Benedict Jacka's Blog, page 28

Reddit AMA Tomorrow

Just a reminder that I’ll be doing my yearly Reddit Ask Me Anything on r/fantasy tomorrow!  I’ll start answering questions at 12 noon GMT, and I’ll keep replying on and off over the next 24 hours before wrapping things up at 12 noon on Friday 4th.  

I’ll post the link tomorrow when the AMA goes live, but in the meantime, here are some links to the AMAs I’ve done on Reddit in previous years:  

2016 AMA (done right after the release of Alex Verus #7, Burned)

2017 AMA (after release of Book #8, Bound)

2018 AMA (after release of Book #9, Marked)

2019 AMA (after release of Book #10, Fallen)

Hope to see you there!

Forged UK Release Today!

Well, after far too many issues, it’s finally here!  Alex Verus #11, Forged, gets its release today for readers in the UK, Europe, and everywhere else that isn’t North America, and hopefully you should all be getting the right edition this time.  

As usual, the book is available in ebook format, a trade paperback edition, and an audiobook narrated by Gildart Jackson.  

Also, just as a reminder, I’m going to be doing a Reddit AMA (question and answer session) on r/fantasy two days from now, on Thursday 3rd December.  If you want to ask me questions about Forged, the rest of the Alex Verus series, or pretty much anything else, drop by and say hi!  

Forged UK Edition – Update

The problem with Forged’s UK edition on Amazon has (in theory) been fixed – the default page for Forged on Amazon UK now links to the trade paperback version.  This comes after a lot of emails to my publishers and a long exchange with Amazon Customer Support, who were exactly as frustrating to deal with as I remembered.  Hopefully it’ll work from now on!  

In the meantime, if you want the UK trade paperback and don’t want to take the risk of Amazon sending you the US edition again, you should be safe getting it from alternative sources, like Waterstones, Book Depository, or Blackwells.

Forged Release Week – Warning for UK Readers!

I’m going to break my usual routine and publish this Friday’s post a little early, since I’ve got a warning to get out if you’re based in the UK.

The eleventh and second-to-last book in the Alex Verus series, Forged, is getting its worldwide release this week, on Tuesday December 1st.  It’ll be available in paperback, ebook, and audio version.  

IMPORTANT WARNING FOR UK READERS!  Amazon.co.uk is currently selling the paper version of Forged in the UK, but they are NOT selling the UK edition – they’re selling the US edition.  

What’s the difference?  Well, the UK and US editions have slightly different editing and formatting – the US edition uses US spelling, for instance.  More importantly, the US version is a mass market paperback, while the UK version is a trade paperback.  These look quite different – here’s a comparison between the UK and US versions of book #10, Fallen.  

 

As you can see, the US edition is quite a bit smaller, with smaller text.  The US edition also uses lower quality paper and the text is more tightly spaced, which makes it harder to read.  Finally, it won’t match with the UK covers, so if you’ve been buying the UK editions it’ll look terrible on your shelves!

Unfortunately, UK Amazon are not making this particularly clear – if you look closely at their page it does say ‘Mass Market Paperback’, but unless you read the small print you’re not going to notice.  Also, they’re (currently) not offering the UK edition for pre-order at all, which makes it look like the MMPB version is the only paper one that UK readers can buy.  So large amounts of people are clicking on Amazon.co.uk, buying what they think is the UK edition, getting the US edition, and then leaving angry one-star reviews because it’s not what they were expecting.  

I’ve contacted my publisher and Amazon, but unfortunately Amazon are not very helpful towards their authors – on past occasions that I’ve tried to get them to make corrections, I’ve received either boilerplate responses or emails in broken English that misunderstand what’s going on.  So there’s no guarantee that anything’s going to be fixed any time soon.  In the meantime, if you’re in the UK, be aware that if you’re ordering a paper edition that looks like this:  

then you’re getting the wrong one!  Once I have a link to where you can buy the trade paperback UK edition, I’ll post it.  

Forged US Release Today!

And it’s finally here!  Book #11 in the Alex Verus series, Forged, releases today in the US and Canada, in mass market paperback, ebook format, and an audio version narrated by Gildart Jackson.  

