C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 107

D.I.C.E.

I’ve been at the Dublin International Comics Expo (AKA DICE), which is Dublin’s rebooted comics convention.

Tell ya what, I’m feeling really enthusiastic about making comics now. :) I mean, that’s not unusual, but I’m ready to press on with “Take A Chance” and see what’s going to happen with it as a graphic novel, and perhaps soon do another chapter of that story. And–I do tend to think in completionist arcs, so when one of the things discussed repeatedly this weekend was short stories, it was something I listened to. So I’d like to put together a few shorter scripts, and talk to some of the artists I know, and see if we can’t at least do some web stuff, probably in Chance’s world, just to develop it some more. We’ll see, but I’m excited about the prospect!

It was a terrific weekend, and I’ll write some more about it in the next few days!

PW reviews BABA YAGA’S DAUGHTER

I don’t typically read reviews, but periodically my editors will send one directly to my mailbox and I read it out of a sense of obligation. Usually they’re nice, because generally my editors wouldn’t bother sending me bad ones. :) So a nice BABA YAGA’S DAUGHTER review from Publisher’s Weekly landed in my mailbox, courtesy of my SubPress editors, and it is thus:

In this strong collection of 11* short stories, a mixture of reprints and originals, Murphy (Raven Calls) returns to the setting of her Negotiator trilogy. The spotlight is on two immortals: the dragon Janx and the vampire Eliseo Daisani. Both friends and enemies, they cross paths regularly over the centuries, often drawn to and influenced by women. “From Russia, with Love” features the titular powerful Russian witch; “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” brings in Susannah Stacey, a would-be vampire hunter in 1870s Chicago, and Vanessa Grey, Daisani’s long-lived assistant. Murphy plays with styles and tone, injecting a sense of myth into “From Russia, with Love,” evoking hard-boiled sensibilities with “Chicago Bang Bang,” and lacing other tales with mystery, romance, and action. Ranging from vignettes to novellas, these offerings grant glimpses of a much larger world, fleshing out its history and pleasing series fans.

*pleased*

*10. I’m pretty sure it’s 10 stories… o.O

further on rookie mistakes

In comments on that last post, someone said: “I would like to read what you think should be thrown away. I’m not sure I’d agree.”

Here’s the thing: you’re right. You wouldn’t agree. But you would be wrong.

I have written entire books without plots. I am a good enough writer that I can almost get away with that, and without an editor who wouldn’t let me, in one case, I would have. And that’s what’s wrong with what I’ve been working on: I had something that looked like a plot, but it wasn’t really. It was interesting, entertaining encounters between characters. Some exciting things happened. Reading it would have been fun.

But if I wrote the whole book that way, a reader would enjoy reading it and get to the end and feel like something was missing. They wouldn’t know what exactly, just that it didn’t feel quite right, and they’d keep looking at it trying to figure out what was wrong and they wouldn’t be able to quite put their finger on it.

Which is essentially what I’d been doing in the 6 weeks I’d been working on the book. The really critical thing, though, is if I pushed through and wrote that plotless book and, God forbid, an editor let it slide on through to publication…

…then I would be leaving my readers disappointed, even if they couldn’t quite put their finger on why. And if I did that, then next time a book of mine came out they might say, “Eh, meh, the last one was okay but I donno, maybe I’ll wait a while until I get this one…” and that’s one way careers are destroyed.

It’s really not that what I was writing wasn’t well-written, or even unreadable. It’s that ultimately it wouldn’t have provided a satisfying reading experience, and *that* is why it had to be thrown out.

Rookie Mistake

For the past six weeks I’ve been working on starting a new book. Now, it often only *takes* me six weeks to write a book, and although there have been some distractions, taking six weeks to get started is really a bad sign. Usually when I don’t want to work on a new project, it means I’ve done something wrong. I *know* that, so I kept looking at it, trying to figure out what I’d done wrong. I reached 75 pages on the manuscript twice, and the first time, I threw out half of them.

