Everything That’s Going On I literally don’t even remember how to blog anymore, it’s been so long, but I’m just going to go for it and start typing. Set the controls for the heart of the sun! For somebody who claims to be a writer on his tax returns I haven’t published a lot of actual writing for the past — oh God — five years. But I have actually been working hard this whole time, and finally this year some of the stuff I’ve been working on is going to start coming out. I am so ready. Or but first: 2019! The big thing that happened in 2019 was that Boom! published the first Magicians graphic novel, The Magicians: Alice’s Story, written by Lilah Sturges and drawn by Pius Bak with extensive hovering and kibitzing by me. I’m a huge comics fan, and I love how it came out. So much. So much in fact that we kept going and produced a five-issue Magicians series. If you’re interested in where the story’s going on right now within the Magicians-books-verse, this is where it’s at. I also did some journalism. I wrote a lengthy story about The Rise of Skywalker for Vanity Fair, which I’m really proud of, though a lot of it was speculation about what the movie was going to be about, which admittedly is not as interesting as it was six months ago. I also wrote an essay about fantasy maps for a fascinating anthology called Lost Transmissions, and an essay about General Tso’s Tofu for a fascinating anthology called Eat Joy. (I like to cook when I’m not writing.) Now on to 2020. The Magicians TV show rolls on: Season 5 kicks off on January 15th — which is today! OMG! It’s going to be incredible and beautiful. Please watch. I’m still working on The Bright Sword, my novel about King Arthur. I’ve now written the whole thing front to back, twice, and it’s still not right. But I think I get what it needs now, I just have to find some time to focus on it. I’m publishing it in 2021 come hell or high water or the actual return of actual King Arthur. In the meantime here’s something that I’m so excited about that I have trouble even thinking about it directly: I wrote a movie. It’s called The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, and it’s kind of a Groundhog Day rethink about two teenagers trapped in a repeating day together. It’s based on a short story I published in an anthology called Summer Days and Summer Nights, and it’s got a cast and a director and it’s going into production right now. It deserves its own blog post which I will one day write. I still can’t believe this is happening. Two more things. One is The Heavens, a TV show I’m creating with Michael London (from the Magicians TV show), AGBO (the studio run by the Russo brothers, of Community/Captain America/Avengers megafame), and Amazon. How this came to pass is a story so incredible I would not have believed it, but asically it’s a kind of premium-cable Sopranos/Wire/Game of Thrones take on space opera in the grand romantic Star Wars tradition. More than that I cannot say. But I hope to be able to say very soon. Last but very much not least is The Silver Arrow, a novel for children. I’ve been working on this book for the past three years but I’ve kept pretty quiet about it because I’ve never written a novel for kids and I wasn’t sure I could do it. But it’s working out! I don’t want to say too much about it yet, but it’s about an 11-year-old girl named Kate and her giant talking steam locomotive The Silver Arrow. The idea was to try to write something that’s funny and sweeps you away, in that way that Roald Dahl’s books do, but at the same time challenges you with real emotional truths, in that the way Roald Dahl’s books also do. We’ll see how I did. The Silver Arrow is out on September 1.



