a pretty darn good bet.

My wife and I know, or at least have spoken with, many of the following authors, and although I’ve not had a chance to read their works their records speak for themselves and I hope you’ll give them a try.

David Dalglish is a hugely popular indie fantasy author. He was really becoming popular just as I was exiting the indie world, and I think of him a bit as a younger brother who has since grown taller than me. He’s an example of the new indie author—having never bothered to even submit his work to the Big Six. He has three series including: Half-Orcs (1-5), Shadowdance Trilogy (1-3), The Paladins (1-3). He’s also has short stories in collections: A Land of Ash, The Gate: 13 Dark & Odd Tales, Lessons III: Demonic Dolls and Other Morbid Drabbles, and a short story he co-wrote with Sean Sweeny: Refugees: A Short Story of Survival. In general his books range in price from $0.99 - $4.95and you can tryout The Weight of Blood (The Half-Orcs, Book 1) for free. He sells ebooks and a number of the titles are available in print as well. He has more than 410 Amazon Ratings and 1,404 Goodreads ratings. On Amazon’s Epic Fantasy Kindle Bestseller List he has books ranked at: #20, #21, #30, #82, and #96.

B.V. Larson is an indie author, who like me was recently picked up by a major publisher, but one of those who straddles the ocean between. The science fiction and fantasy imprint of Amazon will be putting out his Technomancer book in the summer of 2012. In addition he has numerous indie titles in both fantasy and science fiction including: Haven Series (6 books), Star Force Series (5 books), Hyborean Dragons (6 books), Imperium Series (2 books), Seeker Series (2 books), Shifting, Velocity, The Vampire’s Image, Creatures, Spyware, and Lost Shores. Not only does he routinely top the fantasy and science fiction lists, but he has made the Amazon Top 100 Lists with several titles. He also prices his books from $0.99 - $4.95. He has almost 990 Amazon Ratings and 1,182 Goodreads rating. On Amazon’s Science Fiction Kindle Bestseller List he has books at: #12, #64, #74. On Amazon’s Magic and Wizards Books Bestsellers List he has books at: #26, and #62.

Daniel Arenson’s “Requiem books (the Song of Dragon Series)” have been tearing up the chart – bumping my books out of a few choice spots…thanks Daniel. His works include: Song of Dragons Series (1-3), The Gods of Dream, Eye of the Wizard, Firefly Island, Flaming Dove, and a writing tips book entitled: The Word Weaver’s Grimoire. Daniel started his career, as I did by publishing through a small press and then decided to go out on his own. He has 200 Amazon Ratings, and 543 on Goodreads. His Light of Requiem is #2 on the Hot New Releases in Epic Fantasy (two above Rise of Empire at #4). On Amazon’s Epic Fantasy Kindle Bestseller’s list he has books at: #13, #15, and #17 (my books are #26, #41, and #74 so he’s currently outselling me). He also can be found on the Magic and Wizards List at #22. His ebooks range from $2.99 - $3.99 and some titles are also available in paperbacks).

Michael G. Manning is proof that you don’t need dozen’s of books to make a splash on the indie scene. He has just a single series with two books published so far: Mageborn: The Blacksmith’s Son & The Line of Illeniel, but both have, I believe, hit the Amazon Top 100. I know for sure one has. The first is priced at $0.99 and the second for $2.51. The books can be found on Amazon’s Epic Fantasy Kindle Bestsellers list at #8 and #12. He has over 230 Amazon ratings with just these two books.

I could name dozens of others, who are either indie or published through small presses and selling well such as: K.C. May, Aaron Pogue, J.R. Rain, Deborah Geary, Joseph Lallo, Christopher Bunn, Brian Rathbone, Michael R. Hicks, M. R. Mathias, Lindsay Buroker, Thomas DePrima, Vaughn Heppner, Gregory J. Downs, Brian S. Pratt, Michael Foster, Christopher Williams, and even some well selling author’s from my wife’s small press: Nathan Lowell, Marshall S. Thomas, and Leslie Ann Moore. Many of these authors offer free or deeply discounted books so they are painless to tryout.

So I suspect when I visit the salons in Paris this spring, there will be both Old World and New World authors, and thankfully, art—like science—have never noticed borders.

The Great Book Hunt of 2012

2012-01-08T11:18:00.000-05:00

Countdown, Day-9

We’re close now, very close.

When I was in my teens I ran a road rally, which is sort of like a suburban form of scavenger hunt, in that cars are used. There are various types of the road rallies and scavenger hunts. Most gave you a list of items that you are required to find like a pinwheel, or a shoelace. Mine were a bit different.

I provided clues, verbal puzzles of increasing difficulty that would lead to the next clue. “Your next clue lies at the big M,” is an example, and it would indicate the McDonalds (we only had one in our town.) You would then race in your car to the McDonalds and since it said the clue was at the M, that meant you needed to look on the M sign itself. There you would find another clue taped to it. That would be the easiest sort of clue. They got a lot harder.

What might you call an eleven inch ruler? — Little Casear (pizza)

Some were just a series of numbers, other a jumble of letters, other poems, and some photographs or even a recorded song.

And I made the clues themselves challenging.

I spray painted a giant clue on the surface of a parking lot that could only be seen by climbing a nearby tower.
I took out an ad in the local paper for another.
I taped one on a competitor car’s bumper. (Actually all of them, but they didn't know that.)
One was buried in a forest.
One taped to the moving handrail of an escalator.
Another in a specific page in a book in a library.

I did this every year and became notorious as the popularity of the event grew and I had as many as twenty cars causing trouble around my little town, but surprisingly the police and security guards often joined in the fun—once they found out what was going on. And in the end I reserved the back room of a restaurant where I gave out the trophies.

I don't plan to do that again, but since we have the time, let's have a little fun, shall we?

The release of Percepliquis and Heir of Novron are only days away. Exactly how many? The timing is a little funky due to the realities of the publishing business. This is not a flip-the-switch kind of thing. It is more of a general, it happens when it happens, kind of event. I'm confident Percepliquis will be released darn close to the 16th because stores aren't involved, so that isn't much of an issue however, Theft of Swords was officially supposed to be available on November 23rd , but on November 13th Bryan Young, a gentlemen in Houston, took this picture …

He was the first one to find a copy out in the wild. That was a full 18 days ahead of the scheduled release. Heir of Novron is scheduled to be officially available online and at stores on January, 31. We are now 23 days ahead and even I have yet to see the American edition of Heir of Novron—not even a proof.

So here's the deal...

The first person to snap a photo of the American edition of Heir of Novron (no purchase necessary) and send it to me at michael.sullivan.dc@gmail.com, will win an exclusive Riyria t-shirt. This t-shirt was designed by me and is not available anywhere, not even by purchase from me. Thus far I have only given these shirts out as gifts to reward specific people, such as close friends who helped proof the original versions of the books, some folks at Orbit working on my books, and those people at One More Page Books who hosted my release party.

Bryan got one—and you could too. (Starting to sound like an infomercial.)

The Great Book Hunt of 2012, will be the first national scavenger hunt I’ve ever run. You’ll have far less chance of being arrested, but you’ll get a prize you can wear.

Good luck!

A Digital Feast

2012-01-07T15:39:00.000-05:00

Countdown, Day-10

For good or ill, moving to a New York publisher after being a self-pub is like shifting from public school to a private one. You find yourself in a new neighborhood with different kids that look better than you. Kids who know all the fashion trends and are up on current events happening in Asia, while all you know is which alleys are safe to walk home through. These are kids you never expected to be playing with. Kids who dress in better clothes, who stand straight and talk with perfect diction. You don’t make friends easily, because they intimidate you and—you imagine—laugh behind your back. Who let him in? This is a school of privilege, of big names, famous names.

I don’t know anyone here.

I recently read A Moveable Feast by Hemmingway, which is a memoir of his early days spent as an expatriate in Paris. This was back when he was an aspiring writer, a moment in time touched on in the recent Woody Allen movie Midnight in Paris. In his depiction of the era, Hemmingway provides a portrait of a world where artists of the time all knew each other. They either bumped elbows at Parisian cafes, or were in correspondence with their fellows stuck in London or New York. I strongly suspect this is a very romanticized view that Hemmingway may not have intended.

This idea that everyone in a given field knows each other has fascinated me. I often see famous comedians speak of having shared apartments with other famous comics during their struggling years. Actors all either went to school together or bussed tables at the same restaurant. Tolkien and Lewis were good friends and visited the Eagle and Child pub regularly, and Hemmingway and Fitzgerald were drinking buddies in the many haunts of France. How does this happen? Over the long years when I was learning I never met another writer.

This idea of an artistic community that is connected and supportive or even competitive with friendly rivalries is appealing to just about everyone, particularly artists, hence the Allen movie. But as I said, I doubt it was ever truly that way in the 1920s. How could it be when the Algonquin Round Table and Harlem Renaissance were in New York, The Bloomsbury Set was in England, The Lost Generation was in Paris, and Steinbeck, Hammett and Chandler were on the west coast? Nevertheless the very existence of these informal social salon-like gatherings suggests a cohesion of artists that I don’t see today, or at least didn’t until recently.

In reflecting on Hemmingway’s Paris, I began to draw correlations to today, but it wasn’t until I was speaking to my wife about other up-and-coming writers that I began to see connections. The reality is that the artistic landscape has become far less romantic but far more global, as the literary communities of old have reappeared—on the net. Twitter, forums, and sites like Goodreads are the new salons, and it is here that I have met and begun to know my fellow authors.

I also discovered how it happens—how artists come together, how they end up knowing each other. Imagine crash landing on a desert island with ten other survivors. You aren't too likely to just walk off and separate yourself, winging it on your own. People trying to survive in a hostile environment tend to gather together for mutual benefit even if they compete for the same food sources. And the literary field is a very hostile world, like one of those computer games where each level is harder than the last, and there’s always an impossible boss mob you have to defeat before advancing.

Authors are desperate people. We’re starving for any forward movement and no one understands that more than another author. If you have ten fans and I have ten fans, by helping each other out, maybe we can both have fifteen? No one says this. There are no formal or informal alliances. We aren’t that smart and tend to be far too proud, fair, and honest for such backroom antics. But we can’t help our subconscious. If you think it’s great that the author of a well-known book responds to your email, or tweet, it is ten times that when another author compliments your book. Not only is it just plain cool that they took the time to write you, but they also took the time to read you. That right there is fantastic, but then you have the additional godsend of all of those author’s fans seeing that comment and noticing you for the first time.

This is one of the reasons authors connect, for mutual advancement. I saw it happen a lot in the self-pub world. Some even made pacts to rave about the other’s book regardless of their true feelings. I found myself in one of those once, but couldn’t do it. Luckily the other author had not posted about my book and I was able to break the deal. It pissed them off. “This is how it’s done.” I was told. I couldn’t do it and this made me some enemies early on.

