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Posts Tagged ‘with fate conspire’

Things I Have and You Don’t . . .

. . . a preliminary cover sketch for With Fate Conspire.

I’m all the more chuffed because the design in question is one I suggested. Authors are only sometimes asked for such input, and far more rarely heeded, because let’s face it: we’re authors, not art directors or cover designers or marketing wonks, and we generally know very little about what sells and what doesn’t. But for once I had a winning idea, and I can’t wait to see (and share) a finalized version.

Time to fall over.

With Fate Conspire is revised and off to L’Editor.

***

Length of final draft: 157,000 words

Length of kill-file, containing material longer than a sentence or two cut during the process: 57,000 words

***

Dear Whichever God Rules Over Novelists,

What do I have to sacrifice to you in order to guarantee that my next novel will not require me to write thirty-six percent more material than I actually use? Lemme know, and I’ll get right on that.

Your obt. servt.,
A Very Tired Writer

and she can’t call him Frederic yet

Dear Mr. Myers why did your name have to begin with an M it makes all of these sentences unfortunately alliterative gah stupid actual historical people in my novel I’m never doing this again okay that last part’s probably a lie.

<goes back to fixing the book>

for my science friends

I’m not sure how to phrase this best, but — at what point in history did we start to develop actual, workable “detection” devices? I’m thinking of things along the lines of a Geiger counter, but it doesn’t have to be a radiation detector; just a device to measure anything not visible to the eye. Wikipedia claims Gauss invented an early magnetometer in 1833, but the claim consists of three not terribly informative sentences, and the article on Gauss himself just says he developed a “method” for measuring magnetism, without specifying what it was.

Basically, Fate may or may not end up including a device for the measuring of a particular substance/effect/force/whatever, and I’m trying to figure out how much the concept of such a thing existed by 1884. (The question of how this thing works can be dealt with separately, if I decide to include it.)

Any historians of science able to answer that one for me?

more than official

With the two new scenes I added in tonight, With Fate Conspire passed the 150,000 word mark. (150,975 words, to be precise.)

Nothing next to the bricks of epic fantasy, of course — but more than long enough for me. Unfortunately for that sentiment, I have four more scenes to add before this revision is done. Please, God, don’t let this book balloon all the way up to 160K . . . .

I bring these things upon myself

For the amount I’m having to juggle who knows what about whom and when they know it (and when they don’t), I really ought to have a mystery novel to show for it.

Instead, I have an Onyx Court book that makes me want to tear my hair out.

Let this be a lesson to all concerned: never inflict amnesia on multiple characters at once. (No matter how good your reason for it may be.)

Ah well. L’Editor liked it — quite a bit — so there’s that stressor removed; I do still need to do a lot of work, but it’s entirely of my own making. Can’t really blame anybody but myself for that.

Oh, hey! The “l’editor” thing reminded me. If you’re a fluent French speaker and could spare me a few minutes of work checking a handful of lines from this story, please drop me a line, either in comments or by e-mail. It isn’t much, but I should probably fix it before this goes to the copy-editor.

the slow creep upward

Just noticed that as of last night’s revision, With Fate Conspire is officially the longest Onyx Court novel. (144K and counting.)

I’m hoping the damn thing doesn’t hit 150K before I’m done, but given the big honking change I’m thinking of putting in, I wouldn’t bet the farm on that.

new chemistry question for your noses

How about sulfates? Do they tend to smell of sulfur, or not?

(This is what I get for deciding to put faerie science in my books. I have to figure out how the real science goes, then figure out how the fantasy version goes, then figure out how to describe the fantasy version, based on but maybe not identical to how I’d describe the real version. If I ever do this to myself again, somebody please kick me.)

Hey, chemists!

How would you describe the smell of acid? Does it have a smell? (Any kind of acid will do; I’m looking for commonalities here.)

brief missive from mid-con

OH HOLY GOD IT WORKED.

(The stunt I alluded to before? I read a selection from With Fate Conspire . . . complete with RP and cockney accents. One attendee with a British mother said that if she hadn’t heard me speak in my natural voice, she wouldn’t have known I was American. This is pretty much the best seal of approval I could hope for.)

(I still don’t know that I’ll try that stunt in public again, though.)

::falls over::

Draft of With Fate Conspire is off to the editor. I have formally decided I don’t have to look at it again until after Sirens is over, which means I’m on vacation (from this book, at least) until October 11th.

I go fall down now.

oh holy god at LAST.

Through random bloody chance and the favor of the gods of procrastination, the Victorian book, my assembled ladies and gentlemen, HAS A TITLE.

Can I get a drumroll?

<rolllllllllllllll>

With Fate Conspire.

Unless you are my husband or moonandserpent, you do not know — and do not want to know — how much Victorian literature I read through in search of something I could use. This one was lovely but had the verb at the front (and therefore looked out of place with the rest of the series); this one had the verb at the end but the quote it came from only fit the book if I tilted my head at a particular angle and squinted; this one was gorgeous but didn’t fit no matter how hard I squinted; this one was out of period; this one fit the pattern but wasn’t a great title. (Children, learn from me: nevereverever constrain yourself to this kind of highly patterned titling scheme.) I kept on plowing through poet after poet after architecture writer after novelist, trying to find something.

