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Tuesday, 26 February 2008
Tomorrow
Have YOU ever wondered what happens when six or seven sci-fi and fantasy authors are put in the same room with curry and beer paid for by a publisher?Me neither.
But that's precisely what's happening tomorrow lunchtime (Wednesday 27th February), with a positive cornucopia of Gollancz authors in attendance. It's going to be me, Tom Lloyd (Or Lloydy, as we affectionately know him), Rob Grant (Grantsy), Adam Roberts (Robertsy), Mark Chadbourn (Chadders), and Robert Rankin. At least three of those people write proper, honest-to-goodness amusing books, with gags and everything, so you can bet some pretty damn hilarious shit is going to go down.
Richard Morgan (Morgsy) couldn't make it, alas, he'll be watching whales.
So to recap - me, Lloydy, Grantsy, Robertsy, Chadders, and Robert Rankin, in a curry house, talking that high-brow jive that authors talk to each other. You know, where Nabokov went wrong, the shortcomings of the third-person limited, who do you like for the Nebulas, and not at all the SAME OLD RUBBISH that everyone else talks.
Who knows what hilarious larks and hijinks will ensue? Well, actually, if you're in any way interested, YOU, JOE PUBLIC, can know, because apparently the whole thing is being filmed on VIDEO TAPE MACHINES. Not to embarrass the various horrified writers involved as they spill Madras down themselves, but actually for marketing purposes. Publishers, man. What will they think of next? More as I know it.
I believe that Editorial Director Simon Spanton (Spanty, as I affectionately call him) will have an exciting, though probably heavy, brown-paper package to give to me. Ooooooh. More on that mystery in due course.
Following that it's off for coffee with my editor, Gillian (I dare not even pretend to have a nickname for her), who's had the PROFOUND PRIVILEGE of reading the first 90,000 words of my latest book over the last week or two and has, in her own words, "a few vicious suggestions". Always she wants more blood. More torture. More gore. "The readers want gore," I can almost guarantee she'll say. "Gore, gore, gore, torture, and gore. Less of this namby-pamby characterisation bollocks, and more torture. There's only one hideously violent murder in the first chapter! Call yourself a writer?" In all seriousness, we need to come up with ideas for the cover. Something parchmenty, with blood? I wouldn't be surprised.
Then, finally, on BBC4 at 9.00 pm (though repeated at 12.00, I believe). There's the first episode of The Worlds of Fantasy, a TV series on Fantasy Literature for which I have been interviewed, would you believe. This episode focuses on the child hero, apparently - you know, stuff like Potter, Pullman, Pan's Labyrinth. Doesn't feature me at all. The next one (on worldbuilding) might feature some contributions from me, though, moodily lit in a strange old house on Wardour Street. Unless I've bitten the cutting room floor, and HARD (not unlikely). I'm a film editor myself, I know the game. That one (the one that might feature me) isn't until the following week (Wednesday 5th March) at 9.00 and midnight. Anyway, the show's been getting some good write-ups, and fantasy fiction gets precious little attention from the rest of the media, so I'm sure it'll be well worth a look for readers of the genre even if I'm not involved...
Monday, 25 February 2008
Big Fish, Little Fish
The UK Mass-Market Paperbacks of Before They are Hanged (seen here on the right - the smaller one) turned up from the publisher today. They're due out mid-march and will swiftly replace the Trade Paperback edition (seen here on the left - the bigger one) which will go out of print.
Seemed a good moment to discuss the strange ins and outs of different editions, which I must confess I don't entirely understand, but here goes...
It holds generally true that a novel is released first in hardback, then in trade paperback (the hardback pages in a paperback binding, so generally a larger format paperback, sometimes, especially in the US, a truly flipping enormous one), then, perhaps a year after first being released, when committed readers of the author in question will already have bought the more expensive editions, in a mass-market paperback (small format, dodgier paper and printing) which will hopefully be the edition that sticks around on the shelves for at least a few years to come.
