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Posts Tagged ‘onyx court’

10 days, and helping Pakistan

Ten days until A Star Shall Fall hits shelves. The last pre-publication goodie will come in a few days, but I have something else for you: another Onyx Court secret history auction. The community is raising funds for relief after the flooding over there, so I’m offering “authorial fanfic” of the Onyx Court series; you pick the historical person or event, and I tell you what the faeries had to do with it.

(Confidential to CEPetit: if you want an actual story about that thing you mentioned over e-mail, now’s the time. <g>)

The auction runs until next Saturday. Unlike previous comms, the offers and bids are entirely conducted as comments to a single post, so I’m currently on page 12; follow the link above to find my offer.

If it goes for the “Buy It Now” price, I may follow up with a second offer. We’ll have to see.

more review bouncy

Marissa Lingen on A Star Shall Fall.

I’ve already admitted to her in private, and don’t mind repeating here, how relieved her review made me. Why? Because she’s a scientist, and I’ve been biting my fingernails over how the way I handle science in this book will be received. I’ve got at least two major factors complicating it, one being that I’m actively trying to grapple with the issue of how magic and science interrelate (or don’t), and the other being that I’m doing it in the context of eighteenth-century science, which is fascinatingly wacky all on its own. And right now I’m trying to deal with the nineteenth-century ramifications of the ideas I set up in Star, which means it’s a relief to know it’s worked for at least one reader of that sort.

I knew I was setting myself up for this challenge. Back when I decided Midnight Never Come would be the first in a series, and that the books would take place in different centuries, I knew I had a chance to do something you don’t often see in faerie fiction: not to show fae as totally stuck in the past, nor as completely modernized, but going through the process of change. Science & technology is a big part of that, though not the only one, so I knew I’d have to deal with these questions, and that it wouldn’t be easy . . . just as Ashes taught me why you don’t see more English Civil War-era fiction out there (because it’s bloody COMPLICATED, is why), I know why more authors don’t try to mash these ideas together.

On the other hand, if I succeed, I’ll have done something that hasn’t been done in a thousand other novels. And that’s worth a few headaches, I suppose.

on a calmer note

Dear Book,

Don’t think you’re safe just because I’m not using the angry kitten icon anymore. That’s Hel up there, and she will cut you.

But we may — may — have resolved the problem. By dint of doing . . . not a lot, actually. Going back to a plan that fell by the wayside, and trying to find some way to insert more downtime at a particular point. Easy enough on Eliza’s side; I just have to find some justification for why Dead Rick’s plot can skip over a month or so. If I can do that, everything else is fine; I don’t have to redate two-thirds of the book or work around historical events or anything of the sort. Just a bit of downtime, and I’m set.

So long as I can find a way to do that. Don’t ask me how; that’s a problem I’ll tackle tomorrow.

You’re still in the doghouse, though. I knew you were going to be the biggest bastard of the series — and that’s saying something, after the difficulties I had writing Ashes and Star — but you’ve been outdoing yourself, really. Any time you want to start being cooperative, feel free.

Slightly less inclined to light you on fire, but still thinking about it,
Your Writer

Git yer discussion on!

Over on the community, they’re doing GoH book discussions leading up to the conference in October. In an excellent bit of timing, this is month my books are up to bat: Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie are on the table, and the first questions have been asked.

I don’t think you need an LJ account to comment over there (though it would probably be helpful to put some name on your posts). And I doubt they’d object to input from non-Sirens attendees — not everybody can make it to the conference that wants to. So if you want to jump in, feel free!

two bits of short story news

First, Clockwork Phoenix 3 debuts today. This contains “The Gospel of Nachash,” which is my Bible + Sekrit Ingredient story. The whole anthology series has been pretty awesome, full of (as the subtitle has it) “beauty and strangeness;” I highly recommend all three volumes. (And not just ’cause I’m in them.)

Second, there will be audio of “And Blow Them at the Moon,” the Onyx Court Gunpowder Plot story. Which hasn’t been published yet, but I still wanted to mention the audio version is coming, if you prefer to consume your short fiction aurally.

music lists

arielstarshadow, a while ago — where “a while” is “about six months” — you mentioned you’d be interested in seeing my playlists for the Onyx Court books, the stuff I had on shuffle while writing, that the soundtracks got built out of. Well, since I recently found myself with occasion to mail those playlists to someone, I figured I might as well go ahead and put them up on my website. The Midnight playlists are here, and the Ashes playlists are here.

