(no subject)

[truepenny]

So late last night, I finish with the page proofs of The Mirador.

Barely twelve hours later, the FedEx man leaves the proofs of A Companion to Wolves like a foundling on my porch.

Comments

[casacorona.livejournal.com]

It's raining page proofs! Fast delivery, though. :)

[panjianlien.livejournal.com]

"The price of success, I note, is that the mailman brings boobytraps rather than presents," she muttered from behind a two-foot stack of incoming slush.

[stillnotbored.livejournal.com]

Somehow, that just doesn't seem fair.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Did you name it Paddington?

Or is its name Ernest?

[tesseract-5.livejournal.com]

Hurrah for finishing page proofs on one project...the publishing process marches on. I've marked the week that Mirador will be at my local bookstore on my calender as a very happy week this summer.

Maybe this will help a little

[muneraven.livejournal.com]

I just finished reading "Melusine" and I really really liked it. And so far I like "The Virtu" even better. So you made my day by telling me "The Mirador" is a tad closer to publication.

I can I ask you a couple of nosy little questions? Or rather, I AM asking a couple questions and would you mind answering if you have time? They really are little questions (though of course the answers can be big if you want them to be).

1. Your two narrators had very distinctive voices and they STAYED distinctive. Was it tough to pull that off? (Curious because it seems to be impossibly hard for a lot of writers who try it).

2. You did a great job in "Melusine" of showing the world in glimpses, parceling it out and not EVER info-dumping. Did you do extensive world-building before you dove in?

I hope a little fan mail makes your page-proofing a bit easier.

Re: Maybe this will help a little

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Fanmail makes many things easier. It always helps to be reminded that there are people out there enjoying my books.

This post (http://truepenny.livejournal.com/378305.html) may go a long ways toward answering question one. Now that I've got Mildmay's voice, no, I don't find it at all difficult to keep him and Felix from sounding like each other. One of the many things I am anxious about in re: The Mirador is the third narrator and whether I've managed to make her sound distinct from Felix. (So it's not that it's an easy thing to do, because it isn't.) Felix is very close to what I'd call my default voice. Mildmay's voice has its own rules; writing him is qualitatively different from writing any of my other first person narrators.

2. I had to work the calendrical systems (http://www.sarahmonette.com/calendar.html) out in painful detail; other than that (she said shamefacedly) most of my worldbuilding happens exactly the way you see it on the page, in side-comments and anecdotes, and gets worked out after the fact. I did go back and make a timeline of the Lords and Ladies Protector and the Cordelian kings, but I only know bits of the Ophidian dynasty.

Oh and of course there's the map (http://www.sarahmonette.com/melusine-map.html), which doesn't have everything on it anyway.

But mostly, my world-building is a matter of "Oh, I need a cool detail here. What can I come up with?"

Re: Maybe this will help a little

[muneraven.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the answers. Found the draft comparisions fascinating and read them aloud to my partner. :-) Amazing job rewriting and making it really sing.

The only bad thing about your books is that one of Mildmay's more profane figures of speech seem to have crept into my lexicon. I am a sucker for creative cursing.

[hlglne.livejournal.com]

By Grabthar's Hammer-- what a long wait is is becoming to some of us...