Swan Tower

03:12 pm - Happy, er, Surprise Book-Day!

So, turns out I've had it wrong all along: for my UK readers, May Day is the debut of Midnight Never Come! (Apparently I am, in fact, distracted enough to miss this fact. For U.S. readers, it's still June 9th.) If you're a Brit, then hie thee to a bookstore bookshop and get yourself a copy!

You can read the first of several upcoming interviews, this one with The Book Swede, who asked me some very thought-provoking questions about the background and content of this novel.

11:58 am - last excerpt

With forty days to go until Midnight Never Come hits the shelves, I've posted the last portion of the excerpt. It's a long one, so keep clicking through. (Alternatively, you can start back at the beginning.)

(Confidential to sora_blue: You can finally get the answer to your question from a month ago!)

That will actually be the last of the MNC promotional stuff for a while. I leave next week for London, where I will have many adventures researching the next book, and then I will be in the Mediterranean, trying to do no work at all. There will, however, be one last nifty thing, just before the book comes out. And in the interim, you will be getting the return of the trip-blogging, which I know many people enjoyed last year. So enjoy!

07:29 pm - Elizabethan extravaganza!

All you Kit Marlowe fanboys and fangirls out there may be interested to know that Issue #12 of Paradox Magazine is now available to order, and within its pages you may find my story "The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe". No relation to Midnight Never Come, despite that title coming from Marlowe, but I welcome speculation as to how the two might be made to connect. (I suppose the answer might be Ink and Steel.)

Also, C.E. Murphy's book The Queen's Bastard debuts today. I mention this because it will always hold a special place in my heart as the first book I blurbed. Yes, ladies and gents, somebody at her publisher decided that Marie Brennan was a name worth putting on the cover! Oddly enough, the letter I got with the review copy connected it to Warrior and Witch, but it's far more like Midnight Never Come, so that's the vein I will use to pitch it to you all here.

The Queen's Bastard, much like Michael Moorcock's Gloriana, takes place in a setting that is sixteenth-century Europe in almost everything but name. (Unlike Gloriana, at no point did I want to throw it across the room and light it on fire with the power of my rage.) It has espionage and magic and is way sexier than MNC, and it's the first book of a new series called The Inheritors' Cycle. Short-form synopsis is, Belinda Primrose is the unacknowledged bastard daughter of Elizabeth Lorraine, queen of England Aulun, and she's been trained by her father Robert Dudley Robert Drake in the art of international spying and assassination.

Belinda isn't an entirely likeable character; she takes several actions in the story that had my skin crawling. But that's clearly deliberate, and tied in with the growth of Belinda's powers; I suspect that when it's viewed in the larger context of the series, that will become an interesting facet of her character development. I'm certainly very curious to see the next book. This is clearly based on Reformation-era Europe, but taking it one step aside means Murphy can play with some elements of her own creation, and I'm looking forward to seeing where those go.

Finally, I'm hard at work on creating content for the dedicated Midnight Never Come website. (That's just the holding page, until the thing goes live.) The plans, they are glorious. I have no idea what this stuff will look like in execution, but the ideas have me hugely pleased.

05:39 pm - contest results, a bit delayed

I'm not sure if I should never do a contest like this one again because it was so hard to decide on winners, or to do a contest like this every time because I laughed so hard while making my decisions.

For the record, I have three ARCs left, and you lot have convinced me to give away all three. Without further ado, the winners:

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A million thanks to everyone who participated -- this was highly entertaining!

12:29 pm - Remember when you interviewed me?

Last summer or fall I collected interview questions from readers to put in the back of Midnight Never Come. I've received permission to post that on my website -- with special bonus update to the final question -- so that's your MNC-related goodie for today.

I will also post answers to some of the questions I didn't use there, but that will come later -- probably in June.

10:17 am

It's the 16th, and that means I'm posting over at SF Novelists, this time about my decision to leave grad school.

***

Also, I did find another review of Midnight Never Come recently. That's right, folks, I've been Klausnered.

I knew it was coming sooner or later. What fascinates me is that her review reads kind of as if she cribbed it from the Publishers Weekly review. (Only less grammatical.) The resemblance isn't overwhelming, but the structure of the two is very similar.

What's that you say? You want me to link to it? I'm not going to, for the simple reason that, while it's hardly the most spoiler-ridden review Harriet Klausner has produced, it does say a few things I'd rather it didn't. Take my word for it: she doesn't say anything in particular that you haven't heard elsewhere, with better grammar.

12:18 pm - Want one of the last few?

