Elspeth Cooper's Blog, page 10

The Gemmell Awards

The Gemmell Awards trophies. Photo: Sandy Auden

On Friday 15th June, I ventured down to London for the David Gemmell Legend Awards at The Magic Circle. I’d booked a smart hotel, had a new frock to wear and was quite looking forward to the whole thing. It’s not often I get to dress up and go out to play.

The evening started well: I was ready on time, wafted through the hotel reception and got the concierge to hail me a cab. I felt very glamorous in my long dress and floaty wrap but it all came unstuck somewhat when the cab arrived. As I got in, my knee decided it didn’t want to play anymore and folded under me, leading to a very inelegant heap of author, walking stick and handbag on the floor of the taxi. Ho-hum.

Arriving at the ceremony, I almost repeated the performance. The cabbie, bless him, gave me his arm to get out but as I walked across the street to say hello to some folk from my publisher, I stumbled on the cobbles and Simon Spanton had to catch me before I measured my length on the pavement. Simon and I are now thinking of taking our “drunken sailor” act on the road.

Jenni Hill collects Morningstar award from Deborah Miller. Photo: Sandy Auden

Alas I didn’t win the Morningstar award that I was shortlisted for – that honour went to Helen Lowe for The Heir of Night. As she lives in New Zealand, the lovely Jenni Hill from Orbit collected the award on her behalf.

Nonetheless I got to see my mugshot in the programme and quaff copious amounts of bubbly with old friends and new. Sadly, I also missed out on saying hello to quite a few more – the room was packed!

I almost came away with a very nice piece of memorabilia from the auction. I bid on an original Didier Graffet pencil sketch (the bearded axe off the cover of Joe Abercrombie’s The Heroes) but chickened out when the bidding went north of £100 – and promptly got told off by my husband for being a wuss. I’m really regretting not bidding higher; the price it eventually went for was a steal for a piece of original artwork, and all funds raised went to support the awards. Be braver next time, Ellie.

By the end of the night my feet were killing me, even in sensible low-heeled shoes; I don’t know how the Queen manages it. I shared a cab back to my hotel with my agent and his wife, Jo Fletcher, having had a thoroughly marvellous evening. Roll on next year!

Award nominations are like buses…

…you wait ages, and then two come along at once!

As you may or may not know, Songs of the Earth is shortlisted for the David Gemmell Morningstar award for best fantasy debut. Final round voting is now open, if you feel so inclined. Not that I’m hinting, or anything.

Then at the weekend, I got an email to tell me that Songs is also shortlisted for the Compton Crook Award, awarded by the members of the Baltimore Science Fiction Society and presented at Balticon on Memorial Day weekend.

Maybe I should have got my passport updated into my married name after all – just in case, like.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Funny things happen over the course of a novel’s gestation, especially if you’re a writer like me who has a very free-range, organic approach to the whole business. Sometimes it’s only obvious quite far down the line that the book you thought you were writing isn’t actually what’s coming out of your pen. Keyboard. Whatever.

I had a moment of clarity during the final edit before I submitted Songs of the Earth for publication. I realised that a significant character arc didn’t belong there, it actually belonged in the next book. I removed it, and the rest of the script pinged into shape, tighter and better balanced than it had been before.

Something similar occurred during the protracted revisions of Book 2 of The Wild Hunt, and I realised that the reason I was struggling to make part of it fit was because it, too, belonged in the next book.

Now I’m a pretty good multi-tasker, but let me tell you, it’s not easy writing two books in a big fat fantasy series at once – especially if you don’t realise that’s what you’re doing. Kudos to anyone who can manage it, but it nearly turned me into a wreck. It also didn’t help matters that I’d been a bit poorly for quite a lot of the time.

Anyway, the upshot of the matter is that I’ve had to make a change or two, starting with the title. Trinity Moon is no more. All hail Trinity Rising, coming to a bookshop near you in the middle of July. Click the picture to embiggen.

This has had a knock-on effect on Book 3, because all that material that I didn’t know was missing now needs to be accommodated. I’m dealing with that now, and by crikey it’s shaping up well, even if I do say so myself.

Eastercon

It's only taken me forever but I am finally dipping my toe in the con-going waters with an appearance at this year's Eastercon.

I'm appearing on two panels, as follows:

Friday 5pm – There's a hole in my plot! with James Barclay, Joe Abercrombie, Gavin G Smith and Jenni Hill (mod)

Sunday 10am – Promoting yourself online with Paul Cornell, Tom Hunter, Simon Spanton and Danie Ware (mod)

If that prospect hasn't whetted your appetite enough, you can find the full programme of events here. It looks like it's going to be a cracker, even with me in attendance.

