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cover!
Final version, or at least final enough that I’m allowed to post it.
A few notes. First of all, this is the kind of cover that will look much better in print than on the screen, because as I found out the hard way, the details depend heavily on your monitor settings. If you can’t see the building in the background, you aren’t really getting it all. (Yes, there’s a building in the background. I promise. I didn’t see it until I tried a different computer.)
Second, there are two details that can’t be conveyed in an image. The title will be printed in silver foil, and the floral pattern winding through will be done in a spot gloss on an otherwise matte cover. Or at least that’s the current plan.
I’m quite pleased with it. Authorial nitpickiness aside (there’s always authorial nitpickiness), it’s a nice, elegant cover, and I like their choice of a pull-quote for the top; that’s a line from a John Dowland song I found just as I was doing revisions back in August. I’ll leave it as a closing note:
“Time stands still with gazing on her face,
stand still and gaze for minutes, houres and yeares, to her giue place:
All other things shall change, but shee remains the same,
till heauens changed haue their course & time hath lost his name.”
in memoriam
I ended up feeling a lot quieter after I heard about Robert Jordan than I would have predicted I would.
Here’s what it boils down to, and why I don’t feel bad that my thoughts more or less immediately went to his unfinished book.
I never met the man. I saw him at World Fantasy once, but didn’t stand in the enormous line of people with wheeled carts full of eggcrates full of books for him to sign. I didn’t know him personally. All I knew were his books, and the occasional interview or blog post I came across.
The Eye of the World was the one book I took with me to Costa Rica. I took it because it was big and thick and looked like it might keep me busy through two and a half weeks of semi-rough living where I had to carry all my worldly possessions in a backpack for the duration (and I was a scrawny fourteen at the time). I left that book in Costa Rica after I finished it because the series didn’t grab me then (and see above about having to carry everything); later I went back, because my friends were reading it, and then it did grab me.
I know a lot of people got fed up with the Wheel of Time at one point or another, and I’ll cop to having my own problems with it. But ultimately? The core of the story was something I never stopped being interested in. Through all the subplots and complications and so on, I always was curious to see how the main stuff was going to wrap up. That was my connection to Robert Jordan: the story he was telling.
In a sense, then, the end of that story will be the end of my relationship with the man. Whether it ends here, incomplete, or whether they find someone to finish his work . . . either way, that’s how my connection ends. And I know which one I would prefer.
So I don’t feel bad that I’m wondering what will happen with the last book.
My sympathies, of course, are with everyone who did know him — the people who have lost James Oliver Rigney, Jr., instead of Robert Jordan. I don’t expect them to deal with this question any time soon. There are more important things for them right now.
Robert Jordan’s dead.
As they said on Making Light, where I read the announcement, now isn’t the time to hash out what you think about his books, good or bad.
But I can’t help but wonder what they’re going to do about them.
SF Novelists blogging
I forgot to mention it last month (bad Swan, bad), but I’m one of the contributors to the SF Novelists group blog. The sixteenth of the month is my day to post, so today, it’s a ramble on respecting history — that is, writing historical fiction while being respectful to the real people of the time.
In other news, I’m sick. Better now, thirteen days before the wedding, than some time next week, right? Right?
soliciting readings
Here’s the deal: course proposals to teach at Collins have to be turned in stupidly early. As in, by October 19th, I need a complete syllabus, including readings broken down by week, assignments, grading system, and everything else. And since I have a variety of other things between me an October 19th, I’m going to bootstrap myself through this process a bit by soliciting help; otherwise this hunt would take way too long.
I need suggestions for small (i.e. article- or chapter-sized), reasonably scholarly nonfiction readings on certain topics, as follows:
- hard/soft primitivism
- the place of women in republic-era Rome
- western views of Far Eastern/Japanese history and culture
(would Said’s Orientalism work for that? I know he’s more writing about the Middle East) - the American frontier, esp. the interaction of diversity there
- current theories on how we perceive and use history
- the performance of gender/sexuality in Elizabethan England
- the intersection of religious, political, and secular life in the Renaissance
- eighteenth-century piracy in the Caribbean
- events leading up to the O.K. Corral gunfight (not the events of the day itself)
Bonus points if you can figure out what my course topic is, based on this eclectic set of needs. <g>
where did it go?
