After some date-wrangling, number-crunching and budget-scrunching, it looks like I have my convention schedule for the rest of the year.

I'm going to be busier than I thought.

• AnimeNext (June 18-20, central NJ).
• Otakon (July 30-August 1, Baltimore, MD).
• AnimeFest! (Sept 3-6, Dallas, TX)
• NYAF (New York Anime Festival) (Oct 8-10, NYC)

I'm working on setting up sales tables for each event under the Genji Press banner. No guarantees of anything except perhaps the first two, but Otakon by itself would be a massive step in the right direction. NYAF, a nice cherry on top of an already-tasty cake.

I'm also hoping to have CreateSpace / Amazon.com editions of all my books by the second half of the year. I've seen plenty of good reasons to go with them, and to wind down my involvement with Lulu. The purchasing links on the site should not change anytime soon; there will be plenty of advanced warning before that happens.

I'll have more word on each event as the dates draw closer.

Right now I'm auctioning one copy of each of my books currently in print — Tokyo Inferno, Summerworld, The Four-Day Weekend — for Deb's Liver Lovers. If you want a shot at helping someone out, and a shot at getting my books for a fair percentage off the normal price, go check it out.

Additional notes about the auction:

...a fandom auction to benefit Deb Mensinger and her wife, Laurie J. Marks (author of the Elemental Logic series, the Children of the Triad series, The Watcher's Mask, and Dancing Jack, and guest of honor at WisCon 31). This auction is to raise money for the medical and incidental expenses related to Deb Mensinger's liver transplant. Deb and Laurie will have a number of expenses that are not covered by insurance, including the costs related to getting the potential live donor to Massachusetts for testing and, if all goes well, the surgery.

blem, n. 1. abbreviation for "blemish" 2. merchandise with cosmetic damage but which is otherwise intact

Self-publishing brings with it any number of hazards and peculiar conditions. One of them, as I've discovered, is how you can end up with an amazing array of slightly inconsistent product.

Back when I first launched Genji Press, I experimented with a couple of different book formatting options. I eventually settled on the closest thing to a trade paperback edition, both in size and paper quality — but by that time I'd already ordered, and sold, a number of books in other sizes and configurations. Also, by that time, I'd ended up fixing a number of small problems with the texts themselves — typos, dropped lines, switched phrases, etc.

To that end, I've got a few leftovers — blems, if you will. These are older copies of my books which are remnants of that experimental period, in a variety of sizes and with a variety of defects. Right now all I have are copies of Summerworld, but others may turn up from time to time.

What I thought I'd do is pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes sell these "blems" as special collector's items — but not at exorbitant prices. Instead, I'm selling them for a flat $10 (+$2 post) each — along with a CD-ROM that includes the full and most recent text of the book in PDF format. So think of it as buying an e-text version of the book, with an accompanying paper copy!

Because quantities are limited, I can't guarantee which copy you'll receive from the above picture. It's first-come, first-serve.

Click here to order.

Tokyo Inferno is now available immediately at Lulu.com. Go get it!

I don't yet have copies in-house that can be signed, but as soon as I do there'll be an announcement to that effect. I'm waiting for the existing stock of books to come back from Dallas first.

If you want a taster before you take the plunge, go read it here.

Been wanting to get your hands on Tokyo Inferno? Read the first three chapters free in PDF format, or on Scribd.

(Once again, I'll have actual printed copies available for sale once I get back next week.)

And so Tokyo Inferno is done and off to the printer's. At last!

I won't be making the book available from the website just yet — I want to get all that settled after I get back from AnimeFest 2009, which is where the book's big premiere will be held. Look for it there, or catch up with me after I'm back home and no longer passed out on the ground.

Also, in the coming year, I'll probably be moving to CreateSpace for all of my publishing needs. Less costly, more options, better distribution systems. I have to set up an account with them and see what the results are like, all of which takes time — and I'd rather do all that when I'm a little less blown out and able to better assess the results.

I'm also planning on creating merchandise (shirts, etc.) based on the cover art for Summerworld and Inferno. The former, especially: everyone I've talked to loves the idea of having the Bowman With A Machine Gun on a shirt. And so it shall be, as soon as I can find a way to do that without getting crap quality or breaking the bank.

Tokyo Inferno is now as done as it gets! That is, at least until I get some word back from my selected proofreaders and editors. Once I have texts back from them, I'll be able to post my usual teaser chapters for public consumption. Budget permitting, I'll have those available as ashcans at AnimeFest (although, of course, the digital versions are free).

Also to come this week: final cover designs and other muckamucks.

Editing on Tokyo Inferno is moving at a decent clip, all things considered. I'm about 2/5ths of the way through the first (cleanup) pass; then I hope by before the weekend I can do the actual logic/plotting pass. And then I'll pack it up and give it to my Crack Proofreading Squad, you all know who you are (I hope).

I already have the internal layout about 90% of the way there, so that's not a problem. Ditto the cover design — the biggest issue there will be calculating spine width and whatnot, but I have templates for such things already prepped and ready.

My absolute drop-dead day to send this thing to the printer is August 26th. That gives me roughly a week and change to get it out to the people who need to read it, receive any fixes to be made, implement them, and put the last bits of spit'n'polish on the document.

And after that ... well, that's the subject of the next post.

The first draft of Tokyo Inferno is finished, at just over 100,000 words. Now comes the hard part: getting it hammered into shape and taking delivery of the finished product before AnimeFest. If I edit about five chapters a day, that means I can get a first pass done by around Thursday of next week. Odds are I can do more than that on the weekends. But I'll need at least 2-3 passes — one for mechanics, one for logistics, and one more for general read-through.

And after this is done and out there, I'm thinking I'll take the rest of the year off.

Sometime in the coming year I may end up getting back to work on a project I never finished. Tentatively titled Vajra, it was my NaNo project for 2007; it fell short of the needed word count for the month and I ended up shelving it and turning attention to other things. But once it's finished and retitled, it'll be the third book I've written, more or less in a row, that deals with a kind of "Tokyo of mystery" or "enchanted Tokyo".

The first one you already know well: Summerworld. (And if you don't know about it, then by all means educate yourselves.) The second is currently being written: Tokyo Inferno. I hadn't been consciously trying to create a trilogy — past, present, future (sort of) — but that's what came out.

To that end, I'm thinking of bundling all three of them into one volume when they're done — or, at the very least, selling all three together as a single $30 set (perhaps as a convention-only special). The three are linked by many other things other than locale, so it only makes sense. This would be a long way off, of course, but it's something I find myself coming back to as a nice way to wrap up the package with a bow.