L.R. Lam's Blog, page 38

Recent Links

I had an interview for the YA Debut Author Bash hosted by YA Reads over at Book Bandit‘s blog. She also wrote a nice review of Pantomime here.

My agent, Juliet Mushens, has a great guest blog entry at Windmill Books about what she actually does as an agent.

Reminder: Pantomime‘s ebook is still on sale for super cheap, but I’m not sure how much longer the deal will be on. The highest I saw it get on Amazon was ranking #2,446, hitting #22 in Social Issues for Children and #74 Childrens SFF, Mystery & Horror!

A few months ago, Pantomime was reviewed by the American Library Association’s Booklist online, which I missed. A nice review: “At around page 90 in Lam’s impressive debut fantasy novel, there’s a reveal so stunning that it makes it difficult to discuss without spoilers. Still, difficult hardly means impossible, especially as Lam’s memorable characters and rich world building stand tall in their own rights. Using a flashback structure to show both why noble-born Iphigenia Laurus runs away and joins the circus and how she changes her identity to become trapeze-artist Micah Grey, Pantomime does feature standard YA elements such as parental estrangement and problematic romance—yet marvelously transfigures them.”

And lastly, Pantomime had another lovely review on the site Fantasy Faction: “Micah is one of the most sympathetic, well-realised and bravest characters I’ve read about in a long time. . . Well-written and intelligent fantasy with characters I loved and a wonderful protagonist, in a fascinating world. I really enjoyed Pantomime and I can’t wait to re-enter Ellada and continue to unravel its secrets.”

Books Read in August

1. Whit – Iain Banks. I read this as a teenager and upon re-read, I found it a lot funnier than I remembered. A great book told from the point of view of a girl raised in a cult (rather gentler on the whole than, say, the People’s Temple) who has to go into the big, wide world to find her possibly apostate cousin.

2. Otherbound – Corinne Duyvis. I got to read this well in advance. Are you jealous? You should be jealous. It’s a wonderful book about a boy who’s transported into the life of a mute girl in another world every time he blinks.

3. Little Star - John Ajvide Lindqvist – A very creepy tale about a psychopathic young girl who goes on Swedish Idol.  But it’s a lot more than that.

4. The Bone Season – Samantha Shannon – I think the hype sort of jaded me going in. I was left a little cold by it, but because it starts so slow, I think I’ll give the sequel a chance to see what happens now that the world has been set up.

5. Saga Volume 1 - Brian K. Vaughan – I loved Y: The Last Man so borrowed this when I was in Amsterdam visiting Corinne. A great opening to a new series and I’ll be continuing. Love the mesh of sci fi and fantasy.

6. The Diamond Age – Neal Stephenson – Another re-read. I loved it when I was 15 and loved it now. So complicated and wonderfully written. I love Nell!

7. Blood and Feathers – Lou Morgan. A Mushens agent-sister book. I’ll admit that angels aren’t my favourite supernatural creatures to read about, but this was snappily written and lots of fun.

8. The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of her Own Making – Cat Valente. This was on sale for Kindle so I snapped it up. Beautifully written but a bit too twee for me. Think I wasn’t quite in the right mood for it. It’ be something great to read to an 11-12 year old, though.

Total for the year:

50 books!

Ebook sale: Pantomime (and other SC titles) on sale for £0.99/$1.55!

For a limited time, Pantomime (and other awesome SC titles!) are on sale for ebook to celebrate Strange Chemistry’s first birthday.

It’ll only be a limited time, so if you’ve been meaning to buy Pantomime for your Kindle, now’s the time, and the sequel, Shadowplay, is just around in the corner in January. Please help spread the word–I’d love more people to take a chance and pick up Pantomime.

Where to go: Amazon UK / Amazon US / Nook

R.H. Ragona’s Circus of Magic is the greatest circus of Ellada. Nestled among the glowing blue Penglass – remnants of a mysterious civilisation long gone – are wonders beyond the wildest imagination. It’s a place where anything seems possible, where if you close your eyes you can believe that the magic and knowledge of the vanished Chimeras is still there. It’s a place where anyone can hide.

Iphigenia Laurus, or Gene, the daughter of a noble family, is uncomfortable in corsets and crinoline, and prefers climbing trees to debutante balls. Micah Grey, a runaway living on the streets, joins the circus as an aerialist’s apprentice and soon becomes the circus’s rising star. But Gene and Micah have balancing acts of their own to perform, and a secret in their blood that could unlock the mysteries of Ellada.

And don’t forget to take a chance on some other SC titles, links to which can be found on Strange Chemistry’s website here. 

