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Posts Tagged ‘onyx court’

one step closer

Here’s a stage I’ve never had before, in the book-publication process: I just received a stack of covers for With Fate Conspire. Like, the paper wrap for the hardcover. It’s like a real book, just without the book! And that will be coming soon. (I am so excited, y’all.)

And speaking of excited, here’s what Publishers Weekly had to say:

Gifted storyteller and world-builder Brennan returns to the Onyx Court, a faery city that coexists with London, in her fourth historical fantasy (after 2010’s A Star Shall Fall). As the Onyx Court is threatened by 19th-century advances in technology, the faeries and humans increasingly come into conflict. Eliza O’Malley is caught between the two worlds, both of which are often cruel and indifferent to her desperate search for her childhood friend, Owen, who was captured by the faeries seven years before. Unless Eliza can find Dead Rick, the dog-man who betrayed them, Owen will be lost to the faery kingdom forever. Series readers and fans of the Tam Lin myth will be captivated by this complex and vibrant depiction of a magical Victorian era.

The funny thing is, I honestly didn’t think of the Tam Lin overtones until I read this, though obviously they’re there.

Onward to the shelves . . . .

holy cow, they liked it

You have to be a subscriber to Kirkus Reviews to see the whole thing (or, y’know, have a publicist who shares it with you) — but here is a quote from the (ahem) STARRED REVIEW I just received:

Brennan’s grasp of period detail is sure, as the Dickensian squalor of most mortal sections of the city has its mirror in the teeming desperation of the Goblin Market. Despite the cast of thousands, many of the characters have real presence, and after a slow start the plot coheres and swirls forward into a series of tense and surprising conclusions. An absorbing finale to a series that has grown richer with every installment.

There’s been a general pattern of reviews of the series echoing that last phrase, and I have to say, I’ll take that graph, thankyouverymuch. I guess maybe from a sales perspective it would be better to have an amazingly awesome first book, and then tail off afterward (presuming your readership doesn’t all vanish), but artistically? Hearing that I’ve done better with each attempt is very satisfying.

a glimpse inside my mind

So I’m watching the last Harry Potter movie — don’t worry; no spoilers — and at one point there’s a shot which completely distracts me from the movie. This has happened before with the films.

But as I leaned over and said to my husband a moment later: this time I was distracted by contemplating dragon anatomy, and not by trying to ID the slice of London flying by in the background.

Ladies and gentlemen, the new series has clearly moved in and set up house.

Fifty days!

The countdown continues. Today, I share with you my research photos from last year.

It is, as usual, only a tiny selection from the whole: 39 pictures, when I took somewhere between five hundred and a thousand. But a lot of those are blurry, terrible reference shots from inside dimly-lit museums, or placards reminding me what the next photo in the sequence is, or things that wouldn’t mean much to anybody but me. I chose these to give you a sense of some of the things, places, and people that are important in the novel, with a few tossed in for sheer aesthetic pleasure, and a couple more for nostalgia.

Plus a whole wodge of shots from the Natural History Museum, because the decoration in there really has to be seen to be believed.

The rest of my photos, including those from previous Onyx Court research trips, are here.

Sixty days!

I will send everyone off into the weekend, and the month of July, with a nice big chunk of With Fate Conspire, in which we meet Eliza and Dead Rick both.

New material begins here, or you can start back at the prologue if you prefer. Be sure to keep clicking through; I’ve posted several scenes!

Now also seems a suitable time to mention that Marissa Lingen has beaten Harriet Klausner to the punch, posting the first review of With Fate Conspire. No spoilers, so you can read it without fear!

Results of the icon contest for A Natural History of Dragons will go in a separate post, because you’ll be getting a little treat there, too . . . .

in which I post ALL the writing links!

Seriously, I’ve got a lot of these piled up.

First: genarti! Congratulations! You have won the “ARC and Desk Delivery Day” giveaway. Email me your address (marie dot brennan at gmail dot com), and I’ll get that on its way to you.

