linky

This month on SF Novelists, I speculate as to what makes writers dream of movie adaptations, in “Stars in Our Eyes.”

Also, Daryl Gregory had a fantastic post yesterday about the process by which book covers happen, using the example of his own upcoming novel Pandemonium.

While I’m at it, too, I should mention that I when I posted recommending Goblin Quest by Jim Hines, I was under the mistaken impression that Goblin War, the third book of the series, was already out. It just hit the shelves recently, so now’s a good time to go looking if you were thinking of picking the series up. (Maria Snyder also just put out Fire Study, the third book in the series with Poison Study, so there are follow-ups to more than one of my recommendations.)

aaaand . . . . switch!

What’s obnoxious: writing 1761 words of a story and then deciding they really needed to be in first person, rather than third.

What would have been more obnoxious: making that decision even later, so I had to re-do even more of it.

(This is not, for the record, And Ashes Lie. It’s something else that I’ll talk about later.)

AAL Book Reports: Restoration London, Liza Picard; By Permission of Heaven, Adrian Tinniswood

My book reports for Midnight Never Come proved useful to me in the longer run, so you’ll have to put up with them again, I’m afraid. I won’t motivate myself to write them if I can’t pretend they don’t have an audience.

Restoration London, by Liza Picard

What can I say? It’s Liza Picard. Who is awesome. She does a great job of presenting the details of lived experience in historical London, and her commitment to primary sources is great. I also love that she considers things like home decoration and female health just as interesting (or moreso) than the usual topics of history. I don’t think she positions herself actively as a feminist scholar, but her attention to otherwise neglected areas like that would certainly get a thumbs-up from that perspective.

By Permission of Heaven, by Adrian Tinniswood

This was the second book I read for AAL only because I had to wait for it to be shipped to me; I already had Restoration London on the shelf. It was recommended to me by Tyler of Pandemonium Books in Cambridge, and it’s a godsend: a detailed account of the Great Fire, including a chapter devoted to each day, telling me what was burning when, and what people were trying to do about it. I could not possibly write my novel without it.

But he also goes further afield, starting with a bit of the context leading up to the fire and the efforts to deal with it afterward; the latter plays better than the former. I understand why he felt we needed information about the Dutch wars, given religious tensions and also the question of when to recall General Monck, but it felt less than entirely relevant. The after-the-fact material is probably less useful to me, mind you, since I don’t expect the book to go past 1666, but it’s still good to know, especially for future installments in the series. (It’s honestly fascinating, comparing the aftermath of the Great Fire to, say, Hurricane Katrina. Seventeenth-century Englishmen did a remarkably good job of putting their city back together again in a fair and even-handed fashion.)

I’ve got a book on the Great Plague to read next, and a bunch more on the way.

wiktory

I have chosen my ICFA reading. And I’m getting good at eyeballing these things; my selection, when test-read, turned out to be twenty minutes on the nose.

For the record, everything in this selection will eventually be posted on my site as part of the teaser excerpt. But you’ll have to wait a while for it, so what you really want to do is get up at 8:30 in the morning on Friday to come hear me read it. Right?

Right?

Yes, that is officially my time slot. <sigh> Beggars can’t be choosers and all, but still — I’ll have to hope some of Alex Irvine’s and Judith Moffett’s fans stick around, or I’ll be reading to my co-panelists and Farah, who’s moderating.

next tidbit: evidence of my insanity

I honestly meant to do this months ago, but only got around to it now. Which means that instead of doing it the easy and sensible way (noting things down as I got them, or at least while I still had them), I’ve had to recreate the whole mess mostly from the photograph I took back then.

Your MNC Countdown entertainment for today is my research bibliography. Not as exciting as the prologue I posted the other week, but hopefully useful to two types of people: those researching similar topics, and those wanting concrete evidence of my insanity. It’s as complete as I can make it, though I keep remembering and adding in odd books that weren’t on my shelf. (Plus there’s that one Marlowe book I just can’t recall. I can see it in the photo, but not well enough to make out the author, and the title on the spine unhelpfully says only “Marlowe.” Very annoying.)

Anyway, collating the list was interesting, because Jesus Christ I did more work than I thought. And that’s not counting all the random internet resources I never marked down.

Enjoy!

ICFA

(There are too many potential icons for this post, so you just get the swan.)

Attention anybody going to ICFA! I’ll be there, of course — proud attendee since 2003; I can advance both sides of my professional life by flying to Florida every spring, so what’s not to like? — and it turns out I’m going to be doing more than I thought.

At 10:30 a.m. on Thursday I’ll be donning my academic hat (and my legal name) and participating in an interdisciplinary panel about fan studies — a panel of the discussion type, not the “we all read our at best tangentially related papers” sort.

Also, at some point — I don’t know my time slot yet — I’ll be switching to writer-hat and writer-name, and reading in the creative track. I’ve been squeaked on to it due to other peoples’ cancellations, so I suspect I won’t be listed in the program, but they always post the errata next to the reg desk, so look for me there. (Yes, in my sixth year, the worst has finally happened: I’m on the program twice, under two different names.) I will, as you might expect, be reading from Midnight Never Come.

And lastly, I’ll be bringing some small number of ARCs with me, to sell in the book room. My ego loves the mental image of a slugfest over the last copy between a rabid fan and a dusty old academic in the narrow, book-strewn aisles, but since the universe is unlikely to oblige me with such a scenario, you can probably guarantee your receipt of one simply by looking early in the con.

Hope to see some of you there!

Who’s cool?

I built Midnight Never Come partly on the principle of “list everything awesome in that time period, then cram in as much of it as you can.” Which isn’t a bad method. So I’m going to repeat it again, and ask: who and what is cool in the seventeenth century?

I already know I’ll be using the Great Fire, the Civil War, execution of Charles I, Cromwell’s Commonwealth, and Restoration of Charles II. Maybe the Battle of Worcester, too. Other things springing to mind include Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn, John Milton, the Earl of Rochester, Aphra Behn, Restoration theatre, and the Dutch wars.

What else?

People, events, neat places, whatever. The broader a range of things I’m steeping in my head, the better this book will be.

Guess what — I lied.

Decision made; now I can stop being cryptic.

What I said a few months ago? Yeah, change of plans. This is the book I’m writing next.

AND ASHES LIE

September, 1666. In the house of a sleeping baker, a spark leaps free of the oven — and ignites a blaze that will burn London to the ground.

Six years ago, the King of England returned in triumph to the land that had executed his father. The mortal civil war is done. But the war among the fae is still raging, and London is its battleground. There are forces that despise the Onyx Court, and will do anything to destroy it.

But now a greater threat has come, that could destroy everything. For three harrowing days, the mortals and fae of the city will fight to save their home. While the humans struggle to halt the conflagration that is devouring London street by street, the fae pit themselves against a less tangible foe: the spirit of the fire itself, powerful enough to annihilate everything in its path. Neither side can win on its own — but can they find a way to fight together?

There’s the requisite few paragraphs of handwaving, to give you a sense of what this novel will be. The Victorian book will still be happening, never fear; it just won’t be happening now. For a variety of strategic reasons and a few serendipitous ones, we’ve decided it would be better for me to do this one first.

Yes, this does in fact mean I’m switching tracks after four months of research on what is now the wrong time period. Yes, this does mean I’ve got barely more time to prep this book than I did for Midnight Never Come. Yes, this does mean I’m crazy. But I think the Victorian book will benefit from having more time to cook in my head; nineteenth-century London is so big and complicated that I won’t say no to working up to it more slowly. In the meantime, this one has had a number of factors swing in its favor, until it jumped up the queue and put itself at the top.

So. Great Fire. My, um, Restoration faerie disaster fantasy, I guess I’ll have to call it. London go BOOM.

Kind of like my head.

. . . .

The thing about potentially head-exploding developments is that they usually don’t give you any warning before they hit.

That’s why they’re head-exploding.

No, I’m not going to tell you what I’m talking about. Not at the moment. But I promise I’ll say in a week or two, once it’s decided — whichever way it goes. Suffice to say it isn’t a good-or-bad split; both possibilities are good.

for a few of you

Most of you can disregard this. Or rather, follow the link and marvel at the existence of a recipe for apple dumplings that involves Mountain Dew. (Apparently the result is fabulously tasty. We may try it at some point.)

But the real purpose of this post is for the old Changeling folk.

Check out the top of the left-hand column on this page.

If you need me, I’ll be having an aneurysm in the corner.

movie time!

<grumble mutter need to pick a damned Victorian icon already>

Okay, folks. Give me movies! Specifically, movies that depict the gritty underbelly of Victorian London. Think Sweeney Todd or From Hell. Or Gangs of New York, except not about America. Things far, far away from the prettified Oscar Wilde side of London.

What’s out there?

One Hundred Days (and counting . . . .)

Midnight Never Come hits the shelf in one hundred days.

My subconscious is convinced the book is out already, has in fact been out for months, and omg nobody’s reading it i’m a total failure gaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh. I think this is because they printed the ARCs way back at the end of October, complete with full-blown cover, which means it feels like a real book. And if I’ve had the real book sitting around my house for four months, surely it must be in bookstores, right?

Not for another hundred days. So to keep myself from going insane, I’m going to mark the time by parceling out website content. Today’s teaser: the prologue to the novel.

Enjoy!

tonight’s revision wisdom

Mistyping “brain” as “brian” creates much amusement when the character’s boyfriend is named Brian. At least in this particular sentence.

***

So, wow, tonight has not been going as planned, on account of unscheduled unconscious time on the sofa. But on the bright side, I’m getting my revision work done at a godly hour for once.

And when I’m done, I may even permit myself a small reward.

sadness

I did like that scene. It had development and humor and all that good stuff.

But it just didn’t make sense with the thing I had happening in the scene before, so away it goes.

Such is the necessity of revision, alas.

does anyone know . . . .

In eighteenth-century Germany, would everybody there have been your standard blonde-haired blue-eyed Teutons? Or was there more variation in color?

I imagine it might vary by region, but my knowledge of such things is next to nonexistent.