Sign up for my newsletter to receive news and updates!

Posts Tagged ‘writing’

Just a few hours left . . . .

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.

Day Five: In which I draw bad diagrams of clocks

Last night Irrith handed me the question I need to ask about her. She didn’t hand me the answer, mind you, but that’s okay. I’ll pry that out of her soon enough.

On less of a cheerful note, last night featured a different set of idiot roommates, in this case ones who apparently don’t grasp the concept that the last one to bed should turn off the lights. I woke up at 4 a.m. to find them all still blazing away, and me in the top bunk (of three), unwilling to risk my sleepy neck just to turn them off. So less than perfect sleep, and it’s a chilly grey morning when I get up. I’m happy to enjoy the comforts of the cabin this time as I head downriver again.

This route is getting familiar.

Day Three: In which your correspondent goes west, and west, and west some more

Last night’s bedtime wasn’t quite as early as I intended, owing to the sudden brainstorm I had while getting ready for bed, regarding how I could fix some of the problems with Part One of the comet book. I should have known better than to think I was going to accomplish anything on that front before 10 p.m. . . .

But it was a good night’s sleep nonetheless, and thus fortified, I follow the plan and head out to Westminster.

Where I do encounter certain difficulties.

Day One: In which I put my money where my mouth is (once I *have* money)

I don’t know if Mercury’s in retrograde or I spat in the Cheerios of the travel faeries or what, but every step of this trip so far has been plagued with problems: delayed flights, car rental difficulties, wrong turns, and so on. The only saving grace is that so far, none of them have reached the level of “detained for two hours by Israeli airport security.” <knocks on wood> But the unanticipated closure of Blackfriars station, coupled with my ill-considered decision to come in late on a Sunday night, left me stranded only partway to my hostel, with a rather expensive cab ride my only option for getting the rest of the way there.

Oh, and as of writing these notes, I have no money. Figuring out what’s wrong with my ATM card has been added to today’s schedule.

But I soldier on.

more giveaway and goodies

Second winner has been chosen for the Deeds of Men giveaway, so if you signed up, check your inbox.

Also — delayed by my travels — the last pre-pub goodie for In Ashes Lie: its soundtrack. As with Midnight, this is a two-CD collection I put together myself, “scoring” the events of the book. You can hear samples of some of the songs on iTunes, but since most of it’s built from film scores, they didn’t have everything available on that site. (You can, however, hit a pretty good percentage of the total for both novels by acquiring a few key scores, like Elizabeth and Henry V.)

Comet-book blogging will commence on June 1st, when I start the next round of London research. Other than that, transmissions will be few for the next couple of weeks.

Deeds of Men giveaway

The plan is to give away one signed set of both Midnight Never Come and (in advance of publication) In Ashes Lie each week between now and the book release, and the first winner has been drawn. If you’ve already signed up, you’re still in the running; if you haven’t, head on over to the page for Deeds of Men and provide your e-mail address, and you too could get an early copy.

another milestone

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.

Open Book Thread: Deeds of Men

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.

IAL teaser: Deeds of Men

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!

FYI

The free stories I posted for International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day are now all available on AnthologyBuilder. In fact, there’s enough of my fiction up there now that you theoretically could put together your very own collection of Marie Brennan stories, since the minimum for an antho purchase is 50 pages of material. But I recommend finding a couple of other authors you like and making a bigger book, since $14.95 is kind of a lot to pay for nine stories, several of which are flash.

I really like the idea of AnthologyBuilder, and I hope it succeeds. This strikes me as the ideal approach to making an author’s short fiction backlist available, without depending on bookstore support for a collection.

Things we have learned about the characters in the first week of writing

I have fifteen thousand words of book now. It seems like rapid progress — I just had 10K the other day! — but that’s because the number is still small. 5K won’t seem like much once I’m in the middle.

Word count: 15,205
LBR census: Hmmm. I’m actually not sure which this would qualify as.
Authorial sadism: Knowing enough of the ending to be able to foreshadow things. With malice.

