Lilith Saintcrow's Blog, page 156

WAYFARER Release Day!

Well, the day has finally arrived! My retelling of a very particular fairytale is now released into the wild.

The Charmer’s Ball. Midnight. And one glass slipper…

Newly orphaned, increasingly isolated from her friends, and terrified of her violent stepmother, Ellen Sinder still believes she’ll be okay. She has a plan for surviving and getting through high school, which includes keeping her head down and saving any credits she can earn or steal. But when a train arrives from over the Waste beyond New Haven, carrying a golden boy and a new stepsister, all of Ellie’s plans begin to unravel, one by one.

Just when all hope is lost, Ellie meets an odd old woman with a warm hearth and a heavenly garden. Auntie’s kindness is intoxicating, and Ellie finally has a home again. Yet when the clock strikes twelve on the night of the annual Charmer’s Ball, Ellie realizes that no charm is strong enough to make her past disappear…

In a city where Twisted minotaurs and shifty fey live alongside diplomats, hustlers, and charmers, a teenage girl can disappear through the cracks into safety—or into something much more dangerous. So what happens when the only safety you can find wants to consume you as well?

Now available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and independent bookstores.

***

Writing Ellie’s story was difficult, mostly because I was finishing the house-buying process, which was ALL SORTS OF STRESSFUL. It’s the one time in my career I’ve asked for extra time to finish books, though I did end up getting them turned in on time. (I still felt incredibly guilty for even asking.) WAYFARER had a rocky road afterwards too, for reasons related to me leaving YA (temporarily or permanently hasn’t been decided yet) after Ruby’s book–which is still on track to come out next year. (Hopefully. A lot hinges on the numbers for WAYFARER.)

It was also difficult to write because, like , it involved a lot of digging and remembering. Trauma is a funny thing–there are whole chunks of my early life I only remember hazily, and some huge blanks where I’ve blocked some things out to save my own sanity. But for Ellie, I had to remember a time when I was vulnerable and learning that not everyone who offers to help a teenage girl necessarily has said girl’s best interests at heart.

Even if they love her–or think they do.

WAYFARER started when I looked at Ellie and thought two things: boy, she tries so hard to cope, I know what that’s like, and, more interestingly, What if the fairy godmother was just as dangerous as the evil stepmother?

I think about that a lot, and part of the exploration of fairytales is seeing the doubling and mirror-images that go on. The structure of all three books–the publisher calls them Tales of Beauty & Madness, but to me they’ll always be part of my Human Tales cycle–is full of doubles, mirror images, reverses, and twins. Some of them I didn’t even catch while I was writing them.

Anyway, here’s a new story I made for you, dear Readers. Come in, sit down, and let me tell you about a girl whose father died, whose stepmother forced her to work, and how dangerous anything you think a refuge might be…

On Hannibal

So I’ve been watching season one of Hannibal in little bits and pieces. I’m glad to watch it without commercials, but I can’t help but note what years of not watching television has done to my perceptions. I look at the women and think, “Christ, , make them a burger or something,” and, in a few memorable instances, “A FUCKING FORENSIC TECH DOESN’T LET HER HAIR HANG IN THE EVIDENCE, DAMMIT,” and I look at the men and think “Those are not Real People Teeth.” Also, I am very conscious of stage directions, and people hitting their mark.

But generally, I am able to buy into the fiction pretty well. The bits of emotional trouble I’ve had come while watching the depictions of Will Graham’s complete empathy. One would think I would identify with Abby, but I don’t–for one thing, her parents loved her, even if that love took a particularly twisted form in her father. She never had to doubt it. Watching play Will Graham is like watching someone shy get naked–it works because of his willingness to be vulnerable. (Except later in the season he seems to forget Graham has trouble with eye contact.)

I often find myself thinking Will Graham isn’t so different from a writer. That profound empathy is necessary when you’re slipping into a character’s skin, no matter how briefly. Feeling what another person is feeling, thinking like they do, isn’t necessarily comfortable, depending on who you’re empathizing with.

Hannibal himself I find mesmerizing, because Mikkelsen plays him so well–so precise and contained, so subtle in his manipulations. Sometimes the wardrobe department puts him in a suit such a aesthete wouldn’t be caught dead in, but that’s incidental. However, the character that makes me furious is Jack Crawford.