Second, you have a chance to win a complete set of the Onyx Court books by bidding in Brenda Novak’s 2011 Auction, raising money for diabetes research. That runs until the end of the month, so you have about twelve days left to bid. (The prize will ship in summer, when I receive my author copies of With Fate Conspire, or I can arrange to send the first three earlier if desired.) Also, there are lots of other awesome things on offer there, so go browse.

Third, you also have until the end of the month to buy one or more of my stories from AnthologyBuilder, and get a dollar off the cover price. (Fuller details here.)

Fourth, some of you may be interested in , a Yuletide-style fandom exchange for Asian fandoms (e.g. Japanese anime, Bollywood, Hong Kong action flicks, etc). Nominations are open until the 25th, and I’m vaguely tempted to participate; I had fun writing my K-20 story for Yuletide last year. I’m waiting to see how many of the nominated sources I know well enough to write, though, since a lot of the current ones are totally unknown to me.

Fifth, for the language wonks reading this, “Singular ‘they’ and the many reasons why it’s correct.” I am a big proponent of “they” as a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun, largely because it’s one we’ve been using for that exact purpose for centuries now, and it’s a lot more graceful than “he or she” and similar constructions. Mind you, I do find it unsatisfactory for referring to a specific individual who doesn’t fit into standard gender categories; for whatever reason, in those cases my brain seizes up on the apparent plural meaning of the word. (And it’s politer anyway to use whatever pronoun such a person prefers, though that can be hard to do — and the pragmatist in me does wish we could settle on a single alternative, rather than the motley assortment currently in use.) But for sentences like “everyone took out their books,” or referring to somebody whose gender identification is unknown (frex, somebody you only know online), I like “they.” We’re already using it; I think grammar pedants should accept it.

That’s enough for now, I suppose. There may be other link salad-style posts in the future, though; Firefox’s new tab-grouping setup has really encouraged my tendency to hoard these things. :-/

What do I do with this wall?

Ever since I moved to my current residence, I’ve had a map of London on the wall behind my desk: Restoration-era, Georgian, Victorian.

I’ve taken the last of those down now, and the blank space is staring at me. It’s a wide horizontal gap, too big to be filled by any of the pictures I have around. I don’t know what to do with it.

A map of the world A Natural History of Dragons takes place in, perhaps. But I don’t have such a map yet; I’m still trying to figure out the geography of that world.

What the heck do I do with this wall?

huh . . . upgrades

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!!!!!

more (sort of) Onyx Court to tide you over

I screwed up my neck and shoulder on Sunday, so I’ve mostly been staying away from the computer. But I’ll have another fight post soon — possibly tomorrow* — and in the meantime, you can entertain yourselves with “Two Pretenders,” my latest offering over at Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

This is, by the way, the product of one of my charity auctions, where the winner was allowed to choose one event or person in English history and I would tell them what the fae of the Onyx Court had to do with it. In the case of “Two Pretenders,” because the event chosen actually predates the Court itself, the link is more tenuous; but the short story grew out of the summary I gave the winner. So if I do another such auction in the future, remember, you may get an entire short story out of it. 🙂

And remember, after you’ve read the story, you’re always welcome to leave a comment on the forums.

*By which I mean Friday for everybody who isn’t in Asia. I’m actually posting this before midnight my time, but in social terms I don’t believe it’s the next day until the sun has risen or I’ve slept, so even if it were three a.m. Friday morning for me right now (and six a.m. or later for some of you), “tomorrow” would still mean Friday. Confused yet? 🙂

obligatory awards pimpage

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.

better late than never?

It occurs to me I never put up an open book thread for A Star Shall Fall. So, as I beat my head against this bloody short story, feel free to comment here with any questions you wanted to ask or observations you wanted to share. Spoilers for this book are, of course, a given; there may also be spoilers for Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie (or for that matter the short stories), so be warned.

(I may also answer questions about With Fate Conspire, but only if I feel like it. No, I won’t tell you how it ends. Or whether your favorite character is going to die.)

a brief note

There will be an audio version of “Two Pretenders” in BCS; that will reportedly go live in January, which is also (I believe) when the print version itself will be published.

