“Corrupt thieving son of a hemorrhaging leech!” Herrera contributed. “Whoremongering shitwhistle! Just… Fuck that guy.”

“Herrera!” Takata scowled at the Miner. “See? You get him all worked up and he starts saying the ‘fuck’ word.”

She offered an apologetic shrug.

Hey, so I’ve been sitting on some good news for a while now. I’ve sold my debut novel Red Noise to Angry Robot Books. If you want to see the cover, and an interview with me, just pop on over here.

This is a departure for me. It’s not like my short fiction, or like my novellas. It’s been a rough few years, on a number of fronts, and I needed an outlet for some ideas that didn’t want to play nice. At the same time, I’d been poking at a story structure for twenty years after first seeing Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, and then Sergio Leone’s remake, A Fistful of Dollars, and then read Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. There are a lot of variations on that story out there: stranger comes to town and finds a house divided against itself, opponents who’d rather throw a two-for-one funeral than bury the hatchet. I read Transmetropolitan and First Blood, watched Cowboy Bebop. I formed some opinions, is what I’m trying to say.

I’m happy with Red Noise. It’s got okonomiyaki and robots and cranky old guys and a lot of things that amuse me. It’s also got corruption and assassination and hatred and people bring nuclear weapons to knife fights. There’s blood, and the language isn’t polite. Like Takata said, “you get him all worked up and he starts saying the ‘fuck’ word”.

It comes out June 9, 2020, and you can preorder it here.