Paper Fruit

While many of you much appreciated pre-orderers will have already received your copies of Creatures of Want and Ruin, today is the official release date of the book!

The book has been getting a pleasing number of thumbs-up, from Publishers Weekly, from Booklist, from io9, from Barnes & Noble (who were kind enough to call me “one of the most distinct voices in contemporary SFF”), and lastly from Apple Books, who also named it one of their Best Books of November. And a few little birds have told me some other accolades are forthcoming, too!

Even so, if you’d like to, you can help Creatures of Want and Ruin find its audience. If you like the book, or think it’s worthy of attention, please consider helping it (and me!) out with one of the following direct actions:

• Talk about it. Word of mouth is still the most effective form of advertising. If you think about it, chances are a large percentage of the books you read every year were personally recommended to you, so please let people know if they ask what you’re reading!
• Signal boost online. Social media is also very effective at promoting works of art and literature. Please let your social media contacts know about the book’s release and if you enjoyed it!
• Tell your local library. Even if you already bought a personal copy, please mention the book to your local librarian to get it on the shelf there next time you go in.
• Leave a review. Reviews matter to authors. Amazon in particular relies on review volume to decide which books to promote to their readers. A brief but enthusiastic review on any review site, be it a seller like Amazon or B&N.com, or Goodreads and other places like your own blog, will definitely help!

But really, the book is meant to be read and enjoyed, and if you’re doing that, that’s wonderful. Thank you, and happy page-turning!

I’m delighted to announce that Publishers Weekly has seen fit to award Creatures of Want and Ruin a star! Given how difficult a book this was to write, how much I have feared for its quality, this feels like about fifty pounds of bricks being lifted off my shoulders. Here are my favorite bits, because it’s my blog and I get to brag on myself:

• “Tanzer’s charming, confident follow-up to Creatures of Will and Temper continues the conceit of drawing on famous literary source texts for character and plot material; here, The Great Gatsby crashes into the works of H.P. Lovecraft, with, of course, chaotic results.”
• “Fin and Ellie make an appealing team as they work to figure out what’s wrong and stop it, and the depiction of Long Island is a fine example of nuanced, lovely landscape writing.”
• “Tanzer resists simplistic moral takes.”

This was the boost I needed as I claw my way up the last few thousand words of the third and final “creatures” book, Creatures of Charm and Hunger (Spring 2020). That’s been… well, it was supposed to be less political than this book, which is pretty got-dang political (“The portrayal of groups of normal people falling into mob violence and hatred of the other groups is genuinely unnerving”—Publishers Weekly), but life holds its surprises for us all.

So yeah, it’s good! At least the critics think so. So please pre-order–links on the side-bar! It’s a great read according to people who judge such things for a living. Listen to them!

For a while now, “readers” of this “blog” will have noticed a popup at the top claiming I had a newsletter. Well, about a year after setting that up, I finally have scheduled my very first! I hope to use it monthly, which let’s be honest, given the state of this blog, is ambitious, but we’ll see. I like the personal nature of the newsletter, and MailChimp is fun to play around in. So, if you’re curious about stuff I do, please do sign up. I’m trying to make the newsletter a mix of professional news (books, short stories, appearances) and personal hobbies such as my home canning adventures and also my baking and such. I’ll also try to always provide at least one picture of the Toad.

Other than that, it’s been… well, it’s been. I finished the page proofs for the forthcoming Creatures of Want and Ruin (now you can pre-order!) am working on a new short story, and am easing back into the now-announced third book in the series, Creatures of Charm and Hunger.

Yep, there will be a third! The quick pitch is “teen witch murdering Nazis” but of course said witch is a diabolist and there’s more to it than that, but… if that sounds like something you’d like to read, you won’t be disappointed.

Thanks for sticking with this blog, and with me, and see you (hopefully) in newsletter form soon!