Hannibal knows he’s evil, he knows he needs protective coloration in order to continue his preferred existence. Crawford is “fighting the good fight” and knows he’s right–perhaps the most dangerously seductive trap for anyone with a talent for manipulation, which he possesses in a different way than Hannibal’s. The point at which Will says “I don’t know if I can keep doing this” and Crawford’s response is “If you want to quit, quit,” after intimating that there are future murders Will could stop…frankly, I found that incredibly maddening. Crawford, at bottom, cares about Will–but not enough to let him go, because he’s such a great tool and serves Crawford’s purposes so neatly and thoroughly. Laurence Fishburne brings Crawford to life as a not-very-necessarily-nice person, who is on the “right side” but won’t hesitate to break someone if he has to. Fascinating to watch, but when one identifies with Will it’s painful.

The other thought I have is about the show’s structure. I have fun thinking of it as an extended allegory about a personality’s different parts all jostling to create a sense of “self”, even though any sense of “self” is fragile and ever-changing. Hannibal is the cold survivalist part, Graham the fragile compromise, Crawford the superego, Alana Bloom as the Jungian mother-archetype (odds are Hannibal will eventually kill her) and Abby as the child-self…it really, as I watch, fits together a shade too neatly for comfort.

All in all, I like it–but I hope it doesn’t drag on season after season and become a caricature of itself.

Want me to write a book?

Well, actually, a serial, that will be released in ebook form (kind of like Selene)?

Then hie thee hence to Fireside Magazine’s Year Three Kickstarter. If we reach our goal, I’ll be writing an ongoing serial based on my last Fireside story, Maternal Type. Which means cyborgs, bloodsuckers, train heists, Wild West shootouts, and a rebellion. It’ll be fun–if we get funded.

Just sayin’.

Over and out.

At The Station

Get your tickets now!

The Pliny Train is now boarding.

*long low whistle*

I’m working from Loeb Classical Library’s editions, and starting at Books 1-2 of Pliny’s Natural History. (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, direct from Harvard, Indiebound) As we check our luggage and visit the restroom one last time, climb aboard and find a congenial seat (since this is an imaginary train, we can all travel in seperate cars if we so wish) and hand your ticket to the conductor–yes, thank you, sir or ma’am, and there will be someone along in just a bit to offer you a drink, a meal, a hot towel or a pillow, or anything else you shall require.

The Pliny Train believes in comfort.

Anyway. Let’s take a look at our route, shall we?

Gaius Plinius Secundus, as I’ve previously noted, was kind of a BAMF. Born in AD 23, he had several successes in the military before he returned to Rome and studied law. Perhaps wisely, he retreated from public life under Nero[1], and when Vespasian took the purple Elder Pliny must have heaved a sigh of relief, because he and Vespasian went waaaaaay back together–they both fought tribesmen in what is now Germany. (Incidentally, it was ol’ Vespasian who put down one of the big rebellions in Judea. My thoughts on the present-day reverberations of Roman policy in the Middle East must, alas, wait for another time.) Pliny (called the Elder, to distinguish him from his nephew, from whom we get a lot of glimpses of the older man) died in his 56th year, the story goes, trying to get closer to an erupting volcano so he could make geological observations.

In short, this guy saw Vesuvius erupting, and instead of deciding to wait until things calmed down, immediately strapped on his goggles and went in for Science. And, you know, got asphyxiated by poison gases. (Well, he was also going to evacuate people, and might have had an asthma attack…but still.)

The introduction to Rackham’s[2] translation of the Natural History gives us a few telling details about Elder Pliny the BAMF. He read nothing without making a lot of notes and extracts, was a bit of a pedant, and chided his nephew for any “wasted time” away from his studies. (Said “wasted time” was sometimes his nephew walking around Rome instead of being carried in a chair, reading, so…yeah, that tells us a lot about him.) In his dedication–for he dedicated the Natural History to Vespasian–you get the idea that he was more comfortable in a library or a military camp than anywhere else.

Pliny the Elder never married and had no children; he adopted his sister’s son to leave his estate in the family. After reading the dedication–full of in-jokes for Vespasian, learned digs at other authors, and not a few mentions of Cicero–I received the distinct impression that all Pliny’s love was saved for his books and his fellow soldiers. I know, it’s hard to tell after thousands of years, and I’m probably assuming too much, but I think Pliny was more than a little in love with “his” Emperor. He also explains a little of his motivation for engaging on such a huge project:

It is a difficult task to give novelty to what is old, authority to what is new, brilliance to the commonplace, light to the obscure, attraction to the stale, credibility to the doubtful, but nature to all things and all her properties to nature. Accordingly, even if we have not succeeded, it is honourable and glorious in the fullest measure to have resolved on the attempt. (p.11)

In other words, “MOTHERFUCKAS, THIS IS A BIG JOB, BUT SOMEONE’S GOTTA AT LEAST TRY IT. LET’S GO.”