***

What I’m having fun with right now is learning the quirks of my characters. I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet that the focus is shifting a little with this book; Lune will still be in it as a major character, but she’s not the faerie protagonist anymore. Frankly — to divulge a small spoiler from the end of Midnight — a Queen makes a bad protagonist for anything other than a very political story like Ashes; she just doesn’t have the freedom to go running off doing random things. My main character this time around is Irrith, whom you’ll be meeting in Ashes next month.

And there’s all kinds of new stuff to discover about her. She’s turning out to be charmingly amoral in certain ways; she has no compunctions about lying to mortals for the fun of it, and in fact enjoys making her lies as outrageous as she can get away with. Shocking people in general is a great game to her, actually. The scene I finished tonight ended with her and Segraine, a female knight of the Onyx Court, making plans to go investigate something, and Irrith just asked, “So which of us has to be the lady?” (I haven’t decided yet what the answer to that will be. Either way, it’s a disaster waiting to happen.)

As for Galen, the mortal protagonist — I have more to say about him that deserves his own post, but probably his most telling character moment yet came when he went home last scene. He’s young enough that he hasn’t set up a household of his own, and when I asked my hindbrain how we were going to start the scene of Galen At Home, it sent him sneaking in the servants’ entrance after dawn in an attempt to avoid his father.

There are distinct pleasures to be had in writing a single character long-term . . . but this, the odd unfolding of facets you hadn’t yet figured out were there, is especially a new-character thing. Irrith lies. Galen sneaks in the back door. These are the people I’ll be spending the next five months with.

So far, they’re entertaining me.

gngggh

There’s something exhausting about the type of revision that involves radically expanding your first draft. It’s like being on a treadmill: you run and run and don’t get anywhere. I’m four thousand words into a story that was four thousand words long, and I still have two thousand to go.

It’s a lot better now, mind you, and I’m enjoying parts of the process. But tiring. And I’m on a deadline, too, because I want to submit this to a place that’s about to close its reading period. Gngggh.

audio time!

If you have more time for listening to stories than reading them — or if you just want to know how all those random names in “Driftwood” are pronounced* — you can now download the podcast. I haven’t had a chance to listen to it myself yet, but I was fairly pleased with “Kingspeaker,” so I expect this one turned out equally well.

*You should see the e-mails between me and the editor on this topic. I answered several of his queries with “uh, good luck?” There’s a downside to making up foreign words that maybe aren’t even supposed to be pronounceable by human tongues.

Comet Book Report: The Gentleman’s Daughter, by Amanda Vickery

One of the blurbs on the back of this book ends by saying, “Serious history is rarely this fun.” I submit that Ms. Foreman of The Times needs more fun in her life.

Don’t get me wrong; this book wasn’t all that bad. But it was not the most fun history book I’ve ever read, even of a scholarly sort. Especially the first chapter — I almost didn’t make it through that one, and if I hadn’t been carrying this book with me on a trip (ergo it was my only reading material), I don’t know if I would have gone on. The first chapter is dry as all hell, as it painstakingly details for the reader how many letters its subjects wrote to family members, how many to families of their own social class, how many to their social inferiors, etc, and it’s a good thing the book picked up after that, or I would not have finished it.

But it does improve, and I appreciated its subject matter, which is the lives of gentry-class women in Georgian England. Its focus is on the broader social community of Lancashire and west Yorkshire, hence different in some important ways from the kind of metropolitan life I’m writing about, but a lot of the topics (such as marriage and childbearing) don’t vary too much with geography. And it’s always good to get a history that digs into the diaries and letters and household account books, i.e. the stuff that usually gets overlooked. In fact, I was struck by a comparison between this and Roy Porter’s book, whose revised edition predates this work by eight years; Porter stated, early in his book, that “compared with men, we know little about what women felt, thought and did.” Lest you condemn him for accepting that limitation too easily, though, I should also mention that the front cover of Vickery’s book has a quote from Porter, calling it “The most important thing in English feminist history in the last ten years.” Vickery is filling in one of the gaps he acknowledged in his own work.

If you find yourself with a sudden yen to research the period, my recommendation is this: skim the first chapter, paying only enough attention to get a sense of who the women are that Vickery will be talking about all book, then move onto the next chapter posthaste. There’s good stuff in here, but you have to get past the dry statistics to find it.