I got an email this morning from Amazon recommending my own book to me. It was on a list of books along with stuff by Brandon Sanderson, Joe Abercrombie, Brent Weeks, and Mark Lawrence. So… awesome.

I tried to remind myself that it’s not a big deal. They probably saw that I’d been checking my own page (yes, I like to check once in a while to remind myself this whole thing is real). Regardless, it was a pretty surreal moment.

A screenshot, per request.

I’ve had a few friends and family tell me they’ve pre-ordered the book, and the “Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed” sections is now populated, so obviously *someone* has been looking at it. In addition, the number of people who have added it on Goodreads has gone from 34 to 44 since my last post. I know that’s not a lot, but it’s my first book, and at this point anyone who notices it at all still gets me exited.

Book 2. Hrm. The working title was THE KEZ CAMPAIGN, but as I’ve scrapped various starts throughout the summer, that title is looking to apply less and less. As it is, nothing catchy has come to mind, so I’m just calling it “book 2.”

The other day I stumbled across my original summary of book 2. You know, the one I sent to my editor and agent. It is nothing like that now. One of the viewpoints in particular goes nowhere near the plot line I’d planned out. Oh well. I think it’s much better for what I am currently doing. Trying to follow my original outline, and not admitting to myself that it just wasn’t working, put me very far behind.

Speaking of which, I’ll be going to my editor soon and asking for more time on book 2. No more than a month, I hope. But I can already hear the lecture Caitlin (my agent) is going to give me about falling behind. And I will totally deserve it.

In 2013 PROMISE OF BLOOD will be one of the books featured in the Qwillery’s 2013 Debut Author Challenge. If you read twelve debut novels featured on the Qwillery in 2013 you can be entered to win a $100 gift card for a bookstore. Read more about it here. The Qwillery runs book news, contests, giveaways, and all manner of reporting for Science Fiction and Fantasy.

I will be doing a guest post on the Qwillery sometime closer to the release date for PROMISE OF BLOOD. Keep an eye out for it.

Here’s a fun tidbit: since the cover was released on Orbitbooks.net last Monday, the number of people who have added PROMISE OF BLOOD on Goodreads has shot up from a whopping 3 to 34. You can “like” or repin the cover on Orbit’s Pinterest Page.

I’m finally able to reveal the cover for my 2013 debut, PROMISE OF BLOOD!

I am extremely pleased with this cover. The first time I spoke with my editor, she already had this vision in her head. From the moment she told me about it I knew it was going to rock. I did have my doubts about some of the details, I will admit, but she was very willing to work with me and ask my opinion every step of the way and really make me feel like I was part of the process of making the cover.

I can’t give enough credit to Orbit’s art director, Lauren Panepinto, and the team at Orbit.

Without further delay:

So, the program I used to make my site originally did not work out. It ended up being far more frustrating than I had hoped, so I am in the process of building a wordpress site. Hopefully will have it up and running by Monday.

What to say about Worldcon this year?

Well, it was magical.

This was my third Worldcon. I went to LA in 2006 and Denver in 2008. At each of those I hung out with other students from BYU, met a few people, and was part of what some people called the “Sanderson Entourage.” I attended a lot of panels and a few of the coffee meetup things with authors and editors. They were certainly interesting and valuable to me, but I was also going as a very new amateur author with nothing under his belt to make him remarkable.

This year was different. It was my first time going to a convention while under contract. The first time I could hand people business cards and tell them my release date and, after permission from my editor, show them a picture of my book cover I had on my phone (no, you can’t see it yet).

Now, I’m a pretty shy guy. I have a tough time making contact. I love people. I love chatting. I just don’t have the ability that some people do to walk up to strangers, shake their hand, and introduce myself. I’m kind of terrified of it. So Myke Cole made it happen for me. This guy knows everyone. I spent the better part of Thursday with Myke and I was introduced to countless cool people.

Devi Pillai, my awesome–but intrinsically evil–editor did the same thing. I had a laundry list of people I wanted to meet at Worldcon. I told her names and she made it happen. Chuck Wendig? Bam! Mur Lafferty? Yup. Daniel Abraham? Done. Charles Stross? Of course. There were a number I didn’t get to. I had hoped to hang out with Mary Robinette Kowal, for one. But those were because we ran out of time, not because Devi wasn’t ready to make it happen for me.

I had so many cool experiences in Chicago this year. I got to compare cover art for our spring releases with Daniel Abraham. I sat at a table and bull-shitted with George RR Martin. Talked about the fantastic things our dogs have rolled in with Chuck Wendig and Doug Hulick. Doug was nice enough to introduce me to not one, but two different Chicago deep dish pizza places.

I ran into some old friends like Bryce Moore, and made plenty of new ones like Monica Valentinelli, Lissa Price, Jim Hines, and Anne Lyle. I met more people than names I could remember, so I apologize if I’ve left you off the list!

The best experience I had, by far, was getting to know Orbit. Devi Pillai (my editor), Tim Holman (my publisher and the BIG GUY at Orbit, as it were), Tom Bouman (Daniel Abraham’s editor), and Susan Barnes (the editorial assistant), were all there. Devi and Tim took me out to lunch on Saturday and listened to me prattle on about all my hopes and dreams for the first book. They gently pushed me toward reality and met my enthusiasm with boat loads of their own and I learned that my book is in the best possible hands it could be in.

Over the weekend I received a lovely little present in the form of my very first book blurb!

“Promise of Blood is a hugely promising debut. Guns, swords, and magic together? What more could you want? How about tense action, memorable characters, rising stakes, and cool, cool magic? Not only the finest flintlock fantasy I’ve read, but also the most fun. Brian McClellan is the real thing.”
-Brent Weeks, author of the Night Angel Trilogy

I didn’t start reading Brent until January of this year but he quickly became one of my favorite authors. I’ve devoured every one of his books and rabidly await the release of his next (Only five days left. He has a counter on his website). Getting this kind of praise from him absolutely floored me! So frickin’ cool.

