Sign up for my newsletter to receive news and updates!

Posts Tagged ‘amazon’

Ninety days . . .

. . . and counting.

Since I’m aiming to spread the exciting content (i.e. the excerpts) out a bit, this time you get something a bit more dull. Unless you’re one of the people who apparently loves hearing me geek about the historical research, in which case, my research bibliography may count as very exciting indeed.

If the Midnight Never Come bibliography is any example, that list will continue to grow as I keep remembering other books that should be on it. But at least it’s something to start with.

links to close out the year

Brief interview up at Reality Bypass, with me answering some questions and Lune answering a few more, a la Cat and Muse. Midnight Never Come has also ended up on a few people’s lists of their favorite books this year, which warms the cockles of my heart.

Also, since I have a few tabs that have been hanging around forever: another brief bit from me, more like a micro-guest blog than an interview, on the topic of crazy-ass research; and Darrin Turpin’s follow-up to my earlier post on monarchy in fantasy.

Happy New Year, all!

heads up!

I’m sure you all have your Christmas shopping done already, right? But in case you’re looking for a gift for that one last special person, head on over to the auctions. Not only are there many wonderful goodies for sale there, you can also buy a Midnight Never Come gift package, with a signed hardcover copy of the book and many other fun bits to go along. The auction ends at noon (Pacific time) on Thursday.

what we like to call a marathon

Over 4K words today (all of the London Go Boom variety), and over 8K of revision. We’re nearing the home stretch.

This book feels more raw to me than Midnight Never Come, in a way I find hard to describe. It’s not simply that I think I’m being meaner to my characters — though that’s part of it. (I think Irrith is the only viewpoint character I haven’t done anything horrible to. I wonder if I can fix that before the end?) Partly it’s that I think the politics are less polished; whether it’s a genuine difference of time period or a result of the rough edges being worn off the Elizabethan era, the seventeenth century just feels messier, with more sharp corners sticking out. And I’m really going all-out on the explosions, which no doubt contributes in its own way.

Raw. That’s the only word I can find for it.

112K of book at present, with two days of Fire yet to be added.

bonus Friday roundup

Normally I would wait until I have a few more things to post, but two of these, fresh as of today, are the ones I was waiting for before, so what the heck.

***

I’m today’s Big Idea over on John Scalzi’s blog “Whatever.” It’s a feature he runs, where authors lay out what story/setting/conflict seed they started with, and how it developed during the course of writing.

Also, Fantasy Book Critic has posted the world’s most in-depth interview with me. The Midnight Never Come-related parts are probably familiar to those who have seen or heard me talk about it before, but Robert asked a lot of other questions pertaining to academia, short fiction, the future of publishing, and more.

***

In more review-like territory, I made yhlee cry. (In a good way.)

***

There will, I think, be an awesome piece of news to relate soon, but that’s still sitting in the box of Things For A Later Post.

Sporadic Roundup Number Whatever

Remember, you have until midnight Greenwich time (EDT 7 p.m., I believe) to enter the Midnight Never Come competition, with a chance to win £250/$500 in bookstore vouchers. (It’s a pretty sweet deal. D’you think my publisher would notice if I put myself in?)

***

If you want to hear me ramble on, instead of seeing it, Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing has a podcast interview up, wherein Shaun Ferrell asks me questions about writing, academia, and (of course) Midnight Never Come.

You can subscribe to the feed via iTunes, or download the file directly. If you want to cut straight to my part of the podcast, it starts around twelve minutes in; if you want to skip right past me, I think I shut up around the forty-minute mark.

Despite my best efforts, I, er, talked like I normally do. Which is to say, fast. Sorry about that.

***

Review roundup! Only one of them is accessible online, unfortunately.

Our own ninja_turbo liked it, even accounting for friend bias. Being unfamiliar with the history, he was still able to follow along — yay!

Meredith Schwartz and Jackie Cassada at Library Journal call it a “deft blending” and note that, unlike many staples of the Elizabethan fantasy genre, I don’t use real people as my main characters. (Either approach, of course, can work. But they seem to have liked this one.)

And then two more good ones mailed in from my UK publisher. One appears to come from a magazine called Starburst, and wins my heart for calling Christopher Marlowe “Kit.” The other is from SciFiNow, and it tells me I hit one of the targets I was particularly aiming for: “Eschewing the use of the typical Seelie and Unseelie (or Summer and Winter) courts that appear in so many novels dealing with the subject, Brennan has created a faerie society that is quintessentially English.” Rock on! That goes up there with my UK publisher deciding to pick up a London book by an American author in the first place for evidence I’m doing something right.

***

Finally, if you’ve read the book, feel free to poke your head in on the discussions going on in the spoiler thread. I’m enjoying the back-and-forth there quite a bit.

Open Book Thread: Midnight Never Come

Quick reminder: the contest running on the official website for Midnight Never Come goes until midnight GMT on June 30th. All six questions have been posted now, and for every one you get right, your name is entered in the drawing for a $500/£250 gift voucher.

Onward to the purpose of the post.

Consider this the official Open Thread for Midnight Never Come. If you have any comments you’d like to make about the book, questions you’d like to ask, feel free to do it here. Want to inquire about some historical detail? Find out why I chose to do something a particular way? Point out to me some anachronistic words or phrases I failed to scrub out before publication? This is the place. I’ll be linking this post on my website, so if you haven’t read the book yet, you can always come back here later.

(People can and do e-mail me, but I figured I’d try doing this publicly, where people can see what, if anything, others have to say.)

imponderables

The character who was John Highlord when I started writing has been replaced with Thomas Soame, because I realized matters would work better if I used an alderman who was also a member of Parliament later on, and both of them are minor enough figures that they don’t rate entries in the DNB. (Ergo, I can make stuff up and not worry too much about somebody knowing I’m wrong.)

So I ask you: why, pray tell, does my subconscious want to insist that Thomas Soame wouldn’t talk the way I had John Highlord do? Why does it object to him being broad-shouldered? Everything I know about both of these men would fit into a paragraph shorter than this one, and it consists of a handful of dates regarding their public service. I don’t know what they looked like. I don’t know what their personalities were. Yet my subconscious resists the swap.

This, chickadees, is why naming is sometimes a giant problem for me. If I don’t find the right name, I often can’t write the character, and it’s like pulling teeth to change a name once it’s settled in. Some bit of my brain decides nobody named Thomas Soame could possibly be a blunt-spoken, broad-shouldered guy, and god only knows how long it will take to convince it otherwise.

This job would be easier if my brain were rational.