WHAT A GOOD QUESTION, SHAME I HAVE PREVIOUSLY FAILED TO ANSWER IT IN ANY CAPACITY
Here’s my book on Amazon. It arrives September the 10th, the same day as some sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale comes out by somebody called Margaret Atwood, so that’s fine
Get it on Kindle! Get it in hardback! Get it on audiobook, at some point! If you don’t like Amazon get it on Barnes & Noble! More links await ye on my Goodreads page! These guys thought of everything!
Previously you could pay no money to possess two chapters of GIDEON THE NINTH, but we heard your complaints (”That takes effort” “I cannot do it in countries that are not America” “I am very weak and feeble and have only one click to spend before expiration”). All you need to do is hit this link, and the whole first chapter will leap into your eyes!
To me this feels very much like publishing the first chapter of one’s fanfiction online, but wearier. I remember those days when I was green and jejune, earnestly letting people know on Livejournal and Tumblr that the first 10k of my latest magnum opus was up for the five people in the universe interested in Yuffie Kisaragi/Freya Crescent/Gamzee (Bad ship – Ed.), but those days were characterised by modesty and shame. When you start to publish professionally, you become filled with a hot and neurotic desperation that cannot exist alongside shame. “Maybe read this, if you’ve a mind to,” I used to say, eyelashes downcast, fanning myself shyly, hitting PUBLISH on Ao3.
Now I’m like: Read it!!!!!!! Read it to your dog!!!!!!!!!!!! Please, God, I’ve edited this so much!!!!!!! I am assured that if you DON’T read it Satan will read it to me ceaselessly in Hell!!!!! I’ve put in as many jokes as humanly possible on the off-chance you’ll laugh at one!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Before I come undooooone, save me from the nothing I’ve becoooooome.
Tor.com will be running the whole first act over the next couple months. Follow along; you might like it.
(Were you here on the Internet when every YouTube video was a different Naruto and Sasuke AMV set to the All-American Rejects’ It Ends Tonight? I never knew much about Naruto, but this book is all those AMVs at once.)
It bewilders me more than I can articulate that people are now going to say my characters’ names, out loud, in the air; I have put together a pronunciation guide in order to help you on your way to describing to other people your “PALAMEDES SEXTUS ATE MY BALLS” GeoCities page.
Have you ever wanted to read the first two chapters of GIDEON THE NINTH for no money? Now you can, as well as reading free excerpts from authors including Sarah Gailey, JY Yang and Brian Naslund! It’s cheap as free!!!
These two chapters are some of my favourites from the novel because they involve Gideon failing to come up with believable names for monthly porn magazines. This is the type of quality content you have come to expect from me, and I deliver.
I fully recognise none of you may be around any more now that the female-identified nipples have been scourged, but should you still roam these un-nippled halls I will shamelessly update you on my novel. One stops feeling guilt at self-promotion when your book’s on the way; there comes a point where you can no longer even stop, like a shark swims. You understand that to cease is to expire.
This link is to the cover of my book. The disembodied head up there is the head of my heroine. Please click through and examine. For sticking with me on this route, I will give you special information about this novel I don’t give anyone else; if you have read my fanfiction, or my short stories, or even my fanfiction and my short stories, I want to sit down warmly next to you and tell you exactly what kind of old bullshit I’m serving up to you all over again.
GIDEON THE NINTH is the story of seventeen dolts in a space shack trying to become God’s dead best friends. Here are some of the traditional heroic tropes I went with.
* GIRL FALLS FOR SICKLY COUGAR
* BAD LITTLE LEMONGRAB BOY STEEPLES FINGERS, A LOT
* ASTEROID JUGGALOS HAVE A BONE RELIGION (That old chestnut!! - Ed.)
* TWINS BUT ONE TWIN IS A BEEFALO AND THE OTHER TWIN IS A POT OF YOPLAIT ZERO PERCENT YOGHURT
* HERO’S QUEST TO BECOME A NECROSOLDIER SPACE HUNKETTE ENDS PREMATURELY WHEN NO-TIDDY GOTH WITCH TRICKS HER INTO THE HUNGER GAMES (Biblical - Ed.)
I have also put in a Sorting Hat system, just for you! One day you could align yourself with one of my beautiful Space Houses, which consist of:
I started playing Spelunky
– the ‘enhanced edition’, not the lo-fi original – in March 2014, during
the last Oxford vacation I ever spent at my childhood home in Birmingham. I
don’t know why I bought it. It was cheap in a sale on GOG, but even so, it’s a
famously hard platformer and I am famously bad at platformers. I never honed
those nerves and thews on Mario. I miss jumps; I get stressed. I think I lasted
half a level in Meat Boy. I ought to
have bounced off Spelunky after my
first handful of deaths.
