Anne Lyle's Blog, page 6

NaNoWriMo 2013

Seven years ago to the day I embarked on my very first NaNoWriMo, in a desperate attempt to get over the 25k hump* that had been dogging me for several years. What I ended up with was a crude 50,000-word sketch of a novel, but one with characters and a setting that I loved enough to spend the next four years revising it into something saleable: The Alchemist of Souls.

The trilogy spawned by that first gloriously satisfying NaNoWriMo is now complete and published, so I felt it only fitting that I should use this year’s “30 days and nights of literary abandon” to start a brand new project.

Serpent’s Tooth is the first in a new fantasy series, set in the Danaian Empire that features in my short story “A Thief in the Night” (published in the BFS anthology Unexpected Journeys). The novels begin several hundred years after the short story**: the artificers expelled from the empire have established an island city-state far to the north and begun trading their wondrous creations to a world that has forgotten just how dangerous those creations can be.

I’m very excited to be writing something new, especially as secondary-world fantasy gives me so much more room for worldbuilding than the historical fantasy I’ve been writing to date. In some ways, though, it won’t be massively different from what’s come before, because if Night’s Masque has taught me anything, it’s that I love writing urban-based tales of swashbuckling action and intrigue. No traipsing across epic landscapes for me, thank you very much! (Famous last words…)

My aim is for each novel to be essentially a standalone story***, though with characters and settings in common: more like, say, the Ankh-Morpork Discworld novels in structure than a big epic series such as A Song of Ice and Fire. Which is not to say that they will resemble those exemplars in any other way, of course! I don’t have a set plan for how many books I’ll write in this series; at least three****, but maybe more if they prove popular and I have more ideas that fit the setting.

Sadly it’s going to be a while yet before I get this book finished and sold, so I don’t anticipate having anything published until 2015 at the earliest, but fingers crossed I may at least have some good news for you before the end of next year!

* This is when you start a novel all excited about an idea and then run out of steam about 20-30k into the draft—then instead of trying to work out the next step in your plot, you assume the premise is a dud and abandon it for a shinier new idea that you’re certain will provide enough inspiration to finish a book. And it never does.

** Figuratively speaking; the short story could be considered an alternate timeline, though I’ve couched it as meta-fiction: a story written by someone from the fictional world.

*** That’s my aim, at any rate. My muse may have other ideas, once I start writing.

**** I have a title and plot sketch for a sequel, and a title and vague idea of a story for a third

The end of an epic adventure

Today is release day for most editions (ebook, audiobook and US paperback) of The Prince of Lies, the final volume in the Night’s Masque trilogy. An adventure that began just over three years ago, when I finished the manuscript of the first book and started submitting it to agents, is almost over already; something that seemed barely conceivable when I set out.

If I thought I was nervous last December when Book 2 came out, that was nothing to Book 3! My protests to the contrary, The Merchant of Dreams is fairly close to The Alchemist of Souls in tone and structure, even if the setting is changed and the scope somewhat more epic. The Prince of Lies isn’t a massive departure, but it covers a much longer time-span than the other two, and of course being the end of the trilogy it has to wrap up all the storylines I set going in the previous two volumes. I now understand why Scott Lynch found writing his third book such a trial. I might only have a fraction of the readership, but there are huge expectations to fulfil, and it’s inevitable that not everyone is going to like the direction you take your characters in.

Anyway, the time for worrying is past. The book is out there, and I hope that the majority of you who enjoyed the first two books will be satisfied with the conclusion. I shall be celebrating with a whirl of promotional activities (see below), then knuckling down to writing the first draft of my new novel (working title: Serpent’s Tooth). Thank you for buying and reading my books, and I hope to have good news for you in 2014!

The Prince of Lies launch events

October 30th – closing date for the “Book Cover Fun” competition over at Angry Robot Books
October 31st – signing at Forbidden Planet, London (you can pre-order a signed copy if you can’t make the event itself)
Review on Fantasy Faction
Interview on My Bookish Ways
Interview on The Quillery
Guest post Do’s and Don’ts in Elizabethan London on Over the Effing Rainbow
Guest post Making History (alternate history in Night’s Masque) on Rising Shadow

Coming soon!

