Brian Francis Slattery's Blog

Hello all,

I know I've been real quiet. Most of that is because I've been real busy. On the fiction front, that's been with Bookburners, a serial that I've been part of for the past couple years. More on that soon.

But meanwhile, The Next Best Book Blog has picked my third novel, Lost Everything, for a giveaway (now), followed by a discussion (in July).

Here are some of the details. My publisher has agreed to give away 10 copies for people who are interested in taking part in the discussion and haven't yet read it. That giveaway ends June 9.

Then, from July 18 to July 24, we—that is, readers and I—will be discussing the book here on Goodreads.

For even more details, look here—

http://thenextbestbookblog.blogspot.c...

and here:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

I have a thick skin and a sense of humor, and I'm really looking forward to talking with people about Lost Everything in July. Thanks so much to Lori at The Next Best Book Blog for picking it, and good reading, everyone.

Hey!

So, I'm doing four readings for The Family Hightower, and I'm pretty jazzed about them.

September 11: The Institute Library, 847 Chapel Street, New Haven, CT. 7 pm.

September 17: WORD, 126 Franklin Street, Brooklyn, NY. 7 pm.

September 23: Mac's Backs-Books on Coventry, 1820 Coventry Road, Cleveland Heights, OH. 7 pm.

September 29: Porter Square Books, 25 White Street, Cambridge, MA. 7 pm.

The CT, NY, and MA readings will be set to live music, in a Romanian/Ukrainian vein. Come on out!

Howdy all,

We're giving away a few ARCs of my new book, due out in September! I'm excited for y'all to check it out, however it is y'all check out books these days.

The link for the giveaway is here.

If you get a hold of one, let me know what you think!

Like a lot of people on Goodreads, when I first joined, I didn't retroactively enter all the books I'd read already. I just started pretty much from where I was, entering in some of the books I'd read recently. The rest of my Goodreads books are pretty much a catalog of the books I've read in the past few years.

If all the books I'd read were on Goodreads, however, there'd be some pretty glaring omissions. One of them is Russian novels. I've read The Master and Margarita, Petersburg, and very recently, Roadside Picnic. But I haven't read any Tolstoy. Or Dostoevsky. What can I say? Just never got around to it.

This year, I've decided to change that. First up is Anna Karenina. Next will be The Brothers Karamazov. Possibly there'll be a detour in the middle for Dead Souls. As I was telling a friend the other day, my slight sheepishness at not having read these books yet is totally overwhelmed by my anticipation of getting to read them for the first time. Hm. Maybe it was worth waiting after all.

I'm leading a day-long workshop about literary science fiction on December 7. Should be fun! So if you're within spitting distance of Tarrytown, NY, and you're into this sort of thing, then come on out. The link for the workshop is here.

Thanks!

Hey all,

With the contract signed and the first pass of edits done, I can take a deep breath and say: Hey! My next book is coming out! Slated for the fall of 2014, it's tentatively titled The Fall of the Family Hightower. Seriously, the title is subject to change. But not much else about it is. It's a story about a really messed-up family that also happens to be about organized crime, both old-school in the United States and new-school in Eastern Europe. The plot ranges from Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania to various points in Africa to Cleveland, a city I loved more the more I visited it in the course of writing this thing.

I'm also pleased to be trying on a new genre--the publisher, Seven Stories, is calling it a literary thriller, which is as good a label as any. From where I'm standing, I see lots of similarities in the form and structure of this book and science fiction generally. Though it is, first and foremost, about this crazy-ass family. I have never written about such deeply flawed people, and in some ways have never had more fun writing about the characters than here.

Finally, I'm really excited to be joining the roster of authors at Seven Stories, which already has a few fiction and nonfiction heroes of mine. So, hooray! For those of you who are interested, I hope you enjoy it. You know, when it comes out, a year from now.

Like I said, I've really liked being a part of Goodreads because I like hearing how readers respond to the stuff I write.

Jake said some very nice things about Lost Everything (thanks!), but he also said this: The whole reading experience was exactly like those last 5 minutes before you fall fast asleep. You aren't quite dreaming, but you aren't quite awake.

