three links

Useful niche search engines

Fighting Fantasy books with new titles photoshopped on — I think my favorite is the manticore, but there are many good ones.

Live Long and Marry — an LJ community gearing up to raise money to protect gay marriage in California. Currently people are listing items for auction; bidding opens July 1st. Looks like there are a hundred entries, some of them offering multiple items; use the tags to search for what you might like. You can get crafty items, critiques of your work, original art, slashtastic PWP mashups of your favorite characters . . . anything that might appeal to genre folks, it’s probably there by now. Or if you want to offer something yourself, that’s great, too! Full info on offering and bidding is here.

new rule

I think I shall make a resolution never to read or watch or listen to a story that features a weak or stupid character named Kate, so as to preserve the current axiom that all characters named Kate are awesome.

Because Antony’s wife just rocked this scene in so many ways.

Current word count: 24680, but that’s cheating, since 500 is a direct copy of 500 still sitting earlier in the text. (I’ll deal with the first version when I go back and fix all the other problems with Part One.)
LBR tally: Kate loves you, dude, but she also pays attention to politics.
Authorial sadism: Finding out your wife has noticed what you’re up to.

neglected history

Death-marching through The King’s War (five hundred pages down; one hundred to go), I find myself considering a question that’s been in my mind for some time.

Why is seventeenth-century England so neglected in fiction?

Seventeenth and eighteenth both, really, but I haven’t gotten into researching the eighteenth yet. There’s some stuff there, but they get trampled by the Elizabethan period from one end and the Victorian from the other. (Starting early with the Regency.) Tonight I’m probably going to take time off from the death-march to watch one of the only pre-Restoration movies I’ve been able to find (To Kill a King). I know of almost no fantasy novels set during the Stuart era.

Yet the seventeenth century is chock-full of conflict and change. You’d expect to find lots of fiction exploiting that . . . but you don’t. Why?

Possible reasons . . . .

cranky cat has moved onto resigned amusement

Less dilated this morning.

Which is not the same as “not dilated.”

Called the doctor, and they said that, oh yeah, it will probably take the rest of today for my eyes to return to normal. When I politely suggested they might want to warn their patients, the woman on the phone agreed and said she’s suggested it before. (I wonder how many of these phone calls she’s fielded.)

So I half-heartedly continue my imitation of an Italian lady, and thank god I’m at least capable of reading.

one fifth down . . . .

Word count: 22843
LBR quota: This is a classic case of rhetoric collapsing into blood.
Authorial sadism: All of it? Antony’s on the losing side: neither Royalist nor Parlimentarian, but the voice of moderation. He’s doomed.

That’s Part One in the can. The good news: I found the books I need to make Part One 600% better. The bad news: I didn’t find them until I had written 99% of Part One.

But, well, Antony’s last scene here doesn’t suck. Yay! And I won’t have to rewrite all the fae-side stuff. Though I may have to adjust its timeline; I fear I may have to figure out a way to cut the Short Parliament out entirely, in order to make space for all the shenanigans of the Long Parliament. (Or rather, those shenanigans taking place between November 1640 and January 1642. All its shenanigans require far more wordage than this; it’s called “Long” for a reason.)

So that’s a fifth or so of book. What comes next sequentially is not what comes next chronologically, since I’m going to be cutting back and forth between periods of Civil War etc. and days of the Great Fire; I have to wait to write the Fire stuff until I’ve done everything leading up to it.

From here we go to 1648. I’m skipping over most of the actual Civil War because it happened almost entirely in places other than London, and in ways that I can’t very easily integrate my characters into. This is lovely, except that I kind of need to read the remaining 554 pages of this book between now and, uh, tomorrow’s work. And get another book and read that one too; who knows how long it is.

Why yes, I am behind on my research.

But onward we go, through the fog of civil war, and into what follows.

cranky cat is also dilated

Also? It’s been eight hours since they hit me with the uber-dilation drops. Could I please have control of my pupils again?

