Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ

We had the belated launch party for SCOURGE OF THE BETRAYER at our home yesterday, and it was terrific to have so many friends and family there, some I hadn’t seen in years. There were a few people in the back I hadn’t met before who probably just showed up for the free drinks, but I totally respect that. Dig it, in fact. Several folks drove from out of state, and it was a great turnout. So, let me just say thanks and thanks again to everyone who came—it really was wonderful to have you all there. This was a moment I’d been waiting for my entire life, and I couldn’t imagine a greater group to celebrate with.

None of this would have happened without the orchestration of my lovely wife, Kristen. She was the planner, the organizer, the accountant, and the MC of the whole thing, and it’s a good thing, too, because left to my own devices, I would have been dialing people up that day, asking, “Hey, you guys have anything going on today?� And I don’t have a lot of people’s numbers. And I might have been silly drunk, so I would have misdialed the ones I did have. I’m grateful not only for Kristen’s stellar coordination skills, but to all the thoughtful gestures and touches during the party. I’m an extremely lucky man.

Thanks, too, to her friends, Bridgette and Teresa, who were a tremendous help throughout.

It was a fantastic day–I ate too little and drank too much and had a hell of a time. And I can’t tell everyone enough how much I appreciate the support and encouragement. But one more for the road: thanks!

Well, yesterday was my official first book signing. Even after walking in the door to Barnes & Noble, seeing the posters advertising the signing with my ugly mug on them, discovering my books laid out neatl up fronty, I still couldn’t help thinking that I was getting Punk’d (except for the fact that I’m nobody famous, so the ratings for the episode would totally suck. Is that show still on?)

Thanks to everyone who came to the signing. I had an absolute blast. I was worried it would just be me and some guy who was tired of looking for the origami books and decided to pop a squat in the signing area, but the turnout was pretty decent, all things considered. And the ladies who helped me out at B&N were fantastic, and made me feel like I was Pat Rothfuss (or at least Pat Sajak).

We started off with a Q&A session, and I acquitted myself fairly well, I think (or at least didn’t embarrass myself horribly; that doesn’t mean I didn’t make an ass of myself, only that if I did, I wasn’t aware enough to recognize it, which is fine by me). People attending asked some really astute questions, there were some yucks, and the whole thing seemed to flow pretty well, at least from where I was sitting. And once I started the physical signing, I really only biffed one copy, and it was for my cousin, so no worries.

Here is a from someone who attended that cracks me up, and captures what it was like from that perspective. (And she was right–the crazy chatty person was in fact my uncle. He rocks.) This is a great blog, by the way. Absolutely hilarious.

I know I need to add more photos to posts here–they add visual interest, break up the space, and distract from my mad rambling (see forementioned blog). I’ll get on that.

Well, it’s been a crazy couple of weeks. The launch/release of Scourge of the Betrayer was sort of staggered, since it popped up in late April some places, and May 8 at B&N, but Amazon officially had it May 1, so I’m running with that one. It’s available on Kindle on . Juggling guest posts and interviews and trying to line up as many reviews as possible. Craziness. Good crazy, don’t mistake me, but a little on the overwheming side. This day job thing is so getting in the way. . .

After having the story and characters rattling around in my brain pan for so long, with few or no beta readers to speak of, it’s incredibly strange to know that readers out there have it. They are reading it as I write. And there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.

Sure, that’s exciting. But a little anxiety producing. I can’t control what people think or what they choose to put in a review. It’s sort of like sitting in a fiction workshop with your hands clamped over your mouth while you’re story gets workshopped, only on a much bigger scale.

Anyway, I’ll try to put some more exlusive content on here soon, but in the meantime, here’s the guest post A was kind enough to put up last month entitles, “Embedded with the Enemy?� that covered the genesis of the book. If you haven’t checked out Dribble, you should. They have excellent taste.

Embedded with the Enemy?