I believe I loaned someone my photocopy of the “Fantasy as Mode, Genre, Formula” chapter of Brian Attebery’s book at some point. prosewitch, was that you? Or someone else? I kind of need it back.
not too bad
After two rounds of questions on the career thingy, here’s what it recommends for me:
1. Anthropologist
2. Interpreter
3. Sign Language Interpreter
4. Historian
5. Actor
6. Comedian
7. Dancer
8. Translator
9. Writer
10. Musician
The one I don’t get is “comedian.” (For starters, it didn’t ask me a single question about my sense of humour.) But it told me “anthropologist” after the first round, and “writer” started out at #11. If I didn’t need to go to bed, I’d answer more questions and watch how it changes. But as career advice things go, this one isn’t half bad. My major interests do in fact include history, dance, music, and foreign languages.
zoom zoom
I’m really digging my schedule these last few weeks. I teach MWF, which means my Tuesdays and Thursdays are open, and lately that’s led to a pretty high degree of productivity. I go to the gym those days, so I always have to leave the house anyway; it’s pretty easy to talk myself into running errands along the way, especially since the gym is a bit of a drive, and it feels wasteful to go all the way to the other side of town just for that.
It reinforces what I’ve thought before: I’m at my best when I have some structure in my life. Give me nothing but free time and unscheduled tasks, and I end up floundering. Maybe it’s just perception, but I feel like I get more done in an average week now that teaching is taking up some of my time than I did this summer, when my schedule was completely open.
The best example of this rule might be the last two months of my senior year. Having finished my thesis, I was taking two classes, one of them pass/fail, and I had a grand total of five hours of class per week. I wrote a novel and six short stories, and had a great social life, too.
Which raises an interesting point. If I ever do end up writing full-time, I’ll probably need to find some regular volunteer job or the like — something that makes me leave the house on a regular basis. Otherwise the lack of structure might hamstring me.
Anyway, I’m almost done with lunch; time to put my money where my mouth is and do the productivity thing.
(I’ll admit, though, that I’m looking forward to when the wedding is done, and I can officially declare Screw Productivity Week, when I will do jack-all that Tuesday and Thursday.)
I’m weird.
1) I shouldn’t have taken that nap today. Oh, this is going to suck tomorrow.
2) Even with insomnia, there’s something really weird, and possibly wrong, about being up at 4 a.m. outlining a course proposal for next year. (But the idea mugged me when I couldn’t go to sleep, and I didn’t want to lose it.)
Stay tuned to this channel for me soliciting help on the course proposal, probably. As for what it’s about? Five words: I blame Midnight Never Come.
Protected: Milk & Cookies Strikes Back
The deadlines, they laugh at me!
Wow. Shortest edit letter in the history of publishing. (Or at least my history of publishing. And apparently my editor’s history of sending such things.)
Seriously, this thing is one page long. And the top half of that is letterhead followed by the Standard Introductory Paragraph of “Thank you for sending this to me, it’s great, here’s a few nice things about it.” Three paras of Things To Fix, and we’re done.
Mind you, it isn’t three paras of “here’s a few typos;” the three things she touches on are a little more pervasively problematic. As I put it in my response to her, they’re of the “one sentence to describe, rather more to fix” variety. But really? This is the kind of edit letter that makes one come close to collapsing in weak-kneed relief. Oh thank god, she doesn’t want me to rip out this entire plotline and change the ending and replace that character with a one-legged midget from Morocco. Just a few things that aren’t quite clear or powerful enough.
The downside? With the edits so relatively light, she wants to know if I can get it back to her sooner than the agreed-upon date of Oct. 22nd. Which would be absolutely doable . . . if there weren’t a wedding in the way. As it stands, I’ve sent a very waffly response to the effect of “can I play with it for a week and give you an estimate then?” variety.
We’ll see what I can pull off, here.
Protected:
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
I must have been a good little writer-being or something, ’cause the prototype cover I was just sent for Midnight Never Come is PURTY.
If you’re in the camp of people who would have preferred something other than a half-headless chick in leather for the cover of Doppelganger, you’ll be pleased to hear that one of the first adjectives to leap into my head for this one was “elegant.”
I’m waiting to hear if I can post the image I was sent. It isn’t utterly finalized, so the answer may be “no” — they need to do some minor bits of rearranging — but I’ll put it up just as soon as I can.
just great . . . .
They didn’t call John in until the bullets had finished flying, until everybody who was going to surrender had surrendered and everybody who was going to die had died. By that point, of course, she was long gone.
Oh, lordy. I do not need my hindbrain offering me story nuggets whose research requirements start with “telephone the FBI.”
an update to the egotism
Like a proper ego-stroking writer, I just went through the list of nominees (pdf) for the Hugo awards, as they have released not just the short lists of actual candidates, but all the names that were proposed. Turns out I got four nominations for the Campbell. Which isn’t a lot, and nowhere near enough to put me in the running (the lowest person on the short list got 24, the highest [Naomi Novik] got 81) — but still, it’s nice to know. If you’re one of the four, then thank you.
