Flash � The Llama Song
Hello all!!!! I've been out of commission for a while battling the, ahem, demons of deadlines.
But someone sent me this and it was the PERFECT stress reliever. Yes, maybe I'm weird, but it cracked me up. (Warning ... the song sticks in your head!)
Back to deadline!!!!
Julie
We're back with Elizabeth Bear. For more interesting discussions about publishing and life in general, make sure to visit her Live Journal.
What is your daily writing process? Do you plot and outline an entire manuscript or do you create as you type?
Um, yes. *g* Or, more specifically, every novel is determined to be different. I've written books for which I had a chapter-by-chapter outline, and those in which I had no idea what happened next. The story itself dictates the structure; if I know what happens, I can outline--or signpost ahead, as sometimes I jump ahead and write scenes out of order. If I don't know, or I don't know enough, then I go after it in a linear fashion, so I can discover what happens along with the characters.
My plotting technique, however, is to keep breaking things until I can't see a way out. And then try to write the end of the book.
I do use notecards through the end of the book, one for each unresolved plot point, so I don't drop things along the way.
Jenny Casey from Hammered, Scardown and Worldwired is an unlikely heroine. Fifty years old with an artificially constructed body that’s starting to unravel – not the type of person one expects to be saving the world. Did Jenny enter your mind fully formed (and unraveling) or was she a character you fleshed out as you wrote?
Jenny showed up. With her carpet bag and her distinctive manner of speaking instact. Over the years, I've tried to get her to talk to me in third-person and in past tense, and she won't do it. She's curt, sarcastic, trenchant, and doesn't suffer fools gladly, and she tells stories in this very raconteurish "No shit, there I was" style (which is, of course, canonically the way all war stories start)--and she's been that way all along. Also, she's a great protagonist to write because she's prone to flaming out. She doesn't just screw up--she screws up on a kind of epic level.
And characters who do that--without, you know, being forced into "too stupid to live" plotlines by the writer; the mistakes have to be honest, in-character mistakes--are a precious resource. Because you can get them into the most unholy situations. Cautious people are harder to destroy.
I tend to write in defiance a lot, and Jenny's in some ways a reaction to that trope--that you have to be young and pretty and special and a bit naive to protag. So she's middle-aged and crusty and cantankerous and cynical and a bit of a maintenance alcoholic, and she has Baggage. Because I'm contrary.
What kind of research did you do for your Promethean Age series which begins with Blood and Iron? Blood and Iron deals more in the magical realm with the likes of wizards and faeries. Did you expand on what may or may not be already known about these magical creatures or did you put your own spin on things?
Oh, man. I did a lot of research. I mean, a *lot* of research. The oldest Arthurian legends I could find--as well as more modern versions, history, politics, world myth, secret societies real and fictional--everything from the School of Night and the Hellfire Club to the Golden Dawn ad the Diogenes Club (You can kind of see how the Prometheus Club gets its name, come to think of it--I wanted something period enough to seem a little hokey and pretentious to a modern ear) more biographies of Elizabethan notables than you can shake a stick at, Roman/Germanic history, Chinese legendry, the life of Vlad III of Wallachia (aka Vlad Dracula), English history... my Faerie is part Froud, part Shakespeare, part Yorkshire legend, and part Cirque du Soleil.
I have to pause to acknowledge Brian Froud--not so much the Pressed Faeries or Goblins stuff, but _The Land of Froud_ and his earthy pastels--as a heavy influence on how I *see* Faerie, anyway, because I grew up on his artwork. My mother was a huge fan, and so am I. I actually type this with a framed print of his piece "Tapestry" staring over her shoulder at me, and she looks rather a lot like my Morgan Le Fey.
A lot of modern fantasy treats magic as something desirable and the Industrial Revolution as a kind of bugaboo; it craves a return to magic and specialness. But to somebody of that pre-IR era, fairy was serious and scary business. You could lose your child, your heath, your life, your wealth--contact with fairy, with the otherworld, destroyed people. Or remade them. The natural world has been romanticized as living in it has become safer. But it will still kill you. And Faerie is a personification of that ruthlessness.
You know, ruthlessness isn't even the right word, because it indicates agency. And what nature, and by extension Faerie, must bring to the table is really not ruthlessness, but indifference. A blizzard doesn't care if it kills you. It just kills you.