The Joy of Books

An independent bookshop, Type Books in Toronto, created this, a sneak peek at what books get up to when there's nobody around. It tickled me no end, so I thought I'd share it here, too. You will never look at your bookshelves in the same light ever again.

Do that with a Kindle, I dare ya!

Cover art, part VI

Or, something gorgeous this way comes, in the shape of my author's copies of Les Chants de la Terre, from my French publisher Bragelonne.

I don't know if you can make it out in the picture, but the title is embossed, with a touch of electric-blue foil on the twiddly bits. That electric-blue foil continues inside, onto the binding of the book itself, echoing the eagle motif and the curlicues from the UK trade paperback. It's one of the loveliest hardbacks I think I've ever seen.

Messieurs de Bragelonne, merci beaucoup. Je pense que je pourrais être dans l'amour.

Far-flung Songs

I tweeted recently that I'd had a request for an interview from a fantasy fan in Cuba. Here he is – Gonzalo very kindly sent me a picture of himself and his much-prized copy of Bajo la Hiedra. Note the finger carefully marking his place . . .

Fantasy books are pretty difficult to obtain in Cuba; due to their currency not being internationally traded Cuban readers can't just pop onto Amazon or The Book Depository whenever they fancy something new to read. After hearing about my book on the Internet, Gonzalo only managed to get hold of a copy by asking a friend to bring it with her when she came to visit.

If you speak Spanish, Gonzalo runs a fantasy blog and was impressed enough with my last rant to go to the trouble of translating it for his readers. I don't know what an earth came over him.

Just for kids?

"I love when the 'literary establishment' 'discovers' fantasy" tweeted @DelReySpectra, the American genre publishers, yesterday, linking to an article in the New Yorker.

The article in question, The Dragon's Egg – high fantasy for young adults was a very well-written piece, articulate and full of gentle humour, so I can see why Adam Gopnik has won the National Magazine Award for his essays, but by the time I got to the end of it I was left with a somewhat bitter aftertaste: a distinct impression that he thinks *all* fantasy is for young adults.

The books with which he chose to illustrate his piece were Lord of the Rings, the Twilight saga, and the Inheritance Cycle. You could almost see the labels "enduring classic", "for girls" and "for boys" floating over them, saying look at me, look at how balanced I'm being.

I can understand his choices: Lord of the Rings is pretty much guaranteed to be a recognisable name. It's high fantasy, but I wouldn't classify it as YA, which was the thrust of his essay. LOTR is too big, too dense, too meandering for today's average young adult reader: too little happens for far too much of the time, and not even the most rabid Tolkien fan could characterise it as pacy. I admit, I was a young adult when I first read it, but by then I'd already read (by choice!) Beowulf, The Iliad and The Odyssey, so I was not your typical 11 year old.

Stephenie Meyer's Twilight and Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle are undoubtedly aimed at teens (the latter having been written by one, to boot – it's also the only one that really fits a definition of YA high fantasy) and Gopnik's analysis of at least part of their appeal is pretty much spot on:

This is how the Bellas of the world actually experience their lives, torn between the cool, sensitive boy from the strange, affluent family and the dishy athletic boy from across the tracks. It's "My So-Called Life," with fangs and fur.

he said of Twilight, although I think he's stretching it to call a PG paranormal romance "high fantasy". Of Paolini he says:

Adolescent boys, of the kind who take up books in the first place these days, already experience their lives as a series of ordeals: tests, in every sense. . . which aim only at preparing him for the next series of ordeals: this is the story of their life.

Gopnik clearly recognises the publishing phenomena that Twilight and the Inheritance Cycle have become – he points gleefully to the fact that the final instalment of the latter had a print run of over two million copies. But equally clearly, he doesn't think they are very well written: Stephenie Meyer is "an awkward writer with little feeling for construction" and Paolini is "an unskilled narrator and a derivative mythmaker."

