Book promises

Contracts on my mind...

I've just had two requests for story reprints, so that's pleasant.

And today I shall send back three book contracts with some amendments but signed. I've taken a long time to finalized these, and have dithered a good deal. That's what comes of not bothering to get another agent and yet hating to do business. I'm keeping ebook rights and a few others.

FSG, 1996

One of these contracts means that Catherwood will be back in print. Catherwood was doing quite nicely in the way of finding readers and had moved from the Farrar, Straus and Giroux hardcover to the newly revived Bard imprint when the HarperCollins implosion (that's what comes of eating too much, HarperCollins!) took down many imprints, including Bard. I felt it as a great disappointment, one that was followed by my next book being delayed to days after 9-11. I do have the luck, don't I?

Then there's Glimmerglass, a somewhat fantastical book with many threads--growing older, failure and renewal, chasing the Muse, love and marriage, siblings, murderous impulses, a flood, and more. Despite being somewhere on the continuum between what is called realism and what is called speculative fiction, the setting is nonetheless identifiable as a version of Cooperstown. Parts take place in and under the lake, in a wonderful little gate house that I've called the "Seven Dwarves House" because it has seven doors, and in an imaginary great house not so terribly different from others around the lake. And yet, in one key way, terribly different...

And last is Maze of Blood, a book loosely based on the deep-South life and times of that unusual boy and man, pulp writer Robert Howard, with faux-Howard pieces interspersed, and to some degree channeling my hot summer weeks near Lexsy and in Collins, Georgia. I know that boy and his strangeness, and I know that hot Southern world, so I had great fun frolicking with him.

So I am sticking with Mercer for my 12th and 13th books, and by then I will have four first editions with them, a number that rivals my four with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, with lovely acquiring editors Elisabeth Dyssegaard and Robbie Mayes. And I suppose that will mean having the stellar team of Burt and Burt again as book designers. The pair designed A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (Mercer, 2012) and The Throne of Psyche (Mercer, 2011.)

That reminds me, I haven't mailed my Thaliad contract, and the book's almost out. Coming!