signature contest report

If you were one of the entrants to the signature contest, please check your e-mail. We have a winner, but I’m waiting to hear back from everyone before I announce it here.

mini-contest! also emergency!

Now I need someone with calligraphy skills.

The challenge is this: e-mail me an image of Invidiana’s signature. Think sixteenth-century handwriting (see icon) as done by a cold, heartless, Machiavellian faerie queen.

I’ll pick my favorite and send it to my publicist. In return, you’ll receive a copy of Midnight Never Come, plus (if I can wangle it out of him) a contract written in period language, on parchment paper, sealed in wax, possibly with a raven feather, with that signature and Elizabeth’s written at the bottom. (It’s a promotional doohickey they’re putting together for the book, and if it turns out the way we’ve been describing it to each other, it’s going to look awesome.)

Deadline is 10 p.m EST tomorrow (Saturday). Sorry for the short notice, but this whole thing is happening very abruptly; they need to print these things on Sunday. You can send me a scan or a digital photo (if it’s steady and clear enough), or create it directly in a graphics program; whatever works for you. Address for submissions is marie dot brennan at gmail dot com.

I don’t know if there are enough calligraphy/good handwriting types here to make this work — turned out I know too few artists for the “Baby Got Back” contest to happen — but I’m hoping so.

draft.

My brain has melted into goo, my spellinges maye neuer recouer, and I’ll be speaking in run-on sentences for the next seventeen years, by which time I may hope by the grace of God to have finished one . . . but I have a draft.

And if I never have to see the phrase “the said X” EVER AGAIN, it’ll be too soon.

I just wish I could see my publicist’s face when he tries to read this thing. He told me to get as Elizabethan as I could; I don’t know if he realized that meant using twenty-seven words where five would do, all of them spelled with extraneous e’s and y’s and a total disregard for the distinction between u and v.

There may need to be a revision of this tomorrow.

But that can wait for tomorrow.

the passion of the hunt

Two libraries, one incredibly helpful law reference librarian, and the Letters and papers, foreign and domestic, of the reign of Henry VIII later, I have the text of two mid-century secret treaties, and also a collection of Elizabeth’s writings.

Which is not to say people shouldn’t keep making suggestions in the comments to the previous post. More help is always good.

I know this will only confirm my geekery, but — there’s something deeply satisfying about the intensive research slog that suddenly produces the perfect resource or bit of information. It isn’t just the payoff; it’s the effort that goes into it. Of course, you can’t tell from inside the slog whether there are any gems waiting at the end, so you just keep trudging through the mire of English property law, wanting to hit Bracton over the head with his own writings and hoping you’ll get a payoff eventually. When you don’t, it sucks. But when you do . . . .

That’s fun.

emergency research!

Can anybody provide me with or point me toward sources for Elizabethan-era legal contracts or treaties? I need to see the style in which they were written.

And then try to mimic it.

By close of play tomorrow, if I can manage it.

the recommendations aren’t dead!

Every so often (very often, at this time of year), my brain says “down with productivity!”

In this instance, that means you get book recommendations.

I’m trying to convince myself I don’t have to keep to a monthly schedule, so please disregard the suspicious appearance that I’ve posted (late) January and February books. In no particular order, and on no particular timetable, feel free to check out Jim Hines’ Goblin Quest (likely to appeal to “Order of the Stick” fans), and Ekaterina Sedia’s The Secret History of Moscow (likely to appeal to fans of Gaiman’s Neverwhere).

new faces for old books

I got cover flats for the re-issues of Doppelganger and Warrior and Witch yesterday, and in looking today, I see that Amazon has them listed. So if you’ve been curious about them, they’ve been recast as Warrior and Witch — not the most original retitling ever, but man, I tried and failed to come up with anything better. At least this way it’s easy to tell the books go together, both in terms of titling and covers. (And no, they didn’t just flip the picture over for the new cover, though obviously it is meant to be extremely simliar. It is a new picture.)

So yeah. August street date for those, both at the same time, so anybody who finds me via Midnight Never Come will easily be able to lay their hands on other stuff I’ve written. I have no idea if the old versions will get pulled when that happens, of if they’ll coexist for a little while on the shelves. At least they’ve printed on the backs of both that they’re reissues of old titles, so people won’t feel like we’re trying to pull a fast one on them; also, they’ve made the sequel’s cover copy a little bit less spoilericious. Not completely so, but I’m not sure it’s possible to write useful cover copy for it that won’t have any spoilers.

