Garth Nix's Amazon Blog

I've just come back from a short holiday (where I sliced my foot open on an oyster shell while wading across a lagoon) and one of the things that had arrived at my office while I was away was the mighty 1,232 page all in one paperback volume   The Abhorsen Chronicles that includes the three novels SABRIEL, LIRAEL, ABHORSEN and the bonus novella 'Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case'.

Weighing in at 2.7 pounds, or more than a kilogram, it is truly a bugcrusher. But despite its length, the typesetting is clear so it is an excellent way to get all the current existing Old Kingdom stories in one go, particularly as it is only US$14.99 or even less with the various bookseller discounts. It is published by HarperCollins USA, by the way, there are no current plans for a UK or Australian omnibus.

While the omnibus has the advantage of being all in one, there are also the boxed sets of the three books, either the US version  The Abhorsen Trilogy Box Set , or the UK Box set with different formats and covers.

(The UK one has the best box, with spot varnished Charter marks on it.)

I hope to have an update on LORD SUNDAY soon. I haven't quite finished it, it's very late, so the publication date is still up in the air.

There is no real news of the potential SABRIEL film to deliver, apart from the fact that the team is still together, and there are things percolating. Whether this percolation will eventually result in anything remains to be seen! As per usual, I hope for the best and press on.

I am also having some discussions about a KEYS TO THE KINGDOM film or films, so you never know . . .

And while I'm here, a belated Happy New Year to everyone. I hope 2009 is a very good year!

As I've been working on LORD SUNDAY, I've had to refer back a lot to my various notebooks. In one of these notebooks, I found the following sketch, which attempts to give a conceptual view of the relationship between the various demesnes of the House, the central setting of  THE KEYS TO THE KINGDOM series which begins with Mister Monday (Keys to the Kingdom, Book 1) .

It's not a very satisfactory sketch in many ways, because the House is actually more complex and I'd need some sort of three-dimensional projection to show this, but for what it's worth I thought I'd share it here.

The late Joan Aiken wrote many wonderful children's novels, including my personal favourites Black Hearts in Battersea, The Cuckoo Tree  and Midnight is a Place. She was also a brilliant short story writer, and I am particularly fond of  the ones she wrote about the Armitage family and their brushes with magic, fable and mayhem. (And in case you were wondering about the heading to this post,  the Armitages were used to strange events on Mondays, but not Tuesdays . . .)

Now, for the first time ever, all of Aiken's previously published Armitage family stories have been collected together in a single, attractive volume. And even better than that, there are four stories that have never been published before!

The book is The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories (Junior Library Guild Selection)  and I cannot recommend it highly enough. I was delighted to write an introduction to it, simply because this meant I got to read those four unpublished stories immediately.

For quite a few years I've been keen to develop a range of bell charms based on the bells in the Old Kingdom/Abhorsen novels, just because I think they would be cool. I love gold and silver work, so perhaps I have some dragon blood in me, as well as water sprite (look up "nix" in wikipedia).

Anyway, it took some time to find a suitable silversmith, but eventually I got in touch with the extremely talented and aptly-named  Oliver Smith who has designed and cast a range of bell charms. We recently got back the first test production run, and here are some sneak previews.

All the bell charms are cast in sterling silver (.925 silver). There are three finishes which we are calling Bright (as it suggests, bright silver); Antique (a patinated effect on the silver); and Black Handle, as for evil necromancers (the handles of the bells are treated to become black).
    Bright Antique

 Black Handle

Seven charms showing relative size (Ranna, Mosrael, Kibeth, Dyrim, Belgaer, Saraneth, Astarael).

Each bell has a different "representative" Charter Mark on it, i.e the Marks are not the name of the bell or anything like that, they are just to look interesting.

I'm still working out price, packaging etc but the bells will be for sale from an Internet store and will be shipped worldwide. We'll sell the bells individually, so you will be able to put your favourite one on a necklace or leather cord, or you can slowly collect all seven for a bracelet.

When everything is ready it will be announced here in my Amazon blog, on www.garthnix.com (which I must update soon), on my Facebook page etc.

 I've just seen the proof of the cover to The Abhorsen Chronicles, though it's not yet up here. This is a monster paperback omnibus (1232 pages) that contains Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen and "The Creature in the Case" novella. Its official release date is the end of December, but I expect it will be available at the beginning of December or thereabouts, such is the weirdness of release dates. So it would make a good holiday/Christmas/Hanukkah/we survived 2008/whatever present :-)

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[Edited to add a cautionary note, the following stories and the anthologies they appear in are for adults, which includes young adults (teenage and up), but they are not for children. I thought I'd better add that because sometimes some of my KEYS audience presumes everything I write is for children. ]

I've recently read the page proofs of my second Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz novella, which is called "Beyond the Sea Gate of the Scholar-Pirates of Sarskoe" which will be appearing next month (October 2008) in  Fast Ships, Black Sails edited by Jeff and Ann Vandermeer. I also read all the other stories and thoroughly enjoyed the whole book, this is a great collection of pirate tales of all kinds, with contributions from a cunning crew of shifty eye-patched authors that includes Dave Freer & Eric Flint, Naomi Novik, Howard Waldrop, Kage Baker, Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette, and many others. Full list here at the publisher site Night Shade Books.