Nothing like that has happened since I came to Orbit, but I can see the benefit of author cross-promotion and just plain friendship. I know editors who get nervous when authors talk to each other the way one might seeing two ex-lovers having lunch and hearing their name come up.

So here I am in this new school standing alone on the playground not even sure who my classmates are. I imagine I am isolated and everyone else are above me. You always think this on your first day, that because you don’t recognize anyone, that you are the only new face. But there are others who only recently started too—my classmates. They are the other young faces standing awkwardly. Just to make sure however I checked the official school lists—the Amazon book pages. Certain names keep popping up around mine, these are:

Jon Sprunk’s Shadow Son series
Mark Lawrence’s Prince of Thorns
Douglas Hulick’s Among Theives
Mazarkis Williams’s The Emperor’s Knife

Apparently we are all a bunch of thieves and assassins, so don’t mess with us. Especially Lawrence, that guy is crazy.

In A Moveable Feast Hemmingway writes about how he reads the other new authors to keep up on what they’re doing, mentioning this Aldus Huxley guy. This got me thinking about my own peers, (that still sounds arrogant—sorry but it does.)

Jon Sprunk's Shadow's Son page on Amazon

I met Jon at Balticon this last year. He was very friendly and respectful as if I was an equal or something. I picked his first book, Shadow’s Son, up at the Baltimore Book Festival (a signed copy—sweet!) and read it. I’m not a fan of the gritty and cynical fantasy, and I did not expect to like it, but I was pleasantly surprised. I was also a bit irritated as Jon knows bigger words than I do. For all its darkness, Caim is still a hero. Besides I think the Shadow covers, along with Brett’s Desert Spear are the best covers I’ve seen. They practically scream, “Read this!”

Mark Lawrence's Prince of Thorns page on Amazon

As you can see, I’m the number one “also bought” on Mark Lawrence’s page. Prince of Thorns is highly respected on the forums and hit a number of the Best of 2011 lists. So what could I do, I had to read it.

Lawrence is dark. He makes the total absence of light feel pale. I’m not a huge fan of cynical fantasy, but while I was snooping around looking at reviews for his novel I read one that respectfully rejected it on moral grounds. Even the reviewer could not denounce his writing, but they rejected the book because Lawrence appeared unapologetic. I suppose if I had read ten “great book, must read!” reviews I would not have been as interested as I was after that one negative review. It bothered me that such an accusation would be leveled at an art form with the suggestion that Lawrence himself may be morally consistent with his characters if he did not in some way indicate otherwise in the novel. I immediately bought the book and started reading.

I’m now sixty pages into Prince of Thorns, and I am deeply impressed with the writing. I did not expect to enjoy this book as much as I am, which given my predisposition against gritty fantasy, attests to Lawrence’s tremendous talent.

Mazarkis Williams’s The Emperor’s Knife page on Amazon

Douglas Hulick’s Among Theives page on Amazon

I haven’t gotten around to either Douglas Hulick or Mazarkis Williams, but I will be looking at their books soon. Then one day, when we all find ourselves in a café or pub I will be able to chat intelligently and write my own memoir about the heyday of fantasy literature just after the turn-of-the-century and how I knew the greats before they were required reading by high school English teachers.

How Has It All Come Down To This?

2012-01-06T17:28:00.000-05:00

Year in Review

Countdown, Day-11

I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be at ground-zero of something—something historic but in a good way. At Kitty Hawk working on a tan when two brothers in goggles showed up, in London brushing up on my acting when The Theater was rebuilt and named The Globe, in Athens just trying to figure things out when Socrates began teaching, in Paris between the wars, and Lexington when the shot was fired.

Then it happened.

The explosion occurred in November 2010. I don’t remember the day, I doubt anyone remembers the hour. At first only those of us who were connected noticed. Just like in any of the science fiction movies where the researchers buried in their labs are the first to spot the shadow out in space or hear the sound that isn’t supposed to be there. We were on the frontlines and we saw the numbers doing the impossible—we started freaking out.

The revolution had begun.

People speculated for years afterwards as to what caused it. They asked us because we were there, and it was damn strange to watch the news and see them getting it all wrong. Makes you wonder what else they get wrong. How much is just bad guessing. They didn’t even get the terms right. It was like listening to the older generation trying to street-speak, not certain what’s a noun and what’s a pronoun.

The Kindle. The death of books. The end of literature. Chaos. The sky always falls when winds blow, and there are plenty of little chickens screaming doom. Not because they’re scared, but because they were excited. They wanted to see something go boom. The truly scared people didn’t say a word.

Us self-pubs were toiling away in the silent brown plains, sod-busting in the lands no one else wanted. Then someone was drilling a well and it came up a gusher. Before long all the wells looked to be gushers. The Kindle, the iPad, the Nook, they ushered in the age of the ebook, the electronic revolution that changed everything.

Well, not everything. I’m still married to Robin, still have the same three kids, still live in the same little house, still driving the same crappy car. When I think about it very little changed in my general life, but a lot changed in regards to my career. For example…I suddenly had one.

After years of trying to get folks to read my books one at a time, more than ten thousand people bought at least one of the five I had on the market in December 2010 alone. January of 2011 was even bigger. I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t even special. Amanda Hocking, John Locke, H.P. Mallory, D.B. Henson, David Dalglish, Nathan Lowell, B.V. Larson, Victorine Lieske, Joe Konrath, we were all near the eruption point, all touched by the blast. If real-life was a comic book, we’d all have developed powers and become superheroes, maybe formed a league by now. Instead we made money with our books, many of us for the first time in our lives. We were dying of thirst, reaching out our cups into the surf and were hit by a wave.

The first reaction was not to do anything, too afraid we’d wake up. Only it wasn’t a dream and most of us found offers from the big companies. I wasn’t any different. Orbit noticed the numbers. The sales caught their attention, and my story did the rest. If it was a Steve Spielberg film the publishers would be the folks in black suits and SUVs with the tungsten lights and the insta-tents with their own air filters. Only it wasn’t a summer blockbuster, it was a winter miracle that made a lot of dreams come true.

I reached an agreement with Orbit and spent last winter getting to know Devi Pillai, the senior editor who championed my books. She edited the manuscripts. The process was remarkably painless. In the cold months that saw three record snowstorms in the area, I went over the proposed changes and in between edits, I played with creating another novel that had nothing to do with Royce and Hadrian, or epic fantasy. At that time, no one knew what was happening. No public announcements had been made yet. I was waiting on Orbit who wanted to break the news.

At the same time my wife was having to fly all over the country for her job, (something neither of us enjoyed) a job she was growing to dislike more each day. As the sales of my books continued to climb, her employers grew nervous. Those of us who were there at the explosion discovered each other and talked. I even met Joe Konrath and Blake Crouch for dinner in New York. We all had the same story—wow.

As February ended I was settling into my new life as a secretly New York published author. I chatted with my agent frequently, and exchanged a flurry of emails with my editor, and even had calls with my marketing exec and publicity manager. I had seen book cover art for the series and the first set of edits were done, but still there was no announcement. Normally I’m a patient guy, but it was coming on March and my readers all expected Percepliquis to be published in April. I was already receiving emails asking when it would be available, when they could schedule book clubs, when they could get advance copies to do reviews, and all I could do is say I can’t talk about it. This quickly became intolerable and I spoke to Orbit and on the 22nd they published the announcement.

Almost immediately I received a deluge of negative posts, and emails complaining about the delay in the release of the last book of the series. On forums across the net I was labeled a sellout and a liar. I was accused of sacrificing my fans and my integrity for money. This could not be further from the truth as one of the biggest problems with signing a contract with Orbit was that I would be sacrificing far more potential income because of a smaller piece of the pie. I’m also miserably honest, so these two accusations hurt.

I spent a week in a deep depression. The prevailing wisdom was that I should not post in response to the comments as it would only make things worse. By the end of that very long week, I was ready to quit writing once again, to burn Percepliquis, halt the Orbit deal, and pull all the books from the market. I’m fueled by appreciation—not money, and my pilot light was flickering. I’d go get a job at the local Starbucks. I told my wife this. She knows me and looked ashen. Finally I cast caution aside and posted on the 27th explaining what happened and apologizing for not keeping my promise to publish the last book in April.

I braced myself for the new attacks, the new insults, and I wondered how the others who had been at the blast site had weathered their shifts.

To my surprise there were no more insults. Support came instead. The comments on the forums changed their tone. Email offered their own apologies, and I realized that my fans were only mad because they loved the books. That turned it around for me. Then in March, Orbit decided they would allow me to put out a single volume of Percepliquis with my own cover and layout to satisfy all those who had loyally bought my first five novels and wanted to complete the set. With that news, whatever remaining bitterness disappeared.

Also in March my daughter and I began collaborating on Plotholes, a series of satirical cartoons that I published on my blog. That was before she became obsessed with publishing her own webcomic, Ugly Vampire, and now has little time for Plotholes.

In April, Robin finally was able to quit her job and for the first time I became the sole bread-winner of the family, which I think may have pleased me even more than her. This coincided with her birthday and for once I was able to get her what she wanted.

In May I attended the Nebula Awards here in DC and then went up to New York for Book Expo America (BEA) where I met my publishing crew at Orbit for the first time and did a signing of Theft of Swords ARCs—the first time I ever had a line waiting for me to sign books. It felt like I was pretending, like I had won some fantasy camp weekend where you go and are treated like a real baseball player, racecar driver, or published author. I stood at a big booth while three assistants organized the line, held books open to the signing page and ushered signed fans off like security at a concert. No I’m sorry no pictures of Mr. Sullivan from that side, and yes he only drinks Deer Park. Remember to save the pens, we’re sending them to the Smithsonian. Talk about a rush.

The spring found me going over edits for Rise of Empire and as summer started, I moved on to Heir of Novron. I was still stealing free time to get in some writing on the new book I was calling Antithesis.

The summer was unusually hot. Robin was hit by a car while biking—no serious injuries, but a scare, and the refrigerator just up and died on us. To balance against that, foreign language rights continued to be sold as Riyria marched on in its conquest of the world, making Robin less nervous about quitting her job. I updated this blog and closed the old website, and began a series of writing tips—mostly because I could never think of topics. Write about what you know, they say. I settled for writing about what I think I know and hoped it would be good enough.

With all the edits complete, I began proofing the final galleys for the Orbit editions, as my original five novels, one-by-one, were removed from the market until in August, all of my original books had been discontinued and an era—for me at least—ended. That same month DC had a substantial earthquake followed promptly by a hurricane—coincidence? I think not.

With the last of my duties done for Orbit, in late August, I turned my full attention to Antithesis. Part of that was doing some research out west, and I took Robin and my son with me to Death Valley. An earthquake, a hurricane, a flood, and a forest fire later, we returned home.

