Jessica Knauss's Blog, page 20

Becoming Real: A Map of Tenth-Century Spain for Seven Noble Knights

One of the first things my publisher asked for when they accepted Seven Noble Knights for publication was a map showing the locations mentioned in the novel. I had always hoped to have something like that, to orient the reader and because I love maps. I knew I wouldn't be able to cobble together anything that met my artistic standards or that was specific enough to Seven Noble Knights, so I looked for a map artist who could include everything I wanted.

Nuno Alexandre Vieira has a lot of impressive artistic credentials under his belt. He won me over when he said he was from Portugal and knew the Iberian Peninsula well.

The map is now complete. Without further ado:


It's exciting to see the places in Seven Noble Knights, to have this artifact in the real world that attests to the presence of my beloved story. It's black and white because the book won't be printed in color—that may contribute to the aged feel. The lettering was done by hand and I can't imagine anything about this map being any better. I hope the artist wins an award for it.

Now that I can imagine opening Seven Noble Knights to the first few pages and turning the book to orient this map and pore over it, the publication of the biggest project of my life is that much more real. Thanks for sharing my excitement!

Ready for Launch!

The story of Seven Noble Knights was a "bestseller" in the
Middle Ages and Renaissance. Can it capture readers' hearts today? Seven Noble Knights has benefitted from programs at Grub Street already. Now it looks as if Grub Street could be the deciding factor in the success of its launch! I've been accepted into a program I heard about in 2014 and immediately filed away as something I would probably never get to do because it seemed so prestigious and because it's for authors with a book coming out.

I'm now an author with a book coming out! So of course I applied to the seminar of my dreams, the Launch Lab. Twelve authors with book releases in the next year (still hard to believe that's me!) get together with industry experts to plan a book launch that makes sense for their goals, personalities, books, and resources. While I've come up with a few random ideas for getting the word out about Seven Noble Knights, the number of books published each year means that someone trying to go it alone has zero chance of getting noticed. Launch Lab gives my book a fighting chance!

So I'll start now: please notice Seven Noble Knights, the best medieval epic set in Spain you will ever come across. Brave knights, beautiful ladies, and a bloody cucumber... (Maybe I'll find some people who'll commiserate with me about my struggles with using a bloody cucumber as a marketing tactic.)

I've put everything into Seven Noble Knights: blood, sweat, tears, time, international travel, vocabulary, research, sacrifice, and oh so much love. I guess it's time to put some domestic travel and money in, too. I'll be taking the train to the first meeting this very week.

Wish me luck! I'll report on what happens.

World Rhino Day 2015

It's World Rhino Day! How are you celebrating rhinos and helping their cause?

All five species are beautiful examples of cornerstone species that mean the world to their environments. All five species are in trouble.

The smiling Javan rhino. About 60 individuals. The uniquely harry Sumatran rhino. Fewer than 100. The real-life unicorn, the Indian rhino. About 3000 individuals. The beauty queen black rhino. About 4,500. The gentle giant, the white rhino. About 19,000. In Africa, two or three rhinos are murdered every day for their horns, so these numbers, sadly, are only decreasing. I look forward to a World Rhino Day when we can celebrate without thinking about these insane facts, when humans will no longer harass rhinos, who never asked for anything from us.

Except maybe a little love.

A lovely surprise: Five-Star Review of Unpredictable Worlds

Well darn. I've had to modify the cover of Unpredictable Worlds . What terrible inconvenience has led to this drastic measure? A five-star review at Readers' Favorite (which, in truth, is the best thing in the world for a writer!).

Any review is a big deal for me. A five-star recommendation from this lovely institution includes a peachy-keen silvery sticker to put on the book's cover.

A wonderful alchemy of words and circumstances collided to find just the right reviewer. Amazingly, Carine Engelbrecht "got" the book. Read it in full here, and see two major highlights here:

For a collection of stories that stray delightfully off the beaten track of cookie cutter characters and plot lines without any roadside surprises, you can do a lot worse than venturing around inside Unpredictable Worlds: Stories by Jessica Knauss. While the stories are widely divergent, they are grouped around a series of themes that serve like hubs for the author's imagination to take off....

