Sign up for my newsletter to receive news and updates!

Posts Tagged ‘website’

Sporadic Roundup Number Whatever

Remember, you have until midnight Greenwich time (EDT 7 p.m., I believe) to enter the Midnight Never Come competition, with a chance to win £250/$500 in bookstore vouchers. (It’s a pretty sweet deal. D’you think my publisher would notice if I put myself in?)

***

If you want to hear me ramble on, instead of seeing it, Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing has a podcast interview up, wherein Shaun Ferrell asks me questions about writing, academia, and (of course) Midnight Never Come.

You can subscribe to the feed via iTunes, or download the file directly. If you want to cut straight to my part of the podcast, it starts around twelve minutes in; if you want to skip right past me, I think I shut up around the forty-minute mark.

Despite my best efforts, I, er, talked like I normally do. Which is to say, fast. Sorry about that.

***

Review roundup! Only one of them is accessible online, unfortunately.

Our own ninja_turbo liked it, even accounting for friend bias. Being unfamiliar with the history, he was still able to follow along — yay!

Meredith Schwartz and Jackie Cassada at Library Journal call it a “deft blending” and note that, unlike many staples of the Elizabethan fantasy genre, I don’t use real people as my main characters. (Either approach, of course, can work. But they seem to have liked this one.)

And then two more good ones mailed in from my UK publisher. One appears to come from a magazine called Starburst, and wins my heart for calling Christopher Marlowe “Kit.” The other is from SciFiNow, and it tells me I hit one of the targets I was particularly aiming for: “Eschewing the use of the typical Seelie and Unseelie (or Summer and Winter) courts that appear in so many novels dealing with the subject, Brennan has created a faerie society that is quintessentially English.” Rock on! That goes up there with my UK publisher deciding to pick up a London book by an American author in the first place for evidence I’m doing something right.

***

Finally, if you’ve read the book, feel free to poke your head in on the discussions going on in the spoiler thread. I’m enjoying the back-and-forth there quite a bit.

Happy Book Day!

It’s late enough at night/early enough in the morning that I’m going to break my usual rule (it isn’t the next day until the sun has risen or you’ve slept), and declare the beginning of Midnight Never Come Book Day!

(If I’d really been on the irony ball, I’d’ve announced it at midnight.)

So: today you can officially walk into a bookstore and expect to find the book! Borders appears to be stocking it in what I consider to be large quantities, with copies both in the SF/F section (remember to look for a trade paperback) and — at least in this town — on the “New in Fiction” rack. Which is awesome.

As of today, you can also enter the competition! Short form is, there will be a series of mini-puzzles, for which there are hints scattered around the site. (Not all new or changed content is a hint, though; I sent in some belated modifications for the site, which are being instituted as fast as they can manage.) For every question you answer right, you will be entered into the contest. Check back regularly for updates!

Also, don’t forget my own mini-competition: if you send me a picture of my book in the wild, you’ll be eligible to win a copy of my short story “The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe.” You can post those here, or e-mail them to me at marie dot brennan at gmail dot com.

***

Review dump:

The verdict is in from Locus, and they liked me. “Brennan ably combines elements of danger, romance, and individual moral choices that could affect the fates of great realms, for a tale that’s rich in plot and character. She interweaves historic and fantastic details with scholarship, inspired acts of imagination, and a keen wit.” That’s another one to hug close and grin idiotically over.

John Ottinger at Grasping for the Wind has a few criticisms, but on the whole he enjoyed it: “Brennan’s ability to maintain historical accuracy while writing an exciting and fast-paced novel filled with elves, fairies, the Wild Hunt, and brownies makes this story worth reading.”

I don’t believe I remembered to quote from the Romantic Times review before. They gave it four stars, and said “This story of courtiers from different but parallel kingdoms is ripe with palace intrigue, Machiavellian double dealing and star-crossed love.”

I’ve also collected a couple of Amazon reviews, one two-star from a disappointed reader who prefers my first two books, one five-star from someone who enjoyed it a lot.

***

Not a review: I’m guest-blogging today for miladyinsanity, talking about travel and book research.

Happy Book Day!

Monday morning countdown roundup

We’re in the home stretch for the U.S. release of Midnight Never Come.

June 9th, officially, but I know a handful of copies have already been sold in

various places around the country. If you send me a photo of the book on the

shelf between now and one week after the street date, I’ll enter your name in a

drawing for a special prize: a signed copy of Paradox #12, which contains my short

story “The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe.” (There’s absolutely no connection

between that story and this novel, aside from the time period, but you can have

fun imagining one for yourself.)

Also, those of you who prefer your novels in more portable format may be

interested to know that Fictionwise is advertising an e-book copy. I

wasn’t aware one was being issued, but apparently so.

