more giveaway and goodies

Second winner has been chosen for the Deeds of Men giveaway, so if you signed up, check your inbox.

Also — delayed by my travels — the last pre-pub goodie for In Ashes Lie: its soundtrack. As with Midnight, this is a two-CD collection I put together myself, “scoring” the events of the book. You can hear samples of some of the songs on iTunes, but since most of it’s built from film scores, they didn’t have everything available on that site. (You can, however, hit a pretty good percentage of the total for both novels by acquiring a few key scores, like Elizabeth and Henry V.)

Comet-book blogging will commence on June 1st, when I start the next round of London research. Other than that, transmissions will be few for the next couple of weeks.

Deeds of Men giveaway

The plan is to give away one signed set of both Midnight Never Come and (in advance of publication) In Ashes Lie each week between now and the book release, and the first winner has been drawn. If you’ve already signed up, you’re still in the running; if you haven’t, head on over to the page for Deeds of Men and provide your e-mail address, and you too could get an early copy.

Stage Two

Am now in Indiana, despite the best efforts of rental car companies to prevent me from getting here. Was in Ohio this weekend, despite the best efforts of the airline travel industry to prevent me from getting there. Will be bouncing back and forth to Chicago a couple of times in the next two weeks; hope nothing tries to prevent that. Then London. Then New York. Then home.

This trip is crazy.

another milestone

Now we’re at 20K. Once upon a time, this would have been a fifth of a book; since this novel’s planned for 140K, it’s a seventh.

That feels like quite a bit less.

But I made some interesting decisions in tonight’s writing, like answering the question of “how will this character find out about this otherwise well-concealed thing?” with the tidy solution of “they’ll tell him.” I need to make sure they have good reasons for that, of course, but it’ll be easier than contriving a reason he can stumble across it on his own. And this gives me a chance to spin a particular element of the Onyx Court in a direction I haven’t taken it before. When you’re writing a series, these things matter.

Now, however, we go into the Month of Unpredictable Progress. I’ll be on the road, without my research materials or a quiet place to work half the time, so for the next four weeks, 1K/day goes out the window. I’ll get what I can get, when I can get it. And then in mid-June we’ll see what good that semi-composting time has done me.

(Hopefully a lot.)

Word count: 20,718
LBR census: Love (of the puppy-dog sort) and rhetoric (of the rebellious sort).
Authorial sadism: Knowing how to hook Irrith.

Star Trek thoughts, round two

Since I was going to a Yoshida Brothers concert up in the city this evening, and kniedzw was going to the city for an IMAX showing of Star Trek with his co-workers in the late afternoon, I decided I might as well tag along and see what the space dive looks like when projected on a ginormous screen.

(Pretty good. Makes me wanna take up skydiving.)

Anyway, this is the post where I spoil like a spoilery thing, so I’ll cut-tag again.

More like a review than the last post . . .

The Littlest Orange Belt Says Rarrrr

In non-Deeds of Men news, I had a really satisfactory night at karate.

I don’t think I’ve come out and said here that I’m going to be out of town for four straight weeks, traveling hither and yon for family events and a friend’s wedding and research and so on. This will include a week in London, so look for a return of the trip blogging. I’m pretty excited.

But it means I’ll be missing four straight weeks of karate, which is honestly a little frustrating. I learned pinan nidan recently, a new kata, and have just started practicing it; in a month everything I was told about the neko ashi bits will have no doubt fallen out of my head. (Yes, I can practice it on my own, and may very well, but it isn’t the same as having a sensei watch and correct you. I might end up practicing bad habits without knowing it.) On the other hand, tonight I had a better-than-average sparring experience, and while that’s going to rust even more badly than my kata while I’m gone, it’s encouraging to go into my travels with a high note fresh in my memory. (Some nights, my timing and aim and reflexes are on. Other nights . . . not so much.)

I actually asked Shihan whether we had a sibling dojo in London. (Our own place has seen visitors from Hawaii, Germany, and Slovakia in the time I’ve been there; it wasn’t unreasonable to wonder.) Alas, we don’t — or perhaps not “alas,” seeing as how if we did I’d have to decide whether I’d really haul my gi across the Atlantic, and whether I’d have any energy for practice after walking all over the city. This way, I don’t have to find out how lazy I really am.

Oh well. I’ll just do situps and pushups and shiko dachi every day, right? Right???

Sure I will.

Come mid-June, I’m going to be rusty like a rusty thing. Sigh.