At least I can read now. For a good five hours there, I couldn’t focus my eyes enough to process print worth a damn.

cranky cat is cranky

For those who knew my plans:

No eye surgery next month.

I won’t go into all the details, but short form is, I am not a good candidate for LASIK. Too much correction, not enough cornea. I am a good candidate for a lens implant, but my left eye needs a toric lens, which hasn’t yet been approved by the FDA.

So no eye surgery this year, probably.

Frustrated. Cranky. But it’s the right choice.

I suppose this will make getting the novel done easier.

Open Book Thread: Midnight Never Come

Quick reminder: the contest running on the official website for Midnight Never Come goes until midnight GMT on June 30th. All six questions have been posted now, and for every one you get right, your name is entered in the drawing for a $500/£250 gift voucher.

Onward to the purpose of the post.

Consider this the official Open Thread for Midnight Never Come. If you have any comments you’d like to make about the book, questions you’d like to ask, feel free to do it here. Want to inquire about some historical detail? Find out why I chose to do something a particular way? Point out to me some anachronistic words or phrases I failed to scrub out before publication? This is the place. I’ll be linking this post on my website, so if you haven’t read the book yet, you can always come back here later.

(People can and do e-mail me, but I figured I’d try doing this publicly, where people can see what, if anything, others have to say.)

I am mighty(er)

I’ve come up with an analogy for what writing this book feels like. (Warning: weird metaphor ahead.)

Say you’ve been going to the gym for some months, maybe a year, and lifting weights faithfully. And the numbers have gone up, sure, but what does that mean? Then one day you find yourself messing around with a friend, and the two of you get into a wrestling match, and you’re gasping and snarling and trying to get a good grip so you can exert some leverage and damn it’s hard — but then halfway through you realize that a year ago, this friend would have had you face-down on the floor crying uncle in about four seconds flat. And maybe all that weightlifting really has done something.

I don’t think what I have so far is brilliant, but I also know what’s what revision is for. I think I’m getting my foundations in more or less the right place, and that means bringing things up to code won’t be too tough. Sure, for the first time in my life I find myself routinely writing three hundred words and then ripping them right back out again, that very night, to start the scene over from scratch — I’ve written fully 15% more than I have of actual book — but that isn’t defeat; that’s victory. That’s noticing my friend about to get me in a pin I won’t be able to escape, and squirming out of it before I can be trapped.

I’m stronger than I used to be.

(Though not physically. My puny self needs to get back to the gym.)

accidental allegory?

The King saw any restrictions they tried to impose as infringements upon his royal authority.

Writing this scene of political debate, it occurs to me that somebody out there will probably decide I wrote this book as commentary on current U.S. politics. With, I don’t know, faerie warfare as a coded metaphor for terrorism.

Or something.

imponderables

The character who was John Highlord when I started writing has been replaced with Thomas Soame, because I realized matters would work better if I used an alderman who was also a member of Parliament later on, and both of them are minor enough figures that they don’t rate entries in the DNB. (Ergo, I can make stuff up and not worry too much about somebody knowing I’m wrong.)

So I ask you: why, pray tell, does my subconscious want to insist that Thomas Soame wouldn’t talk the way I had John Highlord do? Why does it object to him being broad-shouldered? Everything I know about both of these men would fit into a paragraph shorter than this one, and it consists of a handful of dates regarding their public service. I don’t know what they looked like. I don’t know what their personalities were. Yet my subconscious resists the swap.

This, chickadees, is why naming is sometimes a giant problem for me. If I don’t find the right name, I often can’t write the character, and it’s like pulling teeth to change a name once it’s settled in. Some bit of my brain decides nobody named Thomas Soame could possibly be a blunt-spoken, broad-shouldered guy, and god only knows how long it will take to convince it otherwise.

This job would be easier if my brain were rational.

creative whiplash

I’m not sure whether to be amused or distressed that I game with a group of people who, confronted with a horde of zombies headed for Tiananmen Square, decide that the best of all possible responses is to show up with a tank.

