Greetings of the Season from Our Great and Benevolent Founder
Hello.
I should really hold off writing my address to a grateful planet until after Christmas, but I should be too stupidly busy to do it then so I shall impose upon your holiday cheer earlier rather than later. Specifically, a brief report on my year for your elucidation and delight.
Firstly, and I shall be hearkening back on this repeatedly so you had better get used to this, I have finished writing three novels this year, which makes me awesome even unto mine own jaundiced eyes. I can't say I wrote three, full stop, because one has been floating around two or three chapters from completion for a good while now.
To be precise, in the first instance I finished the "zero draft" (my new favourite term for the shitty first draft, all awash in typos, non sequiturs, repetitions, ugly phraseology, and general cackitude) of Cabal #3, which bears the title of Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute and specifically not Johannes Cabal and the Fear Institute. I'd prefer it to just be The Fear Institute, but apparently it must have "Johannes Cabal" in the title, just like all the 007 novels had "James Bond" in the title. Such are the strange ways of marketing.
This novel is currently in the process of being polished to create a submissible first draft, a process that is not going brilliantly due to the Christmas logjam of things-that-must-be-done and possibly a degree of burnout because I finished three novels this year and the mortal human frame can only bear limited quantities of awesome. Hence, I anticipate being ridiculously busy between Christmas day and New Year's in an attempt to catch up.
The second novel that was written all in its totality this year was my shot at the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in November. I took it as an opportunity to get a monkey off my back -- a story that had been nagging me for about a year or so demanding to be written. It's a sort of pulp thing that required a headlong energy to work, and I realised NaNoWriMo would be the ideal opportunity to start it. I wanted it to be a short novel, as I for one dislike shootin'-an'-'plodin' novels that don't know when to quit. It's like having a hyperactive eight year old boy hopped up on sugar and caffeine screaming in your face for four hours. My NaNoWriMo novel clocked in at about 55 000 words in its draft zero, and that sounds just about right to me. It'll pick up another 5-10k words in its rewrite, which puts it in about the sweet spot for the kind of thing I had in mind. Getting it published is something else ("It's a novel about what? Set where? Set when? Are you nuts?"), but I have a feeling it will see print if only because it's fun and unusual and I think it might intrigue those strange bods in marketing.
The third novel, the one that was largely completed already, is a book for children inspired by a conversation I had with my daughter four or five years ago. She was just riffing away on strange ideas, one of them took my fancy, and the next thing I know I was writing a novel about it. As is usually the way with my stuff, what was supposed to be a fun, upbeat story got rather darker in the telling, but it works so what the heck. That one in its roughly hewn form is about 70 000 words, and will again pick up about 5k in the first rewrite. My agent is particularly keen to read it because its working title "sounds like a Pink Floyd song," which is as good a reason as any.
I won't say much more about this one except to say that my daughter used to love the "Rainbow Fairy" series of books until her lucid eye noted that they all had the same plot, near as dammit, and they changed the artist to one of whose style she could not approve. I wasn't sorry she turned against them, because after a promising start and perhaps unexpected success, the publisher's cynicism became obvious and they churned out sequel series basing the fairies on ever more desperate themes. I think the last one I saw was "The Internal Organ Fairies" or something similar. Wilhemina-Rubin the Bile-Duct Fairy. Whatever. As somebody with an interest in folklore, the unremitting blandness of the stories and the somewhat disrespectful casting aside of a huge mass of myths and legends irritated me. So, I decided to tell a story that, if nothing else, shows the broadness of European folklore in general and British folklore in particular. It's still disrespectful -- and I expect the Folklore Society will take out a contract on me -- but it is so fondly.
On the subject of previous projects, this year saw the publication of Johannes Cabal the Detective, which -- like its predecessor -- seems to be doing respectable business. That will be coming out in paperback in the UK in a couple of months, but I have no idea when the US paperback comes out, I'm afraid. Probably closer to June or July. Last November saw the publication of the Cabal short "The Ereshkigal Working" in the anthology The Way of the Wizard, edited by John Joseph Adams. Next year should see the publication of another new Cabal short, "The House of Gears" published in the Fantasy ezine. Also, some new non-English versions of Johannes Cabal the Necromancer are coming out including the Polish and French translations, the latter published by the splendidly named Bibliothèque Interdite. So, it's all go for 2011.
That's my terribly self-congratulatory spiel done (did I mention I finished writing three novels this year?), so it only remains for me to thank you for your continued interest in my work, to send all who read this my very best wishes and a warm season's greetings for the midwinter celebration of your choice from me and mine.
