Good morning from the fogged up bright windows of my writing room on the third floor. Yesterday a three-day streak of spookily warm weather broke in a downpour—as we walked to the school bus in the last few morning minutes before rain the sky was lowering and about to burst. By the afternoon all the storm had rolled on, leaving the air clear and cool and autumnal. The first afternoon run of the season has become a marker for me, inarguable as an equinox; autumn arrives slowly and then all at once.

Much like the author copies of a soon-to-be-published book.

This one crept up on me a bit, like the season. (I’m even late starting my re-read of A Night in the Lonesome October, which almost never happens.) The year has been a bit stuffed with projects, and I’ve moved from one to the other like a cook tending pans on different burners. Even though it may in fact take the onions a minute to sweat themselves translucent, I’m off to some other task, and by the next time I glance back, it’s time to add the garlic. And since Dead Hand Rule is the second-to-last book in the Sequence, and I’m already deep in drafting the last one, its publication feels more like the next step of an evolving process than a big shift.

But it is a shift. And now it’s a book.

I had a lot of fun with this one. The closer you get to a conclusion, the more the gravity of that end bends character arcs toward itself—all the fun cruising-altitude hanging-out-with-the-characters scenes, which are one of the appeals of a long-running series, become trickier to stage. (I like the Firefly movie quite a lot but it works best if you’ve seen “Shindig” and “Jaynestown” and other episodes like that, with no plot whatsoever; the ‘monster of the week’ X-Files episodes are necessary connective tissue supporting and relieving the overblown arc episodes; the One Piece manga sings in part because of all the sequences where our buds are just hanging out on the ship; the Citadel DLC in Mass Effect, etc.) So I wanted Dead Hand Rule to keep the scope and scale and build—Dawn’s out there and more powerful than ever, the skazzerai are coming, Tara has to try to get a city full of obstinate world powers to do something about it all, and time’s running out—while giving characters and setting room to breathe, show off, crack wise, and enjoy themselves.

And, because it never rains but it pours (do we call that narrative singularity?), another box showed up recently, containing a book that may interest you: the special edition of This is How You Lose the Time War!

The special edition will be available anywhere fine books are sold, I believe, but this of you looking for double-signed copies in particular might want to keep your eye on your local Barnes & Noble. Just sayin’.

For now, duty calls. Take care of yourselves, friends. Work for the liberation of all sentient beings.

Recent reading:

• Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World, by Mark Waddell: A tremendously fun, pacey and unsettling book, out just in time for spooky season. Has a lot of the office satire / “I’m working for an eldritch evil corporation” elements you may enjoy if you enjoy the Craft books, or the SCP foundation, CONTROL, the Laundry files, or Better off Ted—and does play some interesting changes on the way will-to-power and resentment shape the sorts of bargains folks (particularly from marginalized backgrounds) can make with the mind-devouring horrors of late capitalism. Also noteworthy for being a book in which the character works for an evil corporation and actually does some evil stuff (even if it feels satisfying on the page!)—many protagonists in this sort of project can go an impressive number of pages without being conspicuously evil, or even petty.

• Children of Time - Every bit as good as you’ve heard and a bit better. Needs a longer writeup when I have the (hah!) time. Such a parenting book. Hard to think of one I’ve read that’s better on the subject.

• A Civil Campaign - Also as good as everyone says. I put off the Ekaterin books when I was first reading the Miles stories, maybe because, as a young ambitious weirdo myself, I related to young-ambitious-weirdo Miles and didn’t know what to do with the prospect of him settling down. Now that I’m an old ambitious weirdo who has, inarguably, settled down, they’ve been a wonderful gift to unwrap. Civil Campaign in particular is a demonstration of how you can use the audience’s desire to just hang out with beloved characters, to buy yourself time, in which you can carefully set up domino, after domino, after domino, in apparently random order. Until. Flick!

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  Upcoming events:

• On Dead Hand Rule’s release day, October 28, I’ll be in conversation with Elizabeth Bear at Porter Square Books in Cambridge! You can RSVP here. Hope to see you there!