Next update March 9
Time for another update. Some more Children of Fire news, but first I want to talk about a charity golf tournament for a great cause.
My beautiful and overly compassionate wife, Jennifer, volunteers at Lifelong Friends, a privately funded, no-kill animal shelter. She’s also the organizer of this year’s annual Lifelong Friends Charity Golf Tournament. It’s a four person scramble event being held on Wednesday, March 27th at Tera Vista golf course in Round Rock, TX.
March is the perfect month to golf in Texas – lots of sun, temps in the low 80s. So, if you’re going to be in the Austin area and you love golf (like me), or you love animals (like my wife), then please register for the event. You can sign up as a full team, partial team or individual – we’ll make sure you get paired up with fun folks and we’ll do our best to balance out the skill level of the teams. Last year we had about 50 players, and we all had a great time. Hope to see you there!
Okay, that’s my good deed for the day. Now on to Children of Fire. Last month I announced the release dates for the UK and North America: September 5th and September 10th, respectively. But, as I said before, things change. There’s been so much anticipation and excitement over the novel that Random House Del Rey has decided to move the North American publishing date FORWARD to August 27th! You can see the official posting and jacket blurb on the Del Rey website.
You might notice that the new release date lands right between two major SFF convetions – GenCon in Indy on August 15-18 and DragonCon in Atlanta on August 30-September 2. Although I don’t have any official details yet, there’s a strong chance I’ll be showing up at both of these cons to promote Children of Fire, sign some books and meet with the fans. If things go well, we might even have copies of the book for sale right at the Del Rey booth on the show floor! As I get more info about my schedule, I’ll be sure to post it to my Twitter feed and here on my blog.
I’m also trying to put together a special contest where a few lucky fans will have a chance to win advance copies of Children of Fire before it officially goes on sale, but we’re still a couple weeks away from there. Again, once I have the details I’ll post them here and on my Twitter feed.
Besides the UK and North America, we’re also working on some foreign language release dates, but we still need to dot a few i’s and cross a few t’s before I can say much more. But it’s interesting to note that my Mass Effect novels have been translated into numerous languages: French, German, Polish, Chinese (simple character) and Spanish so far. It’s cool to see my work translated into other languages, but it’s presented me with a bit of a dilemma.
Whenever a foreign language edition comes out, the publisher usually sends me 5 or 6 copies. I always like to keep one for myself, and if I have a friend who speaks that particular language I’ll give a copy to him or her. (Mostly so they can read it and tell me how close it comes to the original – you’d be surprised at how much can get lost in translation.) But that still leaves me with several copies of a book in a language I can’t actually read. Right now they’re just taking up storage space in my house. What I need is to find something cool to do with them.
So I’m asking you, my fans, for suggestions. FYI: “send a copy to me” is a TERRIBLE suggestion, so don’t bother. Remember, I started this blog by promoting a charity golf tournament, so let’s try to keep that theme going. I’m looking for a good cause that can make use of these books – maybe a library or school program for foreign language students? I don’t know… that’s why I need your help. So, if you have any bright ideas please send me an e-mail with the subject line FOREIGN TRANSLATIONS.
Okay, I guess that’s about it. For those of you that don’t follow my Twitter feed (or missed it because you follow TOO MANY people), I’ll leave you with a link to a short on-line interview I did with Starburst Magazine, and another one I did with Hollywood.com.
Drew