TTFN
JLH
I should really hold off writing my address to a grateful planet until after Christmas, but I should be too stupidly busy to do it then so I shall impose upon your holiday cheer earlier rather than later. Specifically, a brief report on my year for your elucidation and delight.
Firstly, and I shall be hearkening back on this repeatedly so you had better get used to this, I have finished writing three novels this year, which makes me awesome even unto mine own jaundiced eyes. I can't say I wrote three, full stop, because one has been floating around two or three chapters from completion for a good while now.
To be precise, in the first instance I finished the "zero draft" (my new favourite term for the shitty first draft, all awash in typos, non sequiturs, repetitions, ugly phraseology, and general cackitude) of Cabal #3, which bears the title of Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute and specifically not Johannes Cabal and the Fear Institute. I'd prefer it to just be The Fear Institute, but apparently it must have "Johannes Cabal" in the title, just like all the 007 novels had "James Bond" in the title. Such are the strange ways of marketing.
This novel is currently in the process of being polished to create a submissible first draft, a process that is not going brilliantly due to the Christmas logjam of things-that-must-be-done and possibly a degree of burnout because I finished three novels this year and the mortal human frame can only bear limited quantities of awesome. Hence, I anticipate being ridiculously busy between Christmas day and New Year's in an attempt to catch up.
The second novel that was written all in its totality this year was my shot at the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in November. I took it as an opportunity to get a monkey off my back -- a story that had been nagging me for about a year or so demanding to be written. It's a sort of pulp thing that required a headlong energy to work, and I realised NaNoWriMo would be the ideal opportunity to start it. I wanted it to be a short novel, as I for one dislike shootin'-an'-'plodin' novels that don't know when to quit. It's like having a hyperactive eight year old boy hopped up on sugar and caffeine screaming in your face for four hours. My NaNoWriMo novel clocked in at about 55 000 words in its draft zero, and that sounds just about right to me. It'll pick up another 5-10k words in its rewrite, which puts it in about the sweet spot for the kind of thing I had in mind. Getting it published is something else ("It's a novel about what? Set where? Set when? Are you nuts?"), but I have a feeling it will see print if only because it's fun and unusual and I think it might intrigue those strange bods in marketing.
The third novel, the one that was largely completed already, is a book for children inspired by a conversation I had with my daughter four or five years ago. She was just riffing away on strange ideas, one of them took my fancy, and the next thing I know I was writing a novel about it. As is usually the way with my stuff, what was supposed to be a fun, upbeat story got rather darker in the telling, but it works so what the heck. That one in its roughly hewn form is about 70 000 words, and will again pick up about 5k in the first rewrite. My agent is particularly keen to read it because its working title "sounds like a Pink Floyd song," which is as good a reason as any.
I won't say much more about this one except to say that my daughter used to love the "Rainbow Fairy" series of books until her lucid eye noted that they all had the same plot, near as dammit, and they changed the artist to one of whose style she could not approve. I wasn't sorry she turned against them, because after a promising start and perhaps unexpected success, the publisher's cynicism became obvious and they churned out sequel series basing the fairies on ever more desperate themes. I think the last one I saw was "The Internal Organ Fairies" or something similar. Wilhemina-Rubin the Bile-Duct Fairy. Whatever. As somebody with an interest in folklore, the unremitting blandness of the stories and the somewhat disrespectful casting aside of a huge mass of myths and legends irritated me. So, I decided to tell a story that, if nothing else, shows the broadness of European folklore in general and British folklore in particular. It's still disrespectful -- and I expect the Folklore Society will take out a contract on me -- but it is so fondly.
On the subject of previous projects, this year saw the publication of Johannes Cabal the Detective, which -- like its predecessor -- seems to be doing respectable business. That will be coming out in paperback in the UK in a couple of months, but I have no idea when the US paperback comes out, I'm afraid. Probably closer to June or July. Last November saw the publication of the Cabal short "The Ereshkigal Working" in the anthology The Way of the Wizard, edited by John Joseph Adams. Next year should see the publication of another new Cabal short, "The House of Gears" published in the Fantasy ezine. Also, some new non-English versions of Johannes Cabal the Necromancer are coming out including the Polish and French translations, the latter published by the splendidly named Bibliothèque Interdite. So, it's all go for 2011.
That's my terribly self-congratulatory spiel done (did I mention I finished writing three novels this year?), so it only remains for me to thank you for your continued interest in my work, to send all who read this my very best wishes and a warm season's greetings for the midwinter celebration of your choice from me and mine.
TTFN
JLH