UnCommonwealth

NOOK customer service

For what it's worth, I'm loving my NOOK Color. And the apps for Mac and PC are searchable.

>Christopher: Initial Question/Comment: Is there a way to search the text of a book on my new Nook Color? For example, if I wanted to find every instance of the word "voluminous" in a novel I'm reading?

Book List, and a bit of news

As announced elsewhere already, I've just sold another short story. "The Contrary Gardener," which serves as a sort of companion piece to "The Voluntary State," will be in the next volume of Jonathan Strahan's Eclipse series of anthologies. I think the book will be out sometime in 2012, and I'll say more about it closer to publication time.

I'm spending most of my time this summer working on my next novel, but my first semester as a graduate student in Eastern Kentucky University's MFA program will start in a week or so. The two courses I'm taking (one of which is a fiction workshop) combine to yield this list of assigned books. I've read about half of them before, but look forward to reading or rereading all of them in an academic setting.

• The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Lydia Davis
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
• The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
• Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
• After This by Alice McDermott
• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, annotations and other apparatus by Alfred Appel, Jr.

All but the García Márquez and the Kundera are available for the Nook (well, the Nabokov isn't quite available yet, it'll be out on the 16th, I think, and here's hoping that the notes &c. are hyperlinked) which brings up the point that I've lately learned to enjoy being a reader of screens. I've even been reading on my computer, just this week having read the first four of Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley mysteries on my laptop. I like having other windows open with the OED and Wikipedia live so I can flip back and forth when I come across a word or something else I'm not familiar with. In the case of Elizabeth George, that means I now know what secateurs are (well, I guess I already knew what they were, just not their proper name), and now know a lot more about the furniture makers of England than I ever thought I would.

AJC Decatur Book Festival

Blowing the dust off the blog to invite any and all to come see me (and many, many other writers) at this year's Decatur Book Festival over Labor Day weekend down in Georgia. My particular event is Sunday afternoon at 2:30 on the Eddie's Attic stage. Sneak away from Dragon*Con for the afternoon and come here me talk about Sandstorm and other such stuff!

The Big Idea

Novelist, SFWA president, blogger, and rapscallion John Scalzi hosts me today at Whatever. Check it out!

Reader Reaction

Novelist David J. Schwartz read Sandstorm and here's what he has to say about it.

Later this week, after I get a couple of major school projects out of the way, I'll be back to talk about what's unaccountably piqued the most interest about how I wrote this book--the fact that I wrote it on a manual typewriter.

In which we learn it's all Holly Black's fault

There's an interview with me up today at my publisher's website (I promise that my internet life is not going to be all-Sandstorm all-the-time from here on out, it's just that kind of week). Therein, I talk about how I wound up getting the opportunity to write a Forgotten Realms book in the first place, quite a bit about the book itself, and, heh, a little bit about my teaching "philosophy" when it comes to writing. Also, a bit about Clarion West. West is Best! (Look, sweetie, I made it all the way to the end before I used an exclamation point, and held myself to one just like you said!)

Happy Sandstorm Release Day: D&D Salon

Today my partner-in-life-and-crime Christopher Rowe's first novel, Sandstorm (Amazon | Indiebound), releases into the wild, as they say. Said novel also happens to be part of the Forgotten Realms universe, a Dungeons & Dragons-related property of gaming publisher Wizards of the Coast. I'm sure a few years ago, I'd have thought I knew what that meant and I might even have been guilty (guilty is definitely the word) of dismissing many media tie-ins without a second thought. But that's because a) lots of people do so unfairly all the time and b) I didn't know anything about how such novels come into being. Suffice to say, it's pretty much like writing any other novel. Blood, sweat, tears. (In Mr. Rowe's case, also a typewriter.) With these, just about everything except the broader world is the creation of the author.

via gwendabond.typepad.com

My lovely wife does something very lovely for me. Make sure to read the comments, the story about Karen's kid made me tear up a little.

Launch Day!

At long last, Sandstorm is released today. If you have any inclination to pick it up, or just want to know more about it, you can check out this page. Meanwhile, Gwenda has put together a fascinating roundtable with some fabulous writers (and me) talking about how gaming and gaming fiction figured in their lives. What I wrote is this:

When I was in my early teens, I lived in rural Kentucky, which can be a pretty fantastic place. But I also lived in fantasy worlds, because I had a taste for the more literally fantastic. In particular, I played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons and read a lot of high fantasy novels. My favorite world to play in or read about was the Forgotten Realms, and a lot of what I know about wonder, action, and scope in fantastic fiction comes from reading those books and playing those games back then. I decided that one day, I would be a writer myself so that I could write a Forgotten Realms book of my own. And despite all the twists and turns my life and my career as a writer have taken since since then, I'm delighted that that day has actually come.

Check out what everyone else had to say.

And thanks, everybody. If you read the book, I hope you like it!

It's a book!

The FedEx man just dropped of the author's copies of my first novel! Boy oh boy oh boy!

Yammer yammer

Here's a brief interview with me at wizards.com's bookclub, mostly about the upcoming book.