Interview and giveaway on Fantasy Faction

I&E follow-along: panic time!

I meant to write this post yesterday and schedule it to go out whilst I was on my way to BristolCon, but I’ve been blindsided by a cold (great timing, huh?) and forgot all about it. So instead I’m typing this in my hotel room whilst waiting for my con buddies to turn up…

Well, there’s only one week left to NaNoWriMo—which means that I have no time left to make substantial changes to my outline. Gulp! On the plus side, the opening chapters are pretty much ready to go (I’ve had snippets and images leaking into my thoughts at odd moments for the last few weeks), and I have maybe a dozen chapters’ worth of scenes altogether. On the minus side, I have only the vaguest idea of what’s going to happen after that, so there’s a danger I may stall at the 25% mark, as I did so many times in the past.

However I now have a lot more novel-writing experience under my belt, so I think I can weather the storm. I’ve got more than enough material to keep me going for the first week, and hopefully by the time I’ve written the first few chapters I’ll have a better handle on the characters and where I might take them. I”m not sure I’ll ever be a hardcore outliner, particularly when it comes to completely new projects like this one, but the last few months’ preparation have been invaluable in laying down the foundations for this novel and eliminating ideas that didn’t float my boat.

So, I’m going to enjoy the convention (as much as is possible with a streaming cold!), and not worry too much about where the story is going until I get there. I’ll be posting my progress every Friday, so we’ll see if this strategy works!

Alternative covers for the Night’s Masque trilogy

When I was writing The Merchant of Dreams I bought two Playmobil pirate ships and a bunch of figures to help me plan a small sea battle and the climactic land battle. It was so helpful that I did the same for The Prince of Lies, winning a vintage castle and a bunch more figures on ebay. Not all my recent purchases have been vintage, however; when I was in Hamleys (the famous toyshop in London), I spotted a black-haired, bestubbled medieval dude who struck me as the spitting image of one Mal Catlyn!

Of course I had to buy him so that I could use him in my plans, and it was only a short step from there to a flash of inspiration: maybe I could recreate the Night’s Masque book covers with Playmobil…

I duly hunted down a female figure that could stand in for Coby (a “highwaywoman” from ebay), and set to work. I apologise in advance for my indifferent image-manipulation skills, but I’m still rather proud of the results. So, without any more ado, here they are (click on an image to see it full size):

The Alchemist of Souls

The Merchant of Dreams

The Prince of Lies

Obviously I was somewhat limited by the figures, as their arms don’t bend, but my castle pieces came in very handy as backdrop.

Now I just have to work out what the hell I’m going to do with this big box of pirates, knights, musketeers and other characters. I suppose I could write them into my new book…?

Friday Reads: The Republic of Thieves, by Scott Lynch

Locke Lamora is dying…

The third instalment in the hugely popular Gentleman Bastards series, this novel has been the subject of so much fevered anticipation in the six years since Scott Lynch left us with the cliffhanger of Locke’s fatal poisoning that disappointment seems almost inevitable. Since I didn’t read Red Seas Under Red Skies until earlier this year, my wait was shorter than most; just enough to make me excited for Book 3. So was I disappointed? Yes, maybe a little, but mostly Hell No! I’m not saying The Republic of Thieves is flawless—no book ever is—but I enjoyed it enough to rip through it in a week, despite it being a fairly ponderous tome (almost 600 pages in hardback).

N.B. I’ll try and avoid major spoilers, but a few minor ones are inevitable if I’m going to be able to discuss what I liked and didn’t like.

Even more so than previous volumes, The Republic of Thieves shifts back and forth in time, telling the parallel stories of Locke & Jean’s adventures in Karthain (present) and the Gentlemen Bastards’ theatrical escapades in Espara (about 8-10 years ago?). If you’ve read the description, you’ll know that Locke and Jean get roped into interfering in the election process in Karthain: home of the Bondsmagi and the last city in the world that the Gentlemen Bastards are likely to want to go anywhere near. Thus begins an intriguing new chapter in Locke’s life as he is snatched back from the jaws of death…

As soon becomes clear, The Republic of Thieves is not just another heist caper for Locke and Jean; rather, having kept Sabetha in the shadows for two books, Lynch makes up for it by bringing her to the fore in this one. Which means *gasp* romance!

