It’s always pleasing when I sell a second story to a given market — proof that the first sale wasn’t a fluke. In this case, the folks buying another piece from me are the Intergalactic Medicine Show (who previously published “Lost Soul”), and the story they have purchased is “A Heretic by Degrees”.
For those who have been playing along at home: yes, that’s a Driftwood story, and the first one to sell. May many more follow in its wake!
Those of you who read kniedzw‘s journal have already heard the news, but for the rest of you: my husband’s employer filed for bankruptcy today, putting him out of a job.
This brings into the open something I’ve been considering for a good year, maybe more. Some of you have heard me talk about it, but I haven’t said anything publicly because, well, public = real. (LJ = real, apparently.) But forming an agreement with my anthropology adviser constitutes pretty real, I’d say, so I might as well bite the bullet and type the words.
I’m leaving graduate school.
Yeah. Um. I have a whole lot to say on this topic, but to spare people’s friends-lists, I’m putting it behind a cut.
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.
This just in: the Science Fiction Book Club has picked up Midnight Never Come as a “Main Selection” for June! (Er, I assume that’s June of this year. But checking the e-mail, it actually says “a June catelog,” so who knows — maybe it’s June 3185.)
A peek behind the business curtain: the money from this gets funneled through my publisher (since they’re the ones who licensed that sub-right). Which means I’m suddenly a leap closer to earning out the advance for MNC . . . and the book isn’t even out yet! My pie-in-the-sky dream is to earn out by the end of the first royalty accounting period, but since it hits the shelves June 9th and the period ends June 30th, that pie is pretty far up there. This sale just brought it down by a couple thousand feet. I may just make it after all . . . .
Your tidbit for today: photographs from my research trip to London last year. You can start here, or browse the entire set.
It’s an oddly-balanced set of pictures, for several reasons. First and foremost, I can’t take pictures of 99% of the stuff in the novel because it isn’t there anymore. The best I could do was to photograph some stuff like what was there. But that got hampered by the restrictions against photography inside Hampton Court Palace and Hardwick Hall; those were some of the most informative places I went, but I have very little to show from them. Finally, I also took a great many pictures I didn’t upload, but they’re reference shots from inside museum exhibits, and between the lighting conditions and the necessity of photographing through glass, most of them came out very poor-quality. So my apologies for the odd skew of the set. But those of you who have never been to London will at least have a few mental images now.
*** *** *** *** ***
My publicist wrote to tell me the other day that [redacted: I think I was not supposed to report this yet. But it had to do with a review.] It turns out that isn’t the first review of the book, though. I got myself listed on LibraryThing as an author, and in exploring the links I discovered that two people have already reviewed it. One mixed-to-positive (according to that individual’s allocation of stars), one overwhelmingly positive. And then d_aulnoy‘s ICFA con report includes her reaction; she grabbed the book in ARC while she was there.
Seventy days to street date. It’s finally starting to feel like the book is on its way.
Man, the last time I was having aneurysms like this over a copy-edit, it was because somebody was going after my semicolons. Now it’s my commas, which I sprinkle liberally throughout my writing, in defiance of the rules of grammar but service to the flow and pacing of a sentence.
I’m literally having bargaining sessions with myself. “If you let him delete the comma in that sentence, you can fight back for the pair in this one. Come on. It’s okay. Do you know how many of your readers will notice the presence or lack of a comma there? NONE.”
But I’m a reader! And I notice! the little voice cries back.
Step away from the commas, honey. Save your energy for dying upon the hill of I Want Those To Be A Compound Sentence, Dammit, Not Two Separate Sentences.
It’s pathetic but true: writers do spend their time and energy obsessing about such things.
Partway through reading this book, it occurred to me that reading a heavy-duty academic historical analysis of the causes of the English Revolution might not be the brightest idea for someone who hasn’t yet gotten a firm grasp on, oh, the chronology of the English Revolution.
I made it through, though, in large part because of the organization and focus of this book. Stone divides his causes up into three (admittedly fuzzy) categories of preconditions, precipitants, and triggers, each operating on a successively shorter time scale. The preconditions occupied the bulk of that essay (there are four essays in here, but the titular one is huge), and the preconditions, in his view, ran from about 1529 to 1629. In other words, from the Reformation in England and Henry VIII’s seizure of Church property to the dissolution of Parliament and beginning of Personal Rule/the Eleven Years’ Tyranny. That latter term is a new one by me — see the above statement about not really knowing the seventeenth century yet — but the Tudor parts of the preconditions, I can deal with just fine. So when Stone talked about how the redistribution of Church property changed the balance of economic and political power among the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the gentry, or how early Elizabethan neglect of the episcopacy led to a loss of status for Anglican bishops, I can follow him well enough. And I can definitely see how the policies that kept Elizabeth afloat left James in a nigh-untenable position.
