A Dribble of Ink

The Great Bazaar and Other Stories includes a long new story, as well as several outtakes from the first novel in the series — really, standalone short stories themselves — as well as additional material to flesh out Brett’s bravura storytelling.

Starting today around noon (Eastern Standard Tribe, of course) and through January 2010, Tor.com will be serializing Makers, Cory Doctorow’s upcoming novel, which goes on sale from Tor Books in October. We’ll be serializing the entirety of the novel, with a new installment every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Each installment of Makers will be accompanied by a new illustration from Idiots’Books, each one a kind of tile that will interconnect with the other illustrations in the series, offering limitless possibilities for mixing and matching. In a week or so, after we’ve posted a number of tiles, we’ll release a Flash game in which you will be able to re-arrange the illustration tiles on a grid and create your own combination of layouts and designs.

…

Each segment of the story will be illustrated by a square illustration that relates, at least in part, to the theme or content of that segment. While each illustration will function as a standalone “illustration,” each one will will be drawn in such a way as to share common crossovers along all four sides, which means that any of the illustrations may be placed alongside any other illustration (and in any axial configuration) with guaranteed “crossovers”. [These] will form a coherently-designed 8 x 9 grid of illustrations when the thing is fully assembled. There will be one “right” way for the illustrations to be assembled; in this configuration, an uber-illustration with visual coherence that stands as the “cover” of the Makers book will be revealed. However, the chunks can be recombined into a vast number of other [9 x 9] grids. Or it could be assembled into a [3 x 27] grid. Or it could be assembled as a [81]-panel horizontal “comic.” Or it could be made into a sprawling, multi-tentacled beast of surprising crossovers that resembled a crossword puzzle in its grid-based unpredictably.”

…

We’re all really excited about Makers at Tor.com—we think it’s a good and important book, just like Little Brother was before it. We also think that this is a fun and interesting way to send a novel out into the world, and we’re looking forward to hearing what you think. As the year progresses, and we get deeper into serializing the book, we’ll make other announcements about things we may do with this book as we explore alternatives to traditional publishing. Cory is an awesome guy to work with, and in keeping with his overarching philosophy in regards to creative works, has been very supportive of our playing around with his baby. We hope you enjoy what we’ve come up with.

About

Websites for writers is an independent directory of online writing resources.

The internet is littered with useful websites aimed at writers of all shapes and sizes. Websites for writers showcases the best of those sites to celebrate their wonderfulness and point writers in the right direction.

You can subscribe to the RSS feed or get regular updates via email for free by submitting your address using the form opposite.

Get involved

This directory is a collaborative effort. It’s not one long list of unmoderated links. The sites featured here are chosen by professional, practising writers. It’s designed to grow and evolve, not sit and stagnate.

And you can help. If you think a site should be included on Websites for writers, let us know through our submission page.

“Now It Can Be Told.

Bad news first: The new project didn’t get picked up by Tor. That’s a bummer, because I really liked working with those guys, and I’ll miss them. But the economy’s in the crapper, and apparently they’re being very bottom-line conscious, and the Long Price books – despite great reviews and all — didn’t move as many copies as they had hoped. I’m not happy about it, but I respect that it’s business.

Good news next: My agent shopped the new proposal around, and we got a fair amount of interest from other publishers, with the upshot that Orbit (my UK publisher) bought world rights to the new series in what the trade papers are calling “a good deal.” One thing I thought was particularly interesting: there’s a clause in it that dock’s a fair percentage of my advance if I don’t turn the books in on time. So just be aware that the guys at Orbit have got all y’all’s back.

But the new project — The Dagger and the Coin — starts up next year. It’s a very different project from the Long Price books. I’m not using the same jump between books I did with Long Price. The magic system’s totally different (and I love the hell out of it). The pace is faster. I’m very conscious of the influences I’m cultivating going into it — Walter Tevis, Alexandre Dumas, Tolkien, J. Michael Straczynski, Joss Whedon, GRRM, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Dorothy Dunnett, Tim Parks — and I’m trying to take the things that I love about each one of them and make a stew out of it. It’s set right at the friction point between the medieval period and the renaissance, so we’ve got knights and kings, but we also have merchant houses and finance. There’s some magic of the understated magic. There’s political intrigue. There’s a girl who was raised as the ward of a Medici-style bank, there’s a high nobleman who’s gotten himself and his family in over his head, there’s an emotionally scarred mercenary captain straight out of Dumas.

The point of it all is to make a book that reads to me now the way that the Belgariad did when I was 16. I’m going to be swimming in everything I think is cool for the next year. I’m *really* looking forward to it.”

