On Sunday, before Superstorm Sandy started to roll in, I managed to finish up the first draft of the sequel to Geekomancy, which clocked in just under 79K words.

There’s quite a bit of revision to be done, but it did what a first draft needs to do — I got the skeleton of the story in place, I met and got to know the new characters, figured out what is different in Ree’s life for book two, what her arc will be, and so on. I’m very excited for this novel, and I hope it will carry forward the things which connected strongly with readers in book one as well as adding in some new elements to develop the world.

My next task, along with ignoring the novel for a couple weeks so I can re-approach it with fresh eyes, is to work on some short stories that I’ve been neglecting due to the whole ‘novels under contract’ thing. I’m not participating in NaNoWriMo per say, but I’ll be plenty busy writing this month. And if things go really well, I’ll also be getting back to work on Metaphysical Fencing Academy (placeholder title), the YA fantasy I was working on when the idea for Geekomancy bushwhacked my brain.

Imagine how amazed I was when a Google Alert lead me to DeviantArt and the following piece of awesome fan art for Geekomancy:

Behold the awesomeness:

Fan art by Sarah aka “Shira-chan”

Big props to Shira-chan, the artist who brought this awesome piece to life. I especially love the attention to detail with the T-shirt quilt of convention shirts

It’s been just over a month since I started with Angry Robot Books as the North American Sales & Marketing Manager.

Here are some thoughts on the new job:

• The working environment is awesome. I liked my Wybel gig, but my co-workers at AR are much more My Kind of People. Everyone is in the genre fiction world, so my geekdom isn’t just an Outside Specialty that helps some of what I do, it’s a core facet of what I bring to the table.
• Having greater dispensation to read for work is very fun. With my last job, I had to read a little bit of everything, since we had dozens of client publishers. For AR, it’s all genre fiction, all the time. I’ve been devouring novels as fast as I can, in SF/F, YA, and Crime/Mystery, across our three imprints (Angry Robot, Strange Chemistry, and Exhibit A, respectively). As expected, I’m getting great use out of my Nexus 7, which has become my primary reading device for work.
• Working conventions is very hard work, but totally worth it. I attended WorldCon as an Angry Robot, and spent most of the show working the AR booth, reconnecting with my bookseller roots and meeting tons of people in order to send them away with big armfuls of books. 🙂
• Since AR is a smaller publisher, there is a lot of ‘everyone does everything.’ I’m learning about all aspects of the publishing world — P&L reports, acquisitions, ad buys, publicity best practices, title presentations, cover design, everything. It’s awesome. 🙂
• The gig has been great for my writing. Now that I have a more regular schedule, it’s easier to order my weekly and daily schedule and be consistent in my writing time. I’ve also had the chance to meet lots of AR/SC/ExA authors, and more writer friends means more people to brainstorm with, more people to cross-promote with, etc. Learning even more about the industry from the inside has made me a more appealing guest for podcasts/interviews/etc., since I can talk to the publisher side as well as the author side. The bonuses keep coming!
• There’s also been a fair amount of press about the appointment:

http://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=1826#m17449

http://lunch.publishersmarketplace.com/2012/09/people-88/

and the most recent issue of LOCUS.

• And not to be overlooked is the fact that I’M MOVING TO NEW YORK CITY! I visited NYC last week and signed on an apartment in Queens, which my girlfriend and I will be moving in to next month. It’s a nice and safe neighborhood, and the apartment is gorgeous, with lots of features in the building.

My cyborg overlords at Angry Robot Books are offering a great deal today: For every two Angry Robot eBooks you put in your cart from their Robot Trading Company, you’ll only be asked to pay for one.

More info here: http://therobotreader.com/

I would specifically recommend:

Blackbirds (Chuck Wendig): A visceral urban fantasy about a woman who can see the deaths of anyone she touches skin-to-skin. She gets some help from a trucker and sees his own death a month ahead — being tortured to death by someone looking for her. You can get Blackbirds and the sequel, Mockingbird, together for the price of one!

Zoo City (Lauren Beukes): Arthur C. Clarke-award winning South African urban fantasy about Zinzi December, who has a magical sloth on her back, a bad Nigerian Scamming habit, and who just took a missing persons case way over her head.