The Year that Wasn’t This is Steve Morris’s amazing cover for the Magicians graphic novel, out next year I write slowly, and these days I mostly write long, basically because I suck at short stories and because I’ve (mostly, temporarily) stepped back from journalism. As a result it’s totally possible for me to do an entire year of really intense work and come to the end of it having published practically nothing. 2018 was such a year! I wrote a book review in the New York Times with a very creepy 1970’s-style sci-fi illustration. An essay of mine appeared in a wonderful book about fantasy maps. I also gave a lecture or two. But apart from that (unless I’m forgetting something, which is totally possible) I just wrote and wrote and wrote and didn’t publish anything. I spent a lot of this year working on a novel about King Arthur called The Bright Sword. I turned in a first draft of it in January and a second draft in September, but I figure it’s going to take one more major revision before I can really say I’m in the endgame. You wouldn’t think it would take this long but Arthur is just one of those many-layered multi-chambered subjects that it’s really hard to feel like you’ve come to grips with in any kind of a satisfying way. And it’s a very old story, and I want to feel like it’s getting traction on what feels like a very new world while still remaining true to its old-ness. Plus people have been writing about Arthur for so long, literally more than a thousand years. You look back at that huge long line of brilliant writers behind you, and they’re all looking at you, and you think jeez this had better be good. But surely my good man you can’t sit around writing about King Arthur all day every day! You’re right! I really can’t. I frequently burn out on projects and have to put them down for while and get some perspective. To be totally honest I haven’t even really touched The Bright Sword for a couple of months now because when I look at it all I can see is this kind of black-hole-sun thing where a manuscript should be and then I have to make a saving throw vs. madness. So I’ve been working on other things instead. I read and commented on scripts for the Magicians show as they came in (the fourth season just wrapped a few weeks ago and will start airing in January). There’s also a deeply awesome Magicians graphic novel coming out next summer, which I didn’t write (the brilliant Lilah Sturges did), but I did look over everybody’s shoulders and make them feel uncomfortable while they worked on it. And there are other other things too. Up until two years ago I still had a day job as a staff writer at Time magazine, and when I left—and gave up the salary—I knew I would have to start up some non-novel projects, because it takes me so long to write novels that my family would probably run out of money in between them. And I felt burnt out on journalism. So I took up screenwriting instead. Writing for Hollywood is one of those things novelists are not ever supposed to do ever, and I get that: it can be an incredible time- and soul-devourer. But at the same time when you’re in the business of storytelling it’s hard not to get interested in TV and movies, which are powerful and immediate in ways that are equal to — but very different from — novels. Plus scalewise they’re just incredibly dominant. I mean if you sell a million books you’re a massively successful author. If a million people watch your TV show, well, you’re 1/16th of Young Sheldon. And kibitzing on the Magicians show, watching those guys work, made me wonder what it would feel like to tell stories that way. Writing is a lot about visualizing the book that you want to read but which hasn’t been written yet and then writing it. I started to realize there were un-made shows and movies I wanted to watch too. (And there’s the money, right? True. Though for the time being at least I make much more from books than I do from screenwriting.) So starting two years ago I began flying out to L.A. and talking to people. I did all the things. I lunched. I pitched. I was mentored. And slowly some projects have begun to materialize. Annoyingly (and really there aren’t many things more annoying than when people say this) I can’t talk about them yet. They have developed to the point where I’m getting paid for them (which is a relief) but they haven’t quite developed to the point where they’ve been announced yet. But I’m super-excited about them, and hopefully it will all be out there soon. Meanwhile I just badly miss finishing things and putting them out in the world. In most ways this was an incredibly great year: my family’s healthy, my house isn’t falling down, and I’m writing! And I love writing, I love this business of pouring all your thoughts and feelings into words. But with no one reading them it does start to feel a bit like playing Scrabble with yourself. Which is great, don’t get me wrong. I’ve done enough of it to know! But enough is enough. I’ll see you next year.