Back to drooling on myself, by which I mean prepping for game tonight.

rounding up the week

More collated linky, and then maybe next week I’ll get around to posting about Ada Lovelace and her wings.

Another guest-blog: me at Tiffany Trent’s LJ, talking about researching in order to get things wrong.

More “And Blow Them at the Moon”: the giveaway is ended (Scott will be picking a winner soon), but if you’d like to listen to the story, the podcast version is now available. I enjoyed this recording immensely — like, meant to just check it out, but ended up listening to the whole thing — because Scott arranged for a British reader, who does a marvelous job with the accents. He even does a Cornish accent for the knockers! Or something I presume is a Cornish accent, anyway! (I have no idea what they sound like. Which is Reason #17 why he’s a better reader for the story than I am.)

Further reviews of A Star Shall Fall: Mark Yon at SFF World, which he sums up as “An ambitious tale and a pleasing triumph. Wonderful.” His comments make me very happy. Watch out for borderline spoilers near the end of the review, though. Locus also had a very good review, though it isn’t online, but this bit is pretty quotable:

There’s a sly brilliance to Brennan’s ongoing tales where the city of London moves through history . . . A Star Shall Fall has room enough for intellect and emotion, great issues as well as an array of individuals and personalities: self-mocking wit, bluntness, and ardor among others. As fear of the Dragon mounts, humans and fae come together in powerful scenes that both reflect and find ways to transcend the gap between beings with such very different experiences of Life and Time.

Finally, another public appearance for me: I’ll be down in SoCal on October 23rd for the SCIBA Author Feast and Trade Show (yes, it’s really called that). SCIBA is an independent booksellers’ association, so this is an industry event rather than a fan one, but if any of you will be there, be sure to say hi!

Er, that’s only four things. Uh. Here, have cats in an IKEA store.

I hope five things really do make a post

I hope that one of these days I will regenerate enough brain to post about a bunch of things piling up in my head: Ada Lovelace, Babbage’s childhood attempt to summon the devil, the manga I’ve been reading lately, etc. But that day is not today — not if I want to also get my writing done at a reasonable hour — so let’s just get on to the reminders and such.

First, something unrelated to A Star Shall Fall: if you missed it over the holiday weekend, I’m the most recent guest on Jim Hines’ “First Book Friday” series, talking about Doppelganger.

Second, tchernabyelo, you’re the winner of the birthday giveaway! Since you clearly don’t need to be introduced to the Lymond Chronicles, you can have your pick of either Fire and Hemlock, or Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, or (if you already know and/or have both of those books) something else entirely, which we can discuss in e-mail. Drop me a line at marie [dot] brennan [at] gmail [dot] com with your mailing address and your preference.

Third, kinderjedi is the winner of the Sirens discussion giveaway. Same instructions as above, except that your prize is a signed copy of A Star Shall Fall.

Fourth, if you envy kinderjedi their win, you have a until the end of the day Wednesday (where I think “end of the day” is defined in a vaguely East Coast U.S. fashion) to leave a comment on the BCS forum thread for “And Blow Them at the Moon,” after which I will pick one commenter to receive a signed copy of the book.

And fifth, if you’re curious about the book itself, Kelly at Fantasy Literature recently reviewed it, so you can see what she has to say.

Oh! Sixth! (Which makes this TOTALLY a post, even if the five six things individually are not all that substantial.) I will be doing a reading and signing at Borderlands Books on September 25th. That’s in San Francisco, for those who are anything like local, and it starts at 3 p.m. I hope to see some of you there!

Sing it with me!

Happy Bookday to me, Happy Bookday to me . . . .

Actually, Happy Bookday to all of you, if the release of A Star Shall Fall was something you were looking forward to. As of today, it ought to be on the shelves of discerning bookstores everywhere (in the U.S. and Canada, anyway).

Now seems a dandy time to link once more to my essay on the merits of buying a book from a bookstore, rather than from an online seller. If you have a choice of which way to go, choose the physical store; it will help keep me in business as a writer, just a bit more than an online sale would. (E-books are a whole different game, of course.)

