Christopher L. Bennett's Blog, page 79

ONLY SUPERHUMAN paperback and audiobook available for pre-order!

Well, this comes sooner than I expected — I happened to notice the other day that some of the major book-buying sites online are already offering pre-order links for the mass-market paperback edition of Only Superhuman, which according to them is due to be released on August 27, just about seven months from now. (Give or take, of course, since there’s no fixed release date for most books, just whenever the stores get them on the shelves.) The listed retail price for the MMPB is $7.99, pretty much standard for the format — in other words, the same amount that my Star Trek novels sell for. So fans of my Trek work who’ve found the hardcover of Only Superhuman too pricey, yet prefer to have a physical book rather than buying the $11.99 eBook edition, can now order your copies at last, though you’ll have to wait a few more months to read it.

And Amazon has a preorder link for the audiobook adaptation from GraphicAudio as well, which is due out in February (though I’m not sure when in February) and is apparently 7 hours long and will retail for $19.99 on CD. Here are the links:

Only Superhuman MMPB — Barnes & Noble

Only Superhuman MMPB — Amazon

Only Superhuman audiobook — Amazon

Only Superhuman audiobook — GraphicAudio (not yet active)

Another interview link

Recently I did a print interview for author/blogger Cody L. Martin, which can be read here:

http://codylmartin.blogspot.jp/2013/01/interview-christopher-l-bennett.html

Joseph-Beth signing: The show must go on

Well, the Joseph-Beth book signing on Wednesday went off reasonably well, despite the fact that I’ve been dealing with a cold and a sore throat for most of the week and have been kept up nights coughing. On the wee hours of Wednesday morning, desperate for sleep, I drove to the pharmacy to look for something I could take for the cough, but I wasn’t sure I trusted any of the options, since I had a bad reaction to a cold medicine a few years ago and I didn’t quite remember which medicine it had been. And I was too tired to think clearly anyway, so I just gave up, went home, and suffered through another sleepless night. But Wed. morning I looked online for sore throat remedies, and treated myself with tea and honey, cough drops, and pseudoephedrine from the drugstore. (The stuff that gave me the bad reaction was the stuff that’s replaced pseudoephedrine in over-the-counter meds since it was discovered that the substance could be used to make methamphetamines. Now you can still get it but have to show your ID at the pharmacy counter.)

So by the time I got to the signing, I was still below my peak, but at least my voice was reasonably functional. And the folks at J-B were very helpful and got me a hot tea with lemon for my throat. My scene reading from Only Superhuman didn’t go as smoothly as it ideally would’ve, but I got through it okay. The event wasn’t as well-attended as it could’ve been, but better than some Shore Leave panels I’ve been on. And another local genre author I recently met, Laura Resnick, was kind enough to attend the event and participate in the Q&A/audience discussion after my reading. The audience had a good range of questions about both OS and my Trek/tie-in work, and one of them bought a copy of Forgotten History. And overall, the folks there, both store employees and attendees, had very positive and heartening things to say about the book and its prospects for success. (And they let me keep the banner they printed up for the signing!) We didn’t sell that many autographed copies of the book then and there, but they had me sign the rest of their stock, and the store’s publicity guy sounded confident that the book would continue to have legs, especially once it comes out in paperback this fall. I hope he’s right.

—

Anyway, though the pseudoephedrine helped me have a borderline-functional voice for the signing, I paid for it that night, since apparently one of its possible side effects is sleeplessness, and I didn’t get a wink of sleep despite not having as bad a cough. (Which is odd, because it didn’t have that effect on me in the past — that’s why I thought I should use it instead of the substitute, which I think had similar but stronger effects on me.) That’s at least three nights in the past week, two of them consecutive, that were completely sleepless for me. Yesterday I was getting worried about how long I could go without REM sleep before it impaired me. I stopped taking the decongestant once I realized it was probably keeping me awake, but the tradeoff was that my cough kept me awake again, plus my attempt at a late-afternoon nap yesterday probably threw off my sleep cycle. The cough drops helped, but after sucking on a few of them, they start to taste really foul to me. Still, I apparently managed to get a few hours’ sleep last night, and my throat feels better today. I think I’m finally coming out of it, which is good, because it’s been very hard to concentrate on my writing or other responsibilities the past few days. Which is why this post is a day late.

“Cincinnati Edition” interview link

The interview I did for the Cincinnati Edition radio show is now online. Here’s the link:

http://www.wvxu.org/post/only-superhuman

And a reminder — my book signing is tomorrow, Tuesday January 15 at 7 PM at the Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Rookwood Pavilion, Cincinnati.