Of course, different publishers all have their own recipes when it comes to this type of thing. Many of them, especially smaller presses, only print trade editions, and don't go mass-market (Pyr, my US publisher, is one such). Others are only mass-market imprints, who tend to take books that others have already printed in trade editions (J'ailu, my French Publisher, had previously only published mass-market, but are starting this year to do Trade editions as well). Orbit in the US have been experimenting with putting some fantasy series straight into mass-market paperback and releasing them in rapid succession (even a month apart). Heyne, my German publisher, do only one paperback edition that is somewhere between a trade and a mass-market edition.
Gollancz, my UK (and main) publisher, do all three types (hardcover, trade paperback, mass-market), but they tend to release the hardcover and trade paperbacks together. There's a relatively short print run of hardcovers, which are usually bought by collectors. They don't tend to reprint these because only the 1st/1st is really of interest. The trade paperback edition is therefore the one that generally finds its way onto bookshop shelves and into the sweaty hands of early adopters. Once that edition has been out for around a year and sales have dropped off, and hopefully just before the author's next book is published in trade, a mass-market paperback is released and the trade edition phased out. This hopefully produces a new round of interest in the old book and reaches some markets that are usually closed to trade editions - some outlets, like railway stations and airports only carry mass-market formats and some bookshops just prefer to promote them for whatever reason.
So you can see how this approach makes perfect sense with, say, a crime writer. Each book promotes the next, and after reading a few mass-markets by an author a given reader might choose to get the next book early and move up to a more expensive edition. It becomes a little more problematic in the case of a fantasy series, though (doesn't everything), especially one by an unknown author. Let's say you get into the series a couple of months after the second book comes out, having read good reviews. You buy the first in mass-market, since it's the only format available in the bookshops. You then scramble to buy the second, but find it's only available in this irritatingly much larger format. You'll have no choice but to buy it in trade, or to wait for the mass-market of the second, but then you'll be in the same position with the third book.
Annoying, especially when amazon doesn't really specify what format it is, just says paperback, and gives the dimensions (like anyone checks the dimensions when they buy a book), but it's hard to see a better way of doing things, unfortunately. So for those irritated by a lack of matching books, I can only do what I always do, and blame my editor.
While we're on the subject, see laid out before your disbelieving eyes all five UK editions of Before They are Hanged:
Top Left - UK Uncorrected Manuscript Proof. Has a glossy rather than a textured cover, without foil, and isn't properly set therefore has more pages and is considerably chunkier than the production editions. Sent well prior to general release to reviewers, industry notables, and unscrupulous cads who then stick them on e-bay.
Top Centre - UK Hardcover. Only about 1,000 printed and getting pretty scarce, if the number of people e-mailing me to complain about not being able to find one is anything to go by. See the foil upon its lavishly textured wrap-around cover complete with photograph of the author gleam like the moon upon the sea.
Top Right - UK Book Club Hardcover. A small format hardback printed by the UK SF book club and sold only to its members. Again, a glossy, unfoiled cover.
Bottom Left - UK Trade Paperback, the workhorse edition, complete with textured paper and foil.
Bottom Right - UK Mass-Market Paperback, soon to be unleashed upon an unsuspecting world. Smaller pages and hence more of them. Also incidentally includes a teaser chapter for the next book at the end, since it will be available in trade at pretty much the same time...
Labels: process
Friday, 22 February 2008
Scalding, lukewarm, hot, hot...ish
Sci-Fi & Fantasy forum and review site SFFWorld, where I am occasionally to be found singing my own praises, have been voting on their favourite books of 2007 and guess what came top? Only Before They are Hanged. The Blade Itself was also fifth on the list for the second year running, which was nice. The full rundown, you ask? Well, if you insist:1. Before They are Hanged
2. The Name of the Wind - Pat Rothfuss
3. Reaper's Gale - Steve Erikson
4. Renegade's Magic - Robin Hobb
5. The Blade Itself/The Lies of Locke Lamora - Scott Lynch
See how I've put the books that I wrote in bold face so that no-one misses them. Heavy on the series-based epic fantasy, I think it's safe to say, but I'm not complaining.
