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more Conspiring

Two more reviews came in recently:

Sophie Playle at Doctor Fantastique’s Show of Wonders says, “It captures the dualistic spirit of Victorian London and creates an alternative fantastical history that the reader grows to care about just as much, if not more, than the real world it shadows. The rounded characters and intricate plot create an absorbing story.”

Steve at Elitist Book Reviews says, “I love how believable her characters are. Everything in this setting is bleak, yet the characters never truly give up hope. They will go to any length to meet their diverse goals.”

And I also did an interview on Rachel Ann Hanley’s blog, about a whole variety of topics.

Enjoy your weekend!

Labor Day updates

I’ve basically been having an extended birthday weekend, Thursday through today. Yesterday my brother and sister-in-law had a lovely cookout; the night before I went with many friends to see an entertaining production of Cymbeline (albeit in the Presidio, which — ye gods and little fishes, freezing fog is freezing); the day before that, a whole chunk of goodies showed up in the mail: present from my parents, presents from my husband, signing check for A Natural History of Dragons, and <drumroll> my author copies for With Fate Conspire.

(I did not behave like Gollum over them. But only because kniedzw was watching.)

Updates:

Jim Hines has reviewed the book (WordPress mirror here), and hints at a little nifty something in store for you guys later on.

Joshua Palmatier has a guest post from me about the range of constraints history can impose on fiction.

And I totally forgot to mention before that Mindy Klasky’s Inside Track feature includes a chance to win a copy of the book! Comment either there or at the WordPress mirror to enter.

Bookday plus one

I neglected to mention before that With Fate Conspire will be a Main Selection for the Science Fiction Book Club’s holiday catalogue. That means all four books of the series have been picked up by the SFBC, which makes me really happy.

Woke up this morning to an e-mail containing my Booklist review; I can’t link to it, but I can quote Frieda Murray:

Brennan’s research is impeccable, and her pictures of a London not too well known on this side of the pond are first-class, as is the weaving of the human and fae settings. Her characters, both major and minor, are well drawn and memorable. Brennan’s own fans, historical-fantasy fans, and lovers of classic fantasy will find this a must-read.

Also, I’m featured over at Mindy Klasky’s blog, as part of the “Inside Track” feature, wherein authors go “behind the scenes” of their books. If you’d like to see me talk about the waltz I did with dates in this book, head on over there.

Let’s get Conspiring!

Thaaaaaaat’s right, folks . . . it’s the street date for With Fate Conspire.

I don’t mind admitting that I’m a little nervous about this one. I have a lot of reasons to be: it’s the end of the series (at least for now), which always raises the questions of “did I stick the landing?” Also, it’s my first hardcover release, which brings extra hopes and expectations. Also also, well, let’s face it: this is a rough time for the publishing industry, what with Borders going belly-up. Nobody really knows what that’s going to do to sales figures, but it’s going to be rocky, that’s for sure.

Which is by way of introducing a small plea: if you intend to buy this book, then sooner is better than later and in a store is better than online (unless you’re buying the ebook, of course). And if you like the series, tell people about it. (Heck, tell people about it even if you don’t like it! My ego will survive.)

Onward to the reviews!

Liz Bourke at Tor.com approves of the working-class and Irish bent of the book.

Cat Barson at Steampunk Chronicle reviews the book for fans of steampunk, and mostly likes it.

Sarah at Bookworm Blues hasn’t read the previous books in the series, and also isn’t a fan of faerie fantasy, but still enjoyed this one.

Also, I have the Big Idea slot today at John Scalzi’s blog Whatever (which previously hosted a Big Idea for Midnight Never Come). And finally, SF Signal has included With Fate Conspire as one of the three contenders in their most recent Book Cover Smackdown.

Now I need to decide whether my professional duty to go see my book in the store is strong enough to overcome the incredible soreness of my quads . . . ah, the downsides of biking for such errands.

Also!

Almost forgot this. (Technically it’s now the 11th where I am, but I’m pretty sure it’s still the 10th for most of you, so it isn’t exactly late.)

The last excerpt from With Fate Conspire is up; one last scene apiece for our protagonists. You can read those, or start at the beginning and read the whole thing.

(But be warned: the excerpt skips over some intervening bits, so as to focus on Eliza and Dead Rick; when you pick up the book, don’t overlook those!)

Twenty days and counting . . . .

yes, I do mean to use that icon

Looks like Tor is doing a giveaway for A Star Shall Fall on their site. All you have to do is leave a comment on that post there. So if you’re looking to pick up the book, go forth and comment! (They’re actually giving away three copies, it looks like.)

Also, in Fate-related news, this in from the Romantic Time review: “Appealing characters, a fully realized historical setting and more than a touch of steampunk flavoring collide to create a book that is difficult to put down.” So that’s pretty good.

And now I go back to preparing for my trip.

Thirty, or rather Twenty-Nine, Days

I didn’t want to steal any thunder from yesterday’s announcement, so you get your Fate-related goodies today.

This time, it’s the soundtrack! Just the listing thereof; I haven’t had a chance to try and set up an iTunes mix. Also, the usual caveat applies, that although none of the track titles have outright spoilers, they do provide hints of where the story is going; read at your own risk.

But wait! There’s more!

Backing up for a moment to Midnight Never Come instead, you can now buy a print of Avery Liell-Kok’s portrait of Invidiana (as seen to the right, there) from her shop on Etsy. There’s lots of other great art there, too, including some painted parasols (which might appeal to a few of you), so I encourage you to take a look through it all, and see if anything catches your fancy.

