I can tell I haven’t really gotten into the flow of a scene when all my paragraphs are of the same length. Long paragraphs and short ones are part of the dynamics and tempo of narrative; with no variation, everything’s at the same volume, the same pace. When they start contrasting more, it’s a sign I’m doing something right.
From this insight, I conclude I’m going to have to rewrite the first five hundred words of this scene.
But that’s a job for later.
Word count: 30,038
LBR census: I think fear counts as blood.
Authorial sadism: Since my last update . . . making Irrith play politics, and making Galen face down twenty-five tons of By The Way You Know You’re Mortal, Right?
Halfway through Part Two (of seven). I don’t feel like my narrative momentum has quite cohered yet, but we’re getting there. Mostly it’s still Irrith giving me trouble. Unlike Galen, she didn’t show up with her intestines on a platter, asking if I’d like to play with them; I’m having to pry useful conflict out of her.
This is what happens when you write a relatively care-free character. It’s hard, getting her to care about stuff.
But Galen’s at the Royal Society now. I wonder just how many photographed pages of minutes I’m going to read through before I decide I really don’t give a damn when Henry Cavendish first attended a meeting, and that nobody will much care if I put him there in late 1757. After all, biographical info on the guy is remarkably sketchy, so aside from the minutes, there’s probably no record at all of when he showed up for the first time. And given that I had to photograph handwritten pages out of giant leatherbound volumes you can only get by applying to use the Royal Society library and then filling out request forms, the odds of anybody being able to call me on my error are pretty low.
(If a piece of historical accuracy falls in a forest and there’s nobody qualified to notice, does it constitute an error?)
Er, nevermind. Since they helpfully put visitors at the beginning of each set of minutes, and those are easy to find, I, um, already found my answer. June 15th, 1758. Possibly not his first meeting, but the first one in the range I copied, and therefore the first that will appear in this narrative.
(If a piece of historical accuracy falls in a forest and a deranged writer runs over to prop it back up again, does it constitute grounds for involuntary commitment?)
Bedtime now. Before I go even crazier.
The last Deeds of Men winner has been chosen. Thanks to everyone who signed up for the newsletter — I’ll make it as interesting and news-ful as I can.
Don’t forget that you can still post comments or questions on the discussion thread (same goes for Midnight and Ashes, of course). And I do hope to have more Onyx Court short fiction for you guys in the future — not while I’m plugging away on this novel, probably, but maybe after it’s done I’ll get “And Blow Them at the Moon” or “Bow Street Runner” written.
But first, novel.
I’m going to gamble that LJ has gotten over its indigestion, i.e. will stop randomly eating and then vomiting posts back up again, and link to Alma Alexander interviewing me on the topic of In Ashes Lie, and the Onyx Court books in general.
One is that for the duration of June, Midnight Never Come is available as a one-dollar e-book. You can pick up a Kindle copy at Amazon, or eReader or what have you at Fictionwise, and maybe other formats elsewhere — but the offer only lasts until the end of the month.
The other is that I will be doing a reading and signing at Borderlands Books in San Francisco tomorrow (Saturday) at 1 p.m. If you’re in the Bay Area, come on by, and hear some assortment of short stories and/or excerpts from In Ashes Lie. (I really should make a decision on what I’m reading . . . .)
Which is to say that you can probably already find Ashes in your local bookstore, since they’re generally on the lax side about when they shelve things. But officially, June 10th is the street date for my second Onyx Court novel. Get your dose of faerie politics + explosions today! (Or tomorrow.)
I should also mention that I’ve recovered from the delay imposed by my London research, and picked the next two winners for the Deeds of Men giveaway. I think we’re doing one more set after this, so if you want signed copies of the first two Onyx Court books, sign up now — I’ll do the last drawing next Monday.
Now we’re at 20K. Once upon a time, this would have been a fifth of a book; since this novel’s planned for 140K, it’s a seventh.
That feels like quite a bit less.