This comment really floored me because it is exactly the time of day that I wrote the entire first draft of the book. (How did Jake know?) LE was written by hand, in bed, right before I fell asleep, because at that point in my life I was so busy that it was the only time I could find to write anything. Sometimes I fell asleep mid-sentence. It was weird.

Now, that said, I didn't edit it in the same frame of mind. As you might expect from the way it was produced, the first draft was a total mess, even by my own standards, and it took a lot of caffeine--and a lot of really good feedback from critical readers--to get it to where it is now. It was all probably a lot more work than it needed to be; certainly it would have been more efficient to write while I was fully awake. But at the same time, I think there are parts of it that just wouldn't have turned out the same way if I'd been alert and logical, and some of those parts are my favorite passages in the book (see note 1 below).

I don't think I'll ever write a book like LE again, for all kinds of reasons. And these days, I write in the morning. But I think for LE, the hour when I wrote it suited the material, because above all, I needed to be honest--whatever that means when you're making so many things up--and in the exhausted, half-delirious state that I first got from one end of the book to the other, my guard was down the most.

B

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Note 1: For the record, when I page through my books now--which, I'm serious, is quite rarely--I find them to be pretty uneven, though each one also has passages in it that I don't think I could write as well now if I wanted to. I don't know what that means, exactly, but it's true.

One of the reasons I like Goodreads so much, even though I post on it so little, is because it's a place where I can get a lot of feedback on the things that I write: who likes it, who doesn't, and why. A recent comment about Lost Everything, though, really hit home for me:

Kelly wrote: Brian Francis Slattery, look, I love you, but your all sweeping description of looking out over the landscape of America like some kind of Kerouac-slash-Steinbeck all the time no real plot development to speak of oh wait what the fuck that was the ending shtick is going to get old eventually. EVENTUALLY.

Apart from being hilarious, I think it's also accurate and a sentiment that I totally agree with. In hindsight, I think of Spaceman Blues, Liberation, and Lost Everything as being a way to get at a series of questions that were sort of bugging me, and pretty much the minute I finished the first draft of Lost Everything, a couple years ago now, I knew that I was done--not in the sense of having completely answered the questions (which is ridiculous), but in having done the best I could with them. Moreover, the thing that I've written since finishing Lost Everything is quite different, chewing on a different set of questions. It hops to a different genre. There's no apocalypse, no sweeping vistas. There's not even that much of America. The writing style itself is different, to the point where, looking back on the three previous books, I don't think I could repeat them; apparently the old brain is in a different place now.

Hopefully those of you who have enjoyed the first three books (thank you!) will like what I've been up to recently. Even more hopefully, you'll get a chance to read it at all, as I'm in the throes of trying to sell it now (fingers crossed!).

Thanks again, everyone, for hanging in there this far.

B

Hello, everyone. An advance review copy of my third book, Lost Everything (which comes out in April), has been graciously donated by my publisher, Tor, to Con or Bust, an effort to raise money to help fans of color/nonwhite fans attend science fiction and fantasy conventions. Con or Bust is administered by the Carl Brandon Society, a 501(c)(3) organization with the mission of increasing racial and ethnic diversity in the production of and audience for speculative fiction. This is a really worthy thing and I'm glad to be a small part of it. The auction goes from now until February 25. Please bid!

http://con-or-bust.livejournal.com/10...

Hello, good people of Goodreads.

I am a terrible blogger, so please don't think the worst of me for making this my first post, and perhaps my only post for a good while. But I'm just very excited to tell people: This spring, I had the humbling and thrilling chance to professionally record an album of something between readings and songs, using passages from Liberation as lyrics and backed up by the best band I could put together.

The results can be found here and by following that link above. You can also get it through Amazon and iTunes and yadda yadda, but the Bandcamp interface is way cooler than all of those.

You can stream the songs for free; if you buy and download it, you'll find the recordings will fit on a CD (if you're still into that kind of thing—anyone? Anyone?). We had an amazing time putting it together, and I really hope you like it.

Thanks!

B