Sign up for my newsletter to receive news and updates!

Posts Tagged ‘onyx court’

crawling out of the sickbed

I came down with a cold right after Thanksgiving that seems to have segued with hardly a pause into a second cold, which means I’ve been sick for all of December so far. Bear with me as I try to get some actual business done here.

First of all, and I should have posted this sooner: Epic fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss is putting his fame to good use by raising money for Heifer International. More details at that link, and all of the related posts can be found under this tag, but the short form is that he’s selling off lottery tickets for a giant mountain of prizes, including signed books from many fabulous authors (and also me). Go forth and win swag in the name of a good cause.

Second: this seems an ideal time to remind people of the existence of Anthology Builder, a service that lets you buy short stories and have them bound into a print-on-demand anthology of your own design. My own stories are here, and there’s enough of them now to make a decent-sized antho (especially since you can print Deeds of Men); or you can mix and match with other authors. AB has built up quite a nice selection now, and this is a great way to try out the short fiction of various writers you’ve heard good things about.

Third: I am 599 words into “And Blow Them at the Moon,” aka the Onyx Court Gunpowder Plot story. I’m still not sure how exactly this thing is going to end, but it’s begun with Cornwall’s two most incompetent knockers trying to dig a hole for their own faerie palace in Westminster, which is amusing me. And being amused seems like a good way to start.

The goal is to finish that story and another one that needs a proper title before the end of the month. Whether or not I will manage both depends in large part on whether I can manage to find my way out of these stupid colds.

Sirens site now up

As I mentioned before, I will be one of three Guests of Honor at next year’s Sirens Conference, along with Holly Black and Terri Windling. They’ve launched their new site, so go take a look; you can register, submit a proposal for programming (academic or otherwise), or just browse what’s already there. Everything I’ve heard about the conference has sounded utterly fabulous, so I hope to see some of you there.

WANT.

If you are a language geek . . . .

Go drool.

What I really want is, as the poster suggests, an online version integrated with the OED proper. The 4000-page doorstop sounds less user-friendly. But OMG do I want access to this book (and oh god, the things I could have done with it for Midnight, Ashes, and Star . . .).

idea: good, timing: less optimal

Dear Whoever Puts the Inspiration Juice Into the Shower Water,

I appreciate it — I really do. But couldn’t you have waited to give me the opening paragraph to that Onyx Court story until after I was done revising this Onyx Court NOVEL?

Love,
A writer who was trying to stay focused

***

On the bright side, now that I know this and “An Enquiry into the Causes” aren’t the same story, I can write this one without doing any particular research at all. I’ll have to look some details up, sure, but I’ve read the necessary books already.

It’s kind of refreshing, after Deeds of Men.

134,229.

Finit.

Man, it took me a long time to write that epilogue.

A Star Shall Fall both is and isn’t my longest novel to date. In Ashes Lie clocked in at about 143K in its final draft, but only 129,682 in the first round. I have no idea whether this, too, will be the Amazing Ever-Growing Book when it comes time to revise. That, my friends, is a concern for later.

This is my eleventh novel. I’m pretty pleased with it.

more on free fiction

Reminder: you have until September 1st to toss your name into the hat to win a free magazine.

Since this has come up in e-mail, let me add that I’ll do what I can to match winners with appropriate magazines. If you already own one of those issues and have no need of a second copy, or there’s a story you reallyreallyreally want to read, let me know, and I’ll try to accommodate that as much as is feasible.

(Also — though no one has asked this directly — the thing you post doesn’t have to be gushing fansquee. You’re perfectly welcome to argue with my writing, too.)

Back to the salt mines I go.

Free fiction! Mine and other people’s.

One thing you get from being published in print magazines, that you don’t get from the online ones: author copies.

Sometimes, more than you need.

I’ve got a stack here of random magazine issues, each one of them with a story of mine in it, above and beyond the copies I’m keeping for posterity. I’d like to get rid of them, to good homes — but how to arrange that? With a contest, of course!

It consists of three easy steps:

1) Blog in some fashion about the Onyx Court series. It can cover any piece of the series: Midnight Never Come, In Ashes Lie, Deeds of Men, one of the upcoming books. Your post can be anything you want: a review, historical nitpicking, speculation about what’s coming, fanfiction/fanart, pictures of your cat dressed in a homemade Invidiana costume — whatever.

2) E-mail me a link to your blog post. Send it to marie {dot} brennan {at} gmail {dot} com.

3) Profit! Or at least be entered for a chance to do so.

The items up for grabs are as follows:

That’s eleven potential winners, all told. You’ve got until September 1st to post something and notify me of it — which is plenty of time to sew that costume for your cat, so get cracking!

I should have checked this ages ago.

I’m an idiot.

When I pitched the new Onyx Court novels, I gave both of them working titles, because they sound more like real novels if they aren’t called “the comet book” and “the Victorian book.” In the Victorian case, it was a working title because I’m not terribly enthusiastic about the phrase I chose. In the comet case, by contrast, the phrase is fine; I just thought the passage I’d pulled it from didn’t have enough bearing on the plot to work as an epigraph, which is what I’ve done with the previous two.

And I’ve gone months without digging up the aforementioned passage and taking a second look at it. Which is where the idiocy comes in, because as it turns out, it works very well indeed.

