Out of the Debauched Sloth
Chaz Brenchley's Fortnightly Newsletter
What news on the Rialto, do you ask?
Not so very much workwise, if we’re honest; mostly these last two weeks I have been checking proofs. The good news, though, is that one of those was my own, The Devil in the Dust, aka the First Book of Outremer, my say-it’s-the-Crusades-without-saying-it’s-the-Crusades fantasy series.
Let me acknowledge here and now that these books have had a complicated publishing history, leading to some degree of confusion in both author and readers. I conceived it as a four-book series, and was halfway through book three when my editor asked me to wrap it up with that volume, because sales weren’t good enough to justify a fourth. Which is one of the stories of my life: I also have two trilogies out there which only ever ran to two books each, hey-ho.
So, in the UK there were three Books of Outremer: Large, Extra Large and Triple-X (I had to squeeze a lot into that last one). They were published by Orbit (which is a whole other story, as they’d been commissioned by a different publisher altogether, and Orbit had in fact turned them down already) in the late nineties as Tower of the King’s Daughter, Feast of the King’s Shadow and Hand of the King’s Evil.
Five years later, my new and rather brilliant agent sold the series to Ace in the US. (This was before her boyfriend spirited her away to grow cannabis in India. Which, again, another story.) Ace chose to publish it in six slender volumes, coming out one a month and alternating the original titles with new ones: The Devil in the Dust, Tower of the King’s Daughter, A Dark Way to Glory, Feast of the King’s Shadow, Hand of the King’s Evil, and The End of All Roads.
As I had to find a point to split each of the originals in half, and rewrite a little to make the transitions smoother, I took the opportunity to work through the whole text one more time, editing—and particularly cutting, particularly Triple-X—as I went. As a result, the American editions are my preferred cut, and those (with a little ongoing revision, as no book is ever actually finished and I can never not fiddle with a text) comprise the new edition coming out from Wizard’s Tower Press. We are in hopes that The Devil in the Dust will be up for pre-order by the end of this month.
Oh, and my short story “The Station of the Twelfth”, first published by Tor.com, has been picked up for a year’s-best anthology, so that was nice.
Also lemme just plug m’wife’s work here: she has a short story, “A Bayesian Analysis of Wishes”, in the second issue of ParSec magazine (available now from PS Publishing); she has a flash-fiction piece,”Super. Hero.” on Daily Science Fiction; and she has a poem, “The Other Day the Saucers Came”, in Fantasy Magazine, available now from Adamant Press. That last is in conversation with Neil Gaiman’s poem “The Day the Saucers Came”, and you should probably read both.
To relate some wholly unrelated news, I have planted up a lot—and I do mean a lot—of superhot pepper seeds, and they are sprouting even as we speak. I’m looking forward to a productive, hopefully a very productive season, yay!
(And now I have learned how to introduce an image on Substack [hint: it ain’t hard], so that’s a good. I reckon if I can learn one more functionality each newsletter, I’ll be a Master Substacker soon enough.)
More news in a fortnight, next time the cleaners come. ’Til then, stay safe and read books, they’re lovely things, I find.