This trilogy that began with something I dashed off on a laptop back in 1997 or 1998 is now, more or less, finished. Complete. Finito. I have some line editing and a couple of appendices still to write (“On the Islanders” and “On the Pharisees,” if you must know). But it’s a complete story.

Here are some of the things you can expect from Geosynchron, the concluding volume of the Jump 225 trilogy, when it hits the stores in late February-ish of 2010. (Pre-order it on Amazon here.) I’m going to try to keep this light on the spoilers, so don’t worry that I’ll ruin something crucial. But if you’d rather go into the book completely blind, then, you know, stop reading. Duh.

Some of what you’ll see in Geosynchron:

• Natch imprisoned in a windowless chamber where MultiReal is useless and “time has become unpredictable”
• A ruinous civil war between Len Borda and Magan Kai Lee, including some actual large-scale battle scenes
• A five-chapter-long climax involving a military strike, a MultiReal choice cycle battle, a covert mission, and (of course) creative advertising and marketing techniques
• Quell again giving a one-man exhibition in whoopassery (this time with a dartgun and his bare mitts)
• My homage to the Council of Elrond in The Lord of the Rings: an 18-person, 8,276-word Council of Magan Kai Lee
• A court battle between Jara’s fiefcorp and Margaret Surina’s unscrupulous cousins, Jayze and Suheil
• The introduction of several new characters, including:
  • Richard Taylor, Pharisee and member of the Faithful Order of the Children Unshackled
  • Josiah, son of Quell and novice representative in the Islander parliament
  • Bali Chandler and Triggendala, seasoned representatives in the Islander parliament
  • Plithy, a young punk caught in a Council orbital prison
  • Rodrigo and Molloy, a black code junkie and a black code dealer
  • Martika Korella, an attorney in Andra Pradesh
• Horvil imploring Jara to have sex with him in a Sigh environment called “Vat of Baked Beans”
• The truth behind the Autonomous Revolt that devastated humanity hundreds of years ago (hint: it involves blood sacrifice)
• The truth behind Quell’s thirty years in the compound at Andra Pradesh
• The truth behind the infoquakes that have been wreaking havoc since midway through book 1
• A political manifesto by Quell’s son Josiah, which explains the concept of Grand Reunification
• Events that happen and then unhappen, as well as events that take place in virtual time
• Chapters set in:
  • 49th Heaven, the orbital colony known for its licentiousness
  • Sao Paulo, home to the Patel Brothers
  • Manila, capital of the Free Republic of the Pacific Islands
  • Orbital Detention and Rehabilitation Facility, 12th Meridian, a Council prison
• An ending that’s — well, unique, being that it consists of six chapters that are 95% dialogue
• The climactic confrontation between Natch and Brone that you’ve all been waiting for
• The fate of the world being put to a vote by… the drudges?

A few interesting facts about Geosynchron:

• The current length of the book is 138,244 words; add in the as-yet-unfinished appendices, acknowledgments and afterwords, and the total will probably be around 145,000 words. Slightly shorter than MultiReal‘s 150,000 words, a bit longer than Infoquake‘s 122,000 words.
• The book is once again divided into six sections:
  1. The Prisoners
  2. A Game of Chess
  3. The Consultants
  4. Nohwan’s Crusade
  5. Tyrants and Revolutionaries
  6. The Guardian and the Keeper
• Geosynchron contains 42 chapters. The shortest chapter (Chapter 1) is 646 words long; the longest chapter (Chapter 30) is a whopping 8,276 words. (I am, however, considering splitting that chapter in two, even though the Douglas Adams fan in me recoils at the thought of adding a 43rd chapter.)
• The first sentence: “Margaret Surina is rejuvenated.”
• The book’s epigraph is a quote from John Steinbeck’s East of Eden: “Not every man is defeated. I can name you a dozen who were not, and those are the ones the world lives by.”

After reading all this, you might be asking the question, Is he really going to tie up all of those loose ends in one book? This isn’t one o’ them Robert Jordan-type situations, is it? And my answers to these questions are Yes, for the most part and No.

Geosynchron will end the Jump 225 trilogy. Meaning, the three primary stories I’m trying to tell with this trilogy will conclude at the end of this book. (For the record, those stories are: 1. Natch’s attempts to break free from his utter self-absorption, 2. Jara’s attempts to find value in herself, 3. A world trying to cope with out-of-control technological change.) Does that mean you’re going to see a nice, tidy conclusion where I summarize what every character does for the rest of their lives, Animal House style? Nope. If you’re looking for neat, foursquare endings to all of the plotlines in the trilogy, you’ll be disappointed.

