Matthew Hughes's Blog: barbarians of the beyond - Posts Tagged "ps-publishing"

Noted SF critic Paul Di Filippo reviews my PS Publishing novella, The Yellow Cabochon in the current Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. He says, "Hughes's facility with ornate, roccoco language has never been more polished, and his plotting is sharp and twisty. His evocation of a faded age of wonders piles high the frissons of a factitious but effective nostalgia that is all the more piquant for being manufactured from mere allusions, rather than actual touchstones of our consensual past."

You can read the first few thousand words of the novella, featuring my corpulent master criminal of the far future, Luff Imbry, here.

Back in 2008, I made a deal with the excellent UK small press, PS Publishing, to write three novellas featuring Old Earth's corpulent master thief and forger, Luff Imbry. The first two, Quartet and Triptych and The Yellow Cabochon, were published in limited editions. In 2011, I wrote the third, entitled Of Whimsies and Noubles, and turned it in. But time went by and it never appeared.

I put the long delay down to the kind of scheduling and production problems that are not uncommon in small presses, where too few people are trying to do too many things while trying to ensure the exemplary quality for which PS is known. It turned out, though, that the publisher had suffered a computer crash of epic proportions in which all trace of the third novella had disappeared. And had then been completely forgotten.

At some point, PS saw a post of mine, responding to someone's query about the long-delayed novella. They got in touch and asked where it was. I answered that I had turned it in, years ago. Palms smacked foreheads, and the production wheels began belatedly to turn.

So now it's been copyedited, the cover has been created by Ben Baldwin, who did the covers for the previous two novellas as well as for several of my self-published ebooks, and the text is at the printers. I just have to sign the cover sheets so they can be bound into the finished product, which I expect to do at WorldCon next week. And then Of Whimsies and Noubles will see daylight at last.

There are two editions, one limited to 100 signed copies. You can pre-order here.

Blogger George Kelley reviews "Of Whimsies and Noubles," the third Luff Imbry novella published by PS Publishing last year. He gives it a "Grade A" and says: "As with all of Matthew Hughes Vancian stories, I was delighted by the cleverness and wit of the storytelling."

Unfortunately for those who would like to read it, PS produces only limited editions and the ordinary hardcover release of "Whimsies" is now sold out. Only the signed edition is available. If it's any consolation, I'm now 18,000 words into a new Imbry story that will go into an omnibus edition of the three novellas that will be out, again in two limited editions, probably later this year.

But if you haven't read my Imbry stories -- he's a corpulent forger, art thief, and confidence man of Old Earth in its penultimate age -- I've collected all of them (including the first two PS novellas) as The Meaning of Luff and Other Stories in ebook and POD paperback formats. You can get them most places, including my own web store.

Critic and sf aficionado Mike Barrett's excellent piece on my Luff Imbry stories in the current New York Review of Science Fiction is now available for a free read.

Meanwhile, I'm 20,000 words into the Imbry novella that will go into the omnibus edition of the three others previously published by PS Publishing. Should finish it and turn it in this month.

I've turned in "Epiphanies," a new Luff Imbry novella (24,000 words), to PS Publishing. It will go into an omnibus of the previous three novellas to be published in two limited editions sometime this year.

Imbry started out as a supporting character in Black Brillion (Tor, 2004), where he was a high-stakes forger and confidence man forcibly inducted into the Archonate Bureau of Scrutiny and assigned to work with Baro Harkless, a strange but brilliant young scroot. I actually killed him off in the first draft, but my editor, David G. Hartwell, counseled me against it.

Later on, when PS editor Nick Gevers asked me for a story, I decided to revive Luff and produced "The Farouche Assemblage. " More stories followed, in Interzone and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and then the three PS limited edition novellas.

"Epiphanies" brings Imbry's career to the point at which he encounters Baro Harkless in Black Brillion.

In an effort to aid the Nepalese after the devastating earthquake, something called Authors for Nepal has asked folks like me to donate books to be auctioned on Ebay. I've offered a signed copy of Of Whimsies and Noubles, the limited edition (100 copies) Luff Imbry novella from PS Publishing, which came out last year.

This is a highly collectible title, being not only a signed hardcover, but what's called a publisher's copy: one of only a handful of extras produced beyond the 100-copy limit. Technically, that makes it very rare indeed.

I've only just now been told that the book is up for auction, which closes on Friday. When I checked the Ebay listing, I saw that there were no bids and the asking price was 10 pounds.

If anyone's interested, here's where to go.

I've sold The Kaslo Chronicles, the science-fantasy novel serialized in Lightspeed , to PS Publishing. I should be out in limited editions next year.