The precipitants and the triggers, respectively, he links to the periods 1629-1639 and 1640-1642. That is to say, he’s looking at long-range, middle-range, and short-range causes. And writing from a perspective shortly after sociology apparently rammed into history at high speed, so he’s attempting the admittedly difficult hat trick of bringing in causes from Parliament and the monarchy and the merchants in London and the Puritans everywhere and the Church and the wars England was fighting and social mobility and anything else you can think of. The result? Is a hella dense book. (And regrettably saturated with the passive voice.) But a good one nonetheless, that goes a long way toward making sure I don’t leap straight from 1590 to 1640 or whenever AAL will start, without thinking through the intervening decades.
***
If the structural difficulty with MNC was deciding what year to place it in (since the changeover of interesting historical personnel was so high in the decade to either side), the structural difficulty here is how not to smear this book across forty years or more, to the point where it gets way too distant and boring. There are two ways I can see to do that. One is to turn it into the sort of 300,000-word historical brick that comes with free complimentary LOLcat caption saying “I R SERIOUS BOOK” . . . but that, alas, is not what we’re after here.
The other, of course, is to give up on covering everything happening in that forty years, and to find the perfect turning moments to show more closely. (And probably to pull in the edges. But I honestly don’t think I can reduce this to less than twenty-six years — from the reconvening of Parliament in 1640 to the Great Fire in 1666.) Picking the turning moments, naturally, is far easier said than done.
But the next step in that is probably, y’know, learning what went on in the seventeenth century. It isn’t a good sign when I’m reading this book going, “what happened in 1640? What are you talking about? Huh? The government collapsed? What the hell?”
Time to go find myself a more basic chronological history. Any suggestions?
Yesterday I went swimming, then sat out in the sun to let my hair dry. *^_^*
I do so love ICFA. Even if it makes me get up at 7:30 in the morning to do a reading (and many thanks to the few hardy souls who came by to listen to us). Anyway, by a lovely coincidence of fate, my reading fell on the same day that I was planning to post my next excerpt from Midnight Never Come.
That’s the second part of what I read (and be sure to click past that initial page; there’s more to be had). The first part was, of course, the prologue; for the third part, you’ll have to wait a while, as it won’t be posted until shortly before the book comes out.
Which is far too long from now. <sigh>
The full title of this book is The Great Plague: The Story of London’s Most Deadly Year. And boy, is that some truth in advertising. For those not aware, in 1665 — the year before central London burned down in the Great Fire — approximately one hundred thousand of the London metropolis’ five hundred thousand inhabitants died in a horrifying plague epidemic. At the height of the outbreak, the week of September 12th-19th, between one and two thousand people were dying every day.
Not cheerful stuff, but very, very interesting. And I can’t imagine a better pair of people to write about it than this husband-and-wife team. A. Lloyd Moote is a political historian with a seventeenth-century focus whose interests eventually broadened to include socio-cultural history; Dorothy C. Moote is a microbiologist with a special interest in disease epidemics. Is that perfect or what?
Even better is the approach they took. The epilogue describes the eventual disappearance of bubonic plague from Europe (but its persistence in Asia), through the early days of microbiology and the discovery of the Yersinia pestis that causes the plague, to modern scientific interpretation of just what was going on in the various plague pandemics broadly and the 1665 outbreak specifically. But that’s the epilogue: for the body of the book, while they apply historical methods to understanding the events of 1665, they restrict their medical discussion to the views and understandings of the period. Which is exactly what I need. I like knowing the modern explanation, but I’m glad I don’t have to strip it out to write from the contemporary perspective.
