But you know what’s not an irrational number? 250. Dollars. The fruit is hanging very low here. Do you play something? Anything? Are you in a band? An a cappella group? An orchestra? Do you know someone who is? Do you have a sousaphone? I think you might have one. Seriously. Just check again. I’m pretty sure I saw it.

Do me a favor and spread the info around. Think of it like Kickstarter, only I pay you. Don’t make me produce a humorous video to promote this contest, people. Don’t force my hand. I will do it.

Some other news:

– I’m at the Sweet! Actors Reading Writers series tonight. An actress named Soneela Nankani will perform a Julia passage from The Magician King. Should be cool.

– I put up a long essay over at Time.com about being a book reviewer, and how it’s changed since Orwell’s day

– Somewhere, frozen in the carbonite of Time’s paywall, are my profiles of Joss Whedon and Alison Bechdel, which ran a couple of weeks ago.

And I’ve been roughing out dates for a summer tour. New York, Boston, Chicago, Orlando, San Francisco (and environs), Milwaukee … you can see the events as they go up here.

It goes like this:

(I know I just broke the frame of my own blog. I suck at YouTube. And blogs.)

I love that song so much. I love it as much as the books the theme song of which it is (<–professional writer!) I firmly believe that it should be played as often as possible, in as many ways as possible, by as many people as possible.

So with that in mind, and in honor of The Magician King being published in paperback on May 29, I’m holding a contest for the best cover version of “I Wanna Be a Magician.” Parry picks the winner. The winner gets a cool $250.

There are no holds barred here. Any and all instruments are acceptable. Improvisation is encouraged. You can add variations, facemelting solos, virtuoso cadenzas, new lyrics, new verses, whatever you like. As long as we can recognize the song, it’s in. I don’t care if you have a band, or an orchestra, or an a capella ensemble, or a mellotron, or a hammered dulcimer, or a hammered mellotron. Cover the song and you’re in the running.

To enter: upload your entry to YouTube and give it the tag “magiciankingsongs.” I will then add it to this YouTube channel. This may be an awful and klugey way to run the contest, but as I may have mentioned I suck at YouTube, and I couldn’t think of anything else. We’ll announce the winner here on May 29.

Parry has graciously provided the chords and lyrics, as I am a musical idiot:

I WANNA BE A MAGICIAN

[verse]

	G	Bm
I wanna be a magician
	Em	G
And study at Brakebills
	Am	C
Wander though the hedge maze
	G	D
And cast magic missile spells

[verse]
	G	Bm
Wanna go where the clock-trees
	Em	G
Are ticking in the breeze
	Am	C
'Neath the shade of Castle Whitespire
 	G	D
In the laaaaaaand of
	G
Fillory

[bridge]
	Em	D
Hunt the Seeing Hare and
	C	G
The Questing Beast
	Em	D
Ride the Cozy Horse with
	C	G
Its coat of velveteen
	Em	D
Charge the Ember and the Chatwins
	C	G
To the Western Sea
	Am	Em
And defeat the Watcherwoman
	D
In the land of Fillory

[battle section]
	Em
	Bm
	Em
	Bm

[verse]
	G	Bm
You can keep New York City, 'Cause
	Em	G
there's nothing here for me.
	Am	C
Wanna be a magician
 	G	Bm	D
In the laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand of
	G	C
Fillory
	Bm	D

[outro - repeat X 10,000,000]
	G	C
I wanna be a Magician
	Bm	D
(in the laaaaaaaaand)

That’s all I got. Go! Questions? I’ll answer’em in comments.

I can’t tell you how happy I am about this. But I can tell you this funny story! When it was time for Sophie to go to the doctor and find out the baby’s sex, she was in Australia, but I was still in New York. (There’s a long, very TMI story about why I wasn’t there that only barely redeems me from being a crap husband/father. Anyway.) As soon as she found out, she texted me the result, as follows: “it’s a boy — a boy with a willy!”

It’s not every woman who would make a Blackadder reference at a time like that. It’s not every woman who could.

In a much-much-less-important but still-worth-mentioning development, I won’t be able to make it to WorldCon this year. I wish I could, but the baby is actually due during WorldCon. So I’ll have to deputize someone else to pass on the Campbell tiara.