Also coming up very soon is the US edition of   Dreaming Again: Thirty-five New Stories Celebrating the Wild Side of Australian Fiction edited by Jack Dann, which is out in late September. Again, some great stories in this, with some new Australian authors to watch along with contributions from many stalwarts of the Australian scene. My story is called "Old Friends" and was initially going to be something entirely different. But as often happens with stories, the basic idea morphed into a different tale.

And available right now is my story "Strange Fishing in the Western Highlands" which, like all the stories, features a certain red-skinned gentleman who has recently been gracing the cinema screens. The book is   Hellboy: Oddest Jobs (Hellboy) edited by Christopher Golden, with illustrations by Hellboy's creator, Mike Mignola. There are some fascinating stories in this, and I personally found writing a story about someone else's very well-known and established character an interesting exercise.

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  Back on the children's fiction front, Superior Saturday (The Keys To The Kingdom)  keeps on keeping on, thank you all. I understand some reader's frustration with the cliffhanger ending, but I hope that all will be forgiven when Lord Sunday appears. Sometimes in writing a multi-book series, ending one volume without giving away too much of the next is difficult, and it becomes more and more of an issue the closer you get to the end.

Thank you readers!

THE KEYS TO THE KINGDOM series was back on the New York Times Bestseller list at #10 on the Children's Series list on August 3rd, and will be #9 on August 17 (publishers get advance copies of the next week's list).

In the UK, SUPERIOR SATURDAY is also still lurking about in the Children's Top 20, having got as high as #2 in the Bookscan Children's bestsellers.

And in Australia, it continues to tick along nicely, having got to be the #1 children's bestseller for a week or so back in June and staying in the charts until the end of July.

Thank you all for buying my books. I do greatly appreciate having readers. Particularly since in the first ten years or so of my writing career I didn't have very many, and certainly no books appearing on bestseller lists. Some of you may be surprised to learn that SABRIEL, still my all-time biggest selling book, has never been on a US  or Australian bestseller list (it did make the UK charts, but that was much later). It got off to a slow start, but it just kept on keeping on and after the first few years of not much happening, really found an audience. Which just goes to show that a book that sells very solidly for 13-14 years will outperform many that are immediate bestsellers, but don't last the distance.

One of the frequent questions that I usually don't adequately answer is about what is happening with a possible SABRIEL film.

Well, today I can say a bit more than usual as PUBLISHING NEWS has reported on the "package" that we have put together and will be taking to studios in Hollywood in a few weeks.

That package is:

DIRECTOR:  Anand Tucker (HILARY & JACKIE, SHOPGIRL and the original director of THE GOLDEN COMPASS before he left over creative differences)

WRITTEN BY:  Dan Futterman (Academy Award nominee for his script of CAPOTE and also well-known actor, most recently in A MIGHTY HEART) and Garth Nix

PRODUCED BY:  Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner of Plan B (Brad Pitt's production company).

I have always said that I wanted to co-write the script and work with people who had made great films and whose work I respected, this team represents the achievement of that goal.

I'll keep you all posted on what happens from here!

The PN report is here http://tinyurl.com/423995

My novella "Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz Go To War Again", which recently won an Aurealis Award and has been selected for three of the 2008 Year's Best Collections, has been made available to read for free from the good folk at JIM BAEN'S UNIVERSE, the webzine where it first appeared.

 Read the novella for free at Jim Baens Universe 

If you like it, please do subscribe to JBU or make a donation to them. It's a great magazine.

This particular story is something of an homage to Fritz Leiber's Ffahrd and the Gray Mouser by the way, with a touch of the hat to Robert E. Howard as well. Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz will also be appearing in another novella later this year, and hopefully another one next year.

The novella will also be in the following collections:

Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition (Fantasy: The Best of ... (Quality))  edited by Rich Horton

  Year's Best Fantasy 8  edited by David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer

and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: 2008, edited by Gavin Grant, Kelly Link and Ellen Datlow, which isn't on Amazon yet.

I believe it will also be in:

 The Best of Jim Baen's Universe II (The Best of Jim Baen's Universe) 

Not a bad run for one story which came out of nowhere when I should have been writing other things :-)