Author Catch-Up, With Other Stuff

I've started reading The Book of Joby, but I'm not going to put it up as a featured debut right away. It's thick enough that it will take me weeks to read, and I'd hate to bore everyone with the same book week after week after week. In the meantime, I'm going to do some first chapters, which I have not done since August, I think, and I'm reading a galley copy of Jennifer Estep's Hot Mama.

Having a galley copy is something of a novelty -- it's my first ever -- but I much prefer the finished book and I'll probably go ahead and buy a copy when it comes out. The cover feels like cardboard (probably because it is) and the pages have dried glue that oozed between them during the binding process. Plus the margins are huge and the text is rather tiny. I understand this is to allow room for proofreading markup. It's kind of fun, but it also gets ratty rather easily.

I don't follow the blogs of every author that I announce, but I follow some, and here's some tidbits that I've picked up there and elsewhere. Yet another advantage for blogging authors!

David Anthony Durham is hard at work on the second book in the Acacia series, which he's calling Acacia 2 for now, and he gives us a little slice-of-writer-life.

Lisa Shearin has plunged into a rather aggressive deadline for her third Raine Benares book, The Trouble With Demons. She's blogging on her writing as she goes.

Austin Grossman's novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible, has been shortlisted for the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize.

Mark J. Ferrari has somewhat tentatively started a blog . I have promptly added it to my Google Reader.

Jim Melvin's Death Wizard Chronicles came out with one of the smaller of the small presses, therefore books like his does not get a lot of review attention. However, recently the Virtual Wordsmith put up a very positive review. I peeked at the author's blog as well, and book 2, Moon Goddess, is now available.

That's all for now!