The Bright Sword Tour
INTENSITY IN -- checks notes -- yes -- TEN CITIES
The Bright Sword is coming out on July 16th. I’m going on tour to promote it.
Not in any virtual or zoomy sense, I am actually going to transport my physical corporeal cells all around the USA. And to bits of the UK as well. Any other anglophone nations want a piece of this—Canada, Australia, New Zealand—you just let me know.
I’m really, really looking forward to it. It’s an incredible privilege to be able to travel around and talk to people about books.
There are definitely aspects of it that make me nervous. Like most writers I am a poorly distributed mix of intro- and extro-vert and I’m never quite sure which of these aspects is going to be outward-facing at any given moment.
But mostly I’m just unbelievably excited. My extrovert-face actually loves talking to crowds, especially about books and King Arthur and The Bright Sword, which I have been working on for ten years, and my family got sick of me talking about it about one year into that process, so you can imagine how much stuff I’ve got pent up. I love new places, and food, I don’t mind planes, and I actively, immoderately adore hotels of all kinds.
And at many of these stops I’ll be talking onstage with brilliant people—M.T. Anderson, Ann Leckie, Chantel Acevedo, Jenna Seery, Robin Sloan, Ed Park, Therese Anne Fowler, Hannah Whitten, Paolo Bacigalupi—who I would happily pay money to sit in the audience and listen to.
The tour schedule looks like this:
July 15 Brooklyn, NY, Greenlight Bookstore @ St. Joseph's, in conversation with Ed Park, 7:30 PMÂ EST
July 16, New York, NY, Barnes & Noble Upper West Side, in conversation with Jenna Seery for B&N Poured Over, 7:00 PMÂ EST
July 17, Boston, MA, Brookline Booksmith @ Coolidge Corner Theatre, In conversation with MT Anderson, 6:00 PMÂ EST
July 18, Raleigh, NC, Quail Ridge Books, in conversation with Therese Anne Fowler, 7:00 PMÂ EST
July 19, Miami, FL, Books & Books @ Coral Gables Congregational Church, in conversation with Chantel Acevedo, 7:00 PMÂ EST
July 20, Nashville, TN, Parnassus Books, in conversation with Hannah Whitten, 6:30 PMÂ CST
July 21, St. Louis, MO, The Novel Neighbor @ St. Louis County Library, in conversation with Ann Leckie, 4:00 PMÂ CST
July 22, Wichita, KS, Watermark Books and Café, 6:00 PM CST
July 23, Portland, OR, Powell's, 7:00 PMÂ PDT
July 24, San Francisco, CA, Books, Inc, Opera Plaza, in conversation with Robin Sloan, 7:00 PMÂ PDT
July 25, San Francisco, CA, Rakestraw Books, 7:00 PMÂ PDT
July 26, San Diego, CA, San Diego Comic Con, 12:00 PMÂ PDT
Please come!
If I’m not coming to your home town — and I know that statistically speaking I probably am not—just know that I wish I were. I don’t actually set this schedule myself, it’s my publisher (because they pay for it) and the booksellers who work it out between them. I just go where I’m sent.
In any event I plan to come back to the US in the fall for book festivals and so on. Watch this space.
I would love to go back to NZ! I was in Auckland last year but mostly talking to kids about The Silver Arrow.
NZ please! I just found your Substack today via a link in Robin Sloan's newsletter so I'm working through the posts now. Like a (much more contemporary) version of Steinbeck's Journal of a Novel. I'm currently listening to the Magicians trilogy again before I start Bright Sword.