Let’s start with the obvious: The Chalice War: Cauldron is now out and available from all booksellers in ebook and paper formats. This is the second installment in my Celtic urban fantasy trilogy, The Chalice War. Stone, the first book, came out a month ago. And the third and final volume, Sword, should be released in early August. The cover reveal will be coming soon.
I sold a bunch of copies of the first two books at ConCarolinas this past weekend, and hope to sell bunches more at LibertyCon (Chattanooga — June 23-25). By the time DragonCon rolls around (Atlanta — August 31-September 4), I’ll have all three books in stock.
I have, in a previous post, made the case for supporting authors and their blogs, etc. by buying their published works; I won’t bother making the case again. I have also made the case for buying the early books in a series as they’re released, rather than waiting for the entire series to drop, and I won’t bother doing that again either.
But I did want to spend a bit of time discussing the emotions of a new release, emotions that begin well before the actual publication of the novel. The anticipation can be excruciating. Not just waiting to see the book, or even looking forward to seeing it in the hands of readers, though I feel both of those. With each new book, I experience this sense of excitement about the story finding its way into the world. “I have a new book coming,” I want to shout from the rooftops, “and it is going to blow your minds!!” As I’ve said before, I almost always feel that my newest book is also my best, and so I want to show off a bit, let people see what I’m capable of as an artist now. Ego? Maybe. Pride? Definitely.
I’m asked quite often if I still feel the thrill of seeing a new book in print, even after so many years and so many releases. And the truth is, I do. Sure, the very first time was unlike anything I’ve experienced since. I still remember getting a call from the local bookstore here in our little college town. My author copies hadn’t arrived yet, so when the store manager reached out to let me know the hardcover edition of Children of Amarid was in stock, I rushed over to see it. I’m pretty sure Nancy came with me.
And, typical of me, I was so excited to see the book, to hold it in my hands, to see my name right there on the cover, right below the gorgeous artwork. I was over the moon. But I also recall thinking, “Hmmmm, the image is a bit too dark, and the colors don’t pop the way they should.” I have long been Glass-Half-Empty Guy . . . . Which doesn’t change the fact that I was right. The cover did come out too dark, something Tor corrected with the mass market paperback edition a year later. Just sayin’.
Those competing impulses, though, are fairly typical for me, and, as I gather from conversations I’ve had with other authors, for many of my colleagues as well. Yes, the thrill is real. So is the worry about sales and critical response, the hyper-sensitivity to anything that might be even slightly off with the new product, the certainty that the excitement will prove fleeting while the concerns linger.
We authors notice things others don’t — the darkness of the images is a perfect example. No one else thought the jacket art for the hardcover of Children of Amarid was anything other than cool. But I picked up on the (very mild) flaw immediately. That said, I have been fortunate with my book art throughout my career, and have liked the cover images that appear on almost all my books. There are a couple of exceptions, but I won’t say more than that. The point is, I have never actually hated one of my covers. I know plenty of authors who have. I can’t imagine how difficult that would be.
There can be other problems as well. Sometimes the maps we put in our books are split in an awkward way in order to fit them in the front pages. Sometimes there are typos. I know authors who have had their books published only to find that the print editions begin or end with the wrong chapter or scene!! Oh. My. God. I would lose my freaking mind. All sorts of things can go wrong.
And, as I mentioned before, even if all goes as it should with the published version of the book, and even if the jacket looks great, sales can disappoint. So can reviews. Releases can coincide with economic downturns. Or national tragedies. Or global pandemics. We have no control over such things, of course, and in the context of world events, the fate of our book release is pretty insignificant. Except to us. For us, it’s more than a book release. It’s the realization of years of work and hope and passion.
With all this in mind, I am happy to say that the releases of The Chalice War: Stone and The Chalice War: Cauldron have gone great. No new pandemics. The stock market is up. The art work looks marvelous. All the chapters are just where they should be. (I think — I should probably check to be sure . . . . Yep, they look great!) Sales? I have no idea at this point. It’s too early to know. Reviews? We’ll see about those as well. I worry, of course. I want these books to succeed. I want you to like them. And, if you do, I would love for you to tell the world.
Thanks for reading this.
Keep writing!
I’ve been thinking of this a lot recently because I am in the process — finally! — of reissuing my Winds of the Forelands series, which has been out of print for several years. The books are currently being scanned digitally (they are old enough that I never had digital files of the final — copy edited and proofed — versions of the books) and once that process is done, I will edit and polish them and find some way to put them out into the world again.
