Maggie Stiefvater's Blog: Maggie Stiefvater, page 9

Hello! I was so happy with the sneak preview of Call Down The Hawk (thank you thank you). But just wondering if you've answered any questions already about Opal, where she is and if she was just gonna live alone at the barns? She wasn't mentioned (that I r

Dear brizzbee,

I’m glad you like it! You’ll see Opal again, but also, her whereabouts are explained in the Opal story, which you can either buy separately as a digital thingie in various places depending on your country, or find in the back of the U.S. Raven King paperback. 

urs,

Stiefvater

caucasianscriptures:Great advice

caucasianscriptures:

Great advice

My train has stopped briefly in Edmonton so I’ve galloped to the west side Chapters to sign their...

My train has stopped briefly in Edmonton so I’ve galloped to the west side Chapters to sign their stock (flatteringly, they were staff picks before I got there).

dancingwdinosaurs:It´s ridiculously hot here so I spent all...

dancingwdinosaurs:

It´s ridiculously hot here so I spent all day inside drawing the gang(sey)

‪Sketching on trains is hard because trains move.‬

‪Sketching on trains is hard because trains move.‬

rosalie-art:Drawing for a mock book cover of Blue Lily, Lily...

rosalie-art:

Drawing for a mock book cover of Blue Lily, Lily Blue

Pencil on Stonehenge paper
by Rosalie Lettau

I am using a single second found cell signal to post that I’ve been on a train with no WiFi or cell...

I am using a single second found cell signal to post that I’ve been on a train with no WiFi or cell signal for a day and will be on it for four more and it’s great.

encouraged by another user: i met you at book expo and you surpassed my expectations. i hope you know you have such a great smile and laugh and you were so gracious. next time i'll get the courage to get a picture WITH you rather than taking a stalker-ish

Dear theleiaorgana,

This is a really lovely message to get, thank you, more so now than ever. BookCon was really such a riot of mixed experiences for me — it’s my first big release since I got sick, my first Con I’ve attempted since starting to get better, and it’s the first weekend I got to see how folks would react to me returning to beloved characters.

It was insanely hard on my body, which I thought was getting better. By the first night of BookCon, I’d reverted to a very much earlier stage of my recovery, and making it through the second day involved pulling myself off my shower floor and saying GET IT TOGETHER STIEFVATER. I was supposed to drive to Toronto by that evening for my seminar and instead I ended up passing out by the side of the interstate several times before hauling into Buffalo with badly slurring speech and low morale. I was hopeful I’d be able to tour more for Hawk, but that hope was pretty well dashed. 

It was also very weird to go overnight from my relatively pleasant, neutral existence on the internet to once again having a toxic inbox calling me ‘m*ggie’ and describing why I don’t ‘deserve rights.’ Since TRC simmered down and reached equilibrium, I had forgotten what that was like. It’s not really about living with fandom hate; it’s more about how difficult it is to live with folks hating a version of you that doesn’t exist. I’d hoped Hawk’s fandom on Tumblr might be a different experience — something fun, adventurous, playful, positive, story-centered rather than me-centered — but I’m in the midst now of trying to decide how much I’ll be here on Tumblr this fall. I don’t really have another three years of a whispered and snarled m*ggie stief/vater fandom experience in me, not with everything else happening, not with the rest of the world looking like it does. When it’s @ed or message to me, it drowns out all the fun voices and questions that are entertaining, hilarious, and thought-provoking to engage with, and I have to say, after losing my words and thoughts for months and months and fighting so hard to get my brain back, it just feels empty. 

BUT the Con itself was so wonderful — meeting readers who had been with me since the beginning and readers who had just mainlined TRC or the Shiver series or even Pip Bartlett and readers I recognized from Twitter handles and readers who shared stories of how the books moved things around in their lives in cool and funny and meaningful ways. Seeing other authors gleaming with excitement over debuts they were finally getting to sign for their very first readers, and publishers literally jumping up and down with excitement over stories they were excited to get out in the world.

I got to see one of the only advanced review copies of Call Down the Hawk (they wouldn’t even let me hold it) and thrill at its existence.

And then I got to hear the giddy delight of those looking forward to Hawk. What a glorious charge to the heart as I’m working on book 2. I love this job.

So … like I said, mixed experience, all the feelings! Messages like this are really appreciated, so again, thank you, for making storytelling and Tumblr worth it.

urs,

Stiefvater 

Hey Maggie, love the first 8 chapters of CDTH! This is gonna be a very detail-oriented question, but when reading I noticed quite a few differences between the final version and the sampler. In particular, SPOILER, Ronan "thumbs the well-used furrow betwee

Dear comicsohwhyohwhy,

I’m glad you loved it!

One day when the book is out and it’s not a spoiler for people trying to avoid all stuff before the whole thing is out, I might actually do a line by line comparison of a chapter from it beside its various iterations, because it’s a pretty good look at my thought process while line editing.

Every draft of my novels up until the very last is on-the-nose shorthand for me. I simply can’t write without doing increasing layers of complexity and nuance — it’s too hard to get things out of my head all at the same time. That means that my very first draft has cringy, on the nose dialog. Bald, over the top fight scenes. Perfunctory description. Overlong explanations the logistics for where the characters are going. Three different metaphors when one will do. Emotional and plot reveals are written willy nilly, without thought yet to where the best place to put them is. Pacing is ridiculous, as you can imagine, as paragraph length and density and number controls how fast a reader goes through a chapter, so sometimes they speed through a scene that needs weight or dawdle on a scene that needs speed.

So then I begin to edit.

Every pass through the manuscript takes away some of that clunk, on the nose storytelling, and makes it into something that’ll hopefully do more work in the reader’s subconscious by the end of the book. Every pass through tries to clarify instead confuse, so that the reader understands the rules of magic and the stakes of the book without having to think about it. Every pass through tries to change internal monologue and external dialog to in-character versions of that on-the-nose narration. Every pass through tries to make sure that everything is stacked in the correct order: emotional and plot beats have to build, which means not starting with too much, too soon, and not sagging in the middle. Reveals are adjusted, word choice is streamlined, repeated sentences and unnecessary stage directions cut. Everything in later passes is done with an understanding of where the novel and prose and character ends up later. Finally, scaffolding is removed and then we stand back and smile at the house we’ve built.

I had to go looking to see which bit you meant. It was cut for pacing and tone, and because at the late stage of line edits, I had a full understanding of how much screen time their relationship got in this first book overall and how that scene fit into it.

urs,

Stiefvater

ETA: From my inbox, I know that there’s much debate the deletion of this single gesture and why I would do such a thing and what does it MEAN, but please remember that what you guys have to analyze until November is a slim 8 chapter sampler — a slender fragment of the actual book, which is 480 pages. For me, it was a throwaway jotted shorthand, a tiny tiny piece of a much bigger whole. I know waiting is hard, but I promise there will be far more interesting Ronan and Adam moments than that to come; you will not have to mourn pacing cuts.

how do you feel about someone getting a tattoo of your art? your tarot set means a lot to me and the art is gorgeous but i also understand that it’s your artwork and i wouldn’t want to violate anything but essentially copying it and therefore kind of steal

Dear ibidflash,

Aw, thank you very much for asking! Tattoo away (and tag me if you do, I’d love to see it!)

urs,

Stiefvater