This is the second-to-last book in the series, so as you can probably guess, this is not a good place to start.  Books #1 through #9 in the Alex Verus series are reasonably standalone – if you skip a few books you’ll miss some things, but you’ll still have a fairly good idea of what’s going on (especially books 1-6, whose contents all get recapped).  However, the last three books of the Alex Verus series, #10, #11, and #12, are really just one big interconnected story that happens to be split into three volumes.  If you’re going to read Forged, it is REALLY REALLY important that you read book #10, Fallen, first.  Otherwise once you get into the first chapter (which you can read here) then I promise you, you will have absolutely no idea what the hell is going on, why Alex is in the position he is, or why he’s chasing the person he’s chasing.  

Anyway, enough warnings, go enjoy the book!  Readers outside North America will have to wait a week for the UK/rest of world release date, which is December 1st.  

Forged Release Week!

Well, after a long, long wait, we’re nearly there!  Forged will be out in paper, ebook, and audiobook format in the US and Canada four days from now, on the 24th!

The non-US edition will be released a week later, on December 1st, and I’ll be doing a Reddit AMA two days later, on the 3rd.  

Empty Backlog

A very unusual event as of last week – the backlog of Ask Luna questions is finally clear!  It had got to the point where I was answering messages that had been in the queue for months, so it’s nice to have an empty mailbox at last.  I can’t even remember the last time that I cleared the backlog – I’ve got the feeling it was years ago.  

It’s good timing, since the release of Forged is very close (November 24th for US & Canada, December 1st for UK and everywhere else).  The next few weeks will all be release announcements.  

And on the subject of Forged, my UK author copies came in!  The UK cover looks more ominous than usual, which may or may not relate to the contents.  

Ask Luna #173

From: Kevin

So awhile back you mentioned that seeing your curse was hazy because you struggled with mage vision and couldn’t analyze spells like Alex does. Another time you said that you could now activate focus items but that you did it differently from Alex.

My question is do you think Chance magic in general relies less on mage vision and more on “feeling out”/sensing instead of the more visual effects other mages use?

And to clarify you activate focus items and gate stones by using your curse and that is how you do it differently from Alex?

I activate everything using my curse.  My curse is my magic, that’s how I do stuff.  When all you’ve got is a hammer, you get really creative solving problems with a hammer.  As for visual effects, that’s very personal depending on the mage, I think. 

From: Kevin

Hey Luna I just wanted to say sorry if I frustrated you about my questions about Deleo and her jinn and various other things. I have a disability that makes it difficult to understand things that aren’t clearly spelled out to me and it takes me awhile to process it like everyone else seems to.

But I took your advice that you said in a previous question about keeping you mind open, assume you don’t know everything, and learning the big things by picking up the smaller things.

Like with Deleo pulling off things other powerful mages could not do, the most obvious one was her surviving a blast from Anne that took out Sal Sarque presumably one of the toughest Fire mages in the country.

And putting things together from previous events a likely reason why Morden let himself be imprisoned for so long, was because he knew the Light Council would take forever to decide on his fate and by that time Richard would get Anne to bust him out which would cause the Light Council look incompetent and further weakened.

I guess what I am trying to say is that I took you advice to heart and hopefully am on the right track to understanding things so you don’t have to keep going over things again and again. But to put all of this in a question do you think with my two examples I am on the right path? Sorry in advance if I am off the mark but if I am not thank you for your input it really helps not just with you and Alex’s adventures but in real life as well.

P.S. Is there a chance magic skill that only you can do and other chance mages could not? Just wanted to ask something new that I don’t think anyone else hasn’t asked yet.

You’re more on the mark, yeah. 

One of the things that’s been frustrating me this year is the number of people asking me stuff that’s just completely impossible to answer.  “Why did Morden/Richard do X two years ago when I think they should have done Y because Z?”  Now stop and think about it for a second – how am I POSSIBLY supposed to know the answer to that?  They’re asking for someone’s internal thoughts/reasoning (which I don’t know), about something that happened years ago (which would make it even harder to find out), and then comparing it to their idea of how this person is supposed to act (which is probably wrong). 

