one more month...

Happy New Year, all!

So, only one more month to the hardcover release of Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen. My author's copies of the actual printed book have arrived -- still a thrill even after all these years and books. They look very clean, although I'm sure I'll open it to some random page or another and spot that last elusive typo that escaped all nets. Anyway, the die is cast, the print run is set, etc. etc., and the copies are all ready to start wending their way through the book distribution system.

One year ago, I was just coming to grips with Chapter Fourteen. Huh.

Here's a scan of the Real Thing. Baen has done their usual trick of foiling the art; very pretty from some angles, goes black at others, looks weird on a scan.


and the back:



The previews of reader-response from the eARC release have been, hm, interesting. I expected them to be all over the map, and they are (as they always are, for every book, so that's a sucker-bet.) Different pools of readers seem to have curiously different profiles of positive and negative responses. Trained reader-expectations for some species of action-adventure seem to be interfering the most with taking in the book as it is on first reading. Those readers who speed through the book waiting for the ninjas to burst through the windows and the physical violence to commence for "the story to start" will still be waiting when they shoot off the end, having missed the actual story that was being laid in front of them, and risk being artificially nonplussed.

To reiterate: not an action-adventure, not a political thriller, not a mystery, not YA, not a dystopia, not grimdark. It contains a romance as a major subplot, but (as revealed by the structure and sequencing) that is not the main plot, which is, in fact, SF-nal. "Character study" is not an unfair summation, but characters in the context of technologically driven social changes in their world.

Although I DO WISH old readers would stop telling new ones that they have to read umpty-ump other books before this one. If I've done my job as I hope, they don't.

When writing, I have always to keep in mind those readers who will be picking up this book as their first Bujold or first Vorkosiverse -- the story must be minimally complete in this kit. This is a harder and harder hat trick to pull off as a series advances. The choices are to stuff in wodges of recap, to leave new readers to sink, or to turn away from stories heavily dependent on what went before. This being the only story I seemed to want to tell, the last was not an option.

I hope a new reader will get a complete read; it's even possible that a new reader will get a better reading, as they won't be arguing with the text in their head so much, but rather, attending to the story in front of them, but I have not seen a review from that quadrant yet. I'm very curious about that, although, of course, such readers will be all over the map as well; it'll just be a different map.

Baen plans their e-book release of the finished edition for January 16th. (The eARC will go off-sale at that point.)

Ta, L.