I’ve just sent this to the “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” patron mailing list, but there appear to be about a dozen people on it who haven’t actually joined the group (please please check your trash/spam to make sure the email didn’t get eaten!), so I’m reposting it here:
I was hoping I could put this off until Wednesday and not have to write it at all, but it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that that’s not the case.
“Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” is much less interested in being a short story, and far more interested in being a novelette or novella (15-25,000 words) than I had anticipated. I’ve written well over 8,000 words now, and I think it’s going to take that much again, possibly more, to do the story justice.
So I have two choices. I can haul something into shape by Friday, and be dissatisfied with it, or I can miss my deadline and send a much longer, stronger story in two or three more weeks.
I rather hope you’d all prefer the longer story on a slightly delayed timeline. I’m going to set the re-scheduled delivery date as September 1, which I ought to be able to make even if this thing turns out to be forty thousand words long. Which would be silly. >.<
I'm extremely embarrassed and apologetic about this, and will do my best to make the story worth the delay.
For the record, for those who hope to buy the story later, this means it won’t be available until December 1st. Possibly I should delay it until February, in that case, so people have some time to get through Christmas before the story’s up for availability…
There’s one last chance to win an early copy of WALKING DEAD over at Book Love Affair! Go forth, participate!
I’m curious as to how many readers here picked up the Walker Papers only recently, when the first three were re-released in mass market paperback. Let me know, please!
I didn’t expect 65 of you to respond to the WALKING DEAD give-away opportunity. Heck, I didn’t know 65 of you stopped by this site in a week!
Since I was expecting about, oh, fifteen responses when I said I’d give away one copy of WALKING DEAD, I have decided instead that for your enthusiasm and loyalty and commenty goodness, I will give away three copies instead. I have drawn random numbers from a hat, and the winners are:
NIKKI, April Rose, and Elena!
If you three will please email me your snail mail addresses, I’ll get those into the post for you ASAP. My email address is cemurphyauthor@gmail.com.
I’ve gotten copies of WALKING DEAD, book 4 of the Walker Papers, in the mail. Throw your name in the hat (ie, leave a comment) and next Tuesday I’ll draw a random number and send the corresponding commenter a copy of the book. :)
My first book came out 4 years, 6 weeks ago. Including the comics as one unit, what you see there are 15 books with my name on ‘em.
Today, I am officially impressed with myself.
Book Four of the Walker Papers, WALKING DEAD, is due out September 1, 2009.
Seattle’s a great place to live…if it weren’t for the undead.
For once, Joanne Walker’s not out to save the world. She’s come to terms with the host of shamanic powers she’s been given, her job as a police detective has been relatively calm, and she’s got a love life for the first time in memory. Not bad for a woman who started out the year mostly dead.
But it’s Halloween, and the undead have just crashed Joanne’s party. Now she has to figure out how to break the spell that lets ghosts, zombies and even the Wild Hunt come back. Unfortunately, there’s no shamanic handbook explaining how to deal with the walking dead.
And if they have anything to say about it–which they do–
No one’s getting out of there alive.
Read the first chapter here!
I’ve created a Facebook fan page! I’ll do something interesting like give away a book or answer one question about one of the series, when I reach 100 fans, and another when I reach 250.
I have also joined twitter, as ce_murphy. I’m still trying to figure out what to do with it, but I’m there!
I also might suggest everyone sign up for my announcements-only mailing list, which is low volume (2 emails a month max, and that’s only if I forget something or something very exciting happens after the first time around).
She was too young, even for a man with no age, but she caught his eye. Slim, dark-haired, with long fingers caught in the skirt of a shapeless dress, she was clearly not a child of wealth. She no doubt belonged to the riverboat upon which she stood, a shabby thing that had seen better days. Even so, in the fire’s light they both bent toward beauty.
It was her gaze, fixed on the sky, which arrested him. Others watched the fire, drawn in by its glow and movement, but she looked upward as though she could see what soared above the smoke. That was quite impossible: even knowing who danced there, Daisani could barely see them himself, but the girl watched as if she knew. Such seeing eyes were enough that he might have gone to her then, despite her youth, but tonight; tonight Chicago was burning.