He also explains that in order to make things easier for people who don’t want to read the whole damn 37-book series, he’s going to give us a Table of Contents, and that’s where we’ll start next week. In the meantime, please enjoy your beverages, and feel free to read ahead.

***

[1] I won’t go into who had an axe to grind in making Nero out to be a complete asshole. At least, not right now.

[2] I suppose I should admit that I had a moment of confusing the translator with Arthur Rackham, and having a fit of giggles.

A Productive Wallow

So yesterday I had a good bit of a wallow. Yes, I actually scheduled my wallow in self-doubt, pity, and questioning.

And dumped out 2K wordcount on the suspense-romance I’m doing for my writing partner. It was a most productive wallow.

So now, instead of finishing Bannon & Clare in Hong Kong, I’m working on Agent Zero–the suspense-romance–and the second Jeremy Gallow book, as well as Rattlesnake Wind. Of the three of them, Agent Zero will probably be the one I finish first. It’s heating up and I’m about to start the mad dash for the end. I might send it to the agent once it’s done and see if it can find a home.

Rattlesnake Wind will take a while longer. For one thing, the book wants to be written in a spiral notebook, as if I’m fifteen again. Transcribing it to Word will tax my patience, I’m sure, and I don’t know…once I’m done with it, I may go to a public place and just toss the notebook. Burn it, or something. Maybe give it a Viking funeral over water, I do live near a river. Then I’ll put it away on my hard drive and never look at it again.

Then, the second Gallow book. The first one’s already finished, and I’m boiling the second in the back of my head, bits of the plot arcs, both large and small, coalescing. Wrenching my brain away from China in the 1890s and into almost-modern-day trailer-park sidhe playing both Courts, Seelie and Unseelie, is a little…exotic. I’m sure once I finish another book this weird sense of cramping inside my brain will go away. I had a minor bit of tears welling up when I put the research books for The Jade Crane Affair back on the shelf, I must admit.

But Bannon & Clare are left in a good place, at a natural endpoint for the Londinium books. Maybe one day I’ll go back to them. Doubtful, but possible.

Thanks for all the support and kind words. I’m actually quite lucky, in that I had something else to give my editor when it became clear Bannon & Clare wasn’t doing well. Another instance of the shotgun theory of publishing (produce, finish, rinse, repeat, and sooner or later someone will want something you’ve written) serving me in good stead. It may not work for everyone, but right now, I’m pretty grateful I followed the impulse to finish the first Gallow book. And I’m ever so grateful my editor is honest and flexible, as well as committed to me.

Last but not least, I am really grateful for you, my darling Readers. I’m going to get back to work making more stories for you.

Right now.

photo by:


Moyan_Brenn

Changing Midstream

So…things have now been decided. The Ripper Affair will be the last Bannon & Clare book. Which is fine; my plans were for Bannon & Clare to go traveling, and I’ve been working on the “B&C in Hong Kong” book for a couple months now, but that can go in a drawer. Unfortunately, the numbers on The Red Plague Affair were just not enough to justify the traveling books–which included the “B&C go to America and meet Jack and Cat from Damnation” and the “B&C in the Indus, or, what the hell IS Mikal, anyway?” one. The traveling books were basically a fresh new series, so the Ripper book is a natural endpoint for Londinium’s best mystery-solvers, and it will leave on a mostly-satisfactory note.

It’s a little disappointing, but thankfully, my editor already had interest in another series–remember the trailer-park sidhe? That series, featuring Jeremy Gallow and Robin Ragged (you may remember them from Gallow’s Rescue in the Courts of the Fey anthology) and all their enemies (because, you know, among the sidhe, there are very few “friends”) interested her from the beginning. So, the first Gallow book–which I finished, not thinking anyone would buy it, as I so often do–has taken the place of Bannon & Clare in Hong Kong.

Yesterday was difficult, mostly because I felt like I’d let my editor down. I’ve been working with her for about a decade now, and I felt like I had somehow done something wrong. Of course, she immediately disabused me of the notion, reassured me, and called so I could hear the reassurance in her tone. A good editor is like that–flexible, and committed to communication.

So now I must switch gears, and start working on Rattlesnake Wind, which is a YA I’m writing I don’t think anyone will ever buy (seriously, it’s such a departure from anything I’ve ever done) and gathering visual and emotional food for the second Gallow book. Which means my research reading needs to shift from the Taiping Rebellion and China in the 1890s to fairies, fae, sidhe, and Arthurian legend. I’ll probably be a bit starey-eyed while all that shakes out inside my noggin. Thanks for all your support and kind words–yesterday was sort of a rough ride, emotionally.

And yes, I did visit Emphysema Joe yesterday, but that’s (say it with me) another blog post.