With no Riyria books on the market for the first time in three years, Robin asked me to write a short story to keep my name out there and to whet the appetite of potential new readers in the three month interim before the Orbit book launch. I think it took me two days and The Viscount and the Witch soon hit the market detailing a bit of Royce and Hadrian’s life eleven years before the events in Theft of Swords.

The writing advice posts I put out each Sunday, caught a little following and soon the Polish publisher, who was putting out the Riyria books asked permission to publish some of them in a magazine. Sometime later I received a copy in the mail. The only thing I could read was my name on the cover. So while I’ve never been published in an English speaking magazine, I’ve obtained front cover status in Poland. Funny how the world works.

All through autumn boxes kept arriving at the door—boxes of books. Books from the UK, books from the Czech Republic, books from New York. My books. Different covers, different thicknesses. For those of you who remember ordering books as a kid in school and having that cardboard box waiting on the teacher’s desk for the end of class—it was like that.

I also attended the Science Fiction/Fantasy Writer’s Association banquet in New York. I didn’t know anyone and felt like the odd-kid-out and spent most of my time chatting with Tim Holman from Orbit— at least I recognized him. There was no candy cart, ginger-haired kid with a rat, or sorting hat, and no one knew my name, but also there was no Malfoy.

Then in November, Theft of Swords was finally released. It began popping up in the UK and at American book stores ahead of the official release date, and it was fun to see fans posting photos of their finds. The release party at One More Page Books, was a huge success with a crowd of people and the second line I’ve ever had for a signing.

Rise of Empire just sort of dribbled out with little fanfare as they too just began appearing in bookstores. Robin and I began drive-by signings just to see the books on the shelves and found them on the New and Noteworthy tables as well.

Initial response was tremendous. The books were at the top of Amazon’s Hot New Release lists for Historical Fantasy, Epic Fantasy and just plain old fantasy. All three, actually four because Percepliquis was also making the list based on preorders could be found on the Best Sellers, Top Rated, and Most Wish For Lists. Reviews were better than the first time around, a slew of bloggers had been lined up to post during the initial roll out, and I was soon notified by Orbit that their first print run had sold out and they were ordering a second. As the year ended, there was this pause as the orchestra limber their fingers for the big finale.

And now I’m here, waiting for the conclusion to this epic fantasy, this series of fortunate events. I’m curious and hoping for a happy ending.

The Set

2012-01-05T17:25:00.000-05:00

Countdown—Day 12

The UK proof arrived completing that set.

I find it amazing what can be done with paper thicknesses. As you can see, Rise of Empire has the thickest spine, and Heir almost looks like the shortest book. It’s not—not by a long shot. The UK edition for Heir clocks in at 928 pages, not including the extras, where Rise is only 781. And Theft is a mere 664. But you’d never tell that by looking at them.

In the American editions, the difference is even more profound as those of you who have them can attest. Theft is considerably thicker than Rise, but the weight! Theft seems to float compared the Rise which has the feel of a college text book.

I suppose the thought here is to try and keep the thicknesses similar aiming for consistency. But for anyone looking at Heir and thinking, “Hey, this is going to be a quicker read than the other two,” it may be, but not because of its length.

Angels With Screen-Burned Faces

2012-01-04T11:19:00.001-05:00

Countdown, Day-13

Percepliquis, my last book in the Riyria Revelations series is being released in 13 days, but you already knew that. You’ve known for some time, a lot of people have, and the reason is because of bloggers. Book reviewers and fantasy aficionados who discovered me wandering around the dirty streets of self-published row. I was thin—gaunt really—starving in the shadow of the traditional skyscrapers, knocking on the locked doors. Even the little houses closed their drapes and hushed up when I stepped on their porch.

“Six book series! All finished!” I cried. “Just read it.”

“Shut up you lunatic! No one cares about traditional heroic fantasy anymore.”

I looked down the street I stood on. It was plenty dark and gritty and my shoes had holes. I could see them through the windows of the restaurants, tucking white napkins under their chins. The new kids Sanderson, and that other one—Rothfuss. I sat on the damp curb, my feet in the gutter. How could a single pane of glass separate whole worlds? And by what magic could one enter that world of music and light, a world I could only smell in the form of cooking food.

Everyone paused between bites to look up as Gaiman and Pratchett entered. No one cared when Martin came in, though a few sneered. They were mad at him, coming so late. Gaiman noticed and gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

I shivered on the street. I wasn’t alone. There were others, faint non-descript faces. I would see them trudge by, and forget them as soon as they passed.

“I’ll read yours if you read mine.”

Often I huddled around a burning barrel sharing a cheap bottle of booze. We’d complement each other, speak of how great it would be when we were all in swank apartments on the glitzy part of town, the side we couldn’t even see from there. Vampire epics, Arthurian legends, demon detectives, and ghost romances, we all looked awful—all misfit toys that Simon and Schuster forgot.

“You there!” a guy in a car rolled up. Cheap suit, crumpled hat, chewing the butt of a cigar. “Whatchagot?”

“I—ah…”

“Speak up! I ain’t got all day.”

“Six book fantasy series—ah…traditional though.”

“Traditional, huh? Not much call for that now. Folks tired of it. I still like ’em though, read ’em as a kid, you know? Let me look. No promises. The rest of you stay back.” He took the book. “Hey, you look like a nice kid. If it’s okay, I’ll put in a good word for you.” Then he looked stern, “But it’s gotta be good, you know?”

I swallowed and nodded. “Who are you?”

“Me? Just another blogger. There’s lots of us now. We like to come down here and circle the park at night, just to see, you know—to see if there’s a genius we can discover. Some filthy little Tolkien or Rowlings eating out of a soup can with their index finger.”

“Can you make us famous?”

He laughed and stomped his foot on the floorboards. “Hell no! I told you, we’re just bloggers. Just a bunch of guys and gals who likes reading, see? We like to find the next thing, you know? Find it so we can wave it at our friends. There’s a bunch of us. We’re pretty tight. One of us sees something they like they tell the others. Honestly…” He leaned out the window. “Those swells downtown, aren’t all that. Some are, but they all started somewhere, you know? Somewhere like this I guess. Somewhere no one’s looking.”

“You discovered a lot of good authors down here?”

“Nope. Some ain’t so bad, but most are crap. Still, you can see that in some—in some there’s this glimmer, you know? This idea, and you can just tell that one, could be it.”

“It?”

“Yeah, the next big swell—that is if they survive. That’s the problem down here. I mean just smell it. Heh—you probably can’t smell it anymore, can you? But listen, writers die down here. Everyone enters this park in spring when the flowers are all blooming and stuff, but the cold weather comes and soon it’s winter. Get’s cold here in winter. Somehow looking up at those buildings, at the warm people eating in the restaurants makes it colder.”

“Were you a writer?”

“A writer? I told you boy-o, I’m a blogger.” He starred at the barrel for a long minute with a sad look. “Anyway, you hang tough and I’ll let you know about this book. I like the cover—different.”

“I did it myself.”

“Nice.”

His car rolled out and I returned to the barrel to watch the sparks rise and send my dreams with them.

“Hey you? You Sullivan?”

“Me? Yeah.”

It was another car, different—different guy too, but the same. “Listen I heard what Book Critic said ’bout you. I don’t believe it ’acourse. Gimme the book. Let me see.”

“You another blogger?”

“Yeah, so what?” He said and I thought how he kinda looked like a wolf in a way.

“Ah—nothing. What did the other guy say?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah, Critic?” the man shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Guy’s off his nut. He says you’re better than some of the big boys. He’s on drugs of course. I mean look at you! Have you ever had gloves with fingers tips?”

He took the book and drove off too.

Next week there were five more cars. One fella, a really nerdy guy wearing a hat like a crown lent me a comb for my hair—he wanted a picture. Nice guy. Then this other fella I speculated might be a junkie at first, he wanted to talk too. Then this nice girl who went on and on about this science fiction guy, and another blogger who’s ink dribbled when he took notes. He didn't want to talk at first, he just watched from his car across the boulevard, but eventually he came over too. Finally there came this dame, a real bookworm with a reputation for being a hardcase, she wanted my picture too and to ask me my life story, how I got to the park, how I survived and how it felt to be the talk of the town. I answered, “I am?”

“Not the whole town,” she clarified. “But the bloggers are buzzing. Their buzzing so loud people are noticing.”

“Simon and Schuster?”

“No honey, not them, and not Jesus either if you were about to ask that next.”

“Who then?”

“People—readers.” She closed her notebook, slipped her camera away and paused. “You know, enough readers know about you, want you, and you just might get an answer the next time you knock on Old Simon’s door.”

I didn’t tell her that I had stopped knocking on downtown doors. I had stopped knocking on up town doors. I had stopped knocking on all the doors. No one was ever going to help me. I was all alone.

Then I stopped—but someone had. That guy in the car—that blogger.

If it hadn’t been for the bloggers and reviewers, the small and the tall, I’d still be in that park, or likely, I wouldn’t be anywhere. I was a one shot deal, a flare fired in the night hoping someone would see. They did and now I’m an author with my final of six books hitting shelves in thirteen days. But the bloggers haven’t forgotten about me.

Recently, beginning December 19th, Alex C. Telander devoted his blog Book Banter to a weeklong focus on me, letting me host his blog with five guest posts, on such topics as, What every Author Needs to Know to Make a Living, Traditional or Self-published, A Bit About Contracts. Those, and more, you can read here. You can also hear an interview I did with Alex back in June also on his site by going here.

This week Ritesh Kala and his book review site is also devoting a solid week to help promote the forthcoming release. This will consist of a bio on me, an intro to the series, Ritesh’s review of Theft of Swords, an interview, and finally a guest blog by me. He is also holding a Giveaway of Theft of Swords, which is open internationally and good through January 10th.

I never would have succeeded without the literary merchant marines of the interwebs, the little gossip angels with screen-burned faces, the digital bibliophiles of the brave new world. They were the ones to take the chance, who wasted time on a man with no name.

And it would seem…they still are.

What can I say. They knocked this author out of the park.

Thanks guys.

Percepliquis PreOrder Now

2012-01-03T15:14:00.005-05:00

Countdown—Day-14

I told you I would let you know when the time came. Well, it’s here.

PreOrders will now commence for Percepliquis. The books will ship on January 16th. This is only for the printed, single edition, green cover, final book of the series. If you want ebook versions (kindle, nook, ipad, etc) those will not be sold by me directly. They are purchasable by Orbit through all standard outlets and will be auto-delivered on the 16th as well. (You can use the provided link to find buttons to buy those as well.)

This edition of Percepliquis has been authorized for creation and release by Orbit to meet the desires of those who already own the original printed set of five books so that you may have a completed set. The ebook formats are availible for those who likewise bought the original ebooks individually and don’t wish to pay extra to re-buy Wintertide.

