Introducing Bookburners & Serial Box!

Hi, friends! Let me share something cool with you.  Come into my secret lair.

Yep. A little further back. Around the iron maiden.  Just be careful about the—

… trap door.  Sorry, I really should get better lighting in here, hold on, let me lower you a rope.  Just chill for a second.  The gators are drawn to movement.

Towel?

While you glare at me in silent rage, let me tell you about this Cool New Thing!

People-are-awesome pitch: Bookburners is Margaret Dunlap (The Middleman, Lizzie Bennet Diaries), Mur Lafferty (Shambling Guide to New York, Ghost Train to New Orleans), Brian Francis Slatterly (The Family Hightower, Lost Everything, The Slick Six), and yours truly writing an episodic supernatural procedural series for your reading pleasure.

Worlds-are-awesome pitch: Bookburners is about cop working with a team of Vatican secret agents who hunt down magic and demons and stuff from around the world, stick them in a box, and then never open the box, because that always works so very very well.  (This is the bit where I nod my head and mouth “no” in an exaggerated fashion.)  Miss The X-Files or Warehouse 13?  Like The Librarians?  This is a bit like that, only with significantly more Cronenberg.  (If you read Shadow Unit, odds are you’ll also like this!)

Formal-innovation-is-awesome pitch: Bookburners is a series of sixteen episodes of monster hunting, magic, intrigue, and team shenanigans, each of which takes about fifty minutes to read.  Each episode’s a complete story from start to finish, but they tie together in sequence.  I wrote the pilot!  And you can read it for free here, right now.  The rest of the series will be available episode by episode, or as a subscription, in ebook and audio and on the Serial Box website, once a week, starting with the series’ formal launch in September.  Here’s a page with all those details.

Formal-innovation-is-awesome corollary because this is the internet and internetters gonna net-pick: Yes, serial fiction has been around for a long time—but our main historical comps aren’t actually Dickens or Tolstoy, who published successive chapters of larger works rarely designed to stand alone.  Dickens et. al. wrote serialized novels.  IANA literary historian but I doubt one would think of what we’re doing as a novel; it’s much closer to older serial works like The Tale of Genji or Journey to the West, which are… tricky to claim as novels.  (Not impossible!  But that’s another dissertation.)  In the modern era, author-publishers have been building serialized stories for a while, but the writer’s room model gives us more flexibility—Bookburners draws off every writer’s strengths, and lets us challenge one another.  Shadow Unit is the closest thing out there to what we’re doing, as far as I can tell.  

Don’t-believe-me-trust-the-internet pitch: Here’s io9 on Serial Box!  And here’s SF Signal!  And also, it brings my fannish heart glee to report that some really cool people like the series.

Assuaging-your-fears pitch: If you’re worried about my writing schedule, you’re too kind, but don’t sweat it.  Really.  I turned in next year’s Craft Sequence book back in December, and in the next couple months I’ll turn in *another* novel, then focus on my planned Craft book for 2017.  And The City’s Thirst, another Choice of Game in the Craft Universe, will launch this fall.  I’ve been writing like a crazy person, yes, and I probably will scale back my project pace next year, but fingers crossed, knock on wood, I’ll be fine.

Now: go forth! Read!

And sorry about the gators.