The Corpse-Rat King (Lee Battersby) – The first novel from Angry Robot to be picked out of the Open Door Submissions period last year, this is a darkly comic romp. ‘Corpse-rat’ Marius picks the dead clean of their finest possessions, but when he takes the crown of a dead king, the Dead come to honor him as their king, thinking him the deceased monarch. Now trapped between living and dead, Marius heads off on a mad quest to get the Dead a real king.

Seven Wonders (Adam Christopher) — Adam’s second novel with Angry Robot (the first being Empire State) features San Ventura, home of the world’s last super-villain (The Cowl) and last super-team (The Seven Wonders). When everyman Tony develops superpowers, he sets out to take down the Cowl once and for all. Except the Seven Wonders don’t want any help…Seven Wonders is reminiscent of Astro City or any of the neo-Silver Age re-imaginings of the supers milieu.

This weekend, I attended my first convention as an Angry Robot, which also happened to be my first WorldCon.

For those who don’t know, WorldCon is a traveling convention, meaning that it changes locations each year. Convetion organizers bid on the chance to host the convention. This year the con was held in Chicago as Chicon7, and it for me, it was both delightful and exhausting.

I spent most of the weekend working the Angry Robot Booth, selling brand new books such as Seven Wonders, Mockingbird, The Corpse-Rat King, and the first two books from our new YA imprint Strange Chemistry, Blackwood and Shift.

Working the booth was very tiring, but just as rewarding. I put my bookseller hat back on and spent hour after hour hand-selling our books to visitors and passers-by. Working the booth helped me learn the line much faster, and thanks to the help of our marvelous editors Lee Harris and Amanda Rutter, as well as a rotating guest-star cast of Angry Robot and Strange Chemistry authors, we had a great weekend of sales.

Team Angry Robot had several outings, including a bowling night at a bowling alley that was way more upscale than the ones I was used to, and a fabulously-attended author event at The Book Cellar.

Angry Robot authors Adam Christopher and Chuck Wendig read from their books Seven Wonders and Mockingbird, and Strange Chemistry authors Gwenda Bond and Kim Curran read from Blackwood and Shift. There was a fun Q&A including questions like “Who is your favorite angry robot?” as well as homemade cupcakes by a Strange Chemistry author.

Luckily, I also got away for a few panel sessions, including a fantastically fun panel on Old-Fashioned Storytelling, a fun fannish panel on the Game of Thrones TV show (made all the more awesome by a visit from actor Ron Donachie aka Ser Rodrik Cassel).

I was also on a panel for new writers, which interestingly turned into a ‘New writers helping even newer writers learn important things about the business’ panel, which I really enjoyed. It was great to be able to take the pains I’d gone through on writing query letters and pass on the lessons learned.

And on Monday, the last day, as most everyone wore the look of end-of-con-exhaustion, I did the midlist author thing of sitting at the autograph table with the hope that people would come by. And a couple did, but they were mostly people who already knew me. 🙂

The parties were great, the company was even better, and I was tremendously excited to get to meet many authors, readers, and other SF/F folk. One of the highlights of my weekend was the agency dinner which my fabulous agent Sara Megibow set up. Sara was coincidentally in town, so she gathered up Nelson Literary authors Betsy Dornbusch, Jason M. Hough, Shanna Swedson, Hugh Howey and myself for a lovely dinner. It was the first time I’d met Sara in person, and she is even more of a Publishing Faerie Godmother in person than I guessed from talking on the phone. The six of us had a great bit of shop talk and hanging out, though I’m sad I had to run off a bit early to get to a panel.

Another highlight for me was attending the Hugos. The Hugo is the most prestigious award in Science Fiction/Fantasy (some argue that the Nebula is its match, but for me, the Hugo is the big one). It was a chance to suit up and see the SF/F community celebrate excellence in and service to the community. John Scalzi was a fantastic toastmaster, and the love in the room was palatable. Or maybe that was just the body heat of more than a thousand people in one room at the same time. 🙂

I was completely bushed by the end of the con, but thankfully, I had great new music for the ride home (the Hugo-nominated Wicked Girls by Seanan McGuire and Hazardous Fiddle by Amy McNally).

Two days later, I am still recovering, but it was a world-class bit of fun, and I look forward to going again next year for WorldCon in San Antonio.

