Whew.

Don’t worry, I took a break of a few hours between finishing Codex and gearing up on the next project. A few short, horrible hours. I’ve dropped hints about the new novel in interviews and drunken tweets, but I’m happy to announce not only the subject matter but also the posting schedule.

The novel concerns the waning Belle Époque and the thunderous clash of World War I, back in those heady days at the dawn of the Atomic Age.

Did I mention that the novel is alternate history?

But, by god, there’s a lot of regular history to be read first so that my history is alternate and not just garbage. I’ve spent several years researching the era, and I’m continuing to scour the historical record for the rest of this year while I finish the outline. What does that mean for you, dear reader?

First, that you can expect the beginning of the new novel on a Monday in January. That feels like a long way off, but it’ll come sooner than I think.

Second, the chapters will come less regularly than Codex, on a monthly schedule, but what they lack in frequency they’ll make up for in girth.

Third, the publishing schedule of the Guide to Moral Living in Examples remains unchanged: piping hot updates will still scald your brain on Wednesdays and Fridays.

Of course you do, you’re reading this. And as we all know, fans of mine are suave, sophisticated party animals. You have tons of friends. Anytime you want you can go stomp in military boots at a warehouse, or scrape caviar across toast at a swanky penthouse. You can even Get the Led out in somebody’s basement while you sit under halos of pot smoke illuminated by blacklight.

The world is your army ration, oyster or Dorito, respectively.

So why haven’t you come to the party that my publisher’s throwing over at 1889.ca? They’re giving away a truly heart-breaking amount of prizes. If you so much as enter the giveaway, they will have to forfeit their own expensive penthouses and luxury yachts to fulfill their promises. From riches to rags they will fall, bleeding wealth all the way, until they’re rattling around in a thrice-used appliance box, sold to them by the previous tenants as “a great little fixer-upper.”

What can I say? Kindles are expensive. But not as expensive as producing the trailer for Bears, Recycling and Confusing Time Paradoxes. That’s right, we have produced a trailer for the book, and it (and details of the giveaway) is available here: Party Like It’s 1889!

That would, however, make a badass set of samples. Thud thud slap woosh. Sounds from the wharf.

Now that I have a book with pages to turn, I feel that I should extend that page-turning metaphor to introduce the new site design! The columns are larger and less space-efficient than ever before, and I’ve created a proper homepage instead of the digital equivalent of me writing my name and phone number on your palm in ballpoint. I struggled with widening the columns because it makes the site more difficult to read on mobile devices, but I think I managed to strike a happy balance. Please do let me know if you encounter any crap with the layout on iThingies, small screens or crystal orbs.

Now I’m off to nurse my hangover.

That line, and thousands of its friends, were cut from Codex Nekromantia for good reasons, but the sentiment has always stuck with me, and the thought has been necessary on the long process of making very thorough mistakes on the novel. And now, in the month of October, when I swore that I’d always release it, I’m releasing it.

Mondays will no longer be Moral, at least for the run of the book. I’ll instead be updating A Path Fantastic with sections of the novel.

Starting right now. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it!

So it begins.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/10/stephen-king-kindle-ur

I don’t want to bother with the phrase “ebook” – I was reasonably sure that marketers playing fast and loose with the “e” prefix had died long ago and marketing, as a profession, had moved down the vowel ladder to “i” (the precursor to both vowels being, of course, the indefinite article “a.”  Buy futures in “o” prefixes now because it’s going to be big!).  Is an ebook a novel?  When does “book” need an extra vowel?  Where is the line between medium and message?  “Songs” are called “songs” even on the e-internet.

Although, overall, it is rare for a person to use the term “novel.”  Outside of literary circles, an everyday person usually only uses the word “novel” while attending a party, their glass of spirits rapidly warming in their hands as they keep their ears open for a place to inject a pithy comment about the terribly literate NOVEL that is sitting, ignored but not forgotten, on their bedside table.  Novel and book are interchangeable to them.  But ask the other poor party-goers who find themselves on a forced march towards the land of intellectual braggadocio whether or not it’s a novel or a book that they’re being told about.  They’ll reply, It’s Just A Sodding Book – the sort of thing that you might toss into a bag for a plane ride or skim on the toilet instead of fuming at your choice of restaurant the night before.

Novels (and novellas, and stories) are nothing but abstract ideas and words.  Their medium gives them shape.  And thus ebooks take an ephemeral shape.

Books, though, are physical, tough things.  They’re sometimes sturdier than the ideas that produced them.  They’re small bricks of paper that have been used since their invention to prop things up.  Don’t tell me that a scrap of illuminated manuscript, discarded from official inclusion for an unfortunate, lewd misspelling was never folded up and slid under the leg of a monk’s chair.  Gutenberg himself* kept a brisk side business of selling people “magick shimmies” that were “divine fyxes for househoulde wobbles” made from cast-off proofs (note how we’ve shifted from the -e suffix to the e- prefix?).  I wager that a Kindle owner wouldn’t allow me to prop up a failing table with their widget.

Also, protip: don’t touch anyone else’s Kindle.  You know where it’s been, and that’s even before there’s any e-erotic fiction released for it.  Let alone when the DRM gets opened up and you can enjoy your porn in glorious, 16-shade grayscale.

None of this is to discount novels released as ebooks or as HTML formatted documents or audiobooks.  I’ve stories online, and plan to continue releasing them that way.  But to imagine that a device which costs over three hundred dollars will replace the book, able to be read as well as used as a magick shimmie, is foolish.

Stay tuned for an announcement concerning my upcoming obook! (I told you that you should’ve bought futures!)

*I’m a goddamned liar to whom you ought not listen.