As happens every year around this time, it's awards eligibility season. So it's not a bad thing for authors to remind people what we published in the previous year, as they consider their favourites. I only published two things in 2023, but both have been making waves, which is cool. 

"The House of Saints" was published in 2023, concluding the hard scifi family saga duology of the Quebecois colonists in the clouds of Venus. I'm really proud of this novel and of the Venus Ascendant series. It was a serious levelling up for me, and the first novel got starred reviews from Library Journal and Publishers Weekly, and both have been doing well in English and French. In fact, the French translation of "The House of Styx" has been long listed for the Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire in France, and Albin-Michel will publish "The House of Saints" in French this summer. 

I don't tend to have enough time to write short fiction as well, but often  Chinese publisher will commission a story with a prompt and after they show it in Mandarin, I'll find a publisher for the English markets. "Six Incidents of Evolution Using Time Travel" is such a story. It was picked up by Asimov's Magazine, and I recently found out that it's a nominee for the Asimov's Readers' Poll. Because of that, you can read it at the Asimov's Magazine website for free for a few months. 

​2023 was a great year for science fiction and fantaty, so it's an amazing time to be a reader! Go out and see all the great things!

On the 31st of May, 2023, my novel The House of Styx will be available in French in book stores everywhere, under the title "Les Profondeurs de Vénus" from publisher Albin-Michel. I was lucky enough that Gilles Goulet was the translator again. He'd previously translated The Quantum Magician and The Quantum Garden, so he knew the world and my writing quirks. 

The House of Styx  is my  family saga set in the clouds of Venus in the 2200s, starring Québécois separatists. It's set in the same universe at The Quantum Magician and occurs about 250 years before the events of that novel, although they're not prequel-sequel. Styx got starred reviews from Publishers' Weekly and Library Journal, so I'm pretty proud of it, and the French cover is spectacular! 

Go ahead and ask your library or local book store to stock it!

I am overjoyed that the second and concluding volume of my Venus Ascendant series, the House of Saints, will be out in hardcover in bookstores everywhere on the 29th of August! It will also be released in ebook and audio at the same time, and for those who missed The House of Styx, it's available now in hardcover, trade paperback, audio and ebook everywhere. 

If you don't have an independent bookstore you love, here is a genius link to take you to your retailer of choice: geni.us/TheHouseOfSaints. If you're in Canada, you may want to buy from Bakka-Phoenix, the specialty scifi/fantasy bookstore in Toronto . They're great and ship all over!

The House of Styx and The House of Saints is a complete family saga set in a Quebecois colony in the clouds of Venus. The House of Styx got starred reviews in both The Library Journal and Publishers Weekly, so I'm immensely proud. 

For the completists out there, The Venus Ascendant duology is set in the same universe as the Quantum Magician. It tells the story of the foundation of the  Venusian Congregate, the state that plays the heavy in The Quantum Magician, and especially The Quantum War. My very first Venus story, a novelette called Persephone Descending, was included my collection "Flight From the Ages and Other Stories" if you want to read about the earliest days of the Venusian colony.

I will say too, pre-ordering a book helps authors a lot - it tells book stores that there's interest and often triggers them to order additional copies for their shelves. I hope you enjoy the conclusion to the Venus saga :)

  Life is super busy, all for good reasons. I've been working on a secret project I can't talk about, and on the margins of that, I've been editing The House of Saints, the conclusion to the 2-book Venus Ascendant series. I have structural editing notes on Saints from my editor, from my agent, from an excellent sensitivity reader, and from two friends from my writers' group. It's going well. 
  Earlier this month, I went to Chicago for the World Science Fiction Convention. It was really great - everyone was masked and fully vaccinated so I felt pretty safe and the content was great. It was also really wonderful to see friends in person again. The pandemic caused me to become a little more reclusive for a couple of years, and so I really missed meeting with the nerds who have the same passions as me. I felt energized and re-grounded. 
   And this week, the cover for my first collection was revealed at Nerd Daily! Here's the link. The collection will contain all the stories, novelettes and novellas that are set in the same universe as the Venus Ascendant and Quantum Evolution novels. The stories were all published in great markets like Asimov's and Analog before, and many were picked up for year's best anthologies, but they're all out of print, so I'm really happy that people will be able to read them again. 
   The collection will be in book stores on the 6th of December, 2022, but is available for pre-order already here: geni.us/FlightFromTheAges. Check it out!
    I'll try to post here more regularly now that I'm a fulltime writer. In the meantime, I have to run. It's 706am and I have to start editing at 7:30am :) 

I haven't been active on this blog for a minute, but I've been hard at work! Between January and March, I finished drafting The House of Saints, the second and concluding novel of the Venus Ascendant duology. It felt really good to hand it in to my editor at Rebellion on the 30th of March and I should have comments back so I can finish and polish it in May, which incidentally, is when the Trade Paperback edition of The House of Styx comes out! I'll have more news soon.  
​   D

I was delighted to return to the Functional Nerds Podcast to talk with Tracy Townsend and Patrick Hester! We talked about my new book, The Quantum War, comic books, the writing process, and oddly enough, ice-fishing. It was a lot of fun. If you're not already listening to Function Nerds, you really should - they have a lot of interviews with great authors!  Here's the link to my conversation with them :) 

Yesterday was my last day in the Public Service of Canada. I submitted my resignation last month so that I could go off and have adventures. My last actual day of work was the 20th of October, which coincidentally was my 22nd anniversary of joining the government, and capped my career with a presentation that was important to me.

It's been an extraordinary experience and I can't say enough good things about the working for the Public Service. In the course of my career, I was sent as a representative of Canada to Colombia, Austria, Kosovo, Switzerland, Ecuador, Haiti, and Cuba for missions that lasted from days to years. I also got to represent Canada in discussions with Provinces, NGOs, and academia, as well as with international organizations like the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Organization for Migration, the International Committee of the Red Cross and others like OECD partners.

My responsibilities ranged from skeptical anti-fraud work to highly facilitative refugee protection work. I got to lead extraordinary teams of policy officers and technological disruptors and organizational bridge builders. I got to help change Regulations and even the law in some cases, and my advice went to Deputy Ministers and Ministers. I can't remember the exact number anymore, but I personally sent around 2,900 refugees to safety and new lives in Canada.

A critical part of the Public Service is that after decisions are made, we loyally implement, regardless of whether we would have made the same policy decision ourselves. The reason that's important is because the people of Canada elect a Parliament, and regardless of who forms the Government, that Government represents the will of the people at that time, and they need to be supported. This is part of the zen of being a public servant, to keep your eye on how supporting each Government in fact supports the well-functioning of Canadian parliamentary democracy. I would like to think that I did that well, and taught this zen to my younger staff who were starting their careers.

I did choose to leave though, because my writing career has gotten to a place where that's really now where my heart is and life is short and I can probably make it work financially. One of the things that had me really conflicted about leaving was not the work, but the people. Whether it was my teams, my peers or senior management, my workplace was generally filled with extraordinary people throughout the 22 years. When all the work content calculus was done, the idea of leaving the people was the slow-down on the decision, and that's a really lucky thing to be able to say about any career.

So the first day of the rest of my life as a writer dawns in Montreal, where I'm meeting with friends from the science fiction and fantasy writers' community during the World Fantasy Convention. There will be some writing, some tourism, some industry talk, some making of new friends, some mentoring and making connections for younger authors, and probably a beer or two. I'll have some announcements to make on the way writing is going in the next weeks and months. Thanks for being a part of my new life, whether you're near or far.