Your challenge is this: give me a creative reason why I should mail you one of my last few ARCs of Midnight Never Come.

And I do mean creative. None of this "'cause I really want to read it" stuff; tell me how, if you have an ARC, you will leverage it for Total World Domination. Or how your kitten is being driven mad by alien implants in her brain and only this book can save her. Bonus points for plausible logic, even if it's entirely nonsensical in its premises.

(I'm looking forward to these answers.)

One or more of those who amuse me the most will get an ARC mailed to them next week. You have until Friday to post your answers here, or e-mail them to marie dot brennan at gmail dot com.

01:02 pm - ::squeak::

Don't ask me why I got the UK version first -- but ten copies of Midnight Never Come just showed up on my doorstep.

<happy squeak>

I am ever-so-faintly sad that my copy-editor's diligent work in Americanizing my spellings was ported over without change; I'd love to see the UK editions of these books carry British spellings. (My natural state, for the record, is neither fish nor fowl -- colour but favorite; theatre but center. And grey. Always grey.)

On the other hand, they managed to slip through an incredibly last-minute change I asked for, that they would have every right to deny. So I'm grateful for that.

Fifty-six days and counting . . . .

12:10 pm - more excerpt!

That's right, folks; it's time for another bit of Midnight Never Come. You can start at the beginning, or pick up with with the new material. There are two scenes posted, one introducing Deven, the other for Lune.

There will be one more addition to the excerpt before the book's publication, and several other goodies of a different kind. Read and enjoy!

01:37 am - Want some irony?

Poking around online, I discover that Barnes & Noble's website actually lists the Kirkus review for MNC, which I didn't realize had come out already.

I'm ending my day with one hell of a contrast:

A hardworking, sanitized Elizabethan backdrop frames a tortuously passive yarn populated by lifeless characters: Mediocre stuff at best.

10:06 am - Possibly the Best Monday Morning EVAR

If I have to be jolted awake by my alarm on a Monday morning when I don't really want to be up yet . . .

. . . then this is the sort of thing I want waiting for me when I sit down at the computer:

Stunningly conceived and exquisitely achieved, this rich historical fantasy portrays the Elizabethan court 30 years into the reign of the Virgin Queen, often called Gloriana. Far below ground, her dark counterpart, heartless Invidiana, rules England's fae. Brennan (Warrior and Witch) pairs handsome young courtier Michael Deven, an aspiring agent under spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham, with bewitching fae Lune, who attempts to avoid Invidiana's wrath by infiltrating Walsingham's network in mortal guise. History and fantasy blend seamlessly as Deven and Lune tread their precarious tightropes between loyalty and betrayal. Brennan's myriad fantastical creations ring as true as her ear for Elizabethan and faerie dialogue. With intriguing flashbacks to historical events and a cast of deftly drawn characters both real and imagined, Brennan fleshes out the primal conflict of love and honor pitted against raging ambition and lust for power in a glittering age when mortals could well be such fools as to sell their souls forever.

12:04 pm - But wait -- there's more!!!

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 . . . .

10:10 am - picture time!

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.

11:16 am - Greetings from sunny Florida!

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>

11:27 pm - wiktory

I have chosen my ICFA reading. And I'm getting good at eyeballing these things; my selection, when test-read, turned out to be twenty minutes on the nose.

For the record, everything in this selection will eventually be posted on my site as part of the teaser excerpt. But you'll have to wait a while for it, so what you really want to do is get up at 8:30 in the morning on Friday to come hear me read it. Right?

Right?

Yes, that is officially my time slot. <sigh> Beggars can't be choosers and all, but still -- I'll have to hope some of Alex Irvine's and Judith Moffett's fans stick around, or I'll be reading to my co-panelists and Farah, who's moderating.

10:54 am - next tidbit: evidence of my insanity

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!

07:55 pm - ICFA

(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!

03:04 pm - One Hundred Days (and counting . . . .)

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!

10:46 am - handwriting

One last follow-up on the signature thing, which is really just a ramble about handwriting.

I was thinking thinky thoughts about handwriting, of course, during that whole affair, and fortuitously happened across an article in Slate about the difficulties of deciphering various people's scripts. Man, I pity the folks having to wade through that kind of stuff.

Which brings me to Elizabeth's handwriting. One of the books I got out of the library while working on the contract language was a collection of her letters, poetry, etc. The book I was looking for was checked out, unfortunately, but I went to the appropriate section anyway, and sure enough found another one I could use. Not until I got home did I realize that fate had handed me a little gift: while the book I'd been after had modernized her spellings, this one consisted of direct transcriptions of every document we have that's verifiably in Elizabeth's handwriting. Not only did that mean her idiosyncratic spellings (which can be used, in part, to reconstruct her pronunciation!), but also strike-outs, marginal insertions, re-drafting of speeches . . . and a few photo images of the documents themselves.