Ken, over at Neth Space, rated The Blade Itself highly, but had a rather more lukewarm response to the sequel:
"If you enjoyed The Blade Itself, then chances are high that you'll enjoy Before They Are Hanged ... but since this is the second book of the trilogy, the novelty of the approach has worn off. With the novelty gone, things almost become tiresome in places ... Without Abercrombie's superior characterization and sardonic wit the plot would drag these books into obscurity instead of serving an adequate vehicle for what he's really about."
Interesting. I'm always a bit surprised when people don't like the second book as much, as I (and my Mum, incidentally) think it's better in pretty much every way. Most folks seem to agree, especially those who were perhaps a bit underwhelmed by the first, but there have definitely been a few commentators who really like the first book that are disappointed with the second. Perhaps it's that the plot seems to follow a more well-worn epic fantasy style path in Before They are Hanged. I think that time will vindicate me, but, well, I guess you can't please everyone.
Only look at Lilith St. Crow, author of Urban Fantasies such as Working for the Devil. She just so happens to have been reading The Blade Itself, and she despised it.
Only kidding!
"There's wizards, mythology, kings, princes, a self-absorbed nobleman, ancient legends, fencing - all written so well I was grinding my teeth with envy whenever I HAD to put the book down. This is a fantastic start to a trilogy, and I can't wait to get the next two books so I can see what happens next. There are some tropes, true, but they're handled so deftly and characterised so beautifully they take on the status of old friends instead of worn-out archetypes.
In short, I can't say enough good things about this book, and I highly recommend it."
And finally ... Pat, of Pat's Fantasy Hotlist, who had, shall we say, qualified praise for the first two books, has cast his critical eye over Last Argument of Kings, and given it a pretty decent write up, I have to say:
"Last Argument of Kings is an excellent conclusion to what turned out to be a very entertaining series. And by demonstrating that he can close the show with a bang, Joe Abercrombie now holds the pole position as far as "the bright new voices of the fantasy genre" are concerned."
Proof positive that I do indeed, as many have often suspected, "hold the pole." OK, he gives it 8/10, but it's an improvement on my previous pair of 7.5s, and I think it's safe to say Pat has a ratings system as stern as Eowyn's chastity belt. My epic quest to find an internet critic with the sheer courage, honour, and vision to give me full marks will continue, I swear it.
Labels: reviews
Saturday, 16 February 2008
Influences, Ideas, and A Game of Thrones
You lucky people! There's a positive onslaught of content here at the moment. There's an article by me in the latest SFX (no. 167, I think, with that cheerleader from Heroes looking sensitive yet spunky on the front) about George RR Martin's A Game of Thrones, a book which I daresay needs little introduction for the majority of you. It's one of their book club pieces, in which a well-respected author of today looks back on a classic of the distant (or in this case pretty current) past. Clearly they'd run out of well-respected authors, because they asked me if I'd like to do it.I can't quote the piece here, obviously, since I sold it to SFX for an embarrasingly massive quantity of money that may have approached 10,000 pence. But in essence I talk about the book's great importance in the dark and seedy side of epic fantasy, leading on from stuff like Conan, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and Elric, and how Martin's work seems to have spawned a whole subsection of 'gritty', realistic epic fantasy. What I didn't really talk about in the article was the book's (and the series') importance to ME, and the development of my own work. Of course I didn't talk about that. That would've been arrogant and self-indulgent, and you all know I'm just not like that.
That's why I'm doing it here.
A little background. As a kid I was very into the Lord of the Rings, and read it every year for a while. Wizard of Earthsea also had a strong effect on me. So did Michael Moorcock (particularly Corum and all the crazy names). I watched Conan the Barbarian many times more than is healthy for a teenage boy (there's boobs in it, and I'm not just talking about Schwarzenegger's). I started playing an awful lot of roleplaying games around this time, and with supplements from that, early fantasy-styled computer games such as Dungeon Master, Bloodwych, and Legend, cracking through a load of Dragonlance, and David Eddings first two series (or are they the same series with different covers?) I probably glutted myself on the cheesier end of the fantasy spectrum. Nothing wrong with cheese, you understand, as long as you get some fibre in your diet at the same time. But it did appear (and apologies to any of the glaring exceptions, because I lay no claim to being immensely well read in the genre) there wasn't a lot of fibre to be had in epic fantasy as the eighties turned into the nineties.
