Good afternoon, Starfighters, and I hope your weeks have all progressed awesomely, with ruination to your foes, glory to the cause of Justice, et cetera.  This week: announcements!

First: LAST FIRST SNOW got a starred review in Publishers Weekly!

Gladstone’s gift for vivid storytelling, his deep empathy for his characters, his sly satire of current socioeconomic issues, and the rich, diverse world of his novels have become reliable pleasures, always enthralling and somehow consistently improving with every book.

Bam.  Last First Snow drops on July 14th, Bastille Day, which amuses me for Reasons.  This book is about protest, and communities trying to change themselves.  I described some of the key themes on Tor.com a while back.  You can pre-order it now wherever fine books are sold!  For example: Indiebound, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.  Pre-orders are golden: they help bookstores identify interest in a forthcoming title, which leads to more orders and excitement around the book.  Do what you can for the cause!

Second: FULL FATHOM FIVE is out in paperback this week!

Paperback release is a beautiful time in a book’s lifecycle.  I say this every time my books make paperback, but—when I was a kid, I never bought hardcover.  One hardcover book cost a night’s wages at the pizza joint!  Paperbacks won my heart on price efficiency; I could wait, albeit with great difficulty, for the softcover edition.  So, teenage Max, wherever you are, you can afford this one now.  Locus and the Lambda Award jury liked the book.  You probably will too!  Same link parade:  Indiebound, Barnes & Noble, Amazon.

Third: I’m writing a PATHFINDER novel!

This is long range news—like, I won’t break ground on this book until 2016—but I thought you might like to know!  I’m really excited about this project.  I’ve been tabletop gaming since I was a kid; it’s how I learned to talk, like in a group with people, and how I formed my closest and earliest bonds with friends.  I’m itching to do something fun with the Pathfinder world’s almost but not quite medieval modes of production, murder hobos, planar travel, elves, and sideways transhumanism, with mystically reified morality axes, Vance-adjacent magic, chance-dependent physics—god, consider the sheer potential for shenanigans, and that’s just talking about the ruleset!  Then we get into dead gods, kingdoms ruled by demonic contracts, undead stuff, yes yes yes.  This gnarled conceptual space has so much storytelling potential—so many dark corners and intriguing tangles to explore, Planetary style.  I’ve played with and pondered these concepts in my own tabletop games since Time Immemorial, as veterans of the Faerun Insurance and Recovery Corporation well know, and now I get to share the fruits of those ponderings with y’all, Dear Readers.  We’ve all been playing in the same woods since we were kids, but follow me and I’ll show you what I found there.  This will be a fun ride.  Don’t buckle your seatbelts.  It’s more entertaining for me that way.

*buckles his own seatbelt surreptitiously*

I’m grateful to James Sutter and the rest of the team at Paizo for loaning me their toys.  I promise when I return them all of the heads will be on the proper bodies.  Probably.  Wherever they’ve spent the meantime.

Oh, and if your reaction to this news is but Max what about your other books, first, thank you for your support, and second, have no fear, Dear Reader.  Tor already has a manuscript for Craft Sequence Book 5, which, because I so dearly love making my editor’s life easier, is numbered Four, tentative publication date 2016 sometime.  Even with my tight schedule and overlapping Seekret Projekts for the rest of the year, I don’t anticipate breaking pace on the Sequence.  More news on that front as soon as I have anything firm to report, of course.

Okay, that’s all for now!  Enjoy your days.  Vote in the Locus Awards.  Find someone cool and give them a high-five.  Peace.