If you can't wait that long, all the episodes of the novel (except for the last) can be found in Lightspeed's archives. The final episode will be available for a free read on May 26.

The PS editions will probably contain some new material. This was the first time I've ever serialized a novel and, like Dickens, I was writing and sending in the episodes as they were written. That means I couldn't go back and add something to Chapter 2 to fit with something I didn't think of until Chapter 7. Also, at 74,000 words, it's a bit short.

I'm going to read it for the first time in the next couple of weeks to see where it can take some additions and general tweaking.

 

"The Blood of a Dragon," the final episode of The Kaslo Chronicles, the science-fantasy novel I've been serializing in Lightspeed Magazine, is now available for a free read.

Coincidentally, I'm polishing up the full text of all eleven episodes to turn them into a novel that will be published by PS Publishing in limited editions, probably next year (I don't have a pub date yet).

All of the previous episodes of the serial are archived on the Lightspeed site. As well, they've been turned into podcasts by Skyboat Media, read by J. Paul Boehmer.

There's also an author spotlight interview with me that accompanies the episode. I've enjoyed those interviews because the questions have been well thought out and relevant to the story and the writing process.

I’ve turned in the polished and somewhat repaired draft of the science fantasy novel I’ve been serializing in Lightspeed as The Kaslo Chronicles. I’ve renamed it A Wizard’s Henchman and called it the first book of a series, because Erm Kaslo is a promising character and the story took him to an interesting point of departure. So I’ll probably write a sequel down the line, if I live long enough (I've just turned sixty-six).

 

The book is also a point of departure for me in the long string of novels, novellas, and short stories I’ve been writing under the general heading of The Archonate. That string began a very, very long time ago – the Labor Day weekend of 1982 – when I sat down and wrote 27,000 words in 72 hours. It was an impulse thing, an entry in the annual novel-in-a-weekend contest put on by a small literary press in Vancouver, which I’d heard about only for the first time the day before I started writing.

 

Those 27,000 words, which amazingly had a beginning, a middle, and an end, with a proper arc of character development, came rolling out of me as if it had all been tucked away inside, just waiting for the fingers to strike the keyboard (an IBM Selectric in those days). Years later, when I got my first word processor, I expanded the draft and it eventually became Fools Errant, the first novel of the Archonate.

 

In those initial 72 hours, as I neared the end of the 27,000 words, I came up with the notion that the universe occasionally arbitrarily switches its fundamental operating principle from rational cause and effect to magic. The idea came from something I’d recently read about Isaac Newton, the great guiding light of the Enlightenment in England, who ended his days as the founder and head of The Royal Society (the first British scientific organization), but who began his career as an alchemist. I wondered what had happened to change his point of view so radically.

 

Years later, when I seriously got down to writing more Archonate tales, I was taken by the idea that this great interstellar civilization, The Ten Thousand Worlds, was about to crash into ruin and chaos. And almost nobody knew it – or would believe it if the few who knew what was about to happen tried to warn them. By then I was thinking about the people of Europe, just before the outbreak of the First World War, who didn’t know that four years of carnage was going to bring down Edwardian civilization for good and all.

 

I’ve written about a number of different characters – Henghis Hapthorn and Luff Imbry in particular, who get an inkling of what is about to happen and try to deal with it as their natures dictate. But I’ve received occasional letters from readers who, if they don’t quite accuse me of apocalyptus interruptus, lead me to I think I’m seeing the accusation between the lines.

 

So, with Erm Kaslo, confidential operative of The Ten Thousand Worlds, I’ve finally gone over the top and into the great change. I think it’s worked out well – at least in the polished draft, which fixed some glitches in the serial that resulted from the facts that (a) I don’t outline, and (b) if you’re writing a serial and sending in the episodes as they’re finished, you can’t go back and change something in chapter three to fit with what you’ve only just thought of midway through chapter seven.

 

My apologies to the astute readers who have noticed those little glitches. The version that comes out of PS Publishing will not only be one of their beautifully made limited edition volumes, but its plot won’t leak like an old bucket. It will be out sometime next year and I hope you will buy it, read it, and enjoy it.

The fourth Luff Imbry novella, "Epiphanies," is now scheduled to be published by PS Publishing in October or November. If there are any changes to the schedule, I'll let people know.

Originally, "Epiphanies" was to be included in an omnibus of the previous three Imbry novellas -- "Quartet and Triptych," "The Yellow Cabochon," and "Of Whimsies and Noubles" -- but now it will come out as an independent title in limited editions. That means there will be a hardcover without dust jacket of a few hundred copies, and a jacketed, signed hardcover of one hundred copies. Being PS products, the books will be of excellent quality.

The omnibus, which will include all four novellas, will now be pushed back to sometime in 2016. It will be a paperback.