“Cincinnati Edition” interview this weekend

Today I went down to the building where my father used to work and recorded a radio interview which will be airing this weekend on Cincinnati Edition, a newsmagazine program that airs locally at 7 AM Saturdays and Sundays on NPR affiliates WVXU in Cincy and WMUB in Oxford, OH — just in time to tout my book signing next Tuesday. I had a nice talk with the show’s host Mark Perzel, who had very nice things to say about Only Superhuman, and who even knew my father before his retirement, something I either never knew or had forgotten. Anyway, the interview, which covers my Star Trek work as well as OS, should be up on their website as a podcast by Monday, I’m told, and I’ll post the link when it’s available.

ONLY SUPERHUMAN annotations are now up!

They’re a couple of months late, but I’ve finally completed and posted the annotations for Only Superhuman on my website. The page-by-page annotations and other background notes, artwork, and interviews can be accessed from the main page for the novel.

More ONLY SUPERHUMAN art: Psyche

Last year, I posted the design sketches I’d done for Emerald Blair, the lead character in Only Superhuman. These were illustrations I did years earlier, mostly 2002-3, before I wrote the book. Well, I also did sketches of Psyche Thorne, the other leading lady in the book, but I never got around to coloring them and I didn’t want to post them until I did. Which is something I only managed to do recently.

I hesitate to post these at all, since Psyche is supposed to be a woman of staggering beauty and allure, and maybe that’s something best left to the individual reader’s imagination. Also it’s questionable that my limited artistic abilities can come close to capturing that beauty, even with the excellent real-life exemplars I used as references. But Psyche’s looks are also somewhat unusual, an amalgam of ethnicities, so it may be hard for some readers to imagine what I had in mind. (I’m reminded of how many readers of The Hunger Games were surprised that Rue was black in the film, even though she was specifically described as dark-skinned the first three or four times she appeared in the book. Sometimes readers overlook elements of a physical description.) Besides, I went to all the trouble of finishing the drawings, so I might as well share them.

So here are my illustrations of Psyche Thorne, which, while far from perfect, give a reasonable indication of what I envisioned.

Copyright Christopher L. Bennett

(click to enlarge)

I based Psyche’s face on several women of different ethnicities that I found to be otherwise similar in appearance and exceptionally beautiful. Mostly she’s a blend of two friends of mine from college, one a strawberry-blond Caucasian, the other African-American, but otherwise strikingly similar in appearance. I also used a photo of Kristin Kreuk to get some Asian influence in there, mainly in the eyes and nose, though I don’t think it comes across as well as I’d hoped. And she’s maybe a bit more chubby-faced than what I had in mind, though I think that’s mainly a shading issue with the cheeks. I am happy with the expression, though; it captures the blend of warmth and naughtiness I was going for.

I wasn’t very happy with the colored-pencil work I did. It was hard to get smooth texture, something that was more of a problem with Psyche’s rich complexion than with Emry’s pale one, and the colors I had available didn’t match the skin and hair tones I was going for very well. So I did a lot of work in the computer to fix it — superimposing translucent layers of solid color that better matched what I wanted, and softening and blurring the pencil lines as much as I could without losing the shading detail. It’s not perfect, but I think it came out reasonably well, considering.

So for the second, full-length drawing, I decided to do the coloring entirely in the computer, something I have very little experience with. I had a few false starts, but I finally got a handle on it, I think. This depicts Psyche in the outfit she wore for her big introductory scene in Chapter 7.

Copyright Christopher L. Bennett

(click to enlarge)

The shading isn’t as nuanced as I could achieve in pencil, but I think it gets the idea across reasonably well. And I like the translucent effect the paint program let me achieve with the outer dress layer. Easier than trying to create that effect in colored pencil would’ve been.

If her pose and proportions look a little exaggerated, rest assured I based it all on photo reference. I chose a slinky, provocative pose to fit the character and the outfit. She’s angled a little to the viewer’s left, which makes her waist look narrower than it is. Also, she’s a full 6 feet tall, which makes her seem skinnier in proportion. I wanted her to be tall, slim and leggy in contrast to Emerald Blair’s mesomorphic physique. Emry’s build is inspired by tennis star Serena Williams, while Psyche’s owes more to Maria Sharapova.

I don’t know if I’ll do any more character art for Only Superhuman. Again, these are sketches I did years ago, when I had more free time for drawing, and I’m rather out of practice. But I wouldn’t be averse to seeing fan art, if anyone were interested.

I’m signing at Joseph-Beth in Cincinnati on January 15!

It’s been announced by Macmillan that I’ll be appearing at the Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Cincinnati to do a reading from Only Superhuman along with signing that and, presumably, whatever other books of mine they have around. It’s scheduled for Tuesday, January 15, 2013 at 7 PM, and the address is 2692 Madison Road, Cincinnati, OH 45208.

This isn’t actually up on the J-B site yet, though, so it’s possible the specifics aren’t entirely firmed up yet. If any of this information turns out to need correction, I’ll be sure to post it as soon as I can.