If you are not one of these people, you should be buying Heir of Novron. For one thing, it is now the only way to get Wintertide, which you will want to read before this one. Also Heir of Novron, which contains both Wintertide and Percepliquis, is cheaper. Why? Because I produced Percepliquis, and I don’t have the resources to do the sort of large print run that Orbit can. As such my single version of Percepliquis, even discounted through this direct offer, will cost $14, (it costs more than the other books in the series, because it is almost exactly twice as long as Crown was—off by only a page or so—and paper costs money,) while you can get both books in Heir of Novron for only $10. But if you need the green book to finish the set you have on your shelf. Now’s the time to place your order.

You will also have the option to indicate if you would like me to sign the book. It doesn’t change the price—I don’t charge for autographs—and I will just sign it, or you can have it personalized to a particular person by inserting the name you want in the field, but please either choose signed, signed & dedicated, or unsigned. Don’t just leave that blank. If you do I will assume you want no signature.

PreOrder soon as this will determine how many copies we will have on hand to mail out when the 16th comes. Those ordering late might have as long as a two week delay in getting their copies mailed.

The Countdown Begins

2012-01-02T17:42:00.000-05:00

Well, this is it. It’s January 2012, the time I’ve deluded myself you’ve all been waiting for. At the stroke of midnight the ball had hit bottom and the real countdown began—the fifteen days to the release of Percepliquis. Am I the only one with a six-foot hourglass spilling red sand with days of the week etched on the side? All of you who have just finished Rise of Empire and have been waiting two weeks, think of those who finished Wintertide and have waited nine months. And those who waited nine months think of those who read my books before they were published, but never saw the last book and have waited two years. And those who have waited two years imagine how I feel. I’ve waited—all told—about twenty years for this release. Twenty years of knowing how it would all end, but never being able to tell anyone, never being able to find out if anyone else would think what I created was good.

The books have sold well up until now, but no one has known the whole story. You might think you do. You might think you know the characters, and many of you have theories on what will happen, but you’ve been wrong before, and the deeper you get in the series the less confident you may be about the outcome. People who were quick to declare they knew everything after the first book, weren’t so fast to speculate after the second, and by the fifth I had caught enough with my misdirection so that few—if any—publically proclaim they have not been surprised at least once.

Two books form the backbone of any series, oddly enough, those are the first and last. The first forms the initial impression. It must be good, or no one will read further. The problem is, the second has to be better in order to be just as good, but the middle books are never held to the standard of the first. Readers expect a lull. The last book—that’s different. The last book is the finale. Everyone expects a massive display of fireworks. It has to be bigger, faster, smarter, funnier, more exciting, more colorful, more beautiful than all the others. It’s why everyone made the journey. No matter how much fun we had on the trail, no matter how many laughs, no matter that we saw a deer, or an eagle, or that half buried flying saucer, when we get to the top of the mountain, we want a view that will make us forget everything that came before as, huh—what? Oh that.

Problem is, if you’ve done a good job on that first book, and if you did a better job on the second—now you have to top it. And if the second book had to be twice as good just to be equal with the first, the last book has to blast that away by one of those astronomical distances they always use examples for—if your first book was the size of a grain of sand, your last would have to be the size of the Andromeda Galaxy just to avoid reader disappointment.

I really messed up. I tried to make each book a little better than the one that came before it. I purposely shifted the focus, altered the style, and changed the setting of each book to ensure they were distinct and not seen as just a sequel. And each time I raised the stakes. With each book the problems were worse, the outcome more dire, and the odds of success slimmer. It’s like one of those cartoons where one character pulls a knife, the other a pistol, the first a rifle, the second a bazooka, etc. Wintertide was an M1 tank.

I should be nervous. I should be concerned that fans won’t like the conclusion, but I’m really not. I know it’s good. I’ve always known that Percepliquis is the best of the series, and not by a little. I hate stories where the ending is a letdown. I didn’t want to do that. I was so concerned, I might have gone a bit overboard. Percepliquis is everything I feel a fantasy novel should be. And while I had to dance around and bluff past the first five in order not to give away the ending, I can finally lay my cards on the table and show you what I’ve really been playing with all this time. I’ve been holding a pretty nice hand to my chest for years trying to keep a stone face, but now all the bets are in. Or rather they will be in two weeks.

While I sip my tea and watch the sand spill, here is the first review of the final book of the Riyria Revelations by Scott at Iceberg Ink. Scott’s reviews of the series have always delighted me, and not because he’s a huge fan (although that don’t hurt a bit,) but because he exemplifies the qualities of a good reviewer. He provides opinion with information helpful to a reader in an well-thought out and entertaining fashion, while managing to avoid any spoilers at all. He has done that again with this new review, and all of you can relax and read his comments without any concern of learning something that will harm your reading experience.

Scott also, perhaps more than anyone else who I have never personally spoken with, “gets it.” He has always displayed a keen insight into what I was doing and why. That doesn’t mean he guessed where the story was going, but that he knew why it went where it had. Some critics, positive and negative, misinterpret aspects of the story, making assumptions that aren’t true—“Sullivan clearly did this because…” and they are dead wrong. Some give me too much credit and some far too little. I’ve always wondered if English professors who “explain what authors meant” in their writing, have any real clue what they’re talking about. From my own experience I seriously doubt it.

Scott gets it, and he’s a careful reader, something I don’t find very often.

Some read Crown and came away thinking the writing style was simple because that was all I could manage, and that the tale was rudimentary, lacking depth or complexity. I can absolutely see why they came to this conclusion. In some respects I intended this. I wanted readers not to be looking for more, I wanted to distract them with this fun little story while I secretly planted the seeds for greater things, and I wanted the story to be easy to read with the world-building coming in after the reader was interested enough to learn it. But Scott’s careful reading saw through my plot. This is part of his review back in October 2010:

The writing is easy and flows with a voice that is decidedly deft. This guy knows how to pen a story, no question. In a lot of other fantasy series today there is so much focus on world building that the story itself can get a little bogged down and though it’s not horrible to have that sort of novel out there, it is refreshing to have a book that returns to the roots of the genre, while holding on to a few of the things that make current fantasy books so good. Sullivan cleverly straddles the line between complex thread-built, long arcing plot (which is certainly there, but it is only smoke and whispers....a line here, an idea there...at this point) and a whimsical story with interesting characters that picks you up and whisks you away on a fantastic story that will have you cheering for more.

After reading this first review, I kept my eye on this one. Like I said, I’ve had other wonderful reviews of my books, but this guy—he liked the story for all the same reason I did, and saw more than he should. Scott reviewed all five of my books on his site, and now he’s reviewed the last from an advanced copy that I felt he had earned the right to read early.

Once again, his review has not disappointed.

Thanks Scott…but more importantly, nice review. One of these days you might even get me to watch Doctor Who.

Royal Blood. Tower of Elves – The Riyria Revelations comes to Poland

2011-12-26T17:29:00.001-05:00

I can’t say enough fantastic things about my foreign rights agent. Not only has she done a great job finding new markets for my books, but has a superb eye for picking “the right” publishers. As I recall there were three publishers in Poland who had expressed an interest in my books and I couldn’t be happier with having signed with: Prószyński i S-ka. They recently (October 2011) released Theft of Swords as: Royal Blood. Tower of Elves. Yeah, interesting, huh?

Much like Orbit, Prószyński i S-ka is intererested in more than just “putting a book out there.” They have placed my short story, The Viscount and the Witch in one of Poland’s Fantasy Magazines and are also releasing some of my writing advice blog posts as well.

I’m sure that readers here in the US may not be familiar with Prószyński i S-ka, Polish Publishers doesn’t often come up in idle conversation. But they have some great US titles such as: 11/22/63, Stephen King’s latest book on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and in the fantasy genre they represent Terry Prachette, Ursula K. Le Guin, Orson Scott Card, and fellow Orbit author, Gail Carriger.

So, as authors are often known to do I googled: Królewska krew. Wieża elfów. And to my genuine surprise I found hundreds of hits returned (More than 100 pages). I did a bit of exploring using the translation feature of my browser and discovered:

Many book reviews by online fantasy sites and individual book bloggers
A number of forums that were discussing the books
Multiple places where excerpts were posted
Tons of on-line booksellers with the book for sale.
At least one site where the book made a “Top 10 List”
A Goodreads-esque site (lubimyczytac.pl): where people are reading and rating the book (21 ratings, 10 reviews, 71 people marked to read)

In summary…the same type of thing that can be found in the US. While I shouldn’t be surprised at this I was. Prószyński i S-ka is obviously working hard to publicize the book and from every indication I can see they are doing a great job of it.

So I’d like to thank Marcin Zwierzchowski (my contact person for Poland) and Mark Edward Szmigiel (translastor) and all the other people at Prószyński i S-ka whose names I don’t know but who have my heartfelt gratitude for all the hard work you have done, and are doing, on behalf of my books. I really appreicate your efforts and hope you find working on this project fullfilling—or at least amusing. How well do Royce and Hadrian jokes play in Poland?

Minecraft

2011-12-22T23:39:00.000-05:00

This post isn’t about writing, my books, fantasy books, or books at all. It’s a little about me, but mostly not. It is semi-historical, perhaps a bit informative, but mostly it is a review…but not of a book. In short, this post is something out of left-field. There are two reasons I am writing this post. The first is that it’s the Christmas season and often that means toys, and this post is about a game. The second reason I’m writing this, is that my wife asked me to. Robin feels that if I admit to playing games, it will make me appear more human. Robin is obviously under the impression you all think I’m an alien.

I can guess that many of you are wondering what this is all about, while quite a few others have been nodding at the computer screen since reading the title. Let me explain and to do that we need to go back in time to the era when MTV was as big as Twitter, HBO was brand new, and no one knew if VHS or Beta would win the war.

I got my first computer in 1983. It was a Compaq (because the Apple Macintosh wasn’t invented yet, and thus I was trapped into using Windows machines for the rest of my life) with a floppy drive, separate monitor, and a ruby monochrome screen that ran DOS. I wrote novels on this using SAMNA a now forgotten program that was ahead of its time and so much better than a typewritter. I also played a few computer games, but I cannot stress enough how different computer gaming was back then.

Zork

In the early days there weren’t even graphics. Everything was just text. Glowing green or, in my case, orangish text on a black screen. It took years before the most rudimentary images appeared. At first they were flat monochrome. Later they developed color. If you’ve seen the Tom Hanks movie Big, you have an idea what they were like. The game in the movie isn’t real but mimicked games like Ultima and Wizardry. This was the silent movie era of computer gaming. But starting in the 1990s, gaming shifted into high gear and took off. The 1990s became the golden age of computer video games and gave birth to a large number of game developers and publishers such as Activision, EA, Blizzard, and ID.

