If things had turned out different...

…I’d be promoting a hard-boiled urban fantasy novel right about now. When I finally sold All the Birds in the Sky to a publisher, I had already written five other novels. (And by “written,” I mean that I had revised each of them a ton, torn them up and put them back together a bunch of times, and polished them up.) One of those novels was published, back in 2005. Three others got shopped around and just never went anywhere, for various reasons. But the fifth one, a hard-boiled urban fantasy, seemed like it had a shot at getting published. It was about an enforcer who works for a secret magic society, but he’s also a recovering alcoholic. It was very much influenced by Chandler, Spillane, Macdonald, Hammett, Westlake etc., but also Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim (pictured above) and a bunch of other hard-boiled urban fantasies. This novel was called The Dark-Eyed Girl, or The Witch-Killers, and it has a lot of really cool stuff in it. I really thought it could have gotten a good book deal. But then my story “Six Months, Three Days” started getting some attention, and I was halfway done with this novel that was similar in tone and feel to “Six Months.”

In the end I decided if I got to have a science fiction “debut,” it was way better to lead with the book that was more like “Six Months, Three Days.” And also, even though my hard-boiled urban fantasy novel was funny and weird, it still felt like it was more obviously derivative. It was a book that anybody could have written, maybe. Whereas All the Birds in the Sky, for better or worse, was a book that only I could have written.