Saturday at 1:30 p.m. I'll be at Aunt Agatha's in Ann Arbor with author Mark Terry who'll be launching his novel, "The Fallen" (cake is promised).
PRINT THE LEGEND is a month and three-days-old, now.
Since the novel's launch, more than a thousand miles has been covered to push the book.
Michigan will, more or less, wrap up the core of the PRINT tour. It's been some ride — beyond just the road: the book's editor switched publishers shortly before launch... Then the great Macmillan/Amazon wars ensued and PRINT was unavailable from that online venue for many weeks.
As a result of some of these changes, there's also been a switch in publishing plans.
One of the advantages/oddities of having written an entire series before the first book was even a year-old is the luxury of picking and choosing releases.
I suspect I'm setting some kind of quirky book publishing history with this unprecedented game of musical chairs in terms of the next novel.
PRINT THE LEGEND's follow-up was originally going to be a novel set in 1958 Nashville. A novel envisioned as the last in the series.
A course correction was made shortly before my former editor left Minotaur and we decided to go with a World War II novel which has been talked up a bit on this tour when asked the inevitable question, "What's next?"
Plans appear to be changing again, and with the blessing of my new editor, Kat Brzozowski, we are likely going to go with still another novel for number four — one that will, essentially, restore the series to my originally envisioned publication sequence and conclude what is, in a sense, the Hemingway trilogy contained within the eight book Hector Lassiter series.
It's also a novel that introduces the pivotal woman in Hector Lassiter's turbulent life.
It's a novel that was written immediately on the heels of my second novel, TOROS & TORSOS and is a kind of spiritual brother to that book. Similar in tone and voice. It's also a novel I'm particularly fond of.
More on all this coming soon...although if you show up in Michigan tomorrow, and pose the question, you may learn more.
To give you some sense of where in the world we're headed next, I leave you with this image of a key character from Lassiter #4:
And a musical clue, too:
Hope to see you in Ann Arbor tomorrow... Oh, and limited edition chapbooks to the first 30 who buy copies of PRINT THE LEGEND.
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Thanks for the heads-up, Craig. That sounds like quite a trail you're blazing with this series. Sorry you couldn't make it out to the left coast during the core of the PRINT tour. Will you be coming out to B'con 2010 in S.F. come Oct? Thanks.
ReplyDeleteSorry, no B-Con in San Fran...it's a bridge too far, this year. I'm planning on 2011's version in St. Louis, however.
ReplyDeleteA Stein is a Stein is a Stein.
ReplyDeleteSorry to hear you won't be at B-Con. Whatever the next Lassiter is, I'll read it.
ReplyDeleteNaomi: Yes...Gertrude Stein as a kind of Left Bank Nero Wolfe...that's the drift.
ReplyDeleteSo is Macmillan still going to publish the Nashville novel, too? I was pretty psyched to read that one.
ReplyDeleteWe'll see how it goes depending on how PRINT and the next one does. It was a two-book deal with Macmillan that was struck during Edgar Week a few years back, PRINT THE LEGEND being book one of that arrangement. It's just unusual—probably quite unprecedented — to have multiple books in a series already written and ready to choose from in terms of selecting titles to put out there. Stir in the fact the series is nonlinear, and all kinds of options open up.
ReplyDeleteThat said, in my world, this next one would have been the follow up to TOROS rather than PRINT being #3, so this puts the series potentially back on track for my ideal publication sequence. This next one is also the book in which Hector becomes Hector, and should satisfy some folks have wanted glimpses of more Hector Lassiter prose.