Apparently the links to the Summerworld and The Four-Day Weekend samplers were out of whack due to me moving some directories around. It should be fixed now.

That's right! The first new copies of The Four-Day Weekend are back in-house and ready to be signed, sealed, delivered and sent your merry way!

Signed copies are $25 (includes shipping and any applicable sales tax). Unsigned copies ordered directly from the printer are $15, as always.

Go to the main 4DW page for the purchase link!

The copies I've ordered (which I'll be signing and sending out) should be in sometime next week. Sorry to keep everyone waiting, but I wanted to make sure everything was right.

UPDATE: For those of you who wanted signed copies, I'll eventually have a PayPal link directly from the book page. Look for that in the coming week or so.

Note: To all those who replied, thank you -- I haven't forgotten about you. I've just been dealing with a horrid case of the flu for the past two days. I'm hoping to have all the pending orders fulfilled by this weekend. Thanks for being patient -- I'll have some extra goodies in it for you!

ATTENTION: ANIMEFEST 2008 COUPON CODE HOLDERS!

If you came by the Genji Press table at AnimeFest 2008, some of you got a coupon code -- a six-character code redeemable for a signed copy of either Summerworld or The Four-Day Weekend at the convention price of $15 (instead of the usual price of $25 for a signed copy).

Here's what you need to do to redeem your code:

1. Reply to this post using the comment form below. (Or, click the "comments" link if you're reading this from the homepage.)
2. Provide a valid email address in the email field that you use for PayPal.
3. In the comment body, type the six-digit code I gave you.
4. Wait for a reply from me. You should hear back from me in email before long.

All comments will be screened here and will not be published, so don't worry about leaving additional personal information. If want to leave me a note about another subject -- a thank you, etc. -- reply to this post instead.

According to the fine folks at the U.S. Postal Service, the copies of Four-Day Weekend that I'll be selling at AnimeFest have shipped and should be in my hands before I make like a banana for Dallas.

This'll be something of a first, as I've used the open-source desktop publishing app Scribus to assemble the cover art (although not the interior; I'm still using Word for that). My previous efforts were all Photoshop, but this time I did the graphics alone in Photoshop and added text and layout through Scribus. The end result I exported directly to .PDF and uploaded to Lulu.com.

It astonishes me how easy it is to do so much of this stuff now. It's desktop publishing in the most complete sense of the term. -- not just the design, but every single stage of the publication down to the fulfillment. I'm still working on the promotion end of things, but I figured that part would always lag a bit.

You've been hearing me crowing about The Four-Day Weekend for long enough -- now it's time to actually see for yourself!

I've posted the first chapter sampler (.PDF format) for 4DW, a cut-down version of the first several chapters of the book to fit in a 32-page booklet format. This is the same item I'll be distributing at AnimeFest when I head there later this week, although after I get back I do plan to have a much longer, more complete chapter sampler available as well.

Part of the reason I decided to do this was because my Summerworld sampler -- the first four chapters of the book -- fit perfectly into 32 pages with almost no editing needed. Since that wasn't the case here, and 32 pages is about the upper limit of what I can produce on my own thanks to the magic of Kinko's, I decided to cut down and assemble highlights from the first several chapters to produce this particular sampler. The booklet has a note to this effect, and again, I'll be offering a longer preview at some point in the future, too.

The book itself won't go on sale until I get back from the show, but until then, check out the chapters and sock away those pennies! (And if you're lucky enough to see me at the con, you can buy signed copies of it and my previous books directly from me.)

There's a part of me that still feels like I have something to do, but I know there isn't.

Last night I sent the files for Four-Day Weekend to the printer's. After the usual endless round of checking and cross-checking, tweaking this and fixing that, it's now being prepped for its debut at AnimeFest 2008. Signed copies will be available directly from me at the show for $15+tax, and after I get back it'll start showing up here on the site for sale.