I’ll be out of town when the next spot in the countdown rolls around (which will feature the last bit of the excerpt), so it may be a bit delayed — not sure what my internet access situation will be. I’ll try to get it up at something like the right time, though. In the meanwhile, enjoy!

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 . . . .

Forty days!

Following on the heels of yesterday’s review: more excerpt! An additional scene apiece from Eliza and Dead Rick; you can pick up there, or go back and start at the beginning.

There will be one more set of scenes posted here before the book hits the shelves, plus a couple of other tidbits. Enjoy!

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.

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.

And sixty thousand words!

So, after a very difficult decision (in which I had to convince myself that buying extra icon space on LJ would only lead go overload in the long run), I have settled on not one but two winners for the A Natural History of Dragons icon contest. First, scottakennedy, for something wonderfully period (though I may ask you to switch the text just as soon as I make up my mind what I want!), and second, pathseeker42 for hitting a target she didn’t even know she was aiming at. From the book:

When I was seven, I found a sparkling lying dead on a bench at the edge of the woods which formed the back boundary of our garden, that the groundskeeper had not yet cleared away. With much excitement, I brought it for my mother to see, but by the time I reached her it had mostly collapsed into ash in my hands. Mama exclaimed in distaste and sent me to wash.

Our cook, a tall and gangly woman who nonetheless produced the most amazing soups and souffles (thus putting the lie to the notion that one cannot trust a slender cook) was the one who showed me the secret of preserving sparklings after death. She kept one on her dresser-top, which she brought out for me to see when I arrived in her kitchen, much cast down from the loss of the sparkling and from my mother’s chastisement. “However did you keep it?” I asked her, wiping away my tears. “Mine fell all to pieces.”

“Vinegar,” she said, and that one word set me upon the path that led to where I stand today.

If found soon enough after death, a sparkling (as many of the readers of this volume no doubt know) may be preserved by embalming it in vinegar. I sailed forth into our gardens in determined search, a jar of vinegar crammed into one of my dress pockets so the skirt hung all askew. The first one I found lost its right wing in the process of preservation, but before the week was out I had an intact specimen: a sparkling an inch and a half in length, his scales a deep emerald in color. With the boundless ingenuity of a child, I named him Greenie, and he sits on a shelf in my study to this day, tiny wings outspread.

Compare that to this:

Yeah, you see why I had to take both.

So congrats to you two! E-mail me your mailing addresses (send them to marie {dot} brennan {at} gmail {dot} com) and I’ll get ARCs of Fate on their way toward you shortly.

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 . . . .

70 days and counting . . . . .

It is now seventy days until the release of With Fate Conspire, and that means it’s time for more goodies.

Ten days ago, it was the first excerpt; now it’s my research bibliography. (Not the most thrilling thing in the world, I know, but chock full o’ Victorian-period material, if you need that kind of thing.)

Also, because I’ve been too swamped to do anything more with this until now, I’ll go ahead and say the contest mentioned last time is still open. I need an icon for A Natural History of Dragons — something, y’know, natural historian-y and dragon-y — and if yours wins, I’ll send you an arc of Fate.

Save me from my lack of Photoshop skills, Obi-Wan Internetobi; you’re my only hope!

Er, I missed one hundred. Let’s go for eighty-one instead!

I’ve been so occupied with other things that I completely missed my usual “one hundred days until publication” landmark. Also ninety days. Eighty is tomorrow, but that’s the weekend, so let’s go with eighty-one days, and give you your first excerpt from With Fate Conspire!

“You were unable to stop them.”

In other news, I made it to forty thousand words on A Natural History of Dragons last night. I need an icon for that series, so let’s do a combined event here: post an icon (or even just an image) in the comments that you think would be appropriate for the adventures of my !nineteenth-century lady naturalist, and the winner will get an ARC of With Fate Conspire.

And I’ll try to keep on track better from now on. <guilty look>

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. :-/

Two arrivals

The mail brought lots of exciting stuff yesterday. First:

That’s right, I gots me a shiny, shiny ARC! A whole box of them, in fact, about which more anon. But before I get to that, the second thing that arrived is my new desk!

After some consideration, I did indeed go ahead and buy a GeekDesk. It comes with a little motor that will, within a few seconds, move the desk between sitting and standing height (the latter going high enough to be comfortable for kniedzw, who is 6’3″). I’ll deliver a review once I’ve had more time to settle in with it, but my initial impression is definitely positive. My one complaint off the bat is simply that it doesn’t come with a keyboard tray; the one you see in those photos is taken from my old desk and screwed onto the underside. (The drawers are also from the old desk, and will be replaced soonish, since without the old desktop there’s nothing to cover the upper drawer.)

Anyway, in celebration of both book and desk, I’m giving away an ARC! Tell me in comments what your ideal work environment is: coffee shop and a pad of paper? Lying in bed with a laptop? Floating on a raft in the middle of a swimming pool in the tropics, while well-muscled young men bring you grapes and cool drinks? (It doesn’t have to be your actual work environment, just one you like the sound of. So feel free to be creative.)

(Also, if I previously promised you an ARC (because you made me an icon or whatever), feel free to ping me with a reminder, marie [dot] brennan [at] gmail [dot] com. I’ll be going through my records and making a list, but the notes are scattered and I don’t want to miss anybody.)

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!!!!!

Apparently this is Amazon’s day to post Surprise Cover Art.

Hey, look! I seem to have finalized cover art!

Y’all know what that means: it’s time for another “please make me an icon, because I suck at image manipulation” contest. Something featuring a crop or resizing or whatever of that cover, plus the title, like ceosanna did for A Star Shall Fall. Winner will get an ARC of the book when I have one, or a copy of Star, according to their choice.

Eeee! I can haz cover!