So I more or less stopped reading it in my late teens. No grand decision to fling it aside in dismay, just I went to college and got into other things. You know. Luge. International money-laundering. Semi-professional knife throwing. Russian roulette. And Street Fighter II, of course. During long walks after midnight at around this time, I was still thinking about some of the ideas I'd had earlier, as a reader and a gamer, for world and storyline of an epic fantasy, and characters like Bayaz and Logen Ninefingers were named and gradually taking shape in my mind. In the summer after finishing college (so about 13 years ago, now), with time on my hands, I started writing a book very similar to the one that would finally become The Blade Itself as an exercise to improve my touch-typing. I say similar, because it lacked key elements of the later approach. It was a much more straight-up epic fantasy, cheesier effort, without the sideways, world-weary self-awareness, or most of the laughs. Without Inquisitor Glokta at all, incidentally, who was much the most recent character to emerge. It was, in short, not very good. I'm sure if I read any of it now I would vomit with embarrasment. In fact, I may have vomited a little bit just now thinking about it.
Anyway, I moved to London (summer of '94?) and had other things on my mind - cokroaches, flatmates on the borders of sanity, and so forth, started working and pretty much shelved any plans to write. I started reading a lot of history around this time - Shelby Foote, John Keegan, Alan Clark etc. and had more or less no interest in fantasy. Then someone prevailed upon me to give Game of Thrones a go. Yeah, yeah, I thought, whatever. It blew my doors off.
A Game of Thrones, and its sequels, seemed to bring to epic fantasy a huge amount of what I felt it had been desperately missing. There was relatively little debt to Tolkein (not that there's anything wrong with debt to Tolkein, it's just there's a shit-load of it around already). Martin's world was low on magic, low on romanticism, high on realism, very high on ruthlessness. There was no lame-ass, two-dimensional battle of good and evil. There were no lame-ass, two-dimensional characters. It was an (more or less) entirely human world, with man-made evils, very much like ours. The series was recognisably fantasy, it had enough that was familiar, but it was groundbreaking (at least for me) in all kinds of ways. Above all, the books were extremely unpredictable, especially in a genre where readers have come to expect the intensely predictable. Suddenly, from knowing what was going to happen from the first page and always being right, you found yourself with no idea who'd die next. Sudden main character deaths have become almost de rigeur in the genre since then, or at least in the grittier corners of it, but A Game of Thrones was profoundly shocking when I first read it, and fundamentally changed my notions about what could be done with epic fantasy.
It was also interesting from a technical standpoint - Martin uses the third person limited approach, as it's called, with the events always narrated from "inside the head", if you like, of one of the main characters. All the action is seen powerfully close up, coloured by the personality of the narrator. For me, fantasy went suddenly from being all about the huge, the spectacular, the sweeping wide shot (following on from Tolkein's approach) to being about the experience of individuals. You feel the sweat, the pain, the fear, the blood, you understand the motivations. You see how no-one is a villain in their own mind, even if they are in everyone else's. The great achievement of Martin's books, for me, is that they cover vast, epic, immense events, but never lose that sense of tight involvement with the characters. It wasn't a new approach in wider fiction - I guess Tolstoy was doing something similar in War and Peace - but it was the first time I'd seen it applied so rigorously and effectively in fantasy, and it seems now to have become pretty much the standard method of narration in the genre.
