I knew that attending the 2007 World Fantasy Convention would be a good idea for my career, I just didn’t know why. You always hear a lot of jabber about how networking is so important, it’s always good to have friends, blah blah blah — but you rarely get any concrete examples.
Well, here’s a concrete example. In one of my blogs about my World Fantasy experience, I mentioned that I had finally met Hugo Award-winning SF author Robert J. Sawyer (author of Hominids, Rollback, and many others). Rob and I were both in a group of about ten people who dined at the local pub on the first official night of the con. And then I got a chance to talk with him face to face for a few minutes at the Tor party on day 3. I said on my blog that Rob was “very generous with his time and advice.” What I didn’t mention at the time was that he agreed to read my upcoming novel MultiReal for a possible blurb.
Today, Mr. Sawyer has come through. Here’s his blurb for MultiReal, and boy, it’s a beaut:
Just when we thought cyberpunk was dead, David Louis Edelman bursts on the scene with defibrillator paddles and shouts, “Clear!” If there’s any web more tangled than the World Wide one, it’s the Byzantine networks of high finance; Edelman intermeshes them in a complex, compelling series. This DOES compute!
Damn, I love this. I’m bursting onto the scene! With defibrillator paddles, no less! And I even like the cutesy “this DOES compute” at the end, complete with exclamation point. I think this one’s going to be riding high on my books for years to come, provided you all keep my career going for years to come by purchasing multiple copies of my books.
There’s nothing quite like a colorful blurb from someone who really knows how to give a good compliment. Take, for instance, one of my all-time faves, written by Wallace Stegner for the great Robert Stone: “Stone writes like a bird, like an angel, like a circus barker, like a con man, like someone so high on pot that he is scraping his shoes on the stars.” Then there’s Thomas Pynchon’s famous blurb for his old buddy Richard Fariña: “This book comes on like the Hallelujah Chorus done by 200 kazoo players with perfect pitch, I mean strong, swinging, skillful and reverent — but also with the fine brassy buzz of irreverence in there too.”
Including Sawyer’s blurb and the one by Peter Watts, I’m now two steps closer to achieving my goal of getting praised by every single Canadian on the planet. Robert Charles Wilson and R. Scott Bakker, you’re next!
And thanks again to Rob Sawyer.