It's not really a secret to anyone who looks at my bibliography that I write a LOT. I mean, my first book came out in September of 2009: I am still not even ten years into this game.
But what sometimes seems to come as a surprise is the part where not every book can be written the second I think of it. Some books require me to do other things first. They need me to get BETTER.
(This is not me insulting my early work. I still feel that if I had only ever published FEED, I would not have been forgotten. But there are intricacies of structure and form that have taken practice and effort to learn.)
MIDDLEGAME is a book that took me less than six months to write, but took me almost a decade to get good enough to approach with half a hope of telling the story I wanted it to be.
It's about alchemy and family and lies and truths and time travel and what it costs, what it means, to rewrite the universe. It's about the Doctrine of Ethos and the ethics of divinity. It's about the Impossible City, which has been waiting so, so long to be made whole.
It's about a girl, and a boy, and the bonds they share, the bonds they sever, and the bonds they splice back together, one equation at a time.
There's this concept called "comp titles," where you're supposed to say "oh, my book is like X meets Y" in order to make people want to read it. You're supposed to pick big-ticket items if you can, to increase the odds the hook will work.
(The first time I saw someone saying "it's like Seanan McGuire meets this other thing," I laughed until I cried.)
Well, MIDDLEGAME is basically "Tim Powers meets James Tiptree, Jr., and they agree to collaborate on a 1980s-era cartoon about alchemists." Which is not an easily salable list of artifacts, but y'all have met me. I really can't think of a more SEANAN WROTE THIS description.
I love this book. I love these characters. I can't believe you're finally going to have the opportunity to meet them.
MIDDLEGAME, coming from @TorDotComPub on May 7th, 2019.
I'll see you on the board.
tor.com/2018/09/18/cov…
I'll see you on the board.
tor.com/2018/09/18/cov…
