Series Writing: A Conversation with Jim Hines (part one)

Jim Hines (jimhines) and I have been friends for a while, and so when he and I both wrapped up four-book series this summer, I suggested to him that we might have a conversation about the challenges of writing — and most particularly ending — a story that stretches across multiple books. We’ll be sharing the results of that conversation with you today and tomorrow, the first half here, the second half over on Jim’s site.

Who are we? Well, Jim is the author of seven fantasy novels and more than 40 published short stories. He’s written about underdog goblin runts, ass-kicking fairy tale princesses, and is currently writing about a modern-day librarian who pulls ray guns out of SF books. He’s also a moderately popular blogger, and caretaker of various fuzzy beasts. As for me — if you’re not already aware — I’m the author of six fantasy novels and more than 30 published short stories, which puts me just a little behind him. I’ve written about people split in half (mystically, not with an axe) and faeries hiding out underneath London, and I’m currently writing about a nineteenth-century gentlewoman who travels around the world to study dragons and get into trouble, not necessarily in that order. I am a mildly popular blogger, and alas, have no fuzzy beasts to take care of — unless you count my husband.

Our most recent books are, respectively, The Snow Queen’s Shadow and With Fate Conspire.

Without further ado . . . .

***

Marie: There are a million books out there that will tell you how to write a novel, but I’ve never seen one that tells you how to write a series. Nobody tells you how to do that; it’s something you figure out the hard way, after you’ve got a contract — no pressure! And it’s hard enough figuring out what to do in the middle, but sticking the landing . . . that’s the real killer.

With Fate Conspire was really my first experience with ending a series. You had the goblin trilogy, so at least you’d done this once before; but me, all I had under my belt was the doppelganger duology. Those weren’t even conceived of as a series, not originally; I wrote the first book to be a stand-alone, ending on something major happening, and then built the second around how people reacted to that event. It was a before-and-after model, which is relatively simple — kind of like one long book. The Onyx Court series, on the other hand, was very different. Each plot stands more or less alone, but there’s a certain amount of thematic and character arc across the four, which I felt needed to pay off in a satisfying fashion — but without making the book something that would only make sense to people who had read the whole series.

How about you? What was it like writing Goblin War, versus Snow Queen’s Shadow?

Jim: Don’t you love writing a sequel to a book you never planned to write a sequel for? Goblin Quest was similar, very much written to be a complete, standalone book. I like to joke that of course I planned it all out and knew exactly what I was doing for all three books, but that would be total dung.

Writing the second goblin book was difficult. Ending the series was even harder. Even if each book could stand completely on its own, I was still ending a series. Expectations were higher. I wanted something big, something that brought a sense of closure.

I think closure was my biggest concern. I love that people e-mail me and try to convince me to do another goblin book, but generally it’s because they love the characters, not because they feel like they’ve been left hanging. There needs to be a payoff, like you said. And before I could figure out how to write that payoff, I needed to figure out what the underlying themes and questions of the series were.

Unfortunately, I generally don’t figure out my themes until after the fact … if ever. With the princess books, I was halfway through book four when it clicked that I’d spent the whole series deconstructing and challenging “Happily ever after.” So in addition to wrapping up some plot threads (will T get together with S or won’t she?), I needed something that brought closure to the various ever-after storylines. For the goblins, it was more about survival — so I needed to address how Jig and his fellow goblins were going to survive in the long run.

Your turn! What themes did you find yourself struggling to resolve in book four? And I’m curious, was there a point where it just felt too big? Writing one book is overwhelming enough, but when you’re talking about four books worth of story and characters and setting and details…

Marie: Closure is exactly the kicker, isn’t it? I got the same thing in response to the doppelganger books, people wanting me to write a third one. I won’t be surprised at all if I get the same thing after With Fate Conspire. (In fact, I hope so. Otherwise it might mean I’ve ticked my readers off so thoroughly they’ve given up on me . . . .)

In my case, it’s complicated by the fact that I may actually continue the Onyx Court series someday. Each book takes place in a different century, the sixteenth through the nineteenth; it would be cool to add the twentieth and twenty-first to that sequence. But right now that’s just a possibility, and not one that will be happening any time soon. So I had to approach Fate with the mentality of, this is it. This is the end. How do I make it satisfying?