Open Book Thread: Deeds of Men

If you have any questions or comments about Deeds of Men, this is the place for them. No LJ account required to post.

It is obviously a Spoiler-Rich Zone for the novella, but may (depending on what people have to say) contain spoilers for Midnight Never Come as well.

IAL teaser: Deeds of Men

London, 1625. A young man lies dead in a Coldharbour alley. Before his death, he uncovered secrets that could threaten the mortal world above and the faerie world below. Now, to find the murderer and protect both realms, Sir Michael Deven will need the help of a man with reason to hate the fae of the Onyx Court — the victim’s own brother.

*** *** ***

In between the novels, there are other stories.

Deeds of Men is a free Onyx Court novella, taking place between Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie. You can download it from my website in your choice of formats (HTML, PDF, or ePub), or order a bound copy via AnthologyBuilder.

This is what I spent February working on, what I was researching Buckingham for, what I needed copy-edited in British style. You don’t need to have read either novel first (though it does contain some spoilers for Midnight), and you don’t need to read it to enjoy Ashes, but it covers some of the events between the two books, like a DVD extra. I hope to do more Onyx Court stories in the future, too: there’s lots of fun bits of history that fall outside the scope of my novels, and lots of chances to explore side characters.

(Confidential to matociquala — it has dead Spaniard in it just for you.)

In a little while I’ll post a Spoiler Zone thread for people to discuss the story or ask questions. In the meantime, enjoy!

FYI

The free stories I posted for International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day are now all available on AnthologyBuilder. In fact, there’s enough of my fiction up there now that you theoretically could put together your very own collection of Marie Brennan stories, since the minimum for an antho purchase is 50 pages of material. But I recommend finding a couple of other authors you like and making a bigger book, since $14.95 is kind of a lot to pay for nine stories, several of which are flash.

I really like the idea of AnthologyBuilder, and I hope it succeeds. This strikes me as the ideal approach to making an author’s short fiction backlist available, without depending on bookstore support for a collection.

Things we have learned about the characters in the first week of writing

I have fifteen thousand words of book now. It seems like rapid progress — I just had 10K the other day! — but that’s because the number is still small. 5K won’t seem like much once I’m in the middle.

Word count: 15,205
LBR census: Hmmm. I’m actually not sure which this would qualify as.
Authorial sadism: Knowing enough of the ending to be able to foreshadow things. With malice.

***

What I’m having fun with right now is learning the quirks of my characters. I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet that the focus is shifting a little with this book; Lune will still be in it as a major character, but she’s not the faerie protagonist anymore. Frankly — to divulge a small spoiler from the end of Midnight — a Queen makes a bad protagonist for anything other than a very political story like Ashes; she just doesn’t have the freedom to go running off doing random things. My main character this time around is Irrith, whom you’ll be meeting in Ashes next month.

And there’s all kinds of new stuff to discover about her. She’s turning out to be charmingly amoral in certain ways; she has no compunctions about lying to mortals for the fun of it, and in fact enjoys making her lies as outrageous as she can get away with. Shocking people in general is a great game to her, actually. The scene I finished tonight ended with her and Segraine, a female knight of the Onyx Court, making plans to go investigate something, and Irrith just asked, “So which of us has to be the lady?” (I haven’t decided yet what the answer to that will be. Either way, it’s a disaster waiting to happen.)

As for Galen, the mortal protagonist — I have more to say about him that deserves his own post, but probably his most telling character moment yet came when he went home last scene. He’s young enough that he hasn’t set up a household of his own, and when I asked my hindbrain how we were going to start the scene of Galen At Home, it sent him sneaking in the servants’ entrance after dawn in an attempt to avoid his father.

There are distinct pleasures to be had in writing a single character long-term . . . but this, the odd unfolding of facets you hadn’t yet figured out were there, is especially a new-character thing. Irrith lies. Galen sneaks in the back door. These are the people I’ll be spending the next five months with.

So far, they’re entertaining me.

gngggh

There’s something exhausting about the type of revision that involves radically expanding your first draft. It’s like being on a treadmill: you run and run and don’t get anywhere. I’m four thousand words into a story that was four thousand words long, and I still have two thousand to go.

It’s a lot better now, mind you, and I’m enjoying parts of the process. But tiring. And I’m on a deadline, too, because I want to submit this to a place that’s about to close its reading period. Gngggh.

