Chris Wooding

I’m sure you already have chalked into your calendars that Silver is coming out in May, right? Well to coincide with that, Scholastic are reissuing three of my old favourites with new covers and, I understand, also in ebook (Silver will be ebooked as well). Here are the new covers for you to pore over.

Meanwhile, am on Chapter 28 of about 43 of The Ace Of Skulls. Spent days plotting out a mammoth action sequence which I’m just about ready to start writing. You did know that all them great big action sequences were a delicately balanced sculpture of interweaving narratives and character beats rather than just a load of people shooting at each other, didn’t you? Good, just checking.

Slow news year. Seriously, unless something unexpected happens there will be literally nothing to report till the New Year; I’ll just be tapping away at The Ace Of Skulls. I should probably start filling this blog up with fluff about my personal opinions of people who play their headphones too loud on the Tube, or a lengthy blow-by-blow of my exploits on Football Manager 2013 when that comes out. Actually, no.

So here’s where I am: have hit the halfway point of The Ace Of Skulls. After a bit of a sticky patch it’s all going swell, and I’m over the hump and onto the downward slope towards the very end of the Ketty Jay series oh my god!!! Meanwhile I’ve been editing those old Broken Sky files but I have seriously, like seriously underestimated the amount of time it’s going to take to get them shipshape. This is gonna be a big job. I’m not even through the first one yet. Beginning to wish I hadn’t started it and just put them out as they were…

All forms of film news: nothing to report.

In the immortal words of House Stark: Autumn is boring.

Wow, it’s been a while, huh? Sorry about that. A veritable Sahara of news since May, really. But now I have something to announce, so gather close, you lot!

First order of business is The Ace Of Skulls. I’m a quarter way through and it’s all going very nicely, thank you. However, I think it’s probably now time to let you know that this will be the last of the Tales Of The Ketty Jay. No, put down your knives/poison canisters/thermite detonators, this is for your own good, you know! I always intended that the KJ series was going to be a series of standalones with an overarching story that I could draw to a close in one book. In the planning of this book I came to realise that I’ve just about reached the limit in that sense. There’s already so much stuff to tie up after three books. Either this series was going to metamorphosise into a much more sprawling tale, and risk rambling off into infinity, or I could close it down while I still have it under control and while I can still deliver a book with the necessary pace and verve to keep all you hungry KJ fans happy right till the final page. So I plumped for the latter. I’d rather leave you with four good books than three good, three medium and one that leaves you with a nasty taste in your mouth like you just chewed on a piece of rancid biltong. At least this way you’ll get a proper ending and you won’t go all Mass Effect 3 on my ass (incidentally, the ending to that series was fine, don’t know what all the fuss was about…)

Secondly, some crazy exciting weird news. Broken Sky is coming to ebook! And I’m doing it myself! Eep.

So here’s the story. Scholastic didn’t want to republish Broken Sky so they weren’t willing to put it out in ebook form, and therefore the rights for the books came back to me. However, Broken Sky was written so long ago that I didn’t even have Word at the time and I lost all the original files. Scholastic rather kindly provided me the pdfs of the books to work off, and I converted them to ebook formats and then started going through them to sort out the inevitable formatting errors that arose.

However…

Well, I’d gone about half a paragraph before I was like ‘Ooh, that’s not a very clever sentence. Would make more sense if I just changed it around a bit. There.’ And then three lines on I was like ‘Wait a minute, I just used that word. Better change it.’ And then a bit further and I was like ‘Man, this bit doesn’t even make sense’ and… well, you see what’s happened. Thirteen years on, I like to think I’m a bit of a better writer than I was back then, and I just couldn’t resist the urge to start editing them. And like Ripley with Newt, now I’ve made a clean spot, I have to do the rest.

Now don’t worry, I’m not going all George Lucas on ’em. The story, characters, all of that are just where you left ’em. All I’m doing is tidying up the grammar, making sentences clearer, getting rid of repetition and redundant parts, all that boring stuff. It is taking me ages, but I think it’s worth it, as I still have a warm glowy place in my heart for Broken Sky. Think of this as Broken Sky Remastered rather than a director’s cut.

Anyway, I am now entering the strange world of self-publishing, where few published authors have bothered  dared to tread. I’m still a bit hazy as to what I’ll do with it once I’ve finished polishing it up, and it is gonna take a good while to go through all the books since I’m busy working on The Ace Of Skulls, but eventually I plan to release them in Kindle format and ePub for all other e-readers. Really, my primary concern is that I don’t want these books to go out of print. Because they’re ace. And that’s final 😛

Watch this space, as ever…

Just a quickie to let anyone who has SOMEHOW MANAGED TO RESTRAIN THEMSELVES from buying The Iron Jackal yet, it’s now out in mass market paperback in the UK, and therefore cheaper. You can get it for just under a fiver in the UK and £4.99 on Kindle (which I assume is a price drop from the trade paperback Kindle edition to fall in line with the MMP). Epub editions are also at £4.99.