It helped a bit that when I decided to write sequels to the first book, I knew right away what some of the series’ over-arching structure would be. There’s actually three layers to it, which sounds very fancy when I think about it. Midnight Never Come (#1) and A Star Shall Fall (#3) share the characteristic of being more interpersonal, while In Ashes Lie (#2) and With Fate Conspire (#4) are driven by larger-scale conflicts: ABAB. It’s also AABB, in that the first two books take place pre-Enlightenment (an important sea-change in society) and have Lune as one of the major protagonists, whereas the later books are more “modern” in feel and focus on other characters. And finally, it’s ABBA: Ashes and Star form a pair around the Great Fire of London, whereas Midnight and Fate are about the creation and dissolution of the Onyx Hall. I also knew, as soon as I sketched out the progression of the series, that its focus would gradually slide down from the royal court of Midnight Never Come to the lower classes of With Fate Conspire.

But all of that didn’t help me very much when it came time to plot out what was actually going to happen in the fourth book. Before I started writing, I sat down and did something I should have done from the start, namely, made a list of all the characters and locations and so on that had appeared in the story so far. Then I had to decide which ones were going to return in book four. My reflex, as you might be able to sympathize with, was to include ALL of them. There are two problems with that: first, it leaves no room for new stuff to be added, and second . . . this is supposed to be a book about the final days of the Onyx Hall. Lots of people are dead or fled, bits of the palace have disintegrated out of existence, etc. If everybody’s still there, it isn’t very convincing, is it?

Honestly, though, I think the biggest squid to wrestle came from history itself, rather than my own narrative canon. You want to talk “too big”? Try Victorian London on for size! They called it “the monster city” for a good reason. And I wanted to include a variety of stuff, not just the usual upper-class tea parties: Fenian bombings and the construction of the Underground and photography and dockworkers and evolution and all the rest of it. For everything I managed to work into the story, though, there’s four more that just didn’t fit, no matter how cool they were.

Did you feel the same impulse to go back to people and places we’ve seen before? Or did you have a lot of new things you wanted to incorporate? And whichever route you went, how did you try to ensure that you don’t (as you said) leave people hanging? Wanting to see more of the characters you love is one thing, but quitting while there are still unanswered questions or unresolved conflicts is another.

Jim: See, that’s exactly why I don’t write books set in Victorian England…

***

Speaking of “unresolved,” we’ll break there, and you can pick up part two on Jim’s site tomorrow. (I’ll advertise the link once it’s up.) Feel free to post questions either here or there!

Review and giveaway

The Library Journal‘s opinion of With Fate Conspire:

Brennan’s characters breathe life into a landscape rich in detail and vibrant with imagination. This title should please fans of Mercedes Lackey’s “Elemental Masters” series and Elizabeth Bear’s “Promethean Age” series.

And if you’re a Goodreads user, you can enter a giveaway there to win one of ten copies of A Star Shall Fall. It ends on the 22nd, so don’t forget!

ridiculous costumes for your weekend entertainment

Picked these up from wshaffer: the “national costumes” from the Miss Universe beauty pageant.

2009: “This is in no way safe for dial-up, or for your sense of a just and rational universe.”

2010: “Since I have a different criteria than the judges of the pageant – they enjoy ‘bras that look like eyeballs’ and I enjoy ‘Icelandic schoolmarm’ – I wasn’t sure exactly how to go about picking a winner of my own.”

2011: “For some reason, there is a large Miss Universe contingent that forgets, every year, that this contest is coming up, and they make their costumes the night before. This year it was elevated to an art form of sucking, to the point that many of them walked the entire stage with an earnest expression of ‘What the Fuck, Seriously.'”

Warning: not drink-safe. Clear the keyboard area of all hazards before clicking through.

The month, on SF Novelists…

Those who would like an insight into my research process should head over to the SF Novelists site, where I speak in defense of Wikipedia.

Usual drill: comments here are closed, go comment over there instead, no account required, but first-time commenters will have to be fished out of the moderation queue, so please be patient.

