Archive for the ‘housekeeping’ Category

I’m in Sydney

Friday, January 20th, 2012

Greetings from the far side of the world. Or if you live in Australia, the same side of the world. My wife Sophie is from Sydney, so we come here about once a year.

I’m not one of those obsessive Australophiles, but I do like it here. It’s hot. It’s a totally different biosphere, with all kinds of weird flora and fauna – giant spiders, sulfur-crested cockatoos, etc. The wine is good, and the food is really good. Though everything is expensive, even by New York standards.

The beaches … the beaches beggar description, especially if you grew up in New England, where the beaches are few and grey and punishing. The beaches here are huge and wild, with gigantic turquoise surf, and they’re everywhere. You think people are exaggerating about them but they’re totally not. Supposedly when Jonathan Ive was looking for the perfect color for the original blue iMac, he found it in the surf off of Bondi beach, which is in Sydney.

(When the characters arrive at Benedict Island in The Magician King, the description of that beach is based on Smith’s Beach near Perth, which is where I was at the time.)

Also it’s a chance to give a few interviews in a books market where I’m not very well known. Basically the worst thing about Australia is the flight over. This time around it took 48 hours, because we got diverted to Hawaii, and I spent a day hanging out eating junk food at the Honolulu airport Best Western, a place so seedy that it looked like an Elmore Leonard novel was going to break out at any moment.

Another reason I’m here is to get seriously cranking on The Magician’s Land, though those beaches, and that wine, and the fact that Halcyon’s nanny is 10,000 miles away are all eating into my writing time. Also there’s a huge number of administrative and webby tasks needed to keep the business of a 21st century novelist alive, and they never seem to end.

Like updating my events page, which I haven’t done in months. In lieu of that, I’ll just mention that I’m speaking at Yale in February, and Oxford in March (on the same bill with Jeremy Paxman, which if you loved University Challenge like I love University Challenge, and I know you don’t, would be incredibly exciting), and Clemson in April.

I’ll do a proper tour when the paperback of The Magician King comes out in June. Till then: actual writing.

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Gah — I Didn’t Blog for a Month

Sunday, November 13th, 2011

Sorry about that. I hate that I didn’t blog for a month. This blog is really important to me, but various not-very-exciting things have been happening that resulted in my ignoring it for a month.

For example: I toured Canada for about three weeks. I went to Texas twice. I wrote a bunch of things for Time — the night Steve Jobs died I co-write an entire cover story in four hours — and I’ve been editing Time’s annual Best Inventions issue, which is interesting, and also beloved by advertisers. All good things, but also really time-consuming.

Also my wife’s been working on a novel which is so good that it will render all of my work as dross. I’ve been helping her with that (as she helped me, a lot, with both the Magicians books).

Speaking of which, I’ve also been working on the sequel to The Magician King. Also an as-yet-untitled, unrevealed non-Magicians project that I will try to write concurrently with that sequel, but it may have to wait till after that’s done.

And I’ve taken up writing a weekly books column for Time‘s entertainment blog. I just don’t have space in Time to cover all the books I read, so I’ll take care of the overflow there.

Also it took me like a million tries to beat stage D8 (“Dark Pool”) of TowerDefense. (Two words: splash damage.)

Now the immediate future. I’ll be in Miami on Nov. 19-20 for the Miami Book Fair, where I’ll be doing what should be a really excellent panel with Mat Johnson and Colson Whitehead. Right before that, on November 17 in New York City, I’ll do a reading as part of a PEN American event. Shortly after that, on December 6, I’m co-hosting the annual Housing Works Gin Mingle with Gabrielle Hamilton (whose restaurant Prune has the best bone marrow in New York, if that matters), Téa Obreht, Touré and — wait for it — Colson Whitehead again.

There. That was the blog post that took care of all the boring stuff that I would have said in a month of blog posts. The next blog post, coming soon, will actually be interesting. No — it will be riveting.