Instead, I got hooked. I’d play it a few times (which
doesn’t take very long; early in one’s Spelunky
career surviving for five minutes is a significant achievement) and then
decide it was too hard and not for me. The next day I’d fire it up again,
wondering if I’d somehow magically got better at it overnight. This lasted for
the rest of the vacation, until I went back to work and lost all my free time
again.
The platformer where I threw all our bombs to get out of all our problems and pT used all our ropes to get us out of poverty, culminating, every time, in a dead gold god squashing us to death
My other plot to get this novel out was to appear above your bed as a shower of oily rain and whisper it to you in a hideous susurrus, but turns out they only do that for like, Women’s Lit
The Ninth House Trilogy is getting published with Tor under their Tor-Macmillan imprint. Both halves of that sentence are, by themselves, reasons for joy and fear so commingled that I no longer understand what either emotion means; put together, they ensure that these days I simultaneously want to gnaw off my foot to a stump and continually cause parties to happen. It’s due very much to my agent and very little to me, but it’s happening.
Carl Engle-Laird – an editor so insightful, so longsuffering and so deeply in tune with what I am trying to do here that it is not to be believed – calls the novel “epic science fantasy in which queer necromantic nuns team up to defeat the trial of the Necrolord.” You can read what he said, it is all in the article, along with my face as I stare at the camera and appear to think secret thoughts about dachshunds. (COLD REALITY: I was thinking of how to impress my photographer with even more knowledge of vanilla World of Warcraft raids.) Read his words; they’re good. Here are mine.
1. I need to share these books with you.
2. They answer my question of, What if a bunch of human-equivalent oil slicks… did space necromancy at each other?
3. How can I make sword fights… more dead and more gay?
I will leave you with a quote from Jane Austen, who felt about her heroine, Elizabeth, much the same as I think about mine, Gideon:
I must confess that I think her as complete a dumpster fire as ever appeared in print
don’t think i don’t see that “bushes of love” reference
I’m glad it wasn’t around when I wrote The Woman in the Hill because the urge to call it Bushes of Love would have overwhelmed me and then nobody would have published it.
Every day I worry all day about what’s waiting in the bushes for us. I’m really thrilled to link to another reprint – this time my horror story The Woman in the Hill, a piece of Kiwi Lovecraftiana set in the hills, plain and bush of turn-of-the-century Tauranga. (Having grown up in Whitford, please do not take this as a savage attack on the place, as the worst thing that happened to me there as a child was that I once dropped an egg and a dog ate it).
I wrote this for excellent editor Lynne Jamneck’s Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror and can’t recommend the full book enough. As ever, I also can’t recommend Nightmare Magazine enough – they published my debut horror story Chew back in the day and if you would like to purchase a scary gift for yourself or your loved ones there is a button linked there to do so. This month’s line-up of December spooky stories is incredible, and I have to particularly recommend Nino Cipri’s Which Super Little Dead Girl™ Are You? Take Our Quiz and Find Out! if you want to laugh, feel bad, and also not sleep well that night.
Due to my own greasy need for self-gratification I can’t pass up the opportunity here to link The Woman in the Hill being discussed here on Tor by Ruthanna Emrys and Anne M. Pillsworth as part of their Lovecraft reread. If you want to survey some incredibly intelligent discussion of the debt that The Woman in the Hill owes to H.P., and in general get some fantastic story recommendations and Lovecraftian legacy discussion in your eyeballs, do click through to this and the whole series. You might want to read it after you’ve read my story, though, because it is spoilers.
Thank you for reading me this year whatever you have read, and I hope you enjoy my own take on Lovecraftian protagonists driven demented by things they cannot understand! Happy holidays!!
Back in the back of a Cadillac, number one with a bullet I’ve got a reprint in Lightspeed.*
“The Magician’s Apprentice”, a story completed at Clarion, published by Weird Tales and nominated for a Shirley Jackson, is free to read at Lightspeed! Wrote this in 2010 and I’m still fond of it in 2017, which is all one can ever ask for, really. Please enjoy a story about growing up, magic, comfort food, and the strong bonds we can make with our teachers. Feel-good tale of the year**.
Readers, please be reminded that you can support this truly excellent magazine what bothered to publish me for a mere $3.99, an amount of dollars that nets you not just my story but those by this month’s authors. I haven’t read them all yet or they haven’t landed, but you’ll be getting the likes of Tobias S. Buckell, Genevieve Valentine and a whole host of truly talented others. Lightspeed will give you all these stories cheap as free anyway, but I encourage you to toss money its way, it is a good thing.
(As ever whenever this story pops up, I remember how indebted I am to Dale Bailey, the Clarion instructor for that week and a truly superhuman being.)
* The actual lyrics. ** It is not the feel-good tale of the year.
drowsilybearzerk Asks:
tazmuir Said:
