after-action report

I think I enjoy World Fantasy more every year, as I learn more of how I best operate there. When I first show up, I’m pretty useless: bad at recognizing faces I haven’t seen in a year, bad at worming my way into conversations, bad at social small talk. Warming up takes a while. But I know that now, so I don’t feel stressed by the usual “oh god I can’t find anybody I know and my foot is looking for opportunities to get into my mouth and I’m not having fun yet.” I’ll get there. It just takes time. By Friday I’m doing better, and now I know that my mental list of panels I’d like to see doesn’t even reach the status of guidelines, let alone actual rules; I’ll go if I feel inclined, but if on my way there I get waylaid by a conversation, whatever. I said this weekend, and I really mean it, that I go to WFC for the conversations. For the lunches and dinners and hallways and relatively quiet corners of room parties where I can get into discussions of Mesoamerican kingship, recent TV series, Kit Marlowe’s sexuality, butt-shot urban fantasy covers, gender issues in SFWA, and the abominations of Leviticus, to name a few topics of the last few days.

By Friday night I’m doing pretty good. Saturday’s usually a swimming success. At some point on Sunday I’ll start to hit my limit: I’m ready to put on my headphones and bury my nose in a book for the trip home. And that’s okay, too.

But it isn’t all cookie-cutter routine, either. Every year I expand the circle of people I know. And this year featured the new experience of increased contact with folks from my publisher, specifically members of the publicity departments in the US and UK. I got trotted out for a lunch with some of the book-buyers for Borders, not as the featured attraction, but to smile and make small contributions to the conversation; mostly I learned quite a bit about how the publisher sells the books to the store, before the store sells them to the customer. And I discovered that the publicity guys Have Plans for Midnight Never Come. Not national-tour level plans, but we all agreed that’s not even a good idea for someone at my stage of things. Cool website plans, though, most definitely. I don’t know how much of it will turn out to be pie-in-the-sky, but I love the notions we were batting around.

Speaking of that book, I got anecdotal proof of the quality of its cover: people were very eager to pick it up and look at it, including some total strangers during the autographing session. (And with nearly a dozen people spontaneously approving of the author photo on the back, I am finally reassured I managed to get a non-crappy picture of myself. Readers will expect me to look like that for the next thirty years, I imagine.)

And hey! Amazon has it listed for pre-order. I was going to say “at last,” but really, the book isn’t coming out for seven months. They’re plenty early. So anyway, that’s one benchmark passed. (And apparently that thing I wrote up for my editor back in June was the cover copy. Wish I’d known that then . . . though it holds up okay, despite having been written when less than a third of the book was done.)

Put all that together with a royalty statement that tells me Doppelganger and Warrior and Witch are both still doing bang-up business, and right now? Things are looking pretty good.

almost-real book!

Originally the plan was for me to revise Midnight Never Come in October, copy-edit it in November, page-proof it in December, and then they’d print ARCs (Advance Reading Copies) in January.

Then I got that “hey, could you revise this sooner?” request in September. Turns out that was because they wanted to print ARCs in November.

(This, incidentally, meant copy-editing would be pushed back to January. Or so I was told. Until three hours later, when I was told that no, the freelancer who does that work was available, so we’d be doing it on November after all.)

Anyway, you may have noticed that today is still October. So, oddly enough, was yesterday — the day a box full o’ ARCs hit my doorstep.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!! Booksiesbooksiesbooksiesbooksies!!!!!!!!!!

Ahem.

I held off on posting about it until I could surprise a few people who needed to be surprised with the ARCs I was giving them (the last of those being tooth_and_claw, but I’m not shipping it to Italy when you’re coming back here before too terribly much longer). I have more I need to send out, of course, but those people already know they’re coming.

I’m going to be curious to see how this ARC ends up comparing to the real book. Remember, we haven’t copy-edited the thing yet; it’s printed straight from the manuscript I sent my editor, but typeset like a real book. Only I’m not sure whether that will end up being the real typesetting, or whether it’s just something temporary they threw together while the final typesetting gets worked out. The cover, though, isn’t just full-color (something they don’t always do for ARCs) — it’s the full-blown really real cover, with the foil for the title and the spot gloss. Even color ARC covers often lack the special effects the finished deal will have (the title on the Warrior and Witch ARC, for example, isn’t embossed).

So it looks almost exactly like a real book, except for the big white notes saying it’s an advance copy of yadda yadda and here’s how it’s being promoted.

June is so terribly far away . . . .

research question #1

Must ponder what I want in the way of a Victorian icon. For now, I shall use the MNC one.

Anyway. The real point of this post.

This question is particularly aimed at d_aulnoy, since I know she’s a Victorianist, but if any of the rest of you happen to have familiarity with nineteenth-century literature, please feel free to jump in.