I’m not going to preclude writing more in this universe at some date in the future. But at present, I’ve said all that I’ve got to say in this universe. There are other milieus and other genres that I’d like to take a stab at. There’s this YA fantasy series I’ve been itching to write since the late ’90s about an English boy who attends a school for wizards. I’m not too late, am I?

(Oh yeah, and hopefully this means I’ll have a little bit of time to blog again. Hopefully.)

1. Authors for whom writing comes easily and naturally
2. Authors for whom writing takes a tremendous amount of effort and concentration

Which flavor am I? Well, here’s a clue: it’s taken me about five minutes to get this far in this blog piece already. I’ve rewritten the first sentence three or four times, backspacing before I even got to the colon. In this paragraph alone, I started off with “which camp do I fall in” before realizing that the camping metaphor clashes with the “two varieties” metaphor in the first paragraph above. (And now, here I am, re-reading through the article again two days after I started because I didn’t have time to finish it earlier.)

I’m slow. I’m not going to say that I agonize over my words, because that implies a degree of discomfort and displeasure in the process. But I certainly concentrate intensely on my words. They don’t just come gushing out. (Just changed “flowing” to “gushing.”)

And so when I find myself falling into a prolonged silence on my blog like the current two-month silence, it’s hard to get going again.

It’s especially difficult (changed from “hard”) when what I really should be concentrating on is finishing up the first draft of Geosynchon, the third book in the Jump 225 trilogy. I don’t do this writing thing full-time, and it’s difficult to find the time to blog. It’s about to become all the more difficult because I’m about to become a first-time parent. I have no idea how I’m going to find the time to write when I’ve got two squealing (changed from “screaming”) babies, and a bunch of bills that are overdue because I’ve forgotten to pay them, and a burning desire to occasionally have a, you know, life.

So how do I continue blogging on a regular or semi-regular basis?

It doesn’t help that I don’t approach blogging the way most bloggers approach blogging. Unlike, say, a newspaper column, the whole point of publishing a blog is that it’s immediate and unfiltered. Here’s what I’m thinking today! Just saw Sarah Palin say something stupid on TV, boom, here’s my take on it! What did I think yesterday or last week or last month? Who cares? It’s all now, now, now!

I’ve always resisted the impulse to publish that kind of blog, just like I’ve always resisted the impulse to write those kinds of book. Not that there’s anything wrong with the stream-of-consciousness technique; it’s just not me. I don’t want people to know what I’m thinking on a minute-by-minute basis. I don’t want to showcase my snapshot reactions to the latest flap in the news. Why? Because my off-the-cuff (changed from “snapshot”) reactions are just like everyone else’s. They’re tinged by raw emotion. They’re based on incomplete information. They’re predictable. They can get me into trouble.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s the digested, reasoned, thought-through, considered response that matters. It’s the book that I’ve slaved over and over in draft after draft, carefully layering in plot and metaphor and theme like a pastry chef making phyllo dough. (Just stopped to look up “phyllo” on Wikipedia to make sure I wasn’t misremembering what phyllo is.)

I don’t resent the filter of editing, re-writing, re-thinking, and revising. I need that filter.

So if you’re planning on following my blog, you’re not going to get throwaways (with the exception of the occasional piece of self-promotion and/or book news) (just inserted that). You’re only going to get articles that have been well-thought-out and carefully crafted. You’re only going to get me writing about subjects I care about.

The downside of this approach is that if I don’t have the time or inclination to ponder upon any particular subject, I’m not going to publish anything. I’m not going to fall back on a summary of my day or an interesting song lyric I’ve heard on the radio. Again, perfectly valid methods of blogging. Just not my method.

Sometimes I’ll take too long to ponder over a particular topic (changed from “a particular subject”, changed from “something”), and my meanderings on that topic will become outdated before I’ve even clicked the “Publish” button. These blog articles get saved onto my hard drive where they gather digital dust, unread. Thus, you probably will never read the 752-word-and-counting blog piece I’ve been writing about “The Bizarro Election” featuring my insights on Sarah Palin — because by the time I’m finished with it, the poor woman will (deleted “hopefully”) be on her way back to Alaska where she’ll become a 2018 trivia question for Jeopardy contestants.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying:

1. No, I’m not dead;
2. No, I don’t even have the excuse of being a first-time parent yet;
3. Yes, I do intend to resume blogging on a regular basis; but
4. Yes, you’ll probably (just inserted “probably”) have to be patient.

