Chris Wooding

Gosh, I have been a bit quiet on this site, haven’t I? I see you guys have been chatting amongst yourselves, good, good. Well, you’ll be pleased to know that I’ve been working in the meantime. Am about six chapters from the end of Mammoth Tome of Destiny #1, which I’ve been working on since, um, May 2015. It’s coming in at about 300,000 words (same size as A Game Of Thrones, more or less). Once I’m done with it I’ll have to do edit it but should hopefully be done by end of Feb, just in time for my 40th birthday. Release date is shifting around a bit at the moment, but hopefully it’ll be out towards the end of this year: will let you know when it’s nailed down. I do have a title (finally) but everything is under wraps for now at the request of the publisher, so you’ll just have to wait and see!

I have also signed up with Scholastic for a new series of books for children, titled Jack From Earth, which will be released in the UK and US. Initially it’s for two books with more possibly to follow. These will be much shorter and aimed at 8-12 year olds: the same kind of audience as Broken Sky and Malice. They will be tongue-in-cheek science fiction, kind of a Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy meets Star Wars sort of thing. More details on them later when I get round to starting on them: for the next couple of months I will be pounding the Mammoth Tome to get it finished. Epic fantasy is epic. I need a holiday.

Back to it. I’ll tell you when I’m done!

Twitter: @_ChrisWooding_

So I am! Nine Worlds convention, London, 12-14th August! Behold my schedule. Ignore the panel on Sunday which has strangely been included but which I’m not on. It’s probably not too late to buy tickets! Hurrah!

In other news, am 200K words into my new book, probably another 100K to go. It’s big! Epic fantasy is epic, it turns out. Will let you know when I have a title and when I can reveal more. Current release date is probably end of next year, but nothing fixed yet.

I should put this on the front page one day, but if you want up to date news (such as it is) it’s best to follow me on Twitter @_ChrisWooding_ (note the crafty underscores). And if you want all the secret news I’m not supposed to talk about then find me at the con and buy me a drink.

Eastercon time again! So I will be here on Friday & Saturday 25th-26th of March. Sadly I was a bit late in registering so you won’t see my mug on any panels this year but you’ll probably see it in the bar so come and say hi if you’re around!

Progress report: 9 months, 125k-ish words, and I am just about halfway on my new book. Epic fantasy is epic. Who knew?

Still no title, probably won’t be one till I’m done. Still no details for you, as I want it to be a surprise. Current forecast looks like late 2017 pub date but it might slip. Long wait, but given its length, look on it as getting two books at once. Certainly feels like writing two books back to back…

I will be doing an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session on Reddit Fantasy on Tues 8th. I’ll be popping in and out all day (UK time) to answer questions, so if there’s anything you have a burning desire to know or say, bring it on!

GollanczFest 2015 tomorrow! Yay! So in the meantime I’ve been slaving on my WiP. That’s Work in Progress for those who don’t deal in acronyms. I live in London, we’re too busy to use complete words here in the big city – or the BC, AWLTS (as we like to say). I’m just making stuff up now.

So, news is I am 73,000 words in – almost exactly the length of Velocity – and I’m probably only a quarter way through. Two fifths at most. This is gonna be a big book. And it’s the first of a planned three. Obviously my last epic fantasy wasn’t epic enough.

Seriously though, I’m having a great time writing it. Can’t believe I’ve been doing this professionally for like twenty years and I’ve never actually attempted a quote-unquote ‘Western’ (i.e. vaguely European-feeling) fantasy. Broken Sky was all anime-style and had the conceit that everyone had a superpower. The Braided Path was also much more influenced by Japanese and Chinese culture. I grew up on books like Shannara, Dragonlance and obviously Lord of the Rings and while this book, I stress, is not really much like any of them, it at least comes from the same region. Writing an epic fantasy in the traditional mould is like coming home.

Except obviously it won’t actually be traditional. You know me by now, right?

This! This! I will be here!

I’m happily tapping away through über secret fantasy novel, having a lot of fun with it. Think it’s gonna be a long ‘un, though: already looking like it’ll end up bigger than any of the Ketty Jay books! But it’s epic fantasy, right? Whatchagonnado?

