Autumn Update
This has been a busy and often difficult late summer/fall, beginning with an unexpected death in the family that required considerable attention and travel at the height of the latest COVID surge and again during the aftermath of Hurricane Ida. I’m still dealing with paperwork, and will be for the foreseeable future, but at least I shouldn’t have to travel for that for a while. I hope.
On the positive side, I have sold another novel to Candlemark & Gleam. The working title is The Master of Samar, about the last survivor of a noble family who comes home to deal with his unwanted inheritance, a cursebreaker returning to the City of Curses. This was my pandemic novel, begun last December when nothing else was working, and unusually for me I ended up working out the plot as I wrote the first draft. I’m usually meticulous about plotting. I may not have a complete outline, but I have the main beats of the story lined up in my head, and I know the ending. (When I was working on Water Horse, I had the climax at Nen Elin firmly in mind from the beginning, and everything was aimed at that moment.) With Samar, I had the characters and the situation, but I was about a third into the story before I knew precisely what the ending would be. I think it’s worked, but I’m not sure that’s the way I’d choose to write more books.
As mentioned previously, Lethe Press is slowing down its publication schedule after 20 years, so Amy Griswold and I have decided to take back the two Mathey & Lynes novels, Death By Silver and A Death at the Dionysus Club. We’re hoping to sell them to another queer press, perhaps along with a third novel. Amy and I have also been working on a non-fantasy mystery set in Rome under the Borgia Pope Alexander VI, dealing with the (real) murder of Alexander’s son Juan, the Duke of Gandia. At the moment, I don’t know how the slowdown will affect the Points books, and I’m keeping an eye on the situation.
As things start to open up again, I’m hoping to get back to conventions. Not only have I missed seeing people, but conventions drive books sales in ways that nothing else does. More than that, they’re a piece of the “old normal” that I’d very much like to see return. Currently, I’m planning to attend Marscon in Williamsburg, VA, January 14-16 — assuming, of course, that there are no further surges. Here’s hoping I’ll see some of y’all at a con somewhere soon!
