One Week Into Dead Country

Give or take

Book launches bend time, like black holes do—only black holes, being more dependable as a rule, at least bend it in a consistent manner. During launch, a thirty minute reading can seem an eyeblink and three hours. Days melt and seep through the time-cracks made by email and twitter and not checking author central or goodreads, between trying to decide whether I should do something on Instagram, or whether I should have done more on Instagram in the last six months, or, should I check in about the status of those columns I submitted to that website which were supposed to go live near launch but haven’t yet... and so it goes. Or: forty minutes lying on the couch and listening to a Jean Luc Ponty record feels like a week’s rest.

This isn’t all that different from the process of composition—just more concentrated. I’ve heard myself say more and more in the last few years (and I probably have said in this newsletter before), that whatever else we might say art is, at the very least it is the compression and distillation of time. A book that takes a year to write might take a week, or even a day, to read. (Sometimes, of course, it can go the other way! Imagine setting a novel down at age seven, then returning at thirty-nine.) A fifteen-second scene lasts five pages; twenty years spin into a sentence.

Nor is the artistic work of a writing book, painting a landscape, designing a game, or whatever, limited to the time spent with pen in hand. The work emerges from hours, months, years of training/competition/comparison/study—if you widen your aperture it’s hard not to call the pressures and inspirations and structural forces that supported, checked, and colored the artist’s experience, that led to this particular expenditure of time and effort, all the two in the morning conversations with slightly drunk friends, all the rages and humiliations and yearnings and dreams, all that waking alone on the cold hill’s side, themselves part of the project.

So, Dead Country is out. I am, as I type this letter, ignoring an email in my inbox about ordering galleys for the next book. (Sorry, Matt!) If you’ve read the book, I hope you enjoyed it; if you haven’t yet, there’s plenty of time. Books don’t go stale, or if they do, they don’t go stale nearly as fast as modern media. Prose styles may come into and out of vogue, and societal attitudes may shift, as may our understanding of basic science, but the “special effects” in Milton are as good as ever. Meanwhile, I’d have to pull off a miracle of engineering to play my favorite 90s shareware games on a modern Mac. (Or stand as the beneficiary of someone else’s miracle of engineering.)

I was all over the internet in the last week. Two particular artifacts endure:

• The fine folks at Mysterious Galaxy recorded Amal’s and my book launch event. Whenever I talk with Amal in public I find myself hoping, afterward, that the audience had a tenth as much fun as we did. You can watch the recording here.

• This Tuesday, I had a Reddit AMA! Every launch I tell myself I’ll set a time limit—2hrs seems fair—and stick to it, and every launch I groove on the questions, and look up to discover six hours have passed and left no trace other than a bunch of comments and conversation, and a persistent ache in my forearms. This year’s AMA was a great mix of general writer questions and specific textual / worldbuilding thoughts on the Craft Sequence and Dead Country, so there’s a lot there if you want to go deeper, as the man says. Check it out!

Take it easy, friends. I’ll be back with more essay soon. Meanwhile, check out Dead Country if you haven’t. Reviews are always appreciated if you are so inclined. Be well, and have a great weekend.