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Normality Has Been Restored

Monday, September 5th, 2011

“Anything you can’t cope with is therefore your own problem” – Trillian, a.k.a. Tricia McMillan, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Gratuitous picture of Zooey Deschanel

I’m back from tour. The Infinite Improbability Drive is off or at least idling. The list of things I can’t cope with is still worryingly long.

A word about tour. Tour was great. Actually it was amazing. There was a whole new vibe out there. When I went on tour for the paperback version of The Magicians, I saw maybe twice as many people as had come out for the hardcover version. Something had changed. But this time something had really changed. This time I got, like, 5-10 times as many people as for the paperback. Let me tell you, that means a lot to a writer.

(Also increasing: the amount of e-mail I get. I’m really, really sorry I’m so crap about answering it. The math of it is all wrong: the busier I get, the more e-mail I get, and the less time I have to answer it. It should work the other way.)

I was also surprised by how tough the tour was on me and my family — my being away for that long. Sophie has to pick up a lot of slack when I’m away, and it’s not like she doesn’t have her own professional gigs to deal with. It’s tough to strike a balance. I don’t how much it bothers Halcyon, who’s 1 and therefore still kind of one with the universe in that way that babies are. But Lily (7) basically welded herself to my leg the minute I got home and refused to let go. And I knew how she felt. Maybe I’ll take her with me next time.

I’m not going to do a big roundup of the reviews. Google will do a better job than I will, and it gets paid more than I do. Suffice to say that they’ve been good! And that it’s been interesting watching reviewers and their reviewing organs try to decide whether The Magician King is literature or fantasy or art or entertainment or trash or whatever. (Correct answer is: yes.) Though I will cop to being happy that The New Yorker, that pillar of literary culture, did a short but nice review (this link is pointless unless you subscribe to the magazine, in which case it’s pointless anyway. Sorry.)

And now onwards and upwards! Or at least energetically sideways! There are more projects in the works, which I’ll announce when I can. I have plans for a third and probably final Magicians book. I know how it starts and how it ends, and a certain amount about the middle bits. Damn those middle bits.

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Posted in events, housekeeping, the magician king   |   13 Comments »   |  

I Seem to See a Tree of Iron

Wednesday, July 20th, 2011

I’m just back from Oxford, where I watched my genius sister-in-law get her doctorate in curing cancer.

I love Oxford. My mom went there, and she hated it, and it’s always fun to love the things your parents hate. (In fairness to my mom, as a scholarship student and a woman she ran into a lot of really toxic class and gender prejudice at Oxford. Sorry mom.)

But come on! Tolkien and Lewis taught there. It’s like the Trinity test site for modern fantasy. I made a pilgrimage to the original lamppost that inspired the one in Narnia:

You can’t see the overflowing dumpsters to my left. It’s just as well.

Meanwhile I have shifted modes. My current mode is definitely not my favorite mode, or a mode that I’m any good at it. It is my promotional mode. When you stop writing your book, you have to start forcing everybody to look at it, know about it, and think about it, until their brains are empty of all else.

To that end you give interviews. You write snappy little mini-essays. You go to Comic-Con and sit on panels. (Mine is Thursday at 3. We got the death slot opposite the Game of Thrones panel, but come on! You’ll never get into that one.) It takes up a lot of one’s time that would be better spent blogging. But I will try to keep up better than I have been.

One housekeeping note: I have a story in a new anthology called The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities. I don’t often write short fiction, but I was really proud of the piece. The way the book works is, they gave writers pieces of art to riff of; mine was a lovely sketch by Mike Mignola of Hellboy fame. And there are other, better pieces in the book by the likes of China Mieville and Alan Moore. An excerpt from my story is here.

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Posted in events, housekeeping, things what I wrote   |   8 Comments »   |  

That’s Link-credible! Fan Fiction, The Today Show, Locus, Etc.

