contest reminder
Just a quick reminder that the “Baby Got Back” contest for Midnight Never Come runs through next Monday. Send me your mock-up butt-shot covers!
Posts Tagged ‘novels’
okay, try this
I have a more specific research request for all you Victorianists.
I’m looking for poetry written no later than 1871, on the topic of the London Underground. Yes, I know that leaves only a narrow window of time in which the Underground even existed. Failing that, poetry (also before that date) about railroads.
No, I don’t have a title yet. I have any number of awesome phrases, but none of them are my title.
Suggestions?
another open letter
Dear Brain,
Put the Victorian Age down and back away from it, slowly.
Why? Because you aren’t ready to write that book yet. You know it and I know it; there’s no disagreement there. But do you know what will happen if you do another nosedive into research like last time? You will get sick of the Victorian period, before you even start writing the book. So slow down. That deadline is not for another ten months.
Play with this shiny over here instead. Wouldn’t you rather be reading YA urban fantasies than books about the Victorian sewer system?
Wouldn’t you?
I’d appreciate more than just a grudging nod, Brain. Or else I’m going to start thinking there’s something deeply wrong with you.
That’s better. The Victorian Age will still be waiting when you come back, don’t worry. And in the meantime, we’re going to have fun with some other things.
Affectionately,
Your Writer
Baby Got Back
Feeling artistic? And/or entertained by the notion of putting someone’s rear end on the cover of a book?
Check out the “Baby Got Back” contest I’m running over on the “Fangs, Fur, and Fey” community. Short form is, do me one of those urban fantasy covers you’re seeing everywhere these days — you know, the ones with a woman’s butt prominently on display — but with the butt in question buried under a pile of Elizabethan clothing. The most entertaining will win an advance copy of Midnight Never Come.
after-action report
I think I enjoy World Fantasy more every year, as I learn more of how I best operate there. When I first show up, I’m pretty useless: bad at recognizing faces I haven’t seen in a year, bad at worming my way into conversations, bad at social small talk. Warming up takes a while. But I know that now, so I don’t feel stressed by the usual “oh god I can’t find anybody I know and my foot is looking for opportunities to get into my mouth and I’m not having fun yet.” I’ll get there. It just takes time. By Friday I’m doing better, and now I know that my mental list of panels I’d like to see doesn’t even reach the status of guidelines, let alone actual rules; I’ll go if I feel inclined, but if on my way there I get waylaid by a conversation, whatever. I said this weekend, and I really mean it, that I go to WFC for the conversations. For the lunches and dinners and hallways and relatively quiet corners of room parties where I can get into discussions of Mesoamerican kingship, recent TV series, Kit Marlowe’s sexuality, butt-shot urban fantasy covers, gender issues in SFWA, and the abominations of Leviticus, to name a few topics of the last few days.
By Friday night I’m doing pretty good. Saturday’s usually a swimming success. At some point on Sunday I’ll start to hit my limit: I’m ready to put on my headphones and bury my nose in a book for the trip home. And that’s okay, too.
But it isn’t all cookie-cutter routine, either. Every year I expand the circle of people I know. And this year featured the new experience of increased contact with folks from my publisher, specifically members of the publicity departments in the US and UK. I got trotted out for a lunch with some of the book-buyers for Borders, not as the featured attraction, but to smile and make small contributions to the conversation; mostly I learned quite a bit about how the publisher sells the books to the store, before the store sells them to the customer. And I discovered that the publicity guys Have Plans for Midnight Never Come. Not national-tour level plans, but we all agreed that’s not even a good idea for someone at my stage of things. Cool website plans, though, most definitely. I don’t know how much of it will turn out to be pie-in-the-sky, but I love the notions we were batting around.
Speaking of that book, I got anecdotal proof of the quality of its cover: people were very eager to pick it up and look at it, including some total strangers during the autographing session. (And with nearly a dozen people spontaneously approving of the author photo on the back, I am finally reassured I managed to get a non-crappy picture of myself. Readers will expect me to look like that for the next thirty years, I imagine.)
