Progress Report

I’ve noticed that readers can sometimes get a little … irritated … when authors don’t keep them informed as to what’s going on, particularly with regard to publication dates etc. So in the interests of full transparency, I thought I’d begin the year with a little progress report:

The Blade Itself is coming out in France with J’ailu in February in hardcover under the title “L’eloquence de l’epee” (The Eloquence of the Blade). That’ll be the third foreign language edition to appear (as well as Spanish and German). Looks like Russian and Dutch will be out at some point later on this year as well. Czech, Polish, and Finnish rights have been sold but I’ve no news on when those editions might be published. You’ll know when I know…

Before They are Hanged will be out in UK Mass Market Paperback in February, then in Trade Paperback with Pyr across the US in March.

Last Argument of Kings will be out in UK Hardback and Trade Paperback on March 20th, then hopefully in the US a brief few months later (maybe September). And my trilogy will stand complete before the world! Woooooooh!

Best Served Cold. Hmmmm. I’ve done the first draft of two and a half parts out of seven, and the rest is basically planned out to a point which I’m mostly happy with. So around 70,000 words, somewhat over a third of the way through. Trying a slightly different approach of forging ahead then revising large blocks, rather than constantly reading over and tweaking as I go. It should prove more efficient, but is tough on the confidence since the product day-to-day is lower quality. Still, slightly behind my ideal schedule to make the delivery date of mid-May ’08. A variety of factors are responsible – one year old kicking me in the face all night, heavier than anticipated workload of the day job, an increase in interviews and distractions and other little bits of writing as more books get out there in more countries.

Chiefly, though, it’s just the difficulty of writing new characters more or less from scratch. I’m finding they take a while to mature and settle in the mind. A couple of them have worked well from the off, but others, particularly the central character, are proving more elusive. With The First Law a lot of the ideas had been hanging around in my mind for years, and I spent two or three years writing The Blade Itself and another six months or so editing, so there was plenty of time with no pressure of deadlines for the characters to take concrete shape to the point where writing them was, well, not effortless, but certainly instinctive. Then Last Argument of Kings was particularly easy to write, since the characters and situations were all well established – I pretty much knew where I was going, the towers were built and it was just a question of knocking them down as effectively as possible. This is proving a lot more difficult.

Ironically, the positive responses that the other books are producing only make work on new material harder (not that I’d rather have bad reviews, oh no). The weight of expectation does begin to tell on one, especially given that the new work is something of a departure – hopefully keeping what’s good about the trilogy and delivering it in a more compact form, but with less of the familiar epic fantasy trappings. Will people like it less? Will they get all teary-eyed for the sunny valleys of long ago when I wrote stuff they liked? Will I pick up some new readers, but lose a load of old ones? Will it be too much of a departure for them, or not enough? Worse still, will I like it less?

It’s strange that, as a writer, you’re always at least one book ahead of your readers, so while people are still reading and discussing The Blade Itself for the first time in the US, I’m writing stuff that probably won’t even be published there for a couple of years (if it ever is, of course). “Yeah,” you think, “you liked that, but how about some appreciation for what I’m doing NOW?” Even your editor is unlikely to read things and have an opinion until you’re some way into them. In a way the approval for those old projects, that were completed so long ago that they almost feel like someone else’s work now, only tends to undermine confidence in the new one. In the words of the narrator from Conan the Barbarian (who has taught me some of my most important life lessons), “truly, success can test one’s metal as surely as the strongest adversary.”

So it’s been going slower than I’d hoped. But doesn’t everything always? And publication is set for April ’09, so there should still be ample time. Although it wouldn’t be ideal (since it would eat into development time for the next book), I think I could still deliver as late as August if I really had to and still comfortably hit the pub date. Which is just as well since I have a feeling this will need a good deal more editing than The First Law books did. Still, day job commitments should drop off half way through January and I hope that work rate will improve drastically at that point, and the whole thing will become way easier.

As for specifics of content, I’ll probably leave off talking about that until Last Argument of Kings has been out a while, as there are some characters in common, and I do hate spoilers. Let me only say this:

“A very dangerous woman is betrayed by her employer, her brother killed and she left maimed. So she sets out to seek vengeance on him and the six men who helped, and recruits a set of mismatched and untrustworthy allies – a master poisoner and his unlikely apprentice, a psychopathic convict obsessed with numbers, a Northman trying to escape a life of violence and failing (not who you’re thinking), a torturer (not who you’re thinking), and an over-the-hill mercenary who’d do anything for one last drink. Soon the most deadly killer in the world is dispatched to put an end to their schemes for good, while in the background, and then the foreground, a bitter war rages for control of Styria. The results, as one would expect, are fast and furious, occasionally humorous, always unpredictable, and very, very bloody.”

The bottom line, then? It’s going fine, and you’ll get it when it’s done. The same shit that all the other authors say, basically.

Not that anyone was asking…

Posted in news, process by Joe Abercrombie on January 5th, 2008.