SimCity was released in 1989. Kings Quest V (with VGA graphics) hit shelves in 1990 ensuring graphic adventures would continue in the golden age. In 1991 came Civilization (perhaps the best game ever invented) and Lemmings. Alone in the Dark was released in 1992 a forefather of survival horror games. Wolfenstein 3D and Doom were released in 1993, which while they did not invent the first-person shooter, if you lived back then, you might have thought so. Also in 1993 X-Wing, one of the greatest space combat simulators ever, was released. 1994 saw Warcraft one of the first real-time strategy games, and System Shock. In 1995 came Command and Conquer, and Half-life arrived 1997.

Game from the movie Big

What made this the golden age was the speed of technical advancements coupled with game desgin innovations that worked in tandem to drive each other to greater, more creative heights. There were no rules and it was as if there was this primordial soup back then where anything was possible. Every year game designers came out with something totally different. Some were crazy, some silly, some awful, but some were utter genius. God games were breed with real-time strategy to make things like Dungeon Keeper where you got to be the bad guy while a band of heroes tried to invade your dungeon and steal your treasure. And action games mixed with adventure games to create games like Outcast, a mystery, graphic adventure captured in an action strategy environment.

Over time however, the possibilities began to coalesce. Like planets in a new solar system, genres were born. The Puzzle game, the Simulator, the Shooter, the Turn-Based-Strategy game, the Dungeon Crawl, Graphic Adventure, the Real-Time Strategy game, the Role Playing game, and finally the Massive Multiplayer Online game, and the Squad game. Real-time strategy, and shooters dominated in the late nineties, but then the persistent world games like Everquest and later World of Warcraft appeared and a sort of balance was finally reached. Over the course of the next decade, games got prettier as technology continued to allow for better graphics and smoother game play, but the frothy maelstrom of inventiveness cooled.

Skyrim

I think part of this is that in the old days, graphics didn’t matter much. Games were simple. As time moved forward, players expected better graphics and this required artists, time, and lots of capital. One guy in his bedroom couldn’t put out a lush game like what we see today in the form of Skyrim, and simple-looking games could not hope to compete. Games became the territory of corporations, and businesses need to pay the bills. They can’t try crazy stuff because they think it could be really cool. They need to focus on putting out what is proven, and then just incrementally polish that.

This is why I stopped playing computer games back near the end of the 1990s early 2000’s. It was all just the same thing. Either it was a shooter, a RTS, or a treadmill online game, and while they all looked a little better and felt a little tighter, it was the same game I played a hundred times before. Only now they were designed for the largest audience which meant they were, in a sense, dumbed-down—slick, but lifeless.

My favorite games had been Civilization, Half-life (1-2,) Age of Empires, System Shock 2, Outcast, and Everquest. And for more than a decade I never saw anything as good, nothing new that could capture my interest…until now.

When I first played DOOM, it was revolutionary. I was amazed at the game play, and yet it always felt like only part of a game, like a chase scene is part of a movie. Sure it was exciting, but it needed context. And even as I played it, I imagined how it could be great if only they added a story, a goal beyond survival, one that was integrated into the game rather than revealed in cut scenes. Id came out with DOOM II and later Quake, but they never did what I wanted. Then Valve came along and made Half-life. It was a huge hit and exactly what I’d hoped for.

Everquest

I had the same thoughts when playing Everquest. I wanted to get rid of the treadmill, and be able to permanently change that world. I wanted to be able to cut down a tree, use its wood to make planks and then build a house of my own design. Strip back the grass and plant crops, raise farm animals. Build a wall to defend my land, create my own roads, bridges. I wanted eating and drinking to be required to survive. I wanted to suffer from the elements and freeze if I didn’t have warm clothes, or couldn’t start a fire in winter. I wanted to die of thirst in a desert if I did not have enough to drink, or was stupid enough to wear steel armor. That never happened in the MMOs. And as they advanced they offered less rather than more—less freedom.

That was always the problem. From the very start most all of these games were long corridors that you, as the player, were forced to walk down. There was no turning from the path set before you. Occasionally a game like Elder Scrolls pretended to provide freedom by including tons of repetitive villages and repetitive side-quests that let you deviate from the main storyline. And some allowed for multiple endings, two or three if you were lucky. But the games still locked you in, a prisoner forced to play how they wanted.

With multi-play games that problem was helped as the games became merely settings where live opponents came to compete, but that did nothing to benefit those who weren’t onto competing, those who enjoyed exploring, creating, and more contemplative games. Each year offerings sported slicker, more photo-realistic graphics like in this year’s Skyrim, (which looks beautiful) but it is still the same old game.( I have to admit I have not yet tried Skyrim, though I have watched my son play it.)

I had all but given up, believing that since corporations were in charge nothing revolutionary would happen. Then a year ago my son was in the car with me. We were driving a friend of his home and on the way they were talking.

“I went to sleep in my own house and I was killed,” my son’s friend said. That right there will catch your attention.

“You had a door right? And it was closed?” My son asked.

“Yeah.”

“Did you have torches? You have to make a small room and put your bed in it then circle it in torches or they find you.”

They? I thought. This wasn’t the typical teenage conversation and it caught my attention. When I inquired what the heck they were talking about, my son explained it was a new game he had downloaded called Minecraft. When we got home my son showed it to me.

I think I might have actually laughed at the pathetic graphics. It was all blocky and crude. There was no detail, and it had none of the lovely atmosphere and realism of the newer games. It looked like a children’s cartoon where people had square heads and dots for eyes. Then he showed me how it was played and I stopped laughing.

This was it. This was something different.

It wasn’t made by a corporation, which explained the graphics. Minecraft is an indie computer game originally written in java by its single creator, Markus Persson, or “Notch” as he is known. It is what’s called a sandbox game, in that there is no point to it—no goal, no finish line, no levels to achieve, no classes, skills or races, no opponent to beat—anymore than there is a point to playing in a sandbox. For the most part you make your own fun, which might seem a cop-out on the part of the game designer...until you try it.

Player made castle in Minecraft

The thing with Minecraft is that you exist in a world that is completely transfigurable . You can dig a hole in the ground and use that dirt to build a wall. You can cut down a tree, turn the wood into lumber to make a house, or tools like a hoe that you can use to clear land and plant seeds. You can divert rivers, set trees on fire, create stoves. You can kill pigs then cook pork chops in that stove you made or smelt iron ingots from iron ore and use that to make armor or tools. You can even create rudimentary electrical circuits to power devices. You can, in fact, virtually do anything you want and the world works in a very logical manner. Put sand in a hot stove and you will get glass. Jump off a cliff and you will die. And you have to eat, or you will also likely die. It is good that things are sensible because the game has no directions—no manual. You have to figure everything out, or go online to do research, which surprisingly, is part of the fun. Although, honestly, it is best to watch an introduction video or better yet, have someone show you the game as this is not WoW, and Notch doesn’t hold your hand at all.

Nature in Minecraft

This is gaming the way it used to be when people of vision and little money took crazy chances to make things that made you forget the crappy graphics because you were having too much fun playing the game. And actually, after just a little while, you imagine the graphics as being oddly beautiful. Minecraft is a throwback to the golden age of gaming, an Indian summer popping up in the 2010s.

There is one more thing, and this is where the spice comes in. In this world of Minecraft, there are days and nights. This cycle works just like it does in the real world except that a day lasts only ten minutes, thankfully so does the night, because at night, monsters come out. They come in a variety of types. Zombies, skeletons (who use bows and arrows,) spiders that can climb walls, Creepers that have a nasty tendency to sneak up behind people and explode. Most monsters catch fire in sunlight like a Buffy vampire, but not all, and the challenge of the game is to create a defense against the night. So as the game begins you are Charleston Heston in Omega Man and have ten minutes to build yourself an adequate shelter before night falls. After that you’ll be left blind and defenseless in the darkness as monsters roam the world. This is no easy feat for the newbie, as just learning how to gather resources, make simple tools, and construct a hut can take more than ten minutes.

Award Winner player made building

The best materials like iron, red stone and diamond are found by digging down into the earth, but underground it is dark, and in the dark, the monsters live. Sometimes you stumble on monster’s lairs where if you kill them you can take their horde for your own. There are also abandoned mine shafts alternate dimensions like the Nether and the End, and special hidden strongholds which can be found by creating Eyes of Ender, letting them fly and following them.

Player built mine?

So adventuring and exploring are important parts of the game, but an equal, and perhaps greater part is creating—building homes, farms, towers, villages even whole cities. It is as if you were dropped on a new planet all alone and had to learn how to survive. The game is at its most entertaining when you are trying to do a simple thing. You want to add something to your house, you need a to make a tool to do it, to make the tool you need to get a mineral that is found underground.

You dig and find an abandoned mine. You’re curious so you explore—just a little, then you fall. You plummet four stories. You’re still alive, but you’re in the dark and only have a couple torches. You only have a stone sword and not much food because you never expected to be trapped in a mineshaft. The adventure you go through just trying to get home is epic. You have to fight through nests of posion spiders, figure out how to build a stairway up. You get lost but discover a random chest with some food to keep you alive and steel to make a better sword. You fight zombies and skeleton, and it is a heartpounding thrill ride, but perhaps the best part is that you know this isn’t scripted. This isn’t some preordained plot. This is all just the result of an accident—your own foolishness, and that makes the game more real than the most photorealistic graphics ever could.

The game can be played singularly, or on a server with others. I visited one where the players had created an entire working city with skyscrapers, paved streets with signs, banks and libraries. Others have wars where people create armor and swords (or in some cases guns,) and attack each other. And as the game has an endless supply of randomly generated worlds, and as each world is infinite (you can just keep walking and it will just keep getting bigger,) so there is plenty of replay value.

The kind of city people make on multiplayer servers

I started playing a year ago when the game was in beta. This past November the game was officially released. So besides distracting me from writing, and proving, as my wife wanted, that I am human with other interests, why mention this here? There’s a certain kinship factor. Minecraft is an indie produced game—self published if you will. Persson made it himself and it caught on. With no publisher and no commercial advertising or backing, he sold the alpha and beta versions of his game by word-of-mouth and (at this time) he’s sold around 4 million copies. This has allowed him to start his own gaming company while he continues to refine and add to the feature set of Minecraft.

So, in return for providing me with something new that I can talk with my teenage son about, I felt Notch deserved a plug, even though his audience is way bigger than mine.

At present, my son, his friends, Robin and I all play together on my own server. At least I know where my son is on a Saturday night, and exactly the kind of monsters he’s likely to meet. He also has dreams of being an architect and I can think of no better past time for that.