Thursday, July 7th, 2011

I was working on a headline with “link-unabula” but it just got really arcane really fast.

All right, if I posted at a reasonable rate I wouldn’t have to cram all this stuff into one post, but I don’t, do I? I’ll start doing so soon.

– I’m on the cover of Locus this month, along with the incredible Ted Chiang, whom I have long admired from afar.

– I wrote an essay in Time about fan fiction, which I’ve been thinking about for a long time. My first draft was 8,000 words, and that didn’t seem like enough, and it’s running at 3,500 words, so I’m really proud of it, but some caveats apply.

– The first trade review of The Magician King (a bit spoilery, so reader discretion advised) in Kirkus

– I write here of my love for A Dance with Dragons, which really is everything you want it to be. (I made some stupid factual mistakes in the review. Once again, someone is wrong on the Internet!)

– Jennifer Weiner recommended The Magician King on The Today Show. She referred to The Magicians as “Dirty Harry,” which I’ve been wanting somebody to do for literally years.

– A propos of nothing (or I guess a bit of that fan fiction essay) I was reminded the other day of my great love for A Very Potter Musical, a fan production that pastiches and parodies the original. (The guy who plays Harry, Darren Criss, has now surfaced as a regular on Glee.) They make a lot of edgy choices, like for example Cho Chang’s entrance at 0:25 in Act 1, Part 2. (I could get into a long discussion of the live YouTube version vs. the vastly inferior studio soundtrack recording … but no.)

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Posted in housekeeping, things what I wrote   |   8 Comments »   |  

It’s quiet. Too quiet.

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

Actually the activity over here is appallingly frenetic. I went to Toronto, talked about the future of the book, then got stuck in the airport Sheraton overnight on the way back, from which I drunk-tweeted up a storm. In about three hours I’m going to be interviewing Neil Gaiman onstage.

(I just keep saying that over and over again. Each time I get a little cooler.)

But most of the activity is happening below the surface, meaning I can’t talk about it. I’m writing some interesting essays I can’t talk about. I’m getting some fantastic art for the Magicians store, but I can’t show it to you yet (and we need more. More!) There’s some cool secret things coming that are so cool and secret that I can’t even make veiled allusions to them yet.

Oh, and the new website for The Magician King went up. I had nothing to do with it — I didn’t even know it had gone up! — so I can say that I think it’s lovely and elegant. And The Magician King got its first review, from Kirkus, which is one of the ‘trades’ (meaning it’s for booksellers and librarians and such, and it runs reviews well in advance of a book’s actual publication). It was a great review.

But it’s not up yet. So I can’t talk about it.

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Australia, Land of Enchantment; Also, The Magician King Is Out August 9

Sunday, March 27th, 2011

I’m just back from a month in Australia, where it was summer, and the animals are all different. Seriously, they have sulfur-crested cockatoos and blue-tongued lizards and huntsman spiders just running around like it’s no big thing.

Trust me, it’s a big thing. Australians say huntsmen don’t bite. Don’t believe it. I heard them talking about it, they totally do.


I went to Australia for the Perth Writers Festival, which was really terrific. Perth is one of the remotest major cities in the world, and you really feel like you’re at the writer’s festival at the end of the universe. (Prices are comparable to Milliways, because Perth, despite its remoteness, is a mining center and quite wealthy.) I got to sit next to Margo Lanagan onstage, which alone was worth flying 30 hours for.

(Movies watched on the flights to and from Australia: The King’s Speech, The American, Red, The Town, True Grit, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.)

Then we drove down to the Margaret River, which is one of Australian’s wine regions. If you took a bunch of Hawaiian beaches and spot-welded them onto the Cotes du Rhone, that’s what you’d get. If this place were any closer to civilization it would be mobbed. You taste wine all day, then you go and frolic in the Indian Ocean while dolphins swim by.