I’m trying to come up with a title for the Victorian sequel. I want to do something in the vein of Midnight Never Come: that is, a poetic phrase taken from the literature of the period, which is also (of course) applicable to the substance of the novel. Mind you, I’m still working on figuring out what that substance is — but you’d be surprised (or maybe not) how much having a compelling title can help shape a story.

But of course there’s a lot of Victorian literature out there; I need to narrow it down. Specifically, I want things apropos of London, industrialization, urbanization, maybe the underworld . . . you get the drift. Soppy poems about love and/or how pretty nature is need not apply. Random odes to a hat the poet saw someone wear to the opera, ditto. Stuff that’s a little grittier and grimmer. What poems/poets should I look at?

please update your bookmarks

I have no idea how many, if any, people have bookmarked things off the webpage for Midnight Never Come, but if you have, be aware that the URLs will be changing. Since I’m doing more than one Onyx Court novel, I’ve created a directory for that series, and moved the MNC material off into it.

Once upon a time! . . . later.

February, 1860. Workers break ground for the world’s first underground railway system, that will soon cut through the heart of London — and threaten the secrets that lie beneath.

For centuries, fae have dwelt in a shadowy mirror of the city above. Now, at last, their sanctuary is crumbling. The Queen of the Onyx Court has gone into seclusion, fighting to maintain their defenses, and in her absence, her subjects run unchecked. The filthy, gas-lit streets of Victorian London are their playground and battleground both, in a conflict between ancient magic and modern industry that will force them to an inescapable choice: flee, adapt, or be destroyed.

When I said Midnight Never Come was a stand-alone novel, I meant it. And I still do.

But I figured out how to write a sequel . . . 270 years later.

The blurb above is pure, unadulterated hand-waving. I know roughly the ideas I want to toss into the stew of this novel, but not the specifics of what I’m doing with them, because right now you are witnessing the very embryonic stages of a book. I thought this idea up all of eight days ago, proposed it to my editor all of seven days ago, and got it approved this afternoon. I have not yet begun researching it. But I can’t bring myself to hold off on announcing it until I’ve worked out the finer details. (Like, you know, a title1.)

So what am I really saying? That I’ll be writing another historical London faerie fantasy. (That I am indeed a sucker for punishment.) That the book will be set in the later Victorian period, and will concern any or all of the following: the London Underground, Queen Victoria, spiritualism, imperialism, Charles Dickens, Spring-Heeled Jack, class conflict, the Industrial Revolution, and Christina Rossetti’s poem “The Goblin Market” — plus assorted other things I don’t even know about yet.

Stay tuned to this space for the further adventures of Good God I Really Have Gone Crazy.

—–
1 – Courtesy of certain friends, the tongue-in-cheek working title is Karl Marx and the Faerie Proletariat.

an odd reaction in fandom

By now, everybody’s heard that Dumbledore is gay. That is not, I promise, what this post is about — just the inciting cause of the post.

To entertain myself, I took a brief look at Fandom Wank, wondering what kinds of reactions they were rounding up. (Answer: pretty much the ones you’d expect.) The only link I really followed was one to westeros.org, where they were discussing the issue of “interview canon.” And there I found an attitude that really raised my eyebrows.

I’m paraphrasing here, because several posts I saw raised this point, each one phrasing it differently. But the reaction was something to the effect of, “Authors shouldn’t create canon in their interviews; it should all be in the books.”

Um.

Step back for a moment and look at that. Authors shouldn’t create canon . . . .

Imagine you are a non-fanfic-writing-individual. An author you like gives an interview. They reveal — in response to someone’s question — a detail about the story you didn’t know before, be it that so-and-so is gay, so-and-so grew up in a home with seventeen cats, so-and-so really likes mint chocolate chip ice cream. What is your reaction? Me, I’d think, “oh, that’s interesting,” and enjoy the sense that there’s a real world the author is writing about, that exists beyond the simple words on the pages of the books.

Now imagine that author answering such questions with “Eh, I don’t know.” Makes the world look like those old Hollywood facades, doesn’t it? A pretty front with nothing behind it. What you see is what you get. Kind of boring, really.

Authors shouldn’t create canon in their interviews.

That statement contains a giant roaring assumption that just boggles me: that fanfiction is some how an end goal for what an author does. That authors should be taking the desires of fanficcers into account when writing their books, when talking about their books, when answering the questions of fans. Why? Because apparently it makes things more complicated for the fanficcers, having to track what got said when and whether or not it should count as canon.

If the comments had been phrased in the vein of, “man, now we have to debate whether or not to count that as canon,” I wouldn’t mind. It’s a problem for the people writing fanfic; let them decide how to handle it. But the accusatory tone I saw in some of the comments . . . how inconsiderate of J.K. Rowling, to create canon in her interviews. Apparently she makes a habit of this. The nerve! To know more about her characters than she wrote into the books! To share that information with people when they ask!