First of all, that means the contract is written wherever possible with the spellings Elizabeth favored. (Geekiness, yes, yes, we know.) But it also means I got to look at her handwriting.

The first image is of a translated poem written either by Princess Elizabeth or her tutor. Nobody can tell which, because she, like many students, was copying her tutor's hand scrupulously. It's a very nice, clean italic hand, but lacking in personality, as you would expect. Later on they show a letter to Edward Seymour, and there you can see her developed italic, with various flourishes and personal touches that make it distinctively Elizabeth's handwriting, and nobody else's. If we'd had more time on the contract thing, I would have been supremely tempted to try and make a font out of it, so we could print the entire document in Elizabeth's actual hand. But that's neither here nor there.

The third document gets me right in the gut. Shortly after Mary ascended the throne, she sentenced Elizabeth to imprisonment in the Tower. Elizabeth, stalling for time, asked her guards for leave to write a letter to Mary; she took long enough over it that the tide changed on the Thames, and so her imprisonment was delayed by a day. The image shows the two pages of that letter: in that same italic hand, but messier, less artfully controlled. The lines slant upward, the letter-forms are sharper, and on the second page, uneven diagonal lines cross out the white space between the conclusion and the signature, so that no one could insert additional material that could compromise her already precarious position. The evidence of her worry and fear is breathtaking; looking at her handwriting, I see Elizabeth as a person, not as the much-mythologized Gloriana. She was young and scared and desperate not to be imprisoned. It's a priceless glimpse into the past.

Aaaand then <snicker> there's the fourth and last image. The introduction to the book had talked about the distinct shift in Elizabeth's handwriting after she became Queen, as she adapted her style to her position. Honestly? I though at first that they meant it had become more ornate and regal.

She developed doctor handwriting.

The letter to Sir William Cecil is a nigh-illegible scrawl only vaguely recognizable as italic, or even as Engl -- oh, wait, it's Latin. <g> You can't even tell at first glance what language it's in. But (looping back around to that link up above), I understand now why people working on her manuscripts nowadays run into trouble. The letters m and n become vague horizontal wobbles; a's might be caret marks or o's. Often they can't tell her n's from her u's, which leads to real trouble in her French letters; whether a word is "us" (nous) or "you" (uous, i.e. vous) can change the entire meaning of a sentence. Throw in the abbreviations and idiosyncratic spelling of the time, swirl it all in a blender (which I think she did), and you've got another powerful statement of personality. Elizabeth herself referred to it as "skribling" in a letter to James of Scotland, and a court secretary called it "Queen Elizabeth's running hand." It looks like she wrote while running.

It's an incredible gift, being able to see her handwriting. Whether you buy into graphology or not, certainly our writing expresses our personalities very powerfully.

12:33 am - results of the signature contest

Now that I've heard back from everyone, I'm finally free to post, not just the winner of the signature contest, but all the entrants. I know a lot of people were curious to see what got sent to me, and I think everybody who contributed deserves recognition for their effort. (For the record, they are all receiving copies of Midnight Never Come; the winner also gets other goodies.)

In the end, fifteen people sent me entries; some sent more than one. You can see my favorite contribution from each contestant on my website, where I'm keeping them for posterity. As I said to several people, I'm very grateful to have gotten enough that I had the luxury of contemplating what to me looked the most like Invidiana's handwriting; in the end, it came down to that. And it was a tough choice!

Second runner-up: Maggie Stiefvater, who sent me two entries. The other was more ornate, and I liked it a lot, too, but in the end, this was my favorite of the two:




First runner-up: John Pritchard. I liked this one a lot; the rough edges to the strokes looked very realistic, and in correspondence later he proved that (as I suspected) he knows a lot about the writing of the period:




And finally, the winner: Karen Jolley-Williams! She, too, knew what she was talking about when it came to period handwriting, but in the end she won by stepping back one degree into an older style, as she described in her e-mail to me: "I made the Faerie Queen's letters blacker, more angular and cold, less Humanistic and certainly less approachable in personality than Elizabeth's italic hand." And indeed, the blackletter look ended up being the deciding factor for me. Step behind the cut to see . . . .

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So, that's it! Thanks again to everyone who helped out, especially with the short notice. Closer to the pub date, I will post the thing for which we did all this work . . . .