So! I have a title! Unless my editor tells me to change it, but he said he was fine with it back when I thought I wasn’t, so we can hope not. The Book Formerly Referred to As the Comet Book will henceforth be referred to as A Star Shall Fall — Star or SSF when I’m feeling informal.

(You can tell the Victorian title is Totally Wrong, because it doesn’t have a verb in it.)

Anyway, I hope y’all like. I think I do.

got it!!!

Okay, so I didn’t take anyone’s suggestion. But I’m going to award the prize to kizmet_42, whose nomination of “The Green Lion” for its alchemical resonance led me to my choice:

The Crow’s Head.

Which is a) alchemical, b) pub-like, c) suitable to the Onyx Court, and d) a reference to the supposed burial of Bran the Blessed’s head in London.

kizmet_42, send your address to marie dot brennan at gmail dot com, and I’ll send you your prize.

name a faerie pub!

This one especially goes out to all the Brits, who are more familiar than your average American with the verbal genre known as the Pub Name.

There is a tavern of sorts in the Onyx Hall. I need a good name for it. Right now it’s the White Stag because of the folkloric connections, but really, that’s far too clean and ordinary-sounding. (It was going to be the Ash and Thorn, but that’s been co-opted for something else.) So: suggest to me suitable faerie pub names. If I end up picking yours, I’ll send you a signed copy of In Ashes Lie.

Let’s play pretend

I’ve been so busy this week that it’s taken me days to get this link posted, but: a fellow named Marshal Zeringue contacted me a little while ago with what amounts to a one-question interview question, which was, If they make my book into a film, here’s who I’d like to play the lead role(s).

I cheated a bit and answered for both Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie. Head on over there to see who I have faces for in my head (and who I don’t).

(As far as the comet book’s concerned — I don’t have a good visual reference for either Galen or Irrith yet. I should try to fix that.)

He’s not so much a protagonist as a punching bag.

Just spent ten minutes or so talking at kniedzw, trying to figure out how to make a certain plot point happen, and at the end of it all I decided the best method is: embarrasssing Galen.

Poor boy. I so terribly mean to him.

ETA: I originally typed “humiliating Galen,” then decided to downgrade it. Now that I’ve written the scene?

I had it right the first time.

Poor boy. I’ll make it up to him in the next couple thousand words.

Once upon a time, this would have been half of a book.

Word count: 50,839
LBR census: Love. This book is sadly lacking in blood so far, but the love is shaping up to be even more cruel, so it balances out.
Authorial sadism: Did I mention the love? Also, Irrith just planted her foot so firmly in her mouth I think she stepped on her liver. If faeries even have livers.

I’m roughly halfway through Part Three, and (assuming my target word count doesn’t end up being wildly off-base) a little over a third of the way through the book. It’s hard to pace myself, in terms of expectations; this is the first time I’ve set out to write a 140K book. (Ashes got there accidentally.) Normally I’d be thinking of this as the middle span of the story, since most of my novels, both published and unpublished, fall in the 100-120K range. I’m definitely in “the middle,” broadly speaking — this isn’t the beginning anymore, and it sure as heck isn’t the end — but I’m a good 20K away from the actual midpoint.

I must admit, I’m not sure a seven-part structure was my brightest idea ever. It’s a strange number, and not one we really have a model for, as far as story structure’s concerned, but it fits in other ways. I just have to figure out what kinds of things go in which sections. On the face of it, this should not be a challenge; after all, I could just pretend the part breaks aren’t there, and pace things however seems natural. But there’s such a thing as three-part structure, and such a thing as five-part structure (which I did, for the record, pay attention to while writing Midnight), and the four days of the Fire meant I needed four spans of time in Ashes which dictated some of my structure there, too. I just need to figure out what the seven-part version is.

Well, any way you slice it, the next part is the middle one, when the book stops heading away from the beginning and starts heading toward the end. And I know some of what will be happening then.

Now I just need to figure out what happens in the rest of Part Three . . . .

double-you. tee. eff. — Part Two

Okay, the algebra has moved on to calculus and from thence to astrophysics (kniedzw‘s idea), picking up a side order of Norse mythology along the way, and now I’m trying to decide on a suitable driving weight for what started out as the world’s most improbable clock and has gotten weirder since.

. . . I love my job.

Even if sometimes it randomly requires math.

still digging my way out of the hole

Wrote a cumulative 3806 today in various new scenes, rummaging around in the guts of Part Two to make everything fall into the new order. Still need to replace the scene that introduces the CR itself, and then do at least a rough polish on the Magrat conversation, the coffee-house, and Carline; then probably wholesale replace 80% of the Vauxhall scene, and I’ll finally be ready to finish the scene I was in the middle of writing when I realized I needed to redo half of what I’d done.

One of the cherished delusions of the aspiring writer is that this stuff gets easier as you go. Sure, maybe you have to rework your first novel three times, but after a while you learn to produce clean drafts, right?

Yeah, I’m going the other way. I’ve never had to hack a book apart half as much as I’ve done with this one already. Please, please, don’t let this trend continue.

Word count: 36,810 and trying not to think about how I’m running to stay in place
LBR census: I had to work really hard to find a reason why it wasn’t blood.
Authorial sadism: Yes, Galen, when you get a good idea I will make you share it with the class.