This, the second time, I have realized that the book’s structure is fundamentally broken. I’ve been trying desperately to insert conflict into the story, and it just has not been working. I finally realized it’s because I’ve made things too easy for my main character, right from page one.

From where I’m sitting, that’s a rookie mistake. I haven’t done that since about my fourth published novel, and this is something like the 28th one I’ve written. So yeah, rookie mistake. A really, really aggravating one, too, because it means absolutely everything I’ve written is useless, including my synopsis. I have to throw it all out, and start all over again.

And this, my friends, is part of what it is to be a professional writer: looking a complete failure in the eye, tossing it, and starting anew. *mutter*

Singularity Moment

One of my favorite commercials ever is one where there’s an American football game on, and the ball is spiraling through the air toward the goal posts, and there are thousands of fans coming to their feet roaring with hope. The voiceover says, “Not even the will of fifty thousand fans can send the ball through the goalposts…

“…or can it?”

And no. Of course not. Not with an inanimate object.

And yet. And yet.

Nine months ago NASA sent a machine toward Mars, and that machine had a crazy complicated set of manuevers it had to accomplish in order to land safely. NASA dubbed it “Seven Minutes of Terror” (the video is really worth watching), and for the past week or two people have been getting increasingly excited/nervous/worried/hopeful over its imminent landing date. The good will for this thing to succeed was tremendous.

This morning I got up early–not quite early enough, as it turned out–and logged onto the computer to see /Laura Anne Gilman’s Twitter post as the first thing, crying out, “TOUCHDOWN CONFIRMED!”

I spent the next half hour with tears streaming down my face as I watched the live stream FROM MARS FOR GOD’S SAKE, as Curiosity Rover took and sent her first photographs of Gale Crater back to Earth, and as the men and women at JPL sobbed and cheered and hugged and high-fived with their success.

And I did it all with the rest of the world, with hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of people who had stayed up late, gotten up early, all of us sharing it at the same time, all of us sharing it on Facebook and Twitter and, for the love of all, Times Square, thousands of people at Times Square at three in the morning to watch Curiosity and cheer SCIENCE! SCIENCE! SCIENCE!.

Not even global will for success can make a machine land safely on another planet…and yet.

If this is not a post-Singularity moment, I don’t know what is. Humans have gathered for important events as long as there’ve been humans, of course, but the whole world connecting like this, able to share the moment instantaneously across the globe, for all that emotion to be so broadly extended…I mean, that’s just beyond wonderful. That’s humanity at its best, and we ought to do more of that.

ORSSP: Complete!

The last Old Races e-book collection, AFTERMATH, has now been published!

This collection has one reprint, “Perchance to Dream”, a Janx story also available in the anthology DRAGON’S LURE. It has the ORSSP stories “Awakening” and “Aftermath” (which was the surprise bonus story for ORSSP patrons who subscribed to the ORSSP in the first 5 months of 2011). The other two stories, “Betrayals” and “Choices,” are brand-new.

Margrit Knight has broken the long-held covenants of the Old Races. Ancient rivals are scattered, friendships are broken, and the dragons, djinn, selkies, vampires and gargoyles are beginning to step out of the shadows and into the light.

But the new world may not be what they expect. Dragonlord Janx faces more than he bargained for when human magic interferes with his own. Half-vampire Ursula Hopkins is only starting to understand what she may have unleashed by awakening her brethren, and Margrit Knight herself still has debts to pay after the death of a djinn…

Watch the future unfold in these five new stories of the Old Races!

Buy the AFTERMATH collection:

at Amazon

at Barnes & Noble

at Smashwords

Links to all the blurbs and various places to purchase the e-books are available through this nifty animated ad that I made:

(I made the ad for Bitten By Books, but because it’s animated it was TOOOOO BIG for them. But I liked it enough that I wanted to use it, and, y’know, if you want to, you can too. :))

MOUNTAIN ECHOES cover reveal!

I’ve been given the all-clear to post the MOUNTAIN ECHOES cover!

