Jack tightened his hands on the .45, feeling the silver crosses on its grip dig into his palms. The protective spells sewn into the lining of his jacket were playing havoc with his nerves, jangling them with discordant warnings of the presence of the mal’akhim.

The devils circled around the broken angel like ants around a dead bird, their claws and tongues tentatively touching, probing, tasting. The angel quivered. One tattered wing twitched.

Jack swore. Still alive. He slid the semiautomatic back into his jacket pocket. He wouldn’t get any thanks for blowing a hole through a member of the Heavenly Host. Instead, he slipped out his cell phone and hit speed dial.

Purchase information for various hardcopy and digital formats is also available on the Apex website.

In the divine struggle between good and evil, humans are hardly noticeable to the mal’akhim, but when an ancient seal is broken on the grounds of a California college campus, beings from dimensions beyond the balance of holy and unholy erupt from the earth. A retired priest and an ailing magickian must trust the mysterious Walker Between the Worlds and his skin-eating demon familiar as they step through Heisenbergian passages of probability and battle forces that are so far beyond demon they cannot be fully seen in earthly dimensions. Amidst the earthquakes and interdimensional intruders, the students and staff of California Hills University step across the boundaries of their knowledge and faith, revealing their true natures as the night erupts in earth and blood.

Here’s the back cover copy:

In the divine struggle between good and evil, humans are hardly noticeable to the mal’akhim, but when an ancient seal is broken on the grounds of a California college campus, beings from dimensions beyond the balance of  holy and unholy erupt from the earth. A retired priest and an ailing magickian must trust the mysterious Walker Between the Worlds and his skin-eating demon familiar as they step through Heisenbergian passages of probability and battle forces that are so far beyond demon they cannot be fully seen in earthly dimensions.

Amidst the earthquakes and interdimensional intruders, the students and staff of California Hills University step across the boundaries of their knowledge and faith, revealing their true natures as the night erupts in earth and blood.

No, there isn’t much relationship between this and Clockwork Heart — you won’t find much in the way of romance or steampunk here, although you will find lots of monsters and religion and blood.  Um, I’m guessing the two readerships might not have a lot of overlap….? 

In the meantime, I figured it was time I provided a little update on this and that….

An Agreement with Hell has been tentatively scheduled for release on Oct. 1, 2010.  I’m excited to see it entering the final stages! The novel will be very different from Clockwork Heart — gnostic, extradimensional contemporary horror — reflecting the years I read and reviewed horror as an editor of The Harrow.

Speaking of which, The Harrow Press’s anthology Day Terrors is building up a very respectable collection of acceptances. Kfir and I haven’t filled the book yet, though, so please keep sending us your best horror-by-day stories!

In the meantime, I’m switching back and forth from writing a steampunk story that I’ve tentatively titled “Imprimatur” and working on my Carnifex manuscript, which just becomes more complicated and bizarre every time I return to it. Sometimes I wonder if it will ever be finished….

On the non-writing front, I’m at that point in a professor’s annual cycle when the academic year comes to an end in a last-minute rush of grading and advising and meetings.  This is the last week of classes, and next week is finals. I have to admit that it’s better to be on the finals-grading than finals-taking side of things, although any teacher will tell you that grading is one of the least-loved parts of the job. And, alas, it’s not part of the job that I can outsource, either, as per the advice in Timothy Feriss’s The 4-Hour Work Week! So, today’s job is to finish the grading I’ve been putting off….

My department will be moving to a new building before next fall semester, which has given me a golden opportunity to apply minimalist principles to my office; the fewer boxes it’ll take to pack up, the happier I’ll be. They’d like us out by the end of the semester, but I’ve petitioned to keep my office through summer, since I’ll be working on an executive committee to plan our August faculty retreat, writing a research paper, and overseeing a student project.  Yeah, it’d be nice if profs got summers off, but that’s not the way it works for most of us.

