So early, and yet so chatty!

July 23, 2007

Possibly the Best Fanmail Evar:

I was in line at Borders Bookstore, waiting with the horde for the release of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” I decided to buy a book to read as I waited… [and] “Urban Shaman” called to me. I got though the first 4 chapters before I had to stop to complete the original task. I was hooked!!

I had the latest Potter and “Urban Shaman” at home the next day. I started Potter, put it down after about 150 pages, picked up your book and I did not put I down until I was done. …I am looking forward to reading more of your works in the near future (like tomorrow!). I will just have to work the last Potter book in when I don’t have one of your books to read.

Take THAT, JK! Who’s your daddy?! Who’s your daddy! Huh? Huh?!

O.O

requests a reminder of my publishing schedule. I’m the only one who can keep this straight. :) So, in order of appearance over the next 2 years, the books are:

HEART OF STONE (Book One of the Negotiator Trilogy, Nov 2007)
HOUSE OF CARDS (Book Two of the Negotiator Trilogy, March 2008)
THE QUEEN’S BASTARD (Book One of the Inheritors’ Cycle, June 2008)
HANDS OF FLAME (Book Three of the Negotiator Trilogy, Sept 2008)
THE PRETENDER’S CROWN (Book Two of the Inheritors’ Cycle, Jan 2009)
CAULDRON BORNE (Book Four of the Walker Papers, May or June 2009)

This information can generally be found under the currently working on tag. I’ll stick a link to it in my nav bar. :)

I decided I’m taking today off, where the value of ‘taking today off’ is:

– get a gym membership
– clean kitchen
– clean bathroom
– work on TQB map
– do page 1 rough sketch for Chance #4
– get stripe redone/make appt to get stripe redone
– call estate agent
– work on TPC proposal
– work on Chance #5
– HoF AFS
– find Chance printouts & get ready to submit it
– read Harry Potter

I’ll be happy if I get half of those done. I suspect tomorrow will be another Day Off like that. Wednesday we’re going up to Dublin for Dad’s birthday, so realistically I’m not going to get HoF started until Friday, which is okay, as long as I get Chance 5 done before then. And, er, the TPC proposal, which is probably the more important to finish. Heh. :)

Serious superheroes.

Emily and Kit arrive safely in Bray! With time-warpy goodness (the train came in at a different time than Dad expected)! All we need now is the right kind of Doctor…

Emily and I re-create our famous DONK! photograph (which I can’t find a copy of right now–oh,here it is, as well as the aftermath of donk), wherein we whacked our heads together and a resounding DONK! reverberated over the glacier. This time we managed to not actually whack our heads, though it was a near thing. :)

29 thoughts on “So early, and yet so chatty!”

  1. Attafan! Treasure them, hoard them to your heart…

    Meantime, what’s actually happening with ‘Chance’? Oh, and I’m curious about the process now, because I didn’t realise you produced even rough sketches for it; I thought you wrote and someone else arted.

  2. Once in a while I write something too obscure for my artist, whose first language is not English, to comprehend, at which point I do a rough layout to show him what I mean. I think in 88 pages of comic it’s happened twice. :) That said, I /did/ do the character design for Chance herself, causing more than one of the people who auditioned for the role of artist to wonder why I wasn’t just doing the art myself… :)

    What’s happening with it is that somehow 3 months have gone by since I got the rejection from Image and I have not yet re-submitted it. I’m sure the fact that I had to completely rewrite a book, move, and revise another book has nothing to do with that, and that I’m just incompetent.

  3. That said, I /did/ do the character design for Chance herself, causing more than one of the people who auditioned for the role of artist to wonder why I wasn’t just doing the art myself…

    Hrrumph. Multi-talented people… mutter… scowl… *picks up pencil, blinks at it vaguely, tries to remember what you do with this again…?*

    What’s happening with it is that somehow 3 months have gone by since I got the rejection from Image and I have not yet re-submitted it. I’m sure the fact that I had to completely rewrite a book, move, and revise another book has nothing to do with that, and that I’m just incompetent.

    Yup. Clearly. What have you been doing with yourself? Etc. (Wot, no agent? Agents good. Agents do boring submittings, field horrid rejections, etc etc…)

  4. Hrrumph. Multi-talented people… mutter… scowl… *picks up pencil, blinks at it vaguely, tries to remember what you do with this again…?*

    Well, I’m not good enough to do a comic book, for what it’s worth. :) I’m a good artist, but I’m also good enough, or realistic enough, to know how good I’m not. I couldn’t do what Ardian (or any of the others who made comments of that nature) can do without a decade of practice, and as much as I’d love to, I don’t seem to actually be willing to put that time in. :)

    Oh: yes, agent, but AFAICT, in the comic book field agents are not much use except for contract vetting, which my agent has agreed to do should it get that far. In comics, apparently either you’ve already got a reputation as a creator (Warren Ellis, Neil Gaiman, etc) or you don’t (me!) and if you do, the agent negotiates a price, and if you don’t, comic producers are not any more impressed by or inclined to look at material submitted via an agent than material not.

    I also know a lot more about the field than my agent does, so I’d have to be telling her where to submit and all anyway, and then if you’re using an agent to submit you start getting into this interesting territory of who exactly she represents, the writer, or the writer and the artist, or… so on and so forth. So it’s more practical all around for me to do this, even if I’m not moving as fast as I’d like.

  5. Very cool fan mail and in a choice between you and Harry? There is no choice. It’s you. In fact I started “Stardust” last night but Coyote Dreams arrived today….which to read this evening…..Coyote Dreams I think

  6. So World Famous Author C.E. Murphy triumphs over JK Rowling *and* Neil Gaiman? Wow. You’re cool, Kit. :)

  8. Now that’s some mighty good fan-mail.

    When do your fans get to start cos-play in queues outside Waterstones then?

  9. I have to wait TWO YEARS for the fourth Walker Papers??

    ::twitch::

    ::shiver::

    See ya in 17 days…

  13. Every time I see that date, I have the same reaction. Especially since I seem to finish her books in like… half a day.

    *sighs*

    Maybe I read too fast?

  14. I bet somebody has already written this story.

    Oh, wait, it’s not Friday, is it?

  15. *splorfle* I thought Jo went for the opposite end of the age spectrum! *eyes Gary meaningfully* >:)

  17. Naw we just need to find a way to get the brainwaves of certain authors to operate several computers at once so than can compose ten to fifteen books a year.

  20. HP has all sorts of funky time magic, right? (Plus, I didn’t say anything about good fic…)

  27. Cate, Bujold, Elrod, Freer, Hoyt, L Resnick, Frost aka Radford, Thurman…..

  28. If you’re surprised by this …. well one of us isn’t paying sufficient attention.

    :: two years ::

    :: weep ::

  29. Hey, given a choice between DH, with it’s draggy center, and Urban Shaman, with its quick wit and fantastic spirituality — guess which one I’d choose? :)

    Of course, I read Shaman years ago, so I finished DH in just under 9 hours…. but you get the point :)

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