This Saturday!

Waaaay back in early May, io9.com put up a post restarting their online book club, and their book of choice was The Red. There hasn’t been any promotion or reminders on it since then, but the promised Q&A session is going to take place on Saturday, putting it a couple of weeks behind the original schedule.

I think the Q&A is going to work something like a Reddit AMA. A post will go up at io9.com, probably around noon EDT. In theory, people who have read the book will pop in to post questions, and I’ll stop by a little bit later to try to answer them.

The problem with this set up of course is that it’s very hit-or-miss about who happens to notice the Q&A, and of those, who’s actually read the book. It’s also on a Saturday when, weirdly enough, a lot of people are not online.

So it’s basically fallen to me to generate my own audience (and that never goes well!). So if you’ve read The Red, if you’re up for an online Q&A/discussion, if you’ve got the time, please come on over to io9.com this Saturday! I’d love to have your company there.

I’ll post a link here on the blog when I have one.

Update: Follow this link to io9.com!

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there!

I’m continuing to revise the new novel, and the word count is growing steadily. My target, when I start a novel, is 100,000 words. Epic fantasy writers would laugh at that as being so short, but to my mind it’s a good, solid length. Of course, I almost always overshoot that goal, and I’m sure it’s going to happen again with the new book. Right now I’m at 95,000 words, and I have no doubt at all that I’ll be well past the 100K mark before I’m done.

In other news, io9.com has decided to reboot the io9 Book Club. I was thrilled when I found out yesterday that the first book to read and discuss is The Red. The idea is to encourage people to read the book over the next month, and then to talk about it online. In early June I’ll stop by at io9.com to answer reader questions. More information here. I’m hoping for some interesting discussion.

io9.com likes to come up with top ten lists. Today it’s the “10 Most Important Science Fiction Books About Superintelligence” — and one of my books is included!

My first novel, The Bohr Maker, comes in at #7.

Hey, it’s fun to be remembered! And that’s impressive company.

Over the past year or so I’ve read several disparaging comments about my favorite kind of science fiction — the hard stuff. So I thought I’d address some common misconceptions about the sub-genre in a post that published today at io9.com. Please check it out and let me know what you think.

Here’s a fun little piece from io9.com that I got to participate in. Charlie Jane Anders asks an assortment of science fiction authors “What novel, by someone else, do you wish you’d written?”