This past week I was interviewed by Stefan over at Civilian Reader about Killing Gravity, my inspirations, and plenty more. Go check it out.
This was my first interview, and I’m keen to do more. I’m looking forward to being interviewed by someone who’s read Killing Gravity, and having a real conversation about it. But I guess that will probably have to wait until after its release.
I mentioned this just briefly last time, but just in case you missed it: did you know you can preorder Killing Gravity? It’s only early in the book’s push – we’ve revealed the cover, but not an excerpt yet, and I haven’t had a chance to do any interviews (and perhaps I won’t – I’m still a nobody after all). But trust me when I tell you, it’s a good book. If you like the telekinetic carnage of Akira, or if you want a space opera that’s focussed on one small group of people and not a huge fight for galactic control, or if you just really like Tommy Arnold’s cover art, then you can preorder it now. You can find it online at Barnes & Noble, Wordery, Amazon, and the Book Depository.
And, OF COURSE, you’ll be able to ask for it at your local independent bookseller. Any bookstore with a decent range of science-fiction and fantasy will be able to source it, and in fact Powell’s already has it on their site for preorder (Powell’s is an amazing store. Bibliophiles simply must check it out if they find themselves in Portland). For my fellow Australians, any store that carries books from Tor.com’s range will be able to order it in for you – like Readings for instance – but depending on the databases a store uses, they might not be able to find it.
So there you go, my very first proper shill. I’m immensely proud of this book, and I hope it does well… if only so enough people hang around and read the sequel that I’ve been wrestling with these past few weeks.
When I woke up this morning my phone was blowing up with twitter notifications, because the Killing Gravity cover got officially revealed at Barnes & Noble’s SFF Blog.
Woah.
Click the link, go on, click it. You’ll see the awesome cover, with art by Tommy Arnold, and read a blurb that’s so good I want to read the book. You might also notice that Killing Gravity is due out on May 9th, 2017, and is available for pre-order, which is very cool and weird and another one of those things that makes me realise ‘oh shit, this is real, isn’t it?’.
Over at Tommy’s website he posted a version of the cover art sans title, cover quote and that jerk name, which looks a little something like this:
And Tommy was also kind enough to share some of his working sketches on twitter:
In A and C, you’ll see how Tommy was toying with getting Seven into the art too, which I love. Seven is Mars’ weird experimental cat thing, and a special part of the book for me. In some ways, Seven is the heart of the book – I mean, not really, but pet owners will know what I mean when they read it. She’s vicious and loving and lazy and crazy just like any good cat.
But I’ll talk more about that later.
One morning in early July, I woke up to an email from one of the editors at Tor.com Publishing. They’d recently had an open unsolicited submission window and I’d submitted the manuscript for my sci-fi novella Killing Gravity. It had received a really quick form rejection from another publisher just a few weeks earlier, so I had basically convinced myself there was no way a publisher with as much clout as Tor would want it (Lesson the first: personal preference is a strong condideration in editorial decisions. Just because one editor rejects a story, it doesn’t mean it [and by extension, you] are rubbish). The email subject read “Offer on Killing Gravity,” and I had so thoroughly convinced myself of the impending rejection that I actually thought, That’s a strange way to phrase a rejection.
Honestly, if the email subject had simply read: “RE: Submission – Killing Gravity” there’s a chance I might have deleted it unread (Lesson the second: never, and I mean NEVER, self-reject).
Needless to say, I opened the email.
I literally couldn’t believe it, I was in shock. My first response was to send my partner (the award-winning author of Welcome to Orphancorp, Marlee Jane Ward) a message reading: “Fuck. Motherfucking Tor want to buy my fucking book.” 6am eloquence is not my forte. My second response was to stumble through, knock on my housemate’s bedroom door, and repeat the news to her more-or-less word for word (she later said she thought something terrible had happened, like a death in the family, because I was white as a sheet. When I said ‘in shock’ I meant literally).
Marlee and I had already planned a trip to the States, which meant it was perfectly timed for us to be able to meet up with my editor Carl Engle-Laird in New York, and even receive a tour of the tour offices in the historic Flatiron building. It also meant I could have an editorial meeting with Carl over beers in Kansas City while we were there for WorldCon. Sure, the internet’s an amazing tool, but there’s nothing quite like face-to-face. It’s great when everything just falls into place.
Now here we are, a few months later. The announcement has been made, including the amazing news that Tor.com Publishing are going to publish Killing Gravity’s sequel, and now I can talk publicly about it. Something I mentioned on twitter is that a big part of why this is so exciting (besides it being my first book, which is a huge deal on its own) is that Tor.com Publishing’s line of novellas is consistently of a super high quality, with multiple award-winning novellas, brilliant emerging and established authors, beautiful cover art, and an editorial desire for better representation with their authors and books. To think that Killing Gravity got chosen out of slush to be published alongside Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti, Kij Johnson’s The Dream-Quest of Vellit Boe, as well as upcoming titles from Charles Stross, Cassandra Khaw, and Laurie Penny (not to mention all the other well-regarded authors whose work I haven’t checked out yet), is incredible. Talk about external validation… (I’d had 130 short story rejections in the 18 months before this sale, so Lesson the third: it’s all about forward motion).
So if you need me, I’ll be here, talking about Killing Gravity, offering advice, posting fiction (my own, and links to others), and trying to make the most of this opportunity to kick-start something resembling a writing career.