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.)
So you know how sometimes Amazon gets a wrong piece of information into its book database? The wrong format, or release date, or cover copy, or whatever.
That didn’t happen here.
With Fate Conspire really is going to be a hardcover.
It’s kind of awesome to get that news right after I posted about the celebration of my five-year anniversary of Realio Trulio Being a Novelist. 🙂 And it prodded me to stop waffling over the lovely, lovely icons you guys made for me and finally pick one, with victory going at last to airo25. (This was a hard decision, y’all. So props to everybody else who made me an icon, too.) airo25, e-mail me your address at marie [dot] brennan [at] gmail [dot] com, and I’ll make a note to send you an ARC of Fate when they come in.
My first hardcover. Maybe I can use that to stave off the tedium of the page proofs, which arrived yesterday. 🙂 Whee!!!!!
Five years ago this month, my first novel was published, under its original title of Doppelganger.
In celebration of that anniversary, I dusted off — by which I mean “rewrote from the ground up” — an old novella related to that series, and sold it to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. The first part of Dancing the Warrior just went live, and the second part will be going up in two weeks, with the next issue.
But wait! There’s more!
You can enter to win a signed set of both doppelganger novels (the new edition, wherein they are known as Warrior and Witch). I’ll be giving away two sets, one for each half of the story. All you have to do is comment on the story thread, telling me what your Hunter name would be. Full rules are here; the important bit is that you do need to be a registered forum user, so that we can properly identify entrants. But registration is quick and easy.
Five years. Jeebus. Where did they go?
So, I mentioned before that I have a new series.
It will surprise nobody who’s been around for the Onyx Court books that I intend to do a bit of research. 🙂
NOT AS MUCH AS BEFORE. (Thank god.) But there are some things I want to read about, to get some good material for compost into my head, so this is the first of a couple of posts asking for recommendations.
The first topic up is, of course, the discipline of natural history. Can anybody recommend a good biography of Darwin, something that focuses on the fieldwork end of things? His education, the voyage of the Beagle, that kind of thing; I’m less concerned with what happened after he published his theories. Or books on other natural historians, or the development of the field. I’ve got a few things to read already, but knowing the internets, it’s entirely possible that somebody reading this post has a random love for the topic of nineteenth-century natural history, and knows exactly what I ought to be reading to understand it. If that’s you — or if it isn’t, but you know a couple of things you’d recommend — speak up in the comments.
If you’re not familiar with this topic at all, stay tuned; there will be other requests to come.
Hey, look! I seem to have finalized cover art!
Y’all know what that means: it’s time for another “please make me an icon, because I suck at image manipulation” contest. Something featuring a crop or resizing or whatever of that cover, plus the title, like ceosanna did for A Star Shall Fall. Winner will get an ARC of the book when I have one, or a copy of Star, according to their choice.
Eeee! I can haz cover!
. . . or those who didn’t hear me announce it there:
I have a new book deal.
Three books for certain; the series may run as long as five; title of either the first book or the entire series — haven’t decided yet which one — is A Natural History of Dragons. They are the memoirs of Isabella Trent, Scirland’s foremost lady adventurer and dragon naturalist, and cover her illustrious career traveling the world to study dragons (and getting into large amounts of trouble along the way).
As you might guess from the “Scirland” bit, this is a secondary-world fantasy, albeit one based on the real-world nineteenth century. Hallelujah, I get to make stuff up. There will still be research, of course — there is always research — but it will be of a more compost-y sort; I’ll read stuff, get the flavor in my head, and then make up something in an appropriate vein. You have no idea how much I’m looking forward to that part.
I came up with the idea for this series just before the first round of Novel in 90, several years ago, and it should tell you something that I wrote about thirty thousand words of it in a rather short space of time, before stalling out on account of not having figured out my metaplot. In the interim, I’ve made progress on that problem, and am very eager to get back to the story. The narrative voice is just a delight to play with. In celebration of the deal, here’s an excerpt, from the foreword to the first volume of Isabella’s memoirs:
Not a day goes by that the post does not bring me at least one letter from a young person (or sometimes one not so young) who wishes to follow in my footsteps and become a dragon naturalist. Nowadays, of course, the field is quite respectable, with university courses and intellectual societies putting out fat volumes titled Proceedings of some meeting or other. Those interested in respectable things, however, attend my lectures. The ones who write to me invariably want to hear about my adventures: my escape from captivity in the swamps of Mouleen, or my role in the great Battle of Keonga, or (most frequently) my flight to the inhospitable heights of the Mrtyahaima peaks, the only place on earth where the secrets of the ancient world could be unlocked.