Anyway, we just destroyed the center of Beijing — srsly, I’m talking flaming wreckage of the Tiananmen itself crashing down into the sea of gasoline-charred zombie body parts, bullet casings, shattered concrete, and dead PLA soldiers — and now I have to go write subtle, elegant politics.

My head hurts.

But wheeeeee, is over-the-top gaming fun.

another book-release post

First things first: having found my head rolling around on the floor and screwed it back on to my shoulders, I’m ready to announce the winner of the MNC release contest! By the high-tech randomization method of rolling a die — what? I’m a gamer — the copy of Paradox #12 goes to archangl23. Send me your address at marie dot brennanATgmail dot com, and I’ll send you the magazine!

***

Second: there’s a new interview with me, this time over at the urban fantasy community “Fangs, Fur, and Fey.” We mostly talk about Midnight Never Come, but also about urban fantasy more broadly.

***

Two more reviews in . . .

Karen at SF Signal gives it three stars, calling it “An excellent story full of political machinations and historical accuracy.” I’ll note in passing that I’m pleased by how my prose seems to be coming across; I’m sure there are people who will find it off-puttingly archaic, but for the most part I appear to have hit the target I aimed at — namely, to suggest the period without being impenetrable.

(Now, can I keep doing that?)

Robert Thompson at Fantasy Book Critic also liked it. Pull-quote: “a seductive blend of historical fiction, court intrigue, fantasy, mystery and romance.”

***

Also, two interesting news developments about the Elizabethan period. First, it seems that archaeologists have found a fabulously well-preserved shipwreck from the period. (Is that the fault of my characters? You decide!) And Slate has a piece on a controversial decision to excise a poem called “The Lover’s Complaint” from the Shakespearean canon, and to add a new one —

To the Queen

Glimpses inside a writer’s head

Dammit, Strafford, get out of my novel. I don’t have the space to deal with you.

ETA: Also, how distracting would it be, if I actually put in the line, “Let them go, let them go, to do their endeavour”? One suspects it actually was the line used to start duels. At least in Scotland.

ETA #2: Actually, let’s just do this the right way. Does anybody know of a book I could read to find out how duels and judicial combat were conducted in seventeenth-century England?

this month on SF Novelists

I neglected to link to this before because I was out of town on the day it went live, but I have my usual monthly post up at SF Novelists. This time it’s “The Writer at Play,” wherein I lay out why I think role-playing games have made me a better writer. Feel free to head over there and contribute your own experiences in the comments!

assortment of things

Back home again. Trying to catch up on e-mail. Didn’t I just do this?

2008: the year in which I spend my entire summer playing catch-up. Oh goodie.

road thoughts

Eight states and four time zones later, we’ve reached California. Thoughts on the trip:

Good God, the U.S. is huge.

Going east to west is nice; you effectively get 25-hour days.

So glad I’m not driving back. Especially since I’d have to do it alone.

Just how big is this place?

Thank God for cruise control. I’m pretty certain I didn’t touch the gas or the brake for three hours in western Kansas — and that isn’t hyperbole.

Watching the gas mileage change going up into Colorado is depressing. Watching it change coming down out of Colorado is glee-making.

Especially in a hybrid. Thank God for those, too.

How is all of this a single country?

special interview

We managed to find a motel offering free internet access, so I’m hopping online long enough to post a link to the unusual interview I mentioned a while back.

Welcome to Cat and Muse, which bills itself as the only Internet talk radio conducted entirely by fictional characters. If you check out that link, you will find not me, but Lady Lune, being interviewed by the ex-succubus Jezebel and Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy. (Who can speak only in cliches.)

This is probably my favorite interview I’ve done thus far.

leaving, not on a jet plane

Commencing road trip to California. I probably won’t have internet access again until the end of the week (and sporadically until the 17th), so don’t feel bad if I don’t answer your comment or e-mail or whatever. But any images of Midnight Never Come sent in while I’m gone will be counted for the giveaway.

Adios!