In the current climate of misogyny in the SFF world, switching your focus from boyish criminal escapades to a love story was always going to be a big gamble, but for me at least, it was one that paid off. I’ve seen reviews dissing the romance, saying that it fell flat and seemed unbelievable, but I didn’t feel that way at all. Sure, Sabetha was somewhat melodramatic, but her anger at Locke is rooted in a subtle understanding by Lynch of male privilege; she’s basically pissed off because runty little Locke waltzed in and took over leadership of the Bastards in her absence, without even realising what he’d done—and she’s furious with herself every time she finds herself succumbing to that same charm. It’s a motivation that I think a lot of female readers will get, and a lot of guys just won’t. Sabetha is intelligent and ambitious, and it irks her to play second fiddle to anyone, even (especially?) the man she loves.

I also really liked the fact that we see a lot more of the Bondsmagi and discover that they aren’t quite the “ultimate evil” that they were painted in the first book. I long ago outgrew the need for black-and-white morality in my fantasy, so it was almost a relief to discover that the Falconer is not a typical bondsmage. That’s not to say that the rest of them are pussycats, but in this book they become more understandable but at the same time more worryingly dangerous; the road to Hell is, after all, paved with good intentions.

As I said above, the book isn’t flawless. The theatrical chapters did feel over-indulgent in places, with page after page of the eponymous play being quoted verbatim for no apparent reason—and I say this as someone who has written an entire trilogy that heavily features both the Elizabethan theatre and the Italian commedia dell’arte! Lynch’s faux-Shakespearean text is certainly accomplished, but I feel that less would perhaps have been more.

My real disappointment, though, was that the election storyline felt like an excuse to have Locke and Sabetha go head-to-head, with the politics itself merely a sideshow. The gorgeous cover art had led me to expect Venetian levels of Machiavellian scheming (to mix my Renaissance metaphors), not a campaign of simple vandalism and bribery. Of course if the politics had been gone into in as much depth as Locke and Sabetha’s personal arc, it would have been an even longer book, but it did feel a little unbalanced to me.

Those small gripes aside, it’s still a good book, standing head and shoulders above most of the competition. The final third is as tense as any of its predecessors, and the epilogue’s twist is deliciously satisfying. (Well, OK, maybe I’m biased, since I’ve been known to perpetrate this kind of thing myself…)

In summary: if you love the Gentleman Bastards, you can’t afford to miss out on this latest volume. Not only does it have some of the funniest lines from the series so far (one of my favourites similes is “as crooked as a snake in a clockwork snake-bending machine”), but it brings a whole new level of epicness to the story, and reveals some secrets from Locke’s past that are going to have a major impact on future stories. I’m just glad there’ll be an interim publication (two prequel novellas in one volume, called The Bastards and the Knives) to keep me going until Book Four, The Thorn of Emberlain. Locke and Jean in the war-torn Kingdom of the Seven Marrows; what could possibly go wrong?

BristolCon schedule and a free chapter!

Only two weeks to go to the release of The Prince of Lies, and things are hotting up! In ten days’ time I’ll be at BristolCon, where I have the following items in my schedule:

10.5o am – Reading

5pm – Panel: Magic in Fantasy, with Storm Constantine, Snorri Kristjansson, Paul Cornell and moderator Jonathan Wright

7pm – Kaffeeklatsche (sign up to have a free chat with coffee & biscuits)

If you can’t make it to BristolCon for my reading (and even if you can), you might like to pop over to fantasy book blog The Founding Fields, where you can read Chapter One of The Prince of Lies absolutely free!

