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John W. Campbell Award Nominee!

I was just nominated for the John W. Campbell Best New Writer Award! (!!!!!!!!) For those of you playing along at home, the Campbell Award is the Best New Writer award in Science Fiction and Fantasy. It’s not technically a Hugo, but it’s voted on by the Hugo voters, administered by the Hugo Awards committee, and presented at the WorldCon Hugo Awards dinner. So, um. This is a huge deal.

I’m blown away right now. Some past award winners and nominees include: George RR Martin, Jerry Pournelle, Felix Gilman, Diane Duane, Tad Williams (for Tailchaser’s Song!), Lois McMaster Bujold (!), Nalo Hopkinson, Jo Walton, John Scalzi, E. Lily Yu, Saladin Ahmed, John Scalzi, I’m going to stop now or else I’ll just re-copy the entire list. It’s here—one of those lists where you know almost every name. I’m honored, and awed, and really really excited to be nominated for this award. Thanks so much to everyone who voted. I’ve dreamed of being here.

For those of you who haven’t been here before, here’s a link to the book. I like it, and apparently a number of other folks agree with me! I hope you’re all having a wonderful weekend. I sure am.

EDIT: And here’s the full list of nominees, courtesy of LoneStarCon!

EDIT 2: Since I wrote most of that blog post in a rush before the nominations were distributed, I didn’t actually know who else was nominated for the Campbell! Here’s the list, in addition to yours truly:

Zen Cho
Mur Lafferty
Stina Leicht
Chuck Wendig

A range of really impressive and wonderful people. What an honor. I look forward to meeting as many of them as make it to Texas this year! ‘Cos I’m sure going.

The Year is Dead! Long Live the Year!

One of my favorite internet-geeky traditions over the last few years has been following the Death vs. Old Year chase on Tatsuya Ishida’s Sinfest. Considering this year’s installment just ended, I figure I’m not too late to publish my “Hello 2013” post.

First, finishing up old business: over at The Book Smugglers, Three Parts Dead made Ana’s Most Excellent Books of 2012 Top 10 list, coming in at #2! Also, two Tor.com reviewers named Three Parts Dead one of their favorites of 2012! Each reviewer was asked to pick only three books, which makes this extra neat.

2012 was a wild year for me, and for my family. Huge heaping gobs of change and transformation, one of those years that makes you think Heraclitus was right. My first book came out. I quit my day job. I’m an uncle, now. My wife’s graduated from law school, and started working. I’ve made new friends, climbed on a glacier, given a speech at Comic Con, read the Hunchback of Notre Dame in Paris, visited Napoleon’s tomb, traded jokes with guards in the Department of Justice, and improved from being a complete idiot on the fencing strip to being an almost complete idiot. I drafted a successful Control deck for the first time. I’ve met amazing authors, and I’ve met excellent folks over dumplings who I only later found out were amazing authors.

All in all, a great 2012. 2013 is shaping up to be less hectic, but still awesome. For starters: in the next week or two I’m going to finish the first draft of this novel. And then I’m going to write another one. Because that’s how I roll.

I’ve Sold Two More Books to Tor!

One roller-coaster of a year after I sold Three Parts Dead and its companion novel, Two Serpents Rise, I’m pleased to announce that I’ve sold two more books to Tor!

Publishers’ Marketplace has more information on the deal, but it’s behind a paywall, so permit me to repost:

…Max Gladstone’s A WALKER IN THE GYRE, a “science fantasy” in which an indifferent sci-fi writer must employ his gift — the ability to chart a course through the cauldron of the multiverse — to stop a family of necromancers set on remaking time in their image, to David Hartwell and Marco Palmieri at Tor, in a two-book deal, by Weronika Janczuk at Lynn Franklin Associates, in association with D4EO Literary (World English).

WALKER is by far the craziest thing I’ve ever written (except maybe for my current project). I described it once to a composer friend as a fugue; he asked what I meant by that, and I said, well, the main characters spend a lot of time running away from stuff. If you’ve ever wanted a book about gods, monsters, fractal war machines, wolves between worlds, Tantric supercomputers, sex, death, parenting, necromancy, time travel, Hamlet, blood magic, Oh Hell, destiny, responsibility, and love–this is it. If you’ve never wanted a book like that, I’m very confused by your priorities.

The second book will continue to expand on the universe I’ve built in Three Parts Dead. I’m still in the tapping-fingers-together-and-cackling phase for this one, so in lieu of details you’ll have to content yourself by imagining my maniacal laughter…. (I’m a tenor 2 if that helps.)

I can’t overstate how thrilled I am to be here, right now.

Writing and Lifting Weights

Writing is like strength training in this respect: if you’re doing it right, your personal best two years ago is considerably worse than your personal best today.

Writing is unlike strength training in this respect: even if you’re doing it right, you can’t reduce your skill to a single number. Perhaps your sentences are stronger now than they were two years ago, perhaps your emotional through-line’s more clear. Perhaps you’ve developed your vocabulary, or your sentence structure, or pacing. A single glance is rarely enough to tell how you’ve changed.

Because of this, returning to an old project always makes my knees weak. Maybe I’ve become worse in the intervening years! For the last month or so, I’ve been re-working my thriller novel Sente, which I wrote back in 2005 or so and polished to the best of my abilities in 2007. When I started to edit in May, I was terrified that I might find my work had fallen off since college. After all, I remembered this book as a gem.

Three pages in, I found the first sentence I knew I could improve, and relaxed.

Then, a paragraph later, I found another two sentences to improve, and realized that this round of edits would take longer than I intended.

Two chapters in, I wanted to go back in time and kindly throttle my younger self. “What are you doing with these weird verb tenses? Why, oh why, did you use that word 67 times in your manuscript? Were you even paying attention?”

I was, I know. I paid very close attention. I’m just paying better attention now.