They’re just .txt files, and moderately illegible; when iTunes exports a playlist, it includes all the file information, and it was already enough work just cleaning out the chaff so you could see what the titles, composers, and albums were. I didn’t feel like doing even more work to make it pretty. Also, most of it is film scores. But if that’s the kind of thing you’re interested in — especially the dark-and-atmospheric end of film scores — you can scan through and see what I’ve been listening to.

bookbookbooksiesBOOK

Ahem. What I meant to say was, I have ARCs of A Star Shall Fall, and I am doing my very best not to hug them and squeeze them and call them George, but it’s hard, because you put in months and months and months of work, and this is the first point at which it really starts to seem like that thing you poured your brain into is actually going to be a book.

In honor of that, I’ll jump the gun by three days and give you what I planned to post one hundred days before the street date: the prologue. More excerpts will come later, and other goodies too; and if you leave a comment to this post, I’ll put your name into the hat for a drawing, the winner to receive a signed ARC of A Star Shall Fall. (With bonus copy of In Ashes Lie, if the winner doesn’t already own it; I’ve ended up with an absurd number of those, and need to send them to good homes.)

So. Enjoy the prologue, comment here if you want an ARC, and while you’re at it, think about bidding on a piece of Onyx Court history.

Edit: this particular giveaway is now closed. But stay tuned; there will be others.

two charitable causes, again

Because my first Onyx Court history offer went in less than two hours, I’m doing a second one, this time without the “Buy It Now” price: go here to bid on your own piece of historical faerie fiction. (Now with bonus “Special Richard III Disclaimer.”) The auction ends on May 23rd, so get your bids in soon!

Also, the Brenda Novak auction for diabetes research is still ongoing, and there are still a pair of signed Onyx Court novels up for sale.

two charitable causes, Onyx Court on offer

First, I tried this for the help_haiti auction and it was a lot of fun, so I’m doing it again: Onyx Court historical fiction, up for auction. Pick your person or event from English history, and I’ll tell you what the fae had to do with it. The cause this time around is ; full details here, but the short form is that Deb Mensinger is lined up for a liver transplant that will cure her of porphyria, but her donor (her brother) has no insurance and lives on the other side of the country. So the auction is to help defray costs.

Minimum bid on my offer is $5, “buy it now” is $50, and bidding ends Sunday, May 23rd.

Second, I’m once again participating in the Brenda Novak auction to benefit diabetes research. My contribution is a signed pair of the first two Onyx Court novels. Bidding currently stands at $7, with the increment set at $5.

Both auctions have a LOT of other material on offer, so browse through and see if there’s anything that catches your eye!

UPDATE: Er, so the first auction is already gone, via “buy it now.” I will contemplate possibilities for other offers.

Advice from the pro side

Keep notes.

Keep notes from the start. Write down what the characters look like, and where things are. If you invent a town or something along those lines, make a map, even if it’s just chicken scratches on the back of an envelope.

By taking such steps, you will save yourself the effort of having to reconstruct these things by scrounging for details in the three novels, one novelette, and one novella you have already completed. And when the thing you’re trying to map is a faerie palace which (you have abundantly established) doesn’t correspond in a logical fashion to the city above it, you will be very grateful that you have saved yourself this tedious and problematic work.

If you fail to keep notes, you will use up all your scratch paper trying to find a way to make it all fit together, so you can then decide where and how to break it for the purposes of the fourth book. So be smart from the start.

In other words, don’t be like me.

GOOD morning!

One of the downsides to not writing short stories for a while was that I had nothing to sell to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Well, now I’ve fixed that: about three minutes after I woke up this morning, I got an e-mail saying they’re buying “And Blow Them at the Moon,” my Onyx Court Gunpowder Plot story.