I feel that way about the second and third books in my Case Files of Justis Fearsson series, His Father’s Eyes and Shadow’s Blade. These books are easily as good as the best Thieftaker books, but the Fearsson series, for whatever reason, never took off the way Thieftaker did. Hence, few people know about the Fearsson books, and it’s a shame, because these two volumes especially include some of the best writing I’ve ever done.
Same with the Islevale Cycle trilogy. Time’s Children is the best reviewed book I’ve written, and Time’s Demon and Time’s Assassin build on the work I did in that first volume. But the books did poorly commercially because the series got lost in a complete reshuffling of the management and staffing of the company that published the first two installments. The series died before it ever had a chance to succeed. Which is a shame, because the world building I did for Islevale is my best by a country mile, and the plotting is the most ambitious and complex I ever attempted. Those three novels are certainly among my very favorites.
But of all the novels I have published thus far, my favorite is Invasives, the second Radiants book. As I have mentioned here before, Invasives saved me. This was the book I was writing when our older daughter received her cancer diagnosis. I briefly shelved the project, thinking I couldn’t possible write while in the midst of that crisis. I soon realized, however, that I HAD to write, that writing would keep me centered and sane. I believe pouring all my emotional energy into the book explains why Invasives contains far and away the best character work I have ever done. It’s also paced better than any book I’ve written. It is simply my best.
Recently, I have been reading a biography of Joni Mitchell (a holiday gift from my older daughter), a long-time favorite of mine and, in my opinion, the finest songwriter in the history of rock and roll (more on that shortly). It’s been an interesting read — the author is a bit fawning for my taste, and a bit too eager as well to weave Mitchell’s (admittedly phenomenal) lyrics into his prose. But as is often the case when I read biographies of artists I admire, the book made me think about creativity and the artistic process.
For the past several weeks, I have been sharing “My Best Mistakes,” which have included 
Very early in my career, when my first book, Children of Amarid, was the only one I had out, I responded publicly to a online review from a less-than-delighted reader. Amazon was still a novelty (no pun intended) as was the notion of online reader reviews. (Hard to imagine, right? That the idea of readers offering reviews of the books they’d read should have been new and different and even a bit odd?) I don’t remember what the reader in question objected to about the book, nor do I remember what I said in my public response. The original book is out of print now — only the 2016 reissues are available on the site, so our exchange is lost to the ages. All I know is that someone criticized the book, I didn’t take the criticism well, and I took it upon myself to write a reply and post it to the Children of Amarid Amazon page.
Some years later, soon after the release of Spell Blind, the first book in The Case Files of Justis Fearsson, another Amazon reviewer panned the book because my book was “a blatant rip-off” of Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden books, “a ludicrous case of copycatting.” For the record, I didn’t copy Dresden at all. I had only read the first two books of the series, and the “copycatting” the reviewer claimed I’d done amounted to using tropes of the genre, not elements of Butcher’s work. And so I responded to the review, wanting to set the record straight.
During our tour, we encountered many people selling pottery in front of their homes. And at one table, a mother displayed her wares beside those of her young daughter. I think the girl must have been around 7 or 8, give or take a year, and she had made a few small bowls, seed pots, and dishes. And she had made a tiny storyteller. As one would expect, it was quite crude compared to those we had seen for sale back in Albuquerque (we hadn’t yet been to Santa Fe or Taos), but something about the figure spoke to me. Maybe is was just that the storyteller was so cute. Or maybe it was that the girl herself was so proud of it. Or maybe I saw in this child’s early effort to follow in her mother’s footsteps something akin to my dream of becoming a professional writer. Whatever the reason, I asked the girl how much it cost.
That was a magical day in many ways. Acoma was as beautiful as we had been told, the pale red stone of the Pueblo seeming to glow beneath a deep azure sky, wooden kiva ladders rising above their structures and reaching toward the clouds. At one point, I spotted a rainbow in the clouds overhead — there was no rain, just the prismatic color, which appeared for a moment and then vanished. I think I was the only one on the tour who saw it. I believed that, together, the rainbow and my little storyteller were omens, signs that my dream would, in fact, come to pass.
One idea is to write my next Thieftaker novel, either in the form of a trio of novellas, like I did with