And then I sat down yesterday to read Tim Powers for procrastination, and I found my title.

The funniest part is, the epigraph he used came from a source I’d already gone through, and gotten nothing from. I mentioned some random bloody chance, right? The edition Powers quotes is earlier than the one I’d read, and has a different phrasing. “With Him conspire” is not a line I would have used. But Powers used an earlier edition, and I stared at the epigraph thinking, could I . . .?

I could. I can. My editor has given it the thumbs-up. On this, my last day of revising before I send the draft off to him for comment, my quest has ended. The Novel Formerly Known As The Victorian Book is now With Fate Conspire.

thoughts on steampunk

If you’re interested in steampunk, Nader Elhefnawy has a well-thought-out article on it up on the SFWA site.

I particularly like the way he acknowledges the role of nostalgia without automatically dismissing nostalgia as something that must always be inherently bad. Yes, the steampunk vision of the past conveniently overlooks the less-attractive parts of the period, but the flip side of that coin is that it valorizes the attractive, selecting out qualities we may be losing/have lost in this day and age and trying to resurrect them. Plus, Elhefnawy puts the current era in context with the past in a way I found very eye-opening, characterizing this as the post-apocalypse of the Victorians, with WWI as the apocalypse.

Interesting stuff. I recommend reading it.

holy *shit*.

It’s boggling enough that for the first time since I started writing the Onyx Court series, there are photographs from (nearly) the period in which I’m writing.

Every so often, one of them hits me like a punch to the gut:

YOU USED TO BE ABLE TO SEE ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL.

I knew this, of course. There are all kinds of references, and even paintings, to how the churches of the City used to soar over everything around them, rather than being lost in the cracks. But holy shit. Not just the dome, not just the western towers, but the body of the church. Visible. In more than glimpses caught between the buildings that crowd around it.

Obviously this photo was taken from the roof of a nearby building (or else something in the vicinity of Blackfriars was decidedly taller than everything else around it). You can get semi-decent shots of the cathedral even now, if you could persuade one of the places at the top of Ludgate Hill to let you onto their roof. But nothing with this kind of sight-line and openness, because these days, too many buildings rise higher than the top of the cathedral steps.

It really is a window into the past. The late Victorian period — this photo was published circa 1891 or 1892 — but also more than a hundred years before then, ever since Wren built the new cathedral, because the buildings would have been mostly about that height. Paste in an image of old St. Paul’s, with or without spire, and you’ve got a good idea of what the area looked like centuries ago.

For a London-history geek like me, this just blows the top of my head off.

Things learned from tonight’s revision

1) If a word or phrase isn’t in [square brackets], I should trust that means I’ve already looked up whether it’s in period or not.

2) Scenes are so much more exciting when your protagonist doesn’t play nice.

3) kniedzw gets a funny look on his face when I appear in the doorway of his office and say, “Can I get your help for a second? It’s spousal abuse for fun and profit.”

4) But he is then very good about dragging me across the living room floor so I can figure out where a flying elbow would connect under particular circumstances.

5) I’m still in draft-brain, rather than revision-brain; my subconscious is depressed that all my work has made the book about a thousand words shorter. (Thanks to my first bits of revision being the combination of two pairs of scenes that each really only needed to be one.) But I’m sure it will get longer again, soon enough.

oof.

Went to bed early last night, slept gloriously, woke feeling more like a human being. Which is good, because I’ve got a book that needs revising.

To entertain you while I do that: Alyx Dellamonica’s got an interview with me posted on her blog, wherein I ramble on about a whole bunch of things, including the grade-school evolution of me as a writer, and the perfectly legal tax scam I’ve got going. 🙂

Also, a review of A Star Shall Fall, from a place entertainingly named “Elitist Book Reviews.” Their opinion? “This is how Alternate Historical Fantasy should be done.” Awww, yay! And they hadn’t read the first two books of the series — in fact, they didn’t know it was a series when they started reading — so I now have a clear data point in favor of having pulled off what I was trying to do, namely, making the book work acceptably as a stand-alone.

Now I’m off to print the miniscript of this thing. Ta!

139,446.

It’s messy, it’s ragged, it’s got continuity holes big enough to drive a subway train through, but for the moment, it’s done.

I now have four Onyx Court novels.

Good Christ that epilogue was hard to write. Possibly it sucks. I have no idea. What the hell does one write, to end a four-book series? Especially when one isn’t sure whether this is the end permanently, or just the end for now? How does one wrap something like that up? How many readers will kill me for not showing the [spoiler] they’ll think I should have shown? Will my editor be one of them?

These questions don’t have answers, at least not tonight. Tonight, I back up the file, and sleep the sleep of the novel-completing just.