BlakeCharlton.com

Innocents Abroad: Spellwright to be published in the UK & Commonwealth!

A while ago, I alluded to some nebulous good news. Just the other day, my agent gave me the green light to announce that Spellwright and its two sequels will be published in the UK and Commonwealth* by Voyager Books, a division of HarperCollins. I couldn’t be more thrilled to be added to the Voyager list, which boasts some of my heroes including Robin Hobb, Raymond E. Feist, George R.R. Martin, and many others. The exact UK publication date has not yet been set but should be sometime in summer 2010.

I’m especially curious to see how the folks across the pond react to Spellwright. One of the driving ideas behind the book was to write a fantasy that celebrated the magical (if not mysterious) nature of the English language, rather than an imagined language. And of course Merrie Olde England lavishes love upon our shared and beautiful language by giving it so many more vowels: encyclopaedia, colour, oesophagus. They allow for the pleasing “dreamt” rather than the logical but clunky “dreamed.” In my (admittedly limited) experience of the British, they have a greater knowledge of our language and take greater pleasure in its eccentricities. My hope is that Spellwright and its tangled language strikes the British fancy. As to if it will, only time will tell.

In other overseas news, there is more nebulous good news amassing, this time in Germany. Among my many status-post-test-assignments is an outline for books two and three in the series. Hopefully after I send that in I will have more good news. If you have any extra Teutonic good luck lying around, send it my way please.

*Excluding Canada because we love our Northern Neighbors and want to keep them close so they will always give us maple syrup, take us for long canoe portages, and show us how a developed, equitable country can provide healthcare.