‘Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom’ has a real release date; also, a new blurb from Lawrence M. Schoen

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I just realized I’ve never mentioned that Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom now has a release date that we can believe. It’s June 13! That’s the day we need to think about.

Okay. I’m thinking about it. I don’t know what you’re doing.

We’ve been through the line and copy editing passes, and though I’ve yet to see a galley with all the illustrations in place it seems like the book has begun to make its stealthy, mysterious passage through the world. If you define “the world” as “people who know my editor”.

The reason I think this is true is that there’s a new review in the book’s feed from Macmillan.

So, yep. Robotastic. And charming, a word that’s been used to describe the book before. I never suspected that it was charming, and the idea took some getting used to; but I’m on board with it now. Charm away. Get all charming, book. Go forth and be charming. On June 13. In bookstores, and everyplace else.

Win an artist’s proof of my cover art for “Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom”

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Some lucky – or, at least, some random – attendee at this month’s Arisia convention in Boston will be going home with a signed proof of the poster version of my dust jacket art for Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom.

How could that happen? Well, throughout the weekend they’ll be selling raffle tickets for this and other Fabulous Prizes; and then on Sunday there’ll be a drawing. Proceeds from the raffle will go to the Alzheimer’s Association in memory of Sir Terry Pratchett.

The final poster will eventually be available to the public, but that won’t happen for a while. So this is your chance to steal a march on those folks next door who always get the first dust jacket posters for anything I do. You know those people. You hate those people. They’re just so smarmy.

It’s worth a trip to Boston, just to show them who’s boss.

So if this all sounds great to you, but you have no idea what Arisia is, you can read all about “New England’s largest, most diverse Sci-Fi and Fantasy Convention” right over here.

Hey, Ursula Vernon and Stephanie Law are going to be there. I’m thinking it’s worth your time. And of course there’s the added bonus of a signed print of the Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom cover, for someone who could be you.

The great big post about my great big cover for ‘Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom’

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If you were following along a couple of months ago, you probably know that at that time I was working on the dust jacket art for my book Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom.

I couldn’t show it to you back then. That’s because the auspicious moment for a cover reveal is determined during ancient, eldritch rituals around the smoking braziers and in between the ragged and unsettling tapestries of the towers that brood over the isle of Manhattan.

Yeah, that’s really how they do it. They’re old school, over there.

But last week my editor showed off the front cover and wraparound versions of the dust jacket. So here it is – front cover above, and the whole dust jacket below.

The Old Cover

If you’ve been following along even longer you may remember that I did a cover design for the book, back before it even was a book. It looked like this:

I really liked the vintage paperback palette and the detail of Rusty hanging on to the rocket in a kind of homage to Josh Kirby’s Discworld covers. But I also figured that if a publisher wanted the book, some other artist would end up doing the cover… because cover art is another matter that’s decided during those archaic festivities that I mentioned above.

So I was happy to learn that even though Tor didn’t want my original cover, they did want me to do a new one.

The New Cover

In March I got a rough description of the cover they wanted, and that’s more or less what you see on the front.

But because it was to be a wraparound jacket I had all sorts of room to show the rest of what they wanted, which was the city of Retropolis; and I took advantage of the situation by doing on the back cover what I really wanted to do: a whirlwind of characters in another light homage to Josh Kirby.

Because nothing says ‘humor’ better than a crowd of frightened people who are running for their lives.

But, hey, I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Roughs

First I worked up a series of roughs: there were six of them. Like most of what I do, these roughs started in 3DS Max and were finished (rather lightly, for the roughs) in Photoshop. They were very, very preliminary.

For complicated reasons it seemed like it would be better to offer fewer choices than that, so I cut it down to two. Of those two they picked the rough that I liked best. You can see that one below.

And although I didn’t realize it at the time, that rough is the cover you see now at Amazon, and at Barnes & Noble, and everyplace else where the book’s mentioned. Now that the cover’s been revealed we should eventually see the real cover show up in all those places. I’m eager to see that happen.

The Layers

At the rough stage I still had no idea what my polygon count would be in 3DS Max. (Over seven million!) But it was obvious that I’d need to handle the scene in multiple layers. In the end, there were at least six of these layers. (It’s hard to be exact, because there were problems that showed up only when I’d rendered the scene at a high resolution – so I went back, near the end, to render out my fixes for those.) At the very end I put all the layers together in Photoshop, where I did all kinds of retouching on them until they were a picture.

The biggest single task was the city in the background. For the rough I’d just pasted in bits and pieces of my existing city backdrops to get the building masses about where I wanted them. For the final I had to model new buildings and arrange them all into a layout that made sense. So of the six weeks I spent on the picture, I spent two in the city.

Lighting is always a large task, and here I was lighting about six separate scenes that needed to match. I know this sounds simple: but this isn’t photography. I’m not documenting. The lighting all had to look correct, but in fact it’s subverted and bent in countless ways that better serve the picture.

The simulation above doesn't really show you what I was working on; I often went forward and backward through the layers, and as I worked, of course, I hadn't done any retouching. But you can see what pieces I was working on, even though they look much prettier here.

The Big Picture

Finally, while the dust jacket is large - it's about twenty-one inches across - I wanted it to be even larger. So at its full resolution the picture will become a poster and an archival print at about thirty inches by fifteen.

I really enjoyed working on this, which is a strange thing to say about six weeks of incessant minor changes and test renderings; but there it is.

