TOUR OFFICIALLY ENDS
What a whirlwind.
And I wasn’t even on a BIG tour. Fellow Tor author, the inimitable John Scalzi, is in the middle of an intense 4-week tour, 23 different cities and dates! I felt extremely lucky with my debut novel to have about 10 events spread out sporadically over the last month. I also had a blog tour with over a dozen guest posts and interviews. I’ve put links to all the posts and interviews together in a list on the Appearances page. A big shout out to my publicist, Ardi Alspach, for her work on the whole shebang!
My final event was this past Saturday at my local cozy bookstore, A Good Book Cafe; it was a three hour sit-down signing with fellow author Mark Teppo. This allowed staff and some of my students from the high school where I teach to come on down and buy a book and get it signed.
A little over a month has passed since the debut of The Ultra Thin Man. During this time I’ve been quite jazzed to see some fabulous reviews. I have a smattering of them, snippets from fuller reviews, along with pre-publication quotes, on the book page for the novel. Customer reviews at Amazon have been quite nice. Some very decent ones over at GoodReads, too, although that also tends to be the venue for more …. “less than stellar” thoughts about the book! But this sort of thing is to be expected.
The 2014-15 school year started on September 3rd, amidst all the hoopla of the tour and blog posts, and it was a bit difficult getting my classroom ready, but everything is in full swing now. I also found it difficult to work on book two during the book release window, so now I hope to get back to it and knock out the ending, as I approach 90,000 words. (The Ultra Thin Man went in to Tor at 96,000, and ultimately ended up around 107,000).
I have announced this next news during a number of interviews and podcasts, as well as some book events, so I will also mention the working title of the sequel here on my blog: The Ultra Big Sleep. Yes, it’s another nod to noir, the famous novel by Raymond Chandler. And by gosh and by golly, it totally fits what’s been happening as I plow through the first draft!
So that’s the latest. Thank you to EVERYONE who came out to see me and to check out The Ultra Thin Man. I can still use your help getting the word out about it….particularly if you really liked the book!
Here are a few new pictures from events and book spottings!
