Hee! Well, my nervous trepidation over what the cover art for Shining in the Sun would be like is over, and I have to say I am thrilled 🙂 It makes such a difference, when you know that the novel you’ve angsted over and spent so long on, polishing every word, will be going out into the world nicely dressed.
The cover artist on this is Scott Carpenter of Samhain, and he’s done a bang-up job. I’m so happy with it. Alec is just right – sensitive, handsome… looks ever so slightly as if he would be a bit of a push-over. The golden colour-scheme is so summery, and the distant surfer is just the right touch of mysterious.
In fact, the cover could be an illustration of the point at the end of chapter one, where Alec meets Darren for the first time, and it makes me squee to think it’s that right for the book. Squee!
Also, everyone’s got clothes on! Not a naked torso in sight, even though (as it’s set by the seaside,) there might have actually been an excuse for that this time 🙂
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5. By age, who is your youngest character? Oldest? How about “youngest” and “oldest” in terms of when you created them?
I think my youngest character is probably Oswy, one of the viewpoint characters of The Witch’s Boy. He’s 11. The oldest character I’ve ever written was about 20,000 years old, but he was one of Tolkien’s elves, not one of my own characters.
I don’t remember who was my first character. My most recent is probably Phyllis, who is a retired English teacher, the resident photographer of Matlock Paranormal Investigations, and a keen watcher of daytime soap-opera.
4. Tell us about one of your first stories/characters!
I segued imperceptibly between making up childish games – “you’re King Richard, and you’ve been captured by the Saracens, and we’re your knights and are coming to look for you…” – and writing down stories where the characters did what I thought they ought to, rather than spending two hours squabbling about why they couldn’t be kings too.
My first written stories were pretty much crossovers of everything that I liked at any one time. I don’t remember a lot about them. I know I wrote quite a saga about the Prog Rock band Emerson, Lake and Palmer who were space-faring freedom fighters in the tradition of Blake’s 7, saving the galaxy from the forces of evil by the power of music. (And big guns – even at 11, I felt you couldn’t really believe in a revolution that didn’t have big guns in it somewhere.)
The galaxy that they were saving bore a strong resemblance to the galaxy of seedy spaceports and dead planets with wondrous, dangerous history, which I’d read about in Andre Norton’s Forerunner Foray and seen about a hundred times in Star Wars. ELP featured as themselves, as long as that meant “a bit like Han Solo, but cooler because they played music with deep lyrics at the same time.” Keith Emerson was the one who was always right, but whom no one believed, and the other two were his sidekicks.
I was reading this lovely article about Marketing for Introverts at the Shrinking Violet Promotions blog today. It really struck a chord with me because of this extended writer’s block thing I’ve been going through recently:
“Mitali Perkins is someone who has become quite an industry presence, but she also tweeted over 50,000 words last year. Another blogger I know spends 30 hours a week on her blog. Look at your own personal career goals and ask yourself if this is really where you want to spend your energy. It is very possible that it IS where you want to spend your energy, and if so, fine. But just make sure it is your choice and your decision, not a default setting. It all boils down to our limited amounts of energy, and this is especially true for introverts.”
I thought this sounded very true, and the thought of unplugging from many of my yahoo groups and backing off from Facebook and Twitter, and concentrating on reading things that actually inspired me, was a very attractive one. So I thought I would set my yahoo groups to “Special Notices Only”. I thought the easiest way to do this would be to tick the little boxes at the side to select each group, select “Special Notices Only” at the bottom, and then hit “Save Changes.”
Only afterwards did I realize that the little box at the side was the “leave this group” box. So I’ve now left an entire page of my list of yahoo groups. And I can’t even tell which ones they were, because I can’t get at any history that shows me my list before I hit delete. So if I’ve mysteriously and unceremoniously left your group, I do apologise. I really didn’t mean to do that! I was only trying to go no mail for a while until my inspiration came back. An aim in which I’ve succeeded rather more thoroughly than I hoped!
Meme question #3
3. How do you come up with names, for characters (and for places if you’re writing about fictional places)?
I have about as much luck with names for characters as I do with titles. I’m concerned to get them exactly right for the character, and that often means giving the character an almost right name to start with and then trying out two or three more as I go along until one finally fits. And of course I have to go through that with first names and surnames separately. Names convey a lot of personality to a character all by themselves, although I’ve recently learned that the associations that a name carries don’t seem to be the same in the UK and the USA.
