Technical Difficulties

elisem is committing art again. I have bought a pendant, "Yes, No, Always, Never," because it is absolutely an illustration for Corambis. Which is freaky, because Elise hasn't read Corambis yet.

Also, for those of you optimistically playing along at home, this means that it is suddenly much more likely that the story about Cardenio Richey, the Principia Caeli, and a serial killer in the Lower City will (a.) be written, (b.) feature the Kalliphorne and her husband, and (c.) be titled "Yes, No, Always, Never."

Jeez. I kind of have an endorphin rush off that.

The dreams about failing high school calculus HAVE GOT TO STOP. Especially like the one I had last night, in which I dreamed I was failing high school calculus and then woke up to discover it was true. ARGH.

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Made progress on the new wolf book yesterday. Let's be generous and call it 500 words. Which is 500 more words than I've written in a kind of appallingly long time.

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The indefatigable fidelioscabinet has found an awesome photo-reference for Mehitabel. This is Natalia Alexandrova Pushkina, the younger daughter of Aleksandr Pushkin, and if I could have had her on the cover of The Mirador, I would have been a very happy Mole. (No, it isn't an exact match, but it's really startlingly close.)

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I'm not bothering with segues today, but if I were, this would be a good one to my first Q&A question:

Q: I am super interested in what you told the cover artists of ACE. From the previous posts, I am inclined to believe that you had very little input in the whole cover art business, but you did mention that you described the tattoos and they listened. Would you have wanted the cover art done any other way? If you had said you weren't satisfied, what would have happened?

A: My input extended only so far as the artist and the production team decided to listen to me. (I did object to the cover of The Mirador because I found--and, honestly, still find--the size and shape of Mehitabel's head disturbing. It did me no good.) When they asked me questions, I answered them and was delighted when my answers showed up in the cover art: Felix's tattoos, the cityscape behind Mildmay--the cover of The Virtu is probably my favorite for precisely that reason--Mehitabel's dress. In three of four cases, my descriptions of the characters were followed: Kay, for instance, does look like David McCallum on the cover, and that's exactly how I described him for the artist. Mehitabel is the exception there.

Okay, that's an honest answer to your question, but I want to be clear that it isn't a complaint. I think the covers for these books are fantastic. They're compositionally strong--which many fantasy covers aren't--they have coherent color schemes, they give an impression of lush baroquerie which is exactly what's called for. Most importantly from the purely mercenary point of view, they do exactly what they're supposed to do, which is catch people's attention. I've gotten emails from several people who have confessed to picking up Mélusine on the strength of the cover alone. The fact that devoted readers (and the neurotic pink circus poodle of an author) can list everything the covers get wrong is, well, par for the course.

Q: How did you choose the titles of the individual books of DoL? The main reason that I can think of is because most of them are the places all the events which transpire in, but then Virtu throws a wrench right at that reasoning, and it's really gnawing at me like a rat.

A: I did not choose the titles. Ace did. My titles were Strange Labyrinths, The Labyrinth's Heart, Labyrinths Within, and The Labyrinth of Summerdown. (I've mentioned before that I suck at titles, right?) And even after they'd explained their single-word evocative-of-fantasy title theory, I wanted to call the second book Kekropia and the fourth book Summerdown, and got vetoed again.

Q: ( spoilers for Corambis )

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Q: I have been trying to find a paperback copy of The Virtu, and nobody seems to have one. Do you happen to know where I could find one? All the others in the series are available, but that seems to have disappeared...

A: The Virtu is out of print in both hardback and paperback. I am really really sorry. My agent is making a formal protest on my behalf to Ace, and if/when the situation changes, I will definitely make an announcement.

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Q: I have a question more about one of your short stories than about your books (which I liked a lot, but I can't think of any question that has not been asked yet): I enjoyed "A night in Electric Squidland" very much and remember faintly that you said you wrote or planned on writing more short stories with Mick and Jamie. If you have written and published them, is there a way for this fan from beyond the sea (Great Britain) to buy or read them?

A: I have not managed to publish any more stories about Mick and Jamie. (I have one written that no one will buy, and something else that seems to be the first chapter of a novella, and then three or four other ideas that are thus far obstinately refusing to be phrased in the form of a story.) Hopefully, this situation will change for the better.

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Q: What's your preferred baseball team, if any? I only ask this because of, well, I suppose an auxiliary reference question--the writer Ynge, is it a reference to Brandon Inge?

A: I forget where I got Ynge's name, but no. It wasn't that.

I was raised an Atlanta Braves fan. Now, mirrorthaw and I follow the Milwaukee Brewers on the radio. But I'm more a baseball fan than I am a fan of any particular team.

[You can still ask your question(s) here.]

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ETA: The Sekrit Origin of the Virtu revealed! (Hint: it isn't the toaster.)

"After the Dragon"
first draft, 2600 words
After the dragon, she lay in the white on white hospital room and wanted to die.

Actual finished story--and with an actual story in it! Even if the story is not very good, this is a great improvement over the floundering and flailing and failing to finish things of the past year and change.

And I think I've figured out at least part of where I went off the rails. It's John Gardner's thing which I cannot remember well enough to quote about a short story needing a single action. What I think my stories need is a central action, an act or a choice or a conversation that is what the story is about. The short stories I'm stuck on right now, and there's quite an array of them, all lack that central action, that axis to spin around. And I think that where everything started going wrong was when I started trying to replace a central ACTION with a central THEME. For me, that does not work so well because I am no good at translating theme into action or character or any of the other things a story needs. But if I have a central action, my odds improve dramatically that the rest of the story will come trailing along behind.