Now that the book has been out for a few weeks, I have questions that count as frequently asked, so I thought I might as well give the answers in a centralized location.

Will there be a sequel to Geekomancy?

Yes! I was contracted for two books in the Geekomancy universe, and I am working on the second one right now. The book is currently scheduled for a 2nd half of 2013 release. Book two will shift focus a bit onto Hollywood and show business, as Ree gets a chance for big break as a screenwriter. But there will still be in-jokes galore and Ree’s signature snark and heroism.

I don’t like reading on computers/tablets/phones. When can I read a paper copy of Geekomancy?

Currently, there is no scheduled print edition of Geekomancy. However, my publisher (Pocket Books) is interested in doing a paper edition if the eBook edition sells well enough. That threshold is intentionally vague, but I  believe it is attainable. If you don’t like reading books on a screen but still want to support Geekomancy and/or me, consider getting a copy for a friend you think might enjoy it and does like reading on screens.

Can I read Geekomancy if I don’t have a tablet or smartphone?

Google, Kindle, and Nook all have browser-based reading programs available, so you can read the book on nearly any computer.

I’m driving up to Chicago today to set up the Angry Robot booth and rock the Windy City for WorldCon.

My panel schedule is unchanged:

Thu Aug 30 4:30:pm Thu Aug 30 6:00:pm Storytelling the Old-Fashioned Way
Buckingham — An exploration of the oral tradition of storytelling and how it relates to writing fiction. This panel of storytellers and writers will discuss tricks and techniques of oral storytelling that will and won’t work in the written form.

Sat Sep 1 7:30:pm Sat Sep 1 9:00:pm New Writers Session 4
Addams – A panel for new and debut authors to discuss their work and careers.

Sun Sep 2 12:00:pm Sun Sep 2 1:30:pm Winter is Coming
Field – A look at seasons one and two of the TV adaptation of ‘Song of Fire and Ice.’

Mon Sep 3 10:30:am Mon Sep 3 12:00:pm Autograph Session 17
Riverside center Exhibition Hall

Or you can probably find me at the Angry Robot booth, shilling the awesome tales of our authors, including the first books from Strange Chemistry, our brand-new YA SF/F line.

See you there!

I’m headed to the GenCon game show in Indianapolis this weekend, swinging by on Saturday and Sunday to check out the newest games, say hello to my fellow writers in the Author’s Alley, and meet all sorts of geeky people.

If you’re going to be at GenCon and want to say hello, you can Tweet @MikeRUnderwood to say hello and we’ll see about meeting up!

Yesterday was the pub-day for my friend Jim C. Hines’ eighth book, LIBRIOMANCER, the first in a new series.

That’s right, LIBRIOMANCER.

Unwittingly, independently, Jim and I both wrote geeky self-referential urban fantasies with a ‘mancy’ root for the title, which just happened to come out less than a month apart. This actually happens fairly often in publishing. Not this exact case, but the idea of similar-ish novels coming out from two different houses is usually more a sign that the two books are both hitting a part of the zeitgeist than that one person is copying from the other (I can assure you, we did not copy from one another. I was neck-deep into GEEKOMANCY before I even knew that Jim was writing LIBRIOMANCER. It was just kismet. Nerdy, geeky, kismet).

I’ve read about half of LIBRIOMANCER, more than enough to tell you a few things:

1) It’s delightful. For anyone who grew up with a love of reading, who ever wished to be whisked away into a book’s world, this novel will scratch that itch.
2) It’s funny. Just as in GEEKOMANCY, there are tons of in-jokes and geeky references. LIBRIOMANCER is more literary-focused, but there’s a scattershot across geek culture, as Hines’ protagonist Isaac Vainio, is a big geek himself.
3) It’s different from GEEKOMANCY. The two leads are very different people, with different approaches to conflict, different magical skills, and very different plots.

So if you’ve read and enjoyed GEEKOMANCY, I can wholeheartedly recommend LIBRIOMANCER for a fairly similiar kind of fun. Each novel stands on its own, but I hope that coming out close together will prove to help both LIBRIOMANCER and my own GEEKOMANCY.

Check out Jim’s launch day post on his blog for more about LIBRIOMANCER.