There’ll be more cool stuff—including various giveaways—over the coming weeks, so watch this space…

 

 

Friday Reads: The Tainted City, by Courtney Schafer

Dev is a desperate man. After narrowly surviving a smuggling job gone wrong, he’s now a prisoner of the Alathian Council, held hostage to ensure his friend Kiran — former apprentice to one of the most ruthless mages alive — does their bidding. But Kiran isn’t Dev’s only concern. Back in his home city of Ninavel, the child he once swore to protect faces a terrible fate if he can’t reach her in time, and the days are fast slipping away. So when the Council offers Dev freedom in exchange for his and Kiran’s assistance in a clandestine mission to Ninavel, he can’t refuse, no matter how much he distrusts their motives. Once in Ninavel the mission proves more treacherous than even Dev could have imagined. Betrayed by allies, forced to aid their enemies, he and Kiran must confront the darkest truths of their pasts if they hope to save those they love and survive their return to the Tainted City.

I read and reviewed the first book in this series, The Whitefire Crossing, just over a year ago, shortly after meeting Courtney Schafer at Chicon 7. I really enjoyed it and was looking forward to the sequel, and I’m glad to say that The Tainted City didn’t disappoint.

The book picks up shortly after the end of the previous one, with Dev condemned to hard labour at a mining site whilst Kiran remains a prisoner of the Alathian Council. It took me a little while to mentally reorient myself after a year away, but soon we were back in the Alathian capital amongst the scheming mages and the story took off. From there on it was an even tenser ride than last time, with Schafer not flinching from twisting the knife at every turn. In fact I came to wonder if her main plotting strategy isn’t simply: what’s the worst thing that could happen right now? The result may perhaps lack subtlety, but boy does it keep you turning the pages!

I can’t say a lot more without spoilers, though I don’t think it’s a major giveaway to mention that Ruslan returns and is just as sick and twisted as ever. We also learn a lot more about Dev’s home city of Ninavel, as well as glimpses of the wider world. Our heroes triumph—well, they survive and live to fight another day—but it’s going to be their biggest challenge yet. I know that Schafer is hard at work on the sequel, Labyrinth of Flame, but owing to family responsibilities it’s not finished yet and thus its publication date is unknown. Still, as long as we don’t have to wait as long for it as we had to for Scott Lynch’s The Republic of Thieves, I’ll be happy!

Share my book with the Boosh app

Love ebooks? Have a smartphone? And a Facebook account? If so, and if you’re in the UK or Republic of Ireland, you can participate in the pilot programme for Boosh, a new ebook-sharing service, and read The Alchemist of Souls for free!

The free app is available for Android right now, and will be in the Apple AppStore in a couple of weeks (the release of iOS7 has resulted in a bit of an approval backlog!).

Important: the free copies are on a limited, first-come-first-served basis. Half are being released now along with the Android app, the other half will be available when the iOS app launches. When the free copies run out, you’ll still be able to use the app, but you’ll have to pay to download books.

How it works

Boosh is pretty simple:

“Like” my author page on Facebook (if you haven’t already done so)
Go to Google Play (or the AppStore) to get the Boosh app for Android or iOS, which will download the first three chapters of The Alchemist of Souls onto your phone
As you read, the app loads new chapters and deletes the old ones (an anti-piracy measure – sorry about that!)
At any point in the reading process, you can choose to share the book with one Facebook friend; when you do this, all your other friends will receive a message from you, recommending the book
When you reach the end, you’ll be given a link to optionally buy a physical print copy of the book for yourself or a friend (of course you could buy an ebook or audiobook instead – links on this website!) and the copy on your phone will be deleted

Obviously the app will need access to your Facebook friends list in order to send messages, but that’s the only information it uses.

What if you’ve already read it?

If you’ve already read and enjoyed The Alchemist of Souls and would just like to share it with a Facebook friend, just follow the procedure outlined above but opt to share it as soon as the book is loaded.

Plus The Alchemist of Souls isn’t the only book on there; you’ll have several dozen to choose from once the app is installed, included a selection from Angry Robot. If all goes according to plan, more titles will be added and further territories opened up, but as mentioned above this is a pilot programme restricted to the UK and Eire at the moment. Apologies to my overseas fans!

Book Review: The Folding Knife, by K J Parker

Basso the Magnificent. Basso the Great. Basso the Wise. The First Citizen of the Vesani Republic is an extraordinary man.

He is ruthless, cunning, and above all, lucky. He brings wealth, power and prestige to his people. But with power comes unwanted attention, and Basso must defend his nation and himself from threats foreign and domestic. In a lifetime of crucial decisions, he’s only ever made one mistake.