For example, poor old Tony St.John-Goodchilde from Shining in the Sun. Tony is a relatively posh name in the UK, short for Anthony, and hopefully conveying a sort of Oxbridge, Eton educated, old boy’s network kind of person who is (because he uses the diminutive) making an attempt to sound like he’s not standoffish or up himself. He’s trying to be just one of the guys but, with that surname, he will never manage it. So the attempt itself is foolish and goodhearted and silly, but in a nice way.
Then I discover that none of that information comes across in the States, where Tony sounds like a blue collar worker of Italian heritage. Argh! Since that’s exactly the wrong thing for Tony, he has to become something else. So he went through three or four changes of name before settling on Alec.
It’s difficult writing for a market where you don’t know the kind of information you are getting across simply from the feel of a word, and naming is one of those things which is wildly different on different sides of the Atlantic. I never managed to read The Princess Bride because having a hero called Westley and a heroine called Buttercup was so painful that I couldn’t bear to go on.
As to where I get them from, I have a copy of Erastes’ amazing spreadsheet of Regency names (which is how I knew I could get away with calling Garnet Garnet.) There’s a great website of names of casualties of the Peninsula War which is a good guide for historical names. I have a baby name book, and various baby name websites marked. And there’s the telephone directory for surnames.
Place names in England are easy to make up for me, after I spent a year reading through the entire EPNS (English Place Name Survey) . There are a number of Old English common suffixes and prefixes ( -cot, -ton, -ham, -ing, -stead. Cald-, Long-, [Personal name]-, [object]- etc) which can be combined in lots of ways to get authentic sounding place names which all mean things. For example, our house is called Andingham – which means “the homestead of the people of Andy.”
LOL! Yes, naming is a subject about which I’m ever so slightly obsessed 🙂
List of meme questions.
2. How many characters do you have? Do you prefer males or females?
I think I have too many to count – and I’m not going to count them to prove it. Though I suppose it makes a difference whether we’re talking major players or walk ons. I wouldn’t like to not count the walk on parts, because I’m very fond of them, from Emmie who runs a boarding house in Jamaica and loves her ridiculously high fashion red-heeled shoes, to the guy in the off-license who sold Darren a bottle of vodka while wondering if he should call the police.
Male or female whats? I hate this tendency to call people males or females – it’s not a noun, it’s an adjective. You mean a male or female human? Then bloody well say so. Or, failing that, use the proper words, which are “men” and “women”. Using “female” to mean “woman” strongly implies that everything about that person is summed up in their gender, and that gets right up my nose.
I’ll assume the question means “Do you prefer male or female characters?”
I prefer writing male characters because I don’t feel I understand the idea of “female” and “femininity.” I don’t really feel that I understand women as a whole, or even feel reliably confident that there is such a thing as “women as a whole.” Gender flummoxes me, and I would much rather write a world where it didn’t exist at all, but for some reason, (probably not unconnected to society’s belief that only men are important) the female gender is more obscure and mysterious to me than the male. I’m working on this by reading up lots of feminism, but at the moment it’s still the male point of view that comes naturally to me.
Let’s see if I can keep this up and post an answer to one of the questions every day.
Question #1
1. Tell us about your favorite writing project/universe that you’ve worked with and why.
That’s hard! I tend to love most the project that I’m working on at that time. And I tend to like all my heroes about equally. But if I think in terms of the project that I had most fun writing, it would be The Wages of Sin. Although this had quite a complicated murder plot with clues that I had to work in at strategic points, and a much bigger set of important characters than most of my other stuff – and less space to get the big plot and multiple characters into, since it was a novella – for some reason it was a delight to write. A lot of the time I was writing on inspiration, and watching it come out and all make sense without any feeling of struggle or grinding effort.
All my other stuff has been at least 95% hard grind with the occasional burst of “woohoo! this is fun!” But WoS was probably 65% where I knew what I was doing and I was enjoying doing it. I wish it was like that all the time! So I cherish a fondness for it for being the least painful thing I’ve ever written. And also for Jasper, who is (IMO) the sexiest of my characters – which also took me by surprise. He’s a big, quiet, sensual, simple kind of man, (in the sense of not always second guessing himself) which is rare in my characters. It was nice to write someone without any self-doubt or self-loathing, for a change.
