City of Night cover and publication date

City of Night, as some people have noticed, was originally announced as a March 2010 release — but in happy news, it’s been pushed forward a month, to February 2010. (In the publishing industry, forward=earlier; back=later; I found these terms confusing when I first started working in a bookstore because forward implied, to me, going forward).

The cover was painted by Jody Lee, who has always done wonderful covers for the West novels; as you can see, this one is no exception, and I was very, very happy when I first laid eyes on it (which was at the Worldcon in Montreal). I just finished correcting and returned page proofs for City of Night to DAW, which is the last stage of pre-publication in which I’m involved, so the book is entirely finished at this point. Yay!

I am, however, still working on the following book, House Name, and it’s not done yet, not because I haven’t been writing, but because, well. It’s a wee bit longer than I expected it would be. Everyone act surprised.

I’ve been mostly absent on-line while trying to catch up on deadlines. Writing the novels does take time–and I always account for that when I’m planning ahead. What I sometimes fail to account for are things like copy-edits and page-proofs, which, sadly, also take time, so I’m frequently overly optimistic in the months leading up to a deadline, and then frequently entirely desperate and impossible to live with as the deadline looms larger.

In other news, I’ve turned in Cast in Chaos. Line-edits, copy-edits and page proofs are a few months in the future for that book. I’m also writing a novella set in the Cast universe, but I’m not entirely certain which of three possible stories I’m actually writing; it’s for an anthology titled Harvest Moon, which should be out sometime in 2010.

When I finish House Name, which should be very soon, I’ll have breathing room and the mental energy to be more social, so I should actually be around more often. Thanks so much for your patience.