Even the most dedicated of letter-writers could not hope to answer all these queries personally. I have therefore accepted the offer from Messrs. Carrigdon & Rudge to publish a series of memoirs, chronicling the more interesting portions of my life. By and large these shall focus on those expeditions which led to the discovery for which I have become so famous, but there shall also be occasional digressions into matters more entertaining, personal, or even (yes) salacious. One benefit of being an old woman now, and moreover one who has been called a “national treasure,” is that there are very few who can tell me what I may and may not write.
Beyond this point, therefore, lie foetid swamps, society gossip, disfiguring diseases, familial conflicts, hostile foreigners, and a plenitude of mud. You, dear reader, continue on at your own risk. It is not for the faint of heart — no more so than the study of dragons itself. But such study offers rewards beyond compare: to stand in a dragon’s presence, even for the briefest of moments — even at the risk of one’s life — is a delight that, once experienced, can never be forgotten. If my humble words convey even a fraction of that wonder, I will rest content.
Expect much babbling over the next few months about Darwin and Stanley and Isabella Bird, who actually wasn’t the source of my protagonist’s name, but it’s a nice coincidence nonetheless.
You know how I recently mentioned that my mental queue of Books I Could Write includes twenty-two entries in six series? It’s more than that, really, when you count the standalones and the things I’ve already written but haven’t sold and son on. Rather than do a first lines meme for short stories (which are kind of guilting me right now), I thought it might be fun to tally up all the openings for the novels. Note that most of these are currently laboring under working titles, and for shits and giggles I’ll include some I think are dead in the water.
A terrifyingly long list, really. And it doesn't even include sequels.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .
. . . it was the time between contracts.
That’s right, folks, I am at present the writerly equivalent of unemployed. Aside from the copy-edits and page proofs for With Fate Conspire, I have no contractual obligation to a publisher. Which means it’s time to go rooting through the brain and figure out what I’m going to try and sell.
It’s a fun time because, dude! New ideas! Shiny! Four years of Onyx Court means four years’ worth of creative backlog, all kinds of characters and concepts that have been stewing away in my subconscious. Some that used to look all sparkly and keen have now faded, but others have arisen to take their place. Just off the top of my head, I can think of twenty-two books in six series that I would be willing and able to do next, plus some stand-alones. So I am living in a time of wondrous possibility, where anything could happen . . .
. . . or nothing. This is also the time where I chew off my fingernails, wondering if my sales figures are good enough, whether the ideas are commercial enough, second-guessing what would be the best thing to do next from a career point of view. Self-doubt creeps in, because right now I have no safety net, and the publishing industry is not exactly in good health. I don’t think I’m likely to find myself sans new contract, but it’s taken writers by surprise before, and what if I’m one of them?
And, of course, the worst part is that it’s slow. I have to polish up a proposal, send it to my agent, get her feedback, maybe polish it some more, then wait for her to submit it. After that, it might take weeks or even months to achieve resolution. Hence this icon.
You may be seeing more of it in the days to come.
If you’re a Hugo or Nebula voter, here’s what I published in 2010:
Novel
A Star Shall Fall
Novelette
“And Blow Them at the Moon,” Beneath Ceaseless Skies #50
Short stories
“Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics as Employed Against Lycanthropes,” Running With the Pack, ed. Ekaterina Sedia
“Remembering Light,” Beneath Ceaseless Skies #44
“The Gospel of Nachash,” Clockwork Phoenix 3, ed. Mike Allen
“The Last Wendy,” On Spec #81
“Footprints,” Shroud Magazine #9
. . . I need to get back on the short story wagon, or I’ll have very little to list for 2011.
We now return you to a more interesting corner of the Internet.
The Internet has this magical ability to cough up stuff on whatever topic you’re thinking about, even when you aren’t looking for it*. At the moment, that’s this post by Jay Lake, which led me through daisy-chain of other posts by Seanan McGuire, Edmund Schubert, Misty Massey, and David Coe, all on the topic of titles.
I have titles on the brain right now for two reasons:
1) I just sent my crit group the most recent Driftwood story, which doesn’t really have a name yet, though my tongue-in-cheek dubbing of it as “Two Men in a Basket” might end up sticking just for lack of anything better.
2) I still don’t have a title for the Victorian book.
These two situations have different root causes, I think. Thanks to the first three installments in the series, the Victorian book is hedged about with all these requirements that I should fulfill if humanly possible: it has to be a quote, the passage the quote comes from has to work as an epigraph (ideally for the last part of the book), it should have a verb (ideally at the end of the phrase), etc. Finding a piece of Victorian literature that will fit all the requirements at once is proving much more difficult than I expected — to the point where I may well have to compromise on one or more points, though the perfectionist in me doesn’t want to. For the Driftwood story, on the other hand, the problem is that I don’t have any requirements. It’s a wide-open field, and so I end up standing around in it, not sure where to go.