It’s especially awkward because The Magician King is up for a Hu^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H no wait, scratch that last part. Not a problem.

So to recap: after two daughters (currently 7 and 1 respectively) I will soon have a son, and will probably have to rethink everything I thought I knew about parenting. Which wasn’t much, but still.

Also, naming rights are still available. I take PayPal.

I’m not going to lie to you: I like England. It has taken me a long time to admit this fact. That’s partly because I didn’t want to be one-of-those-American-Anglophiles who is always pretending to be vaguely English, and partly because my mom actually is English, and she kind of hates England.

She went to Oxford in the fifties and was given so much shit there for being a) really poor and b) a really clever woman that she left England forever right after college. We went back a couple of times, to see relatives, but my mom’s antipathy toward the place of her birth was shall we say pretty pervasive. And she had some pretty good reasons.

It’s a lot easier for me. I’m well aware that liking England is a luxury my mom didn’t have — nobody in England gives me shit, or at any rate not more than the usual amount. As a result I find it very pleasant there. I was in Oxford to give a talk at Christ Church College, and afterward I went to dinner at Pembroke College (Oxford is made up of all these different colleges that have their own semi-autonomous identities — it’s basically just like Voltron). We walked in, and my host explained that I was standing in the same senior common room where Tolkien presided as a fellow.

Very pleasant indeed.

(Then he introduced me to the former master of Pembroke, Roger Bannister. If that name rings a bell, Bannister is the guy who ran the first four-minute mile. I know, right? Then just to piss everybody off, he became an eminent neurologist.)

A couple of days later I was staying with friends in a town near Oxford called Bladon, and I went out for a jog. I found an unlocked back gate onto the grounds of Blenheim Palace (pron. “Blennum”), which is a giant mansion where Churchill was born, and I went running through it, along the banks of the lovely Evenlode River. It was freezing cold and raining. Sheep were grazing on this infinitely perfect ancient grass, and I was shooing them out of the way, and dodging through colossal old trees, and keeping an eye out for shepherds bearing shotguns.

And I thought: yes. This is a country I could live in.

I did not run a four-minute mile. But still.

Now that I’m back in Brooklyn I find myself looking around and thinking, this is nice, but why do I live here again? How am I connected to this city? I’ve never lived anywhere that I didn’t leave thinking, thank God that’s over with, I’m never going back there again. It would be nice to change that. But I’m not getting out of Brooklyn for a few years yet.

But that’s all by way of introducing a curiosity I came across the other day when I was transferring data to my bitchin’ new 13″ MacBook Air. I noticed a file with the suggestive name “dungeon crawlin’ fools.doc,” and a date of creation of July 14, 2004. It turned out to be my first cut at a plot outline for The Magicians. (I must have stolen the filename from Order of the Stick.)

I took my very very first notes on what became The Magicians in 1996, but this must have been the writing session when I went back to it, eight years later, and tried to turn it into something real. I have no memory of writing any of this, but I’m surprised at how much of it made into the finished book.

Here are the first couple of paragraphs. I apologize for their being in stream-of-consciousness broken English:

Vietnarnia – ref GLASS DAGGER [ed. note: I must be referring to the Larry Niven story "What Good Is a Glass Dagger?"] — begins as a lark — they go to vacation house to practice combat magic, something they aren’t taught — get there via Penny’s transdimensional magic — stop over in wood between worlds — that’s where he’s been hanging out all this time — he’s been working with a somewhat fringey professor — find ruined shanty, somebody living there — can you even drink the water? — ‘these trees come from paintings with forest backgrounds’ it’s the kind of thing he says all the time now, you can’t even tell if he’s joking — fucked up — war between speaking and non-speaking animals — old rules corrupted — forward to 19^th [century? dunno -- ed.] paradigms — riff on lamppost — city is darkened outpost, armed camp, under siege

nip over to check seasons. it’s summer. nips back. they go through minutes later. season has changed: it’s winter.

janet is the only one affected by the WbW effect

what happens there? drawn into question? becomes setup? they encounter wounded being — river-nymph? needs X? more obscure greek being? its head and shoulders poked up, motionless, from water in frozen stream. horrifying sight. is she a corpse? they had to get her out of there. or is it — is there a hot spring? it flees. then they find mysterious inn. anybody know about X? might could. offers to lead them.