I must confess I haven't read A Feast for Crows yet. I'm waiting on the next and will probably read them both together. Though there was still a load of brilliant stuff in the third book, A Storm of Swords, it seemed more spread out than A Game of Thrones had been. I know a lot of readers love that sense of scale, but I was frustrated by the apparent loss of focus - the adding and divergence of the points of view, the steady increase in the simple spine size of the books without a matching growth in overall narrative movement. The books seemed to get fatter, if you like, but not taller. The story expanded sideways but shrunk lengthways. Maybe I'd been expecting a trilogy, or maybe I was just disappointed as it became clearer and clearer there'd be no final resolution any time soon. Probably there was an element of diminishing returns, in that the first book was, for me, so smack-mouth amazing that it was near impossible to turn me upside down in the same way afterwards. They were great, don't get me wrong, just not as great. I imagine I'm not the only one who's keen to see whether Martin can pull it all together in the long run...
Looking at my own (insignificant) development as a writer, if I may be pretentious enough to do so (mmmmmm ... yeah, I think I can be that pretentious). Between that earlier, suckier effort at writing an epic fantasy, back in '93, and the much more successful effort (at least in my opinion) in '02, what changed? Well, I grew up considerably, for one thing, experienced working life and broader horizons, and learned to take everything a bit less seriously. I read a lot of history, which I think gives the books a much more convincing texture, if you like, than they otherwise would have had. I read a fair bit of heavyweight literature - the sort of thing one boasts about at dinner parties - Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, and Bulgakov, Dickens, Trollope and Sterne and blah, blah, blah which definitely improved my technical reach (as pathetic as I'm sure some people think it remains). I read quite a bit of noir and crime, particularly James Elroy, which taught me some good lessons about hard-hitting prose and twisty plotting. I worked as a documentary editor which gave me some understanding of how to construct a narrative, of how to streamline and cut down (says the writer of enormous 200,000 word books, but hey, I like to think they're pretty tight). I watched a lot of interesting films, including Tarantino's stuff (Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction had strong effects on me), John Woo and manga, the list is endless (well, not actually endless, but bloody long). TV changed, I think, in this period, starting to throw up some really interesting series which were shifting media in general in a more realistic, complicated, ruthless direction - stuff like the Sopranos, the Shield, 24 (at least to begin with), Band of Brothers, and later Deadwood, Nip/Tuck and the Wire (man I love the Wire) - a movement that seems to be creeping into SF TV now with shows like Heroes and Battlestar Galactica. All of that settled on me as well, I'm sure, and I think my approach to action writing probably owes more to what I've watched than what I've read.
So there's an awful lot of different stuff in the pot, as I'm sure there is for every author, and most of it from outside the genre. But in terms of influences from written fantasy, between '93 and '02, Game of Thrones (and A Song of Ice and Fire in general) is definitely the outstanding (if not the only significant) one. I doubt The First Law would look quite the way it does without my having read those books. Hell, maybe I wouldn't even have written it at all.
Labels: influences, news
Friday, 15 February 2008
SF Site Readers' Choice
This is nice. SF Site have posted their Readers' favourite books of 2007. Look what's in there at number 5.Before They are Hanged, that's what, by Joe Abercrombie.
At number FIVE.
Particularly pleasing since I didn't even get near the also rans last year, and it's a book that has barely even been published in the US. SF Site also posted their Critics' favourite books of 2007. I'm nowhere near that list, naturally, which is fair enough, as you'd expect less commercial, more literary stuff to dominate there. It only goes to prove that I am, indeed, "fastly becoming the Big Mac of the genre".
Although, come to think of it, I am only at number 5. Pat Rothfuss is looming large at number 1, as he is on virtually everything this year. Curse that bearded fantasy wunderkind and his way with lyrical storytelling! So I guess I'll have to concede, with great and ill-becoming bitterness, that he's the Big Mac, at least for 2007. I'm probably closer to a slightly less popular staple of the McDonald's menu, like, say, a Fillet o' Fish or something. But I'm on the menu, motherf*ckers!
Before They are Hanged! FIVE!
By who, you ask?
Why, by me, Joe Abercrombie.
FIVE!
I'll go now.