Take those comments in isolation and he has a fair point; the magic of neither series is in the technicalities of its execution. But bearing these examples and those comments in mind, and reading the essay as a whole, the implication is that Gopnik believes *all* fantasy is poorly-written, derivative or backward-looking, bereft of psychological depth or realism–

What substitutes for psychology in Tolkien and his followers, and keeps the stories from seeming barrenly external, is what preceded psychology in epic literature: an overwhelming sense of history and, with it, a sen se of loss. The constant evocation of lost or fading glory—Númenor has fallen, the elves are leaving Middle-earth—does the emotional work that mixed-up minds do in realist fiction.

and comparable to video games—

The gratification comes from the kid's ability to master the symbols and myths of the saga, as with those eighty-level video games, rather than from the simple absorption of narrative

But that wasn't the only thing that made me wince. He also uses the phrase

even someone susceptible to almost every kind of fantasy

as if it's not the fantasy reader's fault that they like this kind of thing; they're susceptible to it, the poor dears, as if it was a genetic defect like fallen arches or a predisposition to diabetes.

Ouch.

To be fair to him, Gopnik makes some good points that fantasy helps kids learn, organize and master the myths and symbols of these sagas as tools to get to grips with school and growing up. Except he made them whilst also pointing out that Paolini's titular hero Eragon learns to be a dragon rider but never grows to be a man, and thus reinforces the tired old condescension that fantasy – any fantasy – is just for kids:

By the time they're ready for college-admissions letters, they're already dragon riders, if not yet grownups.

And then he invites us all to mock this "mere mock history".

Uh-huh.

His final argument is both cogent and compelling, but by then he'd lost me, and no amount of gentle humour was going to win me back. By selecting the examples he did, then picking holes in them for their so-so writing, impenetrable dullness or derivative plots, and highlighting as their strengths only their relevance to teens' lives, Gopnik leaves the reader to conclude that if these are the biggest sellers¹, the rest of the genre must also be like this – only somehow worse, because they didn't sell as well.

And by making sound points about what fantasy can teach in the same paragraph as references to the childhood lessons of how to hold a knife (which most of us mastered before we started primary school) and learning right from wrong (which most of us have got to grips with well before we hit our teens) he again implies that these are lessons for juveniles, ones that grown-ups have already learned.

In other words . . . yes, you got it. Just for kids.

Pardon me whilst I splutter.

Tell George RR Martin he's writing books for kids – it can't have been all the nudity, incest and beheadings that meant the HBO series A Game of Thrones was shown after the 9pm watershed with a warning about adult themes.

Just for kids?

Tell me that kids get all the jokes in Terry Pratchett's books – yeah, even the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle one. I'm pretty sure they teach quantum mechanics at middle school these days.

I could go on about the nonverbal communication in Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quartet, or Joe Abercombie's The Heroes as "an indictment of war and the duplicity that corrupts men striving for total power" (Eric Brown, The Guardian). Just for kids? Seriously?

There is more to fantasy than vampires and werewolves, elves and dwarfs, whatever the intended demographic. If he'd picked more representative example texts instead of just the most visible ones – hell, even read around his subject a bit – he would know that. Instead all he showed was his beautifully-articulated prejudices.

***

¹And why only select the biggest sellers? Why not select The Hunger Games, or Artemis Fowl? The Forest of Hands and Teeth or A Wizard of Earthsea? OK, they're not high fantasy,  but that didn't stop him picking Twilight. Could it be that Adam Gopkin actually doesn't know much about YA fantasy and is only looking at the bestseller list? For shame. Commercial success has never been a metric for literary merit – occasionally they intersect (Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall: sold over 600,000 copies in 2010, and won the Booker); usually, they don't (Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code: sold by the shedload, and, erm, didn't).

 

 

Cover art, part V

Yesterday, my author's copies of the Polish edition of Songs of the Earth arrived, courtesy of my publisher over there, Amber.

I am running out of space for all these books – if the Health & Safety Executive saw the size of the pile in my office, I think they'd shut me down.

I apologise for the not-very-good photo – my tame photographer a.k.a my husband Rob was out. At work. I mean, how dare he?

So yes, that is my foot in the bottom right hand corner, and yes, I am wearing stripy socks. I *like* stripy socks.

Songs of the Earth, en español

I don't think I will ever get over that feeling of utter childlike delight when a parcel arrives from my publisher containing copies of my books. There is jumping up and down like a little girl, and there is grinning, and there is The Squee.

I make no apology for it: the day I become blasé about these things, the day being a writer stops being the most insane amount of fun I can have without the aid of a bucket of chocolate custard, you have my permission to shoot me.

Today's parcel contained my author's copies of the Spanish edition of Songs of the Earth: Bajo la Hiedra, or Under the Ivy, as they chose to title it.

Really attractive glossy cover, gold embossed – and it has flaps front and back like a hardback. Never seen that before.

Hats off to Minotauro; they've made me fall in love with the book all over again.