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Posts Tagged ‘doppelganger’

all the audio that’s fit to hear

I’ve managed to accumulate a small pile of audio news for y’all!

The big one is that at long last, the Onyx Court series is getting an audio treatment, courtesy of Blackstone Audio. Midnight Never Come came out last week; you can pick up that one from Apple or from Audible. The rest of the series will follow in due course!

I’ve also been doing a pile of audio stuff with Serial Box, starting last year. So far they’ve put up ten of my short stories and novelettes: “Daughter of Necessity,” “Coyotaje,” “Love, Cayce,” “Once a Goddess,” “The Genius Prize,” “At the Sign of the Crow and Quill,” “Mad Maudlin,” “A Mask of Flesh,” “What Still Abides,” and “Nine Sketches, in Charcoal and Blood.” But the big news here is that they’re going to do some of my novellas, as well! Deeds of Men was already done as an audiobook some years ago, and I don’t hold the rights for The Eternal Knot, but they’ll be recording audio versions of Dancing the Warrior and the two Varekai novellas, Cold-Forged Flame and Lightning in the Blood. I’ll announce those here once they’re done!

Doppelganger in a Humble Bundle!

I’m delighted to announce that the two Doppelganger novels, Warrior and Witch, are in a Humble Bundle curated by my agency!

The usual Humble Bundle setup applies: the amount you pay unlocks more books as you go along, until for $15 you get 26 books. It’s an incredible deal, and you’ll get a sampling of a great set of authors, including Aliette de Bodard, Tanya Huff, Simon Green, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Charlaine Harris, Jack Campbell, and more. The bundle is available for two weeks (i.e. ending July 31st), but there’s no reason to wait — get ’em now!

Doppelganger reborn!

cover art for THE DOPPELGANGER OMNIBUSLadies and gentlemen, the Doppelganger series is back!

I mean, it technically never went anywhere. But in the decade-plus since it was published, it was getting harder and harder to find the books, and so for the last year or so my agent and I have been working on getting the rights reverted to me. Once that happened, we turned around and produced some shiny! new! ebooks! Not only of Warrior and Witch, but also the prequel novella Dancing the Warrior, and then for those who prefer to get the whole thing in one fell swoop, there’s an omnibus edition that contains all three titles.

(Note that I did these through my agency, so if you’re used to picking up my ebooks through Book View Cafe, they are not on sale there. You can, however, get them from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, iTunes, and Kobo, as well as Indigo in Canada and Amazon in the UK.)

#5DaysOfFiction: Day One

Ten years ago today, my first novel came out.

This isn’t an April Fool’s joke, nor was it then. In fact, I’m happy to say that my less-than-entirely-auspicious debut date turned out just fine for me: ten years on, the book is still in print (though it likely won’t be for much longer). In the interim, I’ve published ten other novels, with twelfth due out on Tuesday, which ain’t a bad run for that span of time.

In celebration of that anniversary, and as a lead-up to the publication of In the Labyrinth of Drakes, we’re going to have Five Days of Fiction! Each day will feature a question, with guest answers from various authors of my acquaintance, and a chance for others to weigh in via comments or Twitter. Anybody who responds to the question will be eligible for a book giveaway: some days it will be one of my books, while others will be books that have had a big influence on me. You have until the next day’s question gets posted to answer; after that I’ll pick a winner.

***

To start us off, let me ask: what’s the earliest story you remember ever writing? Pretty much all of us made up stories at some point, even if we didn’t wind up pursuing it as a more serious hobby or career. How old were you? What kind of story was it? Did you ever show it to anybody?

One lucky respondent will receive a copy of Doppelganger — not Witch; I’m scouring the wilds of the internet to find the original edition, the one that came out on April 1st, 2006.

For me, the answer is a little mystery story I wrote when I was (I think) eight. The woman babysitting me and several other kids that summer taught us out to make little bound books with cardboard and cloth; mine was red, and I wrote a story about a girl named Jessica whose cat was stolen. I felt obliged to fill all the pages of the little book, so as I went along in the story, my handwriting got larger and larger . . . and then in desperation, when Jessica was going to get on a plane after rescuing her cat, I listed everything she packed, because I didn’t want any blank pages left. Yeah. Not exactly proof of future genius, that. 😛

And now for the guest responses! Find out what ~fabulous~ ideas the pros had when they were six . . . .

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(more…)

Ten Years Ago Today…

On December 8th, 2004, I sold my first book.

I tend to think of myself as having sold it on November 2nd, which is when I came home to find a message on my answering machine (we still had answering machines back then; it was the Stone Age) from the editor I’d submitted Doppelganger to, asking me to call her back. In reality, that was the moment at which I moved from “maybe someday I’ll sell a book” to “I am going to sell this book, and soon.” But I didn’t have an agent, and Warner Books didn’t buy unagented manuscripts — I’d kind of sneaked Doppelganger in the back door — so the phone call was basically to tell me I should go find an agent, pronto. Which I did: I officially signed on with one November 16th. But the deal wasn’t official until December 8th, ten years ago today.

In the interim, things have gone pretty damn well. I have nine novels out there, and two more within the next year. My books have been translated into several foreign languages. I’ve gotten a World Fantasy Award nomination. I’ve experienced my share of the vagaries in this line of work, but on the whole, I feel confident in calling my career a success. Heck, Doppelganger and its sequel are still in print! That isn’t likely to still be true ten years from their publication — it took about a year and a half to see the first one on the shelf, so the anniversary of that would be April 2016 — but they’ve trucked along in a manner that I will, channeling my Scandosotan ancestors, call “quite respectable.” Everybody tells you to expect your first book to sink like a rock; having mine still out there eight and a half years on is pretty darn pleasing.

