Sporadic Roundup Number Whatever

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Remember, you have until midnight Greenwich time (EDT 7 p.m., I believe) to enter the Midnight Never Come competition, with a chance to win £250/$500 in bookstore vouchers. (It’s a pretty sweet deal. D’you think my publisher would notice if I put myself in?)

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If you want to hear me ramble on, instead of seeing it, Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing has a podcast interview up, wherein Shaun Ferrell asks me questions about writing, academia, and (of course) Midnight Never Come.

You can subscribe to the feed via iTunes, or download the file directly. If you want to cut straight to my part of the podcast, it starts around twelve minutes in; if you want to skip right past me, I think I shut up around the forty-minute mark.

Despite my best efforts, I, er, talked like I normally do. Which is to say, fast. Sorry about that.

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Review roundup! Only one of them is accessible online, unfortunately.

Our own ninja_turbo liked it, even accounting for friend bias. Being unfamiliar with the history, he was still able to follow along — yay!

Meredith Schwartz and Jackie Cassada at Library Journal call it a “deft blending” and note that, unlike many staples of the Elizabethan fantasy genre, I don’t use real people as my main characters. (Either approach, of course, can work. But they seem to have liked this one.)

And then two more good ones mailed in from my UK publisher. One appears to come from a magazine called Starburst, and wins my heart for calling Christopher Marlowe “Kit.” The other is from SciFiNow, and it tells me I hit one of the targets I was particularly aiming for: “Eschewing the use of the typical Seelie and Unseelie (or Summer and Winter) courts that appear in so many novels dealing with the subject, Brennan has created a faerie society that is quintessentially English.” Rock on! That goes up there with my UK publisher deciding to pick up a London book by an American author in the first place for evidence I’m doing something right.

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Finally, if you’ve read the book, feel free to poke your head in on the discussions going on in the spoiler thread. I’m enjoying the back-and-forth there quite a bit.

0 Responses to “Sporadic Roundup Number Whatever”

  1. she_oft_sings

    I enjoyed listening to the interview.

    • Marie Brennan

      Thanks! It’s only the second phone interview I’ve ever done (and the first fell down a black hole and never appeared anywhere), so it’s a new thing for me.

  2. shui_long

    evidence I’m doing something right

    You’re definitely doing something right – I loved the book. And if I can just clear a couple of month’s worth of backlog, you can have another positive LJ review. For what it may be worth, coming from someone who is English and a historian of sorts…

    In a way, I was almost surprised at how little history was used overtly – which left significant latitude to develop the story – but then realised how much history was there in the background, in ways that a casual reader might not even notice. An American writing about England may have an awful lot of Hollywood to live down, but I think you’ve made a significant contribution in that direction!

    • Marie Brennan

      This next book grapples far more directly with history — which is part of what makes it more difficult.

      But yeah . . . there’s a certain added pleasure when English readers give the book a thumbs-up, just as there would be if I were writing about high school and teenagers said it was really well-done. An insider stamp of approval, as it were.

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