And hey! Amazon has it listed for pre-order
Put all that together with a royalty statement that tells me Doppelganger and Warrior and Witch are both still doing bang-up business, and right now? Things are looking pretty good.
almost-real book!
Originally the plan was for me to revise Midnight Never Come in October, copy-edit it in November, page-proof it in December, and then they’d print ARCs (Advance Reading Copies) in January.
Then I got that “hey, could you revise this sooner?” request in September. Turns out that was because they wanted to print ARCs in November.
(This, incidentally, meant copy-editing would be pushed back to January. Or so I was told. Until three hours later, when I was told that no, the freelancer who does that work was available, so we’d be doing it on November after all.)
Anyway, you may have noticed that today is still October. So, oddly enough, was yesterday — the day a box full o’ ARCs hit my doorstep.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!! Booksiesbooksiesbooksiesbooksies!!!!!!!!!!
Ahem.
I held off on posting about it until I could surprise a few people who needed to be surprised with the ARCs I was giving them (the last of those being tooth_and_claw, but I’m not shipping it to Italy when you’re coming back here before too terribly much longer). I have more I need to send out, of course, but those people already know they’re coming.
I’m going to be curious to see how this ARC ends up comparing to the real book. Remember, we haven’t copy-edited the thing yet; it’s printed straight from the manuscript I sent my editor, but typeset like a real book. Only I’m not sure whether that will end up being the real typesetting, or whether it’s just something temporary they threw together while the final typesetting gets worked out. The cover, though, isn’t just full-color (something they don’t always do for ARCs) — it’s the full-blown really real cover, with the foil for the title and the spot gloss. Even color ARC covers often lack the special effects the finished deal will have (the title on the Warrior and Witch ARC, for example, isn’t embossed).
So it looks almost exactly like a real book, except for the big white notes saying it’s an advance copy of yadda yadda and here’s how it’s being promoted.
June is so terribly far away . . . .
research question #1
Must ponder what I want in the way of a Victorian icon. For now, I shall use the MNC one.
Anyway. The real point of this post.
This question is particularly aimed at d_aulnoy, since I know she’s a Victorianist, but if any of the rest of you happen to have familiarity with nineteenth-century literature, please feel free to jump in.
I’m trying to come up with a title for the Victorian sequel. I want to do something in the vein of Midnight Never Come: that is, a poetic phrase taken from the literature of the period, which is also (of course) applicable to the substance of the novel. Mind you, I’m still working on figuring out what that substance is — but you’d be surprised (or maybe not) how much having a compelling title can help shape a story.
But of course there’s a lot of Victorian literature out there; I need to narrow it down. Specifically, I want things apropos of London, industrialization, urbanization, maybe the underworld . . . you get the drift. Soppy poems about love and/or how pretty nature is need not apply. Random odes to a hat the poet saw someone wear to the opera, ditto. Stuff that’s a little grittier and grimmer. What poems/poets should I look at?
please update your bookmarks
I have no idea how many, if any, people have bookmarked things off the webpage for Midnight Never Come, but if you have, be aware that the URLs will be changing. Since I’m doing more than one Onyx Court novel, I’ve created a directory for that series, and moved the MNC material off into it.
Once upon a time! . . . later.
February, 1860. Workers break ground for the world’s first underground railway system, that will soon cut through the heart of London — and threaten the secrets that lie beneath.
For centuries, fae have dwelt in a shadowy mirror of the city above. Now, at last, their sanctuary is crumbling. The Queen of the Onyx Court has gone into seclusion, fighting to maintain their defenses, and in her absence, her subjects run unchecked. The filthy, gas-lit streets of Victorian London are their playground and battleground both, in a conflict between ancient magic and modern industry that will force them to an inescapable choice: flee, adapt, or be destroyed.
When I said Midnight Never Come was a stand-alone novel, I meant it. And I still do.
But I figured out how to write a sequel . . . 270 years later.