And it’s made more complicated by the fact that novel titles and short story titles aren’t quite the same kind of beast. Certain things could work for either, and in fact I think you can generally port novel titles onto short stories without too much problem. But short story titles can’t necessarily go the other way. “Nine Sketches, in Charcoal and Blood” strikes me as only working for the short form; “Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual” would NEVER go on a book. Short story titles are allowed to be wordier, because they don’t have to function as a piece of marketing in the way their novel-related cousins do. (Exceptions like The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making are just that: exceptions.) Cleverness in book titles is somewhat limited to humourous work, while a broader range of short stories can get away with it.
I’ve said before that my best titles usually show up at the start of the process; my average titles are the ones I stick on after the fact. (I have some bad titles, too, but let’s not talk about those. They’re after-the-fact efforts, too.) What makes a title good? It has to be evocative — which is one of those vague, hand-wavy descriptors I actually kind of hate, but I don’t have a better one that manages to combine the concepts of “striking” and “memorable” and “suggestive of more than it’s saying.” Lots of writers try to achieve evocative-ness (evocativity?) by throwing in nouns that supposedly carry that quality: Shadow. Soul. Dragon. Yawn. My attention is drawn more to odd juxtapositions. Queen isn’t a terribly interesting word, but the contradiction of The Beggar Queen is a lot more intriguing.
And then you have to worry about titles in a series, and how to make it clear these books belong together. I have to say I’m not a fan of the Mercedes Lackey answer to this question: Magic’s Pawn, Magic’s Promise, Magic’s Price; Winds of Fate, Winds of Change, Winds of Fury; The Black Gryphon, The White Gryphon, The Silver Gryphon . . . well, if you dropped all the books on the floor it would be easy to sort the trilogies from one another, but exciting this is not. I prefer Dunnett’s approach with the Lymond books, where the titles may not be individually brilliant, but the running chess metaphor connects them all. This is why the pattern of the Onyx Court titles matters to me, too, because the structural characteristics are what advertise “this is part of that series!”
But you still have to come up with the title. For the Victorian book, I go looking in Victorian literature, but what about stories or novels where the title could be anything? How do you even get started? I swear, sometimes it’s harder than writing the actual stories. If you have any brilliant thoughts, please do share them in the comments.
*By which I mean that our brains have this magical ability to notice stuff that matches the pattern of what we’re interested in. But it’s more fun to say the Internet gets credit.
Recently Jim Hines has been doing a “First Book Friday” series on his blog, inviting authors to tell the story of how they sold their first novel. This week, I’m up to bat, talking about how Doppelganger (later known as Warrior got sold to Warner Aspect, almost six years ago.
Dear Book:
I hate you.
No, really. We’ve gotten to that stage of the writing, the stage where I really just want to light you on fire. It happens almost every book (except for the rare ones that just sail straight out of my head — of which you are SO not one), but this time, I really, really mean it. Why? Because I just figured out that I could solve about 90% of my pacing problems . . . by moving your start date back three months.
This falls into the category of “annoying change” rather than “major seismic upheaval,” since most of what I have to do is change the dates on scenes. But that’s about 100K worth of scenes I have to re-date
FUCK I just realized that doesn’t work.
Because there’s a scene that has to happen on a specific date, and that specific date is before what I thought would be the new start date. But there are other events that have to happen on other specific dates, and SON OF A BITCH I HATE YOU.
<beats head into desk>
Never again, people. Never again. I am so very done with this historical fiction thing, where I can’t just decide when stuff happens because history says otherwise. I’ve been doing this for four books, and I will never subject myself to it again*.
I’m sure I’ll find a way through this. But it is going to cost a lot of pain and suffering along the way. (It already has.) And right now, I kinda want to light the book on fire.
No love at all,
Your Writer.
*Of course I’m lying. It’s like childbirth. In a few years, when I’ve forgotten the pain, I’ll probably decide this is a good idea again. But right now, I mean it.
Now THIS is how to start your Monday morning: with news of a starred review in PW:
As in 2009’s brilliant Midnight Never Come, anthropologist Brennan strikes a resonant balance between history and fantasy in this new tale of the faerie domain beneath 1750s London. Halley’s Comet, which houses the exiled Dragon Spirit of Fire who nearly consumed the city in the Great Fire of 1666, is on its way back to Earth. Human lord Galen is in love with faerie queen Lune, bedding the charming sprite Irrith, and engaged to bluestocking Delphia Northwood; as he attempts to untangle these entanglements, he must also enlist members of the new Royal Society, England’s illustrious scientists, and all the multifarious faery talent he can find to fight the Dragon with humanity’s reason, magical faery instinct, and the power of sacrifice and devotion. Enchanting, fearsome faerie vistas and pinpoint character delineations make Galen’s absorbing quest one to savor and remember.
