Is posting your publications for the year a sign of insecurity? Like, "Look, everyone, I wasn't just sitting around counting my thumbs all year, I was typing with them."

2009 Sales & Publications

Novels published:

• NORSE CODE (Ballantine)

Novels Sold:

• KID VS. SQUID (Bloomsbury Children's USA), scheduled for release May 11, 2010


• LAST (Bloomsbury Children's USA), scheduled for spring/summer 2011

New Stories:

• "The Holy City and Em's Reptile Farm" - in Other Earths (DAW)


• Last Son of Tomorrow - Tor.com


• "Temp" in Tumbarumba

Reprints and Podcasts:

• Taco - Escape Pod


• Carnival Park - PodCastle


• Change - PodCastle


• Chi - Drabblecast


• Frequent Flier Miles - Drabblecast


• "Far As You Can Go" - 9 (Greek)

Came home from evening excursions last night to find Kid vs. Squid page proofs waiting at my door. Of the many things that occur in the journey from manuscript to book, getting page proofs is turning out to be one of my favorites. It's the first time that a book starts to look like a book and it fills me with squee.

From Kid vs. Squid proofs

From Kid vs. Squid proofs

And then there's the somewhat more laborious part of publishing, which is writing the durn book.

From Last

OMG I HAVE THE MOST AWESOME PUBLISHING NEWS BUT I CAN'T TELL YOU!!

(Actually, that's not true. I don't currently have awesome publishing news, and if I did, I would tell you. I just always wanted to type one of those awesome-but-can't-tell-you posts.)

(Actually, thinking about it, maybe I have posted one of those kinds of posts in the past, but being the internet exhibitionist blabby mouth I am, it would have been uncharacteristic of me, and I sometimes blot out my own uncharacteristic behavior.)

(Actually, that's not true. I agonize over my own uncharacteristic behavior just as much as I agonize over my characteristic behavior. I agonize a lot. I'm like a poet.)

Anyway.

I may not have awesome publishing news, but I do have some nice publishing news: My story, Carnival Park, is now up at PodCastle. It originally appeared as part of "Tales From the City of Seams," a sequence of flash stories in Polyphony 4.

Now's a great time to buy books (such as the acclaimed Polyphony series of anthologies, among other things) from Wheatland Press. A relative of publisher Deborah Layne (and an indie bookseller in her own right) lost her house in a fire, and Deborah is donating $10 from every Wheatland book sold this month to help her out. A good cause, and you can get some good books out of it. Details here.

Remember when I used to talk about my life a lot here? Well, I still live. It's been a busy October. Saw an NBA game outdoors in the middle of the Mojave Desert, went to a Moby show, and have several more fun and social events coming up in the next couple of weeks. I've also been writing and waiting for awesome publishing news.

ETA: Forgot to mention another bit of nice news: The Greek newspaper Εννέα recently published "Far As You Can Go," my story about a boy and a broken robot being adventurous and brave and poignantly broken. You can buy it in its original form from Tropism Press and help the publishers get through some challenging economic circumstances.

It's good to have options for places to buy books, and now there's a new one: The Tor.com Store. They're "publisher agnostic," meaning they're not only selling their own Tor books there, but stuff from other publishers, including mine. Full disclosure: My book is a featured title at the store (at least it was today), but I'd think it was an interesting idea and worth pointing out regardless. New ideas, new business models.

***

A reader reacts to Norse Code from a Christian perspective.

***

Heading out for Arizona tomorrow, because I miss it so much that I have to go back. No, of course that's not true! I'm going to a workshop in Flagstaff, and I've got some business in Phoenix to take care of first, by which I mean Four Peaks Brewery and Carlsbad Tavern. I used to get the nachos at Carlsbad on Friday nights after Kenpo class. And, yes, I actually do miss those nachos.

Has anyone here sold novel-in-translation rights to Scandinavian countries? (No, I haven't.) If so, can I ask which publisher(s)? Do you in general know who the good (book-length) SF publishers are? The bad ones?

Any responses here or to my email (gregvan@gmail.com) much appreciated.

Oh, hey, I can't remember if ever mentioned it, but I sold this book last year? And it's out and stuff today? If I recall, it's called Norse Code, and in addition to the valkyrie in the leather pants on the cover (who actually only wears jeans in the book, plus a sensible coat, cuz it's Fimbulwinter, which means it's quite brisk out), there're gods and wolves and a Malamute and an eight-legged horse and farmers from Iowa. It's a hoot, lemme just say that.

You can find some preview chapters online: chapter 1 at Tor.com, chapter 2 at Suvudu, and chapter 3 at Suvudu.

