My front yard, HARD MAGIC reviews, autographed copies, upcoming signings, and the ARC

To start out, my wife got a new camera for Christmas.  She’s getting better at this photography stuff. She even made me look pretty decent.

 

Oh, and to make you all jealous, this picture was taken in my front yard. I grabbed it off of her Facebook profile, so it isn’t as high res as before. So even as cool as that looks, it doesn’t do it justice.

 

You don’t want to move here, though. The crime is out of control. The yard moose are everywhere.

I’ve got to tell you guys. One of the hardest things about being a writer is that first few days after a new book releases. You sit there, biting your fingernails, checking the internet every few minutes, and it is much worse when the new release is something different from the books you’ve released before.

Officially, The Grimnoir Chronicles: Hard Magic doesn’t hit store shelves until May 2nd. However Baen loves putting out advance eBooks, so early that they haven’t even gone through the final edit yet. (typos, yay!) The eARC hit last Friday, so ever since then I’ve been anxiously waiting to see what everybody thinks of my new series.

Well, early reviews are coming in.

http://ramblesfromtechsupport.blogspot.com/2011/02/hard-magic-earc-review.html

http://bigbananaslug.livejournal.com/75526.html

http://www.facebook.com/#!/notes/nathaniel-thoburn-fitch/the-grimnoir-chronicles-hard-magic-review/498280298802

Looking good. I didn’t know if the market was ready for noir/pulp/alternative-history/fantasy/action with blimp fighting, hard boiled detectives, demons, teleporting magic ninjas, Cossack fighting bears, samurai, Tesla super weapons, John M. Browning, Teutonic zombies, and profane squirrels.  What genre is this? Heck if I know. The more I think about it, the more I like the term “Diesel Punk”. And yes, somebody wears goggles.

If you want an autographed trade paperback or one of the limited number of hard covers, go here: http://www.unclehugo.com/prod/ah-correia-larry.php  

The ARC is available for download here:  http://www.webscription.net/p-1363-hard-magic-book-i-of-the-grimnoir-chronicles-arc.aspx

In other news, I’m doing a signing at the Sandy Barnes & Noble this Saturday from 1-4.  It is the annual Authorpalooza and there will be something like 40 writers present. http://store-locator.barnesandnoble.com/event/3080754  I know Brandon Mull, James Dashner, Jessica Day George, and Paul Genesse will be there. Last year they stuck me in outer darkness next to the maps and geography books. Which kind of sucked since I was the 2nd best selling writer there that year. Oh well. Hopefully this year they will move me up to someplace that has some traffic, like by the bathrooms or something.

Coming up after that, I’m going to LTUE again. I’m on six panels. I’m doing one on action by myself, and I’m teaming up with Super Author John Brown again for a new version of Stories that Rock. That’s February 17-19 at BYU.  I’ll post my schedule when it gets closer.

Who wants to make their own MHI patches?
HARD MAGIC eARC available NOW!

23 thoughts on “My front yard, HARD MAGIC reviews, autographed copies, upcoming signings, and the ARC”

  1. Larry, once I get my thoughts collected and typed, I will be posting a review on one of my blogs and the steampunk community on LiveJournal. It has a very large feel of post steampunk to it.;

  2. Didn’t want to stop reading the eARC when it was bedtime last night, so I copied it to my phone and finished the book with Kindle for Android. Felt like a kid reading under the covers with a flashlight again.

    There’s only one problem with this series – now I”m torn between it and MH:x as to which one I like better. I was never really a fan of “1930s pulp” type stories but I will devour this series.

  3. I hate to say it but the early reviews have turned me off the book. I will only be buying it on webscription instead of the eARC and webscription I was thinking about. I just said the reviews turned me off the book, not enough to not buy it and read it, just enough that I’m only going to buy 1 copy.

  4. Hey Larry, I’ll be at your book signing in Sandy with bells on. I’ll have to hunt up my copy of MHI. I bought the arc versions of Hard Magic and MHV. So I can’t get them signed.

    Dude I got to say. If that’s a good picture of you. You’re scarier looking than I thought.

  5. Here’s why I don’t like “diesel punk”.

    Most “something-punk” genres seem to involve, effectively, taking late 20th/early 21st century postmodern hipsters, with all of the cultural baggage that entails, and planting them in fantastical settings (i.e., a technofantasy version of the Victorian Era in the case of steam punk).

    Unless you’ve really, really edited it since I read the rough draft, there ARE no hipsters in Grimnoir. Nor are modern-day attitudes and values transplanted into a historical era. You really did you research to make people act, think, and talk like they actually did in the 1930s, (or at least your best guess).

    Basically, there isn’t a lot of punking going on. But, the term has been popularized and will be stuck to Grimnoir whether you like it or not. Just like MHI was called “urban fantasy” even though it took place in rural Alabama.

    And it’s not like the period didn’t have its own brand of hipsters. The Algonquin Round Table was fancying itself to be quite clever and laughing at its own jokes decades before the development of the Macbook and the hipster takeover of Seattle.

    1. I see the logic here, and I agree. And you’re right, it’s a marketing thing. Alternate Historical Fantasy just doesn’t sound as “hip” as Diesel Punk.

      Just like with MHI, Rural Fantasy just doesn’t grab like Urban Fantasy does.

      With how popular Urban Fantasy is now, you want to fit everything you can into it. Take Dan Wells’ SERIAL KILLER novels. They are YA Horror. Except they are pitching in many places as Urban Fantasy so they will sell better.

      I’m just waiting for DEAD SIX to get marketed there. “The terrorists are a metaphor for vampires…or something…URBAN FANTASY IT IS!!!!!”

      1. Pretty much. When somebody asks me what Grimnoir is, I can tell them that it is an alternative-history/fantasy/pulp/action novel kind of Raymond Chandler meets epic fantasy with ninjas! or I can say Diesel punk.

        That’s what I get for writing novels that don’t fit in genres. At least Dead Six is a thriller… written in a style unlike any other thriller… Damn it!

  6. I have not read the Grimnoir Chronicles eARC (I can’t find it), but want to take this opportunity to respond to this post anyway :

    Do you think you might ever come out to Southern California for any events?

    I also would like to say: I know you won’t remember me, but he only reason I have heard of your books was from you, when we met briefly at a book signing over a year ago in Logan, UT. You said that I probably would not like MHI because of some of it’s content. Turns out, you jumped to the very top of my favourite authors list because of it. And Vendetta is just as good. Thank you for the wonderful style and stories. I cannot wait to be able to read the GC, but I cannot access more than the sample chapters, so I will be required to wait impatiently for May.

    Katrina

    (Originally posted on http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1136158.Larry_Correia/blog before I realised you would never look there!)

    1. I’m going to be in San Diego and LA doing a few signings in May right after the release. Once I’ve got all the dates pinned down, I’ll be posting them here.

  7. …Larry just linked my blog. I’m about to be as famous (internet famous) as I’ve ever been.

    Larry, I agree with Nightcrawler on this one, Diesel Punk isn’t cool enough for this. I don’t know what to call it, but I really enjoyed Hard Magic, I want *more*

  8. My autographed copies are ordered. Any chance that you’ll be doing any events in the upper midwest sometime after August?

  9. Ok, so first of all, I think I would like to live in Utah now. Secondly, I was wondering if any of “the rules” from the movie Zombieland are going to make their way into the MH world?

  10. So far as I’ve been able to tell, the rules for MH are:
    1) kill stuff (monstrous stuff, that is)
    2) make money
    so it’s a much simpler world.

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