News You Can Bruise for 2011 August 1

I've sold my first novel, Constellation Games, to Candlemark & Gleam. (Here's the official announcement.) Starting in November, the novel will be serialized online, one chapter a week, with a collected book to follow later.

I cannot stress this enough: you should subscribe to this book. I pulled out all the stops to make Constellation Games the most fun-to-read thing I could write. It's a near-future space opera set in Austin, Texas. It's got everything I've ever wanted/loved to see in a sci-fi epic: zero-gravity sex, hive minds, terraforming, paleontology, fine art, warps in space-time, existential horror, and shipping containers.

But most of all, it's got video games. My goal was to write the most compelling fictional treatment of not only gaming culture (which already gets a lot of attention in spec-fic) but the creative act of making a game, how our society treats software and games as artifacts, and how other cultures might do things differently. Think of "Mallory", except in the context of what the Candlemark editor flatteringly calls "one of the most stunningly plausible first-contact novels out there."

I'm very happy to have Candlemark & Gleam as my publisher. I showed Constellation Games to some traditional-print-publishing people, and they really liked the story but didn't like the blog-heavy format. C&G immediately got on board with the format, and thanks to the serialization model, we can present the story in a way that conveys the feeling of living through a huge societal disruption. In case you don't get enough of that already.