The book isn’t flawless. It somewhat awkwardly combines a chronological approach with a topic-centered one, dropping in discussions of the medical community’s response or the crash of London’s economy at the points in the plague’s progress that they seem most relevant. (The economy, for example, gets its moment in the spotlight around the description of October, when it hit its nadir.) Possibly as a consequence, it tends to repeat certain things in places, like telling me about how John Allin in St. Olave Southwark was a dissenting minister, or the Guildhall manipulated economic mechanisms to try and keep parish relief afloat, or Pepys was profiteering off his naval contracts in a kind of despicable way while a third of the population that didn’t or couldn’t flee the city dropped dead around him. (He started the year with £1300 in net worth, and ended with £4400, and very proud he was of it, too.) I also could have used more attempt to recreate the experience of living in London while everything fell apart, though I recognize that such descriptions weren’t really what the Mootes were aiming for. Defoe, I assume, will be the place to look for that. But overall, very good indeed.
Four more books arrived today. The research marathon has begun . . . .
What’s obnoxious: writing 1761 words of a story and then deciding they really needed to be in first person, rather than third.
What would have been more obnoxious: making that decision even later, so I had to re-do even more of it.
(This is not, for the record, And Ashes Lie. It’s something else that I’ll talk about later.)
My book reports for Midnight Never Come proved useful to me in the longer run, so you’ll have to put up with them again, I’m afraid. I won’t motivate myself to write them if I can’t pretend they don’t have an audience.
Restoration London, by Liza Picard
What can I say? It’s Liza Picard. Who is awesome. She does a great job of presenting the details of lived experience in historical London, and her commitment to primary sources is great. I also love that she considers things like home decoration and female health just as interesting (or moreso) than the usual topics of history. I don’t think she positions herself actively as a feminist scholar, but her attention to otherwise neglected areas like that would certainly get a thumbs-up from that perspective.
By Permission of Heaven, by Adrian Tinniswood
This was the second book I read for AAL only because I had to wait for it to be shipped to me; I already had Restoration London on the shelf. It was recommended to me by Tyler of Pandemonium Books in Cambridge, and it’s a godsend: a detailed account of the Great Fire, including a chapter devoted to each day, telling me what was burning when, and what people were trying to do about it. I could not possibly write my novel without it.
But he also goes further afield, starting with a bit of the context leading up to the fire and the efforts to deal with it afterward; the latter plays better than the former. I understand why he felt we needed information about the Dutch wars, given religious tensions and also the question of when to recall General Monck, but it felt less than entirely relevant. The after-the-fact material is probably less useful to me, mind you, since I don’t expect the book to go past 1666, but it’s still good to know, especially for future installments in the series. (It’s honestly fascinating, comparing the aftermath of the Great Fire to, say, Hurricane Katrina. Seventeenth-century Englishmen did a remarkably good job of putting their city back together again in a fair and even-handed fashion.)
I’ve got a book on the Great Plague to read next, and a bunch more on the way.
I honestly meant to do this months ago, but only got around to it now. Which means that instead of doing it the easy and sensible way (noting things down as I got them, or at least while I still had them), I’ve had to recreate the whole mess mostly from the photograph I took back then.
Your MNC Countdown entertainment for today is my research bibliography. Not as exciting as the prologue I posted the other week, but hopefully useful to two types of people: those researching similar topics, and those wanting concrete evidence of my insanity. It’s as complete as I can make it, though I keep remembering and adding in odd books that weren’t on my shelf. (Plus there’s that one Marlowe book I just can’t recall. I can see it in the photo, but not well enough to make out the author, and the title on the spine unhelpfully says only “Marlowe.” Very annoying.)
Anyway, collating the list was interesting, because Jesus Christ I did more work than I thought. And that’s not counting all the random internet resources I never marked down.
Enjoy!
(There are too many potential icons for this post, so you just get the swan.)
Attention anybody going to ICFA! I’ll be there, of course — proud attendee since 2003; I can advance both sides of my professional life by flying to Florida every spring, so what’s not to like? — and it turns out I’m going to be doing more than I thought.
At 10:30 a.m. on Thursday I’ll be donning my academic hat (and my legal name) and participating in an interdisciplinary panel about fan studies — a panel of the discussion type, not the “we all read our at best tangentially related papers” sort.
Also, at some point — I don’t know my time slot yet — I’ll be switching to writer-hat and writer-name, and reading in the creative track. I’ve been squeaked on to it due to other peoples’ cancellations, so I suspect I won’t be listed in the program, but they always post the errata next to the reg desk, so look for me there. (Yes, in my sixth year, the worst has finally happened: I’m on the program twice, under two different names.) I will, as you might expect, be reading from Midnight Never Come.
