More good news, and a taste

As these things tend to come in stacks of twenty, I am also pleased to announce that my short story, "Toke", has just appeared on Transmissions From Beyond, Interzone's audio podcast action. The art is done by Colin Peters, who is brilliant. All is well.

New job, new book...

Well, Lou has the news. I just want to say what a thrill it is to work with Lou, and to be published with Pyr. I've known Brother Anders for a number of years now, and his philosophies of publication have done much to inform my own writing zen. This is going to be a brilliant thing, my pretties. Beautiful words. You're gonna love it.

Soon as I write it. Heh.

I think I can get pho, though.

Well, now it's Sunday again. I'm still kinda sick. Definitely better every day, but I have the cough still and kind of some congestion. I don't know. I feel pretty okay, but meh. Meh!

First week of the new job was good. It's nice to be someplace where people want to work, they want to do a good job, and they're good at what they do. It's a change. I really didn't want to be sick my first week, but whatever. It happens.

My parents are visiting all next week. Again, I'd rather than happen when I wasn't sick, but hopefully I'll continue feeling a little better each day and have this thing licked. That's the hope.

There is writing news, but I'm not going to talk about it yet. Expect updates soon. For now, I'm going to go eat some soup. Maybe a nice matzo. If only there was a decent place to get good matzo around here. Stupid suburbs.

First Monday, which was actually Saturday

I'll keep this short, cuz I'm kind of on my ass. The trick is that I was starting to get sick on Friday, had a kind of head cold on Saturday, and am now rocking the head cold with irritated cough since Sunday. I went in to the new job on Saturday to check out the workstation and confirm all the installations were correct. Monday was a pretty good day. I got introduced to a lot of folks, did some jobs, etc, etc. Then I had to call in sick today. Talked too much yesterday, so I spent my day taking naps and drinking hot tea. I'm still pretty stuffed up, but I'll be okay. There's a lot to do at work tomorrow, too. Fun.

More reports later. The internet makes me tired.

Last Fucking Monday

So, it's the last week at the old job. I got through Monday. I think that's pretty good. I spent most of the day correcting things other people had done wrong. I kid you not, these people don't know anything about postal regulations. They're going to learn. Mostly by failing.

I also received the Solaris catalog for this year, featuring the art from HoV on the cover. It's very slick, and very pretty, and I think it'll go a long way towards pushing the book onto the shelves. This has been so long in coming (two years since I started talking to Solaris in earnest, about a year since I delivered the first draft) that it's surreal to think that the book is going to be on English and Australian shelves in two months. And by then I hope to be most of the way through the first draft of this other thing I'm working on. I imagine there will be some disruption, what with the job transition and the impending convention season, but I'm really trying to knuckle down and get things accomplished at a reasonable rate.

Invokation. You're going to read this word a lot in the new book. Get used to it.

This is the third day since my departure was announced to the front office. Three days I was supposed to spend answering questions and helping my coworkers get ready for the transition. Here's what's happened so far:

1)My coworker has spent most of that time training someone else to do his job. He basically expects to dump most of the work onto this person. Which, I believe, is exactly what will happen.

2)I have done no training of anyone. Theoretically that's no big deal, because this guy is supposed to be able to do my job when I'm on vacation. Trick is, he's demonstrated time and time again that he can't do my job when I'm gone. Again, after the 12th it's not really my problem.

3)They still haven't announced it to production. I don't know why. It's awkward.

4)I serve as CSR for a handful of clients. I was told to not contact any of them, that my boss will be taking over those accounts and he'll handle the transition. Some of these guys are submitting jobs and I am technically coordinating, but they'll be mailing after I leave. I'm trying to get my boss to deal with these things but he's just not willing. It's weird. I think he should interact with these people as soon as possible. He's only told people he absolutely has to tell. I've tried to talk to him about upcoming jobs and client patterns, but he just doesn't want to hear it.

I can't figure it out. But then again, there are a lot of things that they do that just boggle the mind, so I guess this is nothing new. In fact, this is pretty much why I'm leaving. At least they're consistent.

Book news, book news. The new book is going well. I wrote a lot last night. I've just been cutting off chapters where I felt it was appropriate for the narrative flow, but that's ending up with some inconsistent lengths and, frankly, some very short chapters. We'll have to see if that reworks itself as I go along. I have also removed guns but kept cog-driven carriages and monotrack railroads. Also turbine driven flight packs. And the magic is fun to write. I just hope it's not too confusing.

More Locus Shenanigans

This isn't that big of a thing, but it made me happy so I thought I'd share. Locus does a listing of all the forthcoming books, separated into US and UK. There's a complete list of books by publisher, with the title, author and month of publication. Before that they do a listing of selected books by author, which tends to be your bigger names and anticipated releases. At the top of the first page of this feature they put thumbnails of some of the covers of the forthcoming books. So in the US section I'm under the complete listing, though oddly enough it lists Oct '09, when the catalog shows it as Sept 29th. Well, that's practically October, so I guess that's no big deal.

But in the UK forthcoming books section, I made the "Selected Books by Author" listing *and* the thumbnails at the top. I'm sure this has as much to do with Jon Foster's brilliant cover as it does my brilliant novel, but it's good to see some coverage within the industry. Some small part of my fragile ego was worried that the book would appear and then pass without comment through the public's conscience.

For kicks, here are the other books that got the cover-as-thumbnail treatment in the UK section: Stephen Baxter, Robin Hobb, Terry Prachett, Kim Stanley Robinson, Neal Asher, Kristin Cashore and Steven Erikson. If you don't know who any of those people are, you should look them up. Oh, and then there's this Tim Akers punk.

I guess the fact that I appeared in the UK section just further confirms the fact that I'm a famous (American-born) British author. And it sure is a pretty cover.