I suppose what’s going on is that people have their own idea of how things are “supposed” to work, and they get confused when it doesn’t happen, and then they write in to ask me.  But the problem is that a lot of the time their idea about how things are supposed to work assumes stuff that’s not true. 

Like, take Morden.  I’ve lost count of how many questions I’ve had about “why did/didn’t Morden do this?”  And usually the implication is that Morden was supposed to do something else instead because that’d be better for gaining more power and taking over the country.  But here’s the thing – I’m pretty sure at this point that Morden doesn’t WANT to take over the country.  Maybe Richard does, but Morden doesn’t.  He’s not just after power, he’s got his own weird set of principles that might not make sense to most people, but he genuinely believes in them.  So it makes him really hard for most people to predict, because they don’t understand where he’s coming from. 

This is what I was getting at with the “don’t assume you know everything” thing – you’re never going to be able to predict how someone like that will act, because you don’t understand them.  The most you can do is keep watching and keep learning.

From: Celia

Hi, Luna! Thanks for taking over the shop from Alex. He seems like a nice chap. Do you ever worry he might end up like Richard, though? Both diviners, it seems, both like their cool toys, both not that reluctant to kill. Alex may be one monkey’s paw away from being just. like. Richard.

You’re not the first person to ask, but my answer’s always the same.  I’ve known Alex for a long time, and he trusts me, and I trust him.  He’s done a lot of stuff that I wouldn’t, but even at his worst, I always feel like I can understand where he’s coming from.  So no, I don’t think he’ll end up like Richard.  I’ve got faith in him, even if we end up going different ways. 

From: bibliosopher

Hi Luna,

I’ve really enjoyed your answers to these questions over the years. I was wondering if it’s possible for a chance mage to accomplish something like divination by using her power in conjunction with a tool like Tarot cards? She could cause the cards to fall out so that they are lucky/useful for her? thanks,

Bibliosopher

Completely possible, yeah.  Wouldn’t work for me, though.  I’ve spent too long learning to use my magic differently.  Sometimes I wonder if I might have copied some things from Alex subconsciously – he doesn’t like tarot cards/fortune telling, so at some level I don’t think it’s useful either.  He never directly taught me the way Chalice did, but I feel like I picked up a lot of his ways of thinking. 

Crunch Month

Still busy on Verus #12.  The book’s a bit over 80% done.  

I usually split the first draft of my Alex Verus novels into six sections.  Each section is about three chapters, and each chapter is about 5,000 words.  Six 15,000 word sections equals a 90,000 word book – sometimes there’ll be a chapter more or less, and I’ll often have an ‘epilogue’ chapter at the end that’s a bit shorter than the others, but if you go back and take a look, my previous Alex Verus novels have come in fairly consistently at around 15 chapters each.  I never planned it that way, it’s just the way things worked out.  

At the moment I’m finishing section 5 out of 6 of Alex Verus #12.  Once it’s done I’ll give it an edit, send it off to my beta readers, and then it’ll be time to start the sixth and final section.  My deadline is December 1st, which I suspect I won’t quite make (I’m going to have some other things keeping me busy in November, and the last section will probably have an epilogue that’ll need a bit of extra work) but I doubt I’ll miss it by much.  The book should easily be done by Christmas.  

The crunch month in the title has been this one.  At the beginning of this October I was about 50% of the way through, with three sections completed.  Since then I’ve written nearly two full sections more, almost 30,000 words, which I think might be a personal record.  It would be nice if I could make this kind of progress all the time – unfortunately things aren’t quite that simple, and to go this fast I have to focus on my writing to the exclusion of nearly everything else, as well as put in a lot of groundwork beforehand.  Still, it’s nice when it works out!

Moving Onwards

One month to go to Forged!

Alex Verus #12 has been coming along very well the past few weeks – going on the assumption that the book will be the standard 90,000 words, it’s now 70% done.  I’ve got the feeling that it might end up running a little longer than 90k, but we’ll have to wait and see (and it probably won’t be much longer, in any case).

No other real news.  I’m just working away and counting down to Forged’s release date.