Kudos to everybody who got a nod.
Birthday Egotism
Every year I feel obliged to explain this post, because it’s a little bit odd.
Some time ago — four years, I think — I was having a crappy birthday. Nothing big and dramatic; just the kind of day that makes one slouch angstily in a chair and think, “I’m twenty-three years old, and what do I have to show for it?”
This was a stupid question, and so I set out to prove that to myself. You see, I’m veryverygood at being self-critical. Not so good at patting myself on the back. Ergo, I made a post about the Awesomeness of Me: all my accomplishments, all the things I had learned, all the things I could do, everything I might be proud of in my life to date. I made myself do so publicly, because the point was to toot my own horn for once. And I didn’t let myself put in any qualifications or disclaimers — which was damn hard for me. Nothing but the positives, all in one place so I could go back and re-read it if I ever sank back into that Slough of Despond.
And this has become a tradition.
Mind you, this year’s birthday has been fantabulous so far. Lunch with friends, then a road trip out to the Exotic Feline Rescue Center — in five years of living here, I’d never managed to go. It’s sunny and the perfect temperature (as far as I’m concerned), I had ice cream, I’m relaxed and happy. But this is tradition. So here is this year’s update of Birthday Egotism: everything from the last year that I’m proud of.
So. I’m twenty-seven years old. What have I got to show for it?
teaching, week one
So I recently began teaching my own course for the first time. For those of you who weren’t around on this journal when I was developing the course idea last fall, it’s called “Fairy Tales in the Modern World,” and is in essence about contemporary retellings/mashups/what-have-you of a whole variety of folktales.
I’m pleased with how it has started. The class enrollment is limited to twenty; I had three people wait-listed as of Monday. One student appears to have dropped, so we’ll see if we get a replacement, or if the wait-lists have already moved on with their lives. I like the size, and since I’m only teaching the one class (instead of three sections), and we meet three times a week (instead of just once for each section), I’m much further along the road to learning students’ names than usual. As in, I can correctly guess over half of them already.
Probably the most encouraging thing is that they aren’t afraid to speak up. I’ve taught sections where people settled in quickly and got talking, and sections where getting anyone to open their mouth is like pulling teeth. (Or the latter, with just that one student who will talk when no one else does. Then I have to try and draw the quiet ones out without stepping on the enthusiastic one.) Several people seem to have come in with a pretty in-depth knowledge of fairy tales already, which should provide good fodder for discussion.
Next week we’ll be blitzing through a history of the more famous tale collectors and/or writers — Basile, Straparola, Perrault, d’Aulnoy, the Grimms, Andersen, maybe a few others. Not the most exciting thing to cover, since it doesn’t provide many hooks for debate, but it’ll be good to get everyone familiar with the basics before we dive into the nuts and bolts of tales.
I’ll probably post about the teaching experience from time to time, though of course there’s always the caveat that my students may find this journal and read it. I don’t anticipate that being a problem, but if for some reason I have a meltdown and decide I hate teaching the class (unlikely), you won’t get to hear about it. ‘sall sunshine and roses, here at Swan Tower. ^_^
and there it goes
Midnight Never Come is out the door (electronically speaking) and in the editor’s hands. Or at least her computer.
Which means I get to pretend, for just a little while, that I’m done with it.
I’m not, of course. She’ll send me an edit letter, after which my revised draft is due October 22nd. Then copy-edits some time in November or December. Then page proofs. I will be so very sick of this book by then.
But for now, I get to bask in the glow of it being (temporarily) Done.
huh.
I’ve been silent lately, haven’t I? The only two posts I’ve made in the last eleven days have been Lymond book-blogging, hence not public.
I promise, I’ll surface again soon. With all kinds of fascinating updates about teaching and wedding prep and all that good stuff. No, really I will.
But before that happens, I will Finish This Revision.
No, really I will. (Because it’s due in to Madame Editor real soon now.)
Back to the grind. I have some thoughts about revision, and what I have learned about it in the last eight years, but those can wait. Like just about everything else.
But hey — I have a new monitor stand. Remains to be seen whether I like it — god, my monitor seems high — but it’s worth trying out, at least. And it provides me with small shelves beneath said monitor, which is nice.
I said “back to the grind” a paragraph or two ago, didn’t I? <sigh> Here we go.
