Finalized Flex Fan Art, AND Me Yammering On New Podcasts!

So if you’ll recall, my friend Bill has been perfecting some really awesome fan art based on my book Flex – well, specifically the character Valentine, everyone’s favorite kinky videogamemancer.  And he applied the colors, and I could not be happier.

He says he’s going to write up a post on the process of making this art, and I surely hope he does. (Or maybe he has; I find Tumblr maddeningly impossible to navigate, proving how wretchedly old I am.)
The only thing that threw me about this piece was the stray bits of garbage on the floor, until I realized this was supposed to reflect Valentine’s messiness. Oh, man, Valentine levels of messiness would make it so you couldn’t see the floor. But I love Valentine’s look so much.  (Go check out his other art.)
Also, the podcast New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy interviewed me, and it was awesome.  Rob went above and beyond the usual podcasting by actually transcribing excerpts from the talk, like so:
On why why a world with Flex also needs flux:
“Flux evens out the odds of magic…. I really hate novels where magic is this thing  you can do … without any kind of cost…. Frequently what I see is, ‘Oh, I’m a magician. I’ll raise an army of the dead and make my castle out of magic,’ and where is any challenge in that for your characters? Where do they have any stopping points to what they can do?… A big tension in the book as to whether the mancers should even use their magic.”
On his approach to writing:
“I’m what’s called a gardener writer, in the business. There are plotters who basically sit down and plot out all their books beat by beat and know their ending the minute they start their first sentence. And Flex, like every story I’ve ever written– basically I wrote an interesting first paragraph and followed it randomly until the end of the book.”
Anyway, I neep away about my process, and how I came up with some of the central themes of Flex (which is still available in bookstores, and the sequel is still coming out in October), so if you feel like listening to me talk for about half an hour, well, here I am.