I’m hoping to get a proper update done on the site soon, add Velocity to the books and maybe remove some redundant parts like the Press section (which hasn’t been updated since the King James Bible first came out) and the Forum which is sadly deader than Pluto’s hopes of becoming a planet again.

Next year I shall also be attending Eastercon in Manchester and Nine Worlds in London, as by that time I ought to be able to tell y’all something of what I’m working on.

See you on the 17th!

I know, right? But here it is, and here’s the skinny.

First up, I’M ON TWITTER. You thought it’d never happen, but it did. Befollow me on @_ChrisWooding_ where you can hear splurts of random communications involving whatever I just tripped over that morning. It’s better than waiting for my tri-yearly posts up on here.

In other news, I am embroiled in a deeply secret project about which I can say a few words only. It is a novel. It is a fantasy novel. It is a fantasy novel that actually resembles a fantasy novel instead of being about, like, some weird skewed kind of pseudo-scipunk-bizarro world that just gets put in the fantasy category because nobody knows what the hell else to do with it. When there’s something to officially announce, there’ll be one of those official announcement things, but it won’t be for a while yet. In the meantime, content yourself that I am writing, have been for a while actually, and that there are more books on the way. And I’m very very excited about getting back to scribbling again.

A story of reckless ambition, unshakable friendship and the perils of fame, set in a broken future…

Cassica and Shiara have grown up in an outback settlement far from anywhere. Life’s hard where they live, but these two girls have a dream. Cassica is a talented driver; Shiara her engineer and navigator. Between them they’ve cobbled together a racer. Their mission: to win the Widowmaker, a three-day rally through the most dangerous terrain in the world. Pursuing them will be the Wreckers, a colourful bunch of psychopaths driving monstrous armoured vehicles, hell-bent on destroying any racers they catch. The winners become legends, rich and famous beyond their wildest dreams. The losers don’t survive…

2nd July in the UK, people! Order it here. Or here if you’re buying from overseas.

Also, also! The Gollancz Festival is back! Now in two cities, Manchester on 16th Oct and London on the 17th. After the big bowl of awesomeness that happened last time, I’m looking forward to it! I’ll definitely be at the London one and possibly the one in Manchester too. Will keep you all updated.

To tide you over till next time, here’s a bunch of goats singing the Game of Thrones theme tune!

… not that you’d know it from the amount of updates on this site! But hey, now I’m here, I have a whole bunch of nothing to tell you anyway! Yay!

When I was a kid, I used to just bang down the first good idea I had, write a book of it, sling it out into the cosmos and move directly on to the next good idea in sequence. These days I’m rather more like a particularly dozy-looking cow chewing a cud in a field in Sussex, gazing placidly at nothing for days, sometimes weeks on end, until I’ve rolled dozens of these good ideas around in my head and tossed out all but one. Then I develop that for a bit, see if it goes anywhere, and if it doesn’t: back to the cud.

Thing is (he said, mixing his metaphors like a $0.79 self-published Amazon fantasy special) you can be the best chef in the world, but once you’ve picked your ingredients, that’s that. Can’t make a lasagna out of chocolate frosting and cake mix. So these days I’m veeeeeery careful about picking my ingredients. Am pulling together ideas for something new and vaguely book-shaped. Between that and a load of screen things I’ve been doing, I’m busy as ever: but as usual, I’ll tell you when anything concrete appears, and not before.

We’re closing in on a cover and a blurb for VELOCITY, will show you when there’s something to show you. But it’ll be out in July (I believe… definitely some month this year with a J in it!). And so I return to my cloak and dagger world of secrets and half-truths, to emerge again when I actually have something of interest to share…

La la la, done and delivered and getting edited now, so all in time for a mid-2015 release (in the UK) which is all still on as far as I know! Blurb and more details to follow nearer the time, there’s no point getting you all excited six months early…

To tide you over, here’s a lovely Pinterest board of the Ketty Jay characters and aircraft, and an amazing concept art piece depicting Retribution Falls. One day I’ll have my own calendar! One day!

I’m pretty busy writing screen stuff these days, but what’s next book-wise, I really don’t know. I’ve finished up everything I’m contracted for, so I’m going to hibernate and ruminate for a while and have a think about what kind of story I want to do next and what I want to commit the next few years of my life to. Will let you know when I do!