Feeling better

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago how stressed I was from the tight deadline on my Trek novel, anxiety about how Only Superhuman was performing, and pain from over-exercising, and how I was starting to feel better as I got close to the deadline. Well, after the deadline passed, I started to feel worse again. The pain came back, my indigestion kept getting worse, and so the stress returned too. I’d lie awake in the middle of the night feeling this ache in my side and be afraid it was an ulcer or a hernia or a tumor or something rather than just the muscle strain that, in the light of day, I knew it probably was.

So I did a few things. One, I went to the doctor and got reassured that it was just a muscle strain, and got some advice on how to cope with it. That actually caused me a little more pain for a couple of days because of one of the tests he had me do, but that finally cleared up a few days later. Two, on my doctor’s advice, I started to cut back on my food intake a bit in order to lose some of the excess weight I’ve put on over the past year or so — fewer between-meal snacks, smaller portions, less peanut butter, fewer desserts. Although I still try to eat pretty healthy, I may have simply been eating too much, and my peanut butter habit was maybe the worst contributor of excess calories.

Three, I got a new mattress and boxspring. My old ones were getting kind of saggy and I thought maybe they might be worsening the pain in my sides; plus I was often feeling quite sleepy and faint-headed during the day. I actually wasn’t sure at first if the new mattress would help, if I’d gotten the right kind that would give me enough back support and what-have-you, if its “pillow top” was too lumpy for me to get comfortable on it. That was itself a source of stress for a while. For the first couple of nights with it, I was awake in the middle of the night and had to get up and then go back to sleep later, but that was due to the humidity or my side pain or whatever, so I couldn’t specifically pin it on the mattress. Still, it caused me some concern.

And four, although this seemed like a long shot, I got a new bottle of the heartburn medicine I take. My recent digestive problems seemed to begin not long after I bought a new bottle of the generic stuff at a different pharmacy than usual. So I’d begun to wonder if maybe there was something wrong with that particular batch, but it was a pretty big bottle and I’m pretty stingy so I didn’t want to buy a new bottle just on a suspicion. I figured that my digestive upset was probably more due to the deadline pressures and so forth. But since the problems were still getting worse even after the deadline, and since there wasn’t that much left in the bottle anyway, I decided to go ahead and buy a new bottle elsewhere.

So the upshot is, it all seems to be working. I’m still a bit sore in my sides, but it’s gradually improving. I’ve adjusted to the mattress and I’m sleeping better and feeling more rested. And my indigestion seems to be clearing up, though I can’t be positive it’s because of the new bottle; maybe getting a better night’s sleep is just reducing my stress, or maybe eating a bit less is putting less strain on the ol’ pipes. Maybe it’s just a placebo effect. But whatever the reason, I am feeling better at long last. Yesterday afternoon and evening, in fact, I felt more relaxed and content than I have in ages. It’s weird, though, but what really seemed to spark my good mood was going for a walk in the heavy rain yesterday. Maybe there were some good ions in the air or something. Maybe it was because I enjoy the sound of the rain, or because it was pleasing to see the little waterfall that formed on the steps of the walkway on the other end of the apartment complex. Whatever the reason, it felt cleansing. And I’m in a better place now psychologically, and increasingly physically, than I have been all month. Hopefully it’ll last.

FORGOTTEN HISTORY reprinted in e-book omnibus THE CONTINUING MISSIONS, Vol. 1

Simon & Schuster/Pocket is about to put out several e-book omnibuses (yes, that is the correct plural) each combining three related Star Trek novels into one volume. One of them, Star Trek: The Original Series: The Continuing Missions, Volume 1, includes my own DTI novel Forgotten History along with Greg Cox’s The Rings of Time and Dayton Ward’s That Which Divides. In this case, the books aren’t really related, more just a trio of recent standalone TOS adventures, although Rings and FH both involve time travel and there’s a slight bit of cross-reference between them. (Maybe TWD also fits with the general theme of space-time phenomena because it involves a pocket universe, though that’s reaching.) But what the hey, it’s a new edition of one of my books. And the FH cover is being used as the cover for the whole volume:

I admit, FH is kind of an odd choice for inclusion here, since it’s not entirely a self-contained TOS novel but ties into DTI: Watching the Clock as well. Still, I wrote it so that it could work as a TOS novel guest-starring some guys from the future. And who knows? Maybe this omnibus will help bring the story to at least some TOS readers who didn’t take note of it when it was published under the DTI banner. Again, though, this is only being released in e-book form as far as I know.

And yeah, it looks as if all TOS prose tales from now on are going to be subtitled The Original Series, presumably to distinguish them from the new movies.

UPDATE: Oops, sorry, forgot to mention — the publication date is on or around January 29, 2013.