And it was important to me to show that. But I also wanted to show the struggle from the point of view of the Fae. Which was tricky. Because from a human perspective they are the villains of the piece. But I'm strongly enough influenced by the likes of Zelazny, say, that I think the trope of showing the otherworld from the perspective of a normal human that the reader is expected to identify with is, well, unnecessary. I'd rather kick him in neck deep and put him in the head of a Mage, a Faerie, a wolf, a changeling grown to adulthood. Which is not to say there aren't kidnapped childen and poets galore, and the odd nod to Tam Lin and True Thomas.
I have five books of this thing written, and ideas for a bunch more. It's just huge, and I hope the marketplace will support my noodling around in that world for a good long time.
Jenny Casey or Seeker of the Daoine Sidhe – in a battle between the two, who would win and why?
In a knock down fight, it would likely be Seeker. As magic doesn't exist in Jenny's world. On the other hand, that steel hand might prove an advantage when dealing with the Fae.
And she's a sneaky old broad. You never know.
What’s ‘up next’ in your career?
Well, the Promethean books start coming out from ROC in the summer, and I've hopefully just delivered CARNIVAL to Spectra (Estimated publication this fall), unless they want more revisions. That's a science fiction novel unrelated to the Jennyverse, which is kind of the unholy collision of Joanna Russ and Robert Heinlein, if you can imagine such a thing. It's a Libertarian feminist dystopia. With spies.
There's a short fiction collection (THE CHAINS THAT YOU REFUSE) forthcoming from Night Shade in May, and there's some assorted short fiction in anthologies and magazines over the next year or so, including a 25K novella in Subterranean, which I'm told will be illustrated by Tim Truman. (This is me making geek faces and bouncing in my chair at the prospect. Tim! Truman!)
In current projects, I'm starting work on UNDERTOW, which is the last book I have under contract to Spectra, and which looks to go all parabolic on me. Then I have to figure out what to do next in terms of science fiction--possibly a novel in the same setting as the Jenny books, but not a direct sequel, which has the working title of SPINDRIFT. Because man, I still have aliens I want to play with. All I've got for that, though, is a fantastic Clarissa Pinkola Estes quote: "When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for."
Also, I have about twenty incomplete short stories that really need to be written, thank you.
I'm not writing any more Promethean Age books until I sell the ones I have written, but I have two novels cowritten with Sarah Monette--a YA historical mystery featuring Kit Marlowe, who now appears in four books and a novelette I've written, because I'm sort of obsessed with the man, and a deconstruction of Fuzzy Telepathic Companion Animal Fantasy-- out looking for publishers, and I have put together a proposal to try to sell a not-a-trilogy of Norse Steampunk Fantasy collectively referred to as "The Edda of Burdens." So maybe somebody will want that. *g*
That should keep me busy for the next few years, I think.
Thank you, Elizabeth!! I don't know about you, but I've just added another author to my To Be Purchased list.
...and that someone is Marianne Mancusi! Hop on over to her redesigned website. It's quite classy!!
This week at OOTB, we hope to introduce you to a new name in fantasy/sci-fi:
Hi, Gang!
I'm excited to report that my first excerpt from my upcoming paranormal release, PARALLEL ATTRACTION is live! I'll be posting the next portion of the prologue about two weeks before the book's publication on April 4th.
In the meantime, I'd love for you to check out the first segment on my website.
Thanks! And have fun! :)
Hugs,
Deidre
In the spirit of l'amour, I thought I would pose this question:
GODDESS OF THE ROSE is a magical, sensuous retelling of Beauty and the Beast – with a modern slant. Our Beauty, Micki (named after the Mikado Rose), and all the women in her family have a special affinity for roses – their blood, diluted in water and applied during the night of a new moon, makes roses grow spectacularly. What the women don’t know is that they have this ability because they are descendants of a High Priestess of the Goddess Hecate. Hecate is Goddess of Night, Magick, the Crossroads of Man, and of Beasts. She is also the proctrectess of The Realm of the Rose – the place wherein all dreams and magick originate. This realm is guarded diligently by The Guardian, a creature on which the myth of the Minotaur was based. The Guardian swore himself into Hecate’s service for eternity, and in return the Goddess gifted him with the heart and soul of a man, even though he has the body of a beast. But all is not well in The Realm of the Rose. The Guardian made a terrible mistake, arousing the Goddess’s wrath to such an extent that she bespelled him and the realm, and Hecate swore that they would sleep eternally unless the Beast was awakened by a woman who carried the magickal blood of Hecate’s priestess, and was wise enough to see the truth, and compassionate enough to act upon it.
