Okay, so my agent tells me they announced the deal on Publisher's Marketplace today, so:

Del Rey has purchased my first novel Spellbent and two of its sequels. I believe their tentative plan is to release Spellbent in early-to-mid 2009 and the other books in the trilogy will of course come later.

I'm entirely geeked about this. I got into science fiction and fantasy partly as a result of reading Del Rey authors such as Anne McCaffrey and Marion Zimmer Bradley, so I'm pretty darn happy to have become a Del Rey author myself.

My agent's getting ready to send Spellbent out to various publishers, and with luck one of them will snap it right up, and with a little more luck it won't end up with a standard jean butt cover. ;-)

However, in the meantime, he said it would be okay for me to post the first chapter of the book, which is entitled "A Simple Storm-Calling".

I should warn those with delicate sensibilities that the chapter contains occasional bad language, het sex, drug references, violence, grisly imagery, and a ferret.

So if you're okay with the occasional f-bomb, etc., go on to Spellbent: Chapter One, Part 1

Gary and I had a pleasant, low-key Christmas. bzarcher and felislachesis took us to dinner Christmas Eve, and that was a lot of fun.

My agent wrote me back with a few suggested manuscript changes for Spellbent and asked me for the synopses for the 2nd and 3rd books in the proposed series. However, it seems more and more apparent that there will need to be a 4th book to complete the overall story arc.

Anyhow, I got the synopsis for #2 written in a couple of hours last night. It's much, much easier for me to write it before the book's written, because all those seemingly too important to cut subplots (which is what hung me up on the Spellbent synopsis) don't even exist yet :)

In case you're wondering how the word count worked out on Spellbent:

86,250 / 80,000 (107.8%)

A question for everyone: as readers, do you care much about chapter titles? Do you even notice them?

Also, I'm sort of curious to see what (if anything) you may think happens in the book based purely on the chapter titles I've used:( Read more... )