I feel like I’ve missed a trick with The Book and the Blade. It would seem that I did not get the memo regarding the standard structure of novel titles in the contemporary market. Absolutely everything seems to be some combination of A____ of_____ and _______ , and with less than ten days to go it is probably a wee bit late to change things.
A Book of Shadow and Blades?
A City of Drunks and Deceased?
A Blade of Sharp and Pointy?
A Man of Inebriated Regret?
A Midnight Panini of Cajun Chicken and Cheese? (Now THAT’S an in-joke I squeezed into the book for a small number of people!)
Well, folks, regardless of marketing reservations it is officially too late to do anything about it now. The Book and the Blade will be released to the world on February 28th of this year… just 9 short days away at the time of my writing this! To say I’m a tad excited would be like saying Trump was a little bit controversial, but it is an excitement heavily tempered by a creeping pessimism. Imposter syndrome really is a kick in the tits. If it wasn’t for my best friend and amazing wife (same person…also my biggest critic…in a good way!) I would have already closed the door so to speak. It is a really odd thing to write a book…to put everything out there, to create something new you hope people love, and then to tie yourself in knots at the thought of people actually reading the damn thing! With that in mind, it is perhaps no surprise I have let things get this close to release day without doing a damn thing about it.
Kel has different ideas.
Last night, while we waited for our daughter on her first official date no less (where did that time go?!) I officially gave in to my wife’s polite suggestions for a launch party…so now things are going to happen. It’ll be in Brisbane…somewhere. The Saturday after the release date…sometime. And I promise I’ll turn up…maybe.
All jokes aside, it has been an amazing (and stressful) few weeks…writing, editing, doing interviews, checking final proofs, panicking, hyperventilating, drinking…and, of course, unboxing my debut novel!
I hope that if you buy it, you enjoy it, or at the very least, don’t hate it so much you start a campaign against the author that goes viral and he never works in this town again and gets sacked from his day job for bringing the English language into disrepute and is then bundled out of Australia by immigration because they just can’t tolerate such amateurish shite on these sun-drenched shores and then his wife leaves him for being such a failure and his kids change their names to completely disassociate and he ends up selling moody-gold from the back of a car on a racecourse market where he rummages through the discarded betting slips for that one small glimmer of hope (or because he can’t afford toilet paper and needs must) and then he wanders off into the mountains only to be found in a bush hugging a tattered copy of the Beano that reminds him of his shattered hopes and dreams.
Something like that anyway.
Cheers folks!
PARLIAMENT HOUSE PRESS / AMAZON / BARNS AND NOBLE / BOOKTOPIA