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.

two historical bits

First of all, since everybody and their brother seems to be sending it to me right now: yes, I am aware of the online version of the 1898-99 Booth Poverty Map of London. (Apparently BoingBoing precipitated this flood?) My thanks to those of you who told me about it, but you can stop now.

(Not pissy; just a little bemused.)

Second: it’s buggy as hell, but Channel 4 in Britain has put up a flash game connected to their TV show, City of Vice. Both focus on the mid-eighteenth century Bow Street Runners, created by the magistrate Henry Fielding and his brother and successor John, who were arguably London’s first police force. I haven’t seen the show (since it isn’t out on DVD yet or anything, and I’m not the BitTorrent sort), but the first episode of the game is a fun little murder mystery. Unfortunately, the game is prone to hanging at odd points — I discovered a lot of complaints online, when I got frozen during a particular bit — so we’ll have to see if they fix those problems.

Don’t play it without a mouse, though; the bits that require coordination are apparently hell on a trackpad or any other such device.

Ich habe Buch!

You know what’s a wacky experience?

Flipping through a book and thinking, “I wrote this . . . but it’s all in weird funny-looking words with too many capital letters!”

Or, to put it differently — I have the German edition of Doppelganger! They sent me four author copies, which arrived yesterday. It’s very strange, I tellya. I can pick out enough words in German to be able to figure out which bit of the story I’m looking at, but not enough to read it much at all, so it’s very alien-looking. And man, some of those nouns get long. But it’s also boggling to think that somebody — one Axel Plantiko — spent who knows how many hours reading over my words and working this strange alchemy upon them.

It’s my book . . . but it isn’t.

Anyway, many thank-yous to Herr Plantiko, and eeeee! German book!