Down around Baltimore, MD this weekend is the S.F. Media convention known as Shore Leave. It’s a particularly rambunctious event this time around as they have both William Shatner and Brent Spiner appearing.
I went down yesterday to be part of the mass signing and book release of the third volume in the ReDeus shared universe series (ReDeus: Native Lands), which I posted about yesterday. That bit ran from 10:00 pm to midnight, and then we all adjourned to the bar for a couple hours until closing time. I drove home and managed to crawl into bed at about 4:00 a.m. today.
But that’s not what today’s post is about.
Prior to the 10:00 signing, there was a program item at 9:00 featuring Marco Palmieri and Greg Cox, two editors at Tor Books. They did a presentation of some recent and upcoming titles from Tor. Near the end, Marco made a little announcement. I had planned to hold off sharing this news publicly until such time as the ink on all the paperwork had dried, but apparently my editor and my agent agreed it was fine. So…
*** insert trumpets here ***
I am very pleased to announce that Tor Books is buying a novel from me. Despite my having published four books through Hadley Rille Books, a small press out of Kansas City, Tor considers me a “debut author.” That’s fine. And while I’ve been very pleased with the my relationship with Eric Reynolds of HRB, going from a small press to the largest publisher of SF in the country is a jump of one or more orders of magnitude in nearly all ways.
And because I’m now finishing up a book for a major publisher, I needed to have a proper agent to handle all the pesky details of contracts that weren’t based on a simple handshake. After far more choices than I probably deserve, I’m delighted to say I am now represented by John Silbersack of the Trident Media Group.
Or to put it another way: this changes everything in my life. It’s the opportunity I’ve been working toward for about two decades, and I’m grabbing hold of it with both hands!
The rest of 2013 is going to be a wild ride. The finished manuscript is due in New York at the beginning of February, and personally I’d like to get it in a month early. Other plans are being reviewed, reorganized, re-evaluated (and in some instances, rejected) as my priorities shift to put this front and center. So if I seem even busier and harder to get ahold of for the rest of the year, this is why.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and put my ass back in the chair and hammer out some more words.