Labels: reviews
Spambait
If you should have a few spare moments at work and need to fritter them away needlessly on the internet (and let's face it, you almost certainly already fritter at least 70% of your time on the internet or there is NO WAY you would have found your way HERE), you could do an awful lot worse than visit Joseph Mallozzi's Spambait.Yes, the Canadian internet raconteur, bon vivant, humour stylist, and occasional Executive Producer of Stargate Atlantis has finally bowed to his own popular demand and gathered together in one place his email responses to various internet scammers, including contributions from the Cookie Monster, FBI Agent Felix Wexler, and my own personal favourite, Baron Destructo.
I suggest you begin with the brief Baron Destructo's response to Mr. Zemin. If that appeals you could graduate to his lengthy discussion with Martin Holme, and take it from there...
Brilliant stuff.
Labels: ha ha
Thursday, 14 February 2008
American Edition
Jeez. You spend all week waiting for Joe Abercrombie to make another post, and then three come at once. But it's good news, folks, it's good, good news.
The US Edition of Before They are Hanged wasn't due to be available until March 25th, but I'm delighted to announce that due to the heroic efforts of the folks at Pyr, it is shipping NOW from amazon.com. Not sure when it will appear in olde-fashioned bricks and mortar bookshops, but probably over the next couple of weeks. Deprived citizens of America, your wait is over!
In order to whet your appetites, I must just quote a bit of opinion on the books from a member over at the Westeros boards which quite tickled my funny bone:
"I actually don't care for Abercrombie as a whole but I do think he writes very accessible work. It is snarky in a not so clever way and it has a great patina of being gritty without actually having characters do gritty things (bar one good slightly gritty but still moralistically heavyhanded moment in the second book). Abercrombie is solid easy to read fast food fantasy. It comes off as filling but ultimately I found it empty ... Abercrombie is fastly turning into the Big Mac of the genre and you might as well take a bite along with everyone else."
Abercrombie is fastly turning into the Big Mac of the genre?
I LOVE IT! I'm getting in touch with my editor now to see if it's not too late to get it on as a cover blurb...
Labels: announcements, news
Wednesday, 13 February 2008
Cloverfield
Late to the party, as always, I went to see Cloverfield tonight. I've seen it get some stick around the place, which quite surprises me as I really liked it, and felt it did exactly what it said on the tin and then some.For those of you not in the know, and without giving too much away - an improbably beautiful cross section of Manhattan folk with complex interpersonal relationship problems are enjoying a fashionable loft party when the city is attacked by colossal monsters. Handheld camera chaos ensues complete with lots of shattering glass, rattling M16s, exploding power transformers, blood, screams, death, angst, and a real shit-load of dust. Everyone is very, very dusty. I even felt a bit dusty in the audience.
There are quite a few moments that stretch belief - where do all the soldiers come from and how did they get tanks into Manhattan so quickly? The motivations of the characters are, on the whole, not terribly convincing. (My god! A giant army of aliens is destroying the upper east side! Let's run towards them!) They seem to get very badly injured then shortly afterwards run up 69 flights of steps without much trouble. The female characters stick to negligible party wear even when there are perfectly good work clothes available. But, for me, the film had just enough of its tongue in its cheek to more than get away with it. There are enough little gags to lighten the mood without damaging the suspense. It's a slantwise look at the monster film, so it has to include all that stuff that a monster film should. Smashed up statue of liberty. Massive foot clomping down and crushing a tank. Skyscraper being demolished etc. And the fact is they do every one of these things very, very well. To bitch about realism seems to me to be kind of missing the point.
At the heart of the film is the notion that "it's all been filmed on a home movie camera so it's all handheld and wobbly and that." This device ain't especially convincing, if you really think about it - I mean, there are about 15 moments where no-one in their right, or even their wrong mind, would have held on to their bowels let alone a camera. But I think once the device is set up you kind of accept it - going back to grab the camera on occasion even becomes an in joke. And it's strangely involving since it puts us in mind so thoroughly of the wobbly, filmed on the camera phone stuff we're so used to seeing these days of 9/11, or 7/7, or the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Then there's some interesting commentary on the ubiquity of filming and photographing in our society, as 'our' cameraman competes with everyone else to get pictures of the chaos. The statue of liberty's head crashes out of the sky and a few moments later the survivors are taking pictures of it on their mobiles.