The blurb above is pure, unadulterated hand-waving. I know roughly the ideas I want to toss into the stew of this novel, but not the specifics of what I’m doing with them, because right now you are witnessing the very embryonic stages of a book. I thought this idea up all of eight days ago, proposed it to my editor all of seven days ago, and got it approved this afternoon. I have not yet begun researching it. But I can’t bring myself to hold off on announcing it until I’ve worked out the finer details. (Like, you know, a title1.)
So what am I really saying? That I’ll be writing another historical London faerie fantasy. (That I am indeed a sucker for punishment.) That the book will be set in the later Victorian period, and will concern any or all of the following: the London Underground, Queen Victoria, spiritualism, imperialism, Charles Dickens, Spring-Heeled Jack, class conflict, the Industrial Revolution, and Christina Rossetti’s poem “The Goblin Market” — plus assorted other things I don’t even know about yet.
Stay tuned to this space for the further adventures of Good God I Really Have Gone Crazy.
—–
1 – Courtesy of certain friends, the tongue-in-cheek working title is Karl Marx and the Faerie Proletariat.
bits of book news
I’ll use my MNC icon, because two of the three have to do with that book.
First of all, the website for Chapters (Canadian book chain) now lists Midnight Never Come for sale, with a release date of June 9th. Amazon, though, has yet to post it.
Second, I got a proof copy of the front cover today, and it is indeed very pretty. They appear to have decided to do the title in gloss rather than foil, while the gloss on the floral pattern may or may not go away. The color is a lot richer than it seemed on the screen.
And thirdly, I finally have some concrete news about the intended reissue of Doppelganger and Warrior and Witch. The intent is to put them both out in August of next year, with a new cover for Doppelganger (to make it match W&W better), slightly different cover detailing for both, and — perhaps the biggest change — new titles! (I’m not positive yet what those will be; I’m waiting to see if my suggestion goes over or not.) The idea is to make them look more obviously related, since there’s frankly nothing on the cover of W&W as it stands that tells you it’s connected . . . until you read the back cover and get a giant spoiler.
Okay, back to work.
open letter
Dear Brain,
Why?
No, seriously. I know I asked you for ideas. But did you have to come up with this? I don’t know if you remember, but we just did the research thing a few bleeding months ago. Is that really what we need to be doing again? I mean, come on.
Yes, it’s a shiny idea. But still.
Okay, okay. Yes. This might be a good thing. Let me sleep on it, okay? STOP PESTERING ME. I have a game tonight, and need to stop thinking about the Shiny! If it really is shiny, it’ll still be shiny tomorrow. You know how this works by now.
So yeah. Knock it off already.
With slightly murderous affection,
–Your Writer
Interview me!
So, here’s the deal. My publisher wants to include an interview with me at the back of Midnight Never Come, and I’ve been give the go-ahead to let the interviewer in question be you, Gentle Readers.
They’re looking for me to answer 7-10 questions about writing in general and Midnight Never Come in specific. I figure I’ll solicit questions from everyone, pick out the most popular and/or the most interesting, and send those in; the ones I don’t answer for the book, I may well post on my website as a bonus.
So post your questions in comments! Try to keep it writing- and/or this-book-related (no questions about my secret life as a Cambodian mortuary-worker-turned-spy), and try to post it by next Wednesday (the 17th) at the latest. (I need to send my responses to Orbit by the 19th.)
Here we go . . . .
Updated to clarify: Feel free to ask more than one question, and to repeat other people’s questions (since that’s how I’ll judge the popularity of a given topic).
the research shelf
Brief challenge: can anybody make me a better icon out of the book cover? This one doesn’t shrink terribly well, but I lack the skills to do anything fancier with it. (The font used for the title is AquilineTwo, available for free online.)
Anyway, the real point of this post is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. With the revisions done and out the door, I’ve decided it’s time to officially dismantle my research shelf — the bookcase where I’ve been keeping all my MNC-related books since April or so. They’re all dispersed back to their usual sections, now. But I took a photo a month ago, to record for posterity what it looked like:
The notebooks on the bottom are unrelated, but everything else is there for the novel. (Well, not the fountain.) Faerie lore on the left of the middle shelf, assorted library books on the right; on the upper shelf, it’s roughly organized by general Renaissance, London, biographies, espionage, and then a few isolates like a book on the Reformation, and a few pieces of period literature. That giant thing in the stack on top is the dissertation Dr. William Tighe mailed to me, one of the few scholarly works in existence that discusses the Gentlemen Pensioners in any detail.