And so on. It goes on like this for — let’s see — 6,331 words. I wish I could go back and tell myself to keep at it, it’ll get published, because I gave up on it a lot along the way.

Then my past self would say: I can’t believe we can’t regrow hair yet.

Must go. My Google Calendar looks like a Superfund site.

But if you’re going to be a writer in the present century you pretty much have to do it. And the truth is, after hating it and fucking it up 10,000 times – and many of the people reading this blog have probably seen me fuck it up in person — I’ve actually started to like speaking in public. A few weeks ago I interviewed Ray Kurzweil at SXSW, and I figured it would be in some dinky hotel conference room named after some 19th Century sailing vessel, but it turned out to be in an auditorium that sat 3,200 people. And it was mostly full.

And the funny thing is, I think it went fine. I’m pretty sure my head didn’t explode, and that I spoke in English most of the time. (Ray was, as usual, brilliant.) Afterwards going back up to the green room Al Gore was in the same elevator as us, so that’s mostly what I remember about the whole thing. But I’m pretty sure it went OK.

So since I’ve thought about it a lot, I’m going to pass along the lessons that I have so painfully learned in the form of this guide to Public Speaking … the Lev Grossman Way!

Lesson 1: Ignore your autonomic nervous system. At this point I’m so used to my heart racing and my palms sweating during an event, it doesn’t even freak me out anymore. I expect it and let it run its course and know it for the atavistic evolutionary response that it is. I don’t worry about it. In fact if that ever doesn’t happen when I’m in front of an audience, call 911.

Lesson 2: Wear something you like. It’s sort of like the broken-windows policy: if you think you look OK, you may actually start to feel OK.

Lesson 3: Do not, repeat not, look at people’s faces. When I’m speaking I look at the aisles and the doors and the lights and the back wall, but not the people. This is because when people are listening to you speak, they tend to look weird. It’s just a fact. I do this too: you feel like the speaker can’t see you, so you’re free to let your face be totally blank and expressionless. But when the speaker sees that, they think they’re absolutely dying on stage. I try not to read too much into it. At readings people tend to look the same when they’re bored as when they’re totally fascinated. The only way to find out if anybody’s actually paying attention out there is to make a joke. If nobody laughs, yep, you’re dying.

Lesson 4: Massively over-prepare. Unless you’re superhuman, if you want to speak coherently in front of a crowd, without notes, then you have to run through your speech, like, a lot of times. More times than you’d think. It’s like drinking water before you go to bed after a big night out: just force yourself to do it. I don’t write things down, or memorize a specific wording for what I want to say, because then it comes out sounding robotic. But I do practice saying what I’m going to say, in different ways, over and over again.

Lesson 5: Either have a beer or don’t. I’ve tried it both ways. Rule of thumb, if I’m in a bar, and other people are drinking, I’ll have a beer. This may or may not make me a better speaker. But the point is: I like beer.

Lesson 6: Do be funny, if you can manage it. The secret here is, you don’t actually have to be super-funny when you’re speaking in public. Nobody expects you to be Jon Stewart. People are pessimistic; they don’t expect speakers to be funny at all, so a pretty small amount of funniness goes a surprisingly long way. Say the joke as un-nervously as possible, and you can almost psyche people into laughing. Just don’t go too far and laugh at your own joke. I’ve seen perfectly funny jokes be killed in broad daylight that way. Not pretty.

Lesson 7: Pretend you’re having a good time. This is an iron law. It doesn’t really feel like it, but when you’re speaking in public you are effectively throwing a party. You are the host of this particular social function, and it is your sworn duty to convince people that they didn’t make a horrific mistake by showing up. You have no choice: whatever your personal feelings or ideological beliefs are about smiling, you must smile, at least a little.

Lesson 8: Bail out early. If you’re going to err — and everybody errs — err on the side of reading or speaking too short. I don’t care if you’re John Milton him-bloody-self: Nobody wants to hear you read aloud from your work for half an hour. I think 12 minutes is about optimal. Time yourself before-hand. I read a printed page in about 3 minutes, but YMMV.

Step 9: Personally I don’t bother with that thing where you imagine everybody in the audience in their underwear. I don’t know about you, but I do that all the time anyway. It’s how I get through daily life.

