Day Eight: In which I do battle with handwriting (and lose)

Thanks to the Great LJ Overmind, I’ve managed to up my count of signed copies of Midnight Never Come from two to fourteen. (Not including the piles at Orbit.) On my way to fjm‘s lst night, I stopped off in Oxford Street and hit the Waterstones there; I did not, however, hit the Borders, on account of it being inside the police cordon closing off a chunk of the street after the fatal stabbing there the day before. Er. Yeah. Yikes.

So if you live in the London area and want a signed copy, here’s the tally of where to find them:

(more…)

Day Seven: In which I have a social life!

The Thames Path pleases me. I have no idea how far it stretches — all the way to the headwaters? — but if I were to keep walking east from Richmond, I’m pretty sure I could go without interruption on from here to Southwark. (If I had the endurance.) The companion trail on the north bank is the part of the same route I travel on my first day of these trips, along the bank from Blackfriars to the Tower. In the City it’s pretty in a paved and urbanized way; out here it’s rutted gravel and untrimmed verdage. It’s easy to imagine myself back in the past, editing out the few modern notes that creep into my view.

(more…)

Day Four: Courtesy of the Goodemeades

One unexpected side effect of not having my camera cable: it’s surprisingly hard to keep myself entertained in the evenings. I didn’t realize how much time I spent last year, sucking the day’s pictures down to my laptop, deleting the bad ones, and labeling the rest before I could forget what they were. I find myself at loose ends in the evenings, more than expected, and curse the combination of virtue and light packing that made the only book in my luggage Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down. I cannot brain enough to read about seventeenth-century socio-politico-religious movements right now.

(more…)

here we go . . . .

I early-voted this morning, because tomorrow I’m leaving on a jet plane and not coming back until I’ve seen England, Italy, Greece, and Turkey — or at least small samples thereof.

I’m nervous. It’s been a while since I’ve taken a trip this long, and I’ve never done a multi-stage thing like this, not that I recall. I had to make a second stack of Things To Be Packed, for kniedzw to luggage up and bring to Rome next week.

No doubt I’ve forgotten something. (You always do.) But my father will be smug; for possibly the first time since I got out from under his thumb enough to avoid it, I made an honest-to-god written list of everything I needed to bring. Yes, Dad, you win.

London trip-blogging to follow. Cruise-blogging will be dependent on how obscenely flagellant the Internet prices are on board the ship. Worst-case scenario: I’ll see y’all again in June.

Happy, er, Surprise Book-Day!

So, turns out I’ve had it wrong all along: for my UK readers, May Day is the debut of Midnight Never Come! (Apparently I am, in fact, distracted enough to miss this fact. For U.S. readers, it’s still June 9th.) If you’re a Brit, then hie thee to a bookstore bookshop and get yourself a copy!

You can read the first of several upcoming interviews, this one with The Book Swede, who asked me some very thought-provoking questions about the background and content of this novel.

last excerpt

With forty days to go until Midnight Never Come hits the shelves, I’ve posted the last portion of the excerpt. It’s a long one, so keep clicking through. (Alternatively, you can start back at the beginning.)

(Confidential to sora_blue: You can finally get the answer to your question from a month ago!)

That will actually be the last of the MNC promotional stuff for a while. I leave next week for London, where I will have many adventures researching the next book, and then I will be in the Mediterranean, trying to do no work at all. There will, however, be one last nifty thing, just before the book comes out. And in the interim, you will be getting the return of the trip-blogging, which I know many people enjoyed last year. So enjoy!

Elizabethan extravaganza!

All you Kit Marlowe fanboys and fangirls out there may be interested to know that Issue #12 of Paradox Magazine is now available to order, and within its pages you may find my story “The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe”. No relation to Midnight Never Come, despite that title coming from Marlowe, but I welcome speculation as to how the two might be made to connect. (I suppose the answer might be Ink and Steel.)