I'm exhausted but also hugely happy. The book started off very differently, in a far more scattershot and meandering vein, and I'm now certain if I had tried to write it as I had originally imagined it, it would have been an overblown mess. After I found the discipline to cut it down to the story it needed to be, it took off and really started to go places.

I've talked with friends about the possibility of revisiting Winthrop and Henry and all the rest in another story, but I haven't decided completely what that is. One idea that sounds better than most of the others is for them to visit Japan -- but I'd want to actually do that before I attempted to write about it. So there's no hurry about embarking on a follow-up -- yes, I'm loathe to say "sequel" if only because I've always been against the idea of simply writing another book for the sake of it. This would have to stand on its own two non-prosthetic feet as an idea before I could even think about hitting the keys.

So, where from here? I'll save that discussion for another post, but I'll leave the last word to Kurosawa: "People always ask me what my favorite of my own movies is, and I say, 'My next one'."

At just a few minutes shy of 1PM today, I completed the third-draft edits for The Four-Day Weekend. I've since sent the edits on to my readers -- who, with any luck, will be sending me back corrections before I have to get the book to the printer's a little later this week.

I don't have a sampler chapter yet, but I'm aiming to have that ready by the coming week. What I may do this time around is excerpt a few pieces here and there rather than just the first couple of chapters straight through, as a way of giving people a better flavor for the book. (One might argue that is itself a case for moving chapters around, but I've got reasons for keeping things as they are.)

As it stands, I've managed to achieve about 90% of what I had in mind with this book, and the 10% that's missing is not a 10% that I'll miss in the long run anyway.

Expect the book itself to be available for on-line ordering the first week of September!

The edits for The Four-Day Weekend (formerly The New Golden Age) began in earnest this past week. 50 out of 300 pages is 1/6th of the manuscript -- not bad for only a couple days' work!

That said, this is only the first of two or three editing passes -- the first is for major cleanup (moving blocks of text around, rewriting sections that need it), and the second is for line-by-line cleanup, something I'll probably have a little third-party help with. This is actually not something I do well by default, so the more additional help I have the better.

I've noticed that I typically have a fairly clean first draft -- a lot of the most aggressive, "I don't think I need this at all" editing tends to happen before I ever sit down at the computer. Most of what happens at this stage is organizational: figuring out what to emphasize or put into the background, that kind of thing.

Another thing I'm trying to figure out is how much to excerpt. I'm actually thinking of doing something slightly unorthodox -- chapters 1 and 2, and then a later chapter about Henry and Winthrop's early life, which is actually chapter 5 or 6 (I'm still dithering with the chapter order early on).

My drop-dead day for getting the ms. to the printer's is August 15th. If I keep up my current pace I could well have a first pass done by early next week, and some early-draft samples after that. Look for another progress report in a few days.

The first draft of The Four-Day Weekend, formerly The New Golden Age, is complete.

6:08 PM, Sunday June 29 2008. 117,022 words.

Fais que ton rêve soit plus long que la nuit ("May your dreams last longer than the night")

For those who haven't been following along, this is my new novel -- it's set in the world of fandom. The story: two friends set out to take some time off from their lives at a major convention, and get a rejuvenation they aren't expecting in the slightest. It's not just a run-through of everyone's favorite fandom stories, though: it's a look at some very specific people who just happen to be in that scene, and are also about a dozen of my closest friends. (For everyone who's ever argued "Fandom is a way of life" vs. "Fandom is just a damn hobby", here's the middle road: "Fandom is a place to feel at home".)

I've got a fair amount of text in my old blog back from when this was under its old title. There were some excerpts from a primordial draft that I actually stopped work on, dismantled, and then resurrected into the project as it currently is.

So where from here? First, I have to clean up the text a bit -- make sure it's in good enough shape to be read by the people I've promised it to -- and then perform my own editing pass on it. I should have a promotional sample up on the site by August 15 or so, and by the end of August it'll be in print and ready to order. (Barring acts of god or Congress, that is.) "Excited" doesn't begin to cover it.