Historical serendipity strikes again. I chose Antony’s ward more or less at random; basically I decided to put him on Lombard Street, which meant either Langbourn or Candlewick, and I chose the former. Turns out — if I’m correctly translating from a modern map of ward boundaries; King William Street wasn’t there back then — the first City plague death in 1665 was in Antony’s ward.
I should double-check this in Stow, but not tonight.
Part III is done. Which is something of a miracle, since it’s about 5K longer than my original estimation for the length of each of these sections.
Word count: 72010
LBR tally: Lately, rhetoric is winning.
Authorial sadism: I’ve slacked off on that for a few scenes, actually. They need some breathing room before the things I’ve got in store.
***
So here’s how me and deadlines work.
The book is officially due October first. I got started June first. At one thousand words a day — my standard pace — I can therefore write 122K by my deadline. I was aiming for a 110K book, so that gives me breathing room, as does the fact that I tend to accumulate overage; 1K/day is a minimum, not an average.
But I knew going in that this summer would involve more non-working days than usual, thanks to everything else in my life. So that margin of safety shrinks. Then I realize the book needs to be longer. How much longer? Don’t really know. I’d be surprised if it goes past 130K, but 120K is pretty much a given at this point. Suddenly, that margin of safety? Not so much with the existing.
Ten days before the end of July, I realize I’m about six days ahead of the base schedule. I decide to see if I can’t up that to ten by the end of the month — that is, to close out July with 71K instead of 61K. (Consequence: I work through Conestoga, tapping away on my laptop in my hotel room at night.) And then I decide on this trip to Dallas, and figure that we can do a bit better with that goal; I’ll finish Part III by the end of the month.
And so I have done. In the last three days, I’ve written over six thousand words. But this afternoon’s scene was only 402 words, so we’ll probably sit down and poke at the beginning of Part IV later tonight.
In a truly delusional world, I would try to do Part IV and then the bits covering the Fire by the end of this month. But that’s going to be another 40-50K words, and the middle of August will be shot all to hell, so I won’t lock myself into it.
(I won’t lock myself into it. But anybody who knows my working habits know that the minute I think of something like that, my subconscious decides I’m going to try for it anyway.)
This is how I do it. Not with carrots dangling in front of me, but a stick behind. I drive myself hard early on because that’s better, in my mind, then driving myself at the end; I’d rather push through and have breathing space than find myself in a crunch right before deadline. Who knows what else might crop up to delay me? Who knows how many additional words this book will need in order to be fully itself? If it caps out at 140K, I need to know I’ll have enough time for those extra words.
Yes, it is crazy-making. But now doesn’t seem like the time to fiddle with my habits. So Part III is done, and we’ll write more tonight — just to be safe.
It may look like I’ve been cherry-picking reviews that speak positively of Midnight Never Come, but the truth is I post everything that makes a substantive comment on the book. (I don’t figure you all want to see every post that mentions it in passing; possibly you don’t even want to see what I do post.) Anyway, as if to prove that, this roundup is a mixed-to-negative bag — for some reason I hit a run of less enthusiastic reviews lately.
occultatio read it right after finishing Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, which is the fastest way I can think of to make my book suck. I will be the first in line to admit that, by comparison with her, my writing is lightweight. But if I work very hard and eat my vegetables, one day I may grow mighty enough to equal her first novel. (Pardon me while I go cry again over the fact that she was that damn good right out of the gate.)
meganbmoore liked it in the end, but found the opening overly political and slow-going.
Trinuviel at FantasyBookSpot loved the premise and structure, but the execution just did not come through for her. Despite that, I recommend you go read her review if you like digging past the surface; she clearly knows her way around the Tudor period, and says many intelligent things about my structural choices.
And then a glowing review, to wrap this set up: Lory Hess at the Green Man Review stayed up way past midnight reading it. (And made my day by being the only person so far to make mention of the alchemical allusion at the beginning of Act I. That was a shout-out to my Memento peeps.)
***
Here’s the funny thing about Trinuviel’s review, which I’d like to discuss more. As I said, she knows her history, and brings up the motif of doubling in Elizabethan thought, connecting that with my mirroring of Elizabeth and Invidiana.
If I were smart, I’d let you believe I planned that all along. Truth is? I didn’t. At the time that I thought up Invidiana, I had no idea that doubling was a thing back then, and I’d never heard of the king’s two bodies. I came across it later, certainly — I don’t think I could have done that much research and missed it — but even then, it never occurred to me to turn around and connect that to the idea already in place.
