David Anthony Durham's Blog, page 52

Go To The Next Room

Random post, this one.

Okay, so you know I'm writing for George RR Martin's Wild Card series, right? A month or so ago, he responded to my three part Infamous Black Tongue story. Lots of edits, lots of things to change. My story has to jive with the work of like six other authors - and none of us have read the other author's work! Just George. Master of it all, he is. And good thing, too, because he's an awesome editor. Everything he asked for - either to fit with other stories, or just editor...

Nebula Awards Final Ballot

It's just gone up! The titles in the novel category (where my attention always goes) are:

The Windup Girl , Paolo Bacigalupi (Nightshade, Sep09)

The Love We Share Without Knowing , Christopher Barzak (Bantam, Nov08)

Flesh and Fire , Laura Anne Gilman (Pocket, Oct09)

The City & The City , China Mieville (Del Rey, May09)

Boneshaker , Cherie Priest (Tor, Sep09)

Finch , Jeff VanderMeer (Underland Press, Oct09)

For the rest, take a look HERE. Congrats to them all!

Locus: Three Out Of Four

Locus has just come out with their list of recommended titles from 2009. Alas, The Other Lands (Acacia, Book 2) isn't on the list. Sigh. Not that I'm surprised. I don't think Locus reviewed me this time around, and that kind of precludes later inclusion in a "Best Of" list. Such is the way it is, though, and one must remember that you can't have everything. In this case, there's a balance that still leans in my favor.

Locus did, for example, give me a doozy of a great review for Acacia: The W...

New Cover

I'm writing from the lobby of the hotel at Boskone. Just taking a break for a sec. It's been good, but I'll keep this quick.

I just got a glimpse at the cover Doubleday has planned for the massmarket paperback of The Other Lands. It's the same basic image, but retooled a little. Take a look...

New York Times on E-Book Pricing

Here's another article about the whole thing. Nothing new really, although for me it's official confirmation of stuff I've watched happen personally.

It's got a quite a few quotable lines in it, but I'll resist the urge.

Are You Sure You Want To Say That? Just Wondering...

I recently noticed a blog post by an aspiring sf writer of African descent. She got turned on to the genre, apparently, by reading Harry Potter, and now she has a recently completed manuscript. Thinking she would look into what other black writers had accomplished in the genre, she looked for some titles to read, found Acacia: The War with the Mein, read it and... decided to blog about how lame it was. She didn't like it much. Found the characters mostly uninteresting, their names annoying, n...

AudioFile Interview

My librarian just informed me that I have an interview/article in the current issue of AudioFile magazine. Nice.

HERE it is!

Barack/Barad the Lesser

I got an email from a kind fan recently. Let's call him V. He said nice things about the series, and then he asked me a question. It was about the character Barad the Lesser from The Other Lands (Acacia, Book 2), a character who appears to be mentioned once in the first book - but only in passing - as Barack the Lesser.

Part of V's question was worded like this:

"I wondered when exactly you'd been working on the novel and how much Obama was on the national radar when you chose to name a...

Hampshire Reading

Hey I'm doing a reading!

"Fiction writers Christine Lehner and David Anthony Durham will read from their most recent works of fiction on February 11 at 7 p.m. in the Hampshire College Library Gallery. A book signing and reception will follow the reading. The event is free and open to the public. "

HERE'S more info on it.

Charlie Stross on Amazon, and Toby, and fashionista_35

Another examination of the subject, with some great points.

And here's Tobias Buckell.

All these guys know way more about this stuff than me...

As does fashionista_35, as proven here.

You know, I'm actually not too confused anymore. :)