I enjoyed taking a trip through the author's imagination—that is exactly what Unpredictable Worlds: Stories by Jessica Knauss was, a journey of wonder. 

I'm impressed that the reviewer loves the rhino stories. I've started a rhino novel, but since I didn't know how I would find people who both love to read fiction and find out about rhinos, I abandoned that idea. This review gives me hope and the idea to maybe resurrect it as a shorter piece.

I get a particular frisson of authorial delight when the reviewer singles out some stories that never found a home before I published them in Unpredictable Worlds . Many of the stories in this book have been published elsewhere, and therefore had that outside validation any writer seeks. It's music to my heart that a reader I've never met is reading and enjoying stories that mean the world to me, but haven't made an obvious impression on anyone else before this point. Calling "Threads Woven" "a rich tapestry of creativity and character" when it's had no other feedback (other than form rejection letters)—I wonder if any reader knows how easy it is to give an author the ultimate gift. It goes to show: you never know who is going to respond to which story.

It's nothing short of wonderful that the reviewer points out the relationship between some of the stories. True interaction with my texts. I couldn't ask for more.

So here's that new cover, proudly displaying the shiny five-star badge. Plans to make the ebook available in venues other than Amazon have been in the works for a while now. Find your updates here!

Love in the Air

This weekend marked the sixth anniversary of my husband and me.

Time is such a bizarre construct. We're still newlyweds, and yet when we look at our wedding video, we appear to be children. Maybe it's because we had no idea of the adventures that awaited us. Maybe it's because our love has only grown. It seemed infinite on our wedding day, but our love is much bigger, wider, deeper, and stronger now.

True love grows and develops. It occupies the world without detracting from it.

Look out, world! One day, love will be so enormous, it will obliterate all the hate.

The Price of Blood by Patricia Bracewell

I treated myself to  The Price of Blood  a few months ago. I say "treated" because I had high hopes and it met every one of them.

I was looking for a novel that immersed me in a time long past. You'll think your memories of this book really took place a thousand years ago.

I wanted specifically to know what it would have been like to be Queen Emma, faced with important men and Viking attacks. Bracewell's Emma is easy to sympathize with and the historical stakes are clear without it ever feeling like a textbook. I took away a vivid image of Emma and Athelstan looking out at London from the castle that I don't think comes from any film I've seen. It comes completely from Bracewell's evocative skill.

I wanted characters whose motives I could understand while the plot maintained historical authenticity. I didn't expect to be so disgusted by King Aethelred while still feeling the same political and family pressures that made him act in such outwardly bizarre ways. I didn't expect the Elgiva subplot to be so fascinating and to give the reader another female character possibly even more vibrant and true than Emma.

This novel exceeded any expectations I could have had in the way it keeps the suspense going even when the snippets from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle at the beginning of the section give away some of what's going to happen. I found Emma's big scene at the end of the novel, where she really comes into her own, so amazing as to make me want to recommend the book to every reader, everywhere. It's even more amazing now that I know the scene was the author's creation, an imagining of what must have happened in order to produce the results seen the history books.

The Price of Blood  is all that I hoped a historical novel could be. It's even more impressive because it's the second in a trilogy.

Novels I've Read in 2015:  Eleanor & Park  by Rainbow Rowell
Along the Far Shores  by Kristin Gleeson
Station Eleven  by Emily St. John Mandel
A Kiss at Kihali  by Ruth Harris










Mermaids in Paradise  by Lydia Millet










Raven Brought the Light by Kristin Gleeson










The Price of Blood  by Patricia Bracewell











Lucky Us  by Amy Bloom

The Gracekeepers  by Kirsty Logan


Love in Infant Monkeys  by Lydia Millet

The Map of Chaos  by Félix J. Palma

Wild About Harapan: Sumatran Rhino News

Harapan Last October, I was seized with a desire to go to Cincinnati. It's the site of the last Sumatran rhino in the Western Hemisphere, you see, so if I didn't drag my husband on an autumn road trip, neither of us would probably ever see a Sumatran rhino. I had a feeling he would be headed back to the nature reserve where all his living relatives reside. And now it appears I was right. It's the right decision for him. Such a sweet rhino shouldn't be alone. But oh, how we'll miss him. Safe travels, Harapan!


