justification

Working on building playlists for the novel looks like cat-vacuuming par excellence . . . until you realize that doing so has helped you figure out what’s changed in the faerie court between the last book and this one.

I am vindicated!

a sighting

My local Barnes & Noble has two copies of MNC on the shelf. (Two signed copies, now.) Which is another landmark in the Really Real Book progression. I’ve seen it out in the world for myself! In my home country, even!

Another victory: both my Gmail and sundell.net accounts are down to ten messages each, from the giant backlog created by my travels. I still have things I need to deal with, but the insurmountable pile has mostly been surmounted.

other reviews

While I was out of town, reviews also appeared for a couple of the venues my short stories have been published in.

Sherwood Smith (sartorias) liked issue #12 of Paradox, which includes “The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe.” The verdict on my story is that it’s “a taut, lapidary triptych,” and the verdict on me is that “Her scholarship is sure, her sense of pace impeccable.” Yay! (Don’t forget, you’re eligible to win a copy of that story if you send me a photo of Midnight Never Come in a bookstore. Or in your hot little hands, or whatever. Proof that it’s out in the world.)

Also, though I don’t believe the anthology Clockwork Phoenix is available yet — I think it’s debuting at Readercon — there have been a few advance reviews. Publishers Weekly says “all 19 stories have a strong and delicious taste of weird,” and Charles Tan at Bibliophile Stalker found it a solid, enjoyable antho. I’ll let you know when that one’s actually out.

unrelated

kniedzw has been posting honeymoon pictures to Flickr, so I shall, too. These are my most interesting or artistic shots from Rome, Delos, Mykonos, Rhodes, Santorini, Istanbul, Ephesus, and Athens; the Pompeii pictures are on his camera, mine having gone belly up the night after Athens.

You will notice some duplication between his set and mine; we had a habit of taking extremely similar shots. Which isn’t a bad thing: sometimes one or the other of us got a better angle or frame on it.

Special to Lymond folks: there’s a picture of the Topkapi Palace harem.

Why don’t I ever do stuff like this in novels?

It’s all about:

1) Luring the bad guy and a few of his most powerful minions away from the warehouse

2) Curb-stomping a few of the remaining minions and blowing up the rest

3) Kidnapping a scientist out of the zombie-making bunker below the (now burning) warehouse

4) Stuffing a jet ski* into the freight elevator and snapping the cable so it falls a long long way and blows up the zombie-making bunker and what’s left of the warehouse

5) Recruiting the kidnapped scientist into working for me in my genetics lab/incipient cult.

I mean, srsly. Exploding jet skis. Which I think Johnnie used as an improvised melee weapon during the curb-stomping phase.

*We all know from Waterworld that jet skis are the most explosive object known to man.

back on the treadmill

Time to bring out this icon again, as I get properly underway with AAL. Last night’s writing was like pulling teeth, but that’s the natural result of fighting jet-lag long enough to put the words down. (Normally I don’t have this much trouble adjusting, but normally I don’t have seven hours’ difference and a cold to overcome.)

1,132 today. And, resurrecting the LBR tally: all rhetoric, today. But more fun than last night’s blood, because a) I’m awake and b) the random alderman I picked out of the 1639 flock is coming out with lines like “The king pisses away money as his father did — though at least he has the decency to piss it on war instead of drunkenness and catamites.”

Now to clean up the downstairs so we have somewhere to sit while gaming.

Monday morning countdown roundup

We’re in the home stretch for the U.S. release of Midnight Never Come.

June 9th, officially, but I know a handful of copies have already been sold in

various places around the country. If you send me a photo of the book on the

shelf between now and one week after the street date, I’ll enter your name in a

drawing for a special prize: a signed copy of Paradox #12, which contains my short

story “The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe.” (There’s absolutely no connection

between that story and this novel, aside from the time period, but you can have

fun imagining one for yourself.)

Also, those of you who prefer your novels in more portable format may be

interested to know that Fictionwise is advertising an e-book copy. I

wasn’t aware one was being issued, but apparently so.