Transparency

I was thinking the other day how important it is for readers who care about a writer to know what the hell that writer is doing with his or her time when he or she hasn’t published a book for a while. So I’m writing a note to let you know what I’m doing with my time. Some of you already know. But for those who don’t: Since The Magician’s Land came out in August 2014 my one desire has been to get another book out there. To that end I wrote half of a young-adult book. I also wrote half of a middle-grade book, based on a story I’d been telling my kids at night. I also wrote a screenplay. Not very surprisingly, none of these things resulted in another book, by me, coming out. But while I was doing these other things, a big idea for a novel came clunking down out of the vending machine of my head. It was an idea for an Arthurian novel that was not, at least on the face of it, primarily about King Arthur. I’ve always loved Arthurian stories, but for a long time I felt like the last words had already been written on him, by, collectively, Malory, Tennyson, White, Sutcliff, Stewart, Zimmer Bradley, Cornwell and probably a few others I’m forgetting. Not much white space left on that particular map. But in spite of that, just as a mental exercise, I sometimes thought about what sort of Arthurian novel I would write — what called to me from that world, what would feel relevant to what I and the rest of humanity are going through right now, in our lives and in our time. It was, for a long time, a bootless errand. Until I blundered on something that felt interesting. White’s brilliant stroke in The Once and Future King, or one of many of them, was to write the story of Arthur’s childhood. All that business about Wart as a kid in the Forest Sauvage, Merlin living backwards, changing him into animals and so on, that was all White’s invention. Nobody had ever really tried to tell that story before. I started to wonder if there was something interesting you could do with the other end of the story –the aftermath of Arthur’s death. People had sketched in this part of the story, but not in any great detail. Almost the entire Round Table dies along with Arthur at the Battle of Camlann. A relative nobody, Sir Constantine, succeeds Arthur on the throne. Lancelot and Guinevere give themselves to God and then die. The few survivors — Lancelot’s gang — hunt down Mordred’s kids and then die or go on the Crusades and then die. Arthur either convalesces on Avalon or doesn’t. The End. I felt like there had to be more. What if you began the story with the death of King Arthur (kind of like A Song of Ice and Fire starts, more or less, with Robert Baratheon’s death). When the last battle has been fought, when Arthur has been spirited away to Avalon, what happens to the survivors? What transpires in the shattered, darkened chivalric world he left behind? An Arthurian world but post-apocalypse, where the center has failed to hold, and the central pillar has collapsed. And while you’re sorting out those questions, what new light would those answers shed on what came before? Could they give us a new sense of why and how Camelot fell? Could you go back and re-interpret the story of Arthur’s life and death through that lens? I got interested in the answers to these questions, interested enough that I wrote the first 80,000 words of a novel about them and started pitching it. Viking — the same good people who published the Magicians books — bought it. Working title is The Bright Sword. That was in August of 2016. I’ve been writing hard ever since. I quit my job at Time to write even harder. (I was burned out at Time, after almost 20 years there, and the Magicians TV show was still bringing in money. New season starts January! Also, although I didn’t know it, Time was about to explode.) It’s a very different challenge from the Magicians books. It’s not a series, it’s one big long thick book, significantly longer than anything I’ve written before. Most of the characters are older. It demands a huge amount of research. I’ve taken a few longsword lessons; I need to take more. I find a lot of historical fiction to be rather deadly, so I’ve been studying writers who bring a fresh, immediate, contemporary feel to it — Hilary Mantel, Neal Stephenson, Kate Atkinson. I’m also interested in what Lin-Manuel Miranda did with the Founding Fathers in Hamilton. A lot of 20th-century writers (like Cornwell and Stewart) have taken a hard-nosedly historical approach to Arthur, re-grounding him solidly in sub-Roman Britain. (Or as solidly as possible, considering how little we know about the Dark Ages.) I’m taking a more romantic, classically Arthurian approach to Arthur, more in the Malory/White/Sutcliff mode, retaining the shining armor and chivalry and medieval geopolitics and the Holy Grail. But I’m throwing some Dark-Ages historical grit into the mix too. Lots of Roman ruins. Since last fall I’ve bought a whole library of books about medieval history, arms and armor, longsword technique, medieval battle tactics, Roman Britain, Celtic paganism, medieval forestry and on and on. One of the great things about Arthur is that there is no real canon, and everybody chooses the elements and finds the balance that let them say what they want to say. I hope I’ll find my balance. It’s a long haul — I don’t even have a publication date yet — but I’m really proud of the work I’ve done so far. My whole focus is on getting it finished and into your hands ASAP. Excelsior.



A Magicians Fan’s Guide to Watching The Magicians They’re showing the first episode of The Magicians tonight — it’s at 10pm on Syfy — and I thought I should post something ahead of time to kind of ease you through the transition. Because some things in the show are Not The Same. For example: the characters are a few years older than in the books – they’re entering graduate school rather than college. Also in the books we don’t learn about Julia’s life and her world until the second book, but in the show she’s a major character from the start. And Janet’s name is Margo. Penny is way more badass than Penny in the books. Also there’s an extra Physical Kid whose name is Kady. Some things from the books don’t happen, some things happen differently, and other things happen that are nowhere in the books. When you see this stuff you may find asking, why, great triple-horned god, why? The answer to all of this is basically, because of TV. It’s a different medium, and you tell stories differently there. Not everything translates directly. That may sound a little glib. And believe me, there were a few changes that I got hung up on along the way (I didn’t write a word of the show, but I saw and weighed in on each script, and on rough cuts of the episodes). But you know what? After a while I got over it. The people who made it are mega-fans of the books, and whatever changes they made, they did it to get as much as they could of the feel and spirit of the books on screen. They are in very, very good faith. I’m a huge fan of the show. I get psyched every time they send me a new episode to watch. It’s dark, it’s smart, it’s weird, and it’s very funny. It’s cool to see the magic on screen. The actors are acting their hearts out. So give it a shot. There’s really nothing else like it on TV. I’ll be watching too. p.s. Many people have asked if the episode tonight will be online somewhere. As far as I can tell it will not, so if you don’t have cable you’re out of luck. Come to think of it I don’t have cable. Fortunately I have a copy of the show, so I’ll watch along anyway.