The “pinpoint character delineations” bit makes me exceptionally happy, because character is one of the things I specifically focused on in writing Star. Based on the reactions so far, it looks like it worked. Eeee! <bouncebouncebounceSTARREDREVIEWbounce>
In review news from this weekend past, Jim Hines also enjoyed the book:
This is my favorite of the series so far. The plotting is sharper, the characters are great, and Brennan continues to blend history and magic so smoothly it’s hard to tell where one ends and the next begins.
(He also says later that “Authors are, at their best, simultaneously cruel and beautiful.” Hee.)
My Monday: pretty fabulous, so far. How’s yours been?
Bit by bit, the landmarks pass.
If I can just figure out what’s happening in Dead Rick’s next three scenes or so, I’ll be set for the rest of this Part. Then I can maybe kick my pace up a bit and try to finish before the end of the month, giving me a few days to plot strategy for Part Three before I dive into it. That would be nice. This whole “days off” thing is still weird, but I like to do it when I can.
. . . dang it. I had figured out something for Hodge’s scene, and now I’ve forgotten it.
Oh well. If it was a good idea, it’ll come back.
Word count: 70,092
LBR quota: Love, maybe? Whatever covers figuring out that doing something constructive can help tide you over until that revenge thing happens.
Authorial sadism: Hodge can’t get no respect. <g>
Dear Dead Rick,
I’m sorry I’m a horrible person.
Tomorrow morning kurayami_hime will read this and say, “You’re not sorry at all,” and she’ll kind of be right — but I have to say it anyway. Because one of your levers is more like a giant knife sticking out of your heart, and sometimes I just have to give it a good twist.
Sorry.
If it’s any comfort, I suspect you have some RIGHTEOUS FURY OF REVENGE scenes coming up later in the book. It’s got that feel in my head, even if I don’t know the specifics yet. I hope that helps.
Love and apologies,
A mean, mean person
I totally have to surrender my Latin geek card in shame, but attempting to figure out this phrase is stalling my forward progress in the scene, so I’m just going to toss it out to the LJ mind and get on with what Dead Rick is doing.
How would you say “Two worlds joined as one” in Latin?
This is the extra bit I alluded to yesterday, when I posted my research book list: I finally have a version of the cover that I’m allowed to post. (There may be minor tweaks before it hits the shelves, but they’re along the lines of fiddling with the text, rather than image changes.)
In honor of that, I’ve started putting the page for the book into proper order. Enjoy!
Also: since my image-manipulation skills end at being able to crop and shrink pictures. I will be grateful to anyone who can make a nifty icon out of this, so future book posts can use that rather than the comet image I’ve been employing.
Very brief update, as I’m on the road and need to get moving: the history geeks among you may appreciate my research bibliography for A Star Shall Fall.
I may have another thing to add to that later today or tomorrow, but for now, I must run.
The good news is, I don’t think I’ll have to completely replace every Dead Rick scene from Part One.
Just a bit more than half of them.
Seriously, I feel like a book or two ago, somebody sneaked in and replaced my writing process with another author’s. I used to write relatively clean first drafts; now I flounder through writing wrong scenes left and right, inventing Spanish nymphs that may not even show up in the final draft, and generally failing to figure out what one of the villains is doing. Some concerted effort on my part has at least begun to sort that last bit out, which is why my pessimistic guess of “all Dead Rick scenes” has been revised downward to “five of the nine, with revision on the rest,” but it’s still disheartening. (Oh yeah, and I’ll probably need to write at least one entirely new scene, aside from replacing half of those already there.)
I’m glad I noticed the growing pattern from Ashes and Star, and gave myself extra time for this book. Otherwise I’d be screeeeeeeeewed.
I’m also very glad that I figured out most of Eliza’s PII while in London, as it gives me something to do while I figure out where I went wrong on the Dead Rick end. If I can manage to do his scene replacements while moving forward on her part, I’ll be in good shape. But first I need to finish sorting out him and Nadrett — and figure out if La Madura’s staying in the book or not — so I know what to replace those scenes with.
The other writing-related bit of news I promised is another excerpt from A Star Shall Fall. This one introduces Mr. Galen St. Clair, first of the novel’s two protagonists — with a bonus cameo appearance by a Famous Historical Figure. (Who, like Newton, and indeed most of the FHFs that show up in this book, is not so good with the social graces. I guess that’s what happens when your book concerns itself with scientific history.)
If you missed the earlier excerpts, the beginning is here. Enjoy!
