Secret Prophecy

Just finished the first draft of The Secret Prophecy — it ran out at a little more than 95,000 words. As Churchill once remarked, this is not the end, not even the beginning of the end. But it may be the end of the beginning. Since I’m in a quotation mood this morning, let’s note too that Hemingway said ‘The first draft of everything is crap.’ So what happens now is I wait until I can approach the text as a reader might, thus discovering its strengths and weaknesses, and, in the process, produce a second draft which may or may not be good enough to send to the publisher. Meanwhile, I shall celebrate progress so far with some tapas.

Update

I always hate doing it, but one of my more pleasant New Year chores is the update of my Web site, http://www.herbiebrennan.com. It’s done now, I’m feeling virtuous and heading back to my new novel, The Secret Prophecy, after abandoning the poor thing completely for a Christmas break. I’m also feeling curiously optimistic, which is unusual for me at New Year: I have some adult projects on the go just now, plus electronic versions scheduled of some of my old gamebooks. All in all, it could be a fun year.

Omnibus Best Seller

This morning’s post brought me two copies of the Italian omnibus edition of all four Faerie Wars novels in a single 1,473-page volume with a magnificent cover by Paolo Barbieri.

This morning’s email brought the news that it went directly into the Italian best-seller lists just days after publication.

I’m feeling chuffed.

Faerie Wars in Italy

Right from the beginning, Faerie Wars did rather well in Italy, where the whole series became a bit of a best-seller. Now my Italian publisher, Mondadori, plan to publish all four books, Faerie Wars through Faerie Lord in an omnibus edition, thus presenting the entire story of Henry and Blue in a single massive volume. They’ve just sent me the cover art, by the world-famous fantasy painter Paolo Barbieri, and it is absolutely stunning. Can’t wait to see the finished production.

Busy, busy!

Been trying to take a bit of time off, but have now partnered with Andrews UK to market electronic versions of my mildly naughty novel Madame de Gaulle’s Penis (or Madame de Gaulle’s P**** as I’m told some electronic publishers will insist on calling it.) I’ve had half a century of experience with conventional publishing, which works on Vatican time and usually takes a year or more to bring out one of my books. The electronic world is something else: the team at AUK think in terms of weeks or even days. As a result I’ve had my busiest time in months, learning about all sorts of exciting things like metadata. I’ll let you know if it makes my fortune, but at the moment I can tell you it’s a lot of fun.

New Publication Date (and name) for Faeman

For reasons best known to themselves — at least they haven’t explained them to me — Bloomsbury have decided to move publication of my new Faerie Wars novel from autumn of this year to January of 2011. The launch of the book, originally titled The Faeman Girl and now definitely called Faeman Quest (because research shows, according to my agent, that boys won’t buy books with ‘girl’ in the title) now coincides with U.S. publication of the second Shadow Project novel, The Doomsday Box, to be published by HarperCollins in the same month and year.

Madame de Gaulle's Penis

I've finally ventured into the realms of self-publishing with a novel considered far too rude for public consumption by anyone on my agent's extensive list of mainstream publishers. It's called Madame de Gaulle's Penis, a fictional memoir of the Sixties and tells the story of a sex maniac who falls foul of Madame de Gaulle's penis and vows a terrible revenge.

Since several of you out there think of me as a children's author, I have to say categorically that this book is absolutely, positively NOT suitable for children or young adult readers — it's much too naughty — although regrettably I have no way of stopping you buying it if you decide to do so.

Madame de Gaulle's Penis is not, and probably never will be, available through your local bookshop, but you can order a copy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and, more cheaply but a little slower, from Lulu.com. It might even turn up on the Barnes and Noble web site eventually. Search for it by title or author name.