***

If you were curious, yesterday’s post was an image of the promotional item my

publicist and I made for Midnight Never Come. It was sent to the

bookbuyers for stores in order to get them interested in the novel, and is, of

course, the thing for which I held the signature contest in February.

Want more? Why not try . . . <drum roll> . . . the website?

That’s right, folks: Orbit has put together a gorgeous website for the book.

Poke around and take a look at the goodies, and make sure you find the

semi-hidden link. It isn’t entirely finished yet; they’re doing a soft launch,

and will start rolling out the rest of the content on the 9th. If you come back

then, you’ll find a mini-game you can play, with some rather nice prizes to be

awarded.

***

With the book out in the UK and soon to be out here, reviews have started to

surface. My favorite pull-quote has to be the tag line from SFX Magazine: “Like John Le Carre if

he was obsessed with faeries.” (Alas, the review is not available online,

though it may be eventually.) They liked it, and read it through a political

thriller lens, which I find interesting. Not sure I can live up to a comparison with Le Carre, but hey. Anyway, I figure I’ll do occasional review round-ups here, whenever I reach a critical mass.

Myfanwy Rodman at The Bookbag read it the same way, calling it “a

historical thriller with a fascinating twist,” though one that starts a bit slowly.

Darren Turpin at The Genre Files found it “a highly-enjoyable mix of

Elizabethan and faerie politics and intrigue.”

Chris

Hyland, the Book Swede (who interviewed me last month) read it as a love

story, and flatters me immensely by saying, “What sets Marie Brennan apart

[from similar stories], then, is the quality of her writing, the complexities of

her plot, the characterisations, the world-building… everything” — though he, too, felt it opened slowly.

Mark Yon at

SFFWorld.com appreciated all my research, and didn’t find the romance as

off-putting as expected.

Elizabeth Bear

(aka matociquala), who has her own Elizabethan faerie novel

coming out next month, says of my characters that “These are not kinder,

gentler faeries. Really they’re not.”

Mervi Hamalainen at Curled

Up concurs, saying, “Midnight Never Come returns the fairies to their

roots: terrifying, alien, yet captivating at the same time.”

And finally, Debbie Chapman, a Waterstone’s bookseller, calls it “an amazing,

moving, murderous, magical tale.”

***

In other words, so far people are pretty much liking it.

(Except for Kirkus, of course.)

last excerpt

With forty days to go until Midnight Never Come hits the shelves, I’ve posted the last portion of the excerpt. It’s a long one, so keep clicking through. (Alternatively, you can start back at the beginning.)

(Confidential to sora_blue: You can finally get the answer to your question from a month ago!)

That will actually be the last of the MNC promotional stuff for a while. I leave next week for London, where I will have many adventures researching the next book, and then I will be in the Mediterranean, trying to do no work at all. There will, however, be one last nifty thing, just before the book comes out. And in the interim, you will be getting the return of the trip-blogging, which I know many people enjoyed last year. So enjoy!

Elizabethan extravaganza!

All you Kit Marlowe fanboys and fangirls out there may be interested to know that Issue #12 of Paradox Magazine is now available to order, and within its pages you may find my story “The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe”. No relation to Midnight Never Come, despite that title coming from Marlowe, but I welcome speculation as to how the two might be made to connect. (I suppose the answer might be Ink and Steel.)

Also, C.E. Murphy’s book The Queen’s Bastard debuts today. I mention this because it will always hold a special place in my heart as the first book I blurbed. Yes, ladies and gents, somebody at her publisher decided that Marie Brennan was a name worth putting on the cover! Oddly enough, the letter I got with the review copy connected it to Warrior and Witch, but it’s far more like Midnight Never Come, so that’s the vein I will use to pitch it to you all here.

The Queen’s Bastard, much like Michael Moorcock’s Gloriana, takes place in a setting that is sixteenth-century Europe in almost everything but name. (Unlike Gloriana, at no point did I want to throw it across the room and light it on fire with the power of my rage.) It has espionage and magic and is way sexier than MNC, and it’s the first book of a new series called The Inheritors’ Cycle. Short-form synopsis is, Belinda Primrose is the unacknowledged bastard daughter of Elizabeth Lorraine, queen of England Aulun, and she’s been trained by her father Robert Dudley Robert Drake in the art of international spying and assassination.

Belinda isn’t an entirely likeable character; she takes several actions in the story that had my skin crawling. But that’s clearly deliberate, and tied in with the growth of Belinda’s powers; I suspect that when it’s viewed in the larger context of the series, that will become an interesting facet of her character development. I’m certainly very curious to see the next book. This is clearly based on Reformation-era Europe, but taking it one step aside means Murphy can play with some elements of her own creation, and I’m looking forward to seeing where those go.