Full list of Questions for the rest of the month:
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I was about to say that I was still going through the crisis that started around Christmas, but then I decided that you can’t have a crisis for four months. A crisis doesn’t have that kind of staying power. Add together S.A.D (which is getting better), the fact that I have two frozen shoulders (which are getting worse), which makes sleeping difficult and waking painful, and a month of sick children (who are better and worse alternately), and you have a writer who is very unproductive and feeling very sorry for herself.
Essentially, I don’t know what to do with myself any more, and that is reflected in Under the Hill, which doesn’t know what kind of a book it wants to be. Or perhaps it’s just that I can’t make myself want to write it, no matter what it is – fantasy or romance. I have no muses, no inspiration, no energy, no enthusiasm. I can’t imagine ever having them again.
I badly need something new and fabulous to come along and re-awaken me, but naturally that kind of thing never comes on call. The last time it happened was discovering Patrick O’ Brian in 2007, and I’ve been living on that boost ever since. Now that it’s run out, am I too old and cynical (and tired and despondent) for something new? I hope not! Does anyone have any hints on summoning the muses? I wouldn’t force, but perhaps they could be persuaded?
Because I can never resist perfumes that sound like poems and make you smell like weird things. I joined a decant circle run by snowwhitemoon fairly recently and read through the descriptions of all the perfumes on offer in BPAL’s “Lupercalia” selection 2010.
Due to being skint, I could only afford four imps this time, so I had to choose very carefully, and I’ve been rewarded for that by liking them all now that they’ve arrived. I got:
Milk Chocolate, Coconut, Cardamom, Rum and Ginger Truffle – which requires no explanation 🙂
It smells to me like bitter dark chocolate, slightly burnt, with ginger and a hint of pine fresh detergent. It’s the least successful of the four, but smelling like dark chocolate with a hint of ginger and pine is still not a bad thing.
Bijoux Y’ha-Nthlei
Described as “neroli, Hawaiian ginger, white musk, tarragon, beeswax, heliotrope, yellow rose, oud, coriander, amber and lime peel.”
It smells floral at first but soon changes into a long lasting citrusy scent which slowly mellows to incorporate something softer and more vanilla-ish. I can’t detect the musk at all, unfortunately.
Khrysopelex
“Caraway, amber, saffron, bergamot and neroli.” I got this one because of the bergamot, for the sentimental reason that that’s what John’s cologne in False Colors smells of. But this doesn’t smell of anything of the sort. It’s practically ecclesiastic, with a strong something that smells of frankincense or some other incense. I guess that must be the amber? However it is, I like it a lot. It’s a powerful, sacred sort of smell and makes me feel as if I should be wearing vestments.
Octopus and Abalone Diver
“Ambergris accord, water lily, freesia, sea spray, molluscan sea shell accord and driftwood.”
I got this one because I wanted to smell what Ambergris smelled like – it being a popular ingredient of 18th Century perfume and the base of the scent that Jasper wears in The Wages of Sin. And I have to say that it’s also nothing at all like I expected. I thought it would be a much earthier, darker, ranker scent, but this is really light and fresh, like cut grass, spice and musk. It’s my favourite of the batch, but unfortunately doesn’t last long on me, so I can see myself using it up really quickly. I wonder if it would last longer on a hanky or a locket?
The Old Market Tavern in Bristol (www.omtbristol.co.uk) is hosting a promotion evening for I Do Two on Wednesday April 14th. The Landlord, Richard Evans, has come on board in a big way – he’s offered to lay on a free buffet – and will promote it on his website and through journalist contacts in the various local papers. Venue magazine (www.venue.co.uk) will be plugging the event and reviewing the book. Their L&G editor has been in touch and he’s very positive about it.
Authors Charlie Cochrane and Bruin Fisher will be there, signing copies of the anthology. Anyone who fancies turning up will be more than welcome. Contact me if you want directions or further info and I’ll put you in touch with Bruin, who has arranged and is organizing it.