I will take three weeks off, though; I’m heading to Japan from the week after graduation to early June. (One reason I practice minimalism is to have the freedom to travel.) I hope to blog about it here, if I can find the time and the WiFi access!  Which means I’ll be carting along my laptop, a rather big chunk of the duffel bag’s worth of packing space I’m allotting myself, but…. Right now I’m immersing myself in a crash course in tourist-level Japanese. I’m not confident that I’ll be able to read hiragana by the time I leave, but I hope to have an assortment of essential phrases and questions memorized!

Finally, I enjoyed a little personal success last Saturday — I took and passed my test for orange belt in kempo! Yay! I’m so relieved!

Good timing, though — yesterday afternoon I mailed off the proofs for the Boys’ Love Manga book, after my co-editors and I painstakingly pieced together the index. (Note to self: never engage in another project that requires manual indexing.) And tonight is the midterm exam for the Japan travel course I’m auditing, so I can bail out and work on Agreement, instead. Ah, the  joys of being a professor instead of a student! More meetings, but no exams.

I hope reviewers will enjoy Agreement. It’s very different from CH, so I’m a little concerned that some will go to it expecting a romantic fantasy and be startled to find that Agreement is contemporary horror. Should I put a disclaimer on it?

I really am working on a CH sequel. Unfortunately, it’s been delayed by my academic writing, which, since it has a deadline, has pushed everything else back. Fortunately, the deadline is imminent, and after the manuscript is off to the publisher, I should have a few months before the proofs come back in which to return to CH2.

In the meantime, Taya and Cristof are waiting patiently for me to return, although recently they’ve been asking me how they’re going to find anything to eat over the course of the next few scene-days. Um, well, a little fasting never hurt anyone, right?  Lt. Amcathra, on the other hand, is growing restless and pointing out that he really ought to have a few viewpoint scenes soon, and I keep arguing back that it’s Taya’s story, not his. …I’m not sure how I’m going to resolve either problem, but I keep hoping my subconscious will work it all out while my conscious is scrutinizing end notes and bibliographies to make sure all the periods and parentheses are in the right places.

It’s official: Apex Book Company will be publishing my second novel, An Agreement with Hell.

An Agreement with Hell is contemporary horror, and it includes a few of my favorite things: Christian folklore and apocrypha, chaos theory, labyrinths, and poststructuralist magick. Not to mention bizarre creatures laying waste to quiet little California Hills University….

It’s too early to set a firm publication date, but I’m told that Fall 2010 might be in the ballpark.

I’m looking forward to working with the editors and staff at Apex!

On the other hand, getting the implicit rejection (the editor didn’t send out individual emails to those of us who didn’t make the cut) did shake me out of the submission lassitude that’s gripped me since returning from India. I sent out two stories last night and one this morning. One of the stories I submitted, “Fellgate,” had been languishing at another zine for over a year, and although the response to my queries was “we’re still looking at it,” I’ve finally given up. So “Fellgate,” “Destiny” and “The Prince” are all out again. “The Prince” had been accepted by Shadowed Realms right before it closed down, which was very disappointing, so I hope it finds a good home now. I still have a few other stories sitting in submission queues here and there, and I’m just waiting to hear back.

I’m also mulling over the need to send out An Agreement with Hell to another publisher. Like “Fellgate,” it’s been sitting at one place for well over a year since the editor requested the full MS, and my queries about its fate haven’t received a reply. I have to assume that’s an implicit rejection and move on, I think. Unfortunately, Agreement runs 54K words, which is about 4K over most novella ranges and 6K under most novel ranges. Cutting 4K would be very difficult. Adding 6K wouldn’t be impossible, I suppose, but it would take some effort — perhaps more than I’m willing to put into it right now. So I’ll keep looking around for potential markets for it, but I won’t try to rush it out.

In the meantime, I’m finally working on a chapter of King’s Monster that has some hope. I’d been stuck at the same spot for about half a year. At last I scrapped three chapters (painful!), but I was still stuck. Today I decided not to use the viewpoint character I’d been trying hard to use and went back to the main protagonist’s POV, and things are flowing more smoothly. Too early to get overconfident, but at least there’s hope. I have three viewpoint characters and I’ve been trying to keep their number of POV chapters roughly equal, but I think I may just have to accept that one of them will have significantly fewer chapters than the rest. I don’t know why I’ve been resisting that for so long!