So if you’re looking for that last minute Christmas gift that someone will smirk at, roll their eyes and say, “Are you kidding?” and then disappear playing for years to come. You can buy a gift code for Minecraft for $27, and they can download the game Christmas morning (which usually takes five minutes.) Setting up your own server so you can play together can be a herculean odyssey, but that too is part of what the golden age of gaming was all about.

Happy Holidays

Can’t Beat That With a Swizzle Stick

2011-12-21T11:02:00.000-05:00

Yesterday Theft of Swords went live on the Starbuck’sDigital Network. What that means is if you’re in a WiFi enabled Starbucks, when you log in to the Internet you will be greeted by a splash screen asking if you’d like to read my book…for free.

That’s right, for the next two weeks you can read the entire novel for free on your computer, tablet, or phone. So if you’ve been wondering if my books are worth buying, or if there is someone you want to get interested in the series, now you can do it for the price of a cup of coffee—actually no purchase is necessary, but given that Starbucks is being nice enough to host this, I don’t think buying a cup of coffee is too much to ask.

So have a merry caffeinated Wintertide, and—if only those people who visit Starbucks in the next two weeks take the time to read my book—so will I.

Writing Advice 26—Selling Yourself

2011-12-18T10:38:00.001-05:00

My first signing tour, fall 2008

So you got your book done. You’ve edited it. You’ve published and seen a few reviews—now what?

My wife once compared the career of an author to climbing the Blue Ridge Mountains. Every time you think you’ve reached the top you see another, even taller ridge, rising ahead of you. It never ends. Now comes the time when you have to sell yourself. You’ve spent years learning how to write. You’ve poured hours into creating a great book, but now none of that matters as you realize you’re at square-one again. Now you must learn how to be a marketing genius and a charismatic salesmen.

Marketing, publicist, salesmen? Clearly if you had wanted to be any of these you would not have written novels for the last few years. Instead you shut yourself up in a small dark room, living in imaginary worlds because you’re a sensitive, introverted, self-conscious, shy, person likely lacking in confidence. And now you have to go out in public, jump up and down, wave your hands and shout, “Look at me everyone! I’m great!”

It sounds about as much fun as six-chambered pistol roulette.

It is awkward and scary unless you have that “salesman” gene, and you know the type, the person who loves talking about themselves to a group of strangers, but hates being alone in a quiet room for more than five minutes. Without that superpower, which few writers have—given that most of their time is spent alone in quiet rooms—promoting yourself is unnatural and most uncomfortable.

All the writers I know (including myself) begin this stage the same way—with self-deprecation. “I wrote this book, you probably won’t like it. It’s not all that good. Wanna try it anyway?” With a sales pitch like that, it’s amazing you aren’t a bestseller. Still, it feels wrong to lie, to present yourself as something you aren’t, and you know you aren’t anyone great.

This creates a negative spiral. People are drawn to people who exude confidence, (the good kind at least—because there is a bad kind.) Confidence is most often derived from experience, (the bad kind comes from an artificially inflated ego.) This is a problem, because everyone starts with a want of experience. You need confidence to get people to read your books, but you need the experience of people reading and liking your books to gain confidence. So how do you do it?

First you must realize that you really aren’t being honest when you undersell yourself. You don’t really think your book sucks. You wouldn’t be trying to sell it if you did. You like your book. In fact, you should love your book. You should feel it’s the best book ever written. I’m not joking. Given that you wrote your book, given that you created it to suit your own personal taste, it is like a tailor-made suit. It should fit you better than any store bought suit and as such—for you—your book had better be the best book you’ve ever read, because if you don’t love your book…how can you expect anyone else to even like it? So recognize that at least one person in the world thinks your book is the best that has ever been written. Obviously, not everyone will agree with your sentiment. Not everyone liked Harry Potter either. Yet it is a mistake to focus on this single point. Logically, if one person in the world believes it is the best book ever, then it is very possible there could be dozens who would at least like it. Maybe more. Probably more. And who are you to judge what the person in front of you will or won’t like?

I did a bookstore signing where I stood at a tiny table near the front doors. I was a veteran by this time (or felt I was,) and I had a good idea who would be interested in my books and who would not. Big guys in football jerseys and old men, always ignored me. Old ladies in clusters, and women with lots of make-up, did too. So I was trying real hard to catch the eye of the geeky twenty-something guy wandering the sci-fi stacks even though a gray-haired gentlemen dressed like a corporate banker was glancing over at me.

The old business man closed the distance and started asking questions. He was just wasting my time, he would likely have a daughter who was trying to get published and want to talk about the business, and I needed to concentrate on attracting the geek. Of course, by this point you realize what happened. The old guy was intrigued and bought my books. Later he wrote me emails of appreciation (thinking I would not remember him—ha!) He loved the books, posted great reviews on Amazon for me and is a wonderful fan. The geek, when I did get to talk to him, wasn’t interested. So you never know what people will like. You can’t predict their tastes based on how they look, anymore than a person should judge a book by…well, you know.

All this is fine, but it isn’t really going to help you the first time you have to go to a bookstore to do a cold table signing, or a convention where you man a vendor’s table, or even the first time you do a reading where you and maybe two other people are there. And how miserable might you be on a panel, sitting beside five other authors, all of whom have more experience than you? How can you be confident when people ignore you, when they sneer at your books. The answer is simpler than you might think.

You fake it.

You see, humans can’t smell fear like hyenas. You just pretend that you know what you’re doing, that your book is great, that they are missing out on the story of a lifetime if they pass this opportunity by. It isn’t a lie, because as far as you personally are concerned, it’s true. You aren’t afraid to tell a friend to go see the movie you really liked. You don’t fumble over words and say, “Well, I liked it, but you probably won’t.” No. You say, “Wow, that was a great film, you should watch it! You’ll love it!” Why is that so easy, but selling your book is hard? It’s because it is your book, your creation. So for that brief moment, pretend it isn’t. Pretend it’s someone else’s book and you’re just selling it. Instead of saying, “What I was trying to do here was…” say, “The book is about…” as if you just found the thing on a shelf, read it that moment and had to tell someone how good it was. Maybe they won’t agree, but hey, you’re entitled to your opinion.

The thing is if you act confident, and if you pretend long enough, it stops being a pretense, because somewhere along the way you actually pick up enough experience to be genuinely confident. So your first few tries at anything will be disasters. Even if they aren’t, you’ll feel they were. You’ll be terrified, nervous, embarrassed, and awkward. And the only thing you’re certain about is that everyone looking at you knows this. Each one is suppressing laughter out of polite kindness, but none of that it actually true. What people see is an author—a published author. For what it’s worth, that’s still a rank with privilege. People will grant you respect. They will be impressed even if they haven’t heard of you. There are a lot of famous authors that people never heard of—you might be one of those. They don’t see a person fumbling with words, shaking, sweating and repeating themselves. They see an accomplished author, standing in front of people speaking, talking fast because they are so smart, or slowly to help the audience understand their genius. Of course they are a genius, they wrote a whole book.

Occasionally you might run into another author, or a serious aspiring writer, and they will see through your charade, but they above all people should be sympathetic. Authors rarely criticize other authors, because we know, we’ve been through it, we’ve worn those shoes and know how that feels. Besides, there is never a shortage of people willing to try and destroy what others have built. When you live in tornado alley, you don’t rip down your neighbor’s walls.

It has been my experience that when you take a chance, when you stand up and hold out your work, people are far more likely to applaud than to throw things, and it has nothing to do with the quality of the story or the writing. Contrary to what we are often led to believe, most people are generally very nice, kind, understanding, compassionate, and empathetic. They realize the risk, they see the vulnerability, and knowing how hard such a thing would be to do, they respect the person standing there, for doing that, for having the courage to stand in the open and reach for an impossible dream.

Looking back you might catch a glimpse of that respect and suddenly, you’ll discover you’re feeling a lot more confident. Maybe you’re worth something after all. In that moment, the negative spiral reverses itself. Positive begets positive. Invisible gifts are exchanged. And while you’d still rather be writing, well, it isn’t so bad after all.

Is Riyria Right for You?

2011-12-17T12:03:00.002-05:00

With the new release of the books large numbers of people are hearing about the series, but don’t know if it’s something they would like. Recently I’ve seen several posts asking what people would compare it to. I normally prefer to have readers do the comparing as my opinion is bias, but I do know what others have compared it to in the past and in most cases they told me why.

So for those of you trying to determine if my books are right for you, here is a list of novels that readers most frequently used to describe my books, and my understanding as to why they did so. Following the list is my own personal summary description for those who might not be as fantasy-genre literate.

FritzLeiber/Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser: Most often compared by fantasy veterans I suspect because of the big fighter/little thief similarity, and sword and sorcery feel, but I haven’t read Leiber so I can’t say for certain.(purposely staying away from these due to the comparisons.)

Scott Lynch/The Lies of Locke Lamora: Mostly because of the thief motif, but these are denser reads and more focused on the heist aspect, where mine are more adventure novels.

George Martin/Song of Ice and Fire: I think people compare me to this because it is what everyone has most recently read, but Martin’s work has a very different writing style, very different tone. If this is all you know, then imagine a light-hearted, version with more traditional elements (wizard/elves,) a much faster pace, humor, and easier to read, (some would say simplistic,) prose.

Brent Weeks/Night AngelTrilogy: Weeks has a similar light writing style, but his work is far darker and grittier in tone and topic—these are about assassins assassinating after all. Mine are about thieves who don’t get to do much stealing.

Jon Sprunk/ShadowsTrilogy: I would actually compare this to Week’s books more than mine, (both about assassins,) but the tone is a shade less gritty which makes it a step closer to mine.

David Eddings/Belgariad series: I think people compare me to Eddings because along with Feist, this is the last good traditional fantasy they can remember. But this falls in the “boy destined to defeat the dark lord” category that my series lacks.

Raymond Feist/RiftwarSaga: Like Eddings, this compares to mine in that it is from a time before fantasy turned cynical and gritty. Aside from that I don’t notice too many other similarities.

Robert V.S. Redick/TheRed Wolf Conspiracy: Don’t know, I haven’t read it yet.

Peter V. Brett/The Warded Man: Don’t know, I haven’t read it yet.

Patrick Rothfuss/KingkillerChronicles and Brandon Sanderson/MistbornTrilogy: I think mostly because they are both relatively new and their outlooks are less cynical.

J.R.R. Tolkien/Lord ofthe Rings: Because every fantasy is eventually compared to it.

Jim Butcher/Dresden Files: We share a similar light, casual writing style that employs humor and a quick pace. Of everyone here, I personally feel Mr. Butcher’s Dresden books read the most like mine even though our settings (his is contemporary Chicago) and stories are very different, and Butcher's books are far more episodic (he’s got like 13 or 14,) where mine, while generally complete stories, form a single series arc that is finite and therefore has a larger, single-story feel.