Not everything I used is there. I think my Agas map book is missing, as are The Book of the Courtier, The Prince, and the complete poetic works of Sir Philip Sidney, which I pillaged in my search for epigraphs. I do not claim to have read everything on that shelf in its entirety. There’s almost nothing there, however, that I didn’t at least try.
It could have been a lot more. That’s the terrifying part.
But it’s dismantled now, and I’m finding out just how massively certain sections of my library (like “London” and “faerie lore”) have grown. Rearranging books is an activity that makes me oddly happy, though, so it was a pleasant task for a sunny Friday afternoon.
best books and best books
Well, that’s it. I’m done with the revisions on Midnight Never Come, and I must say I’m rather pleased with the state of the book. Which sparked me to ponder the difference between “the best book it can be” and “the best book I can write.”
Most of what I do is the former. This is the latter.
Let me put it in metaphorical terms first. You know that height is determined by both genetics and nutrition, right? As in, your genes allow for you to be a range of possible heights, but your nutrition will determine where in that range you fall. (Broadly speaking. I need the metaphor, not the biological specifics.) Well, most of the time what I’m doing is feeding my books all the nutrition (effort) I can give them, so they reach their full potential in terms of growth (or rather, quality.)
I think of it this way because my ideas tend to come out of my subconscious, and are inflexible to a certain degree. They are what they are, and if I care about them enough I will write them, but that doesn’t guarantee that every one is a groundbreaking new leap forward in my skill. There will always be some development — I never want to coast — but I can’t necessarily take an idea that’s capable of being five foot nine and make it six foot just because. I make them the best books they can be, given the ideas they’re built on. If there are flaws, weak points, it’s a problem in the foundation; the only way I can do better is to write a different book.
Midnight Never Come has eaten everything I’ve thrown at it, and asked for more. I can’t feed it enough to make it hit its full potential. It is the fourteen-year-old-boy of novels.
It’s close to being as good as it can be. I can tell. There are very few places in the book where I look at it and think, man, that could punch the reader just a little bit harder — but there are a few. And those places exist, not because I haven’t put in the effort to fix them, not because the foundational ideas aren’t strong enough, but because I simply don’t have it in me to squeeze out those last few drops of awesome. This not quite the best book it is capable of being, but it is the best book I am capable of writing.
When I wrote Warrior and Witch (to pick one example), I deliberately tried to work on a bigger political canvas. That was the major challenge of that book. This book? The political canvas got bigger again. And there are more pieces on my mental chessboard. And the embroidery of its description and style is more intricate. And a whole lot of other metaphors I could toss in there, which boil down to: I’m pushing myself everywhere. I can’t think of a single major aspect of the book that isn’t bigger and better than what I’ve tried before.
You could say, shouldn’t that be true of every book? In theory. But the truth of the matter is, my brain doesn’t cough up ideas that advanced on a regular basis. Most of them push me on one front; some push me on more. Which is fine, really, because working selectively on different aspects of my writing make leaps like this one possible. If I sat around waiting only for the truly record-breaking ideas, I’d never come up with them, or be capable of tackling them if I did.
But it’s odd to look at a book and think, this truly is the best I can do. And not have it be a negative statement (c’mon, is that the best you got? pfff), but a positive one.
<ponders> I’m not sure this post conveys what’s in my head. It feels like this reflects badly on most of the other books I’ve written, and I don’t mean for it to do that. I promise, I don’t slack on any of them.
Maybe what I should say is: most of my books are the best I can do with my ideas, while this book is the best my ideas can do with me.
cover!
Final version, or at least final enough that I’m allowed to post it.
A few notes. First of all, this is the kind of cover that will look much better in print than on the screen, because as I found out the hard way, the details depend heavily on your monitor settings. If you can’t see the building in the background, you aren’t really getting it all. (Yes, there’s a building in the background. I promise. I didn’t see it until I tried a different computer.)