In celebration of this day, please tell me what your favorite book is (or favorite author, if picking a single title is impossible), and why!

speaking of Ree . . . .

Possibly the easiest way for me to encapsulate the character I talked about in a previous post is by linking you to this song.

It’s an amazing remix all on its own. I love the way it builds, wave-like: it keeps climbing and then receding, stepping back to a quieter level when you expect it to bust out in full Linkin Park screamo yelling. 😛 But more than that, it fit beautifully with Ree at the pivotal moment of her story, the brink of her metamorphosis from the broken, lost thing she had been for eons back to her original self. “I’ve felt this way before” . . . she’d been shattered, and had tried to piece herself back together — thought she had succeeded — but then during the course of the game she was shattered again, falling back to square one, so far from her goal it was almost impossible for her to believe that she was actually closer to it than ever. “Against my will I stand beside my own reflection” . . . she sold half her soul to someone else, not realizing that was what she was doing, and she had to reclaim it. “Without a sense of confidence, I’m convinced that there’s just too much pressure to take” . . . the problem with her Seelie side was that it had too much confidence, without the fatalism of her Unseelie half to temper it, which is how she got broken again, and then the symbolism of the diamond and pressure over time pretty much guaranteed I had to use this song. This was Ree at her lowest point, one step away from victory, and the tension that builds throughout this evokes those days perfectly in my mind. There’s more to it than one song, but I can point to the song and say, this. This is why I can’t forget her story.

When I make soundtracks for characters, or for games I run, or for novels, many of the songs are filler. They go in because I want the whole story in music, and so I pick the best matches I can; in the really good soundtracks, even the filler is pretty solid. But this? This is why I go to the effort. For the one or two or five songs that are the story, the ones that become so linked with the narrative that they end up feeding back into it, and it can be eight years later and hearing them still brings the story to life in my head. This is Galen walking into the chamber below the Monument. This is Dead Rick getting his memories back. Here’s the entire second half of Doppelganger, according to my half-dozing brain when I was in the middle of writing the book; I can quite literally map segments of the novel to the various stages in the music, because my subconscious had decided this was the outline it was writing to. (Much like what happened here, though that was on a smaller scale.)

It’s no accident that I also love film scores. Pairing music with story — turning music into story — is one of my favorite things. Since I’m not a composer, I have to settle for the mix-tape approach. Sometimes it works out very, very well.

Chickens and eggs

mrissa has posted her Minicon schedule, with a panel on which comes first: the story or the setting. To quote the description,

Which Came First

The chicken or the egg? The story or the world? Does the story you want to tell determine the setting, or does your chosen setting demand a certain kind of story to be told in it? Are there some types of stories that simply cannot be told in a particular setting? How do creators balance these seemingly opposing forces in imagining their tales?

Which has gotten me reflecting on that question and how I would answer it. Off the cuff, I thought I probably start more with the setting — hi, anthropology, yeah. But does that hold up when I actually look at the data?

(For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to keep this to novels, but I will include unpublished novels in the list. It’s probably a different ballgame if I look at short stories; that, however, would require more time than I want to devote to this right now, and a refresher course as to what the heck I’ve written.)

Cut for length; I have more novels than you guys know about.

Worldbuilders

As in previous years, Patrick Rothfuss is running Worldbuilders, a charity auction/lottery to raise money for Heifer International.

He’s been adding prizes in batches, and mine just went live. By donating, your name will go into the lottery, with a chance to win not only copies of Warrior and Witch, but a signed ARC of A Natural History of Dragons. Plus there’s, like, a bazillion other awesome prizes — you can check out the site for more.

Go forth! Donate!

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/571250.html. Comment here or there.

disaster relief book sale fundraiser

I’m going to take care of two problems here today:

1) I would like to raise funds for the American Red Cross in the wake of Hurricane Sandy,

2) I have way too many author copies around the house, that I’d like to get rid of.

So we’re having a book sale here at Swan Tower. Comment on this post, or e-mail me at marie{dot}brennan{at}gmail{dot}com, and I will sell you the following books at the following prices, including autographs and (if you request it) personalization to you or another person of your choice.

Note that the prices are a bit higher than they might otherwise be, to ensure that packaging and shipping doesn’t take too big a bite out of the Red Cross donation total. (I will send books overseas, too, but since this is for charity, I will probably ask you to kick in a few bucks extra to cover the increased cost of shipping.)

    $10

  • A Star Shall Fall, mass market paperback (17 copies, was 19)
  • Warrior, mass market paperback (2 copies)
  • Witch, mass market paperback (1 copy)

Please spread the word wherever you think people would be interested. I’ll try to keep this list updated in a timely manner, so that you’ll know how many books are left of each type. ETA: Total raised thus far = $245

The sale will run for one week (so, through next Thursday morning, the 8th of November).

Guerrière

Lirez-vous français?

If you can read the above sentence and the answer is “yes” (or rather, “oui”), drop me an e-mail at marie[dot]brennnan[at]gmail[dot]com. I have two copies of Guerrère — i.e. the French-language translation of Warrior — looking for good homes. (No residents of France, please; I’d prefer to send them to people who can’t find the book in their local shop.)