I’ve always been fascinated by embedded journalists. Chronicling a military campaign right in the middle of the action rather than second- or third-hand, at a safe remove. It’s hard to get more visceral than that—dust in the face, grit in the teeth, adrenaline thumping, shadows jumping, blood splattering immediacy, all while trying to just stay alive long enough to somehow give what happened some kind of coherency. Whether book or article, writing is often a solitary, quiet affair, but writing front and center on a military endeavor changes the whole ball game.

Being a self-professed geek (at least 12th level), I naturally take observations like this and start plugging them into a fantasy scenario. How would this play out with a quill and ink on a different world, and how could I complicate it to make such a chronicler’s life even more hellish than anything your modern embedded journalist might endure? I’m a cruel bastard like that.

Now, that phrase “embedded journalist� is a recent invention, but the notion isn’t—Jean de Joinville was a crusader groupie 700 years ago. And Glen Cook cooked up a ripping yarn about a chronicler in a mercenary company—you might have heard of it—so the idea isn’t unique to fantasy either. I had to figure out how to differentiate my take, so I resorted to that most ancient and venerable of writerly tactics, the “what if� game�

What if the archivist’s new patron provides only enough information to entice him along—promising adventure, hinting at fame—without supplying any of the really essential details. You know, like the fact they are going to be involved in a covert operation with decidedly bad odds of survival. And what if said patron belongs to a military order known for its treachery, renowned for black atrocities? What would convince a chronicler to take on job like that, murky and ill-defined, with unsavory company?

I considered having my archivist/narrator on the run from something, but I opted for more mercenary and foolish reasons. What if this gig sounds appealing because he’s ridiculously bored? Maybe recording the vastly uninteresting tales of merchants and minor nobles is just mind numbing enough to make the risk sound worthwhile. He’s being offered the chance to hitch his wagon to history being made—what’s a little danger along the way against that? (A big deal, as it turns out. A real big deal.)

And what if he’s just experienced enough to attract the attention of the patron, but young enough to be imbued with the extraordinarily dumb conviction that bad things always happen to everyone else?

OK, so he signs on, against his better judgment and misgivings. What else could I do to make things as painful as possible for the young scribe? Well, maybe his new patron claims to possess a cursed weapon that captures the memories of men he’s killed, bombarding him with them. And a steppe nomad traveling in the retinue has to drain those foreign memories out like poison. Is the patron mad? Who knows? Certainly not the chronicler, who’s really starting to think signing on to this gig was a colossal mistake. And all this before discovering that the military company is trying to engineer a civil war in a neighboring kingdom, and the last two chroniclers hired to accompany them might have met an untimely (as in, bashed to pieces with a flail) end.

So he’s forced to stay on, recording what he witnesses, trying to make sense of it all, and mostly struggling to avoid getting slashed, stabbed, crushed, shot, or smashed to death.

Unfriendly fire in front, unfriendly threats from behind, and not a whole lot of friendly in the middle.

This was the basic impetus for writing Scourge of the Betrayer. Then I had to figure out how to flesh this puppy out. While the canvas will expand as the series progresses, I really wanted the first book to be more intimate than epic in scope. No dark lords, no grand prophecies, no vast armies, and just enough of the supernatural or fantastic to be intriguing. A small cast of noirish characters, shady politics, and the intricacies and dangers of the operation revealed in a slow burn. The term “gritty� gets bandied around a lot as a marketing device, and it’s beginning to lose some of its potency (well, whatever potency it might have ever had). That said, if you’re going to go gritty, military fantasy is the place for it. Not exactly full of bunnies and rainbows.

Like most fantasy writers, I love worldbuilding. Coming up with elaborate magic systems, eons of history, deep cultures. But doing those things can be seductive—at least for me. It’s fun to spend months (or years) creating a richly detailed world, but you can get lost doing it, and if you forget to populate it with interesting, compelling characters and story, nobody will give a damn. So I knew with Scourge, and what I was trying to do, I would need to really rein myself in, to make the thing as character-driven as possible.

But being my own worst enemy, I still found a way to muck it up. Once I had the basic characters in place, I still allowed things to sprawl and bloat—I decided to have the chronicler not only record what was happening in “real time�, but also big chunks of back story narrated by the patron. Which took up tons of space on the page, slowed the pace down to a crawl in spots, ran counter to the patron’s generally reticent/secretive behavior, and proved to be one heck of a narrative mess to clean up when I decided to scrap the back story sections and strip them out, as those seriously impacted the structure of the more immediate sections.