If you’re interested in reading what I’ve got to say about stuff and you don’t want to be bothered to check back on my blog page to see if I’ve published anything new, I invite you to sign up to subscribe by email (bottom of left column), or use the site RSS feeds.

Thanks, y’all.

*

(Now that I’ve finished the article, I’ve got to go back and re-read to make sure I’ve made a coherent point. I’ve got to make sure the title I’ve given the piece accurately reflects what’s in it, because I’ve been known to meander off course into totally different subjects.)

(And finally, I feel obligated to go hunt around for some pictures — generally of the humorous or ironic variety — to make the article visually interesting. So here I go… Okay, the Rodin Thinker statue is an obvious one, and it’s already in the blog media library. And for the second I’ll use one of my favorite sketches of a dude scribbling at a desk while smoking a pipe. Artist unknown, or at least I’m too lazy to look it up. Just have to do some quick image manipulation so the images fit onto the page… there.)

(Now, the final step. Save the article, and preview it. Re-read for last-minute typos and harebrained sentences that I’m going to regret later. Do last-minute tightening of the language. Make sure the pictures don’t create any funky link breaks… Done.)

(Don’t forget to add meta information for the search engines and the archive pages.)

(And finally… is this whole meta thing of the parenthetical asides too cutesy and John Barthish? Should I delete all these parenthetical comments about process? Hmm. Maybe. But I’m the kind of writer who likes to live life on the edge.)

(Have all of these parenthetical comments made this blog piece too long? Do I need another picture to fill up the space? No. Dude, stop. Just click the fucking “Publish” button already.)

(Publish.)

I’ve now gone ahead and done the same thing for MultiReal. You can now read online the first drafts of MultiReal‘s chapter 1, along with footnotes and commentary about each draft. The big difference between the Infoquake drafts and the MultiReal drafts is this: for the latter book, there were thirty-five of them. Yes, thirty-five drafts of chapter 1. Told you I’m something of a perfectionist. (Keep in mind that most of these first drafts were simply rehashes of prior drafts, and most of them are incomplete.)

Instead of posting all thirty-five drafts up on my website, I’ve chosen to simply post the best or most representative samples of the eight different directions I tried. Along with the final published version, of course.

So among the abandoned concepts you can read about in these drafts are: Magan Kai Lee as ruthless martial arts expert (draft 1), a bureaucratic smackdown between rival governments about the weather (draft 17), Horvil fascinated by advertising (draft 18), and Henry Osterman trekking off to Harper’s Ferry to commit suicide (draft 29).

Quick excerpt from draft 29, my favorite abandoned version of chapter 1:

Henry Osterman was dying.

He stumbled into the provincial town of Harper on his own two feet, a pallid scarecrow of a man, his hair greasy, his clothes tattered, his fingernails curling in on themselves like shriveled worms after the rain.

Nobody could say how he had gotten there. The roads leading to Harper had been pulverized a quarter of a millennium ago by the wrath of thinking machines run amok. Tube trains and hoverbirds were technologies for a theoretical future when the world had learned to live without fossil fuels; multi and teleportation were the pipe dreams of lunatics. To get to Harper these days, you needed either a strong horse or a boat limber enough to steer through the debris clogging the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers. Osterman had neither.

The city itself was barely worth the effort. A few dozen dilapidated buildings huddled together at the bottom of a hill, that was all. The more prosperous cities nearby had pieced together a fragile shell of trade from the shards of yesterday’s civilization, but so far Harper had little to contribute. Still, you could get three radio stations again in Harper, and sometimes on clear nights you could see the feeble blink of a Chinese satellite. The local music scene was bustling. Drinking water was almost drinkable. Progress.

Hopefully this will prove useful to writers looking for some insight into the process, if not for future scholars at the Edelman Studies departments of major universities worldwide.