Or, if you’d like to try and get a signed copy direct from me instead, you have two ways to do it (both of ’em with fairly good odds). First, you can participate in the discussion threads on the community: the fifth and final thread is up today, asking about the city of London, and previous threads are here, here, here, and here. I didn’t realize there would be a fifth question today, so I’m extending the deadline on this giveaway a little bit, to the end of the day on Friday; any comment left on one of those threads before then will make you eligible to win a copy of the book.

Second, you can read “And Blow Them at the Moon” (an Onyx Court short story over at Beneath Ceaseless Skies) and join in the discussion for that in their forums. For this giveaway, you have until the next issue goes live at the end of Wednesday next week.

If you’re looking for other goodies, like my London photos or the soundtrack for the novel, all of that is on my site.

Aaaaand I think that’s it, at least for now. If anybody needs me, I’ll be here in the corner, alternately bouncing and chewing my fingernails off . . . .

last chance to bid

I’ll be at a wedding tomorrow, so this is your final heads-up (from me, anyway) that the auctions end tomorrow. Lots of great stuff on offer over there, and a chance to win your own bit of Onyx Court secret history in the name of flood relief. Go forth and do good!

there’s always one more thing to fix

It didn’t even occur to me that part of the American-ness of the copyediting for the Onyx Court books was the order of dates: August 26, when the British would be more likely to order it as 26 August.

But somebody pointed that out over on the BCS forums, so we’ve gone in and changed the ordering on the dates for “And Blow Them at the Moon.” My apologies for the error; we went with British spellings (everywhere we could spot them, anyway), but didn’t think to change the date formatting.

It’s ‘splody time . . . .

<bounce> I’ve been looking forward to this.

“And Blow Them at the Moon” has gone live at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. This is an Onyx Court story (though not the one I sold yesterday), and I am very pleased with how it’s turned out. It also constitutes the last pre-publication goodie for A Star Shall Fall, which comes out (eek) next Tuesday; Magrat, the main character from this story, will be showing up in the novel, too.

And, because chances to win a signed copy of the book are just FALLING OUT OF THE TREES, YO, the editor at BCS has conspired with me to give one away over there: all you have to do is leave a comment on the story thread in their forums. (You’ll need to be a registered forum user, so we can contact the winner.) That runs two weeks, i.e. until the next issue goes live. Together with Laura Anne Gilman’s virtual birthday party and the Onyx Court discussion threads on the Sirens community, you have three, count ’em three chances to get your hands on a copy. And don’t forget, there’s the secret history charity auction, going until Saturday! Bidding stands at twenty dollars, and every bit of it goes to help flood relief efforts in Pakistan.

(I promise actual content will return to this LJ pretty soon. But I’ve got a friend’s wedding this weekend, and the book release next week, so at the moment spare time to write interesting posts is in short supply. If you want reading material from me, have a story.)

the Onyx Court news keeps rolling in

If you’ve looked at the Onyx Court charity auction, you’ve seen my note about how I may end up writing a short story from the historical prompt the winner chooses. That was, in fact, the outcome of the original auction, for the Haitian earthquake relief; in writing a summary for the winner, I thought of a way to frame it as a short story. So I wrote it, and I sent it out, and now Beneath Ceaseless Skies has bought it! The story is “Two Pretenders,” and I count it as Onyx Court continuity, though it’s a bit different in period and tone from the rest of the series. The winner got to read it a while ago, long before the rest of you, so if you want a backstage pass like that (and the pleasure of knowing you were a part of the process), head over there and put your bid in.

Along with that, the last round of book discussion is up over on , asking about urban fantasy in a historical context. Previous questions about mortal and faerie love, pov and non-linear time, and the interrelationship of the Onyx Hall with London are still open.

And y’know, yesterday I got this big honkin’ box of author copies of A Star Shall Fall, which need to go to good homes. So I’m thinking I might select a random commenter from the discussion posts to receive a copy. Add your two cents’ worth on one of those four posts (or more, if you feel so inspired), and you might be the lucky winner!