Second, there are two details that can’t be conveyed in an image. The title will be printed in silver foil, and the floral pattern winding through will be done in a spot gloss on an otherwise matte cover. Or at least that’s the current plan.
I’m quite pleased with it. Authorial nitpickiness aside (there’s always authorial nitpickiness), it’s a nice, elegant cover, and I like their choice of a pull-quote for the top; that’s a line from a John Dowland song I found just as I was doing revisions back in August. I’ll leave it as a closing note:
“Time stands still with gazing on her face,
stand still and gaze for minutes, houres and yeares, to her giue place:
All other things shall change, but shee remains the same,
till heauens changed haue their course & time hath lost his name.”
The deadlines, they laugh at me!
Wow. Shortest edit letter in the history of publishing. (Or at least my history of publishing. And apparently my editor’s history of sending such things.)
Seriously, this thing is one page long. And the top half of that is letterhead followed by the Standard Introductory Paragraph of “Thank you for sending this to me, it’s great, here’s a few nice things about it.” Three paras of Things To Fix, and we’re done.
Mind you, it isn’t three paras of “here’s a few typos;” the three things she touches on are a little more pervasively problematic. As I put it in my response to her, they’re of the “one sentence to describe, rather more to fix” variety. But really? This is the kind of edit letter that makes one come close to collapsing in weak-kneed relief. Oh thank god, she doesn’t want me to rip out this entire plotline and change the ending and replace that character with a one-legged midget from Morocco. Just a few things that aren’t quite clear or powerful enough.
The downside? With the edits so relatively light, she wants to know if I can get it back to her sooner than the agreed-upon date of Oct. 22nd. Which would be absolutely doable . . . if there weren’t a wedding in the way. As it stands, I’ve sent a very waffly response to the effect of “can I play with it for a week and give you an estimate then?” variety.
We’ll see what I can pull off, here.
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
I must have been a good little writer-being or something, ’cause the prototype cover I was just sent for Midnight Never Come is PURTY.
If you’re in the camp of people who would have preferred something other than a half-headless chick in leather for the cover of Doppelganger, you’ll be pleased to hear that one of the first adjectives to leap into my head for this one was “elegant.”
I’m waiting to hear if I can post the image I was sent. It isn’t utterly finalized, so the answer may be “no” — they need to do some minor bits of rearranging — but I’ll put it up just as soon as I can.
and there it goes
Midnight Never Come is out the door (electronically speaking) and in the editor’s hands. Or at least her computer.
Which means I get to pretend, for just a little while, that I’m done with it.
I’m not, of course. She’ll send me an edit letter, after which my revised draft is due October 22nd. Then copy-edits some time in November or December. Then page proofs. I will be so very sick of this book by then.
But for now, I get to bask in the glow of it being (temporarily) Done.
MNC PSA
We interrupt this revision to bring you the following complaint:
God, I hate working with non-decimal currency.
It took an irritating amount of math to figure out what £46 13s. 4d. works out to in Elizabethan marks. (Seventy, in case you were wondering.) Doing calculations where there are twelvepence (d) to the shilling (s) and twenty shillings to the pound, and a mark is worth 13s. 4d., is a good argument for modern currency systems.
I need a song . . . .
Okay, great Internets ubermind. I need a rather specific music recommendation.
I’m soundtracking Midnight Never Come, and I don’t seem to have anything appropriate for a particular scene. Of course, I can’t share the details of the scene, but the relevant thing I’m aiming for is the somewhat ominous ringing of bells. Deep bells, not little hand-bells, and it should seem like a threat rather than a triumphant sound. (What can I say? Faeries don’t like church bells.)
I know some of you listen to a great many movie scores, and that’s probably one of my best bets for finding something suitable. Any suggestions I could go looking for?
Edited to clarify: to borrow Deedop’s phrase, I need something aggressively ominous. I also need something that doesn’t sound too modern; I’m not actually using truly period music for this soundtrack (though I listened to some while writing the book), but I’m trying to avoid synthetic sounds.
