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!

handwriting

One last follow-up on the signature thing, which is really just a ramble about handwriting.

I was thinking thinky thoughts about handwriting, of course, during that whole affair, and fortuitously happened across an article in Slate about the difficulties of deciphering various people’s scripts. Man, I pity the folks having to wade through that kind of stuff.

Which brings me to Elizabeth’s handwriting. One of the books I got out of the library while working on the contract language was a collection of her letters, poetry, etc. The book I was looking for was checked out, unfortunately, but I went to the appropriate section anyway, and sure enough found another one I could use. Not until I got home did I realize that fate had handed me a little gift: while the book I’d been after had modernized her spellings, this one consisted of direct transcriptions of every document we have that’s verifiably in Elizabeth’s handwriting. Not only did that mean her idiosyncratic spellings (which can be used, in part, to reconstruct her pronunciation!), but also strike-outs, marginal insertions, re-drafting of speeches . . . and a few photo images of the documents themselves.

First of all, that means the contract is written wherever possible with the spellings Elizabeth favored. (Geekiness, yes, yes, we know.) But it also means I got to look at her handwriting.

The first image is of a translated poem written either by Princess Elizabeth or her tutor. Nobody can tell which, because she, like many students, was copying her tutor’s hand scrupulously. It’s a very nice, clean italic hand, but lacking in personality, as you would expect. Later on they show a letter to Edward Seymour, and there you can see her developed italic, with various flourishes and personal touches that make it distinctively Elizabeth’s handwriting, and nobody else’s. If we’d had more time on the contract thing, I would have been supremely tempted to try and make a font out of it, so we could print the entire document in Elizabeth’s actual hand. But that’s neither here nor there.

The third document gets me right in the gut. Shortly after Mary ascended the throne, she sentenced Elizabeth to imprisonment in the Tower. Elizabeth, stalling for time, asked her guards for leave to write a letter to Mary; she took long enough over it that the tide changed on the Thames, and so her imprisonment was delayed by a day. The image shows the two pages of that letter: in that same italic hand, but messier, less artfully controlled. The lines slant upward, the letter-forms are sharper, and on the second page, uneven diagonal lines cross out the white space between the conclusion and the signature, so that no one could insert additional material that could compromise her already precarious position. The evidence of her worry and fear is breathtaking; looking at her handwriting, I see Elizabeth as a person, not as the much-mythologized Gloriana. She was young and scared and desperate not to be imprisoned. It’s a priceless glimpse into the past.

Aaaand then <snicker> there’s the fourth and last image. The introduction to the book had talked about the distinct shift in Elizabeth’s handwriting after she became Queen, as she adapted her style to her position. Honestly? I though at first that they meant it had become more ornate and regal.

She developed doctor handwriting.

The letter to Sir William Cecil is a nigh-illegible scrawl only vaguely recognizable as italic, or even as Engl — oh, wait, it’s Latin. <g> You can’t even tell at first glance what language it’s in. But (looping back around to that link up above), I understand now why people working on her manuscripts nowadays run into trouble. The letters m and n become vague horizontal wobbles; a’s might be caret marks or o’s. Often they can’t tell her n’s from her u’s, which leads to real trouble in her French letters; whether a word is “us” (nous) or “you” (uous, i.e. vous) can change the entire meaning of a sentence. Throw in the abbreviations and idiosyncratic spelling of the time, swirl it all in a blender (which I think she did), and you’ve got another powerful statement of personality. Elizabeth herself referred to it as “skribling” in a letter to James of Scotland, and a court secretary called it “Queen Elizabeth’s running hand.” It looks like she wrote while running.

It’s an incredible gift, being able to see her handwriting. Whether you buy into graphology or not, certainly our writing expresses our personalities very powerfully.

results of the signature contest

Now that I’ve heard back from everyone, I’m finally free to post, not just the winner of the signature contest, but all the entrants. I know a lot of people were curious to see what got sent to me, and I think everybody who contributed deserves recognition for their effort. (For the record, they are all receiving copies of Midnight Never Come; the winner also gets other goodies.)

In the end, fifteen people sent me entries; some sent more than one. You can see my favorite contribution from each contestant on my website, where I’m keeping them for posterity. As I said to several people, I’m very grateful to have gotten enough that I had the luxury of contemplating what to me looked the most like Invidiana’s handwriting; in the end, it came down to that. And it was a tough choice!

Second runner-up: Maggie Stiefvater, who sent me two entries. The other was more ornate, and I liked it a lot, too, but in the end, this was my favorite of the two:

First runner-up: John Pritchard. I liked this one a lot; the rough edges to the strokes looked very realistic, and in correspondence later he proved that (as I suspected) he knows a lot about the writing of the period:

And finally, the winner: Karen Jolley-Williams! She, too, knew what she was talking about when it came to period handwriting, but in the end she won by stepping back one degree into an older style, as she described in her e-mail to me: “I made the Faerie Queen’s letters blacker, more angular and cold, less Humanistic and certainly less approachable in personality than Elizabeth’s italic hand.” And indeed, the blackletter look ended up being the deciding factor for me. Step behind the cut to see . . . .

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