For those curious to know, I just finished the first draft of book 2, Blood of the Green Children.  It’s currently a little bit longer than the first draft of A God for Thieves was.

Happy Valentines Day.

This is sort of a good housekeeping, full disclosure kind of thing to start off with.  If a link on this page is going to Amazon or Smashwords, it is probably an affiliate link, which basically means that if you end up buying something Amazon or whoever will give me a small cut for having sent you their way.  It doesn’t increase your price or anything, it’s just a small part of how I try to support my family as a writer.

And on to something that people will actually like, let’s talk about DRM on my books.

A God for Thieves does not have DRM on it.  That way you can put it on your phone, tablet, or whatever and read it at your leisure.  I chose to go DRM-free on the basis that if my books were in dead tree format, nothing would really stop you from enjoying that book as you saw fit, or even reselling it to a used book store.  Heck, I buy most of my books used, so it would be fairly hypocritical of me to apply a different standard to my own work.

That being said, if someone seeds my book onto a file-sharing service and thousands of people start downloading it for free, I’m going to be pretty bummed out.  Like I said, I am trying to support my family here.

It’s true!  A God for Thieves is finally finished and out there in the wild.  It is currently available through Amazon and Smashwords.  More formats are coming soon, but if you’ve got an app/reader of choice, let me know and we’ll work on getting it there.

It’s been a long process but now it’s free to roam the internet.  I’m very excited for people to be reading it.

If you want to help me, the best thing you can do is read the book and leave an honest review on your retailer of choice.  That will help drive more eyeballs to it.

Thank you so much.

This may become a regular-ish feature on my site, but here are three pieces of media that I am currently a little obsessed with:

1. The Mountain Goats – We Shall All Be Healed

When the little stereo in the kitchen isn’t tuned to NPR, it’s playing We Shall All Be Healed on repeat.  It’s a perfect album for singing along to while I’m cooking dinner or doing dishes.  I’m digging lyrics like “the ghosts that haunt your building have been learning how to breath”, but the maudlin subject matter is lightened by energetic beats.  I can’t get enough of it.

2. The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl

There is no reason why a book based on one of Marvel’s most ridiculous characters should be as good as this, but it is.  Ryan North delivers consistently hilarious writing and Erica Henderson’s art is vibrant, full of those wonderful facial expressions that really only work in a more cartoony style.  Read it.

3. Discworld

I first tried reading these in high school and only ever finished The Color of Magic.  I clearly wasn’t ready for them then, but I am now.  Terry Pratchett built an awesome world full of enjoyable characters, but the ones I really look forward to are the City Watch books.  I’m always eager to start another case with Vimes, Carrot, Angua, Cheery, Nobbs, Detritus, Dorfl, Reg… okay, I’m not going to list them all.

I read yesterday that Richard K Morgan’s excellent novel, Altered Carbon, is being adapted into a series for Netflix.  This makes me very happy.

Altered Carbon is one of my favorite books.  Oddly enough, it was not another urban or contemporary fantasy novel that really inspired me to sit down and write A God for Thieves, it was Altered Carbon.  I’d like to think there’s a little bit of that neo-noir/cyberpunk aesthetic in my work, even if it’s only a tiny little bit of shared genes, like a how a dachshund proudly considers itself kin to a timber wolf.

I remember reading a while back that the movie rights for Altered Carbon had already been optioned, and though it excited me, I was concerned about how you would make it work at feature length.  Partly I wondered about casting.  If they wanted to do a sequel, how would they deal with the complete change of cast inherent in the whole body-swapping aspect of the Altered Carbon universe?  But I think a limited series is a much better fit for it.  Shows like True Detective have paved the way for a more anthology style program where a complete change in cast between seasons wouldn’t be as jarring.  That way they could move on to Broken Angels for season two with no worries.  (confidential to the producers of Altered Carbon: don’t chicken out.  Let the main character suddenly be black in the second season.  It’ll be fine.)

Of course, this is assuming they’re going to stretch the book to cover the full season, and not try to turn it into a procedural or something silly like that.  That would be a mistake.

Elisabeth and I were talking about it yesterday, and she was saying how she was never happy with novels being turned into movies, because they always had to cut so much out.  Novellas and short stories are easier to adapt without losing much.  A full series can also be awkward for a book, with the content being spread too thin.  But a limited series seems about like the perfect fit to me.

Anyway, I’m really looking forward to seeing Takeshi Kovacs on my TV.