Holy beans, guys! Penultimate Walker Papers book! (And damn, I wish I’d thought of saying RAVEN CALLS was the antepenultimate book when it came out, ’cause I love that word. :))

Recent Reads

I’ve been reading quite a lot and doing a terrible job of keeping up on blogging my recent reads. This week I’ve read:

- the 2nd and 3rd WVMP RADIO series by Jeri Smith-Ready, and I just bought the, er, free download novella that is book 3.5. Something happened in the 3rd book that I didn’t like, but I’m waiting to see if it pays off and is justified or if I think it was just a mistake. :)

- the 2nd Starbridge book, SILENT DANCES, which in my callow yout’ was my favorite of the series and which I suspect still remains my favorite, although there’s one aspect of it that makes me go o.O when it didn’t when I was 17. (It’s a romantic subplot where it’s very nearly love at first site for the 20 year old protagonist. Which, since it didn’t bother me when I was 17, is probably fine, but as an adult I thought it was too convenient.)9

- the first Agatha Raisin mystery novel, which became increasingly charming as it progressed and which I am now looking forward to reading many more of. My big plan for the day may be to go find books 2 & 4, in fact, as I already have 3 & 5. :)

BYD review

I don’t normally link to reviews, but then, I don’t normally have a limited edition collection of short stories that I’m all nervous about coming out, so I shall point you at this review of BABA YAGA’S DAUGHTER, which is generally a nice one. The reviewer had a completely legitimate problem with one of the stories–I sort of never imagined people who hadn’t read the Negotiator Trilogy would be reading BYD, and the story the reviewer was uncertain about is the flip side of something that happens in the trilogy. Without the trilogy side of the story I can totally see it not working as well as it should, but I genuinely didn’t think of that until, er, I read this review. :)

Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! Subterranean Press has their new website up and running, and it’s beautiful! Wow! Here, admire it while you pre-order BYD! (Actually, I’m pretty sure everybody who reads this blog who is *going* to preorder BYD already has, but, y’know. One must do one’s duty, or something. :))

Speaking of BYD, I’m going to pat my own back about it for a minute here, so let me put this behind a cut tag… :)

Just before I went on holiday I very belatedly finished the proofs for BYD. I had a real and particular goal for the collection, which was that it would tell the stories of several characters who are secondary, tertiary or even non-existent in the Negotiator Trilogy. I wanted them to be linked, but for the collection to be in no way considered a novel. I also wanted the collection to enrich the Old Races universe in a meaningful way, but also for it to be completely unnecessary for readers to pick up the collection for backstory if I should ever write more novels in that world.

And to be frank, I succeeded admirably. The book does exactly what I hoped it would in all of those respects, and I’m very, very pleased about that.

But here’s the thing that surprised me: the first story in the book, “From Russia, With Love,” is one of the best things I’ve ever written. I was a little uncomfortable, in fact, with the idea that it is the first story, because it’s good enough that I didn’t think the others could stand up to it. But in doing proofs, and reading the stories both all out of order and also as a cohesive unit for the first time…they do stand up. Every one of them is really well written, the voices change for the different stories, the characters grow and remain true to themselves, and one of the stories (the above difficult one) puts a completely different spin on some of the events of The Negotiator Trilogy. I was really, really surprised at how much I just flat-out liked the stories, and at how well I thought they did their job.

So not only is the collection, to me, a successful attempts on a physical, it-does-what-I-was-aiming-for level, but it’s also a tremendous artistic triumph. I’m really, really proud of it.

BABA YAGA’S DAUGHTER is my 19th published book. It’s the first one I’ve ever come close to regarding as an artistic triumph: I do not think of my writing in that way. I find that hugely encouraging, when you get right down to it. It kind of suggests I’m continuing to learn and improve, and that’s rather heartening.

Guest Blog: DB Jackson’s THIEFTAKER!

