Sword and Laser are also running a competition! You can win a limited edition hardcover of Empire State, and a limited edition hardcover of The Age Atomic over at Goodreads. It’s open worldwide, and you can enter right here.

Finally, last week I was a guest on 89 Chapters, Pakistan’s premier English language radio book show, where I chatted for a couple of hours about books, writing and music. You can now listen to the whole show here. For those interested, this is the complete tracklist I chose for the show:

I’ll do up an iTunes/Spotify playlist for that later this week.

VS Comics #4

The Sentinel is a crime/urban fantasy set in Prohibition New York (you can probably sense a theme here), and is about a rookie cop who is killed and resurrected as an Egyptian god of vengeance. With art by Nathan Ashworth, letters by Mike Stock, and edited by Ned Hartley, The Sentinel is pulp adventure in 6-page bites, and alongside episode 1 there’s an interview with me where I talk more about my writing and the comic. All that, and three other stories, for £2. Grab it!

Couple of links have popped up recently:

• Adventures Fantastic gave The Age Atomic an excellent review, saying that I “pulled out all the stops on this one”. Thanks!
• Over at The Literary Platform, Chris Farnell has posted an interesting piece on writer/fan collaborations, with some contributions from me on the Empire State Worldbuilder experiment.

This Saturday I’m on 89 Chapters, the book show on CityFM89 based in Karachi, Pakistan. Hosted by the wonderful Mavesh, we talked for an hour about books, writing and music, and I had a blast. The show airs 2pm local time, which is 10am Saturday in the UK – you can listen to it live on air, and afterwards the show will be available to stream from the 89 Chapters website. I’ll put the link up for that once I have it.

The full list of nominations can be found here. My congratulations to everyone on the ballot!

The Sir Julius Vogel Awards are given out by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Association of New Zealand; eligible voters are members of SFFANZ or Au Contraire, the NZ national science fiction convention, which is being held on 12-14th July in Wellington.

My thanks to everyone who nominated me! Not a bad way to start the day, really…

• Last Thursday I took part in an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) over at Reddit. It was a lot of fun answering questions, and if you jump over to the thread you can find out some more about my writing, future projects, the comicbook character I most want to write for, and who my fantasy casting for Jennifer Jones and Evelyn McHale from The Age Atomic are… among other things!
• The Age Atomic was reviewed in Saturday’s Financial Times - you can read the full review online here, or click here for a photo of how it appeared in the print newspaper on page 10 of the Life & Arts section - who said, with reference to the first book, Empire State:

The first novel revelled in 1930s noir movies and pulp fiction. This one – a worthy successor – touches on the Red Menace paranoia of the dawn of the nuclear era but has the same jazzy plotting and anything-goes attitude that made Empire State such an unalloyed pleasure.

• Paper Mages gave The Age Atomic a rather enthusiastic review, saying that I have:

… joined a list in the back of my mind of authors who reliably deliver book on book with the same quality and power of the very first, I trust him with my future reading and I think you’ll find yourself doing the same.

• Finally today, Ellie Ann has made a video review of the book, which pretty much blew me away. You can watch the review here, and you’ll also find some brief answers to a couple of questions she sent me.

Tomorrow evening I’m appearing as part of a panel discussion entitled The Future is Unwritten: E-books vs. Print (spot the obvious problem) hosted by Creative Industries Trafford. The event kicks off at 6.00pm at the Waterside Arts Centre, 1 Waterside Plaze, Sale, M33 7ZF. It’s free to attend, but you have to book a place – click here for more information and tickets.

And then we found each other on Twitter, and discovered we were both still writing. So we wrote and we talked and we made big plans.

And Jen is a fantastic writer. Her short stories make me weep with envy, and her novels are just as good. Yesterday it was announced she had signed to Headline for a fantasy trilogy, starting with The Copper Promise in Spring 2014. I’m delighted her work has found such a good home!

Over to Jen…

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt over the last few years, it’s that everyone’s path to publication is different. Some writers assail the mountain on a troupe of hardy goats, sipping buttery tea and eating elvish bread; some fly in, clinging to the gnarly talons of giant eagles; a few may burrow up from the rocky centre of the world, utilizing a team of fearsomely clawed mega-moles. And some of us trip over the mountain accidentally.

The path that led to The Copper Promise, and ultimately its hugely exciting home at Headline, started with a question:

“Do you have anything longer I could read?”

The thing was, I’d been writing and releasing a few short horror stories here and there, and they’d even attracted a few readers. The answer to the question was yes, of course; I’d written a few books, but they were all in varying stages of gruesome edits and certainly weren’t suitable for public consumption just yet.