But I made some interesting decisions in tonight’s writing, like answering the question of “how will this character find out about this otherwise well-concealed thing?” with the tidy solution of “they’ll tell him.” I need to make sure they have good reasons for that, of course, but it’ll be easier than contriving a reason he can stumble across it on his own. And this gives me a chance to spin a particular element of the Onyx Court in a direction I haven’t taken it before. When you’re writing a series, these things matter.
Now, however, we go into the Month of Unpredictable Progress. I’ll be on the road, without my research materials or a quiet place to work half the time, so for the next four weeks, 1K/day goes out the window. I’ll get what I can get, when I can get it. And then in mid-June we’ll see what good that semi-composting time has done me.
(Hopefully a lot.)
Word count: 20,718
LBR census: Love (of the puppy-dog sort) and rhetoric (of the rebellious sort).
Authorial sadism: Knowing how to hook Irrith.
If you have any questions or comments about Deeds of Men, this is the place for them. No LJ account required to post.
It is obviously a Spoiler-Rich Zone for the novella, but may (depending on what people have to say) contain spoilers for Midnight Never Come as well.
London, 1625. A young man lies dead in a Coldharbour alley. Before his death, he uncovered secrets that could threaten the mortal world above and the faerie world below. Now, to find the murderer and protect both realms, Sir Michael Deven will need the help of a man with reason to hate the fae of the Onyx Court — the victim’s own brother.
*** *** ***
In between the novels, there are other stories.
Deeds of Men is a free Onyx Court novella, taking place between Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie. You can download it from my website in your choice of formats (HTML, PDF, or ePub), or order a bound copy via AnthologyBuilder.
This is what I spent February working on, what I was researching Buckingham for, what I needed copy-edited in British style. You don’t need to have read either novel first (though it does contain some spoilers for Midnight), and you don’t need to read it to enjoy Ashes, but it covers some of the events between the two books, like a DVD extra. I hope to do more Onyx Court stories in the future, too: there’s lots of fun bits of history that fall outside the scope of my novels, and lots of chances to explore side characters.
(Confidential to matociquala — it has dead Spaniard in it just for you.)
In a little while I’ll post a Spoiler Zone thread for people to discuss the story or ask questions. In the meantime, enjoy!
Actually, it began a while ago, when my agent asked me to write a sample of the next Onyx Court book to send out with the proposal. I already had nearly eight thousand words in the bank when I announced the deal.
But today is the real beginning, the day when I sit down and start cranking out words at a steady pace. The LBR icon will come back, I’m sure, for progress posts, but this first one gets my brand-spanking-new comet icon. (It really ought to be a pic of Halley’s comet, but the sad truth is that the 1986 return did not produce any pictures half so spectacular as this one — whichever comet it is — and the various older depictions don’t make great icons. You’d all be wondering what the white smudge is, or why I have a Bayeux Tapestry icon for an eighteenth-century book.)
Anyhoo. 1093 words: a hair over quota, to cross the 9K boundary and make myself feel good. I’ll talk more later about Galen, the mortal protagonist of this book, and the ways in which I’m going to have to stretch to write him, but so far, so good. I think it’s safe to say Galen is not in much danger of being boring.
Tomorrow, I get to play with a centaur . . .
It’s May 1st. Do you know what that means?
Time for me to start work on the sequel to In Ashes Lie.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Onyx Court series will continue! I’m slated for two more books: one in the eighteenth century, one in the nineteenth. Technically they have working titles, but around the house, they’re known as “the comet book” and “the Victorian book.” (Exciting, I know.) The latter was first announced back in 2007 — the original plan was for me to write that one instead of In Ashes Lie, because I was going to do these things out of chronological order. The comet book goes in between: culminating in 1759, it mashes together Halley’s comet, Sir Isaac Newton (yes, I know he’s dead by then), alchemy, and the consequences of the Great Fire of London (coming in June to a bookshelf near you).
