Want to see how the sausage is made? Learn all the dark secrets of editorial meetings? Live life high on the hog like all of us publishing big wigs? Well, now is your chance.
Orbit US is seeking an editorial assistant to join the team in our New York office. We are looking for motivated, engaged, and committed individuals who want to pursue a career in genre publishing. Publishing experience is a big plus, but not required. What is required is an enthusiasm for genre fiction, a near pathological attention to detail, and truly supernatural organizational skills.
This week Jack Womack chats with Daniel Abraham, author of THE DRAGON’S PATH, which is out now. Subjects covered include economics and fantasy, warcraft and tradecraft, sympathetic villains, and a writing trick Daniel learned from video-games.
You can listen to the full episode below, or subscribe on itunes or the RSS feed.
Love Hurts is a short story from my new Dresden Files anthologySide Jobs (originally in Songs of Love and Death, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois). It takes place between Turn Coat and Changes.
Gardner Dozois has a bunch of awards for his anthologies because he’s good at them, and I leapt at his invitation to contribute to the anthology he was working on with George R. R. Martin, originally titled Star-Crossed Lovers. Despite my enthusiasm, finding a starting point for a Dresden story was sort of a puzzler for me, since Harry Dresden might be in the top three Star-Influence-Free lovers in the whole contemporary-fantasy genre. How was I going to bring him into a story with a theme like that?
Answer: Get him into the thick of things next to Murphy when seemingly random love spells are running amok through the city. After that, all I had to do was apply his usual streak of luck and cackle madly to myself while typing. The title of the anthology changed to Songs of Love and Death after I had written the story, which is probably a good thing. Otherwise, I may have tried to find a way to fit a death-metal battle of the bands into the margins somewhere. No one deserves that.
So I have written before about how I love the Simon Morden trilogy that has started hitting shelves. Samuil Petrovitch is my favorite kind of snarling sarcastic anti-hero, and a genius rocket scientist to boot. My kind of guy. And I especially love Orbit for letting me be a bit daring with the cover design and rock these really graphic optical illusion covers.
So what you don’t know is that the initial design was even crazier. I wanted to hide the cover text IN the optical illusions. Slight legibility problem, I admit, for a teeny book cover…but FABULOUS for a poster. And since I know you guys love these how-to videos, I screen-captured my process so you too can make your own Editable-Text Optical Illusion Poster…and melt the retinas of all your friends. After the jump you can even download the Illustrator file I used, and add your own text. Read the rest of this entry »
You can learn to make your own in our How-To video, or you can win your own! Just sign up below and you’ll be entered to win one of ten “Mind the Gap” posters.
Something Borrowed is a short story from my new Dresden Files anthology Side Jobs (originally in My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding, edited by P.N. Elrod). The story takes place between Dead Beat and Proven Guilty.
I wrote this for the very first anthology in which I’d ever been invited to participate. I’d met Pat Elrod at a convention and thought she was quite a cool person, and when she asked me to take part in her anthology, I was more than happy to do so.
When I wrote this story, I was thinking that the Alphas (a group of werewolves who often provide great backup for Harry at difficult moments) hadn’t gotten nearly enough stage time in the series thus far. It therefore seemed like a good opportunity to give them some more attention, while at the same time showing the progression of their lives since their college days, which I felt was best demonstrated by Billy and Georgia’s wedding.
Inane trivia: While I was in school writing the first three books of the Dresden Files, my wife, Shannon, watched Ally McBeal in the evenings, often while I was plunking away at a keyboard. I didn’t pay too much attention to the show, and it took me years to realize I had unconsciously named Billy and Georgia after those characters in Ally McBeal. Who knew? TV really does rot your brain!
The David Gemmell Award nominees have been revealed and we are pleased to announce that Orbit titles have received a total of 5 nominations across the three categories!
Side Jobs: Stories from the Dresden Files is the perfect intro to the world of Jim Butcher’s P.I. protagonist Harry Dresden (think Indiana Jones meets Dirty Harry with a generous helping of Sam Spade) since no previous knowledge is required to enjoy these bite-sized tales.
For Dresden Files fans, this collection will unveil the hidden stories between the full-length novels … Expect new revelations on Harry Dresden’s half brother, Harry’s love life and don’t forget — one short story takes place an hour or so after the climactic ending of Changes!
Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be bringing you Jim’s own introductions to some of these short stories that will begin to unlock the secrets between the files. Uncovering the rest will be up to you.
Over the weekend at Eastercon, the Hugo Award nominees were announced. Both Mira Grant’s FEED and N.K. Jemisin’s THE HUNDRED THOUSAND KINGDOMS were nominated for best novel!
You can read the first three chapters of THE HUNDRED THOUSAND KINGDOMS here, and the first chapter of FEED here.
- - April 28th, 2011