Ten Snaps: Amsterdam

This past weekend I went to Amsterdam for a family reunion with my aunt Ginger, cousin Paul, cousin Dylan, who just had a beautiful baby girl named Ava with his wife, Rixt, cousin Lonnie and his wife Dawn and daughters Genevieve and Isabelle. I stayed with awesome Corinne Duyvis who made me delicious poffertjes and showed me around Amsterdam a bit.

Me and Corinne!

Signing Pantomime at the American Book Center.

Rixt and Ava

Rixt’s mother’s paintings

We took a day trip to the lovely town of Heusden

Family!

Poffertjes and Baileys. Breakfast of Champions.

My favourite Van Gogh painting

My 2nd cousin Genevieve reading Pantomime

No visit to Amsterdam is complete without…stroopwaffels!

A Guide to YA Novels with LGBTQ Characters

YALSA’s the Hub has made a handy dandy graphic guide to YA Novels with LBTBQ Characters. The full post can be found here. I’m absolutely delighted that Pantomime is featured. It’s been shared on Tumblr and has gotten over 19,000 shares, which is so wonderful. I’ve pasted the bit below which has Pantomime, but please do check out the full graphic!

 

Inverness Book Festival

Cheesily pointing at my name!

On Tuesday, August 6th, I took the train up to Inverness for my first Book Festival appearance at Eden Court. The festival is on until Saturday, so here’s the website with the programme if you know anyone in the area. It’s run in part by Sandstone Press, who are in a way book cousins with Angry Robot/Strange Chemistry, as they’re both distributed by Faber and Faber in the UK.

Before the event, I met the chair of the panel, Kelsey Moore, who is another displaced American who has moved to Scotland. She works for the Moniack Mohr creative writing centre, which is located not far from Inverness. It seems like a wonderful writing centre in a gorgeous setting that runs programmes most of the year, some which are Arvon and some which are not. Kelsey was an excellent chair and really helped put my nerves at ease.

Unfortunately this was the only photo Craig took, where I am stretching!

The audience at the even was small but enthusiastic, asking excellent questions about Pantomime, my writing process, and the world-building. We touched on the subjects of being an outsider, the role of technology in Ellada, the importance of names, and the melding of different genres. Afterwards there was a brief signing and one girl even asked to take a photograph with me, which was very sweet! 

I got to meet one of my online writing friends, Emma Maree Urquhart, which was lovely! We chatted away and all too soon she had to catch the bus home, but I’ll see her again at World Fantasy Con.

The rest of the time was relaxing in Inverness, which was lovely even if it was raining heavily most of the time. It was a nice wee break in the Highlands.

A huge thank you to everyone at Eden Court & Sandstone Press for arranging the event and being so welcoming.

Books Read in July

1. Control – Kim Curran. The excellent followup to Shift, about a boy with the power to undo any decision he’s ever made, and it came out in the UK yesterday so you should all go buy it.

2. Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon – I read this as a teenager during the height of the hype, and was left a little cold by it. I re-read it when we went to Barcelona and absolutely fell in love with it, perhaps as a result of being older, being a writer, and being in the city where it was set as I read.

3. The Weight of Souls – Bryony Pearce. This also came out in the UK yesterday, and you should also buy it! Taylor Oh receives a mark if she’s touched by a ghost must avenge that death before the Darkness comes for her. 

4. – Elizabeth Wein. I finally read the book which I’ve heard so much about, and I enjoyed it.

5. The Devil of Nanking – Mo Hayder. I read this a few years ago and it absolutely haunted me. I re-read it, and unlike a lot of books, I still remembered it very clearly. Such a good book looking at the history of Japan and China through the lens of a troubled English girl in modern Tokyo. Though that doesn’t even really begin to describe it.

6. Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales – Gordon Jarvie. Book research.

7. Stolen – Lucy Christopher. A gripping tale of a girl stolen from an airport and forced to live in the Australian outback with a troubled young man. Very gripping–I read it in a day.

8. The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince – Robin Hobb. My mom sent me the hardback for my birthday. I loved this short novella about the piebald prince, though it felt like it could easily have been spun out into a full novel.

Recent Roundup

A few weeks ago I went to Glen Coe with Elizabeth May, who took this gorgeous photo:

It was so warm I was wearing shorts, which RARELY happens in Scotland!

Last weekend I was in London to celebrate the launch of Kim Curran’s Control and Bryony Pearce’s The Weight of Souls. There’s a great summary of the launch party on the Strange Chemistry website.

The rest of the weekend was lazily hanging around with Kim. We went to see Now You See Me, which we thought was brilliant good fun. A heist movie with stage magic? It’s like it was made for us. But don’t watch the trailers for it, as they’re a little spoilery.