Reincarnation

An exchange with kitsunealyc has got me thinking about one of the aspects I really love in Changeling: The Dreaming, namely, the fact that the premise incorporates reincarnation as one of its fundamental elements. The faerie souls are born into a series of mortal hosts, and sometimes they remember their past lives, which means you can have all kinds of fun with patterns and echoes and change over time.

Hell, that was the precise notion that set the ball rolling for Memento.

And it makes me wonder — who out there has written fantasies that make use of this idea? Not just reincarnation, but remembering past lives, telling a story where the fixed and mutable characteristics of a soul are a central part of the tale. Katharine Kerr’s Deverry books come to mind, and Jo Graham has started a series of history-hopping fantasies that appear to feature the same souls incarnating as central and peripheral figures in various periods (the Trojan War, Ptolemaic Egypt), but those are the only ones I can think of offhand. The Wheel of Time, I suppose, but that’s one of a billion ideas swirling around in that series, and it doesn’t get the exploration I’d like to see.

I had fun running the idea in Memento, and I had fun playing with it via Ree, my long-term LARP character. What’s it like to remember — in your early twenties — that you generally don’t live to see your twenty-fifth birthday? What does it mean for friendships and enmities when the universe hits the “reset” button on your lives? How can you take something that appears to be a fundamental part of your nature, on a metaphysical level, and work around and with it so you don’t repeat the same mistakes you always have? I have no idea what kind of story I could use to explore those notions again, but I suspect I’ll think of one eventually, because clearly my brain isn’t done with it yet.

So where can I go to feed my brain? Kerr, Graham, Jordan — who else?

audio time!

If you have more time for listening to stories than reading them — or if you just want to know how all those random names in “Driftwood” are pronounced* — you can now download the podcast. I haven’t had a chance to listen to it myself yet, but I was fairly pleased with “Kingspeaker,” so I expect this one turned out equally well.

*You should see the e-mails between me and the editor on this topic. I answered several of his queries with “uh, good luck?” There’s a downside to making up foreign words that maybe aren’t even supposed to be pronounceable by human tongues.

What better way to fight diabetes than with books?

I meant to post this yesterday: Brenda Novak’s Online Auction to Benefit Diabetes Research. It’s an annual thing, apparently, and this year they contacted me to see if I’d like to donate. You can find me under Historical Fiction (a signed set of Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie) and Sci Fi and Fantasy (ditto Warrior and Witch), but more to the point, you can also find goodies by lots and lots of people who aren’t me. Not all of them are books, either.

The auction is huge, and it all goes to a good cause, so poke your nose on over there and see if you can’t find something for you or someone in your life.

Comet Book Report: The Gentleman’s Daughter, by Amanda Vickery

One of the blurbs on the back of this book ends by saying, “Serious history is rarely this fun.” I submit that Ms. Foreman of The Times needs more fun in her life.

Don’t get me wrong; this book wasn’t all that bad. But it was not the most fun history book I’ve ever read, even of a scholarly sort. Especially the first chapter — I almost didn’t make it through that one, and if I hadn’t been carrying this book with me on a trip (ergo it was my only reading material), I don’t know if I would have gone on. The first chapter is dry as all hell, as it painstakingly details for the reader how many letters its subjects wrote to family members, how many to families of their own social class, how many to their social inferiors, etc, and it’s a good thing the book picked up after that, or I would not have finished it.

But it does improve, and I appreciated its subject matter, which is the lives of gentry-class women in Georgian England. Its focus is on the broader social community of Lancashire and west Yorkshire, hence different in some important ways from the kind of metropolitan life I’m writing about, but a lot of the topics (such as marriage and childbearing) don’t vary too much with geography. And it’s always good to get a history that digs into the diaries and letters and household account books, i.e. the stuff that usually gets overlooked. In fact, I was struck by a comparison between this and Roy Porter’s book, whose revised edition predates this work by eight years; Porter stated, early in his book, that “compared with men, we know little about what women felt, thought and did.” Lest you condemn him for accepting that limitation too easily, though, I should also mention that the front cover of Vickery’s book has a quote from Porter, calling it “The most important thing in English feminist history in the last ten years.” Vickery is filling in one of the gaps he acknowledged in his own work.

If you find yourself with a sudden yen to research the period, my recommendation is this: skim the first chapter, paying only enough attention to get a sense of who the women are that Vickery will be talking about all book, then move onto the next chapter posthaste. There’s good stuff in here, but you have to get past the dry statistics to find it.