Well, the good news about the blog being down so long is that quite a bit of stuff has been hap­pen­ing with the Ele­men­tal Assas­sin series, which means I have some news to share.

The biggest is this — the books are now going to be pub­lished in mass mar­ket for­mat. Huz­zah!

I can­not tell you how excited I am about this move to mass mar­ket. Given the crap­tas­tic econ­omy, the cheaper for­mat will mean that the books are much more afford­able for folks — $6.99 or $7.99 ver­sus $14 or $15 for a trade paperback.

The release sched­ule is still the same — Assas­sin 1 in Feb­ru­ary, Assas­sin 2 in June, and Assas­sin 3 in Octo­ber. Since the books are going to be released in the mass mar­ket for­mat, they will actu­ally hit shelves a week early, which means that Spider’s Bite, the first book in the Ele­men­tal Assas­sin series, will now be out on Jan. 26, 2010. Not that I’m count­ing down the days or any­thing …

Also, in the last month, I’ve done copy edits for Spider’s Bite, revi­sions on Assas­sin 2 (title still to be deter­mined), and I’m get­ting revi­sions on Assas­sin 3 from my edi­tor this week. So stuff is finally start­ing to hap­pen on the pro­duc­tion end of things.

Oh yeah, and I’ve started writ­ing Assas­sin 4 too, just in case my pub­lisher wants more books in the series (which I hope they do).

Any­way, that’s what’s been going on with me and my books. What have you guys been up to while we’ve been on forced hia­tus? Share in the comments.

I’m back!

For those of you won­der­ing were I’ve been, well, back around the first of May, my Web site got hacked. I did man­age to do a blog post about that before the hack com­pletely took the site down.

Any­way, my Web site guy put the site back up about two weeks later. I did some work on it — and then it got hacked again.

I kid you not. The very next freak­ing day.

Evi­dently, some­body out there either doesn’t like me or just enjoys trash­ing people’s sites. Because it was a pretty bad hack with lots of nasty, cor­rupt files every­where. Any­way, it took my Web site guy a while to go back through and weed out all the bad files. (Thank you, Justin!)

The result of which is that now all the infor­ma­tion on the site is about two years old. Sigh. I have a backup copy of the info from the last time I updated the site, but it’s going to take me a while to go back through and phys­i­cally change and refor­mat all the pages again.

Any­way, thanks for your under­stand­ing and patience. Hope­fully, the site will not get hacked again as I (slowly) restore all the old infor­ma­tion. But if it does go down again, then that is why. And know that I am work­ing to get it back up as quickly as possible.

In the mean­time, we will return to our reg­u­larly sched­uled blog posts. I’ve got a ton of books to review, and I’ve man­aged to see some of the sum­mer block­buster movies.

Oh yeah, and I’ve got some news on the Ele­men­tal Assas­sin books to share too.

I’m glad to be back!

Is over at Mag­i­cal Mus­ings. Enjoy!

I have a lot of love for the TV show How I Met Your Mother. So you can imag­ine my delight when I saw a link for T-shirts with say­ings from the show.

I might have to get one of these to go with my A-Team T-shirt.

What are you read­ing right now?

I’m work­ing my way through The Lies of Locke Lam­ora by Scott Lynch. It’s basi­cally an epic fan­tasy heist book about a group of thieves called the Gen­tle­men Bas­tards. Pretty cool, so far.

In the near future, I plan to read Smooth Talk­ing Stranger by Lisa Kley­pas; What A Scoundrel Wants by Car­rie Lofty; and Lover Avenged by J.R. Ward, along with a stack of fan­tasy books that I have.

What about you guys? What are you read­ing right now? Share in the com­ments. And happy read­ing this weekend!