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Posts Tagged ‘novels’

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!

Who’s cool?

I built Midnight Never Come partly on the principle of “list everything awesome in that time period, then cram in as much of it as you can.” Which isn’t a bad method. So I’m going to repeat it again, and ask: who and what is cool in the seventeenth century?

I already know I’ll be using the Great Fire, the Civil War, execution of Charles I, Cromwell’s Commonwealth, and Restoration of Charles II. Maybe the Battle of Worcester, too. Other things springing to mind include Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn, John Milton, the Earl of Rochester, Aphra Behn, Restoration theatre, and the Dutch wars.

What else?

People, events, neat places, whatever. The broader a range of things I’m steeping in my head, the better this book will be.

Guess what — I lied.

Decision made; now I can stop being cryptic.

What I said a few months ago? Yeah, change of plans. This is the book I’m writing next.

AND ASHES LIE

September, 1666. In the house of a sleeping baker, a spark leaps free of the oven — and ignites a blaze that will burn London to the ground.

Six years ago, the King of England returned in triumph to the land that had executed his father. The mortal civil war is done. But the war among the fae is still raging, and London is its battleground. There are forces that despise the Onyx Court, and will do anything to destroy it.

But now a greater threat has come, that could destroy everything. For three harrowing days, the mortals and fae of the city will fight to save their home. While the humans struggle to halt the conflagration that is devouring London street by street, the fae pit themselves against a less tangible foe: the spirit of the fire itself, powerful enough to annihilate everything in its path. Neither side can win on its own — but can they find a way to fight together?

There’s the requisite few paragraphs of handwaving, to give you a sense of what this novel will be. The Victorian book will still be happening, never fear; it just won’t be happening now. For a variety of strategic reasons and a few serendipitous ones, we’ve decided it would be better for me to do this one first.

Yes, this does in fact mean I’m switching tracks after four months of research on what is now the wrong time period. Yes, this does mean I’ve got barely more time to prep this book than I did for Midnight Never Come. Yes, this does mean I’m crazy. But I think the Victorian book will benefit from having more time to cook in my head; nineteenth-century London is so big and complicated that I won’t say no to working up to it more slowly. In the meantime, this one has had a number of factors swing in its favor, until it jumped up the queue and put itself at the top.

So. Great Fire. My, um, Restoration faerie disaster fantasy, I guess I’ll have to call it. London go BOOM.

Kind of like my head.

. . . .

The thing about potentially head-exploding developments is that they usually don’t give you any warning before they hit.

That’s why they’re head-exploding.

No, I’m not going to tell you what I’m talking about. Not at the moment. But I promise I’ll say in a week or two, once it’s decided — whichever way it goes. Suffice to say it isn’t a good-or-bad split; both possibilities are good.

movie time!

<grumble mutter need to pick a damned Victorian icon already>

Okay, folks. Give me movies! Specifically, movies that depict the gritty underbelly of Victorian London. Think Sweeney Todd or From Hell. Or Gangs of New York, except not about America. Things far, far away from the prettified Oscar Wilde side of London.

What’s out 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!

tonight’s revision wisdom

Mistyping “brain” as “brian” creates much amusement when the character’s boyfriend is named Brian. At least in this particular sentence.

***

So, wow, tonight has not been going as planned, on account of unscheduled unconscious time on the sofa. But on the bright side, I’m getting my revision work done at a godly hour for once.

And when I’m done, I may even permit myself a small reward.

sadness

I did like that scene. It had development and humor and all that good stuff.

But it just didn’t make sense with the thing I had happening in the scene before, so away it goes.

Such is the necessity of revision, alas.

Ich habe Buch!

You know what’s a wacky experience?

Flipping through a book and thinking, “I wrote this . . . but it’s all in weird funny-looking words with too many capital letters!”

Or, to put it differently — I have the German edition of Doppelganger! They sent me four author copies, which arrived yesterday. It’s very strange, I tellya. I can pick out enough words in German to be able to figure out which bit of the story I’m looking at, but not enough to read it much at all, so it’s very alien-looking. And man, some of those nouns get long. But it’s also boggling to think that somebody — one Axel Plantiko — spent who knows how many hours reading over my words and working this strange alchemy upon them.

It’s my book . . . but it isn’t.

Anyway, many thank-yous to Herr Plantiko, and eeeee! German book!

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…)

And then there were nine.

1686 yesterday, 5195 today, and we. are. done.

60095 words, not including the title, because this is the first time I’ve hit the end of the book without finding an acceptable name to slap on it. I blame the fact that it’s so damn short; if I had another 40K to think, maybe I would come up with something.

Not that I want another 40K, mind you.

The little niggling slave-driver in the back of my head is reluctant to count this as my ninth novel, since it’s less than half the length of some of the other ones I’ve written, and only three-quarters the length of even my shortest adult novel. But that’s YA for you. It’s a book by SFWA standards, so a book I shall call it, and it is the ninth such I have completed. And my first YA!

Time to go flop around like a landed fish and try to turn my brain off. (It hasn’t quite yet noticed that we’re done.)

rebooting

I’m finally getting around to the post I was going to make on Friday, except that I decided it would be better not to bump the signature contest down peoples’ flists.

So, that YA I’m working on. I wrote steadily through January, and even managed to keep it up while at VeriCon, which is little short of a miracle; it required me to be up and working at 3:30 in the morning when I had a panel in seven hours, but hey. I got the words down.

But I came back from the con and that Monday got handed a stack of student stories to grade, which came as something of a rude awakening; I’d seriously underestimated the time each one would demand from me. That might have been fine, except that the sudden increase in workload happened to coincide with a realization about the story: that I was about to step into the endgame, and I was very much not ready. I could have kept plunging ahead, but after eight books I’m developing a sense of when delay is the better part of valor; I needed to step back and get my ducks in a row, or whatever I wrote was just going to be useless crap anyway.

That turned, unfortunately, into a week and a half long hiatus. Which tends to be a bad thing, right before the end of a book. I ultimately had to go back and re-read everything I had so far, but at least it had the salutary effect of convincing me the entire thing doesn’t suck; certainly it has its weak points, but the middle is decently solid. Then I embarked on an incredibly tedious task, namely, plotting the book out scene by scene, one per index card — from multiple points of view. Val’s the only narrator the book has, but it’s long occurred to me that I could probably make my plots more well-knitted if I took the time to think through the story as it’s seen by different characters. What do they think is going on in particular scenes? What are they doing when they’re off-stage? I ended up cheesing out and only noting four other characters on the cards (it should have been six), but that was enough. The last one gave me the reason I needed for why the next thing was going to happen, and that was what had been stalling me.

I’ve gotten nearly six thousand words in the last three days, and at this point, quotas are going out the window. It’s a dead push; I’ll be writing everything I know every day that I can, because I think I can only figure out the next bits by putting down the ones I have. I’m near the end, certainly — 53K on the ms so far, and I’m aiming for something just over the 60K line. I just need to figure out what kind of confrontation we’re going to end with, then work back from there to get the next few paragraphs after where I stopped last night. If I can get that some time today, I should be clear to the end.

It’s tough going. Maybe I shouldn’t novel at this time of year. But having gotten myself into it, the only way out is through.

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.