The paperback version of A Shadow in Summer is on the shelves! (And in a great huge pile on my table, for that matter.) If any of y’all were waiting until it only cost eight bucks, the hour is now arrived. Tell your friends, tell your neighbors. Mention it politely to you enemies.

(Actually, seriously, if y’all would do me the favor of mentioning on your blogs that the book’s out, it’d help a lot. Hell, send me email at StreetTeam@danielabraham.com that you did the thing, and I’ll give you a short story or an excerpt from the next books. I won’t even check if it’s true. [grin])

So my family has ganged up to give me a great big lovely present: August.

For the next five weeks, my folks and my wife have engineered child care for the Darling Child that I might have between 5 and 6 hours a day, six days a week, to get some writing and editing done. I’m hoping that I can use the time to:

1) finish and polish the last book in the Long Price series,

2) write a couple of the short stories I’ve promised to do, and

3) [redacted — wasn’t supposed to talk about the project at all.  Who knew?]

But first, August.

(Also, I’d like to welcome any of y’all reading the blog courtesy of the RSS feed through Amazon. Stop on by at http://www.danielabraham.com/ for other stuff like the Ask the Author page, news, free stuff online. You know, stuff like that.)

If y’all are in Albuquerque on September 8th, around 1pm, stop by the Barnes & Noble at Coronado Mall. I’ll bring the chocolate.

Hey, groupmind:

Anyone have a good translation filter from Wordstar for DOS to something . . . eh, more modern? I’ve tried the HABit converter with less than stellar results. I’m working on Word 2002 on an XP box.

[EDIT: We have an answer.]

Tim Pratt had an interesting post on the openings of his various novels. It had the feel of an incipient meme, so I thought I’d take a look myself.

My first two trunk novels aren’t anyplace I can easily put hands on them, written as they were before the age of the word processor. (Yes, manual typewriter, both.)

So instead, I have a contemporary supernatural novel titled Unreal City that I sold to Meisha Merlin back when they existed and bought back before they went belly up:

There was a light snow falling in Whiteoak the night Moss Kittridge shot herself. It started around seven; the cold afternoon winds died down, and little white motes like ashes dusted the winter-dead trees. By seven, it was sticking to the roads a little. Looking out her bedroom window, she could see grey slush forming in the gutters, close enough to liquid for tires to fling aside and solid enough not to flow back. It would be ice by morning. Not that she’d be there to see it

.

Then the first of the Long Price books, A Shadow in Summer:

Otah took the blow on the ear, the flesh opening under his teacher’s rod. Tahi-kvo pulled the thin lacquered wood through the air with a fluttering sound like bird wings. Otah’s discipline held. He did not shift or cry out. Tears welled in his eyes, but his hands remained in a pose of greeting.

The second one, A Betrayal in Winter:

“There’s a problem at the mines,” his wife said. “One of your treadmill pumps.”
Biitrah Machi, the eldest son of the Khai Machi and a man of forty-five summers groaned and opened his eyes. The sun, new-risen, set the paper-thin stone of the bedchamber windows glowing. Hiami sat beside him.

The third, An Autumn War:

Three men came out of the desert. Twenty had gone in.

And the fourth, The Price of Spring:

Eiah Machi, physician and daughter of the Emperor, pressed her fingers gently on the woman’s belly. The swollen flesh was tight, veins marbling the skin blue within brown. The woman appeared for all the world to be in the seventh month of a pregnancy. She was not.

And finally, Hunter’s Run, the collaboration I wrote with George and Gardner:

Ramon Espejo awoke floating in a sea of darkness. For a moment, he was relaxed and mindless, drifting peacefully, and then his identity returned to him lazily, like an unwanted afterthought.

Of them all, I think I like Unreal City and An Autumn War best as stand-alone fragments. As important as the hooks are, though, I suspect I’d learn more by looking at the last lines. That, however, would be a deeply spoiler-rich environment. So maybe I’ll do that part on my own.

The copy edited manuscript for Hunter’s Run — the novel that grew out of Shadow Twin — arrived on my doorstep this morning.  This will be about the three millionth time I’ve looked over this story, and only a couple more to go after this.

One interesting difference is that it’s the first time I’ve had the copy edits done in Word’s “Track Changes” function.  It’s a little early for me to be certain, but I think so far I like it.  It’s going to be much easier to tell what the copy editor meant now that I don’t have to interpret handwriting (it’s been an issue before).

Part of the oddness of this particular project is that the UK and US editions aren’t running perfectly in harness.  I can already see arguments that the US copy editor thinks were important enough to change that the UK folks didn’t think worth mentioning.  I suppose it’s normal enough to have the same book by the same author (or in this case authors) with a bunch of minor textual differences.  A Shadow in Summer is about to come out in paperback in the spiffy new fewer typos format.

Still, I have this little OCD moment where I want  everything to be exactly the same except the quote marks and the covers…

Ooh! My very first legitimate Ask The Author post.

One of my favorite punk economists on the  attention economy:

Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab

My first teacher in this biz was Fred Saberhagen. Back when I was in high school he was part of a mentorship program that let kids with ambitions to be something or other actually see what it looked like in practice. I wanted to be a writer. I got to work with Fred.

I went up to his house every Saturday. I’d drop off what I’d written, and he’d tell me what was wrong with it. That sounds harsh. He was encouraging, he was tough, he wanted me to make it. My first book came out last year, dedicated to him. My kid sat on his lap.

Fred Saberhagen died after a long illness on the 29th of June, 2007. I’m told his family will announce a date for a memorial service later in the year. In lieu of flowers, donations should be made to Doctors Without Borders, Catholic Relief, SFWA Emergency Medical Fund, or John 23rd Catholic Church in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Thanks, Fred. Good work. We’ll miss you.