If by some bizarre chance you live near Oxford, and you want to see these principles in action, I’ll be speaking at the Oxford Literary Festival on Friday night.

Next week: How to Make Love … the Lev Grossman Way!

And also there’s life. And children. And dentists. They get in the way a lot too. Plus I just got back from SXSW.

[Amy Billingham wrought this awesome graphic to accompany Julia in her progress through Suvudu's Cage Match bracket.]

This won’t be a long post, as I’m not in a terrifically bloggy place just now. I’m writing, but worse than that I’m plotting, which personally I find to be the most brutal, rock-breaking part of this process.

People don’t talk about plotting that much, they mostly talk about writing, and don’t get me wrong, writing scares me. Pretty much everything scares me. But plotting, that is the serious shit. When you’re in the novel business, you’re not just in the business of saying things with words: you’re extruding the stuff of your unconscious in the form of a series of dramatic events, and that is just a weird thing to be doing. No maps for these territories.

Afterwards, when it’s done, you look at the book and you think, dude: of course, how could I not have seen that, what else did I think was going to happen? (I also think that about everybody else’s books, because of course it’s only mine that are difficult.) But for some reason you have to do it wrong in every possible way before it finally comes out right.

I tried not to book myself wall-to-wall this spring, because I have a lot of writing to do, but I got some offers I couldn’t say no to —  because I didn’t want to — so I didn’t.

So I’m going to the L.A. Times Book Festival in April, for example, because it’s always good fun — it’s really well run, and really big, so you can sort of catch up with everybody at once there. I’ll also be at the Oxford Literary Festival at the end of March because wow — Oxford! My mom went there. And C.S. Lewis taught there. And Jeremy Paxman, host of University Challenge, is also going, and my obsession with that show is well-known. I’ll also be at the Clemson Literary Festival in April because Jillian Weise is running it, and she is the coolest.

I’m doing a lap of my alma maters this spring: I’m a guest at Harvard’s SF/F convention Vericon in March, and on Monday — like, this coming Monday, 2/27 — I’ll be speaking in a really informal way at Yale. So come to those if you’re around and want to hold my hand through the inevitable psychodrama of my returning to my roots. And I’ll be sharing a stage with Ray Kurzweil (or really he’ll be sharing it with me) at SXSW Interactive for one of the keynotes.

That’s most but not all of them — check the Events page if you want to get granular, or just follow me on Twitter so I can bother you about them directly, in real time, forever. (One more: I’m reading as part of the Guerilla Lit series next Wednesday — Leap Day! — a rare New York City appearance.)

And if you can’t make these, I’m doing a full tour this summer to promote the paperback release of The Magician King. Then I’m morphing into an immortal cyborg, so I’ll be pretty much omnipresent from that point on.

No wait! Just a little bit more mourning — there. Done.

Hang on, now I have to mourn my not getting a Nebula nomination. OK, now I’m done.

It’s Monday morning, and I’m wearing my special fancy writing slippers — black with golden fox-heads embroidered on them. I was going to try to find a picture of them online, but there doesn’t seem to be one. Even the manufacturer appears to have discontinued them. Or maybe mine are the only pair ever made, and they have magic powers.

Though probably it’s that first one.

I’m wearing them because I’ve taken a leave of absence from Time. I’ve spent the past couple of months outlining the new book, and taking a tentative cut at the early chapters. Now it’s time to lay down some prose. In bulk. Bulk prose.

So I’m not going to be off the grid for the next couple of weeks, exactly, but I won’t really be on it either. I’ll be sort of next to the grid. I can see the grid from where I am. But this is the part of the process where the book really happens, so I have to get focused.

I feel a lot of pressure, because I don’t have a ton of free time to write my books, and when I get some I have to seriously use it. Pressure is good for me though. In school I was a good test-taker — I was one of those annoying people who always kind of sucked along during the semester but then somehow came out of it with a decent grade, because suddenly during the test I woke up and started paying attention.

So it’s test time. Time to wake up. Smell the coffee.

God I need some coffee.

It’s an exciting time. Except if your series doesn’t get greenlit.

The Magicians show was not greenlit.