Micki does awaken the Guardian and he abducts her to The Realm of the Rose, thinking that she would automatically break the curse placed on the realm and set things to right, but modern woman Micki is a very unexpected kind of High Priestess, and there are forces at work within the realm, both of love and of hatred that might change the shape of dreams and magick for all of eternity unless Micki is brave enough to make the ultimate sacrifice…
Romance Reviews Today gives GODDESS OF THE ROSE a Perfect 10 and calls the newest installment of the Goddess Summoning Series "an enchanting tale from beginning to end, GODDESS OF THE ROSE truly deserves RRT’s Perfect 10, an award that is exemplified with each word and every page in P.C. Cast’s latest.
GODDESS OF THE ROSE is available for purchase from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
I may have to give up on the "normal" thing. I was up again last night to the wee hours, working on revising those last chapters, which meant I slept in again (and then lay there daydreaming for a while). I may have to set an alarm to jolt myself out of that particular sleeping pattern, and even then I doubt it will do me much good because if I know I don't have to be anywhere or have any other reason to get up early, I've been known to just turn the alarm off. I don't think it's a problem, in general, except when I have to be somewhere before noon, and I have a lot of those kinds of events coming up. It would be nice to reset my internal clock a little bit so I can function in the morning (or at least fake it).
Now that I've got a little time to play with promo ideas and plans, I find myself faced with a few big decisions on what resources to allocate and how to allocate them. There is one big issue at work with all of this: I'm kind of cheap. I have a healthy dose of Scottish blood, and I'm coming out of a phase in my life when I had no money at all (more than two years of unemployment with occasional freelancing before I got a book deal), which makes it very hard to spend money. I guess I have a Depression-era mentality that makes me want to save for an inevitable rainy day. So spending large amounts of money on anything goes against my nature, even when I can sort of convince myself that it's actually an "investment" in my business. The big "investment" I'm pondering at the moment is the Romantic Times Booklover's Conference in May. That's a huge fan-fest for readers, writers and booksellers with lots of parties, chances to promote yourself, booksignings, and the like. I've tried asking people about it so I could quantify the value of it, but I haven't had a straight or definitive answer. I've heard that it's a lot of fun (if you like big, wild parties), but from the sounds of things, it's only a really good promotional tool if you write certain kinds of books and are really good at getting out there and promoting yourself.
I do happen to write one of those kinds of books, and if I'm "on," I have found that my presence can do a lot to encourage people to check my books out. I'm basically a nice person, and a lot of times people who talk to me come away thinking that if I write like I talk, my books should be at least mildly amusing. Anyone who goes to the effort and expense to go to an event like this is bound to be passionate about books, so they're people who would be likely to spread word of mouth. I just haven't been able to convince myself yet that I'll get a value out of it that's anywhere near the expense of it. Everyone who attends would have to buy at least one copy of one of my books for it to even out in royalties, or else there are other proportions, like half of the people there would have to buy at least one book and then tell at least one person, etc. I have to make up my mind by next week because then it becomes even more expensive.
Then there's the web site issue. I design and maintain my own site (which reminds me, I need to update it), but my agent is nagging me to get a more "professional" looking design. I'm kind of an oddball about the web. As long as the information is there, I don't care what a site looks like (I think fondly of the days of the Mosaic text-based browser), so I'm still not convinced about the value of going for a slick, glitzy site. I think it's better to have something that's not entirely ugly but that has lots of info and that's updated with fun new stuff every so often than to have a slick, static site that's updated less often and has less stuff on it (because you have to go through some designer to get it updated). Maybe I could compromise and get a professional logo and some header type things done that I could throw onto a site I continue to put together and maintain.
Needless to say, I'm all about the cost/benefit ratio. Sometimes I'm too practical for my own good.
GODDESS OF THE ROSE will be touring on OOTB blogs next week. Isn't this a gorgeous cover? Doesn't it make you want to rush right out and buy it? That's my first thought anyway.
Together for the first time in one thrilling volume are Rebecca York's Killing Moon and Edge of the Moon, two of her highly acclaimed werewolf novels full of suspense, intrigue, and passionate hunger.
Killing Moon
A P.I. with a preternatural talent for tracking finds his prey: a beautiful genetic researcher who may be his only hope for a future.
Edge of the Moon
A police detective and a woman who files a missing persons report become the pawns of an unholy serial killer in a game of deadly attraction.
{Edited to Add: Robin beat me to the punch in announcing the PEARL finalists. We're using both posts because Robin's showcases the entire list of finalists and this post shows off the beautiful covers belonging to OOTB members. Sneaky (and quick) Robin!!}
The Paranormal Excellence Award for Romantic Literature (aka P.E.A.R.L) 2005 finalists have been announced and look who's made the cut:
Shoot, looks like my PEARLS announcement here didn't stick! But the Paranormal Romance Group has nominated writers and books for their annual contest and some of them are right HERE on this blog!