US readers, still no news from Spectra on whether it’s coming out on your shores yet (I understand they’re waiting for an outline for Book 4, which I just delivered to my editor like 10 minutes ago). So you can get it for the fractionally more expensive price of £6 (or the equivalent in dollars) at Book Depository. However, since that includes free international shipping it probably actually works out cheaper, or something.

Having spent an eternity plotting out The Ace Of Skulls (Tales of the Ketty Jay 4) to achieve the infinitely complex tesseract of plot, character, drama and good old machine-gunning-people-in-the-face that my hungry readers demand, I’m about ready to get going on it at last.  Although first I have to edit Silver. Anyway, it’s all on schedule and well in hand. I’m planning to deliver by the end of the year, with tentative pub date Sept/Oct 2013, though possibly earlier if the schedule allows.

It’s Eastercon again! This time in London. Residents of Hatton Cross are already barring their doors and sealing up the windows with the blood of a recently baptised goat.

Since it’s in the city where I live there’s really no excuse for me not to turn up and blaze a flaming swathe through the bar area. I shall be attending on the Friday and Saturday, and possibly crawling in on Sunday morning so all can behold my ruined and broken remains, that I may serve as a warning to others. In between I’ll be sitting on a couple of panels, one about constructing and using magic/technological systems in stories and another about worldbuilding, cos I can rattle on about that stuff for ages. Both are on Saturday at the moment, though it’s possible things will be shifted around a bit before the event.

This year George R R Martin is among the guests of honour, so it should be a good ‘un.

See you there!

Darian Frey’s Suvudu Cage Match is up! Follow the link to read how I think the fight would go, and then vote for Frey. Then pass it around and get your friends to do the same. Let’s get him into the next round so I, er, have to think of some way he can beat the crap out of an even MORE impossible opponent from a book I haven’t read 😉

Vote vote vote!!!

Woohoo! Silver has been delivered to my editor, on deadline day, no less.Usually I’m very good with delivering ahead of deadline but various other projects meant this one went right down to the wire. It occurs to me that had there not been an extra day in February this year, it would have been late. What are the chances? Gotta be, like, one in four, easily!

Delivery of a book is the closest it gets to feeling like it’s finished, because I know it’ll be off my plate for at least a month before anyone comes back to tell me how terrible it is. And there’s something final in the act of hitting SEND and flinging it away across the webosphere, letting other people see it for the first time. Later I’ll start to fret about whether they think it’s actually any good or not or if I’ll have a bucketload more work to do on it, but for now, I’m demob happy and off to rampage through the capital.

What’s that? Rock out again, you say? If you insist. This one’s a bit sweary though, don’t listen if you’re tender 😉

Aaaaaaaaand the rough draft of Silver is in the bag.

Veterans of my blog will know that this is not the end, far from it. A read-over and edit is needed before it even goes to my editor, who will edit it some more, and we’ll go back and forth for a bit before it’s all in shape. But even knowing that, there’s something so very very awesome about typing those final words, slumping back in your seat and exhaling a long, long gasp of relief. Hell yeah.

Party time!

So for those who didn’t know already, the folks at Suvudu.com do a contest every year in which characters from SF and Fantasy series battle it out for survival, and they win according to who gets the most fan votes. And this year Darian Frey is in the mix! I fully expect him to get creamed at some point but until then I’ll be doing my damnedest to make sure he doesn’t. Which basically means I’ll be bugging you to vote, and to get you brother and dad and dog to vote too, and to start, like, this whole campaign in your school or office to get everyone nearby to vote. Who knows, maybe you’ll meet the girl/boy/ox of your dreams while doing it? Karma, that’s what that is. Anyway, watch this space. Or this one.

For those of you who like drawing stuff, Suvudu are running a fan art competition this year. Anyone fancy drawing Frey? You know you want to…

Cover reveal! Cover reveal!

Follow this link to the Gollancz blog where you’ll get a look at the new edition YA Ketty Jay books. My publishers decided that a slightly younger audience would also benefit from a dose of swashin’ and bucklin’ and some light air piracy. Why let adults have all the fun?

Now panic not, everybody. The old covers (the “adult editions”) are still on sale, and the 4th KJ book will follow a similar cover format to the originals. This is just Gollancz’s way of allowing me to reach my evil tentacles into other parts of the bookstore. You may be surprised to learn that there’s plenty of kids out there who’ve read my YA stuff but never made the trek to the SF/Fantasy section of the bookstore to pick up the other stuff. Try and avoid me now, suckers!

These books are uncut and exactly the same as the adult books on the inside. If you haven’t checked it out yourself yet, you can read the Logbook Of The Ketty Jay for a taster. This is an informal prequel to the events of Retribution Falls. Very, very mild spoilers (since it talks about things you don’t find out immediately in the book), and some mild bad language.