The DWJ Project: Puss in Boots

Another slight entry. (I almost combined it with the post on Yes, Dear, but decided to keep all the books in separate posts, for the sake of organization.)

This is a straight-up retelling of the “Puss in Boots” tale, with no particular alteration that I could spot. My copy, which I think was produced for World Book Day, has some nice running illustrated borders at the top and bottom, and small images of the characters scattered throughout. It’s moderately attractive, and so if you want to own a copy of this story, and prefer Diana Wynne Jones’ style to Perrault’s (which, really, why wouldn’t you), then it’s worth having.

The DWJ Project: Yes, Dear

Not much to say about this one. It is, to the best of my knowledge, the only straight-up picture book Diana Wynne Jones ever wrote. That being a genre I’m almost completely ignorant of, I’m more or less completely unqualified to judge whether this one’s any good.

The story, such as it is, concerns a girl who finds a magic leaf, but nobody in her family will believe her about it. The artwork is pleasing enough. If you have a small person in your acquaintance and you want to get them started on DWJ as early as possible, you might have use for this book; otherwise, it’s far too slight to really be appreciated in the same way as her other work.

Followup on “Say Yes to Gay YA”

A few days ago, I linked to a piece by Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith about an agent’s request that they remove or straighten a gay protagonist from their book.

Their article didn’t name the agent or the agency, but today Joanna Stampfel-Volpe at Nancy Coffey Literary & Media Representation came forward (on a site hosted by agent Colleen Lindsay [edit: former agent]) to say that she is the one in question, and furthermore, that “there is nothing in that article concerning our response to their manuscript that is true.”

[Another edit: Joanna Stampfel-Volpe is speaking on behalf of the agency, but herself is not the agent involved in the incident. I apologize for the misreading, which managed to persist through me reading not only her post, but a vast number of comments on both rachelmanija and sartorias‘s journals. Ironically, I’d have less editing to do if I’d stuck with my original draft, where I started out referring to “the agent,” without a name. But then I decided that if I was doing the authors the courtesy of calling them by name, I should do the same for the agent. My error, and I am editing the remainder of this entry to fix it.]

Brown and Smith stand by their original article.

So this has just turned into a case of “they said, she said.” Which has, naturally, made many people leap to conclusions on one side or the other: “Oh, I knew that story sounded fishy from the start; clearly the agent is telling the truth” or “the agent is a lying homophobic liar.” Since it’s doubtful anybody has a recording of the phone call where all of this went down, actual proof is hard to come by. I do think, however, that it’s possible to apply logic and draw at least a few tentative conclusions.

First of all, Brown and Smith didn’t name the agent or agency, and specifically said they didn’t want this to be a witch-hunt against one person; lots of other people have come forward with stories of similar things happening to them, and the statistics on queer representation in YA support the idea that publishing has a problem with non-straight characters (and non-“mainstream” characters in other respects, too: non-white, disabled, etc). The overwhelming focus of their post was to call out for agents, editors, readers, and writers to try and reduce the barriers against diversity in the genre.

Stampfel-Volpe chose — presumably with the permission of The Agent In Question (hereafter TAIQ) — to identify the agency publicly, and both she and Lindsay spend most of their focus on TAIQ and the writers, rather than the larger issue; they accuse Brown and Smith of “exploiting” her. They do call for general diversity as well, but in the end, you can kind of play bingo with that post; for example, Lindsay says TAIQ is a friend of hers, and not a homophobe. Note that the post on Genreville explicitly said TAIQ may or may not entertain personal feelings of homophobia; Brown and Smith don’t have any basis for judging that. You don’t have to hate gay people to contribute to the ways in which they get silenced. It can happen even if you like them, because that’s how institutionalized prejudice works.

Second, there’s the question of why the agency responded publicly. Apparently rumours have been flying behind the scenes, people asking whether TAIQ was the one. There was nothing in the original post, or any public follow-up that I’ve seen, which could possibly have produced those rumours. This creates two immediate possibilities: first, either Brown or Smith gossiped privately before Stampfel-Volpe took it public, or second, that other people have had similar experiences with TAIQ, and speculated based on those experiences.