I think it’s more useful to think of the art of characterization as something akin to the art of additive sculpture. When you build a character, you’re not describing an existing personality so much as building one from the ground up… Just like with sculpture, when building characters you’ll often throw in materials that you’ve got lying around the shop. And just like with sculpture, your characters don’t have anything that you don’t explicitly put there yourself…

4. A thematic purpose. Why did you decide to put this character in the story? You should have a reason for every character you’re going to put on paper. If you take the classic Star Wars trilogy, you’ll see that every major character serves a purpose vis-a-vis our protagonist, Luke Skywalker. Darth Vader represents what will happen to Luke if he continues down the path of anger and impetuosity; Leia stands for the home, family, and society he’s trying to defend; Han Solo represents the temptation to abandon community and responsibility; and so on.

Go read and comment on the DeepGenre blog, if you’re so inclined.

Step 10: Get your first readers’ feedback, and listen to it. This is the difficult part: you need to listen to your first readers. Really, really listen. You cannot argue with them. At all. They’re going to try to sugar-coat their criticisms, because they don’t want to make you angry or disappointed. And they’re going to be biased anyway, because they’re your friends and they probably share your worldview to a certain extent. So you need to very patiently coax the truth out of them, and let them do most of the talking….

Step 14: Make decisions, and stick to them. Just like you have to commit to writing your novel, you need to get serious about making tough decisions in the writing of it. Can’t decide if your characters should act a certain way, or if you should use a certain point-of-view, or if you should include a particular scene? You’ll need to make these tough decisions at some point, and you’ll need to stick to them…. When confronting tough decisions, it helps if you stop thinking of your choices as a shell game, where the “right” answer lies under one of your decisions. Every writing choice is the right choice, as long as you make it the right choice. There’s no Big English Professor in the Sky passing judgment on your work. Commit to a choice and make it work, and you’ll never go wrong.

Go ahead and make your comments, if any, on the DeepGenre blog.

Excerpts:

Step 2: Noodle around and figure out if your idea is novel-worthy.… Your first real challenge is to explore that idea to see if it’s worthy of spending a year or two of your life on. This is not a light decision to make. These characters are going to set up camp in your dreams, they’re going to pop out at you from the side of the road while you’re driving. You’re going to find yourself standing in a 7-11 wondering which flavor of Slurpee your protagonist would choose and how they would pay for it (corporate credit card? cash from wad in pocket? five finger discount?). You need to know if you can live with these people….

Step 5: Structure as you go. Some writers can zip through a draft of a novel by the seat of their pants. Others diligently outline every step their character’s going to take over the next hundred thousand words. It’s likely your process will fall somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. Regardless, you need to have some idea of structure if you expect your novel to work. You might not know what that structure is when you start, and you might change it drastically as you go, but you can’t just expect Frodo and Sam to wander to Mount Doom by themselves. Either they’ll wander around aimlessly or they’ll wind up at the Cracks of Doom at the end of chapter 3, and then your novel will be in big trouble.

Make your comments over on DeepGenre if you’re so inclined.

The chapter in question is a flashback featuring a conversation between Marcus Surina and his daughter Margaret. In the original passage, Marcus says: “There’s a look people get when the Null Current is about to pull them under, Margaret. A look of inevitability. It’s the look of the stalk of wheat, watching the thresher approach and knowing that the time’s come for a newer, stronger crop to bask in the sun.”

Now Marcus Surina’s supposed to be a little — well, odd. But Deanna’s concern was that having him ascribe emotion to a stalk of wheat might be a little too odd. So we hashed it out this morning over IM as follows:

Deanna: With the wheat thing, maybe about a mouse that can’t get away fast enough?

Deanna: I’ll look at it more closely on second read, or you can let me know if you think of something.

DLE: Let me look at that sentence

Deanna: I just know it hit me as off when I read it the first time.

DLE: Hmm

DLE: You’re right… it does seem weird for a stalk of wheat to have a “look”

Deanna: Yeah, I was afraid the reader would perceive him as loonier than you intended.

DLE: He *is* supposed to be odd, and use really weird metaphors

DLE: But… you’re right. That might be pushing it.

DLE: What if I said something like “It’s the look that the stalk of wheat must get when it watches the thresher approach…”

DLE: Does the “must get” distance it at all?

Deanna: Hm. I think “look” is really the problem.

Deanna: “Look” with “wheat”

Deanna: From my way of thinking…

Deanna: It’s early in the book. The reader isn’t going to know yet if it’s just him who talks that way, or if you just write that way. I would fear someone picking it up in the bookstore and thumbing through the first few pages might think you continually use those.