Show and Tour I should have done a post a while ago, obviously, when the TV show got greenlit. But I didn’t. I was distracted, by among other things the TV show being greenlit. If you post questions in the comments below I’ll try to answer them, but be warned: I will mostly fail, either because I don’t know the answers, or I can’t say. More news: the paperback of Magician’s Land is out in June, and I’ll be going on tour. Exact details will be posted shortly, but I’ll be coming to Seattle (June 17), Portland (June 16), DC (June 24), San Francisco (June 18), New Haven (June 11), Boston (June 10) and Burlington, VT (June 23). As well as plain old New York (June 9 in Manhattan, June 25 in Brooklyn). (Dates are tentative-ish, but pretty firm.) Also I’ll be in San Diego for Comic-Con in July. I want to call out the Cambridge event in particular, because it’ll be a conversation with Gregory Maguire, who wrote Wicked, and I’m unspeakably excited about it. It’s at the Brattle Theater, by way of Harvard Bookstore. It’s also a big deal to me because I grew up around there. I hope you’ll come if you can.



Posting a New Post If I only ever seem to post about upcoming events anymore, that’s because these days I’m pretty much only posting about upcoming events. I’m in a weird primordial state right now where I’m super-focused on the early stages of a couple of new projects, and each one is like a tiny planet, where its surface is still molten and malleable, but it’s cooling, slowly, toward the point where it might one day support primitive life-forms. I feel jealous of my time and energy and only want to focus it on these zithromax online paypal baby planets. Nevertheless a few interesting things are afoot. This Wednesday I’m talking to Helen Macdonald about her book H Is for Hawk at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn. It would be great if you could come. But even if you can’t: find and buy this book, it’s astonishing. Then next Tuesday, April 14, I’ll be at a literary salon held by an organization called Pen Parentis. More importantly, Kelly Link and Marly Youmans will be there. Almost as importantly, there will be wine.



A Quick, Completely Self-Promotional Note on Awards and Events Very quick. I wouldn’t even be posting this except that a minor point came up that requires clarification. Totally technical thing. The Magician’s buy azithromycin tablets Land is eligible for a Hugo this year, and obviously I’d be over the moon, way over, if it made the final ballot. I’ve never been on one. But it’s been pointed out to me by a couple of people that technically it might also be possible to nominate the Magicians trilogy as a whole, instead of just the book by itself. (This rule came up last year when the Wheel of Time series was ruled eligible in its entirety.) But—having talked to a couple of people who understand the process way better than I do (which is basically not at all)—for various reasons I think it’s better not to take the whole-trilogy approach. So just in case you’re a Hugo voter and you think you might want to vote for the books, I’m suggesting that people just vote for The Magician’s Land on its own. Though it’s probably all academic in a year stuffed full of excellent work by the likes of Jeff Vandermeer, Ann Leckie, John Scalzi, Jo Walton, William Gibson and many, many others — there’s a good list of Hugo-eligible books here. The competition’s beyond stiff. I’ve gotta stop publishing in the same year as these people. I’m not going to publish anything at all this year, except for journalism (and blog posts). It’s a writing year for me, not a publishing year. But I do have a few public appearances coming up. On Wednesday, February 18, I’ll be doing an extremely fun event called Person Place Thing in Brooklyn, where I’ll be talking and telling stories, and there’ll be music by Mamie Minch. Then on March 9 I’ll be reading as part of the 6th anniversary of the Franklin Park Reading Series, which is a great series. Its name notwithstanding, it happens in a bar, not a park.