Which is also, I should mention, a novelette. In the space of the last couple of weeks, I’ve sold both of the novelettes I’ve ever written — not counting that thing I did back in fifth grade, which might be of roughly that length but will never see the light of day. Since there are a lot fewer potential homes for stories nine thousand words long, I’m very pleased to see both of them happily settled. Especially since Onyx Court stories, with their historical context, are probably never going to run short. 🙂

The only downside is that my list of stories in submission keeps shrinking. For all the right reasons, mind you — but it’s something to try and fix anyway. 🙂 (Ironically, I’m pretty sure the “revision of short story” mentioned at the end of that post refers to this story, which sold on its first trip out the door.)

Help Me, Victorianists — update

For those who may have missed it over the weekend, I’m offering a prize to the person who helps me find a title for the Victorian book. If you know nineteenth-century British lit, please take a look at that post for details on what I’m after.

A few clarifications, to help refine the hunt:

1) Although “should include a verb” is #3 on the list of priorities, it’s a pretty big #3; that’s pretty much the single unifying characteristic of the series titles so far, as seen from the shopper’s point of view (i.e. before they read the book and find out where it came from). I want something where a person who’s maybe read the other books could see the title and think, “Is that a new Onyx Court book?” So I’m pretty seriously committed to maintaining this pattern unless I absolutely can’t.

2) Please do quote the passage your suggested title comes from, rather than just the phrase itself. The reason for this is that I don’t just need a title; I need an epigraph (the quotes that head up the different sections) from which the title will come, and so I’m also judging whether the passage fits the story or not. I’ve already had at least one suggestion where the title-phrase would be perfect . . . except that the passage it comes from isn’t, no matter how hard I try to convince myself otherwise. And it’s easier for me to judge that if I don’t have to hunt for the source of the phrase.

3) Until you see a post saying “Hey guys, I found a title!,” assume I am still taking suggestions. Feel free to keep sending them in.

4) It did occur to me that there’s one other angle which could work for the end of the book, in terms of epigraph subject matter. It’s a bit more of a spoiler than the last post was, though, in that you can begin to guess where I’m going with the story. So I’ll put it behind a cut again, and if you don’t want to be spoiled for the book, you can just ignore what follows.

This is why one suggestion came so close . . . .

street date!

Yes, it’s odd that I usually get this first from Amazon — but it looks like the publication date for A Star Shall Fall will be August 31st. (The day before my birthday!) For those who have been champing at the bit to get this one, at least now you know when to expect it.

You didn’t *really* need that sleep schedule, did you?

I was about ready to head off to bed at 3 a.m. last night (my usual time, for those not aware).

By the time I actually got there, it was nearly 5.

The reason? I was working on revising “And Blow Them at the Moon” last night, which requires at least two pieces of heavy lifting, completely replacing a pair of scenes. The first one was like pulling teeth, and I’m not sure what percentage of that was the difficulty of the scene, what percentage was me just not committing my brain to the task. But I finished it. And then, of all things, a Facebook application handed me some motivation: I was very close to regenerating enough stamina in this little monster-killing thing to go kill monsters one more time before going to bed, so I told myself that while I waited for that to be ready, I would poke at the second scene.

Then it was nearly 5 a.m. and I’d replaced both scenes.

And I think, more than anything, this is what I love about being a full-time writer. They say, and it’s true, that you can’t wait for the muse to strike if you want to have a career (full-time or otherwise) — but sometimes it does strike. When it does, having the freedom to say, “eh, I can just sleep in tomorrow” is a glorious thing. There was a point at which I knew I could kill monsters and go to bed, but I didn’t want to; I wanted to keep writing Magrat doing something very brave and rather stupid, and so I did. (Whoever knew Facebook could be good for productivity?)

Of course, that meant I slept until 1 p.m. today — which is still only eight hours, but some of them are at a time even I don’t consider to be reasonable for sleeping. So now I go eat something (god, I haven’t had food since about 9:30 last night), and trundle through the requisite 50 pages of my page proofs for Star, and then probably read more about the Underground.

And hope I can go to bed at a reasonable hour tonight.

more auctioning

The Carl Brandon Society is sponsoring a fundraiser to help people of color attend Wiscon, a well-respected feminist SF convention. I’m auctioning off a signed set of the first two Onyx Court novels. There are a lot more goodies on offer; details about how to offer, browse, bid, donate, or request assistance here.