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.
I remember when I moved into my freshman dorm at Harvard, and there was a list on my pillow of everyone who had lived in my room since 1804. (Nobody famous, but Ralph Waldo Emerson had lived down the hall.)
I'm reminded of this as I look at the list of the Lord Mayors of London. It's kind of boggling to imagine being elected to an office that stretches back in an unbroken line to 1189. (Well, the elections go back to 1215. The two guys before that were appointed.) I won't count them myself, but Wikipedia says almost 700 individuals have served.
Stop and think about that for a moment. Monarchical dynasties come and go; they overthrow each other, die out, pass to collateral lines. Sometimes they even get abolished and re-instituted. And those who occupy thrones are put there by birth, not by merit. I'm less impressed by that than I am by this, a tradition of annual elections stretching back nearly 800 years.
This is the kind of thing that makes me realize how American I am. We've had forty-three presidents over 219 years. Whoop-de-doo. 219 years is an eyeblink, by the standards of European history.
Brits think 100 miles is a long distance, and Americans think 100 years is a long time.
Back I go to making a list of the aldermen of London in 1640 -- another institution that's been around for eight centuries or so.
Edited to add: I also get brief flashes of what it's like to be a historian, reading meaning between the lines of incredibly boring information. List of aldermen? Boring as hell. But then you notice things like the sudden turnover in 1649, the year they cut the king's head off. Normally there were maybe one or two vacancies in a year; maybe four or five, maybe none. The list for 1649? Stretches nearly four pages. John Smith of the Drapers' Company was selected for Walbrook on June 12th, sworn in the 19th; on June 20th they selected William Nutt of the Grocers' Company. He got sworn in on July 10th, four days before the selection and swearing-in of Hugh Smithson from the Haberdashers. Smithson in turn lasted five days, to be succeeded by William Bond, also of the Haberdashers, who made it all the way to 1650 before vanishing. And that's not the worst of it; Cornhill Ward alone went through nine aldermen in 1649.
I know seven aldermen were forcibly booted for Royalist sympathies, but I don't know why the rest of them had the political lifespan of mayflies. What aspect of the unrest had them coming and going in a matter of days?
The list doesn't say. But it raises the question, and I think that's how historical inquiry gets started.
Edit #2: Also, my apologies to Richard Martin of the Goldsmiths, who is apparently the real-life individual I booted off the historical stage when I made Deven's father the alderman for Farringdon Within. (There was a limit to my historical accuracy, but you have to dig pretty far to find it.)
Since Martin got to be Lord Mayor in 1589, I'll just pretend he was busy with that instead.
If you're grappling with a problem in your story, and then you think up a solution, and then decide (as you should) that no, that solution is too easy, so you toss in a complication, but you still don't quite know how to make it work . . .
. . . then the answer is in fact to toss in another complication.
Throw plot twists at it until it works1, sez I.
1 -- Method not advised for all stories. But it works for some.
You know what happens when I post two research book reports in one day?
I get into the sort of mood where I'm genuinely excited to discover that all the minutes of the House of Commons from the seventeenth century are available online. And that the IU Library has a book that lists seven hundred years' worth of the aldermen of the City of London.
The sad thing is, I do have a life. And this is it.
I know, I'm posteriffic today. But I'm finally making visible progress on research, so you get book reports.
This particular item, published in 1937, is apparently the most recent -- nay, the only -- useful resource out there for information about the Roman and medieval city wall. Which seems bizarre, but hey. It's jointly written by Walter G. Bell, F. Cottrill, and Charles Spon, who took it in turns to write about the wall in various periods, from its first construction by the Romans to its demoltion through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.
The archaeologist in me alternately cringes and giggles at the gimpiness of 1930s research methods and the unapologetically patriotic tone of the writing, but it does provide me with a great deal of handy information, both for this and later books.
So for the 0.00001% of you who might need to know about the London Wall in excruciating detail, this is your book. (Unless the folks at the Museum of London are wrong, and there's a better one out there I could have been reading.)