How I would describe the series for someone who might know very little about fantasy:

Take the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, mix it with the television series I Spy, set it in a post-Roman era mythological Europe, and then sprinkle in the long view political-mystery-building plot of say the Babylon 5 series, with the reading ease of Harry Potter and the standard traditional fantasy elements popularized by Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and the pace of Star Wars. That ought to do it.

Feel free to add any additional comparisons you think are applicable.

The Good Neighbor and Another Book Release

2011-12-16T12:46:00.003-05:00

It was the howling that first alerted me. I heard the sound of howling and peered out of the kitchen window. The dog was in the ivy, pacing and howling near my neighbor's side door. I did not see a human companion. Just the dog, bounding around and howling. Clearly something was wrong. I went out my front door and crossed to my neighbor's yard. The dog looked dubious. "Hey boy. What's wrong?" The dog bounded past me and returned, tilting its head quizzically. The side door of my neighbor's house was open. Not good. I approached and called out "Mike? Robin? You there?" No response. The dog came and went always just out of arms reach. "Good boy." I nudged the door open a bit farther with my foot. "Anyone home?" And then I saw the blood on the floor...

This thriller intro was written by my neighbor, Steven Jones. It isn’t the opening of a book, a short story or flash fiction—it isn’t even fiction. It is from an email he sent describing what happened on Wednesday. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

For those of you keeping track, this last Wednesday was the official release of Rise of Empire, the second in the Orbit Riyria trilogy, and Robin and I were in New York. While there, maybe it was the season, or the fact we took a train, but I kept hearing lines from It’s a Wonderful Life, most notably:

You wouldn't mind living in the nicest house in town, buying your wife a lot of fine clothes, a couple of business trips to New York a year, maybe once in a while Europe. You wouldn't mind that, would you, George?

New York is a giant movie set. You see scenes, or what might have been settings for films and shows everywhere you look, everything from thirties gangster films to present day romantic comedies. The city appears to be conscious of this and the stores, coffee shops, and bars play music from the forties that fit just as well with your classic holiday movie as it does with the more modern Nora Ephron film.

After a day of walking down Fifth Avenue and ogling the Christmas window displays of the major stores—Macy’s wins hands down—we met with my agent in a swank hotel bar. Everything in New York is dark inside. Every bar and restaurant I’ve been in makes me wish I brought a flashlight, and yet outside due to the electronic billboards, its bright as day. We had drinks, chatted about the release that was only hours away, if there was any news on the movie or video game frontier, and I signed contracts for the Japanese version of the Riyria Revelations.

It all felt kind of dream-like. I suppose Manhattan can do that. You’re either walking around in a dream or a nightmare depending on your circumstance. I never bought into the vision of life as an author. I never fantasized about the lifestyle. I think there are some aspiring writers who—that’s all they think of—and maybe a few accomplished novelists actually live in that world. I personally never believed it was real and I certainly never thought I would have the chance to taste it. This idea of being wined and dined by agents and publishers as if you were famous, is the stuff of movies and mystery/detective television shows. First, I didn’t think it really existed, and second, I’m not a big name author—I’m barely an author at all. But there I was with my wife in this world of glamour, one book out and the second about to hit. In this episode of Living the Dream, the part of "rising star" will be played by Michael Sullivan. I didn’t walk around in a daze, but every once in a while it would sneak up and thwack me on the head.

Look at you all spiffafied! Walking around Manhattan like you have a right to be here. It felt like catching a perfect snowflake. Beautiful, but you know the moment it hits your glove, the moment you have the opportunity to really see the beauty, it will melt. I didn’t want to get attached to something that was fleeting.

The next morning I was up early because a newspaper reporter was desperate to interview me before her deadline. So I sat in my tiny New York hotel room, feet up on the modern art table looking out the window at the myriad of architectural styles as I recounted my life story to Lois Lane. Yes, it’s true, I crashed to Earth in Smallville, Kansas… I sipped my Starbuck’s mocha watching as people entered their offices across the street and watered their plants, the sun glinting off a Petticoat Junction style water tank while in the background it did the same with the gold-leaf covered pinnacle of a skyscraper . This was all too weird.

We did some Christmas shopping, and couldn’t help stopping in every bookstore to sign their copies of Theft and Rise. Store clerks can get surprisingly excited, even if they don’t know who you are. It was nice to see the books on the shelves and gracing the New and Noteworthy tables.

Later that day we met my publisher—my editor Devi, and marketing and publicity director Alex—for lunch near Grand Central Station. Turns out Theft of Swords already sold out its first print run, as has Rise of Empire. A second print run is underway. Also Theft and Rise were number one and three on Hottest New Release in historical fantasy both in book and ebook. This had everyone at the table smiling and made for a very nice lunch.

The one hair under the iPhone protector in all this, (fly in the ointment—seems dated so I thought I’d modernize the adage,) was an email that came in from my neighbor.

You see my wife and I have a dog. He’s an American Foxhound mix. We got him from the local pound three years ago. Hounds like packs and he hates to be alone. He’s also learned how to open the front door. Even though my daughters and son were home they were at work and school, that morning and Tobi did his magic trick. Unfortunately for him, his door opening Houdini cut his paw and he proceeded to smear blood all over the inside of the door and on the floor before getting out, looping around the neighborhood and howling. Apparently he figured we’d hear him in New York. Oddly enough, he was right.

I received an email from my neighbor who, as you might be able to tell from the opening paragraph of this post, was a bit concerned that he should call the police. After speaking to me on the phone, Steve was kind enough to coax Tobi back in the house and lock it up, and I am extremely grateful for his help. It’s wonderful and reassuring to have a neighbor like that. I haven’t always.

So thanks Steve, thanks Teri, thanks Devi and Alex, and thanks to everyone who bought a copy of Theft and Rise. The snowflake on my glove might not last long, but you all contribute to make it awfully pretty.

Writing Advice 25—Dealing With Reviews

2011-12-11T10:25:00.000-05:00

When at long last you finally manage to get published, either through a traditional house, an indie press, or by self-publishing, you will have to face reviews both good and bad. How do you deal with people bashing your work? How do you handle critics who make comments about your novel that are blatantly wrong? Comments, through intent, preconceived blindness, or lazy reading, slam you for things you didn’t even do? Or did do and they said you didn’t? How do you deal with people putting words in your mouth that you didn’t say, or making assumptions that are completely false? Even accusing you of plagiarism?

You don’t.

When you hear/read comments that make you want to chew through steel, you just have to repeat this simple mantra: People have the right to their opinions.

It really is as simple as that.

You might think they are wrong, but in a way that is only your opinion, and how can you expect them to accept your opinion of a topic when you refuse theirs?

The thing you learn after a few years of listening to people both praise and destroy your work is that everyone has different tastes. Some people will love the very thing that someone else abhors. And there will be large groups on both sides of any argument.

Last year I wrote a post called The Best and Worst of 2010, that was passed around a bit back then. In it I cut and pasted comments about my first book The Crown Conspiracy—all from people I never met. I went to the effort of matching them so that for every comment on a specific subject, I also listed the exact opposite opinion presented by someone else. For me it was a way of venting, for others who read it, the example was enlightening and reassuring.

The problem with writing is that it is very hard to tell what the majority of people think.

When I was in high school I was known for my art, and Mrs. Franchi, my English teacher, suggested I do a comic strip for the school newspaper. I wasn’t in the journalism class, and I wasn’t in the newspaper club. I just asked the teacher overseeing the school paper if they would publish a comic—no one had ever done it before, certainly not on a regular basis.

So I created an ongoing fantasy story, the adventures of Fobert the Fibbit and his trusty side-kicks, a bird and a dwarf, who he picked up along the way. I did a full page comic each week that was inserted into the paper. I expected instant praise, but heard nothing. Months went by and still I heard nothing—nothing good. The journalism students and the members of the newspaper team, hated me and my comic. They asserted in their self-important attempt to act like real journalists that the comic demeaned the serious nature of their work in the news. All I ever heard were insults and jokes. When finally the teacher overseeing the paper’s publication claimed I intentionally inserted the word “fart” in the text after she had approved the comic for printing (which I did not) and proceeded to berate me and insist I was a liar, I gave up. The comic wasn’t worth the effort. It wasn’t fun to work each week making something that nobody wanted and that everyone universally hated. I ended the comic series and washed my hands of the whole affair feeling depressed.

A week later, the first week the paper came out without a comic, I ran into a kid in the cafeteria—a kid I never met before.

“Are you the one who made the Fobert comic?”

“Yes,” I replied cringing.

“Why’d you stop?”

“No one liked it—actually everyone hated it.”

“I liked it.” I must have looked surprised, because he went on. “I never bought the paper before, but I bought it every week just to read your comic. It was nice that it was an insert cause I just tossed the rest. I wish you hadn’t stopped. Now I have nothing to look forward to on Fridays, well, besides getting out of school.”

He was the first, but he wasn’t the last. Other kids found me to complain that I ended the comic. A lot of them were people I only knew by sight, underclassmen, girls who I was only just getting the nerve to speak to. One was my future wife. The year after I graduated I returned to talk to Mrs. Franchi, and saw a copy of the new school paper on her desk. There was a comic in it that looked a lot like mine.

“Someone is stealing my idea,” I told Mrs. Fanchi with a decidedly irritated tone. “And not doing a very good job of it. I thought this school taught that plagiarism was bad.”

“He’s a huge fan of yours,” she said. “He loved your comic, and when you stopped he was very disappointed. This year he decided to do something about it. His comic is a tribute to your work.”

I just stood there looking stupid. And like any good teacher, Mrs. Franchi let me.

All these invisible people loved my comic, but I never knew. This was a lesson I learned and kept in my back-pocket knowing one day I would need it again:

People are slow to praise, but quick to complain.

When things are the way people want, they are content and silent. It is only when something happens that they don’t like that they become vocal.

The same thing happened again almost a year ago when I announced I was accepting a deal with Orbit Books that would delay the release of the final installment in the series. Until then I got two, maybe three comments on my blog—most of the time, none at all. And sure I had sold a lot of books, but that didn’t mean people actually read them, and it certainly didn’t mean they liked them. That post about the delayed release had over thirty comments almost all negative. I also received email and lots of forum attacks. I honestly had no idea my books were so popular until I decided to withhold one for ten months.

It’s hard to determine how appealing your book really is when you know you’ll only hear—and hear in detail—how much people don’t like it, while those who do like it, don’t say a word. I’m the same way, and this extends beyond the scope of books. I have a childhood friend who was quick to compliment others. At the time I assumed he was disingenuous, (he wasn’t) even so it made me feel better whenever he said something nice (even if I thought he was lying). As I got older I made an effort to be more like that—to tell people when I approved. I even told my friend that I admired his ability to praise so easily, when for me, it was hard and often uncomfortable. I was stunned to discover no one had ever complimented him like that before and I could see the smile I put on his face.

