Fibrous Words
Advanced reader copies of The Sword Defiant are out in the world! Early reviews are cropping up on Netgalley and Goodreads! I use exclamation marks to conceal nervous apprehension!
It's big (550 pages of story) and shiny, with a very lovely cover by Thea Dumitriu and more elves, vatlings, hideous eldritch horrors and shapeshifting forest-folk than you can shake a talking sword at.
In a few days, I shall pick a random subscriber to this newsletter and send them an ARC.
Actually, that deserves an exclamation too - here it is: !
Use scissors and glue to move it into place.
Ask a grown-up for help if needed.
Book Two of Lands of the Firstborn is nearly ready for submission to the cold pitiless eyes of the editor.
Moria is... well, not quite at the same stage, but Now for the last race! said Gandalf. If the sun is shining outside, we may yet escape.
Secret Project DAGGER is now getting the bulk of my writing time for the next few weeks, while Secret Project RINGER is waiting for feedback from collaborators.
I contributed a story to the latest issue of Grimdark Magazine, and was lucky enough to get a fantastic cover illustration by Carlos Diaz. The story's set in the same world as the Black Iron Legacy series, and depicts a Guerdonese mercenary company fighting in the Godswar. Check it out at https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/product/grimdark-magazine-33/
It's strange how little changes make a big difference. I got a bedside reading light, and suddenly I'm flying through print books again. I just finished Utopia Avenue and The Lost War, and before those I finally scaled Mount Alan Moore's Jerusalem on my third attempt.
It's a big book - it makes The Sword Defiant look slim - and a challenging one. I'm unsure if it quite needed to be quite so long; the core concept of eternal recurrence means that the plot is, well, entirely visible when you step outside linear narrative, so it does feel like it repeats itself a lot. But the individual chapters are absolute gems. Moore plays a lot with different writing styles, and in every case I found myself cursing him at the start of the chapter ("oh god, 70 pages of Joyce pastiche?") and loving it by the end.
Would I recommend you read it? Well, I'm shelving it next to House of Leaves and my sadly unread copy of Infinite Jest, and you can draw your own conclusions from that.
Here is where I intended to put a Warpcon report.
Unfortunately, a few days before the convention, I got COVID. Gaming conventions have always been rife with plagues - any event that involves a few hundred people crammed into small rooms all talking loudly at each other is going to involve the transmission of what we used to call con crud, but now it's a lot more serious. I still went up for an afternoon, and stood outside the convention centre in the open air - masked, ringing a handy leper bell (via an app I found) and shouting unclean. I managed to (social-distantly) catch up with people I haven't seen in much too long; it wasn't like being in the Old Bar on the Saturday night in 1999, but it's never going to be that again, COVID or not.
I did, however, make it over to London for a few days, including meetings with publishers and discussion of future projects. I also got to pop into the absolutely fascinating Magdalena Abakanowicz exhibition - I hadn't encountered her work before, but it's very much My Thing, with giant cryptic monstrous ambiguities floating in mid-air.
Strange powers dwelled in the woods and the lakes that belonged to my parents. Apparitions and inexplicable forces had their laws and their spaces.
Magdalena Abakanowicz | Tate Modern
If you're in London, make it Your Thing too.
I never like this time of year between Warpcon and my birthday. I always end up dwelling on missed opportunities and bad choices.
Head down and nose to the keyboard to get through the dark days.