Today brings three very different book announcements of different kinds.
First, Apocryphile Press is bringing out an audiobook of The Falling Tower on Audible, with an AI reader** (one imitating a British woman, to get Charles Williams’ accent in the right general part of the world)! I’m a written-word-preferring human myself, but I know audiobooks are great for many people (and for me on long walks). The Falling Tower features: the chaos of being a freshman at Harvard, Charles Williams’ ghost, what at least appears to be the language from before the fall of Babel, unprincipled AGI, and vampires coming to life out of fan fiction. If any of that sounds fun, and you want to read something of mine that’s lighter and/or more conventional than Out of Tales and its digital offshoots, I’d recommend giving The Falling Tower a try.
Second, much in bigger news — my longtime friend Warren Tusk is releasing his novella (also with Apocryphile) entitled The Goetist on January 5. It’s a philosophical dialogue between a magician and the demon he summoned, modeled on Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, and, while Tusk’s positions are almost as different from C.S. Lewis’s as they can be, he’s one of Lewis’s only rivals for “ability to write philosophy that crawls into my head.”
Can be preordered here: https://www.amazon.com/Goetist-Warren-Tusk-ebook/dp/B0FV2PCTZ5.
Or, if you’re interested in an advance copy for review: https://booksprout.co/reviewer/review-copy/view/240715/the-goetist
Third, I have finally (finally, finally) managed a draft of February Book (Of the Abandoned, was going to be This Thing but that name belongs more properly to a chapbook manuscript — and also implies a degree of intimacy that was getting claustrophobic). Most of the writing process was agonizing (fitting for a book about all the ways love goes wrong); I finally found some excitement and momentum in October, when I 80% gave up on the rigid structure I’d imagined. There’s a ton of revision to go, and depending how I and my first readers feel, and how sad I feel about relinquishing much of the web portion. Tough decisions. I might look for traditional publishers this time; we shall see.
** AI: I have a lot thoughts and feelings about the various real AIs out there (tldr: there are huge and horrible problems with AI-as-it-is-in-today’s-world, but the problems are problems with society, not the AIs, and, in the end, if it turns out humanity can create entities that effortly outclass it at everything, it should suck it up, take the ego hit, and do so)… but that deserves its own blog post.
Of Elsewhere 