Finally, I’m hard at work on creating content for the dedicated Midnight Never Come website. (That’s just the holding page, until the thing goes live.) The plans, they are glorious. I have no idea what this stuff will look like in execution, but the ideas have me hugely pleased.

overly ambitious

I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time; why I chose yesterday afternoon to start it, God only knows. But, as a part of my ongoing project to include business advice on my website, I have finally thrown together the beginnings of a glossary of terms.

Now I need your help.

See, there are undoubtedly many important words I have forgotten. There are definitely important words I have defined inadequately. Heck, some of them don’t have definitions at all, yet. I’m pretty sure pitch and point are two different things, but I have no idea what. Reserves and out of print, I know what they are, but not well enough to provide a coherent definition of when and how those things happen. And then there are the definitions that are just kind of weak, like offset printing. I may even have some things entirely wrong.

So please, if you know the publishing industry, poke around in that glossary and provide me with expansions and corrections. This is going to be a work in progress for a while, I’m sure, like my two lists.

International Pixel-Stained Technopeasantry Unite!

In Internet terms, this is ancient history, but I liked this the first time around, so I’m doing it again. (As are some other people.)

Short recap, for those born after the Hendrixonian period of the Cretaceous: the former vice-president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America railed about people posting fiction online for free. The response, as provoked by papersky (Jo Walton) — after we were done making fun of him — was a whole hell of a lot of people posting fiction online for free.

Last year I posted “Calling into Silence,” my Asimov Award story from 2003. This year it’s a piece that might have the best ratio of length-to-pride of anything I’ve written — which is to say, there are things I’ve written that I’m prouder of, but they’re also substantially longer. “Silence, Before the Horn” is just a flash piece, but I like it all out of proportion to its length.

Both stories are available through Anthology Builder, where you can put together an anthology of your own design and have it printed and shipped to your door.

Remember when you interviewed me?

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.

the recommendations aren’t dead!

Every so often (very often, at this time of year), my brain says “down with productivity!”

In this instance, that means you get book recommendations.

I’m trying to convince myself I don’t have to keep to a monthly schedule, so please disregard the suspicious appearance that I’ve posted (late) January and February books. In no particular order, and on no particular timetable, feel free to check out Jim Hines’ Goblin Quest (likely to appeal to “Order of the Stick” fans), and Ekaterina Sedia’s The Secret History of Moscow (likely to appeal to fans of Gaiman’s Neverwhere).

what to do with the recommendations?

So, the July-to-December delay in posting recommendations probably made it clear that I’m having trouble with that whole endeavour.

Keeping up with the recommendations has always been difficult. I have a limited amount of time for reading; I have an even more limited amount of time for reading novels. Then, even when I am able to spend time on fiction, not everything I read is suitable. Some of it is re-reading, instead of new material. Some of it, I don’t like enough to recommend. And even when I find something new and good, maybe the thing in question turns out to be a six-book series, which still only provides me with one month’s worth of material. Is it any wonder finding twelve a year proved tougher than it looked?

Adding in the “primary source” recommendations (folkloric material I thought fantasy writers might enjoy/benefit from/make use of) was supposed to lighten my load, and it did. Nine novels or series a year, instead of twelve. But because of the way I chose to approach the folklore recs, those ended up being even more work than the novel ones. It’s no accident that I slammed to a halt this year during August: that was the Prose Edda, and I just kept on not finding the time and energy to put that one together. My solution ended up being not so solvent.

With five years of this under my belt, I’m wondering what to do now.

I know that I don’t want to change over to straight reviews instead of recommendations. I think reviews serve a purpose, of course — negative ones included — but what I want to do here is point people toward good books, not away from bad ones. So I figured I’d turn to you lot and see what your preference would be for, among my various possibilities.

Feel free to make other suggestions in comments.

We interrupt this holiday to bring you two pieces of updatery.

The first is that there’s a new service in town, folks: Anthology Builder. So far it’s still in beta, but here’s the general idea: authors upload stories, which you can then purchase, iTunes-style, and assemble into a print-on-demand customized anthology which gets shipped to your door soon afterward. I’m not sure how well it will fly, but I really like the idea, and so far have uploaded “Calling into Silence”. That’s the same story I made available online for IPSTP Day, so you can read it for free, but consider it me dipping my toes in the water of Anthology Builder. My hope is that the site prospers (or something like it does), and in the long term I can use it as a way to make all of my published short fiction available for custom reprinting. Otherwise it tends to sink without a trace, and short story collections are hard to sell via traditional commercial publishing.

