Three Quick Things

First, the official on sale date for The Scroll of Years is September 24! (Amazon and B&N have been listing September 10, so I thought I'd better get the word out.)

Second, Paizo Publishing has added my Pathfinder novel The Dagger of Trust to their catalog. There's no hard date as yet. I had a lot of fun with this one.

Third, thanks to the hard work of Matthew Kressel, I have an author web site! I am still moving in, so to speak, but you can look at it here. Thanks to Matt, to my agent Joe Monti for recommending him, and to Kerem Beyit for kindly letting me incorporate his cover art for The Scroll of Years.

Now Far Ahead the Road Has Gone

Took this photo last month when we hiked beside the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. Thought it made a good companion piece to the one below.

Over Rock and Under Tree

Picture from a family hike a while ago in the Rancho San Antonio Open Space Preserve.

"Book Bomb" to help Ben Wolverton

Buying a book by David Farland (aka Dave Wolverton) today will support a good cause. Details via Lou Anders here.

[Edited to make the link actually work, sorry.]

Writing Updates

I'm preoccupied with many things right now, including a family illness. But it's time I posted an update on my writing news.

First, I'm pleased to report that this week my science fiction story "Waiting for a Me Like You," (F&SF November/December 2012) is appearing in audio format at the award-winning StarShipSofa, as narrated by Jonathan Danz.

Second, in recent months I've been working on some fiction for Paizo Publishing, makers of the Pathfinder roleplaying game. As a longtime gamer myself, I have been having a lot of fun with this. More on that as things develop.

Last, but far, far from least, that cover above is by the amazing Kerem Beyit, for the upcoming Gaunt and Bone novel The Scroll of Years, to be published in September by Pyr. The book takes place after the story "A Wizard of the Old School," (F&SF August 2007) in which our semi-heroes finally looked to be settling down. Alas, life for sword and sorcery characters is rarely that simple, and Gaunt and Bone find themselves fleeing from assassins, all the way to the Far East of their continent.

I hope to be more talkative in the future, but this is probably the last post for a little while. A satisfying post to make, though!

Sometimes You Just Have to Cast "Zot!"

Just being silly, and playing with Apple's "Paper" application. I took a break from revising a big project ... and unfortunately there is no "Zot" spell for that!

Four Story Ideas About Books

Bookstalkers

Magic exists, and you need to destroy books to make it happen. More than that, the books need to be powerfully-written and have something to do with the effect you want. Fiction works better than nonfiction. Worst of all are books of nonfiction that purport to be divine or supernatural in any way. Goodnight Moon is good for a sleep spell. Agatha Christie books are good for poisonings.

Sleepers

Librarians dedicated to keeping sorcerous books out of the wrong hands hide the books in plain sight, in a large university library. The books sit openly on the stacks, but they are not cataloged. Their spine labels indicate call numbers that do not actually exist in the Library of Congress cataloging system. Our protagonist gets suspicious because he's a cataloger, and he passes by a book that Doesn't Seem Right. Alas for him, his activities have been noted. A hidden camera watches every forbidden book, though at a distance, since mechanical devices tend to fail around the strange tomes. For that reason there's also the Sleepy Student brigade, slumped at strategic positions with Secret Service style earphones and cell phones. Their job is to identify, follow, and perhaps delay the perusers of the forbidden texts until a senior librarian can arrive. (Other permutations: Books with UV markings and librarians with special dark glasses for reading them; dummy books; books composed of tomes sliced up and spliced together, making it difficult for one peruser to check out a whole text without serious effort.)

Zombie Book

A device that has stored a group of photons, "frozen" them so they cannot propagate. The photons encode the locations and passwords to critical computers on the global net, computers which have already been infected by a virus, but lack only the proper trigger to become "zombies," at the command of the device's master. The device has the appearance of an ancient grimoire, bound in dubious leather.

A Thousand and One For All

A librarian in a fantasy world is charged with weeding books. One ancient book refuses to go gently and promises to tell the librarian a new story each day the librarian keeps it in the library...