Also, on the way back from Gatwick, I saw Pantomime in the North Terminal! That was amazingly exciting, especially as they had 11 copies!

Updates:

The cover image for Shadowplay is done, so hopefully it’ll be able to be unveiled soon! All I can say about it now is that I’m really pleased with it and Tom Bagshaw is so talented. If you’re a blogger and would like to be involved in a cover reveal when it goes live, feel free to drop me a line via the Contact page with the subject “Cover Reveal.”

Over on Bookshelves of Doom, I talk about 10 books that shaped Pantomime.

Over on Shadowhawk’s Shade, I have a guest post called the , where I discuss how I choose names for my characters, often based on name meanings.

I got my first review in a language other than English! It’s in French, which I studied for six years, so I was quite proud I could puzzle most of it out, and it’s a lovely wee review.

To Those Saying The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith Tanked: Please Stop.

The news broke over the weekend and so this is breaking to no one: The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith was really written by none other than J.K. Rowling. She punked the publishing industry, and everyone’s talking about it. It’s been picked up by most news outlets, and overnight it hit number 1 on Amazon and its sales went up 158,000%.

I’ve seen several people/sources expressing shock and horror that only 1500 copies were shipped from the warehouse and of those 1500 hardbacks, only 400od had sold (and maybe 1000 ebooks, though I don’t think any of these numbers are substantiated, either–the 400odd number probably came from Nielsen bookscan, and those numbers can be pretty off). But this was in the UK only. In 3 months. On an unknown debut. In a saturated market. In a recession. That’s not tanking. It’s healthy.

The Cuckoo’s Calling had a normal publishing experience. Not a lot of fanfare, not in every bookstore window, no big blog tour, no events (she couldn’t very well show up, could she? Though that would have been SO fun if she did waltz out at a low-key launch somewhere). Now the book quite obviously doesn’t have a normal experience, because it was written by a woman richer than the Queen of England, writer of a book series pretty much everyone knows. This shows several things:

1. Good books stand on their own. Robert Galbraith’s career wasn’t over. “He’d” probably sold enough for them to continue with the series, but they’d have decided more based on the paperback sales, if this hadn’t come to light. We’ll never know what the paperback sales would have been, now.

2. Word of mouth usually takes longer than 3 months. I personally wish it had stayed under wraps longer, to see what the paperback sales would have been, if momentum would have grown with each book in the series. That’s what happened with Harry Potter–it wasn’t until the 3rd book that it hit the stratosphere. How amazing would it have been for Rowling to do it not once, but twice? Things take time. Da Vinci Code was Dan Brown’s 4th book. Daughter of Smoke and Bone was Laini Taylor’s 3rd, I think.

3. Unless very heavily marketed, it’s hard for people to take a chance on debuts. Or to find out about debuts. Even very good books–and The Cuckoo’s Calling had awesome blurbs and great reviews. 1 star reviews on Amazon only appeared after the news broke. People like to reach for books where they know what they’re going to get. I know I’m like that. If I’m lazy and know I want to read something I’ll enjoy, I grab one of the Margaret Atwood books I haven’t read yet.

So please don’t say it tanked. It didn’t, and now it’s doing phenomenally. Which is great. I’m sure I’ll read it. The Cuckoo’s Calling performed like many books in those 3 months. It performed better than many books.

There’s speculation that this was a planned stunt–that the news broke in a timely manner before the paperback release. That may be, but that still doesn’t stop the fact that it seems like the secret was kept pretty well, at least for a few months.

I hope J.K. Rowling does this again with more pseudonyms. She seemed to enjoy not having the expectation–I can’t imagine how scary it must have been launching The Casual Vacancy, as such a successful author. Plus it’d be fun–which debut next year could secretly have been written by her?

Sp maybe pick up a debut, and don’t do so because it might secretly have been writing by J.K. Rowling (unlikely she’s doing it twice this year, after all!). Do it because if debut authors are well-supported, maybe they’ll have chances to put out more books, some of which might become your next favourites.

Links

My short essay The Grey of Gender: Intersex and Gender Variant/Non-Binary Characters in YA, which originally appeared on GayYA, was reblogged on the DiversityinYA tumblr.

Jo Stapley at Once Upon a Bookcase had a Pantomime-themed day for her LGBTQ YA Month, which you should all check out. She had an in-depth review (some spoilers, but she also wrote a spoiler-free review a few months ago), and an interview from me.

There was a really lovely review from Ingrid at the Magpie Librarian which I can’t help but share.

If you’re near Inverness on August 6th, I’ll be appearing at the Inverness Book Festival.