The dust jacket is a set of panels that have to work together as a single picture, but which also need to stand on their own when they’re seen on the book: the front and back flaps, the front and back covers, and even the spine will be seen as separate pictures once the dust jacket is folded around the book. It’s a really interesting challenge.

And that set of pictures has to show the shopper what the heck this book is about.

By that I don’t mean what happens in the book. It’s more a question of what the book is like.

So, the way I see it, this is what my book is like:

Oh! And you remember that old cover design? It turned into a pretty great title page. Because we waste no part of the animal.

Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom: a mildly informative update

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If you’ve been wondering what’s going on with Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom, well… so was I, for awhile. I thought I had reasonable expectations for how speedily the publishing industry moves. In this I was mistaken.

But March and April have seen a sudden burst of activity, a new release date, and the slow transition from my recent no expectations to my current cautious reserve.

The book’s new publication date – which I still consider a pleasant daydream – is March of 2017.

That date is looking more likely these days because the sales department has taken an interest. At some point their interest will turn into intent, penetrating looks directed at any part of the book that isn’t moving toward the release date, and once those intent, penetrating looks start darting around I think we can be pretty confident about the date. Nobody wants to get looks like those.

I’ve finished a couple of rough layouts for the book jacket and I expect I might start getting some looks of my own once everybody’s had a chance to see them. The dust jacket designs were a genuine blast to work on: they’re wraparound designs, so each one is a big picture that’s made up of five smaller rectangles that also need to work on their own. I really enjoyed working on them.

No, you can’t see them.

But I am looking at them while I’m typing – which is actually pretty difficult – and I can tell you that we’re probably going to have a pretty nice cover.

In the meantime we can look forward to The Purloined Patents of Doctor Brackett, the serial that should start up in June at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual. Purloined Patents will kick off a series of short serials that’ll run into February of next year. So there’s a lot to look forward to, in just a little while.

Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom: now an international sensation

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I can’t guarantee what kind of sensation that is; and if it’s the sensation of clammy tentacles slithering into your ear, well, I refuse to take responsibility. That’s on the record.

But I just ran across this announcement from the St. Martin’s Press catalog of upcoming titles. It delighted and surprised me, and I enjoyed that sensation. So maybe you will too.

Between you and me and the entire Internet, that’s not the release date; and when I did a quick count I came up a little short on jet-packed heroes, plucky rocket engineers, and bubble-helmeted canine companions – though maybe my editor wants to talk to me about them. Could be a subtle message.

But despite those discrepancies, nice to see!

The first 1024 words for The Untitled Sequel to Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom

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Here’s a rare photograph from the lower level of the Secret Laboratory, showing most of the first 1024 words for The Untitled Sequel to Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom.

My favorites? “Giraffe”, “Unmentionable”, and “Lotion”.

Extra Innings for Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom

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A couple of days ago I finished the last of my planned revisions to the illustrations for Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom. That last one was an all new replacement for my Chapter 17 illustration; I never felt quite right about the old one, and the new one’s much nicer.

And I thought that would be the end. But in spite of myself I keep on tinkering with the Chapter 1 illustration: I’m not sure whether I’m revising it or replacing it. So far I’m banking on "revising", but I may be wrong. That happens all the time.

It’s all tantalizingly close, anyway: twenty-one illustrations for the chapters, a title page, and two pseudoendpapers. It’s a big set by most standards, though a small one by the standards I set over at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual. In that case… I plead insanity, if you’re asking.

In related news, very neat but gradual things are happening and – once they’ve stopped happening – I look forward to letting you know what’s up.

Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom: something’s up

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Yes! has just told me that will , and – as you know – that means ! I couldn’t be more excited. I mean, .
 

PS: Those censors at are far more powerful than I realized.

Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom, on the sort of final stretch

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This morning marks the milestone that at least one of us has been clamoring for: I think I just finished the first pass on my illustrations for Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom. I’m hedging my bets there because, a.) sometimes I change my mind, a day or so later; and, b.) the last one – the illustration for Chapter 1 – has been kicking me up and down the street and I can’t be sure that it won’t continue to abuse me.

For those reasons, that’s not the illustration for Chapter 1 that we see up above. What we do see – and what the reckless among us may click on, to see embiggified – is what I call “Pseudoendpapers A (Front)”.

In the unlikely event of a hardcover edition this would make one half of a pair of endpaper spreads; in the rather more likely trade paperback edition the pseudoendpapers would become simple two-page spreads at the beginning and end of the book.

The pseudoendpapers are (still) crying out for taglines. The text you see at the top here will probably not make the cut because it’s a kind of spoiler. It has the right tone of melodrama tempered by farce. It’s just not quite what I need.

So the taglines are one thing I still need to do. The other things add up to revisions to six of the chapter illustrations. The revisions range from mistakes (“Oops! I forgot to put the shazbrogenator in there, when it’s clearly described in the text”) to enhancements (“That’s not crowded enough for a crowd scene”) to potential explosions (“What the heck was I thinking there, anyway?”). I’ll probably be working through those issues for the next few weeks.

So I’m a couple of weeks behind schedule. I guess that’s not too bad, percentage-wise, when the schedule covers about six months. Back in my days of art direction I’d always pad a schedule by about 20%; but I can’t fool myself that way because I am myself: too canny to be taken in by that sort of subterfuge.

The only bit that’s running seriously behind is the next book. I expected to be pounding the keyboard by now, but I’m still thinking some things through and dreaming of index cards. As one does.