Deanna: It’s made more clear when you get to the part that explains his daughter thinks it’s weird.

Deanna: But your call regardless.

DLE: No, I totally understand what you mean

DLE: I just really want to keep the wheat metaphor in there somehow

Deanna: Not a mouse among the wheat?

Deanna: Hm…

Deanna: Well, I think you’d want to avoid ascribing emotion to the wheat.

DLE: Well, the point is that it’s seasonal… the wheat gets old and dies, a new crop rises up, then it grows old, etc.

DLE: LOL Sure, no, you’re right

Deanna: Oh, I wasn’t getting that. I thought it was just about the thresher coming.

DLE: Well, there’s that aspect too

Deanna: (Trying to think of live things that come and go in seasons, like mayflies…)

DLE: Hmm…

DLE: I’m wondering if I can reconstruct that paragraph so that he can use the metaphor without using a “look” of the wheat

Deanna: I’m sure you can.

DLE: I wonder if I did something like “It’s like the stalk of wheat, when the thresher approaches and the time’s come for a newer, stronger crop to bask in the sun.”

Deanna: That would probably work.

DLE: Let me think on it a few minutes here…

Deanna: NP. I’m just continuing to CE.

DLE: Okay. How’s this: “Like the stalk of wheat when the thresher approaches, and the time’s come for a newer, stronger crop to bask in the sun.”

Deanna: Let me go back and look at context.

Deanna: Well, it’s better. But the context is still talking about a look.

DLE: Hmm.

Deanna: It doesn’t have to be decided right now at all.

Deanna: You can think about it.

DLE: When I say “look,” I’m thinking more about the aspect of something when *you* look at it…

DLE: What if I said “You can look at some people and tell when the Null Current is about to pull them under. It’s inevitable. Just like you can look at the stalk of wheat,” etc.

DLE: Something like that

Deanna: That would be better. It ascribes agency to a human then.

DLE: Yeah.

DLE: “Some people, you can look in their eyes and see that the Null Current is about to pull them under, Margaret. You can see the inevitability. Just like you can see the stalk of wheat as the thresher approaches, and know that the time’s come for a newer, stronger crop to bask in the sun.”

Deanna: Yeah.

DLE: Cool. You’re right, I like that better.

DLE: As soon as you mentioned this, I started thinking of a stalk of wheat with a little cartoon face on it going “Oooooh noooo!!!”

DLE: And that’s not good.

Deanna: LOLZ

So that’s how it went.

Don’t think that we’re going to have conversations like that about something on every page in the book. But we’ll probably have half a dozen or more of these kinds of conversations throughout the copyediting process.

My understanding of the business is that this kind of interaction between copy editor and author is an anomaly, and that most of the time the twain shall ne’er meet. But personally I can’t see the harm in it. It helps produce a better book, doesn’t it?

The book measures 477 pages, or about 148,000 words (including appendices). There are 6 sections, 45 chapters, and 8 appendices. The opening epigraph comes from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” The tagline? “Infinite possibility is only a state of mind.”

Now, when I say the book is done, of course that doesn’t mean it’s absolutely, completely done. That means it’s going off to my editor at Pyr, Lou Anders, for any last-minute comments. I’ll be printing out another copy of the book for myself and giving it a last read-through with red pen in hand. I’ll be incorporating those changes by the end of the month — and then the book goes off to the copy editor. But I expect the changes to be pretty minor from this point on.

(Want to know how finicky I am? The printouts after the jump below showing some of my line edits to MultiReal are from the fourth complete draft of the book.)

Here’s an example of the kind of changes I’m talking about. I discovered yesterday that, after who knows how many read-throughs and rewrites, in chapter 45 one of my characters was “threading her way through the throngs of Thasselians.” I’ll admit I’m not always above allocating an assortment of alliteration in my writing, but this one was totally unintentional. And it sounded ridiculous, so it needed to be fixed. (The even more ridiculous part is that I had misspelled “throngs” as “thongs.” Freudian slip?)

So having completed the book, I can definitely say this: you have never, ever read a book like MultiReal before.

MultiReal might be the most exciting book you’ve ever read that contains both a series of Congressional speeches and a three-way dartgun battle. It has both a granular discussion about the ethics of different software pricing models and a virtual sex scene with four-breasted mermaids.