There was also bad news for Sumatran rhinos this week, the kind of news that shakes one's faith in humanity and makes on wonder what it's all about. Previously, we could say that Harapan's relatives had a small enclave in Malaysia as well as their main home in Indonesia. That spread is no more. The Sumatran rhinoceros has been declared extinct in Malaysia because of human greed. The species is utterly dependent on the population living in Indonesia now. It's hard to even say how many are left at this point.

On the brighter side, Harapan's new home hasn't had a poaching incident in years because of aggressive protections in place. He and his species have a fighting chance. It's far from time to give up.

How Not to Be a Potential Client

Now that I freelance for a living, my life depends on developing good relationships with clients. Far be it from me to complain about any potential client's behavior, but I need to share this one with the wider world because it's representative of what freelance editors encounter every day. I've changed some of the details to protect the identity of the person who sent me this message via one of the freelancing sites I belong to.Greetings!I am shopping around for an editor to go over the final draft of my [genre I work with] novel before I sent [sic] it to print. I need someone who is very detail-oriented to double check for typos, grammar mistakes, etc. Are you available to take on a project this week? My goal is to have the edits done by next Monday. Also, what do you typically charge for a project that is just under 100,000 words?Thanks!
Let me dissect the flaws in this all too average message so that if you're ever in the market for an editor or proofreader, you can do better. Correspondence to potential editors is one more place you can make a good or bad impression, one more chance to put your best foot forward as a writer.

I am shopping around for an editor to go over the final draft of my [genre I work with] novel ...

The opening is off-putting because of the phrase "shopping around." Yes, freelancers are aware clients do this, but if this person had written something along the lines of "I saw that you like to edit novels in this genre," it would have been a point for them rather than against. It would have shown that the client had read my preferences and may also have done some (highly advisable) research into the books I've edited in the past. Such research benefits both of us because it makes it more likely that you'll find the right fit, which results in a good working relationship and satisfactory results.

I need someone who is very detail-oriented to double check for typos, grammar mistakes, etc. 

It's great that they give some sense of the work they'd like done, but the "double check" sentence makes me suspicious that this person doesn't really know what services they need, and the "etc" doesn't help that impression. Ideally, before you approach your researched editors, you need the following elements in place: 1. A completed book. 2. Someone (preferably many people) whose opinion you trust to read the book. 3. A list of issues your trusted readers found that you can't correct on your own. Editing the book as much as you can by yourself will save you time and money. Knowing the specifics of what you need will make for a better estimate process, saving time, money, and heartache.

Are you available to take on a project this week? My goal is to have the edits done by next Monday. 

What's the rush? Most editors have many projects going on at once and scheduling each project is a superhuman act to begin with. Much as we might like to help, we can't throw our other projects a week off schedule without serious consideration and, ideally, previous notice. It takes time to find tiny errors. This client was expecting someone to find all the needles in 100,000 bits of hay in just a little more than six days. Why the need to get the book to the printer so quickly? Please don't leave your copyediting and proofreading needs as the last hurried step in a production crunch. It stresses everyone out and creates opportunities for the mistakes we're all trying to avoid.

Also, what do you typically charge for a project that is just under 100,000 words?

The last question is inappropriate, since rates are explained on all the freelance sites I belong to. 100,000 words in a week would qualify as a rush job, which is far from typical. How can I know that I would charge typical rates for this book when I haven't seen a sample? A better approach would have been: "Please take a look at the attached sample and let me know your best quote for this last-minute rush job."
Every human interaction is an opportunity to prove you are a thoughtful, considerate human being as well as a professional. Remember that even when you reach out to someone online, there is a human being very similar to you, with their own issues and concerns, on the other end. 

Castles in Spain: Monzón de Campos

A couple of years ago, I found out about the peculiar history of a Spanish castle and fantasized about going there. Something I'm proud of about my last trip to Spain is that it wasn't just Honeymoon II for my husband and me—I got to see places I thought I might only ever write about. So that counts as research.

Yes, I got to visit the castle at Monzón de Campos. I took all the pictures in this post myself.

