“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!

Words do not begin to express how thrilled I am to tell you all that…

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s brilliant Shadows of the Apt series is coming to the US!!

We’ve just done a deal to bring Empire in Black and Gold, Dragonfly Falling, and Blood of the Mantis out here. All three books will be appearing from Pyr in early 2010, published in trade paperback in three consecutive months , March-April-May, so US readers can catch up with this dynamic series fast. Shadows of the Apt is a fantastic fantasy, with steampunk elements, that absolutely blew me away when I read it. Airships, steam trains, giant insects, fantastic characters, great action…

From the book description of Empire in Black and Gold:

Seventeen years ago Stenwold witnessed the Wasp Empire storming the city of Myna in a brutal war of conquest. Since then he has preached vainly against this threat in his home city of Collegium, but now the Empire is on the march, with its spies and its armies everywhere, and the Lowlands lie directly in its path. All the while, Stenwold has been training youthful agents to fight the Wasp advance, and the latest recruits include his niece, Che, and his mysterious ward, Tynisa. When his home is violently attacked, he is forced to send them ahead of him and, hotly pursued, they fly by airship to Helleron, the first city in line for the latest Wasp invasion. Stenwold and Che are Beetle-kinden, one of many human races that take their powers and inspiration each from a totem insect, but he also has allies of many breeds: Mantis, Spider, Ant, with their own particular skills. Foremost is the deadly Mantis-kinden warrior, Tisamon, but other very unlikely allies also join the cause. As things go from bad to worse amid escalating dangers, Stenwold learns that the Wasps intend to use the newly completed railroad between Helleron and Collegium to launch a lightning strike into the heart of the Lowlands. Then he gathers all of his agents to force a final showdown in the engine yard…

And for those of you wondering why you should wait for the US edition? (And needing another reason other than your karma and the desire to support Pyr in bringing across more such deserving UK authors…)

Well, I’m pleased to announce that the brilliant and talented Jon Sullivan, who did the covers for the 2nd and 3rd books in the UK, is going to be doing brand-new artwork for all three of the US editions. Now that’s worth

Well, the story setting for this Zelda is, of course, in a completely different era and Link is older than he was previously. More approaching adulthood. There is one hint. Maybe from the art work you can see that he’s not holding a sword.

I know you’re a big fan of writers such as M. John Harrison, China Miéville and Gene Wolfe and count them as big influences in your writing. What does Nights of Villjamur have to offer to fans of those writers. And, on the other hand, what does it have to offer to those who are more into lighter, more traditional fantasy?

I started writing in the first place after I read Miéville’s The Scar – I couldn’t find anything similar on the shelves. Nothing else did what that book did so I thought I’d give it a go myself, initially writing consciously under that dreaded New Weird banner…

I mean the New Weird was a bit of a misnomer – a stillborn literary movement which these days just leads to rejection letters. In editorial offices, the NW died years ago; so I had to resort to more traditional aesthetics.

But I hope that the spirit the New Weird (and New Wave for that matter) lives on in what I do now – an interest in doing something slightly different that the normal, writing with a conscious style, thinking of unusual themes and seeing if people want to think about different things. Mixing genres, too. So that’s what I think might appeal to fans of those writers. (And, for the very keen-eyed, I’ve slipped in a few references to them – someone in NOV, for instance, wears a Fuligin-coloured cloak, which is the same as worn by Severian in The Book of the New Sun.)

But, all this pretentious solipsistic nonsense aside, there’s huge amounts of fun shit in there too. In fact, it should be core to any modern book – you can’t write classics like Viriconium in the modern publishing world, it just wouldn’t be accepted by editors who are looking for a modern story. I love fantasy – I’m not ashamed to say I write it. I’m a fanboy at heart, I do read in the genre, and there’s a lot to celebrate here.

I mean, I’m not going to attack Tolkien simply for the sake of acquiring cool – I have RayBans for that task. I understand the importance of story and entertainment to readers. So I hope the pacing is good enough to appeal to the fans of lighter fantasy, that the narrative entertains, and that there are exciting enough creatures, and that the characters, although a little messed-up in the head at times, can charm…

In a nutshell: the deeper things are there if people want to find them, and if not, then that’s cool too. Literary endeavor should not exclude entertainment. (But I’d also add to that: entertainment should not be an excuse for failed literature…)

Mark Charan Newton wears his influences on his sleeve, boldly name-dropping the likes of M. John Harrison, China Miéville and Gene Wolfe as driving forces behind his first novel, Nights of Villjamur. But where does that leave me, a self-professed anti-snob – a fan of Terry Brooks and John Scalzi, shy of those more literary works of fantasy, even downright terrified (if forced to be honest)? This was a question I asked myself as I cracked open Newton’s first novel, and I’ll admit I was afraid of the answer.

The most immediately jarring asset of Newton’s debut is the prose. Shockingly contemporary, one has to wonder if this tale of political intrigue might be set not on a fictional fantasy world, but in a far future version of our own, corrupted beyond recognition. Newton sets few ground rules with his prose – noirish and moody as it follows a washed up detective tackle a series of mysterious murders; erudite and pretentious when following the leader of a dark cult, tackling the morality behind necromancy; casual and loose as a roguish con-artist ignores every rule of the vicious noble circle into which he is thrown. I’ll admit to struggling with this early in the novel, with the prose seeming to get in the way of the story, but as the novel moves on, Newton’s command of the language tightens dramatically and I started to forget these concerns, instead focussing on the story and characters at hand.

…

Nights of Villjamur is being bandied about by reviewers and publicists as a literary fantasy, delving into the underused Dying Earth sub-genre and written to appeal to those looking for something more from their fantasy. While this is certainly true, I was surprised at how much more there was to the novel from the perspective of a Terry Brooks fan. I was worried I would find a dense, overwritten piece of philosophical literature hidden under a fantasy verneer (think Terry Goodkind’s Naked Empire, but not piss-poor), but what I found instead was a tightly plotted novel that worked just as well as a fantasy novel as it did a piece of introspective literature. In short, it would behoove potential readers to drop preconceptions of ‘literary’ fantasy and give Nights of Villjamur a fair shot. With a more than competent debut, Newton seems smartly poised to tackle a wide swathe of readers with Nights of Villjamur, and his future as a writer is bright, indeed.