So over the last couple months, I’ve meant to write about two dozen different blogs. The upcoming book got a cover, for example:
(As always, guest starring my thumb.)
But I’m guessing by now you’ve already seen that. We have a UK cover too. There’s some promotional stuff going on with the book, where if you pre-order The Narrow Road Between Desires, you not only can get a signed copy, but you’ll also get one of the promotional postcards we made to showcase some of the fabulous art Nate Taylor did for the book:
(Sleepy child shown for scale.)
By the way, if you haven’t pre-ordered a copy yet, there’s still time to do that. I signed a *bunch* of books so that they could be available everywhere, B&N, Books-a-Million, as well as a any indie bookstores that would like to prepare. You can pre-order and get a signed book and postcard at the Worldbuilders Marketplace too, of course. But we wanted you to be able to buy from your local bookstores, too. Because we *love* local bookstores around here.
If you don’t have a local bookstore, here’s a link that will show you all the different places where you can buy the book.
But back to my point, I’ve had a bunch of things to share with you. A lot of things I’d love to talk about…
…but I haven’t posted any of them. Partly because… I’ve signed more than 30,000 books over the last month (some for the US, some for the UK) so that (hopefully) y’all can get copies even though I’m not doing a signing tour. Partly because I’m helping my boys with school and trying to be a good dad, partly because there’s a lot of other stuff in my life that eats a truly unfortunate amount of my time and energy…
I’ve also been doing interviews, livestreams, and other things to promote the upcoming book, of course:
(I’ve got one of these happening tomorrow, FYI.)
The other reason I haven’t written about a lot of this stuff is that… well… it’s important to me. And if it’s important, I want to do it really well. REALLY well. Perfectly, in fact. And it takes a long time to write a perfect blog… More time that I usually have.
So today I’m trying to change that by writing an imperfect blog. This is it, by the way. It’s a blog where I just tell you some things and try to come to grips with the fact that the blog isn’t as funny, or detailed, or clever as I’d like it to be.
So… with that in mind. Here’s the most recent piece of news I mentioned at the end of last week’s livestream….
Yeah. It’s a Bast-themed calendar.
It started as a joke. I was working on the illustrations for Narrow Road, and getting some feedback from Julia Maddalina, (an amazing artist I’ve worked with for years. You’ve seen her work in the worldbuilders store.)
While we’re chatting, I made some comment about Bast being sexy, it’s a shame he doesn’t have a pin-up calendar, etc etc… Then 20 minutes later, Julia sent me a sketch Bast. I honestly can’t remember what the first one was, because we joked about it for weeks, and she sent me sketches of him washing a car in daisy dukes, dressed up as a lumberjack, and just generally being the hot fae he is.
Then eventually, it started seeming less like a joke and more like a fun side project I could release alongside the book to make some money for Worldbuilders.
I hesitate to call it a pin-up calendar. As there’s a lot of baggage that goes along with that term, a lot of sexism and objectification. But we *have* pulled a bit from that tradition for some of the images.
(This is one of my favorites)
But a lot of the art we developed doesn’t follow in the pin-up tradition. It’s just playful, and silly, and fun…
(Not really a pin-up)
While working on the calendar, I never really talked about it, as I wasn’t sure we’d be able to get it finished this year, and the last thing I wanted to do was get people excited about something and then not be able to deliver it on time. But it’s at the printers now, going through final proofs, and now I wish I *had* been talking about it for months, because Julia’s art is amazing, and this has turned into something I’m really proud of.
(Yeah. That’s Bast as a sexy Mr. Tumnis…. Plus Noir. I don’t know why I’m proud of it. But I am. I’m really, *really* proud of it.)
Last week, I was showing the finished project to a friend who runs a bookstore down in Madison because I was excited about it being finished, and they ended up ordering a hundred copies for their store. It was only then that I realized that some of you were in direct contact with a bunch of people who would love to buy something like this….
Aaaand. That’s it. An imperfect blog. The story of how I accidentally made a Julia draw bast without his shirt off a bunch, for charity.
Here’s the tricky bit. We’ve done calendars in the past and learned the hard way that they’re not an evergreen product. I don’t want to print, like, 150 of these, then run out and have a bunch of people be sad because we ran out and they can’t have one.
On the other hand, I also don’t want to throw away a thousand calendars when February rolls around. It’s a huge waste of money, and feels like an ecological hate-crime.
So right now we’re doing a pre-order sale in Worldbuilders online store. For a couple days, if you buy multiple copies, you can get a big discount. (That sale is going to go away when we put in our final order this week.
You can also put together a bunch of different bundles over there, where people can get a discount by buying a bunch of things at once. Like a copy of the new book, a calendar, and one of the new coins we make with shire post to celebrate the release of Narrow Road.)
(These show up in the book, and I’m *really* happy with how they turned out.)
So… there you go. Many announcements made imperfectly. Hopefully I’ll be able to come back and go into more detail about some of these things later, but at the very least I’ve managed to mention them to y’all.
And now, I’ve got to go make breakfast for my boys.
Later space cowboys,
pat
P.S. If you happen to be a cool indie bookstore, and want to sell some sexy Bast during the holidays, drop us a line over at: [email protected].