This is the book I needed to read before Stone's. If you're looking for a clear, readable, narrative overview of seventeenth-century history, I'd definitely recommend this one. It starts with a pair of chapters on the social and political world throughout the period, then begins moving chronologically, separating the century into reasonably distinct segments for James I and VI, the Duke of Buckingham, Charles I, the start of the Civil War, the conclusion of the Civil War, the Commonwealth/Protectorate, and the Restoration. (It goes on from there, but I stopped in 1667; I might well come back and read the later chapters after this novel is done.) A few of Kishlansky's break-points seem oddly chosen -- why 1644 as a dividing line in the Civil War? -- but divisions like that are always going to be a little arbitrary.
The political perspective seems, if anything, excessively moderate. I'm not sure if the contrast with Stone comes from the different times at which the authors were writing, their political inclinations, their theory backgrounds, or what, but Kishlansky appears reluctant to paint anybody in a noticeably negative light. Charles I doesn't seem unreasonable, Cromwell seems like a patriot -- hell, even Strafford comes across as not all that awful, when Stone made it sound like he was practically eating Irish babies with tartar sauce. Granted, Stone's purpose was to trace the causes of the conflict, so he's more likely to highlight the negatives, but still -- Kishlansky might be a bit too forgiving.
But that's okay. I came to this book hoping to understand what happened, and now I do. The result is that I finally have a tentative outline for which time periods And Ashes Lie will be covering. I call that a win.
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 ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
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.
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>
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?
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?
Well, that's it. Page proofs are in the mail, headed back to the publisher.
It isn't exactly true to say I'm washing my hands of this book until June, because of course I'll need to do things to promote it. But work on the book itself is done.
And so, at last, the giant map of Elizabethan London has come down off the wall in the upstairs hallway . . . to be replaced by a new one, of course. I have a partial 1828 map, which is about forty years on the early side, but it might go up for now (once I get it flattened out). Especially since I'm not sure how best to go about getting a more contemporary one.
I just hope I can find some method that doesn't involve three hours at Kinko's with a bunch of tape again.
This?
Is exactly what I need to keep in my head as I ponder this upcoming Victorian book.
(A book which really needs an icon of its own, and also a title. And that other book over there needs a title too. Why are all the things I'm working on remaining obstinately nameless? "Victorian steampunk faerie fantasy" and "Super Sekrit Project CHS" get old pretty fast.)
I have a more specific research request for all you Victorianists.
I'm looking for poetry written no later than 1871, on the topic of the London Underground. Yes, I know that leaves only a narrow window of time in which the Underground even existed. Failing that, poetry (also before that date) about railroads.
No, I don't have a title yet. I have any number of awesome phrases, but none of them are my title.
Suggestions?
Dear Brain,
Put the Victorian Age down and back away from it, slowly.
Why? Because you aren't ready to write that book yet. You know it and I know it; there's no disagreement there. But do you know what will happen if you do another nosedive into research like last time? You will get sick of the Victorian period, before you even start writing the book. So slow down. That deadline is not for another ten months.
Play with this shiny over here instead. Wouldn't you rather be reading YA urban fantasies than books about the Victorian sewer system?
Wouldn't you?
I'd appreciate more than just a grudging nod, Brain. Or else I'm going to start thinking there's something deeply wrong with you.
That's better. The Victorian Age will still be waiting when you come back, don't worry. And in the meantime, we're going to have fun with some other things.
Affectionately,
Your Writer
Must ponder what I want in the way of a Victorian icon. For now, I shall use the MNC one.
Anyway. The real point of this post.
This question is particularly aimed at d_aulnoy, since I know she's a Victorianist, but if any of the rest of you happen to have familiarity with nineteenth-century literature, please feel free to jump in.
I'm trying to come up with a title for the Victorian sequel. I want to do something in the vein of Midnight Never Come: that is, a poetic phrase taken from the literature of the period, which is also (of course) applicable to the substance of the novel. Mind you, I'm still working on figuring out what that substance is -- but you'd be surprised (or maybe not) how much having a compelling title can help shape a story.
But of course there's a lot of Victorian literature out there; I need to narrow it down. Specifically, I want things apropos of London, industrialization, urbanization, maybe the underworld . . . you get the drift. Soppy poems about love and/or how pretty nature is need not apply. Random odes to a hat the poet saw someone wear to the opera, ditto. Stuff that's a little grittier and grimmer. What poems/poets should I look at?
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