I have launched brianmcclellan.com!

It’s a sparse website. Not much to look at. I don’t have much art or accolades to display. But I did do it all myself. I only have the most basic (and I mean BASIC) knowledge of html and wordpress was not adequate for my needs, so I used a program my brother has called xara. The only real issue right now is that I want to have my blog on my own website, and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to do it in this software.

The art I do have is courtesy of Isaac Stewart, the awesome guy who will now officially be doing my maps! He designed my business cards and they look fantastic. I love what he has done with simple woodcut-style designs and will at some point ask him to do more (when he’s not already swamped with art he’s doing… for me).

I’ve had a lot of people ask me how big my book is going to be. I’ve always used the same answer: not a clue. Hardcover will be a different size from paperback or trade paperback. Type size and margins differ. There are a lot of factors.

However, I can give you a good idea as to the paperback. Yesterday, Brent Weeks mentioned on Twitter that the first two Night Angel books came in at 155K words each. PROMISE OF BLOOD is floating right around 160K. So, go to your bookstore and pick up the first Night Angel book. It’s called THE WAY OF SHADOWS. Buy it, because it’s a really damned good book. Take it home and read it, and then hold it up to the light and examine the thickness. Mine will be about the same size. Maybe a smidgen bigger.

So, I thought it would be a good time to get a real website up and running. I figured out the basics. Played around with the free template wordpress provides. It looks like garbage.

I’m designing something right now with some new software. I don’t actually know how to use said software, so that is kind of rough. Hopefully the final product won’t look like garbage. And hopefully I can get it done before Worldcon.

Oh, yeah. Worldcon in a week. I’m very excited to go. It will be the first time I’ve met my editor face to face.  It’s still a little far out to pimp my book so I’m going primarily to make new friends and see old friends and have a generally good time.

The biggest news is I have a release date. PROMISE OF BLOOD will hit the shelves on April 16th, 2013. I haven’t heard the exact date for the U.K. release but I’ve been told they will be simultaneous. And as for the French release… not even a guess.

First, an update on the book:

I’ve been tossing around series titles with my editor the last week or so but so far nothing has stuck. I did get her the maps for PROMISE and am pleased at how they turned out.

I was supposed to get the next round of edits back this week but I just received an email informing me they will be coming more toward the middle of June, so I will just keep hacking away at book 2.

Book 2 does not yet have a title. I’ve been having a frustrating week, and may end up going back and throwing out everything I’ve written so far. *grimace* This will put me quite a ways behind and see me playing catch up for the rest of the summer. I’m not pleased about it, but better to scrap things now than when I have 120K words written.

I’ve mentioned before that wifey and I have put inordinate amounts of time into our yard. One of my brothers thinks this is stupid, because it’s a rental property. But we plan on being here a while and the yard was in such terrible shape that I couldn’t help but try to improve it. We’ve replanted about half of the lawn and I put in four 4′x8′ garden boxes and filled them with tomatoes, rhubarb, blackberries, onions, garlic, and peppers. They are looking fantastic.

Before

After

I put in the boxes at the beginning of April and planted the first tomatoes at the end of April. This was a risk, as the last freeze is usually around the 18th of May, but the gamble paid off and we already have blossoms on the tomatoes. The blackberries and rhubarb, both planted just after the boxes were finished, survived the early freezes and are now gorgeous.

The next part of the yard we worked on was the very back of our lot. It had spent years filling with yard debris like leaves and sticks and rocks, and at some point our landlord had dumped about 200 bricks into the low muddy spot to be used at a future date. After a wet winter, parts of the yard had 6″ of standing water. We had to rip all of the junk out of there and level the ground and reseed the lawn.

This is after 60+ hours worth of work

What it looks like now

The bricks came in handy. I used them to lay a patio for the beehive to rest on, as the location I wanted the hive was right where all the water congregated during the winter. I sloped the back section so that water now drains across our lawn, rather than to it.

Finally, I saved the raspberries. They had been planted on either side of the front door in lieu of flower beds. Some might find that odd. I loved it. My very own raspberry patch! Unfortunately they had been severely neglected. The branches had bent over double to form arches; they’d never once been pruned or thinned and were full of dead canes; weeds had grown rampant and I very much doubt they’d ever been fertilized. Raspberries need a ton of nutrients, so this is especially important.

I trimmed back all the canes and got rid of the dead growth and added manure and fertilizer to the soil. Michele weeded them several times until I was able to get the mulch for them, and I put about 4″ of mulch down.

I don’t have a “before” picture for the raspberries, but I can show them to you now:

Right side

Left side

Our first berries coming on before June

“Brian,” some of you may ask, “shouldn’t you have been working on book two or even a new series during all this time you’ve put into a property that doesn’t even belong to you?”

Well, shut up you. I have to live here.

The parents of one of my oldest friends have a house right on the water at Chautauqua Lake in western New York. They were kind enough to invite a group of us up to lollygag and shenanigize for the weekend. We started off in prime fashion: with a flat tire on the New York state border. I decided that the best use of my time, instead of helping with the tire, would be to take pictures.

Hard at work. Or hardly workin’! Amiright?? I’ll show myself out.

By “swim” I mean watch my friends mix water floaties, ropes, and alcohol.

Being Memorial Day weekend, there were some fireworks over the water. I found my camera phone has a firework mode. The pictures came out really well; timing was the most difficult part of the shot.

Independence Day had it wrong. When the aliens attack, it will be on  Fourth of July, not before.

The highlight of any weekend: the breakfast cake.

The face of a man who has eaten his whole breakfast cake and now regrets it.