To give you an idea of how complex this book is, chew on this: there are three main point-of-view characters, three minor point-of-view characters, one chapter in epistolary form, and one chapter from the global omniscient point of view. The prose slips from past to present tense a few times. You’re going to learn that one important piece of history mentioned in Infoquake didn’t quite happen the way you think it happened. Some of the characters speak in code. More than one have double allegiances. Oh, and have I mentioned the multiple, alternate, simultaneous, and asynchronous realities?

The plot bobs and weaves around, with a number of false starts and red herrings. There really isn’t one single narrative thread running through the book like there was in Infoquake. It’s still largely Natch’s story, of course, but Jara’s going to come much further into the foreground. And by the time the book comes to a close, you’re not going to know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, or whether some of them are still alive. If I’m counting correctly, there will be a total of eight different competing factions by the end.

In other words: MultiReal is designed to be trippy, challenging, and more than a little disorienting. One of the major themes of the book is the difficulty of making tough decisions based on incomplete information — and what if you didn’t have to? So if I’ve done my job correctly, you the reader will get a taste of what the characters are going through.

It’s a delicate tightrope for a writer to walk. The book has to be daunting enough to surprise you and confuse you at times; but it also has to be easy enough to follow that you don’t need a pad of graph paper and a scientific calculator. It’s got to have the meat of a grand political saga, the seasoning of a science fiction thriller, and the special sauce of old-school Wired magazine.

But that’s not to say MultiReal won’t be a lot of fun. You’ll meet a Natch look-alike named Geronimo who plays for a band called Dregs of Nitro. You’ll see Robby Robby with a big, frizzy Afro. You’ll see Quell opening a six-pack of whoop-ass with a big, electrified shock baton. You’ll see the top floor of the Revelation Spire (the world’s tallest building), which houses the remnants of the Venus de Milo. You’ll get a taste of what a MultiReal-fueled soccer match would look like. You’ll see how the diss make coffee. You’ll get to meet the infamous Aunt Berilla and see what happens when the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp crashes her estate. You’ll see a drudge get pushed in front of a moving tube train. You’ll see the Defense and Wellness Council kicking ass, taking names, and then putting all those names on 24-hour surveillance. You’ll see Horvil using MultiReal to perform acrobatics on a darkened stairwell. And oh so much more.

I’m still a novice at this novel-writing thing, so take this opinion with a grain of salt. But book 2 was about five times as hard to write as book 1.

I had a number of false starts. At some point, I intend to post all the first drafts of MultiReal‘s chapter 1, just like I did with Infoquake. (Read the nine drafts of Infoquake‘s chapter 1.) (Update 8/25/08 @ 1:30 PM: Here they are.) But we’re not just talking about differences in style and tone here. There were entire subplots considered, begun, and abandoned. There were a few times when I polished and polished that first chapter until it was perfect… only to decide that I needed to go in an entirely different direction. My wife and I even drove out to Harper’s Ferry so I could get a good look at the setting for one of those abandoned chapters. (Luckily, it wasn’t an entirely wasted trip; Harper’s Ferry does make a short appearance in the beginning of chapter 2.)

I’m hoping that Geosynchron, book 3 in the Jump 225 Trilogy, proves to be much easier to write. I’ve got a detailed outline and some individual scenes sketched out in my head. I’ve also got a very old first draft already written, though it’s so far out of date it will almost be no help. (To put things in perspective… when I wrote this first draft, Quell was an old man who liked to smoke hand-rolled cigarettes, Brone had died during the Shortest Initiation in book 1, and Natch still had a spunky girlfriend named Ferris. Then again, when I finished this draft, the only thing special about September 11 was that Bob Dylan’s long-awaited new album was expected to be released on that day.)

Excited? Can’t wait? Don’t worry, there’s still plenty of time to order a copy of Infoquake and read it through before MultiReal hits the shelves. Pyr has yet to announce their final schedule for the season, so I’m not going to pretend to give you an official word about scheduling — but it looks like we’re talking about Summer 2008.

And don’t worry, I’m planning all kinds of crunchy, wholesome promotional goodness surrounding the book. There’ll be free online material, con appearances, giveaway contests, podcasts and video blogs, readings, and more. So keep your RSS feed readers tuned to this here blog now, m’kay?