This is a hard post to write. I’m really, really disappointed. I also feel bad that I got everybody excited about the project, only to have it immediately fail. I promise you — and I can’t stress this enough — I wouldn’t have done that unless I had some very good reasons to think that the show would in fact be greenlit. In fact I’m pretty stunned that it wasn’t.

I guess those reasons weren’t ironclad. Or maybe they were ironclad but not, I don’t know, adamantium-clad.

At any rate, clearly there was an issue with the cladding.

I don’t have a lot of good information as to why it didn’t happen. I don’t deal with network directly, and even beyond that the networks are pretty black-box about stuff like this: they don’t give out a lot of detail about their decision-making process. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that it has something to do with Terra Nova not doing as well as Fox hoped, so they weren’t anxious to go for another high-profile, high-concept, expensive genre show.

But that’s just speculation. I can’t imagine The Magicians would have been as expensive as Terra Nova. For one thing there aren’t half as many acceraptors in it.

Anyway.

From here the way forward for the show gets rockier, obviously. We’re going to take the script to cable networks. We’re also going to renew talks on the feature-film side. I can’t say I’m bitter about it. I wouldn’t have played my cards differently — we got exactly the right people and exactly the right script. It would have been incredible. It still will be, if we can get it to go somewhere else.

But no question, it’s a big disappointment. We had a really good shot this time, and it didn’t work out.

There ought to be something like a square-cube law of writing, whereby after an author writes a certain amount of words, the amount of mail those words generates makes writing more words impossible … well, maybe there oughtn’t.

At any rate, in lieu of dealing with my mail the way I’d like to, I’ll answer some FAQ’s here. If you click through there’s a treat at the end, courtesy of Christopher Shy.

Will there be another Magicians book?

Yes. Working title: The Magician’s Land.

When?

The Magician King came out exactly two years after The Magicians. I’m hoping to stick to that pace. I have a very detailed outline of the new book, and I’ve written the first few chapters.

Will Alice come back?

I could tell you, but it’s really better if I don’t.

Will that be the last book? Is this a trilogy?

[unintelligible]

Will you come speak/read/sign at my convention/conference/school/cosmogenesis/etc.?

Maybe! If I can. I like making public appearances when I can fit them in. Give me details. I have a lot of events scheduled this year already, none of which appear on the Events page of this site yet, because my fingers are weak and tired.

How did you get published in the first place?

Really slowly.

Will you read my manuscript?

I can’t. It’s not that I don’t want to. But reading and writing things is what I do for a living. I spend all my waking hours doing it. I do it while I’m brushing my teeth. I can’t do any more than I already do — I’m maxed out.

Do you do research for your books?

Sort of. I mean, it’s not like I go to Fillory and look around and interview the inhabitants, but I do travel. I don’t tend to go places because I think I’m going to write about them — such behavior would imply the existence of resources of money and thinking-ahead that I don’t have — but sometimes you find yourself in a place, and you realize, yes, I need to write about this place, because something important happens here. And you take down the details. Venice was like that for me, and Cornwall, and the south of France. Also Brooklyn.

Can I buy Magicians merch? Brakebills merch?

Yes. Yes you can.

Your novels sell pretty well. Why do you still work at Time?

That’s a good question. I’ve talked about this before, a couple of times. Bottom line is, I do make a pretty good living from my books. I look at some other writers who are in comparable places in their careers and think, gorram it, they write fiction full time, why don’t I? But I can’t. If I’d made certain decisions earlier in my life, and not made a few others, I could. But  as it is I have a lot of overhead. For reasons that don’t bear going into, I have to live in New York, and that’s incredibly expensive. Also a lot of people depend on the money from the Magicians books, not just me.

And it’s not like working for Time is a crap job. It’s a great job. It doesn’t pay as much as The Magicians pays, but it pays enough.

Do you even see this e-mail? Or does it just go to your assistant or whatever?

I do see the e-mail. I don’t have an assistant. It’s just me.

Quit yer whining.

[unintelligible; possibly "that's not a question"]

Will you answer questions for my class/book club?

Yes. I love clases and book clubs.

Can I be your intern?

I used to say no to this one. Now I’m starting to think I could use the help. But I have to figure out how it’s going to work. Watch this space.

What would a really awesome picture of Alice by Christopher Shy look like?

It would look like this:

Awesome, right? So awesome.