Also, C.E. Murphy’s book The Queen’s Bastard debuts today. I mention this because it will always hold a special place in my heart as the first book I blurbed. Yes, ladies and gents, somebody at her publisher decided that Marie Brennan was a name worth putting on the cover! Oddly enough, the letter I got with the review copy connected it to Warrior and Witch, but it’s far more like Midnight Never Come, so that’s the vein I will use to pitch it to you all here.

The Queen’s Bastard, much like Michael Moorcock’s Gloriana, takes place in a setting that is sixteenth-century Europe in almost everything but name. (Unlike Gloriana, at no point did I want to throw it across the room and light it on fire with the power of my rage.) It has espionage and magic and is way sexier than MNC, and it’s the first book of a new series called The Inheritors’ Cycle. Short-form synopsis is, Belinda Primrose is the unacknowledged bastard daughter of Elizabeth Lorraine, queen of England Aulun, and she’s been trained by her father Robert Dudley Robert Drake in the art of international spying and assassination.

Belinda isn’t an entirely likeable character; she takes several actions in the story that had my skin crawling. But that’s clearly deliberate, and tied in with the growth of Belinda’s powers; I suspect that when it’s viewed in the larger context of the series, that will become an interesting facet of her character development. I’m certainly very curious to see the next book. This is clearly based on Reformation-era Europe, but taking it one step aside means Murphy can play with some elements of her own creation, and I’m looking forward to seeing where those go.

Finally, I’m hard at work on creating content for the dedicated Midnight Never Come website. (That’s just the holding page, until the thing goes live.) The plans, they are glorious. I have no idea what this stuff will look like in execution, but the ideas have me hugely pleased.

thinky thoughts on magic

superversive has a lengthy and thought-provoking post up, asking why we hanker for magic. It’s many things in passing, including a deconstruction of ceremonial magic and a literary analysis of several founding fathers of fantasy, but for me, the two most interesting bits are further in.

First is the summary of Steven D. Greydanus’ “seven hedges” which “serve to divide the magic of fantasy from the magic of curses and occult powers.” I find these fascinating, honestly, because they seem to arise out of a set of concerns that, well, don’t concern me. Greydanus (and superversive) are writing in the context of Catholic theology, and more broadly Christian theology; it’s the same context Tolkien was writing in, and he, too, had to address those concerns. What does it mean to write about magic when you believe magic is either real and bad (because then you are circumventing God) or fake and bad (because then you are wasting your time on a delusion)?

And I find that I’m not concerned with that question. Maybe I should be, and it’s a failure on my part to ponder the deeper implications of fantasy. I read the summary of the seven hedges, and found myself irritated by them. Why should I limit magic to non-human, already-trained wizardly supporting characters in another world where magic is entirely known, and lard the tale with cautionary road signs? I don’t think superversive thinks I should, but it might be that Greydanus does. (I didn’t have the enthusiasm to read his piece myself.) But those restrictions are predicated on a certain assumption of the connection between magic-in-fiction and magic-in-life, and while I haven’t thought through all my feelings on that matter, off the cuff, I’m fairly sure my feelings are not his.

Anyway, that’s one thing I’m chewing on. The other is the excellent Old English proverb superversive quotes: Man deþ swa he byþ þonne he mot swa he wile. “A man does what he is when he can do what he wants.” Magic as a means of dipping human will in myth . . . that’s a mode of thought I can get behind. Looking at my own writing, I can see how some of the magic-facilitated turning points in my stories are expressive of the characters’ inner selves, more directly than mundane action could show. (In fact, I’m tempted to write an essay explicating some examples of that, but it would be spoilery as hell — especially since one is drawn from Midnight Never Come.)

So. Thinky thoughts on magic. Go forth and think!

overly ambitious

I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time; why I chose yesterday afternoon to start it, God only knows. But, as a part of my ongoing project to include business advice on my website, I have finally thrown together the beginnings of a glossary of terms.

Now I need your help.