And over at John Scalzi's blog, I've got a Big Idea column up. How'd that happen? Because I put a grenade down Scalzi's pants and threatened to pull the pin. "Get your hand out of my pants," John said. "Wait, no, don't! Wait ... Oh, fine, you can have a Big Idea column."

And that's how you make things happen in this business. You be a freakin' professional, people.

Thanks for all the kind words posted in the comments yesterday and dozens and dozens of previous days. As it says on the acks page, I appreciate all the "awesome folks who have kept me company by leaving thousands of funny and lovely comments on my silly blog."

That means you.

From Final Norse Code cover

What do you do the day before your first book comes out? Well, in my case, I try to forget about business and contracts and sales and numbers, and I try to remember that I never wanted to be a writer so I could bathe in the strange and murky waters of business and contracts and sales and numbers. I wanted to be a writer because, along with love and friends and snacks, writing makes me happy. Part of writing is sharing. Tomorrow, I get to share my book with people, and that's a happy thought.

Anyway, that's how I'm trying to think.

***

The estimable Gwenda Bond interviews me on her estimable blog. I talk about the book, naturally.

An overall shiny review of Norse Code [Amazon - Powells - Barnes and Noble - Borders - Mysterious Galaxy] in Publishers Weekly:

Norse Code Greg van Eekhout. Bantam Spectra, $7.99 (304p) ISBN 978-0-553-59213-9

Short story author van Eekhout makes a successful leap to long fiction with this thrilling urban fantasy. [Plot summary redacted to avoid stealing PW's intellectual property, but the reviewer does make the book sound quite exciting.] While a few aspects of the conclusion don't quite hang together, the compelling prose and epic blend of mythological and modern elements make it clear that van Eekhout is an author to watch. (June)

Heyee, I've got a new story in Other Earths, an alternate history anthology edited by Nick Gevers and Jay Lake. "The Holy City and Em's Reptile Farm" is about Em, a young girl whose family runs a fading roadside tourist attraction along Vía 66, a pilgrimage route that's been bypassed by the new interstate highway. To save the family business, she travels to the Holy City, a desert oasis of neon lights, glitzy entertainment, buffet lines and slot machines, and finds herself embroiled in a conflict involving the Knights Templar, the Hawaiian diaspora, Atomic Golgoltha, and thieves after the holiest of holy relics.

Here's the table of contents:

"This Peaceable Land, or, The Unbearable Vision of Harriet Beacher Stowe" by Robert Charles Wilson

"The Goat Variations" by Jeff VanderMeer

"The Unblinking Eye" by Stephen Baxter

"Csilla's Story" by Theodora Goss

"Winterborn" by Liz Williams

"Donovan Sent Us" by Gene Wolfe

"The Holy City and Em's Reptile Farm" by Greg van Eekhout

"The Receivers" by Alastair Reynolds

"A Family History" by Paul Park

"Dog-Earred Paperback of My Life" by Lucius Shepard

"Nine Alternate Alternate Histories" by Benjamin Rosenbaum

I've got a short story (very short, like, less than 140 characters short) on the Thaumatrope Twitter feed today.

For my next act of experimental fiction, I shall bark a three-word story on the corner of University and Grimm at 2:38 PM today. There will be profanity.

And another blurb came into today. Editor, agent, and author are all thrilled.

"Norse Code has bone crunching battles, ironic ravens, a resistance movement of dead Iowans, a great loner hero redeemed by the love of a spunky valkyrie in California during the apocalypse, and lots of wit. If that doesn't sound like fun to you, all I can say is, well, I'm sorry. Cause it is." -- Maureen McHugh

I've gotten a few nice blurbs for Norse Code by some wonderful writers whose work I love and admire, and yesterday I got my first blurb from someone whom I actually don't know personally. Check it out:

“Van Eekhout plays with Norse mythology like he invented it. This is a really fun read, with plenty of cool bits to chew over after putting it down. I like this book a lot.” -- Steven Brust, author of the Jhegaala

And this one, from someone whom I've touched with my own hands:

"Greg van Eekhout combines the thrills of gods and monsters with the chills of endless winter in this inventive modern fantasy. Neil Gaiman fans take note!"-- Tim Pratt

And I got another one from Jay Lake, but I read it on Google Chat so don't have a written record of it. It's shiny.

ETA: Jay quadruples his kindness by re-sending me the blurb:

"NORSE CODE is a clever, witty reimagining of one of our enduring myths in a world of Southern California baristas and shopping malls: Ragnarok at Malibu, with wandering gods, thoughtful monsters, high tech Valkyries and world-spanning catastrophes. Van Eekhout demonstrates his well-deserved reputation as a masterful short fiction stylist on a much larger canvas -- one that stretches from the frozen basements of hell to the depths of black infinity, without ever losing his focus on the human and the humane. A satisfying read that taps the vein of our oldest legends in the most modern way possible."