But I like doing things the hard way. That’s how I roll.

Nichola Cropper and Jean Hontz won the signed copies of SCOURGE OF THE BETRAYER. I will get those in the post post haste! :)

Thanks to everyone who jumped into the Giveaway. I'm sure I'll be doing another one relatively soon.

This is one of the guest blogs I posted on the Night Bazaar a few weeks ago. That's a great place where writers getting published by Night Shade Books get to hang out and riff on all kinds of fun writerly stuff. If you haven't dropped by, you should--never telling what kind of gypsy treasures you might turn up there! Anyway, the topic for this week was whether you depend on a lot of feedback as you work, or fly solo for the most part. Enjoy. . .

Some writing is collaborative in nature--sitcoms, some movie scripts, plenty of nonfiction. But writing fiction, with few notable exceptions, is generally a solo effort. You cloister yourself and labor away in solitude, trying to take some idea that is beautiful, sublime, terrifying, or fantastic in your head, and translate it into words on a page that capture the essence of what spawned them. Sometimes you fail at this; sometimes you fail a lot. And it’s all on you—you can’t point the finger or blame a poor working relationship with another writer. When you bomb, it’s a poor working relationship with yourself or your ideas. And boy, that’s no kind of fun to face.

Ultimately, though, if you keep after it and revise long enough, you’ll create something you feel pretty good about. Even if it isn't perfect, it’s solid. You think. But you’re still so close to the writing, sometimes it’s hard to tell. And that’s when it can be really worthwhile to show the work to someone else, to get validation or confirmation that what you've produced isn't complete drivel.

In college and grad school, I participated in a lot of fiction workshops (some might say too many!). You can learn some really good habits in them, but some pretty lousy ones, too.

In theory, a workshop is full of smart, savvy, sensitive students who provide constructive criticism in a safe environment. In practice? Well, it doesn't always play out that way. Some writers are incapable of providing anything less than barbed, nasty feedback, and while most professors won’t tolerate that crap, I’ve been in some classes where they not only ignored said nasty asshats, but thought it would be a fun social experiment to actively encourage the writers in the class to act out their worse possible instincts. If a bloodbath ensues, hey, good times!

It can be hard to separate yourself from your work. After all, you wholly invested yourself—to you, both the process and the end product couldn’t be more personal. But at the end of the day, readers are just judging what’s on the page. Not your intentions, hopes, or the demons you wrestled with to find the words, only the words, and whether they’re the right ones or not.

In most workshops, you have a gag order while the rest of the group discusses your piece. So it can be really tough to sit back in silence and listen to the group hash out their opinions of the work, particularly when they are ripping it to shreds. You want to spring to its defense, provided context, or call them all asshats. So, you either develop thick skin in response to stinging criticism, or you end up a wailing neurotic mess. I've seen the latter happen. It ain't pretty.

Thick skin is good. That’s one thing most workshops teach you. And with any luck, if you do enough of them, you also develop the ability to objectively critique your own work.

By analyzing someone else’s work each week (and not just from a lit. crit. angle, but looking over the nuts and bolts shop stuff) a writer begins to develop a critical apparatus. You identify problems and solutions in the text, think about the myriad of choices the writer made throughout, and how different choices might have improved the story.

And as you refine those skills, if you are receptive to what others in the group say about your own work, you also get a decent antennae for what works or fails in your own stories, what your own strengths and weaknesses are.

But therein lies another of the potential pitfalls of writer’s groups. Sometimes, ten people will have ten wildly divergent opinions about your story. Even if those readers are collegial and not snarky, that doesn't guarantee they will provide coherent or useful commentary. Some days, you walk away thinking, “Well. . . apparently my story is fantastic, melodramatic, overripe, truncated, brimming with authentic sounding dialogue, corny as hell, too long, too short, with a beautiful-heinous-mediocre title. Thanks for that.�

Trying to appease everyone in a writer’s group is usually impossible, and sometimes dangerous to the work itself. You dilute your ideas, soften all the edges to avoid offending anyone at all, or end up with a Frankenstein monster of a story with disparate parts and bad skin tone.