So, the series in order: an Elizabethan faerie spy fantasy, a Stuart faerie disaster fantasy, an Enlightenment faerie alchemical fantasy, and a Victorian faerie steampunk fantasy.
(And then maybe a Blitz book and a modern book, but I’d have to think up plots for those first.)
There’s a bit of a shakeup on the back end, though it won’t mean much for you the readers: the publisher for these next two will be Tor, not Orbit. No terribly exciting drama to tell you about; it’s just that Orbit wanted me to work on something new before returning to this series, but I was keen to keep going. The intent is for Tor to put out the comet book in 2010, and the Victorian book in 2011. Both will be trade paperbacks, with a possible later reissue as mass-market. And OMG I can’t wait to write these things.
I’ll in London again in early June, doing the research round. Look for Trip-Blogging Part Three then, and ongoing posts about my reading and wordcounts, which I will endeavour to make interesting. (In fact, stay tuned for revelations as to which recent questions on this journal have been secretly comet-related . . . .)
Eighteenth century, here I come!
I’m trying (again) for the one-story-a-month thing, which means I’m gearing up for February. This one is going to be a bigger project, and involves at least one piece of directed research. So:
Can anyone recommend to me a good biography of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham? I’m particularly interested in the last five years or so of his life; I could care less what he got up to in childhood.
(Oddly, this is completely unrelated to me reading The Three Musketeers. THAT book, I picked up because I’m trying to figure out what “The Three Hackbutters” should be about, other than its title.)
It may look like I’ve been cherry-picking reviews that speak positively of Midnight Never Come, but the truth is I post everything that makes a substantive comment on the book. (I don’t figure you all want to see every post that mentions it in passing; possibly you don’t even want to see what I do post.) Anyway, as if to prove that, this roundup is a mixed-to-negative bag — for some reason I hit a run of less enthusiastic reviews lately.
occultatio read it right after finishing Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, which is the fastest way I can think of to make my book suck. I will be the first in line to admit that, by comparison with her, my writing is lightweight. But if I work very hard and eat my vegetables, one day I may grow mighty enough to equal her first novel. (Pardon me while I go cry again over the fact that she was that damn good right out of the gate.)
meganbmoore liked it in the end, but found the opening overly political and slow-going.
Trinuviel at FantasyBookSpot loved the premise and structure, but the execution just did not come through for her. Despite that, I recommend you go read her review if you like digging past the surface; she clearly knows her way around the Tudor period, and says many intelligent things about my structural choices.
And then a glowing review, to wrap this set up: Lory Hess at the Green Man Review stayed up way past midnight reading it. (And made my day by being the only person so far to make mention of the alchemical allusion at the beginning of Act I. That was a shout-out to my Memento peeps.)
***
Here’s the funny thing about Trinuviel’s review, which I’d like to discuss more. As I said, she knows her history, and brings up the motif of doubling in Elizabethan thought, connecting that with my mirroring of Elizabeth and Invidiana.
If I were smart, I’d let you believe I planned that all along. Truth is? I didn’t. At the time that I thought up Invidiana, I had no idea that doubling was a thing back then, and I’d never heard of the king’s two bodies. I came across it later, certainly — I don’t think I could have done that much research and missed it — but even then, it never occurred to me to turn around and connect that to the idea already in place.
All the things she says about the way the doubling plays out were most definitely deliberate, but the idea itself was a felicitous accident. Which is something I’ve wondered about ever since I started writing seriously enough to think about the kinds of things we tend to say in English classes and research papers: how much of what we see in a story is deliberate? This gets into the whole “the author is dead” notion in literary criticism, and I’m on the fence about that. On the one hand, being an anthropologist and a writer myself, I always want to know about the person behind the words, the ways in which the author and the context of creation can shed new light on the story you read. On the other hand, sometimes you can find perfectly legitimate meanings in a text that were created completely by accident. It’s why I’m always careful to phrase things as “you can read this out of it” unless I know for a fact that the author put it in there on purpose.