If you've had a novel published by a print book publisher and did something to promote it, what did you do that you feel worked?

My friend Aaron cheers me up with this 12-22-08 New Yorker cartoon:

From Desktop

A few recent short story appearances to mention.

First up is "The Temp" in Tumbarumba, a collaborative project by Ethan Hamm and Ben Rosenbaum and a bunch of writers. This was one of those things that when Ben told me about it in email I just sort of nodded and thought, "I honestly have no idea what he's talking about but it sounds cool."

ETA: Now that I think on it, I don't think Ben really explained it to me. I think he just described it as being something transformational or transitional or about change and surprise and maybe something to do with hybrids.

Anyway, here's an explanation:

Tumbarumba is an add-on for Firefox web browsers. It quietly sits in the background, occasionally inserts a fragment of a story into a webpage that is being viewed. The result is an absurd sentence that is reminiscent of the surrealist exquisite corpse game. If the inserted fragment (we call the fragments "tumbarumbas") is spotted and clicked upon, the entire story will emerge and eventually take over the page.

And once I understood that, I said to myself, "Why would I ever want to complicate my internet experience with such nonsense???" But then I turned the add-on on and forgot about it and one day I was reading a news story about Sarah Palin and the paragraph started telling me about how the wires in her head were giving her headaches when she jacked in and it was a surreal moment and then I went, "Oooh. Okay. I get it now. Cool."

Next up is "Frequent Flier Miles" in Flytrap #10, which will be the last issue of Flytrap (at least for the foreseeable future), since editors/publishers Tim Pratt and Heather Shaw have a kid and jobs and writing careers and lives and didn't want Flytrap to become a source of pain and obligation rather than one of pleasure and fulfillment. And who can blame them? I'll miss Flytrap, though. It's been one of my favorite markets to read and to appear in, and I'm proud to have been in the first issue as well as the last issue, and also one in the middle there somewhere.

Finally, "Shadow of Myself" in The Exquisite Corpuscle, an anthology edited by Jay Lake and Frank Wu, featuring interleaved fiction, poetry and illustration, available at Amazon or directly from Fairwood Press.

And now I release you from this infomercial.

Podcasting is the first time short fiction has been presented in a format that takes advantage of suburban sprawl and boring cubicle jobs.

So, I'd been waiting for my editorial letter and line-edited manuscript for Norse Code, and I'd been doing so with some trepidation, because even though I talked to my editor and she'd given me a good idea what to expect and nothing she'd said was truly fret-worthy, I was still a bit nervous, because this is my first time through this process and my first time working with my editor and what if she'd only bought my book on a dare or else was suffering from a head injury from which she'd since recovered and was having second thoughts and had come to conclude that my book was just a huge wad of suck and needed to be a different book entirely or else her whole publishing company would laugh at her and maybe glue her desk drawers shut.

Anyway.

Yesterday I got the letter and line-edited ms, and even though it's a long letter and there're a lot of red marks on the ms, and I'm not being allowed to get away with sloppy writing and sometimes very sloppy thinking, revising looks like a manageable project that's going to result in a much sharper book. And yet I was not asked to kill a single darling: not a line, not a scene, not a character. It's still going to be my book. Maybe even more so. It's just about honing and clarifying and fixing some bad or non-existent logic.

So, for the next few weeks, it's back to the world of Norse gods, valkyries, eight-legged horses, genomics and trashing Los Angeles. I'm genuinely excited.

Travis Sheerman interviews me at Blogging the Muse. Goodness, but I do go on a bit, and even answer the if-you-were-a-cookie question.

"The Osteomancer's Son" just got posted on PodCastle, in podcast form: here.

Writing that makes me think of Milhouse saying, "Remember ALF? He's back. In POG form!"

And, no, I never have noticed that I bear a resemblance to Milhouse Van Houten, thank you very much for asking.

I do not have a complete draft of my YA novel, but I have typed the first word of the first scene (the) and the last word of the last scene (laughed), and all the words in between. The reason why this doesn't constitute a first draft for me is because if I sent it out in the world in this shape, even to trusted first readers, it would die. The lungs are hanging on by mere threads. The heart is sewn onto the elbow.

So, what's required now is what they used to call meatball surgery on M*A*S*H. It's not polish and perfection. It's more stuff like, if the heroes employ a mummy in the climax to save the day, I have to actually go back and write in a mummy for them to employ.

This is a dangerous time for me. The language is clunky, the characters inconsistent, some of the plot business completely nonsensical, and not being able to fix all these things before people read the draft can push me pretty far out on the ledge of shame and despair. But I don't have time to fix all these things. I only have time to shove the heart into the chest cavity and hit it with my fist and scream, "Live, damn you, live!" Alan Alda-style.