Fandom wankery, indeed.

Okay, I’ve got it.

Okay, I have my thoughts in order now. For those of you just tuning in, this is about an anonymous comment left on my journal, which I feel to be very wrong-headed, but against which I was having a difficult time assembling my arguments. I can’t promise conciseness, exactly, but I’m aiming for coherence, which is what I was lacking before. And thank you to everyone who commented, often making points along these same lines, which helped me go “yeah, that’s what I was after.”

To recap:

It seems to me that a lot of books these days throw in a mixed cast for the hell of it, to be PC, to try to please everybody. Some stories are just Man Stories; some are just Women Stories. Could you imagine a random female having been thrown into, say, DELIVERANCE? The whole idea is silly. I say you should write a story as it is–if it’s male adventure, then that’s what it is; throwing in a woman won’t make it different or better.

We can leave aside the triple use of the eyebrow-raising notion that writers “throw” such things into their stories “for the hell of it.” I want to talk about the gender politics here.

First up: “Man Stories” vs. “Woman Stories.” This presupposes a notion of stories being ineluctably “male” or “female” in their point of view, intended audience, whatever. Presumably “Man Stories” involve blowing stuff up, while “Woman Stories” are touchy-feely. But I’m likely to suggest watching Die Hard, while my husband will vote for When Harry Met Sally, so clearly that’s not universal. Does this make me a bad woman, and him a bad man? Gendering stories like that just reinforces the ideology that as men or women we “should” behave in certain ways, have certain tastes, etc. And that has pernicious knock-on effects in the long term.

Next: the suggestion that “a random female” doesn’t belong in Deliverance, or whatever male-focused story you want to substitute in there. (Hint: “a random” anything doesn’t belong in any story.) I’m not terribly familiar with Deliverance, so let’s take the example from comments in my other post, that of Wellington’s army on the Peninsula in the 19th century. Granted: soldiers of the time were all-but-universally male, and the fact that the occasional cross-dressing woman did end up in the army doesn’t mean you should shoehorn one into the story out of some misguided notion of gender parity. But is that the only approach? Armies were surrounded by laundresses, prostitutes, local women, officers’ mistresses, wives following their soldier husbands, and a variety of other individuals of the female persuasion. Not every story will involve such people, true; a focused short story about one soldier comforting another as he dies on the battlefield might have just two characters, both male. (But does the dying one have a fiancee or wife? Are there women picking over the corpses around them?) Arguing from extreme cases is pointless, though. More important is the general picture: that while the soldiers of the time were male, writing about a 19th century army while ignoring all that supporting cast perpetuates a fallacious notion, namely, that Manly Man Soldiers don’t need or have wimmen in their lives. They did and do. Or, to state it more broadly: it perpetuates the fallacious notion of women’s irrelevance to history (or the present day).

From there: if your story is set in a secondary world, you own what you created. And I don’t mean the copyright. I mean that you have made choices; you are responsible for them. Does this mean you should create only utopian societies where everything from gender onward is peachy keen? Of course not. That would be boring. But if you set it up so women are insignificant to your story, then can you explain why? Are your reasons good? I could tell you why there are so few men in Doppelganger, and while my reasons have a certain amount of validity, I’m not thrilled with them. I’d probably handle it differently now. But the point is, I own those choices; I’m the one who made that world and told that story.

All of this, of course, applies just as well to race, etc.

And in conclusion: little or nothing of what I’m saying here applies to the book this all started with, because I don’t think these fallacies are what was at work in that writer’s mind. My anonymous commenter simply happened to post in reply to that entry. There may be a connection in his mind (I’m assuming it’s a him), but not in mine.

commentary invited

Normally I wouldn’t single out a commenter on this journal for public (and communal) rebuttal. But in this case, the comment was posted anonymously. Now, maybe the person in question just doesn’t have an LJ account, and didn’t realize that it’s generally appreciated for such people to sign their comments. On the other hand, maybe not.

The comment was posted in response to my issues with The Lies of Locke Lamora. Here it is, in its entirety.

It seems to me that a lot of books these days throw in a mixed cast for the hell of it, to be PC, to try to please everybody. Some stories are just Man Stories; some are just Women Stories. Could you imagine a random female having been thrown into, say, DELIVERANCE? The whole idea is silly. I say you should write a story as it is–if it’s male adventure, then that’s what it is; throwing in a woman won’t make it different or better.

So: either an honest person who didn’t realize they should sign their comment, or someone hiding behind anonymity because of the substance of said comment. Either way, I don’t much care who it was, because I’m not looking to attack the person behind the words; I’m looking to attack the words themselves. Because I think this statement is very wrong-headed.