And, bottom line, the way it's all shot and edited is bloody effective. Effects and action all merge seemlessly - the grainy wobble-o-vision is forgiving to the monsters and the carnage and helps them look very real (if with slightly odd elbows). We can cut from one scene to another with a jerk and some static just like we get on You've Been Framed, which means the pace need never slow and the film need not outstay its welcome. And it doesn't. It's beautifully done, from a technical standpoint. You feel stuck right down there with the action, in amongst the nitty gritty, the little people, and the destruction looks truly massive and genuinely terrifying. My heart barely stopped going for 90 minutes, and that's a hard trick to pull off.
Admittedly, I saw this in a good cinema with good sound. At home on your mom's old black & white it might not work quite so well, but hey. To me, this film achieves exactly what it set out to achieve in spades. No pseudo-science bibble-babble, no striving for deeper issues, and above all mercifully free of the unforgiveable Hollywood soft-centredness that made I am Legend such a disappointment. Just edge of the seat action and really pretty people looking really scared. That's always a winner, right?
8/10
Labels: film and tv
Back on the Grid
Woooo! Got my computer back and it works, and now makes a noise like a quiet exhalation of air rather than an orc dying slowly of an agonising bowel wound. Got to be a good thing. Five star service from Sony, which has quite bowled me over. Six days between leaving the house and coming back fixed, all data intact, they even cleaned it top to bottom, put a nice letter in there apologising for any upset they'd caused me, included a new cleaning cloth, and all completely free of charge. I feel like a VIP. Damn it, I am a VIP! It's amazing the low priority a lot of companies seem to put on customer service these days (he says, bitching like a grumpy old man). As a result of this experience I feel more fondly disposed to Sony than I did before the malfunction. By contrast, I will never buy another Dell product as long as I live. Surely that's worth the relatively small investment in the customer service, one would have thought? Truly, it is a world gone mad...Anyway, email and other services should now be resumed as normal. You've probably all been missing me during the five days since my last post, right? You've probably been feeling a sense of aimlessness, emptiness and depression. You've probably all been checking your browser every ten minutes to see whether I'd made another post. Fear not. Here is an interview with me run by Aidan over at A dribble of ink. Should clean up those sweaty shivers of withdrawal quick sharp...
Labels: interviews, news
Friday, 8 February 2008
Curios and Trivia
Various First Law related curios and trivia from the interweb this week:An interview with yours truly over on French website Elbakin.net conducted by Pat of Pat's Fantasy Hotlist in English or in French. It's more of an introductory sort of an interview for the French audience, focusing on the first book, so those of you who've been slavishly following my every word (and I'm sure there are many thousands) will probably find nothing massively new. But hey, if you slavishly follow my every word (as everyone should), I'm sure you'll love it anyway, because that Joe Abercrombie guy is a hoot. There'll be some other interviews over the coming weeks that perhaps broach newer subject matter.
A very pleasing review of Last Argument of Kings from a man I've shared enough beer with to consider a friend. Mr. Marcus Gipps works for Blackwells and is a respected bookseller with an understanding of the fantasy genre both deep and wide - so you must believe him when he tells you things like this:
"It all works really well, is what I'm trying to say - I care about these characters ... the plot all comes together nicely in the end, people are actually changed by their experiences, and along the way we get some lovely writing. There's a battle scene here that rivals anything I've read in fantasy, quite frankly ... I'm hugely impressed, and if you have any interest in modern fantasy with a (seriously) dark edge, these are well worth reading."
Woo hoo! It's particularly pleasing since Marcus, I think it's fair to say, took time to win over. Someone who I'm still in the process of winning over is one Amras at A Slight Apocalypse. His reviews of The Blade Itself and Before They are Hanged tickle me much:
"I thought that the Blade Itself was one of the most over-hyped and poorly written fantasies I've had the misfortune of reading, and I could not believe why everyone was loving this trite bullsh*t ... I reread The Blade Itself to better learn to love myself. That's a horribly selfish thing to do, you might say, and you would be in the right. It was selfish and also a tad pompous, but somehow I believe that Joe Abercrombie would approve of it nonetheless."