All the things she says about the way the doubling plays out were most definitely deliberate, but the idea itself was a felicitous accident. Which is something I’ve wondered about ever since I started writing seriously enough to think about the kinds of things we tend to say in English classes and research papers: how much of what we see in a story is deliberate? This gets into the whole “the author is dead” notion in literary criticism, and I’m on the fence about that. On the one hand, being an anthropologist and a writer myself, I always want to know about the person behind the words, the ways in which the author and the context of creation can shed new light on the story you read. On the other hand, sometimes you can find perfectly legitimate meanings in a text that were created completely by accident. It’s why I’m always careful to phrase things as “you can read this out of it” unless I know for a fact that the author put it in there on purpose.
At any rate, her comments are food for thought — especially since I’m currently trying to decide how seventeenth-century fae, influenced by contemporary mortal ideas, might handle the issue of legal justice. I think we have a tendency to cut our fantasy creations slack, to behave as if absolutism and arbitrary sentencing are somehow more attractive when they’re done by a faerie, but this strikes me as a fine time to poke holes in that idea. (Now I just need to figure out how to follow a different model without making it mundane and boring.)
Things have been so crazy-busy that I haven’t said anything about this before, but today is the street date for Warrior and Witch (the novels formerly known as Doppelganger and Warrior and Witch). Not that this means much, since they’ve been on shelves in many places for the last week or more, but y’know. Anyway, I highly encourage obsessive-compulsive tendencies toward completism, so go buy the new editions, to go along with the old!
Can anybody make me an animated LJ icon that shifts back and forth between the new covers? I’d like to have one all-purpose icon for that series.
Edited: Many thanks to jimhines for the timely satisfaction of that request.
Survived Day 1 of Conestoga despite getting up at 4 a.m. for my flight (having gone to bed after midnight, with only middling success at that whole “sleep” thing). Even managed to get 1099 words tonight.
Yay for Jack pov, at last. Yay for Antony’s wife getting to do something important. And if that scene doesn’t quite find the right note for resolving a certain problem, well, I can fiddle with it when I have functioning brain cells again.
‘Night!
These things have been piling up, so . . . .
I answer six questions for Jeff VanderMeer’s Amazon blog. Some of them are standard. Some of them are very much not.
***
Doug Knipe, Sci-Fi Guy, liked the book.
So did Graeme Flory, though he felt a bit overwhelmed by the historical detail.
By contrast, Emily Huck didn’t see much actual history in it, at least in the sense of specific events. (She will find this flaw remedied and then some in the next book, if she picks it up.)
Gayle Surrette of SFRevu forgot to take review notes while reading, which is encouraging.
Matt Staggs of Enter the Octopus thought the ending was a bit rushed, but liked it anyway.
Kathy, the Oklahoma Booklady, gave it 4.5 out of 5.
fhtagn read it side-by-side with The Queen’s Bastard (which I blurbed) and liked it. Go Elizabethan fantasy!
And more good things from Aliette de Bodard, who’s the first person I’ve seen peg it as a secret history. (Which is how I view it — that and “historical urban fantasy” are my personal labels for it. Which answers a question in Graeme’s review, I suppose.)
***
I’ve gotten way fewer e-mails about this book than I did after Doppelganger came out, but many more reviews, both professional and casual. Interesting.
2896. Because I am very bad at stopping in the middle of the ‘splody. And then another 39 more, because I’m also bad at stopping 37 words short of my next benchmark.
Well, I wanted to hit 60K before Conestoga. I just didn’t mean to do it tonight.
Wordcount: 60002
LBR quota: Blood. It goes well with ‘splody.
Authorial sadism: Well, I had to come up with a reason they couldn’t just solve all their problems that way.
Favorite bits: Yay for crispy moths, conveniently timed changes in the lieutenancy in the Tower of London, curious horses, cameo appearances by Scottish fae, and knowing that particular peep has your back.
So the auction (which has raised over forty-three thousand dollars, at last count — good god!) included an offer from the inestimable yhlee: an original music composition, to a prompt of the buyer’s choosing.
I jumped on the “Buy It Now” price like a rabid weasel three minutes after the auction opened, and chose as my prompt . . . the Onyx Court series.
That’s right: my books now have a theme song.
Want to hear it? You can download the recording from my website. (Right-click and save, natch.) If you would like to hear the early draft, that’s available, too. Share as you please; just make sure to credit Yoon Ha Lee as the composer and artist, and my series as the inspiration.
***
This seems as good a time as any to mention my policy regarding fan work. It hasn’t really come up yet, but someday it might, so for future reference, here’s my stance.
If you want to compose your own music, or draw some art, or write a story, or whatever, based on Midnight Never Come or anything else of mine, then so long as you aren’t using it for commercial purposes or trying to lay claim to the original work itself, I say have fun.