At any rate, her comments are food for thought — especially since I’m currently trying to decide how seventeenth-century fae, influenced by contemporary mortal ideas, might handle the issue of legal justice. I think we have a tendency to cut our fantasy creations slack, to behave as if absolutism and arbitrary sentencing are somehow more attractive when they’re done by a faerie, but this strikes me as a fine time to poke holes in that idea. (Now I just need to figure out how to follow a different model without making it mundane and boring.)
Last summer or fall I collected interview questions from readers to put in the back of Midnight Never Come. I’ve received permission to post that on my website — with special bonus update to the final question — so that’s your MNC-related goodie for today.
I will also post answers to some of the questions I didn’t use there, but that will come later — probably in June.
I remember when I moved into my freshman dorm at Harvard, and there was a list on my pillow of everyone who had lived in my room since 1804. (Nobody famous, but Ralph Waldo Emerson had lived down the hall.)
I’m reminded of this as I look at the list of the Lord Mayors of London. It’s kind of boggling to imagine being elected to an office that stretches back in an unbroken line to 1189. (Well, the elections go back to 1215. The two guys before that were appointed.) I won’t count them myself, but Wikipedia says almost 700 individuals have served.
Stop and think about that for a moment. Monarchical dynasties come and go; they overthrow each other, die out, pass to collateral lines. Sometimes they even get abolished and re-instituted. And those who occupy thrones are put there by birth, not by merit. I’m less impressed by that than I am by this, a tradition of annual elections stretching back nearly 800 years.
This is the kind of thing that makes me realize how American I am. We’ve had forty-three presidents over 219 years. Whoop-de-doo. 219 years is an eyeblink, by the standards of European history.
Brits think 100 miles is a long distance, and Americans think 100 years is a long time.
Back I go to making a list of the aldermen of London in 1640 — another institution that’s been around for eight centuries or so.
Edited to add: I also get brief flashes of what it’s like to be a historian, reading meaning between the lines of incredibly boring information. List of aldermen? Boring as hell. But then you notice things like the sudden turnover in 1649, the year they cut the king’s head off. Normally there were maybe one or two vacancies in a year; maybe four or five, maybe none. The list for 1649? Stretches nearly four pages. John Smith of the Drapers’ Company was selected for Walbrook on June 12th, sworn in the 19th; on June 20th they selected William Nutt of the Grocers’ Company. He got sworn in on July 10th, four days before the selection and swearing-in of Hugh Smithson from the Haberdashers. Smithson in turn lasted five days, to be succeeded by William Bond, also of the Haberdashers, who made it all the way to 1650 before vanishing. And that’s not the worst of it; Cornhill Ward alone went through nine aldermen in 1649.
I know seven aldermen were forcibly booted for Royalist sympathies, but I don’t know why the rest of them had the political lifespan of mayflies. What aspect of the unrest had them coming and going in a matter of days?
The list doesn’t say. But it raises the question, and I think that’s how historical inquiry gets started.
Edit #2: Also, my apologies to Richard Martin of the Goldsmiths, who is apparently the real-life individual I booted off the historical stage when I made Deven’s father the alderman for Farringdon Within. (There was a limit to my historical accuracy, but you have to dig pretty far to find it.)
Since Martin got to be Lord Mayor in 1589, I’ll just pretend he was busy with that instead.
If you’re grappling with a problem in your story, and then you think up a solution, and then decide (as you should) that no, that solution is too easy, so you toss in a complication, but you still don’t quite know how to make it work . . .
. . . then the answer is in fact to toss in another complication.
Throw plot twists at it until it works1, sez I.
1 — Method not advised for all stories. But it works for some.
You know what happens when I post two research book reports in one day?
I get into the sort of mood where I’m genuinely excited to discover that all the minutes of the House of Commons from the seventeenth century are available online. And that the IU Library has a book that lists seven hundred years’ worth of the aldermen of the City of London.
The sad thing is, I do have a life. And this is it.
I know, I’m posteriffic today. But I’m finally making visible progress on research, so you get book reports.