We can’t answer this one; tracing those rumours to their origin is a lost cause. But as a data point, I offer up this: nowhere, publicly or privately, have I seen Brown and Smith provide a single detail, other than that it was a female agent at an agency that has repped a bestselling YA dystopia, that could have given away TAIQ’s identity. (And yes, I have plenty of evidence to back up both those claims.) This doesn’t disprove the gossip theory, but it does give a data point against it. As for the other, I have no evidence either way. I’m open to other possibilities as well.

Finally — as some people have noted on Stampfel-Volpe’s post — there may be a middle ground here. As I said before, institutionalized prejudice works in less-than-obvious ways. It’s possible the conversation could have been phrased in a way that TAIQ did not see as reinforcing homophobia, which nevertheless could be heard that way. Without the exact words, we can’t judge for ourselves. But I will say, for my own part, that I have a hard time believing this was, from the agent’s side, purely an issue of craft, and not of the marketability of queerness. If the pov in question “didnโ€™t contribute to the actual plot” (Stampfel-Volpe’s words), then how could that be solved by making him straight? If she didn’t actually suggest making him straight — if that’s a misinterpretation — then how could Brown and Smith have subsequently heard anything that could be misconstrued as “if this turns into a series, later on you can show that he’s gay”? And how could the misunderstanding have persisted past Brown saying his sexuality was a moral issue she would not back down from?

Looking at it logically . . . the only thing I can conclude is that either Brown and Smith are outright lying — maybe as a publicity stunt, because they haven’t yet found representation for the book (as various people have begun to accuse them of, over on the agent’s rebuttal post) — or the agency is trying to do very inept damage control for an incident that was, in its outlines if not every detail, more or less like the Genreville post describes. As you can probably guess from my analysis above, my money is on the latter. Is that based partly on personal knowledge of one side and not the other? Sure. I know the authors; I don’t know the agent. I judge them to both be experienced professionals unlikely to manufacture a hissy fit because one particular book hasn’t sold yet. But even without the evidence I’ve seen and you haven’t: one side was careful not to make this personal, and the other side was not. One side offered summaries of what both parties said in the conversation; the other omitted the authors’ responses from their summary. Heck, one side had two people involved, and the other had only one. I know people’s opinions can reinforce each other, but there had to have been a moment where Brown and Smith spoke to each other after the phone call to share their opinions. I’ve heard nothing to suggest either of them started off by saying “I’m not sure that’s what she meant,” and was eventually talked around to the other’s interpretation. If their interpretations matched up from the start, that’s at least a minor form of fact-checking.

When all’s said and done, though, my real conclusion: go read the Genreville post again. Skip the parts about the agent; read the parts about the difficulty in getting non-straight, non-white, non-“mainstream” characters through the filter of authors’ brains, agents’ judgement calls, editors’ purchasing power, bookstores’ support, and readers’ inclinations, all the way to the public eye. That, more than any one book or agent or incident, is the part that matters.

Due to ridiculous amounts of spam (months after and unrelated to this incident), I have locked comments on this post.

I promised to post it ages ago . . . .

. . . so here it is at last, my costume from Sirens last year:

This was for both the masquerade ball at the end of the conference, and the A Star Shall Fall launch party beforehand. I described it as “non-specifically Lune,” in that it’s her colors and an Elizabethan style, but not me trying to actually dress as her.

(The other person in the photo, incidentally, was one of my two frontrunners for winner of the costume contest, until somebody solved my problem by mentioning that she was staff and therefore ineligible. Alas, I can’t seem to find a shot of the actual winner, who dressed as an aspen fairy, and was gorgeous. But the one you see there — her armor! It’s made from a cut-up-basketball! And she brought a RAPIER!!! <swoon>)

So yeah. That was my costume. I paid somebody to make it for me; I’ve had the fabric and design planned for ages, but never had the time (nor quite the gumption) to attempt something that difficult. This, my friends, is why god invented SCA costumers. ๐Ÿ™‚

Now I just need to find more excuses to wear it . . . .