See, there are undoubtedly many important words I have forgotten. There are definitely important words I have defined inadequately. Heck, some of them don’t have definitions at all, yet. I’m pretty sure pitch and point are two different things, but I have no idea what. Reserves and out of print, I know what they are, but not well enough to provide a coherent definition of when and how those things happen. And then there are the definitions that are just kind of weak, like offset printing. I may even have some things entirely wrong.

So please, if you know the publishing industry, poke around in that glossary and provide me with expansions and corrections. This is going to be a work in progress for a while, I’m sure, like my two lists.

three links, and some thoughts

It is apparently Feminism Day in the internets. (I know why, actually — it’s a particular stage of ripples from an earlier much-discussed incident — but I’m not going to try to trace the lineage; I’m just here to provide the links.)

First up, something most of my personal friends understand, but worth spreading as a public service: “A Straight Geek Male’s Guide to Interaction with Females.” It’s the basics, nothing more, but it never hurts to remind people of them.

Second: the L.A. Times on, well, one of the fastest ways to piss me off royally, aka Men Who Explain Things. You know, the patronizing jackasses who presume they know more about Topic X than you do, even when they don’t. Bonus rage points for the fact that, while some of them sometimes do it to other men, it is frequently directed at women. (Includes a fabulous anecdote of the best shut-down possible. Alas, it is not often possible — but it must have been satisfying when it happened.)

Third: a lengthy post from synecdochic on “Don’t Be That Guy.” Very long, but useful not just in identifying the male behaviors that put women off, but offering suggestions for how “allies” (other guys who notice the problem) can help out. I’m sure somewhere in the three pages and counting of comments, multiple somebodies have pointed out that the suggestions do often involve a man speaking on a woman’s behalf because she won’t be listened to, but — as I believe the poster acknowledges — sometimes that’s regrettably necessary. Ultimately no woman should ever need a man to step in and speak for her, but if him doing so gets us a step closer to that day, I won’t discourage it.

. . . but you know, it’s odd. Many of the experiences that last post talks about, I just, well, haven’t experienced. Not often, anyway. And I can’t help but ponder the confluence of factors that makes that so.

Partly, no doubt, it’s causal factors. I’m not curvy and I don’t tend to dress in anything remotely resembling a revealing fashion (LARPS notwithstanding), ergo I’m not as likely to have the “my eyes are up HERE” problem. I associate mostly with guys who are legitimately Good Guys, and therefore unlikely to patronize or dismiss me. (Half of them are better feminists than I am.) Etc.

Some of it, though, has to be perceptual. In other words, I do encounter such things, but I don’t notice them. I’ve said before that I must have run into more than two or three sexist teachers in my educational career, but I guess I just steamrollered over the others without noticing. Because on the one hand I can’t think of more, but on the other, I can’t find much evidence in my life of sexist assumptions and behavior holding me back. I’m having a hard time articulating what I mean by that; I don’t mean I’m immune. Situations where I was hampered externally, sure, those no doubt have happened. But I have rarely felt inferior, inadequate, what have you, as a result of my gender. I actually believe it’s true when I say that I went from Great At Math to Sucking At Math, not because I felt like I couldn’t do it, but because I didn’t feel like doing it. And sure, my loss of interest partially coincided with one of the identifiably sexist teachers — but only partially. I never felt incapable. (Nor was I, if I managed to pass AP Calculus by doing all the homework the night before the test.)

At cons? I suppose many of the writers I hang out with there are women. If I tally up a mental list of the people I anticipate seeing when I go, it’s definitely skewed female. Then again, this is more likely to be a problem of interaction with strangers or new acquaintances than with established friends. But if there have been room parties/dinners/whatever where a guy was checking me out or behaving like he had a right to something from me or dismissing my words, I just . . . haven’t noticed. And have not, so far as I can tell, let it affect me.

And you know, I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, yay me! I can haz self-esteem. On the other, maybe I’m missing out on opportunities to push for change, to make a difference, to call people on their bullshit instead of ignoring it. (Or maybe it is undermining me after all. You can be oppressed without noticing your oppression.) How much can I trust my own perception? How much good do I do in a broader sense by shrugging this stuff off?