Selfish and pompous? How could I not approve of my two favourite qualities?
That's all for now. I continue not to receive e-mail directed to joeabercrombie dot com, but will hopefully be picking it up within the next couple of weeks, and will respond then. Honest.
Labels: interviews, reviews
Monday, 4 February 2008
Off the Grid
Aaaargh. my second computer in ten months has started to produce a really horrible noise, and now has to go back to the manufacturer, almost certainly to have its fan changed out, and probably to have the hard-drive purged while they're doing it, no doubt giving me days of endless fun trying to reinstall all my software, reconfigure all my settings, and put all my files back on, no doubt to find I failed to back up something vital. Ah, how computers have made all of our lives so much easier.I must give some credit to Sony, here, though. Their customer service has been (so far) very good, and in a world in which customer service seems to have become ubiquitously utterly shite. I contacted one very pleasant man, who competently investigated the problem and arranged for the computer to be picked up, next day. They then phoned me back if you can believe that, twice and I spoke to the same person each time, who gave every impression of the whole business being of some interest to him personally.
This contrasts sharply with the indescribably awful experience I had last year with the incompetent cretins at Dell. Contacting their Indian call centre was something like Kafka meets Fawlty Towers, but without the laughs. I rarely raise my voice on the phone. They had me, on several occasions, literally screaming with rage. In the end, after a litany of cock-ups that make the occupation of Iraq look competent, I had to send the whining piece of shit they sold me (and also the wrongly specified replacement - long story) back and get my money returned. Alas they could not refund the many hours of my life they had stolen. Those are gone for good. My advice? Never, ever buy anything from Dell.
But I digress. The bottom line is that there may well be some interruption in the usually smooth flow of information from me to everyone and anyone else. I may well lose all my e-mails, I may well not be able to pick up any e-mail for a while. If, therefore, you sent me, or send me, e-mails over the last or next couple of weeks, I may not immediately reply. If I haven't replied after a couple of weeks, it might be worth e-mailing me again.
Apologies. Bloody computers. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.
Labels: news
Saturday, 2 February 2008
Bonjour, tout le monde!
For everyone's safety, I think that's about as far as my French should ever go. Yes, today is French Publication day for The Blade Itself, or, as they say across the channel, "L'eloquence de l'epee," the first book, of course, of "La Premiere Loi". Ha ha. Is it sad that I get a kick out of just hearing it in French? Yes, yes it is. "La Premiere Loi." Ha ha.
The publisher is J'ailu, a long established imprint who publish Mass Market editions of such well-known fantasy names as George RR Martin, Robin Hobb, Neil Gaiman etc. etc. This is a new project for them, though, in that they're making a move into trade editions. So the book is first available as a hardback, but will later, I believe, appear in trade paperback and mass-market editions. Because it's a bit of a new endeavour for them they're giving it a big push, which is always very nice to see. If there were to be any French speakers among you (and as far as I can tell there's not that many among you who can manage English to that high a standard), there's actually an interview with my French Editor, Thibaud Eliroff, online about this very collection.
The cover is an interesting one. It's the first representational artwork I've seen of anything from the book yet, and that kind of thing is always going to be surprising for an author. The whole style is just a long way from my first, vague conception of what the characters might look like. Still, the purpose of a cover is to sell the book, or perhaps more accurately, not to deter people from buying the book, and the tastes of different readerships, in cover and in content, differ widely. Witness the black covers with a hint of red/green/blue that seem wildly popular in Germany. My job is writing the books, the selling you have to leave to the publisher, and that's especially true of a foreign market where you know even less what the rules may be. I haven't actually seen any copies myself, yet, but I'm guessing it will be done to a pretty high standard. Even on the proof, the internals are very nicely done.
More news as it appears and my Google translator allows me to make some kind of sense of it...
Labels: announcements, news