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Posts Tagged ‘midnight never come’

But wait — there’s more!!!

This just in: the Science Fiction Book Club has picked up Midnight Never Come as a “Main Selection” for June! (Er, I assume that’s June of this year. But checking the e-mail, it actually says “a June catelog,” so who knows — maybe it’s June 3185.)

A peek behind the business curtain: the money from this gets funneled through my publisher (since they’re the ones who licensed that sub-right). Which means I’m suddenly a leap closer to earning out the advance for MNC . . . and the book isn’t even out yet! My pie-in-the-sky dream is to earn out by the end of the first royalty accounting period, but since it hits the shelves June 9th and the period ends June 30th, that pie is pretty far up there. This sale just brought it down by a couple thousand feet. I may just make it after all . . . .

picture time!

Your tidbit for today: photographs from my research trip to London last year. You can start here, or browse the entire set.

It’s an oddly-balanced set of pictures, for several reasons. First and foremost, I can’t take pictures of 99% of the stuff in the novel because it isn’t there anymore. The best I could do was to photograph some stuff like what was there. But that got hampered by the restrictions against photography inside Hampton Court Palace and Hardwick Hall; those were some of the most informative places I went, but I have very little to show from them. Finally, I also took a great many pictures I didn’t upload, but they’re reference shots from inside museum exhibits, and between the lighting conditions and the necessity of photographing through glass, most of them came out very poor-quality. So my apologies for the odd skew of the set. But those of you who have never been to London will at least have a few mental images now.

*** *** *** *** ***

My publicist wrote to tell me the other day that [redacted: I think I was not supposed to report this yet. But it had to do with a review.] It turns out that isn’t the first review of the book, though. I got myself listed on LibraryThing as an author, and in exploring the links I discovered that two people have already reviewed it. One mixed-to-positive (according to that individual’s allocation of stars), one overwhelmingly positive. And then d_aulnoy‘s ICFA con report includes her reaction; she grabbed the book in ARC while she was there.

Seventy days to street date. It’s finally starting to feel like the book is on its way.

Greetings from sunny Florida!

Yesterday I went swimming, then sat out in the sun to let my hair dry. *^_^*

I do so love ICFA. Even if it makes me get up at 7:30 in the morning to do a reading (and many thanks to the few hardy souls who came by to listen to us). Anyway, by a lovely coincidence of fate, my reading fell on the same day that I was planning to post my next excerpt from Midnight Never Come.

That’s the second part of what I read (and be sure to click past that initial page; there’s more to be had). The first part was, of course, the prologue; for the third part, you’ll have to wait a while, as it won’t be posted until shortly before the book comes out.

Which is far too long from now. <sigh>

wiktory

I have chosen my ICFA reading. And I’m getting good at eyeballing these things; my selection, when test-read, turned out to be twenty minutes on the nose.

For the record, everything in this selection will eventually be posted on my site as part of the teaser excerpt. But you’ll have to wait a while for it, so what you really want to do is get up at 8:30 in the morning on Friday to come hear me read it. Right?

Right?

Yes, that is officially my time slot. <sigh> Beggars can’t be choosers and all, but still — I’ll have to hope some of Alex Irvine’s and Judith Moffett’s fans stick around, or I’ll be reading to my co-panelists and Farah, who’s moderating.

next tidbit: evidence of my insanity

I honestly meant to do this months ago, but only got around to it now. Which means that instead of doing it the easy and sensible way (noting things down as I got them, or at least while I still had them), I’ve had to recreate the whole mess mostly from the photograph I took back then.

Your MNC Countdown entertainment for today is my research bibliography. Not as exciting as the prologue I posted the other week, but hopefully useful to two types of people: those researching similar topics, and those wanting concrete evidence of my insanity. It’s as complete as I can make it, though I keep remembering and adding in odd books that weren’t on my shelf. (Plus there’s that one Marlowe book I just can’t recall. I can see it in the photo, but not well enough to make out the author, and the title on the spine unhelpfully says only “Marlowe.” Very annoying.)

Anyway, collating the list was interesting, because Jesus Christ I did more work than I thought. And that’s not counting all the random internet resources I never marked down.

Enjoy!

ICFA

(There are too many potential icons for this post, so you just get the swan.)

Attention anybody going to ICFA! I’ll be there, of course — proud attendee since 2003; I can advance both sides of my professional life by flying to Florida every spring, so what’s not to like? — and it turns out I’m going to be doing more than I thought.