Here’s why I’m posting it: I know how I feel about the statement, but I’m having trouble articulating why. The thoughts are there; I just can’t catch them and make them settle down as words. (Not efficiently. I could maunder inefficiently on about the essentializing notion of Man Stories and Women Stories and the popular straw-man of “just to be PC.” But nobody wants to read four pages of me trying to get to the point.) So I turn to you, my mighty LJ readers, to help me out on this one. I know there are any number of you who could go to town on the fallacies of that comment, and I invite you to do so.

That way, the next time this comes up, I’ll be able to articulate my arguments against it more concisely than I can right now.

oof.

If the last two days of work have not precisely slain the Paper Monster, at least they have dealt it not one but several Mighty Blows.

See, the Paper Monster can’t actually be killed. I turn my back, and the next thing I know it’s sprouted more bills and class papers and critiqued drafts and scribbled-on bits and oh wow I never even opened that envelope. But it can be beaten into submission, at least temporarily.

My mistake was letting it grow so big this round. But it grew, and then I was moving, and then I was in England, and then I was noveling, and then I was getting married. The results were predictable, and entirely my fault.

On the other hand, I have a floor again. And maybe this time I can even keep up with my filing system.

Hah. Optimism.

bits of book news

I’ll use my MNC icon, because two of the three have to do with that book.

First of all, the website for Chapters (Canadian book chain) now lists Midnight Never Come for sale, with a release date of June 9th. Amazon, though, has yet to post it.

Second, I got a proof copy of the front cover today, and it is indeed very pretty. They appear to have decided to do the title in gloss rather than foil, while the gloss on the floral pattern may or may not go away. The color is a lot richer than it seemed on the screen.

And thirdly, I finally have some concrete news about the intended reissue of Doppelganger and Warrior and Witch. The intent is to put them both out in August of next year, with a new cover for Doppelganger (to make it match W&W better), slightly different cover detailing for both, and — perhaps the biggest change — new titles! (I’m not positive yet what those will be; I’m waiting to see if my suggestion goes over or not.) The idea is to make them look more obviously related, since there’s frankly nothing on the cover of W&W as it stands that tells you it’s connected . . . until you read the back cover and get a giant spoiler.

Okay, back to work.

open letter

Dear Brain,

Why?

No, seriously. I know I asked you for ideas. But did you have to come up with this? I don’t know if you remember, but we just did the research thing a few bleeding months ago. Is that really what we need to be doing again? I mean, come on.

Yes, it’s a shiny idea. But still.

Okay, okay. Yes. This might be a good thing. Let me sleep on it, okay? STOP PESTERING ME. I have a game tonight, and need to stop thinking about the Shiny! If it really is shiny, it’ll still be shiny tomorrow. You know how this works by now.

So yeah. Knock it off already.

With slightly murderous affection,
–Your Writer

fans

Not the sort who send you e-mail or ask for autographs; the sort you hold in your hand, for cooling yourself.

Does anyone have a recommendation for how to hang folding fans on a wall in a manner that won’t damage them? The one time I’ve done it, I’ve put in two small nails just inside the outermost sticks, below the fabric, but that warped the fabric where the weight was resting on the nails. I’m looking for a better solution. (All I can think of is nails on either side of the pivot pin, but they’d have to stick out awfully far, and I’d still probably need small nails at the top corners to keep it open and flat against the wall.)

the previous post, condensed

If you list off the years in which the events of Elizabeth really happened, it looks something like this (with parentheses for the fuzzy dates):

1555
1554
1555
1558
1559
(1568)
1559
1579
(early 1560s)
(early 1580s)
1582
1570
1581
1560
1571
1586
1569
1572

. . . not quite what you’d call chronological, ne?

so how accurate is it?

With Elizabeth: The Golden Age opening today, I have decided that now is a good time to post about Shekhar Kapur’s first installment, the 1998 film Elizabeth. Researching Midnight Never Come gave me an interesting perspective on it; I can now recognize what is and is not historically accurate in it. (Short form is: much of what happens is true, but not in that order and at that time.)

So for the curious, I offer up this glossing of the film’s historical accuracy, with footnotes and educational precepts for the wise.

(I shouldn’t have to say it, but I will: here be spoilers aplenty. Don’t read on if you don’t want to see them.)

First, a note on the visuals. Kapur’s commentary track on the DVD is very interesting, and chock-full of information on such things. He recognizes that the Elizabethans did not in fact live in bare stone rooms (they preferred wood well-padded with tapestries and rush matting), and also that fashion did not follow precisely that trajectory. Those elements are as they are for thematic reasons.

Now, going more or less sequentially through the film:

Cut for stupidly long length; don’t say I didn’t warn you about that, either