The trick is discerning what feedback is really applicable to your stuff, and what works for you. And that goes back to defining your own ability to self-critique or recognize the wheat from the chaff.

Since leaving school, I haven’t done the writer group thing. When I've needed/wanted another opinion, I've usually asked a select writer buddy or two to review my work. Only one beta reader actually read the manuscript of Scourge of the Betrayer from start to finish before I started shopping it around.

However, as I recently wrote in another post, that might not have been a good thing. No matter how much you trust your own judgment, you can still miss problems inherent in the text that jump off the page to other readers. It’s easy to think that just because writing is solitary that you have to go it alone in the whole endeavor or can only depend on yourself.

Getting feedback, wherever you find it, can be really useful and instructive. Sometimes even lone wolves need to hang around the pack for a little bit, even if they end up running back into the wild on their own after a good group howl.

This is one of the guest blogs I posted on the a few weeks ago. That’s a great place where writers getting published by get to hang out and riff on all kinds of fun writerly stuff. If you haven’t dropped by, you should–never telling what kind of gypsy treasures you might turn up there! Anyway, the topic for this week was whether you depend on a lot of feedback as you work, or fly solo for the most part. Enjoy. . .

Some writing is collaborative in nature–sitcoms, some movie scripts, plenty of nonfiction. But writing fiction, with few notable exceptions, is generally a solo effort. You cloister yourself and labor away in solitude, trying to take some idea that is beautiful, sublime, terrifying, or fantastic in your head, and translate it into words on a page that capture the essence of what spawned them. Sometimes you fail at this; sometimes you fail a lot. And it’s all on you—you can’t point the finger or blame a poor working relationship with another writer. When you bomb, it’s a poor working relationship with yourself or your ideas. And boy, that’s no kind of fun to face.

Ultimately, though, if you keep after it and revise long enough, you’ll create something you feel pretty good about. Even if it isn’t perfect, it’s solid. You think. But you’re still so close to the writing, sometimes it’s hard to tell. And that’s when it can be really worthwhile to show the work to someone else, to get validation or confirmation that what you’ve produced isn’t complete drivel.

In college and grad school, I participated in a lot of fiction workshops (some might say too many!). You can learn some really good habits in them, but some pretty lousy ones, too.

In theory, a workshop is full of smart, savvy, sensitive students who provide constructive criticism in a safe environment. In practice? Well, it doesn’t always play out that way. Some writers are incapable of providing anything less than barbed, nasty feedback, and while most professors won’t tolerate that crap, I’ve been in some classes where they not only ignored said nasty asshats, but thought it would be a fun social experiment to actively encourage the writers in the class to act out their worse possible instincts. If a bloodbath ensues, hey, good times!

It can be hard to separate yourself from your work. After all, you wholly invested yourself—to you, both the process and the end product couldn’t be more personal. But at the end of the day, readers are just judging what’s on the page. Not your intentions, hopes, or the demons you wrestled with to find the words, only the words, and whether they’re the right ones or not.

In most workshops, you have a gag order while the rest of the group discusses your piece. So it can be really tough to sit back in silence and listen to the group hash out their opinions of the work, particularly when they are ripping it to shreds. You want to spring to its defense, provided context, or call them all asshats. So, you either develop thick skin in response to stinging criticism, or you end up a wailing neurotic mess. I’ve seen the latter happen. It ain’t pretty.

Thick skin is good. That’s one thing most workshops teach you. And with any luck, if you do enough of them, you also develop the ability to objectively critique your own work.

By analyzing someone else’s work each week (and not just from a lit. crit. angle, but looking over the nuts and bolts shop stuff) a writer begins to develop a critical apparatus. You identify problems and solutions in the text, think about the myriad of choices the writer made throughout, and how different choices might have improved the story.

And as you refine those skills, if you are receptive to what others in the group say about your own work, you also get a decent antennae for what works or fails in your own stories, what your own strengths and weaknesses are.