A Funny Business

Sometimes you just gotta channel the Dude, and abide. It’s probably time for me to go visit Emphysema Joe and get some advice. Or even just sit for a bit, now that it’s not -20 outside. They’re even saying some sun today.

And why, may you ask, am I contemplating spending time out in my backyard talking to a resin statue of a pothead undead gnome? No real reason, I guess, except I found out the numbers on a certain series had plummeted, and as a result, well, the last three months of work might have been for naught. Publishing’s a funny business. You spend months waiting for some indication, any indication, of what the hell’s happening. You get so used to delayed gratification, and you also get used to the perceived helplessness of not knowing what the fuck for months at a time.

Of course, as the author, it sends me down into a spiral of “what did I do wrong? Did I somehow make the book suck? Have I run out of stories? I was excited, I gave it my all, but am I blind? Is it just a big pile of suck? Is my career over? If it is, how do I pay the mortgage? AUGH!”

You get the idea. Pretty much everything in a writing career seems designed to turn even the most well-balanced and sane of people into a neurotic mess. And of course, being not the best example of sane (come on, I am still chortling over an undead sorcerous hamster) I get tipped into a raging whirlpool of self-doubt, second-guessing, panic, and outright terror.

Nothing’s been decided yet, of course. I’ll probably get a call from my agent later today, and she’ll probably chide me for worrying, as she so often does. She’ll reassure me, and I’ll feel marginally better for a while. But the panic will still return at weird moments.

I love my job, but I’m not blind to its pitfalls. The knife of Not Looking Away cuts both ways more often than not.

So, if anyone needs me, I’ll be out in the backyard with the dogs, talking to Emphysema Joe.

Harry, the Undead

Going to the grocery store is always an adventure. My children have learned this.

After piano lessons on Saturday, the Princess and I stopped at a New Seasons to pick up various things. While there, she fell in love with the idea of a diffuser–tealight in the bottom, water and essential oils in the top–and picked out a lovely gray-silver one. We headed for the checkout, engaged in the sort of cryptic talk that happens when you’ve known someone all their life. All was fairly normal (despite our long-running exploration of a couple manga series themes) until we unloaded the diffuser. “From this side it looks like just a jar,” the Princess said.

“Maybe for a gerbil’s ashes,” I replied, eying it.

And thus, Harry the Undead Hamster was born. The checker overheard us, and picked up the diffuser, examining it critically. “It does look like an urn,” she said, handing it to the bagger. “Doesn’t it?”

“It does!” He turned it around. “Wow. From this side I’m all, how do you even get that open?”

By this time the Princess was laughing almost too hard to speak and I was doing my Harry the Undead voice. By the time we left the checkout line we knew Harry was: undead, possibly a gerbil, possibly something else, who had become undead by an accident involving a sorcerer, an Elixir of Life that halfway through the recipe was a very potent poison, and said sorcerer’s hut burning down, trapping Harry in the urn for all eternity. We amused both the checker and the bagger mightily, I wager.

By the time we had driven home, giggling like loons, Harry had evolved into the quasi-sidekick of a long-suffering teenager who kept getting roped into staving off the apocalypse, which Harry would warn her of when she was trying to finish her chemistry homework. And at dinner, we revamped the whole story for the Little Prince’s amusement, complete with Harry voices and laughing so hard we could barely eat OR breathe. “You have GOT to write this down,” the Princess said. Maybe I will.

Parenthood is awesome. Especially when you have an undead, sorcerous hamster around.

Kiggins

The Kiggins building in downtown Vancouver, home to the Kiggins Theatre and Niche.

All Aboard The Pliny Train

Can anyone guess what this is?

What’s “choo choo, motherfuckas” in Latin?

It’s THE PLINY TRAIN.

You’re looking at Loeb Classical Library’s ten-volume set of Pliny the Elder‘s Natural History. Which I’m going to do a read-along of, right here on this very blog.

Lest you think this will be boring, oh my chickadees, let me school you.

Pliny the Elder was a BAMF. This was a guy so committed to science he saw Vesuvius erupting and didn’t thing “fuck me, let’s get away from that.” Oh no. Instead, this guy grabs a ship to take him closer, because he’s gotta find out what happens. He’s gotta see for himself, because that would make an awesome addition to his wide-ranging studies on the natural world.

Of course, the volcanic gases killed him. You guys, he DIED FOR SCIENCE.

I like the Loeb books because they’re Latin on one side, English on the other. The Natural History is a big ol’ whale full of detail, and frankly I need to get back into studying my Latin. SO. If you want, read along with me. I plan on finishing Book I in March, quite possibly sooner.

The Pliny Train is now boarding. Come along for the ride. I promise it’ll be fun.