If commercial profit comes into the picture (you’re a musician who wants to record the song on your next album) or you might be stepping on the toes of a right reserved in my contract (a student film), then please contact me so we can work something out. Even if what we work out is just a thumbs-up to whatever you had in mind in exchange for a link to my site, it’s better to make that clear. I’m unlikely to object or to charge you some exorbitant fee. (Unless you’re a major Hollywood studio, in which case I’m getting a media agent and instructing that person to take you for all they can. (I should be so lucky.))
In the case of things like music and visual art, I’d be flattered if you let me know this is happening. If it’s fanfic, I’m unlikely to read the work in question; legal twitchery aside (what if you write something and then someday I use a similar idea?), it would probably just hurt my brain to see other people’s takes on my characters. But I do believe that fan work is a sign that readers are engaged with the story, so I don’t mind people playing around with my ideas. If you feel so inspired, then by all means, go right ahead.
Word is in from matociquala (author Elizabeth Bear) that a clerical error, made when her most recent novel Ink and Steel was put into one major distribution system, may be the reason why it isn’t showing up in a lot of bookstores, nor in their computers when booksellers search for it by her name or the title.
Which is threatening to kill the series, because unsurprisingly, when your book isn’t there, and isn’t easily findable in the system, your sales figures don’t look too good.
First of all — god, that’s scary. Somebody types something in wrong, and there goes your book. The situation may be salvageable, but right now, things aren’t going well.
So the other purpose of this post (besides saying what is wrong with our industry?) is to make a quick rec for the book. I’ve been too busy to keep up with my website recommendations, and I’m slated to write a proper review of I&S and its second half Hell and Earth in a little while, but a decent number of people reading this journal would probably be interested in her novel. How do I know this? Because this is, as she said in her comment on my book, the summer of the Volcano Asteroid Impact Alarmingly Well-Researched Elizabethan Faerie Novel. Ink and Steel takes place three years after Midnight Never Come, with a different selection of historical figures (we only overlap in a few small places), but it, too, has faeries and espionage in the streets of London. And if you’re reluctant to pick it up knowing it’s only the first half of a very large novel, Hell and Earth is coming out next month, so you don’t have long to wait.
If that appeals, then, go now — not later; there may not be a later — to your bookstore and check for it on the shelves. If it isn’t there, ask for them to order it. And if they can’t find it in their system, give them the ISBN (978-0451462091), since that’s the only way to get around the error. (Also think about looking for the earlier books in the series — earlier in terms of publication date, that is. Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water are set in the modern period, and you may be able to find them in trade paper still, or mass-market paperback where B&I is concerned. I recommended that one here.)
You may have no trouble at all; it may be on the shelves. But if not, please consider putting in the extra effort. It’s a good book, very full of plot and characterization and faerie lore, and I’d hate to see it killed by a clerical error.
1410 tonight. It’s hard to stop at quota when you’re about to blow up one of the conventions of faerie fantasy.
Whee!
Word count: 53,379
LBR tally: Rhetoric, finishing off yesterday’s scene, followed by impending blood.
Authorial sadism: Finding your blind spot. Then realizing how long it’s been there.
Amazon UK has an item listed called Midnight Never Come: And Ashes Lie: Bk. 2, which apparently is 384 pages long and coming out next June.
I would like to know where they buy their crack.
***
Apropos of that, though — today my editor gave the go-ahead for this book to be longer than the last one, because I feel like I’m short-changing my own story, trying to cram it in too small of a sack. The pros reading this will have already leapt ahead to the immediate corollary concern, which is what that means for my deadline. Answer? Heck if I know. I intend to still make it.
I’d better, if the book is supposed to be out by June 4th . . . but they’ll have to shrink the typeface to get it on 384 pages.
***
Also, I just spent ten minutes wandering around my house trying to find the reference book I needed. That’s the Royal Exchange, that’s Pride’s Purge, that’s Whitehall, that’s the wrong book on Westminster . . . . I think one of the next packing stages will be clearing off the bottom shelf of my research bookcase and letting these books just annex it already, because the piles around the house are getting stupid.
Mush!
Today I got started working before five, and knocked out about 1400; then, against my better judgment (I know that slow and steady wins the race), I came back for a second sitting. 2,458 today — and all before midnight! The first overrun was excusable; I mean, I was three paragraphs away from Jack finally making his entrance. I’ve been looking forward to him all book. But did I really need to write the rest of that scene today? No. (Not to mention it’s a stupidly long scene. Though heck if I know how I can trim it. The tree may have to go away. <sad face>)
I am, however, being vindicated in my decision not to work on revising the earlier parts yet. As I suspected, I am getting to know Antony much better in this part, which will benefit me in the revision. Apparently he’s one of those guys who accomplishes more the less you give him to work with. Who knew?