***

If you were curious, yesterday’s post was an image of the promotional item my

publicist and I made for Midnight Never Come. It was sent to the

bookbuyers for stores in order to get them interested in the novel, and is, of

course, the thing for which I held the signature contest in February.

Want more? Why not try . . . <drum roll> . . . the website?

That’s right, folks: Orbit has put together a gorgeous website for the book.

Poke around and take a look at the goodies, and make sure you find the

semi-hidden link. It isn’t entirely finished yet; they’re doing a soft launch,

and will start rolling out the rest of the content on the 9th. If you come back

then, you’ll find a mini-game you can play, with some rather nice prizes to be

awarded.

***

With the book out in the UK and soon to be out here, reviews have started to

surface. My favorite pull-quote has to be the tag line from SFX Magazine: “Like John Le Carre if

he was obsessed with faeries.” (Alas, the review is not available online,

though it may be eventually.) They liked it, and read it through a political

thriller lens, which I find interesting. Not sure I can live up to a comparison with Le Carre, but hey. Anyway, I figure I’ll do occasional review round-ups here, whenever I reach a critical mass.

Myfanwy Rodman at The Bookbag read it the same way, calling it “a

historical thriller with a fascinating twist,” though one that starts a bit slowly.

Darren Turpin at The Genre Files found it “a highly-enjoyable mix of

Elizabethan and faerie politics and intrigue.”

Chris

Hyland, the Book Swede (who interviewed me last month) read it as a love

story, and flatters me immensely by saying, “What sets Marie Brennan apart

[from similar stories], then, is the quality of her writing, the complexities of

her plot, the characterisations, the world-building… everything” — though he, too, felt it opened slowly.

Mark Yon at

SFFWorld.com appreciated all my research, and didn’t find the romance as

off-putting as expected.

Elizabeth Bear

(aka matociquala), who has her own Elizabethan faerie novel

coming out next month, says of my characters that “These are not kinder,

gentler faeries. Really they’re not.”

Mervi Hamalainen at Curled

Up concurs, saying, “Midnight Never Come returns the fairies to their

roots: terrifying, alien, yet captivating at the same time.”

And finally, Debbie Chapman, a Waterstone’s bookseller, calls it “an amazing,

moving, murderous, magical tale.”

***

In other words, so far people are pretty much liking it.

(Except for Kirkus, of course.)

returning to the world of the internet-living

I am back home. Half a day and change later than I should have been — weather cancellations stranded us in Chicago last night — and horribly jet-lagged, but otherwise fine. (And, judging by the comments I’ve received so far, much more tan than anyone here has ever seen me.)

I have not read the Internet since May 6th. If you got married/had a sex change/moved to Laos/cured cancer/did anything else you would like me to know about, please say so in comments. ‘Cause God knows I’m not reading through the archives of all this stuff for the last three and a half weeks.

If you contacted me, I will be responding as soon as I can, jet-lag permitting.

Expect regular blogging to resume henceforth.

today’s adventure

Rode a donkey up the Cliffs of Moher-esque side of the Santorini volcanic caldera.

Hey, it beat climbing those 600 steps.

In my usual way of things, though, I neglected to remember that kniedzw had never been on a horse until after I convinced him to go on a donkey ride.

cruising

So far, I have:

Stood in the sacred lake where Apollo and Artemis were born. (Or at least stood with my feet in the depression that used to be the sacred lake until the French archaeologists drained it in the 1920s to save themselves from malaria.)

Viewed the spot where the Colossus of Rhodes probably stood.

Bathed my feet in the aquamarine waters of the Aegean.

So far? It’s going well.

rain day count

London: 0/8 days

Rome: 2/2 days

Something is seriously wrong with this picture. (Though, to be fair, the Rome rain days have been temporary sprinkles, not solid rain. But still: ROME. With rain. When London had nary a drop.)

Also, re: Vatican — buh.

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:

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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.

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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.

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