So I started thinking about writing a novella, a quick and breezy story I could pop up online for people to read, and then I could say: “Look, I am capable of writing longer things. And it’s not all about people eating other people.” (My short stories do seem to tend towards cannibalism. Clearly it’s an issue.) I thought it would be fun to write some rip-roaring fantasy, the sort of fantasy that might have hung around with Fritz Leiber and David Gemmell in a tavern, snorting ale through its nose laughing at their jokes and generally misbehaving. I threw myself into it, gave it a title I actually rather liked, and proceeded to have a high old time writing it.

And then a strange thing happened: I fell in love with it. I fell in love with the characters – with Wydrin and her lack of table manners and her skill with a dagger – and I fell in love with their world, which was magical and odd and full of lots and lots of places I really wanted to go and look at.

The novella, I realised, wasn’t a novella at all. It was two, maybe three novellas. Or maybe it was more than that. In the end, The Copper Promise grew to be a rather sizable tome, and it was honestly the most fun I’ve ever had writing a book. And it was all rather accidental.

The first part did go up online for people to read, but I was lucky enough that the novella attracted some interesting attention, and the amazing and terrifyingly wise Juliet Mushens, who I can only describe as a Super-Agent, took me on as a client. This was just before Christmas. I was over the moon, and frankly, stunned. It was supposed to be a novella, I muttered to myself over the turkey and crackers. It was a breezy little thing.

Juliet, who by her very presence tends to improve things, gave me a list of notes and I went in for another edit. Those future books, the ones beyond The Copper Promise that had previously been just a gleam in my eye, went from being possibilities to realities, and what a joy that was, to know that I would have further adventures with Wydrin and the gang. And now I know that thanks to the awesome John Wordsworth at Headline, I will be able to share them with likeminded fantasy fans. Brilliant.

So, I offer a random piece of writing advice. Not something I would normally do, mind, as most writing advice needs to be taken with giant mounds of salt, since writers are all naturally liars and infinitely varied in their ways, but I feel like it sums up my experience neatly.

Remember always that your path will be different to everyone else’s path. You might climb the mountain with the aid of a wizard and a number of amusingly named dwarves, or you might travel there on a tripped-out steampowered sky-whale; either way, the journey is your own.

Jen’s website and blog are here, and you can find her on Twitter as @sennydreadful.

Some new reviews of The Age Atomic have popped up:

• Over at Sci Fi Bulletin, Paul Simpson gives it 8/10 and says:

 Christopher provides a fast-paced novel which juggles high stakes and personal quests with great aplomb

• At Fifty Books, 365 days, they say:

The Age Atomic is a glorious and joyous ode to the pulp science fiction of old. Awesome fun, from start to finish, just straight up, pure entertainment.

There’s also a new interview with me up at My Bookish Ways, where I talk about The Age Atomic, my writing process, and my favourite books. They are also hosting a giveaway for both The Age Atomic and Empire State – you have two days left to enter, and it is open to residents of the US, Canada and Europe. Full details after the interview!

It’s out in paperback, which you’ll be able to find at the usual places, including:

Forbidden Planet (signed copy) | Amazon.co.uk | Waterstones | The Book Depository | Blackwell’s | WH Smith

It’s also out as a limited edition (/100), signed hardcover, exclusive to Forbidden Planet. You can order that here, or come along to the launch tonight (Thursday 4th April, 6pm), where I’ll be doing a reading and signing. Paperbacks will also be available.

Also out today is the limited edition (/100), signed hardcover of Empire State, once again exclusive to Forbidden Planet and featuring a new cover and some new bonus material. The order link for that is here, but again, it’ll also be available tonight.

People after the ebook or US editions should follow this link.

See you tonight!

As was revealed in my CNN interview, we finally have a title for my Tor book! Readers of this blog may recall it’s gone through several titles, starting as Ludmila, My Love (nice title but didn’t fit the book I ended up writing, plus it has punctuation in it which plays havoc with databases apparently), then ending up as Shadow’s Call (the blandest title in this history of bland), with others inbetween.

Anyway, it’s a dark space opera, it’s out in March 2014 from Tor Books, and it’s called The Burning Dark.

And the revised manuscript is due 1st May, so if you’ll excuse me, I have some editing to get back to…

• Over at John Scalzi‘s The Big Idea, I talk about The Age Atomic and blame a lot of it on Chuck Wendig
• And speaking of Chuck, over at terribleminds.com, he gives me ten tricky questions on the book
• Over at Angry Robot, you’ll find a long extract from The Age Atomic!

Just a wee note on the UK Kindle edition of The Age Atomic – I’ve had a few people tell me they can’t find it on Amazon.co.uk. This is because Amazon have my name backwards on the paperback edition, which means that listing isn’t automatically linking to my Amazon author page or any of my other books, and crucially, to the Kindle edition of The Age Atomic.

Angry Robot are trying to get it sorted, but in the meantime the direct link to the UK Kindle edition is here. A full list of order links (in other formats and from other sellers) can be found here.

Have a good Easter everyone! I’m not at EasterCon this year, but I hope to see some of you at Forbidden Planet next Thursday!