Ketchup

Okay, so we've got a fun laundry list of developments this week:

1) If you live in the Bay Area, I have a local book signing on Friday, May 21st, starting at 7pm at Bay Books in Concord. We'll be answering any questions you have about the Plague Year trilogy like "What really happened to Andrew Dutchess?" as well as peeling back the lid on my Secret New Big Thriller Novel. Be there or be triangular.

Bay Books
1669 Willow Pass Road
Concord, CA 94520-2611
925-671-2245


2) My editor at Ace informs me Plague Year has gone to its sixth printing. Yes! Did I know there was a fifth printing? No! They never tell me anything, but I was pleased indeed when she told me this. This book's got a nice set of legs.

Ymmmm. Legs.


3) I've sold my third story to Asimov's and it's a dark and wild story that's more "sci fi" than usual for me with clones, combat suits, and all the usual mayhem of the future. Sheila Williams reports that "Planet of the Sealies" won't appear before the January 2011 issue, which is, like, forever. Heck, it's practically the future. But in the meantime, please let me brag with this butt-whompingly awesome quote from her acceptance letter:

>> I've always enjoyed your writing, but I think it is deepening and growing in its complexity and emotional resonance.

Wow. I love it when they love it!


4) I'm set to make my Estonian debut any time now in the seventh volume of an sf anthology whose title I'm told translates as The Sidereal Time. For those of you out there who are fluent, The Sidereal Time #7 includes both of my "Julie Beauchain" stories as translated by a hilarious genius who grew up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain and, in our correspondence, has regaled me with stranger-than-fiction tales of life under the Soviet boot.

It's outrageously cool to have friends in far places.


5) The first half of the Secret New Big Thriller Novel is done. Yes!


6) Speaking of the Secret New Big Thriller Novel, we also have a new winner for the Name Game Contest whose victory I've yet to post on the official contest page. Nevertheless, David Hoyer of West Virginia will now find himself in one of my upcoming novels -- not a prospect with a high survival rate! Ha. It's amazing anyone wants to enter.

The trick is "David Hoyer" is just too similar in name to one of the Secret New Big Thriller Novel's heroes, ROMEO Agent Drew Haldane, so David has agreed to wait patiently for my next novel. Since this will be something of a wait, unfortunately, I've also decided to award him a cameo appearance in the Secret New Big Thriller Novel as the USS Hoyer, an AEGIS cruiser in the Carrier Strike Group featured in the book.

What!?! ROMEO? Navy ships? Is this some kind of clue?

And so I summon thee, Kellen Squire!


7) Super fan Kellen Squire has written super things about the Plague Year series on Amazon and elsewhere online, although he's gently taken me to task for failing to address the fate of the U.S. Navy during the machine plague. "What happened to those squids!?" he's asked. "They have nuclear and biological warfare protocols that would have allowed them to stay safe inside their ships!"

"Not for eleven months," says I, but that's neither here nor there.

So here it comes, Kellen. One of the major threads in the Secret New Big Thriller features the U.S. Navy at its finest. :)

Labels: Asimov's, foreign sales, Name Game Contest, PLAGUE YEAR, The Secret New Big Thriller