I have in the past mentioned that one of the perks of my job is getting to read early manuscripts for upcoming books. Last year my friend and fellow Magical Words blogger DB Jackson asked if I might read his novel THIEFTAKER, which turned out to be a Revolutionary War era urban fantasy novel.

I don’t *normally* send people emails while I’m reading their books, but I sent David at least two or three during the course of reading THIEFTAKER, saying things like “ACK YOU DID WHAT HOLY *CRAP* DUDE!” and “OMG I did NOT see that coming ALGHGLH!!!” David said he’d never had anybody emailing him while reading, either, so the whole thing was an amusing and novel (er, so to speak) experience for both of us. Anyway, I loved what David had done, so I am now delighted to offer up a little five-question interview I did with him in celebration of THIEFTAKER’s release!

Before the interview, let me give you a couple quick links: Sample chapters for THIEFTAKER, and David’s site, where all pertinent social network links can also be found. THIEFTAKER is available now!

And now, interviewy goodness!

1. I was lucky enough to get to read an advance copy of THIEFTAKER, which I utterly enjoyed. But you’ve gone out on something of a limb with it–it’s Revolutionary War urban fantasy. What made you decide to tackle urban fantasy set in a different era?

This is a far more complicated question than you know — several forces conspired to lead me to this book and series. The original idea for THIEFTAKER came from, of all things, a footnote in a book about Australian history. The footnote discussed the vagaries of 18th century law enforcement in England, including the rise of thieftakers, who retrieved stolen items for a fee. In particular, it discussed London’s most famous thieftaker, Jonathan Wild, who used to have his henchmen steal goods which he would either sell for a profit or return for that finder’s fee. He built an empire for himself on this business model. Reading about him, I thought “What a great idea for a book!” I would have an honest thieftaker, who could conjure, but who had to deal with a Wild-like corrupt nemesis. So from the start this was going to be an urban fantasy, although not a contemporary one.

In my first draft, THIEFTAKER was set in an alternate fantasy world. But when I talked to my editor about it, he suggested turning it into a historical fantasy and setting it in London. Now I should mention here that I have a Ph.D. in history — U.S. History. And my response to his suggestion was that I could see turning it into a historical, but not in London — everyone sets books in London. What if we set this in pre-Revolutionary War America? I had always been fascinated by the late colonial era, when the British Empire in the New World was coming apart at the seams. And given the lack of an established constabulary in the colonies, particularly in Boston, where the books take place, it made sense that thieftakers could have thrived in the colonies.

So there it is — somewhat circuitous, and probably more than you wanted to know. But that’s how I got here.

2. I happen to know you’re an avid photographer as well as a talented writer. How do you make time for both? Is doing a photography gallery showing as exciting as getting a new book on the shelves? (Yeah, yeah, that’s two questions, suck it up!)

I am an avid photographer — an interest you and I share, if I’m not mistaken. And like you I would probably answer the question by saying that as a parent and a spouse, finding time for my photography is probably the least of my concerns! In all seriousness, though, I find that in order to be successful with my writing, and in order to keep myself sane, I have to find time to do other things. Each morning before I sit down to write I take time to do something active, something that forces me out of my chair, and away from my computer screen. Most days that involves going to the gym. But we live in a beautiful spot on the Cumberland Plateau, and so several times during the year I will go out to take photos. I’m particularly eager to get out with my camera in the spring when wildflowers are blooming, in the fall when the leaves are changing, and in the winter after a good snow. But the larger point is that making for time for such things is more than a matter of recreation. It keeps me healthy, and I think that ultimately it helps my art, not only by giving me a break, but by engaging a different part of my brain. I find creating an effective image satisfying in a way that is totally different from the satisfaction I get from writing a good scene in a story or book.

On the other hand, the rush I have gotten from seeing my photos exhibited, or from making a photography sale, is quite similar to the thrill of selling a new book or seeing my novels on a bookstore shelf. That moment of seeing an act of creativity realized — consummated if you will — is pretty magical.