Strange Horizons fund drive

Strange Horizons is conducting its annual fund drive (which is a major component of how they can afford to pay their authors pro rates). If you donate, you’ll be eligible to win one of a number of nifty prizes; that list there is only the tip of the iceberg, with more being added throughout the month. (Including, yes, a few of my own books. ๐Ÿ™‚ But they’re the least of what’s on offer.)

SH publishes a lot of high-quality short fiction, so go forth and donate!

Yes to Gay YA

Rachel Manija Brown (rachelmanija) and Sherwood Smith (sartorias) have an important essay up at Publishers Weekly, Say Yes to Gay YA, where they recount how an agent offered them representation for a YA novel on the condition that they either straighten a gay point-of-view character, or remove him from the book entirely.

You can read the details there, as well as suggestions for how to put an end to this kind of thing. You can do the same on Rachel’s journal, if you prefer LJ, but the PW post includes a mechanism for posting anonymously, if you’d prefer that. They’re particularly interested in hearing from any authors who have experienced similar pushback from agents or editors, so as to explore just how widespread the problem is. The reader-side viewpoint is also valuable, to help prove there is an audience for these books.

If you’re on Twitter, the hashtag is #YesGayYA.

one more

I forgot to put Unhallowed Metropolis on the list! (I never owned the book, which is why I overlooked it.)

Man, that was a fun game; I’m sorry that moving out to California cut my involvement short. Our GM told us our characters should be from the East End. I don’t think he expected us to make the most illiterate, amoral, disease-ridden group of PCs known to gaming history — but wow, did it produce a fun dynamic.

more Conspiring

Two more reviews came in recently:

Sophie Playle at Doctor Fantastique’s Show of Wonders says, “It captures the dualistic spirit of Victorian London and creates an alternative fantastical history that the reader grows to care about just as much, if not more, than the real world it shadows. The rounded characters and intricate plot create an absorbing story.”

Steve at Elitist Book Reviews says, “I love how believable her characters are. Everything in this setting is bleak, yet the characters never truly give up hope. They will go to any length to meet their diverse goals.”

And I also did an interview on Rachel Ann Hanley’s blog, about a whole variety of topics.

Enjoy your weekend!

games I’ve played

Because I was trying to list them in the car on the way home tonight.

(An asterisk means I probably played less than five sessions.)

    tabletop game systems I’ve played in

      old World of Darkness

    • Vampire
    • *Werewolf
    • *Mage
    • Changeling
    • Mummy
      new World of Darkness

    • Mage
      other White Wolf

    • Aberrant
    • *Exalted (2nd ed)
    • Scion
      d20

    • Dungeons & Dragons (3.5 ed)
    • *Redline
    • *Mutants & Masterminds
    • Star Wars (revised ed)
      Cinematic Unisystem

    • Buffy
    • Angel
    • *All Flesh Must Be Eaten
      other

    • Dungeons & Dragons (2nd ed)
    • GURPs
    • *Ars Magica (not sure what edition)
    • Serenity
    • Shadowrun (not sure what edition)

. . . and it looks like I’ll be starting in a Legend of the Five Rings game soon. (RPG, not card.) LARP-wise, it’s all been Mind’s Eye Theatre, hacks thereof, or the Buffy/Angel tabletop system applied to a live-action game. (You know those little plastic bubbles you get from vending machines, that have toys in them? We scattered a bunch of those around the site, with a d10 in each.)

My experience really isn’t that diverse. The problem is, I rarely run games myself, so I’m dependent on what other people are minded to run. And most of my gaming was done in a very White Wolf-leaning town.

Answers, Round Final

The last set from the question post. Thanks to everybody who participated!

***

stevie_carroll asked, Do you have an unlikely favourite place in London (out of your top whatever places in London as opposed to your very favourite place)?

I guess the question is, what makes a place unlikely? I love the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral — not for any reason having to do with it being a big famous landmark, but because of the way the cathedral’s position fits into the City in my head, and the way you can sit on its steps and watch the sun set over the West End and eat your yakisoba from Wasabi or pasta salad from Tesco’s for dinner. It’s my mental “home” in London. But that might class it as “very favorite,” I guess.