It’ll be neat to see myself suddenly jump up to a more substantial shelf presence, with three books out there at once. I don’t know what quantities they’ll be shipping of any of them, but it should be pretty good.

thing-a-day

I’ve talked to a couple of people about Thing-a-Day, which is sort of a NaNoWriMo-esque quasi-movement thingy — by which I mean it’s a web-organized thing you decide to participate in for a set period of time, collectively with other people. Er, that isn’t very clear, is it? The website explains it better. Anyway, the point is to do something creative every day in February, for about 20-60 minutes. It can be the same creative something every day, or different things; it can be your usual creativity, or something you’ve never done before.

Me? I’m drawing.

I’ve said for a long time that I’d like to be better at it (my current level being “not very good at all”). I would especially like to be able to draw people realistically, since I think that might help me a lot with visualizing my characters. So I’m going to be drawing twenty-eight faces at a minimum, one per day. (Today I went on for a while longer, drawing three still lifes of decreasing crappiness, but I expect I won’t have the time and inclination for that every day.) I’ve arranged for weekly tip sessions with the inestimable tooth_and_claw, so hopefully I’ll see improvement along the way.

If any of them turn out decently, I might post them. But ain’t nobody except T&C, and maybe not even her, seeing what I did today.

it’s that time of year again . . . .

. . . the time of year when I am the laziest laze-about to ever laze.

Seriously. Late January, early February? It’s all I can do to pause the Buffy DVDs long enough to go feed myself so I don’t die of starvation. I had things I was going to do tonight. I have things I’m going to do tonight.

. . . right?

Maybe if I watch all the rest of Season 7 really fast, then the lack of additional Buffy to watch will compel me to be productive.

Maybe.

old-skool sale

In the days of old, back when writers used typewriters and typesetters lost fingers to their hot-lead monstrosities, story acceptances used to be sent by post.

That was not the intent of Christopher Cevasco, editor of Paradox, but since his e-mail appears to have vanished into the ether, the first I knew of my sale there was when the contract showed up in my mailbox today. The arrival of an envelope from them had me sighing in disappointment, thinking I’d been rejected, but as I felt the heft of the thing, I was reminded of the old maxim that bad news comes in fat envelopes, good news in skinny ones. I had a fat envelope, but then again, we’re long past the days when writers asked for their manuscripts to be sent back to them, so it just might be a contract inside . . . .

And so it was. Yay!

So good news for all you Kit Marlowe fan-boys and fan-girls; “The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe” will be in Issue Twelve of Paradox, which is slated for April. I’m exceedingly glad to see it find a home there, since it’s more a historical fiction story than a speculative one, and Paradox is explicitly a historical fiction mag with an interest in historically-related spec fic. This was pretty much the best matchup I could imagine for this particular story.

Edited to add: Hah. Five minutes after posting this, a rejection for a different story arrives in my inbox. Good ol’ Gmail, keeping my ego in check . . . .

for the WIN

We’ve been joking for a while that I should come up with some book idea that would allow me to write off the upcoming Mediterranean cruise as research, and therefore a business expense. (We aren’t paying for the cruise itself, but y’know, the expenses that go with it.)

On the way to Boston for VeriCon, my subconscious coughed up just such an idea.

The best part is, I wasn’t trying to think of any such thing. I’ve been toying with some YA ideas lately, trying to think of what else I could do to ensure an ongoing YA publishing career, and one of my ideas (archaeological in nature) hopped from Mesoamerica to Egypt to the classical world, and then did a neat little do-si-do and came back out as a story about archaeological looting, the black market in antiquities, and supernatural happenings on board . . . you guessed it . . . a cruise ship.

Right now, my subconscious appears to be made of win.

I should also have a Mesoamerican icon . . . .

I love the fact that I have trained my memory decently well to hold onto ideas I have while falling asleep.

Because last night I came up with a short story that, if I can pull it off, might just be brilliant. Not just my usual, fairly plot-driven fare, but something much deeper, and more unusual in its structure. And it has an awesome title. (Though you have to know the story to know why it’s awesome.)

Then I went to sleep and forgot about it.

But partway through today, while I was thinking about other things, my brain tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Oh yeah, don’t forget about this.”

I have it down in notes now, and who knows? I may try to write some of it this weekend. I wrote “Nine Sketches” half at VeriCon, and I’m damned proud of that one; maybe this one can get in on some of that mojo.

So, yeah. “Chrysalis.” Might be my next story, if I can hold onto Mesoamerica and teen-angst urban fantasy at the same time.

Update: Well, now I know what all the people in the story are called. (Or at least most of them. Depends on whether I only name the pov characters, or whether folks like Konil’s daughter will get named, too.)