One mistake, though, can be enough.

 

I first encountered K J Parker’s work last summer, when Sharps was released in paperback and ebook. I loved the combination of sardonic wit and understated worldbuilding, so when I discovered that Fantasy Faction had chosen another Parker standalone for their September book club choice, I couldn’t resist joining in.

At first I found it heavy going, even compared to Sharps. The protagonist, Basso, is a banker, and the early sections detail his rise to power as First Citizen of the Vesani Republic. Parker’s narrative style is very dry, often committing the cardinal sin of telling rather than showing, and yet the prose is so polished and Basso so compelling a character that the book drags you along in spite of yourself as you wonder what enormity he’s going to commit next. Both stylistically and plot-wise it reminded me a great deal of I, Claudius, with its cut-throat (sometimes literally!) politics in a world of senators and slaves.

As I mentioned above, I love Parker’s worldbuilding. There might not be any fantastical elements, but the history geek in me revels in all the real-world parallels. This book is clearly set in the same world as Sharps, but probably somewhat earlier; at any rate, it resembles an alternate history of the late Roman Empire, in that there is an Eastern Empire ranged against a motley collection of smaller states that resulted from the collapse of the Western Empire. The Vesani Republic itself resembles Venice: it relies almost entirely on trade, having little or no agricultural territory, and since the ruling class consists of merchants rather than knights, it hires mercenaries to fight on its behalf. It’s as if the Roman Empire dissolved gracefully instead of being overrun by barbarians, and thus went (politically) straight from the fourth century to the seventeenth without any pesky Middle Ages in-between!

My sole gripe with this book was the character of Basso’s sister. Admittedly he does something terrible to her and her family early on in the story, but her bitter hatred of him, and her resultant campaign to ruin his life in a myriad petty ways, started to grate eventually. On the other hand, Basso’s dogged love for her despite her enmity does serve to give him a touch of nobility to balance his other, less admirable qualities.

Back on Fantasy Faction, an issue that provoked much interesting debate was “what is Basso’s one mistake?” I won’t discuss that—or the metaphoric resonances of the title—here, for fear of spoilers. All I can say is that this book impressed the hell out of me, and will stay with me for a long time. Whether or not you consider it to be fantasy, The Folding Knife is a fine novel and well worth (re)reading. Though I fear that next time, knowing what is to come, the prologue may reduce me to tears…

I&E follow-along: The muse is in the building

Since I’ve been a bit stalled in my plot recently, I decided to try a method I’ve used in the past to batter my way through a sluggish spell: buy a new how-to-write book. I know, I know; I’ve done courses and read literally dozens of books on the subject, but sometimes what you need is a fresh perspective on a familiar topic.

Thanks to the Kindle, you can get some excellent how-to-write books very cheaply (I read them using the Kindle app on my iPad). This time around I bought Writing a Killer Thriller by Jodie Renner, and Rock Your Plot by Cathy Yardley. I chose the former because I realised that the book I’m working on would work well with a thriller structure (my agent wants something plot-driven!) and the latter because, again, I needed help with plotting. Neither contained anything radically new (the thriller one is basically a compilation of advice from various books, many of which I’ve already read), but evidently something in them woke my Muse…

I’m now working through the exercises in Rock Your Plot, which aren’t that different from Holly’s “critical modules” in HtTS – it’s all about identifying your main characters’ goals and motivations and what’s stopping them from achieving them. Maybe it was just a different phrasing of the questions that struck a chord, but I soon found myself with the main plot points for a standard 3-act structure.

In doing that, I discovered that I didn’t really like the villain’s plan, so I came up with something nastier. After that everything started sliding into place—or rather popping into my head at inopportune moments, like when I was supposed to be getting ready for work on Monday morning!

I need to poke said ideas a bit more to be certain they’re truly interesting and not just clichés rendered down from the thousands of movies and TV shows I’ve seen, but I’m starting to feel like I have a handle on this plot at last. Oh, and I have a working title now too: Serpent’s Tooth. It seems I can’t get away from Shakespeare, no matter how hard I try!