And lastly, I’ll be bringing some small number of ARCs with me, to sell in the book room. My ego loves the mental image of a slugfest over the last copy between a rabid fan and a dusty old academic in the narrow, book-strewn aisles, but since the universe is unlikely to oblige me with such a scenario, you can probably guarantee your receipt of one simply by looking early in the con.
Hope to see some of you there!
I built Midnight Never Come partly on the principle of “list everything awesome in that time period, then cram in as much of it as you can.” Which isn’t a bad method. So I’m going to repeat it again, and ask: who and what is cool in the seventeenth century?
I already know I’ll be using the Great Fire, the Civil War, execution of Charles I, Cromwell’s Commonwealth, and Restoration of Charles II. Maybe the Battle of Worcester, too. Other things springing to mind include Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn, John Milton, the Earl of Rochester, Aphra Behn, Restoration theatre, and the Dutch wars.
What else?
People, events, neat places, whatever. The broader a range of things I’m steeping in my head, the better this book will be.
Decision made; now I can stop being cryptic.
What I said a few months ago? Yeah, change of plans. This is the book I’m writing next.
AND ASHES LIE
September, 1666. In the house of a sleeping baker, a spark leaps free of the oven — and ignites a blaze that will burn London to the ground.
Six years ago, the King of England returned in triumph to the land that had executed his father. The mortal civil war is done. But the war among the fae is still raging, and London is its battleground. There are forces that despise the Onyx Court, and will do anything to destroy it.
But now a greater threat has come, that could destroy everything. For three harrowing days, the mortals and fae of the city will fight to save their home. While the humans struggle to halt the conflagration that is devouring London street by street, the fae pit themselves against a less tangible foe: the spirit of the fire itself, powerful enough to annihilate everything in its path. Neither side can win on its own — but can they find a way to fight together?
There’s the requisite few paragraphs of handwaving, to give you a sense of what this novel will be. The Victorian book will still be happening, never fear; it just won’t be happening now. For a variety of strategic reasons and a few serendipitous ones, we’ve decided it would be better for me to do this one first.
Yes, this does in fact mean I’m switching tracks after four months of research on what is now the wrong time period. Yes, this does mean I’ve got barely more time to prep this book than I did for Midnight Never Come. Yes, this does mean I’m crazy. But I think the Victorian book will benefit from having more time to cook in my head; nineteenth-century London is so big and complicated that I won’t say no to working up to it more slowly. In the meantime, this one has had a number of factors swing in its favor, until it jumped up the queue and put itself at the top.
So. Great Fire. My, um, Restoration faerie disaster fantasy, I guess I’ll have to call it. London go BOOM.
Kind of like my head.
The thing about potentially head-exploding developments is that they usually don’t give you any warning before they hit.
That’s why they’re head-exploding.
No, I’m not going to tell you what I’m talking about. Not at the moment. But I promise I’ll say in a week or two, once it’s decided — whichever way it goes. Suffice to say it isn’t a good-or-bad split; both possibilities are good.
<grumble mutter need to pick a damned Victorian icon already>
Okay, folks. Give me movies! Specifically, movies that depict the gritty underbelly of Victorian London. Think Sweeney Todd or From Hell. Or Gangs of New York, except not about America. Things far, far away from the prettified Oscar Wilde side of London.
What’s out there?
Midnight Never Come hits the shelf in one hundred days.
My subconscious is convinced the book is out already, has in fact been out for months, and omg nobody’s reading it i’m a total failure gaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh. I think this is because they printed the ARCs way back at the end of October, complete with full-blown cover, which means it feels like a real book. And if I’ve had the real book sitting around my house for four months, surely it must be in bookstores, right?
Not for another hundred days. So to keep myself from going insane, I’m going to mark the time by parceling out website content. Today’s teaser: the prologue to the novel.
Enjoy!
Mistyping “brain” as “brian” creates much amusement when the character’s boyfriend is named Brian. At least in this particular sentence.
***
So, wow, tonight has not been going as planned, on account of unscheduled unconscious time on the sofa. But on the bright side, I’m getting my revision work done at a godly hour for once.
And when I’m done, I may even permit myself a small reward.
I did like that scene. It had development and humor and all that good stuff.
But it just didn’t make sense with the thing I had happening in the scene before, so away it goes.
Such is the necessity of revision, alas.