The second update is that I’ve made a big push to atone for my suckage since July. What suckage is that, you ask? Why, the suckage of not having posted any book recommendations. I’ve taken advantage of my enforced free time, and thrown up all the rest of them in one fell swoop. The two remaining folklore recommendations are for the Prose Edda and the Volsunga saga; the three novels are Avalon High by Meg Cabot, The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, and The Homeward Bounders by Diana Wynne Jones.

Stay tuned for a later post, wherein I will discuss the future of those recommendations. You can probably guess, based on that huge gap, that I’m thinking of making some changes.

please update your bookmarks

I have no idea how many, if any, people have bookmarked things off the webpage for Midnight Never Come, but if you have, be aware that the URLs will be changing. Since I’m doing more than one Onyx Court novel, I’ve created a directory for that series, and moved the MNC material off into it.

I would have posted this earlier, but LJ and the lack of power and so on. Y’know.

If you were one of the people who hated the trailer for The Dark Is Rising, I invite you to clean your palate as I did, by re-reading the book. (It’s this month’s recommendation.)

edit help?

A kind reader just gave me a heads-up about an error on Wikipedia. (I know, shock, gasp, etc.) It seems that some helpful soul decided to add a link to the page on Doppelganger. Unfortunately, the link in question leads to the page for Moya Brennan, aka Máire Brennan, the lead singer of Clannad.

If any of you are or know someone with the capacity to fix this, could you? ‘Cause as neat as it would be to be an Irish singer, I’m not, and I can’t seem to edit the opening paragraph of the article to remove the link, nor do I know how to stop the redirect from assuming I’m Máire instead of Marie.

If it’s only a few days late, it counts as on time, right?

Er, maybe not.

Anyway, June’s book recommendation is now up on my website: Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys.

Also, if you’re one of the people signed up for my e-mail newsletter, could you confirm that you’ve actually been receiving it? I don’t need everybody to report in, but I realized I’m taking it on faith that the system’s working as advertised, and I’d like to know they’ve been going out properly. (There should be a new one hitting your box some time today.)

Happy International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day!

Remember the little ‘splosion I linked to a while back, where the vice president of SFWA called a bunch of people some highly insulting names for having posted their work for free on the Internet, claiming they were somehow stabbing the industry as a whole in the back by doing so? One of those names was “pixel-stained technopeasant wretch.” Because SF/F writers are a snarky bunch, and because a lot of us think Dr. Hendrix is wrong wrong wrongitty wrong about such things, Jo Walton (papersky) has adopted that phrase for the first-ever International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, i.e. today.

So today, you may read good stories all over the Internet, because many writers are answering her call to post works of professional-quality fiction on their websites for free.

My contribution? “Calling into Silence”, my Asimov Award story from a few years back. I chose to post that one for three reasons:

1) I can’t post stories I’m trying to sell if I actually want to sell them, which I admittedly do;
2) I don’t want to inflict on you guys stories I gave up trying to sell, or never tried to sell at all;
3) this story gives me a neat opportunity to mess around with font colors for effect. (I almost messed around with fonts, too, but the color adjustments ate enough of my time yesterday that we’ll leave it as it stands.)

I may post something else later today, too, but for now, that will do.

And if you want to read more pro-quality fiction posted in honor of this day, check out papersky‘s roundup over here.

Swan Tower facelift

All right, folks. Courtesy of the inestimable sapphohestia, Swan Tower is getting a facelift to its CSS. I would very much appreciate it if some of you could take a look at the pages she’s mocked up with the new style, and let me know what you think. Is it readable? Does the page layout feel balanced? How does it work in other browsers, or with other sizes of screen? Etc. (Don’t bother pointing out busted links; we’ve only got three pages set up. When the change happens for real, we’ll just be pasting in the new CSS; all the links will work as they normally do.)

The three pages to look at are:
Introduction
Doppelganger
Midnight Never Come

There are two changes I still intend to make, though they haven’t happened yet. One is that I’m trying to get a proper site logo designed, which would replace the current image in the upper left-hand corner. The other is that I intend to have a bit of padding around images (the example here is the Doppelganger cover image) so the text doesn’t run right up against the border like it does now. But other than that, what changes, if any, would you folks suggest?

also, gip

I couldn’t find a portrait of Elizabeth that was quite what I wanted in an icon, but she did have a lovely signature.

So this can be my Elizabethan-love icon.

And now I think I need to flop down on the couch like I’ve been meaning to since I got home. (Morning workout + most-of-the-day trip to Indy = tired kitten.)

Newsletter!

If you’re reading this post, then odds are you’re already well-informed about my writerly doings, but I should still announce the creation of a newsletter, which you can sign up for here. It will be a once-a-month thing (no more — I promise) with a quick rundown of short story and novel news (like sales and street dates), website updates, and public appearances. So if you want a nice, compact version of the straggling announcements that show up here, that’s the way to go.