I also love the fragment of the old London Wall I found on my first trip and revisited every subsequent time. It’s tucked away from the busy roads, and has a lovely bit of garden around it.

I don’t know if any of those count as “unlikely,” though.

***

dmstraylight asked, If a PnP RPG based on the Onyx Court series was produced, what system would you want it to use and why? How about for Doppelganger? Driftwood?

The obvious answer for the Onyx Court is Changeling: The Dreaming, since that’s where it came from. But you’d have to do a lot of system hacking at this point to make it work, since Banality doesn’t figure into the Onyx Court, and it’s kind of a central idea for Changeling; rip that out and the whole thing falls apart.

If not Changeling, then maybe Deliria, which I haven’t actually played, but is in my head as a reasonably flexible system for doing faerie-related stuff.

The doppelganger books, I don’t have a ready answer for. I have L5R on the brain at the moment, so that’s the first thing that leaps to mind (especially with the Void and all), but from what I’ve seen of shugenja spells, they don’t lend themselves to the mixed-Element approach of the witches in my novels. Come to think of it, I have a hard time thinking of any magic system that treats conjunctional effects of that sort as a common thing, rather than an occasional exception, though I’m sure such things exist. Any suggestions from the peanut gallery?

Driftwood, of course, is easy. 1) Grab every gaming core book off your shelf. 2) Drop them on the floor to make a map of Driftwood. 3) Have fun. ^_^

***

Aaaaaand that’s it for this round of “ask me anything.” Tune in at some indeterminate future point for more!

Japan pictures

I guess it’s appropriate to use this icon: the Summer Queen, and boy howdy was there summer.

I have finally, after a herculean effort, gotten my pictures from Japan down to something more like a reasonable number. They’re up on Flickr, and if you head over to take a look, you’ll sort of get a partial narrative of our trip. Now that I have them posted, actual narratives will follow soon.

Answers, Round Four

I figure I’ll leave the question post open until I answer the last one. (At present, I probably have this post and one more to make.)

Also, you don’t need an LJ account to post a comment — I’ve resisted locking that down, despite the spam.

***

bookblather asked, How do you feel about Mary Queen of Scots?

My feelings there are . . . complicated.

I basically have two perspectives on her: the one acquired through reading Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, and the one acquired through writing Midnight Never Come. The latter is decidedly skewed toward Elizabeth’s side of the tale, while the former is more partisan to the Scottish side (though I wouldn’t say it’s strongly so). Sometimes these two conflict, and which one wins out depends on my mood and what I had for breakfast.

In general, I think her life was a deranged soap opera. All the parental drama and marriages and murders and imprisonment — it’s just crazy. I can’t really imagine what it was like to live through that. One of these days I should really read a good biography of her life.

(Also, even when I’m feeling less than entirely sympathetic to her, I still think her execution was awful. Nobody should have to go through that.)

***

logovore asked, What fictional settings would you most like to (temporarily and safely) visit?

I appreciate the qualifiers, which change my answer rather substantially. ๐Ÿ™‚

The Chrestomanci ‘verse from Diana Wynne Jones’ books would be a great one; I’d love spirit-traveling around to the different worlds. Pern, because flying and going between sounds awesome. Pamela Dean’s Secret Country, even though I don’t know enough literary references to truly enjoy myself there. The Commonwealth of Letters from Silverlock, even though ditto. ๐Ÿ™‚ Florin, from The Princess Bride, just to say I’d been there. The World of Two Moons, from Elfquest.

The funny thing about trying to answer this question is, I have a hard time separating the setting from the roles within it. I can’t think of Pern without also thinking of having my own telepathically bonded dragon. I can’t think of Chrestomanci without imagining myself as an enchantress within it. Do I get to be special in these worlds? Or am I just me, with no skills or benefits I don’t already have? That affects my opinion quite a lot.

Any way you slice it, though, almost all of my answers are places I’ve had in my head since childhood. It seems the settings I’ve read about more recently don’t flip that “I wish I could go there” switch in my brain.

***

wshaffer asked, If you were a rock star*, what instrument would you play, and what would your band be called?