In spite of what several websites say, this castle is no longer a hotel. It has been used recently for meetings and signage indicates it's some kind of cultural center, but overall I get that sense that Monzón de Campos isn't exploiting this resource to its maximum potential. I would be happy to take that burden from them. Hint, hint.

The town Monzón de Campos is part of the sweeping views from the castle. Monzón was the capital of the County of Monzón, a large, important region in the Kingdom of León. The first remarkable event on this site was what inspired me: in 1028, the three Vela brothers assassinated the Count of Castile, García Sánchez, in León on the day he met his wife-to-be. This was tantamount to regicide, and the brothers fled León and holed up in the castle at Monzón. I can imagine them keeping watch over the countryside from the castle perch—they knew someone would come for them. In the end, it was García's brother-in-law, King Sancho el Mayor of Navarre, who took revenge for the fallen count. It's said that Sancho burned the castle with the brothers inside.

The castle was rebuilt, but wasn't yet the version we have today for the next highly notable and inspiring event: here in 1109, Urraca, Queen of Castile and León, married Alfonso I el Batallador of Aragón. The ceremony was the beginning of a thrilling saga of wars and intrigue that I chronicle here. Before the couple's official divorce, the castle sheltered one of Urraca's favorites, Pedro González de Lara, who was forced out by jealous Castilian nobles and imprisoned for a time in a different castle.

In 1217, Berenguela, who was trying to claim the throne over her underaged brother Enrique I, had troops at Monzón and Enrique's soldiers attacked them. In another royal dispute in 1299, María de Molina took the castle for her son, Fernando IV, from the princes de la Cerda, who were attempting to usurp the throne. In 1304 Alfonso de la Cerda pledged homage to Fernando IV and in exchange for that loyalty, received the castle. The king took it back in 1312, when it was apparent that Alfonso de la Cerda wasn't keeping his promise.

Once it remained under royal possession, the castle's history became more peaceful, passing from hand to hand by donation and inheritance rather than siege and force. It took on its distinctive tower in the early 1400's and passed into the hands of the comuneros during 1520–1522, but was royal once again after that conflict.

It served as a prison and became a parador for a time. In 1978, Monzón de Campos received possibly its highest honor when the castle became the site of the constitution of the Autonomous Community of Castilla y León.

As you can see, my husband and I were there on a cloudy day. We were unable to go inside, which contributed to the vaguely deserted feeling. Or maybe I was being haunted by the strong spirits of the castle's past.

Thank you for joining me during this interlude. Back to Seven Noble Knights revisions now!

Birthday Facts About Jessica K, 2015

Waterfire in Providence has more pyres. I'm taking cues from a previous post for this one. Keep the plagiarism close to home.

1. Yesterday was my birthday!

2. Waterfire in Providence has more pyres than I had birthday candles. Thank goodness!

3. My husband and I have been mock-lamenting the fact that nothing could ever top the gift I got last year. Achieving a lifelong dream and having it be so moving... Nothing better.

4. This is the first birthday in five years that I'm living in exactly the same building as I was for my last birthday! Before that, it was a hotel in North Carolina (2013), an apartment in Atlanta (2012), an apartment in Arizona (2011), a condo in Pennsylvania (2010), and an apartment in Cambridge, MA (2009 and 2008). That skips a couple of locations we happened leave before August. And yes, our traveling feet are itching to get on the move again.

5. Partially because we haven't moved in the interim, and partially because of the theory of the way perception of time collapses as we age, it really doesn't seem as if a whole year has passed since my last birthday. Normally I can tell the difference between years because we're in a different location; this time the changes are more subtle.

6. One change is that last year, I didn't have to ask for time off because my birthday was on a Saturday. This year, I don't have to ask for time off because I'm freelancing, so time management is all up to me, anyway. My husband, however, had to do a lot of fancy footwork to get some time off because he now has a job where he usually has to work on Sundays.

7. I thought I would have "it" all figured out by this age. I'm not sure if that was a silly thing to think or it really has become harder to get one's affairs in order in this tumultuous world.

8. Here's what I've figured out: I love my husband. I love Spain. I love rhinos. I love living in New England. I don't ask for a lot, and most of the time I get even less than I ask for. New theory: ask for more.