Want more? This short story is up for commission through fundable.com. Fundable is a site which takes pledges for financing a project. If the project reaches its financing goal–in this case a base of $750 with paypal fees included, so a total of $826–then fundable accepts the pledges and the project goes forward. If the goal isn’t reached within 25 days of the first donation, then the project is canceled and no one pays anything. There’s a $10 minimum donation fee, which is fundable.com’s idea, not mine; I’d have probably set it at $5. Sorry about that.
“Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” will be a 7500 word Janx and Daisani story. Contributors will have exclusive access to the story for at least three months before it’s produced anywhere else.
I have to say this was a great deal of fun for me. Some of the story suggestions were perfectly wonderful, things I wouldn’t have thought of myself but which were terribly obvious as soon as they were suggested. Obviously not everybody can win the anthology, but *many* of these ideas will, I think, end up as the root idea for stories. Thank you all!
The winner is /blythe025, who said I would love to see a story told from the point of view of a priest.
For some reason this idea really caught me. Possibly because I like the priest in the Negotiator trilogy so much, but somehow there’s just a real romanticism to that idea for me. I actually feel like I could build a book around the idea of a priest dealing with the Old Races, though I’m already terribly torn on *when* I would set that story. Or whether it would have to be a longer story, a series of its own, just trying to deal with the religious and spiritual connotations of the Old Races’ existence, from a Western theology’s point of view. I’m just utterly enamored of this idea!
Other ideas, including exceedingly moderate spoilers, are behind the cut.
Read the rest of this entry »
The final tally for my two auction items was $375, not enough for me to write a new Walker Papers or Old Races short story, but *more* than enough to prompt a FANTASY MEDLEY give-away. I’ve got one last ARC (advanced reader’s copy, as opposed to the finished version) I can send to someone, so this is your chance.
THE CONTEST: tell me (in no more than 50 words) what Old Races story you would like to see told. It doesn’t have to be something that comes organically from the books; you can just randomly want “a story about the djinn” or something.
THE CAVEAT: I may make off with one or more idea and turn it into a story at some point. :)
THE OTHER CAVEAT: This contest is also running at my main blog at mizkit.com/mizkit.livejournal.com, so it’s possible the winning entry won’t actually show up in *this* comment thread. I will, however, post the winner’s entry at both locations, so everybody’ll know who won and for what story idea.
THE WARNING: I expect there will be spoilers for the Negotiator trilogy in this thread. If you don’t want to be spoiled, stay out of the comments.
THE WINNER: will be the person whose story idea I like best!
THE DEADLINE: the contest will end on June 9th. :)
THE OTHER CONTEST: My agent, the incomparable Jennifer Jackson (who apparently started agenting at the tender age of nine), is celebrating her 16th year of being an agent by running a contest for ARCs and books written by her clients. Go read her instructions carefully and participate! :)
I’ve been informed by my editor that THE QUEEN’S BASTARD has gone back to print for a fifth time. Presumably this is in response to a sales jump accompanying THE PRETENDER’S CROWN release, so I’m utterly delighted. Thank you all so much!
Someone asked recently if there would be more books in the Inheritors’ Cycle. I have plans for 2 or 3 more books in that series, but I haven’t yet sold them to Del Rey, the publisher for that series. I’ll be writing up a proposal toward the end of the summer, so hopefully I’ll have more information about whether the series will continue by the end of 2009.
In the meantime, DEMON HUNTS, book five of the Walker Papers, has been completed and delivered. There is, however, still time to bid to become a character in that book, and if bidding on both my auction items combined (the Irish gift basket is here) goes over $450 by the close of the auction on Sunday, I’ll write a new Walker Papers or Old Races short story for my internet audience. :)
And speaking of the Walker Papers, the mass market editions of books 1-3 should be available now! I’m ridiculously excited about these, as they’re my first mass market releases under the CE Murphy byline. May they be the first of many!