But therein lies another of the potential pitfalls of writer’s groups. Sometimes, ten people will have ten wildly divergent opinions about your story. Even if those readers are collegial and not snarky, that doesn’t guarantee they will provide coherent or useful commentary. Some days, you walk away thinking, “Well. . . apparently my story is fantastic, melodramatic, overripe, truncated, brimming with authentic sounding dialogue, corny as hell, too long, too short, with a beautiful-heinous-mediocre title. Thanks for that.�

Trying to appease everyone in a writer’s group is usually impossible, and sometimes dangerous to the work itself. You dilute your ideas, soften all the edges to avoid offending anyone at all, or end up with a Frankenstein monster of a story with disparate parts and bad skin tone.

The trick is discerning what feedback is really applicable to your stuff, and what works for you. And that goes back to defining your own ability to self-critique or recognize the wheat from the chaff.

Since leaving school, I haven’t done the writer group thing. When I’ve needed/wanted another opinion, I’ve usually asked a select writer buddy or two to review my work. Only one beta reader actually read the manuscript of Scourge of the Betrayer from start to finish before I started shopping it around.

However, as I recently wrote in , that might not have been a good thing. No matter how much you trust your own judgment, you can still miss problems inherent in the text that jump off the page to other readers. It’s easy to think that just because writing is solitary that you have to go it alone in the whole endeavor or can only depend on yourself.

Getting feedback, wherever you find it, can be really useful and instructive. Sometimes even lone wolves need to hang around the pack for a little bit, even if they end up running back into the wild on their own after a good group howl.

The imagination is a beautiful thing, and watching your kids develop theirs is one of the great joys of parenting. This usually manifests itself in the what if game. What if I had a long tail and could hang from trees? What if I had an eye on the back of my head? What if I belonged to a different family that didn’t have other sisters or bossy parents?

Gabrielle (age 5) got a very serious expression on her face today, which always means a doozy is coming up. She said, “Dad, what if I had a super big tongue. Like a whale’s. Then I could lick the whole world.�

Now, no father wants to think about his daughter licking the whole world. But a whale tongue? Seriously, gross.

Scarlett (just turned 3), loves to run around naked. A lot. When Kris or I want her to put something on, usually when she’s running in front of the big windows too much, we either say, “Nobody wants to see your inappropriates� or “nobody wants to see your business.�

Well, the other day, Scarlett was butt naked and darting across the living room in front of the open windows. She must have caught a look from mom, because she made a preemptive strike, stopped, saying, “Nobody wants to see my business, right mom?�

Mom said, “That’s right, Scarlett.�

Scarlett got a huge grin on her face, turned around, bent over to show mom her little brown eye, and said-sang, “Look at my business!�

Scarlett (just turned 3), loves to run around naked. A lot. When Kris or I want her to put something on, usually when she’s running in front of the big windows too much, we either say, “Nobody wants to see your inappropriates� or “nobody wants to see your business.�

Well, the other day, Scarlett was butt naked and darting across the living room in front of the open windows. She must have caught a look from mom, because she made a preemptive strike, stopped, saying, “Nobody wants to see my business, right mom?�

Mom said, “That’s right, Scarlett.�

Scarlett got a huge grin on her face, turned around, bent over to show mom her little brown eye, and said-sang, “Look at my business!�

The first Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ giveaway is going out the door. I ran it for a week and 761 people registered to win an autographed copy of SCOURGE OF THE BETRAYER. Which, considering I edited the copy midstream and Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ took a day to approve things, haven’t run an ad on Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ yet, and nobody knows me from Adam or Abdul, seems like a pretty decent number.

So, congrats to Laeser Tyburn—I hope you enjoy the book!

People might not *completely* judge a book by its cover, but it can certainly intrigue or turn people off in 2.5 seconds. I know how fortunate I am in having a kickass, uber-awesome cover--it can only help drum up interest for the book. I’ve heard horror stories of authors hating the covers their publisher came up with, so hats off to Night Shade Books.

I’ll be running another giveaway here shortly. Stay tuned.