Word count: 50521. That landmark is the other reason for the overrun.
LBR tally: 2,458 words of nearly pure rhetoric.
Authorial sadism: You know what happens when you give somebody a young son in Part I? They’re all growed up by Part III, is what.
It isn’t even 8 p.m., and I’ve already done my writing for the day. Because I just felt like doing it, instead of reading or whatever.
That’s a nice feeling, and not one I’ve had much of lately.
(Mind you, the desire was born of pure sadism. Last night I started an Antony scene that I’ve been dying to write, because it’s just so mean.)
Word count: 48090
LBR tally: Blood, of the metaphysical kind.
Authorial sadism: I’ve had enough time to think through the consequences of some of the things I’ve established in this and the previous book. Much to Antony’s detriment.
Sweet gibbering monkeys, I thought Part Two would never end. 2549 tonight, and I’ve been batting well over a thousand for a week now in an attempt to put paid to this thing before I go to Minneapolis.
Antony’s way over on word-count. It’s his fault Part Two is over quota. But that’s a problem to fix in revision — somehow.
It came so very very close to “rocks fall, everyone dies” tonight. Or at least one character dying. But dropping the ceiling on him would have raised the question of why all the problems couldn’t be taken care of that way, so I had to use another method.
Two dead people in the first part; three in this one. (And one in the Prologue.) Will the number keep going up?
Word count: 45767
LBR tally: Blood. Blood, blood, and more blood.
Authorial sadism: This is one of those “all of it” moments.
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.
1565 tonight; the previous two days have been 1415 and 1885. I may not get to write this weekend — short-notice trip to Minneapolis — so I’m letting myself charge ahead a bit, building up a surplus. I can miss two days and still be on schedule.
I would have stopped at 1259, but that put me just short of 40K. And we all know how I respond to seeing landmarks so very, very close.
Word count: 40,235
LBR tally: We all know what happens when rhetoric fails.
Authorial sadism: Failing. Lots. And not getting your final chance to speak.
The major purpose of this is to say that Orbit has announced the winners of the website competition. (If you are one, I think they’ve notified you by now, but everyone else may not have heard.) Thanks to everyone who participated, and I hope you had fun!
***
Review time:
juushika was not a fan of the flashbacks, and found the characters a bit underdeveloped, but liked the book overall.
Two people in Italy also seem to be saying nice things about it, as near as I can tell from Babelfish and my own limited command of the Romance language family. (Hey, people in Italy — keep talking about it! Then maybe I can make a translation sale there.)
***
Brief quasi-interview piece on Sci Fi Wire, the Sci Fi Channel’s news service. John Joseph Adams (better known to some of you as the slush reader for F&SF) interviewed me, then compiled my answers into something more like an article.
There should be a few more coming in the nearish future, too — but I want to clear these tabs, so here’s this stuff, and I’ll post again when the other things happen.
Dammit. “Idealist” is an anachronistic word for the period, and in its earliest usage, it referred to a specific philosophy. “Optimist” is also out-of-period. “Utopian” is not, but it doesn’t mean quite the same thing as “idealist,” and that’s the word I really want.
The answer to this, of course, is to say “to hell with the OED” and use the word anyway. I doubt anyone not reading this journal would ever notice the word in the novel and think, that’s anachronistic. But having established this principle in my prose, I’m remarkably unwilling to surrender it.
Maybe this will be the corollary to the use of “medieval” in Midnight Never Come. There just wasn’t a word in use back then that efficiently conveyed the period I was trying to reference, so I finally gave up and used it.
Yes, I do obsess this much. But most of you are not surprised. Those who are, are probably new to this journal.
Dear Readers of My Previous Entry,
Sorry, but the assassination attempt has been called on account of a) that scene doing enough other things already and b) me realizing what an idiotic tactical move it would be on the part of the would-be assassins. And since I want them to look tactically smart a little while later, it’s better to leave the targeted character alone.
But I wrote 1885 words tonight so I could finish that scene off and get through the bulk of an extremely pivotal scene following, so I promise you, there will be interesting things in its stead.
The principle quoted yesterday still holds, though.
Word count: 37118. I have a little less than five thousand words in which to do WAY TOO MUCH, and then Part II ends.
LBR tally: Rhetoric, with 100% chance of blood in the next few days.
Authorial sadism: Being given a chance to achieve the thing you really really want.
A sentence that really did just come out of my mouth:
“When in doubt, throw in an assassination attempt.”
Next year, when y’all are reading this book, and somebody tries to kill a character partway through Part II, you’ll know why: the rest of my plans for the scene just weren’t entertaining me enough.