So, to celebrate, here's the first line meme:
( for the kitties! )

(There was no Project Valkyrie today, as the weather was just too fucking gross.)

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What I haven't been posting about, obviously, is the revisions for Corambis that are due at the end of the month. I haven't been posting about them mostly because this is the part of the process that is difficult to articulate in a way that makes it interesting to people who haven't read the book yet. You know, when your writer-friend tells you, "I moved the chunk where Gilbert finds the pruning shears in the abandoned mental asylum from Chapter Four to Chapter Two, and OMG it makes the bit with Tabitha and the two ormolu swans in Chapter Three look like I meant to put it there all along!" And you smile and nod and metaphorically pat your writer-friend on the head and try to insert something that looks like a conversation into the conversation.

You know how it goes.

And maybe later, when the book is published and you read the bit with Tabitha and the two ormolu swans in Chapter Three and realize that, yes, of course the chunk with Gilbert and the pruning shears had to go in Chapter Two, maybe you call your friend up and go "OMG the pruning shears! You were so right!" and the two of you shriek and giggle like hyenas who have just found the most sumptuous elephant carcase of their lives.

Maybe.

But my point is, this kind of revising is neither particularly intelligible nor particularly interesting from the outside, and of course the sentence-level stuff even less so. So I'm not posting about it. Just trying to get it done.

I'm also not posting about this head cold, and believe you me, you're grateful for it.

Today, I am full of virtupitude. It is not yet noon, and I have already gone to the bank, the post office, the FedEx outpost, and the pet supply store, PLUS caught Quicken up to date and stared with opprobrium at the mmpb page proofs of The Mirador which the FedEx ninjas brought me.

If anybody's noticed a typo, please leave a comment.

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Yesterday, the Post Office ninjas brought me a CueCat from LibraryThing. And I neutered it myself. Despite this amateur hardware hacking, it works like a dream. Expect my LibraryThing catalogue to expand by leaps and bounds.

(N.b., since I feel like I should say it somewhere: I don't use any of LibraryThing's more social functions. Just the books, ma'am.)

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Books read recently:
The Order of the Death's Head
The Architect of Genocide
Flora Segunda
Disapproving Rabbits
Now We Are Sick
The Wee Free Men

Currently reading:
The Demon and the City
Talking to the Dead
The I Ching

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So any number of people are talking about first novels (and Jay has a poll!), and I figure I can play along with that game.

Novel -3 (as in, I thought of it as a novel at the time, although it was probably something like 8,000 words max): The Pendant Quest. This is the one I wrote when I was twelve. It's the Belgariad with the serial numbers insufficiently filed off crossed with, um, A Little Princess. Which tells you exactly what I was reading when I was twelve. I finished it, submitted it to a local children's writing contest, and took second place.

Novel -2: High Priestess of the Timeless Gods (N.b., my complete suckitude at titles started young.) Same as -3 except substitute The Tombs of Atuan for the Belgariad and Dragonsong for A Little Princess. And I was fourteen.

Novel -1: Demon's Rat. This one is almost a real novel, about 40k. The adventures of a gigantic rat constructed by a trapped demon. There's also elves and minotaurs and Hell's voicemail system. It's completely cracktastic, but I feel relatively confident in saying that it's all mine.

Novel 0: The Fourth King. Urban fantasy. I wrote this novel my senior year of high school as, basically, an independent study. 97k. Here's where the unlikeable borderline sociopathic protagonist first shows up. Also the trauma and the angst. Also some rather unpleasant misogyny issues (two female characters, one of whom is the villain and the other of whom is a gold-plated bitch). I submitted this one to Tor and got a very nice rejection letter. Subsequently, I have discovered that not only do I hate all of the secondary characters, but also that the book does not work. It has bad parareality problems. "Write what you know" is problematic advice at best, but this one falls into the "don't write what you don't know" category. I didn't know the first thing about what I was writing about, and it shows. Excruciatingly. There are bits and pieces of it that actually seem to belong in a different book, and that book may get written someday. We'll see.

Novel 1: [Mélusine & The Virtu]. I've told this story before; my first two books started off as one book. That's the book that got me representation.

Novel 2: The Mirador. I wrote it while waiting for my eventual agent (who is not my current agent for reasons which, as Fraser says, do not need exploring at this juncture, because they're both complicated and actually not interesting--no drama here) to respond.

Novel 3: Mélusine. A year later, having gotten some nice rejections on Novel 1, my then-agent suggested I might want to take a look at it and see if there was anything I wanted to change. I started a white-page rewrite. Mélusine is longer than the original novel and has about half the material. This is the first novel I sold.

Novel 4: The Virtu. Ditto. I got the contract for the first two Doctrine of Labyrinths books while working on this one.

Novel 2 revisited: The Mirador got extensively revised after it sold, including an entire new subplot.

Novel 5: Corambis. First novel I wrote, ground up, after selling it. Which has been a learning experience and then some.

The foregoing is only talking about novels that actually got finished. There are several failed novels between -1 and 0, and at least one between 0 and 1. There are currently two half-finished novels, Cormorant Child and The Emperor of the Elflands, one of which is, so help me blue fuzzy thing, going to be Novel 6.

Also conspicuously absent from this discussion are my short stories, but I didn't start writing those successfully until after I'd finished Novel 1 anyway. I wanted to be a novelist from the get-go.

In the interests of pretending that I may, at some point in the future, ever do a lick of work again (and because stillsostrange and cristalia are my bellwethers), here's that first-line meme.

( Get comfy. This could take a while. )