3. Describe your writing process a bit. Do you plot each and every arc? Do you use music to help set the mood? How do you get through any rough patches? Is your focus limited to 1 manuscript or do you multi-task? (That’ll teach you to complain about 2 questions up above!)

I am what writers generally call a plotter (as opposed to a pantser — a person who writes by the seat of his or her pants). I tend to outline my books ahead of time, and almost always know as I begin a book how the story is going to end. But I don’t plot every plot-point — far from it. My outlines tend to be vague. I’ll write maybe a sentence or two for each fifteen page chapter. “Ethan goes to speak with Samuel Adams. They agree that Summer Ale is far superior to Boston Lager.” That’s it. The rest I let happen as I write. So I suppose I’m actually a plotter who has a bit of the pantser in him. I often compare my creative process to drinking a bottle of soda. When I drink a Coke, I don’t open the bottle more often than I have to, because I don’t want the Coke to lose its fizz. In the same way, I can’t write about, or talk about my story too much — and that includes outlining in too much detail. Because the more I do those things, the more fizz I let out. And eventually the story will go flat on me before I’ve had a chance to write it.

I do listen to music when I write, but I’m very particular about what I listen to. I will only listen to instrumental music, and generally only bluegrass and jazz. I find that lyrics distract me. On the other hand, I find that the improvisational quality of bluegrass and jazz feeds my creative energy and keeps me moving through my narrative.

Rough patches, as you know, have so many possible causes that it’s hard to generalize about how I handle them. I do find that when my narrative stalls on me, it’s usually because of something I’ve done earlier in the manuscript. Sometimes, I’ve allowed one plot thread to overwhelm the rest of the story. Or I’ve had a character do something that he or she would never do. Or I’ve used a plot twist that really doesn’t work. The point is that my own mistake has led me to a dead end. And so I will go back and read through what I’ve written thus far to identify the point where things started to go wrong. Generally, when I find that moment and correct the mistake, the book starts to flow more smoothly.

As for my focus, that’s changed over the years. Used to be, I could only work on one project at any given time. Having my mind in two stories or worlds at once was more than I could handle — and all the works in question suffered. I’ve gotten over that and currently am working on not only the Thieftaker project, but three other novel length projects that are in vary stages of revision and/or re-conception. I actually have come to like working this way; I find that the more projects I have underway, the less likely I am to grow bored with any of them.

4. If you had to choose a theme song for Ethan, what would it be? Why? (At least so far as you can explain ‘why’ without spoilers. :))

A theme song for Ethan? Wow. Good question. I think I would go with “Gimme Shelter,” by the Rolling Stones. This is fairly dark book. Violence looms in every scene. War — in the form of the Revolution — is drawing closer. “War, children, it’s just a shot away…” There is literally fire in the streets. “Fire is sweeping our very street today…” And yet he also manages to find love in this climate, as the song does at its end. “Love, sister, it’s just a kiss away…” Yeah. I think “Gimme Shelter” works pretty well.

5. What’s your secret superpower, the one weird thing you can do that nobody else can? And if you got to have a *real* superpower, what would it be?

I’m not sure that I have a superpower. I mean, I make a mean vegetarian fajita. And I’m really good with a grilled pork loin, too. I skip stones on water very, very well. Oh, wait. I know, but I’m reluctant to reveal this because it will tell people just exactly how much of a nerd I am. I’m a birdwatcher, and I am incredibly good at identifying birds by their songs, particularly the birds here in the Southeastern U.S. where I live. I can basically pick out a song and know exactly what bird it is. Let the abuse begin . . .

As for the *real* superpower, do you mean which would would I be most likely to have, or which one would I really like to have? I would really like to be able to make myself invisible and go wherever I want whenever I want. I think that would be very cool. Although I have to admit that as I get older I often think that the best superpower would be to be able to eat anything I want without consequences. But if you were talking about which superpower I would be most likely to have if such things were dispensed at birth as a matter of course, it would probably be something totally prosaic and useless. Like, perhaps, being able to identify any bird by its song . . .