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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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!