I was also in Australia because my wife is Australian, and we wanted to hang out with her family, in the city of her birth (Sydney, not Perth). Plus it’s summer in Australia. And if we don’t start exposing the baby to huntsman venom now, it will never built up an immunity.

Also: The Magician King will be out August 9. More on that in a bit.

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Posted in housekeeping, the magician king   |   13 Comments »   |  

Seasonal Affective Destruction

Wednesday, January 12th, 2011

I’m not so much posting just at present. I’ve gone on leave from Time to finish The Magician King, and it turns out that that has involved really decisively disconnecting from the Internet and “social” “media” and really reality in general. That combined with the usual seasonal affective disaster has caused me to fall silent.

But fear not. I will rise and blather once again, as the ancient sages foretold.

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Posted in housekeeping, the magician king, whining   |   15 Comments »   |  

The Campbell Award: It’s Not Too Late

Sunday, January 2nd, 2011

The Hugo Award nomination period is open.

Yes, I know what you’re going to say. It’s awkward so I’ll even say it for you: Lev, you didn’t publish any books in 2010. Not one. You can’t have a Hugo nomination. There’s nothing to nominate you for.

But I’ve thought of that.

(FWIW I did actually publish a short story in 2010. The first and only short story I’ve ever published in fact. I’m very happy with it — I wouldn’t have published it otherwise — but in general I’m crap at short stories. It’s because I don’t read them, or not much. It’s just a weakness of mine as a reader. I don’t like meeting a bunch of characters, and parsing a whole fictional world, and then being turfed out of it after like 20 pages. It’s like drinking in a bar that closes at 9 o’clock.)

But to return to my earlier point: you are correct. I didn’t publish any books in 2010. But — and here you have to imagine me talking like Hercule Poirot when he’s gathered all the suspects in the drawing room at the end of the book, and he’s preparing to spring the trap — not every Hugo Award is a Hugo Award. There is an award for which I am eligible. It’s not a Hugo, it’s merely Hugo-like. Hugo-esque.

It is the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

And I’m declaring my eligibility for it. Fortunately you stay eligible for two years after your first SF/F publication, so 2009 books still qualify.

Yes: I was eligible for it last year too, and I wasn’t nominated. This may be because nobody thought I was the best new writer. But: it could also be because people didn’t realize I was eligible. I’m not sure which. So let’s find out!

Personally I’m really hoping it’s that second one.

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Posted in housekeeping   |   9 Comments »   |  

Person of the Year: It’s Not You, It’s Mark

Tuesday, December 21st, 2010

I couldn’t say before, because it was secret secret secret, but for the past six weeks I’ve been busy writing a long story about how Mark Zuckerberg is Person of the Year.

The editors talked to me about writing this piece all the way back in August, and I figured subsequent events — like the midterm elections, maybe — might change their minds, but they didn’t, which led to a lot of secretive flying back and forth between New York and Palo Alto at odd hours to interview Zuckerberg and people who know him.

(In the process I lied about what I was doing to lots of people, including readers of this blog, and I feel bad about that. But I couldn’t think of another way to make it work.)

It was stressful but not unenjoyable. As a writer I’m really not a sprinter, I prefer the long haul, and I rarely get to do long-haul New Yorker-style features in Time. The magazine just isn’t built around them, and when it is they’re usually about war or politics or business, which the editors wisely do not let me write about. But Person of the Year (or P.O.Y. as they call it here) has a special aura around it. When you mention it the bar goes silent, a glass breaks, the editors cross themselves, and an old gypsy woman looks up from the corner and tells them they’d better give you extra pages, if they know what’s good for them.

And plus it was a good story. Zuckerberg is interesting, and Facebook is interesting.

But now I’m thoroughly burned out on my day job and ready for another crack at my night job. I haven’t looked at The Magician King in 6 weeks. I figure it’s probably let its down its guard by now.

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Posted in housekeeping, things what I wrote   |   10 Comments »   |  
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