I’d be the keyboardist, probably. (My two instruments are piano and French horn, and while I could name some random instrument I don’t actually play, the truth is there’s no instrument I love enough on concept alone to overcome my love for the ones I know in reality.)

As for a name, that’s harder. What kind of band is this? (I take “rock star” in a broad sense; it isn’t necessarily a rock band in genre terms.) Let’s say we do sort of world-folk fusion, with maybe some electronic and percussive elements on particular songs. I’m sort of tempted to call it “Cabinet of Curiosities” or “Kunstkammer” or something of that sort, but that makes us sound steampunky, which isn’t necessarily what I’m after. I dunno. It’s cheating on the principle of these posts, maybe, but I’ll hand this one back to the commentariat: what do you think such a band should be called?

Labor Day updates

I’ve basically been having an extended birthday weekend, Thursday through today. Yesterday my brother and sister-in-law had a lovely cookout; the night before I went with many friends to see an entertaining production of Cymbeline (albeit in the Presidio, which — ye gods and little fishes, freezing fog is freezing); the day before that, a whole chunk of goodies showed up in the mail: present from my parents, presents from my husband, signing check for A Natural History of Dragons, and <drumroll> my author copies for With Fate Conspire.

(I did not behave like Gollum over them. But only because kniedzw was watching.)

Updates:

Jim Hines has reviewed the book (WordPress mirror here), and hints at a little nifty something in store for you guys later on.

Joshua Palmatier has a guest post from me about the range of constraints history can impose on fiction.

And I totally forgot to mention before that Mindy Klasky’s Inside Track feature includes a chance to win a copy of the book! Comment either there or at the WordPress mirror to enter.

Answers, Round Three

More answers from the ask me anything thread.

***

starlady38 asked, If you were to write anything in the Onyx Court world post-series ending, what would it be about and when would it be about?

Chronologically post-ending, or just written post-ending?

Chronologically, as others have said, the most likely continuation of the series would be into the Blitz, and then to the modern day. (Whether or not that will happen depends on multiple factors, one of which is sales figures for the rest of the series, so if you want a Blitz book: go tell your friends to buy the rest of ’em!) I have to admit I sort of like the notion of a historical series that spans enough time to stop being historical, though there would be some interesting challenges associated with doing so.

At least, that’s the novel side of things. I’ve written a few Onyx Court short stories, and intend to write at least a few more; one of those would be a Jack the Ripper story, taking place not long after the end of With Fate Conspire. Aside from that, the top spot on the short fiction list is probably the “Ada Lovelace builds herself wings” story.

***

yhlee asked, Favorite weapon?

Rapier.

What? I watched The Princess Bride at a very impressionable age. ^_^ And then took fencing classes at my local rec center, where our teacher couldn’t keep us linear and make us leave our off-hands out of it for love or money, until he said “screw it” and taught us rapier-and-dagger styles instead of foil or epee. The left-handed weapon of my matched pair of rapiers was a gift from him.

The style suits me, I think, and I want to get back to doing it. I am definitely built for speed and accuracy above strength, and it’s a great weapon for Renaissance-ish settings, which I do admit I have a soft spot for.

***

alecaustin asked, Did you ever get a chance to do the research you wanted to do for the Mt. Hiei story?

I’m working on it, yeah. (Actually, I need to steal the car from my husband so I can make a trip down to the Stanford library, after which work will proceed at a much more useful pace.)

Also, under which edition of D&D (if any) are you level 31? (4e would break in half, but you’re okay under 3e’s Epic level rules, and still within parameters for Classic D&D…)

Who says it’s D&D? I’m tempted to claim I’m a Dragon Age DW rogue, and just picked up Unending Flurry. (Man, pair that with Twin Strikes and Low Blow, and your opponent bleeds out like you cut their femoral artery.) But even with the Awakening expansion, DA classes cap out at level 35, and I want to live long past that point. WoW would be a good choice, since they keep raising the level cap — but I don’t play that game and have no interest in doing so. In which case, okay, fine, I’m a D&D 3.5 character, playing for a GM who (hopefully) doesn’t mind coming up with the stupidly over-the-top plots that become necessary when playing epic-level PCs. ‘Cause I intend to become very epic.