For writers however, it is easy, and almost impossible not to focus on the negative when it comes to their own work. The bad reviews and comments are always so much louder. Even a great review—if it has one nit-pick—is remembered as awful, because the negative criticism is so overwhelming on an emotional level, while the nice things are always seen as the polite fluff. Everyone asks “How are you?” upon meeting. They don’t really care, it’s just a way of greeting. But if they say, “You look awful.” You know they mean it.

And as a writer, just as ignorance of the silent approvers is bad, so is focusing only on the bad.

Not long ago there was a woman who responded to what was generally a decent review of her book, but had some negative things to say as well. She responded defensively on the reviewer’s blog in a series of comments that degraded into insults. This public conversation went viral and became the poster-child for how to destroy a writing career before it starts. The idea of “any publicity is good publicity” has its limits. All the other bloggers and reviewers read it and declared they would never read her books—ever.

When someone criticizes your work, all you can successfully do, is thank them for taking the time to read it. Anything else is putting a gun in your mouth.

And just because a review pointed out flaws, doesn’t make it a bad review. I’ve had four and even five star reviews where the commentary that followed it made me believe the critic hated the book. People have ripped my novels apart and then ended by saying they were eagerly awaiting the next book. This happens a lot.

I think, as a writer you need to put yourself in the position of a reviewer. Whether they host a review site as a hobby or as a job, they feel responsible for their readers—not the authors. And this is how it should be. Their job is to evaluate books and give recommendations to readers. If they fail in this, no one will listen to them. I think there is also a fear of fan-boy stigma. Even if you absolutely love something you feel obligated to find something to complain about, if only not to be seen as a total gushing teenage girl, bouncing incessantly in front of a stage where the Beatles are playing. Such overwhelming praise is not dignified and might not be accepted by the critical audience they write to. Nothing is that good, and reviewers who do nothing by gush, will not be taken seriously and soon ignored.

This isn’t to say there aren’t bad reviews. And when I say bad, I mean objectively bad. Reviews that even if they are full of praise, are just badly done.

The worst reviews are those that succumb to hyperbole, give away spoilers, and provide nothing of value or insight for the reader. A good example would be this short review of L. Frank Baum’s work: “This is the worst book I’ve ever read! I really hated The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and I knew all along it was a dream.”

This kind of review is awful. Not only is it worthless to readers hoping to gain some real information to help make an informed decision, it ruins the story for all who read it. I am lucky not to have received many of these, but there are a few out there that I won’t name in the hope they will just fade away.

The fact is, I’ve read wonderful reviews by people who hated my books. People who took the time to write down detailed explanations of why they felt my books were poorly done, using intelligent examples and comparisons, but always careful not to spoil the story for those who might disagree. One such individual I personally contacted and asked if he would be willing to expound even further so that I could make corrections. He was so surprised, he agreed. I did make changes to the book (which were not so major as he first suggested) and as a result, he altered his review to a more positive position. This was never my intention, but it was a pleasant result and shows what can happen if you respond to those with opposing opinions with respect and a checked ego.

So the bottom line is, never respond to a negative review except to thank the reviewer. I try not to even respond to positive reviews as, then by omission, you are showing your disapproval of negative ones. You can also make it appear as if you and the reviewer are buddies which can undermine the critic’s credibility. The last thing you want to do is hurt a reviewer who likes your books. I have written some private messages to reviewers who I feel did not just like my work, or happen to write what I felt were excellent reviews, but understood my books on a level I did not expect most people would. Hearing that someone really “got it,” that they understood exactly what it was I was doing, is fantastic. But even then I hesitate because I feel establishing a friendship with reviewers is, in a way cheating, and can make it harder for a critique to slam my next book if they feel it warrants it.

Reviewers are people too, and they have opinions on what is good and bad. Some like long books, some like short ones, some like simple books, some like complex books. If a book is in contrast to the values the reviewer holds, it doesn’t mean it is a bad book necessarily, but only that individuals who share those values will most likely not enjoy it. Just think about those friends you have whose opinions on movies you know not to take. Good reviewers understand this and restrain their comments to reflect that while they did not like it, those of other tastes, might. You don’t see them making statements like: “Worst book ever/just shows that anything can be published/evidence of how far civilization has fallen/don’t buy this book!”

Good reviewers also don’t rate a book based on the price anymore than they rate it on the cover art—although they may mention both so readers can be aware, and explain whether they feel it was worth the cash or how well the cover reflects the contents.

It is a reviewer’s responsibility to be honest so that those who have grown to trust them (knowing their personal book-ideological slant) can evaluate whether your book is a good fit for them. And a well-done-bad review can be a very good thing for an author. It will wave away those individuals who, if they had read it, would post scathing reviews on Amazon, or make it their life’s work to denounce you as a hack. A well-done, negative review can save you from this fate because no matter how good a book you’ve written, no matter how universal the appeal, someone will hate it and it is best to keep it out of their hands.

Most reviewers don't like posting negative reviews. Many refuse to. They simply restrict themselves to reviewing only the books they like. They are well aware of the pain they can cause, and there is a reason why executioners are rotated in their responsibility, only psychopaths have no problem hurting others. And yet it can cause even more problems, hurt even more people, being dishonest.

This is why you never see, nor ever will see, reviews of other author's books on this blog. I would make a terrible reviewer for the same reason I was so impressed by my friend who finds it so easy to praise others. I am both a very honest and critical person, particularly when it comes to writing, or stories in general. Getting praise from me is like squeezing water from a stone. It's a problem I'm still working on, and one of the reasons my wife never asks me the famous, "does this dress make me look fat?"

I’d just like to end this post by thanking the 99% of all the book reviewers out there for doing a great job. As for the 1%...I’m pretty sure Dante wrote about a special plane in hell for them, which I am certain they reviewed poorly.

I Knew This Would Come Back To Haunt Me

2011-12-07T10:35:00.000-05:00

When you’re not published and you are writing a book, you don’t always think about the possible long term repercussions of what you type. When I originally penned the Riyria Revelations I never expected it to be published; I never expected anyone to read it. Every once in a while I would get lost in a conceit-filled dream where I hit it big and had a massive and rabid fan-following where long after I was dead, people would write spinoffs, and there would be movies and tv shows and Broadway plays (can’t you just see Royce and Hadrian singing and dancing?) and additional stories set in the world of Elan, but always, the original six books would be considered the canon, and anything in them sacred. It was at times like this that I would pause over a name I had just made up and think, maybe I should put more thought into this. Then I would realize I was just full of myself—what were the odds—and just left it. I mean the name was good enough. It looked pretty on the page. It looked like the kind of name the character ought to have. Did it really matter that even I didn’t know how to pronounce it?

The thing is, when I read, I often come across names of people and places I can’t or don’t bother working out the sound for. I’m usually wrong anyway. I pronounced Aragorn, Aragon and still do. And Sauron will always be Saron in my head. Instead when I read I merely register the odd, hard to pronounce words visually and move on. I assumed others often did this as well. Even if they didn’t, it wasn’t likely to matter, as the books would never escape the black hole of my bedroom where I toiled away in silent Sisyphean despair.

I was wrong.

The books were published. People read them. And while I thought I was going to skate by on this issue, I received a phone call this week from the company creating the audio version of the books. You guessed it. He wanted to know how to pronounce a long list of words.

Nathan Lowell had already done an audio podcast of The Crown Conspiracy, but there were not as many names in that one. Now Theft of Swords is being produced, and there are a lot more twisted, mangled words to deal with—including some lines of elvish. In a review of my books, someone commented about my use of the elvish language, “He’s no Tolkien.” In case you don’t know Tolkien was a professor of linguistics, taught Old and Middle English, worked for the Oxford English Dictionary, and created new languages for fun. I, on the other hand, had trouble spelling “evil.” So I think it is fair to say the reviewer got it right in that criticism. So it was with great consternation that I awaited the phone call.

They had sent me a long list of words they wanted me to pronounce for them. Most were easy. I mean, I know how to say Arista (Ah-wrist-ta) even though many people pronounce this (Air-wrist-a.) And even some of the stranger ones like Percepliquis and Gilarabrywn, trip off my tongue daintily as I’ve spoken them a thousand times. But there are some that I stared at wondering, what the heck is that? Is that even in my book? I called them on one, but no, it was in there and I stared at it wondering what I had been thinking when I wrote that.

I was wondering the same thing when I came to, Dioylion. This was the author of a rare scroll. A one-off name, never to be used again. But I do know what I was thinking. I was shooting for a vaguely ancient Greek sounding name like Aeschylus, Diogenes or Pythagoras, something educated and ancient. I never thought I, or anyone else, would need to know how to pronounce it. As I said, you just don’t think of that when you’re sitting at a cardboard folding table in a corner of your bedroom staring out the window at neighborhood kids playing kick ball in the cul-de-sac and you need a name to fill a slot in this waste-of-time you have the self-involved arrogance to call a book.

But there I was staring at this list of monsters I had created, on the phone with David who was using some sort of magical short-hand to take the sounds coming out of my mouth and record the way I said them.

Sometimes I would cheat: “How would you say it?” I asked sounding all, I’m testing you, dude.

He would read it and I would reply. “Ah yes, that’s it exactly!”

Still, I felt like I was being grilled by a police interrogator. “Give us a name! Is it Ni-fron or Neye-fron? And is it Lye-um, Lem, Lee-um, Lime, Leem? I was actually stumped by the simple looking word Liem. It is actually a misspelling of Liam, as in my head I hear it as Lee-um. To be honest I don’t see how Liam can be pronounced Lee-um anyway. Personally I think it should be spelled: Leeim or Leeum. Why I didn’t do that, I don’t know.

Sensing my panic, David assured me that, “Hey, it’s fantasy. You can pronounce it anyway you like.”

I liked David.

Then I got to the line of elvish that looked like I just mashed my palm on the keyboard. I didn’t, but still. I took a pass on that one, and granted carte blanche to the narrator on however he wanted to handle that—because I’m not Tolkien.

When I was done, I was satisfied with my performance. I got most of the answers right.

So for those of you who were wondering, yes there will be an audio version of the series. The books will be narrated by actor and artist, Tim Gerard Reynolds, an Irishmen (this will please my mother) who will lend a little Celtic favor to the books. I haven’t actually met, or spoken with Tim, but on his Facebook page he writes:

I'm soon set to record Michael J. Sullivan's "Theft of Swords," Volume one of the Riryia Revelations. These fantasy novels have been years in the making, and with their intricate and satisfying plots, they are also remarkably, and refreshingly funny too. Looking forward to it!

So, I like him already.

The only ETA I have on when the audio books will be available is—soon. Given that Tim hasn’t started recording, even that might be a bit optimistic. I’ll let you know.