This particular item, published in 1937, is apparently the most recent — nay, the only — useful resource out there for information about the Roman and medieval city wall. Which seems bizarre, but hey. It’s jointly written by Walter G. Bell, F. Cottrill, and Charles Spon, who took it in turns to write about the wall in various periods, from its first construction by the Romans to its demoltion through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.
The archaeologist in me alternately cringes and giggles at the gimpiness of 1930s research methods and the unapologetically patriotic tone of the writing, but it does provide me with a great deal of handy information, both for this and later books.
So for the 0.00001% of you who might need to know about the London Wall in excruciating detail, this is your book. (Unless the folks at the Museum of London are wrong, and there’s a better one out there I could have been reading.)
This is the book I needed to read before Stone’s. If you’re looking for a clear, readable, narrative overview of seventeenth-century history, I’d definitely recommend this one. It starts with a pair of chapters on the social and political world throughout the period, then begins moving chronologically, separating the century into reasonably distinct segments for James I and VI, the Duke of Buckingham, Charles I, the start of the Civil War, the conclusion of the Civil War, the Commonwealth/Protectorate, and the Restoration. (It goes on from there, but I stopped in 1667; I might well come back and read the later chapters after this novel is done.) A few of Kishlansky’s break-points seem oddly chosen — why 1644 as a dividing line in the Civil War? — but divisions like that are always going to be a little arbitrary.
The political perspective seems, if anything, excessively moderate. I’m not sure if the contrast with Stone comes from the different times at which the authors were writing, their political inclinations, their theory backgrounds, or what, but Kishlansky appears reluctant to paint anybody in a noticeably negative light. Charles I doesn’t seem unreasonable, Cromwell seems like a patriot — hell, even Strafford comes across as not all that awful, when Stone made it sound like he was practically eating Irish babies with tartar sauce. Granted, Stone’s purpose was to trace the causes of the conflict, so he’s more likely to highlight the negatives, but still — Kishlansky might be a bit too forgiving.
But that’s okay. I came to this book hoping to understand what happened, and now I do. The result is that I finally have a tentative outline for which time periods And Ashes Lie will be covering. I call that a win.
I intend to pitch another Onyx Court book to my publisher, that would be set in the mid-eighteenth century and form . . . call it bookends, with And Ashes Lie. Either one stands on its own just fine, but they do form a pair.
I’m pondering that story in my off moments, even though it’s Not What I’m Writing Just Now. Come up with an idea. Elaborate the idea. Oooh! It would be fantastic to have Character A do this thing where they tell the guy thus-and-such, ’cause that would put a really nice twist on the idea.
Go away. Do other things. Ponder.
No, wait. Given what happened in MNC, it totally doesn’t make sense for Character A to have those lines. They’d never say ’em. But they’re good lines . . . .
Okay, so invent Character B. Duh.
Keep pondering. While doing other stuff.
So how does Character B get into the story? Who is Character B? (A problem for next book, dear . . . .)
No, no. A problem for this book. Because it would be so much better if Character B were a side person in AAL, and then became more important in the next one.
Ooh, good! Let’s remember that.
Ponder some more.
AHA! Yessss, my precious. Introduce Character B when Thing X happens. It illustrates that thing we wanted to do after MNC, and puts them on the board before their big important moment in the next book and stuff for the Victorian one, too! and oh yes this will do nicely.
Series writing is a new thing to me. Doppelganger got slightly revised to better support its sequel, and I’ve constructed a few closed-trilogy ideas, but this is the first time I’ve really gotten down into the guts of something conceived of as interlocking pieces, rather than as sections of a whole. Apparently this is how it works: your brain ricochets back and forth between different parts like the victim of a pinball machine, but every so often you hit something and rack up a few points, and then if you’re really lucky lights start flashing and bells start ringing (and then be sure your ball doesn’t slip past you out the bottom . . . .)
Pinball: my newest weird writing metaphor.