I don’t particularly know. But at the very least, chewing on these questions is good for me.

random query

I don’t suppose any of the Brits reading this journal are in Oxfordshire? Or are at least familiar with that area?

I’m trying to sort out something for research purposes.

Edited to add: Okay, it looks like what I really need is a bus schedule to get myself from Swindon to either Woolstone or Compton Beauchamp and back. (And, y’know, advice on whether I should be worried about hiking a few miles alone in the Oxfordshire countryside.)

light bulb

Sometimes the answer to your plot problem is staring you right in the face.

If one of Charles’ problems in 1640 was that he had three kingdoms to juggle, then clearly the way to set up problems on the fae side is to drag Ireland and Scotland into the mess, too.

International faerie politics for the win!

sorry, Team Boston

Despite the best efforts of our east-coast friends (and they *were* good efforts, believe me), the decision is done: kniedzw and I will be heading west. He’s accepted a job offer from Akamai’s San Mateo office.

Timetable is still fuzzy. His work starts June 16th, but I won’t be following until (probably) August, along with all our stuff. Yes, this means moving in the middle of writing a book. On the bright side, Akamai is helping out with moving expenses, which means that for the first time in my life I can pay somebody else to do the heavy lifting. This makes me happier than I can say.

And I’m going to live in California! I confess that one thing which swung me toward the west coast was looking at the area in the satellite view of Google Maps; seeing San Mateo nestled between the blue of the water and the thick green belt of the hills made my heart sing. Nature! A bike ride away! kurayami_hime has been waxing poetic about the eucalyptus forests, and I’ll get to see them for myself. And redwoods! I adores me some redwoods.

It’ll be a new experience for us both. We won’t necessarily stay there forever, but I’m glad we’ll be staying there for a while.

AAL Book Report: King James and the History of Homosexuality, Michael B. Young

Dear Typesetter Of This Book,

I know the truth. You snickered to yourself when you saw what had happened in the last paragraph of Chapter Seven, where the line spacing required the word “arsenal” to be hyphenated onto the next line.

Kisses,
— The Part Of My Mind That’s Twelve Years Old

***

Dear Michael B. Young,

Thank you for letting your snark off the leash every so often. Like when, after telling me over and over again how much Thomas Scott wanted war and was so happy when he got it, because now England was a “nursery for soldiers,” and then tossing off in two lines that he was soon thereafter murdered by a soldier and life does have its little ironies, don’t it? Or when, addressing the question of whether the people around James understood what was going on with him and his male favorites, you go through a paragraph about how the Archbishop of Canterbury deliberately prettied up Villiers and chucked him into James’ path, and what in the world did he think he was doing?

— The Part Of My Mind That Appreciates Entertaining Nonfiction

***

I picked this book up on the recommendation of cheshyre, to get a sense of the atmosphere of James’ court (spilling over into Charles’), and how the critics of that lifestyle bemoaned it as homosexual. It’s a pretty good read, quite short — 155 pages, not counting notes — and quick to process. Though it probably could have been shorter if the conclusion hadn’t taken twenty pages to beat you over the head with the excellent points it raised in the preceding chapters.

I have yet to actually read Bray’s book Homosexuality in Renaissance England, but this appears to be a good counter-argument to Bray’s thesis that male homosexuality at the time was only conceived of in terms of sodomy (and therefore witchcraft, the devil, popery, and the general dissolution of the world). Young acknowledges that Bray’s probably right in certain cases, that some people wandered around with “sodomy” in one compartment of their brains and “what the King does” in another compartment and determinedly didn’t connect the two, but he also quotes a number of contemporary writers who appear to have been floundering around for a word they didn’t have yet — namely, homosexuality as we now conceive of it.

Hmmm. I might have more sympathy for James’ situation if he hadn’t been such a raging misogynist at the same time. Oh well.

Good book. Now on to the next one. Mush!