Lately, I’ve been a bit…disinterested…in following quite a few blogs. This isn’t about 1 or 2 or even a handful of blogs, but more about some that are in my blogroll, others that are not. At times, I find myself wanting to take on the role of the reader, of the person who receives book suggestions rather than providing all sorts of info on the books old and new worth reading. But too often, I’m not finding that when I’m browsing through a couple dozen blogs a day.

Instead, I’m finding more and more space devoted to this contest or that giveaway. For a few blogs, that is virtually all of their content. They don’t ever say much of anything about the books being pimped out. When a review is written, too often it feels rather vague and as if the punches were pulled back some. Just this sense of CYA, I guess.

The promotional blog is something that is pretty well designed to make me stop following / reading it.

Turning twenty-seven may be terrifying for some, but for Alex, a struggling artist living in the midwestern United States, it is cataclysmic. Inheriting a huge expanse of land should have made him a rich and happy man; but something about this birthday, his name, and the beautiful woman whose life he just saved, has suddenly made him—and everyone he loves—into a target. A target for extreme and uncompromising violence . . . In Alex, Terry Goodkind brings to life a modern hero in a whole new kind of high-octane thriller.

When Tor.com launched a little under a year ago, we had a long list of things we wanted the blog to be: an online science-fiction and fantasy magazine for stories and comics, a group blog featuring both pros and fans, and a community site for SF/F fandom. A lot of people didn’t know what to make of us. Some people were confused about the fact that we were actively trying to be as publisher agnostic as we could be, because we believe that other imprints besides Tor Books put out quality SF/F too (some people are still confused, and that’s fine—we’re working on them with our Jedi mind tricks). Other people were disappointed that we weren’t going to be selling books. A subset of those people were upset that we weren’t selling ebooks in particular. We do a lot of listening over here, and it quickly became clear that we needed to build a bookstore.

Well, we certainly took our sweet time (in internet time, that is—by publishing standards, we’re maxing out the FTL drives on the Flatiron building), but today we’re ready to roll out the first part of our bookstore. At first we weren’t sure exactly how to go about it, since Tor.com was conceived from the outset as more of a fan site and less of a retail outlet, and we wanted to make sure we created a store that was both unique and useful, but most importantly that kept true to soul of Tor.com’s initial mission.

You can go and check out the store here. I’ll wait to explain the features until you get back.

In keeping with Tor.com’s publisher-agnostic attitude, the Tor.com Store offers science fiction and fantasy media from most major publishers—the only requirement is that the books in question relate to the genre in some form or another. In keeping with the spirit of our “…And Related Subjects” tagline, we’ve made sure to be as inclusive as possible, and are going to be constantly updating and refining the selection of titles available in the Store.

In order to make the Tor.com Store a curated space for SF/F books, we’re taking advantage of our biggest asset: the voices of our bloggers. The Store’s Special Picks section features lists of books made up by our community of authors, artists and bloggers—if you want a handy list of most of the books Jo Walton has blogged about on the site; if you want to know what books Ellen Datlow considers the most influential SF books (this week); or if you’re curious as to what books Leigh Butler considers to be the “sweatpants of literature”, this is the area of the store you want to check out first. We’ve got a nice handful of lists to start with, and we’ll be adding more continually.

Creating this type of bookstore from within a single large publisher has been an interesting learning experience, and is an ongoing process—we’ve still got plenty up our sleeves, including, of course, an ebook store. We’re dead-set on getting this as right as we possibly can: we want to sell you ebooks that are a pleasure to read, are useful and hassle-free to manage, and we want to sell them to you in a way that is as simple and as unencumbered by technology as we can possibly make it. As an ebook reader, these are headaches I’m all too familiar with, and I have no desire to enable them further. So it’s taking us a bit longer than the print store, but I’m happy to announce that we’ll soon also make ebooks available for sale, and in keeping with the spirit of Tor.com, the ebook store will carry titles from all SF/F publishers as well.

In the meantime, do enjoy our shiny new Store. Check out our Special Picks and our merchandise store. Kick the tires. Buy some books. Let us know what you think (you can either comment here or email me directly at pablo [dot] defendini [at] tor [dot] com—if you email, do include the subject line “TorStore Feedback”, please. It helps with my inbox-fu). And stay tuned for more developments: along with the upcoming Year’s Best Fantasy 9, edited by David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, which will make its exclusive debut on the Tor.com Store in the coming weeks, I’m particularly excited about playing with Brandon Sanderson’s new novel, Warbreaker, and Cory Doctorow’s upcoming Makers, among other cool projects. As always, watch the skies!