Subject: 2005 PEARL Finalists 
Here they are at long last, the finalists for 2005 Paranormal Excellence
Awards for Romantic Literature (PEARL).
2005 Finalists are:
BEST FANTASY / MAGICAL
Goblin Moon by Candace Sams
Warprize by Elizabeth Vaughan
Haunted by Kelley Armstrong
Heart Choice by Robin D. Owens
Guardian Of Honor by Robin D. Owens
BEST FUTURISTIC
Origin In Death by J. D. Robb
Unmasked by C. J. Barry
Stargazer by Colby Hodge
Awaken Me Darkly by Gena Showalter
Touch Of The White Tiger by Julie Beard
A Taste Of Crimson by Marjorie M. Liu
BEST TIME TRAVEL
Spell Of The Highlander by Karen Marie Moning
Dreams Of Stardust by Lynn Kurland
A Breath Of Snow And Ashes by Diana Gabaldon
A Connecticut Fashionista In King Arthur's Court by Marianne Mancusi
Hot & Heavy by Sandra Hill
BEST SHAPE-SHIFTER
Sins Of The Night by Sherrilyn Kenyon
The Dark One by Ronda Thompson
Dark Lover by J.R. Ward
Tiger Eye by Marjorie M. Liu
Dead Walkers: The Protectorate by Angelique Armae
BEST NOVELLA OR SHORT STORY
Mating Net by Rowena Cherry
"Road of Adventure" in What Dreams May Come by Robin D. Owens
"Banshee Cries" in In Winter Moon by C.E. Murphy
"Forever Mine" in Beyond The Dark by Linda Winstead Jones
"A Hero's Welcome" in The Journey Home by Rebecca York
BEST ANTHOLOGY
The Journey Home by Catherine Asaro, Diane Chamberlain, Mary Jo Putney,
Patricia Rice, Rebecca York
Highland Vampire by Adrienne Basso, Hannah Howell, Debbie Raleigh
What Dreams May Come by Sherrilyn Kenyon, Robin D. Owens, Rebecca York
Beyond The Dark by Linda Winstead Jones, Evelyn Vaughn, Karen Whiddon
Winter Moon by Mercedes Lackey, Tanith Lee, C.E. Murphy
BEST SCIENCE FICTION
The Good, The Bad, And The Undead by Kim Harrison
Darkscape: Redemption by R. Garland Gray
Urban Shaman by C.E. Murphy
Windfall by Rachel Caine
Every Which Way But Dead by Kim Harrison
BEST EROTIC
Toil And Trouble by C.S. Chatterly, M.A. duBarry
Unleash The Night by Sherrilyn Kenyon
White Tigress by Jade Lee
Mercenaries by Angela Knight
Master Of The Moon by Angela Knight
BEST NEW AUTHOR
Marjorie M. Liu
Elizabeth Vaughan
Dawn Thompson
Marianne Mancusi
Robin
Enter a mythical world populated with vampires, dragons, demons and Nymphs…enter a world of dark seduction and powerful magic…enter Atlantis…..
All Atlantis seeks the Jewel of Dunamis, which legend claims can overcome any enemy. Grayson James, human agent for the ultra-secret Otherworld Bureau of Investigation, has orders to keep it from the wrong hands – or destroy it. What he doesn’t know is that Jewel is a woman, not a stone! But once he meets this precious gem, destroying her is the last thing on his mind…
Jewel, part goddess, part prophet, is a pawn in Atlantis’s constant power struggles. She needs Gray’s help to win freedom and uncover the secrets of her mysterious origins. Gray needs her wisdom to navigate monster-ridden Atlantis. But need blossoms into passionate love as they fight demons, dragons, vampires – and a prophecy that says the bond between them could destroy them both.
Susan at Singletitles.com said "JEWEL OF ATLANTIS is clever, witty, sexy, exciting and just plain fun to read. Full of lots of "other world" goodness, it's a paranormal romance lovers delight. With characters that are rich in personality, scenery that is lush and enchanting, and dialogue that is snappy, fresh, and fun, you just couldn't ask for a better story."
Rush over the Gena's website for an excerpt of JEWEL OF ATLANTIS, and for a mighty fine time, visit Gena's blog.
JEWEL OF ATLANTIS is available for purchase at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
JEWEL OF ATLANTIS will be making the rounds as next's week OOTB Tour. If you can't wait that long (and you shouldn't -- it's good, people), visit Gena's website for an excerpt.
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