At 10:30 a.m. on Thursday I’ll be donning my academic hat (and my legal name) and participating in an interdisciplinary panel about fan studies — a panel of the discussion type, not the “we all read our at best tangentially related papers” sort.

Also, at some point — I don’t know my time slot yet — I’ll be switching to writer-hat and writer-name, and reading in the creative track. I’ve been squeaked on to it due to other peoples’ cancellations, so I suspect I won’t be listed in the program, but they always post the errata next to the reg desk, so look for me there. (Yes, in my sixth year, the worst has finally happened: I’m on the program twice, under two different names.) I will, as you might expect, be reading from Midnight Never Come.

And lastly, I’ll be bringing some small number of ARCs with me, to sell in the book room. My ego loves the mental image of a slugfest over the last copy between a rabid fan and a dusty old academic in the narrow, book-strewn aisles, but since the universe is unlikely to oblige me with such a scenario, you can probably guarantee your receipt of one simply by looking early in the con.

Hope to see some of you there!

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!

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 . . . .

(more…)

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.

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.

truly done

Well, that’s it. Page proofs are in the mail, headed back to the publisher.

It isn’t exactly true to say I’m washing my hands of this book until June, because of course I’ll need to do things to promote it. But work on the book itself is done.

And so, at last, the giant map of Elizabethan London has come down off the wall in the upstairs hallway . . . to be replaced by a new one, of course. I have a partial 1828 map, which is about forty years on the early side, but it might go up for now (once I get it flattened out). Especially since I’m not sure how best to go about getting a more contemporary one.

I just hope I can find some method that doesn’t involve three hours at Kinko’s with a bunch of tape again.

Aaaaand done.

Sigh. It’s so clear — now that it’s too late — that I needed two more paragraphs in that novel. One in this scene and one in that scene, to give a particular aspect of the story a bit of the punch it’s lacking.

But it’s way too late for that.

Oh well. I have finished the page proofs, listening to my soundtrack all the way, and at the very end text and music lined up perfectly, and I sniffled a bit. If I can still be moved at all by this thing, after having read it so very many times, there’s hope for it yet.

Even if it is two paragraphs short.

gyargh

And then sometimes, even though you read your copy-edited manuscript out loud, even though you had the online OED open in a tab almost the entire time you were writing your book, you get to the page proofs — the stage when alterations can have expensive consequences — and you realize your Elizabethan novel has the word “thug” in it.

Which comes from the Thuggee cult in India, and didn’t enter English until the nineteenth century.

Here’s the thing about this kind of work, the obsessive checking of word histories to root out any glaring anachronisms. It’s like being the CIA. Nobody will notice when you do your job right. Nobody will look at a paragraph and say, “Good on her! She didn’t refer to this character as paranoid, because we didn’t have that word until Sigmund Freud* came along!” Success is utterly invisible. They’ll only notice when you screw up, when you call someone a thug two hundred and twenty-five years too soon.

This is one heck of a thankless job.

—

*Yes, I know the word didn’t actually originate with him. Remember, I have the OED. It just sounded better that way.

things you don’t think about

One of the changes I’ve noticed with Warner turning into Orbit is that now my CEM and page proofs come with cover sheets that explain those parts of the process in more detail. (Page proofs arrived yesterday.) I always knew changes at this stage were expensive, and that if I made too many I’d have to pay for them myself, but this time around I’ve got concrete info: the allowance for author changes is generally somewhere between $200 and $800 dollars, depending on the book, and changes cost about $1.50 a line.

Which led to me noticing something. Thanks to the way I chose to structure it, MNC has a grand total of (I think) seven hard page breaks in the text. Things like the act openings with their epigraphs get their own pages, but the narrative itself leaves white space at the end of a page only seven times — at the end of each act, plus the prologue and epilogue.

Why does this matter? Because changing at the page-proof stage has a ripple effect. If the alteration I’d like to make in the first para of the prologue shortens it by one line, that will pull a line from page 2 onto page 1, and so on back until you hit a hard page break.

Of which there are only seven in the entire book.

There are many reasons to ponder things like chapter structure — how many, how long, etc — but this is a new one by me. Building the book this way means I have to be even more economical with my page-proof-stage changes, or next thing I know they’ll have to reset the entirety of Act Four. So I’m very glad I made myself read the entire CEM out loud, to catch as many verbal infelicities as possible; now is not the time to fix broken sentences. But even so, I find myself wanting to delete two words from the first paragraph, and I have to be really careful about that.

Note to self: chapter breaks are your friend.