The Next Big Thing

You may have seen other authors posting this meme. I was tagged by my new excellent friend, the lovely Leigh Evans, and I thought it would be fun. Answer some questions; tag some of my author friends to do the same. Here goes!

What is the working title of your next book?
Dust and Light, the first book of the Sanctuary Duet.

Where did the idea come from for the book?
Unfinished business! My novels Flesh and Spirit and Breath and Bone took place in a deliciously complex world. A civil war raged in a kingdom suffering a disastrous decline in the weather. Magic was confined to a group of wealthy families - known as purebloods - who provided their services to cities, nobles, clergy, or whomever else could afford to pay for them. To nurture and preserve their magic, purebloods kept themselves detached from ordinary society and politics.  They created a mannered, disciplined subculture, linking themselves to their clients by strict contracts.

It had been great fun to develop and structure the pureblood culture – but as it happened the hero of Flesh and Spirit had spent his life running away from his pureblood family. In fact he called the life of a pureblood sorcerer “slavery with golden chains.” But his jaundiced viewpoint  left many aspects of pureblood life unexplored. When I started considering what project I wanted to work on when I finished The Daemon Prism and the Collegia Magica series, I wondered if there might have been someone else interesting raised in the pureblood social structure—someone who embraced and believed in it—and that’s when I met Lucian de Remeni-Masson.

Unlike most pureblood sorcerers, who inherited the talents of either the mother’s bloodline or the father’s, Lucian demonstrated gifts in both his mother’s artistic line and his father’s bloodline magic of history. That’s when the story took off.

What genre does your book fall under?
Mythic fantasy with a strong mystery element.  Or something like that.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
Oh, I never do this – or if I do, I don’t tell. I’ve found that my readers have such widely varying images of my characters, so I don’t like to skew them too much. The lesson came clear when I had readers casting Seyonne, the hero of Transformation, with everyone from a young Daniel Day Lewis to Orlando Bloom! Suffice it to say that Lucian is a lean, good-looking young man of twenty six with typical pureblood features: dark, straight hair, aquiline nose, and dusky skin.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Maybe I can distill it into three. Lucian de Remeni, pureblood sorcerer with a bent for portraiture, has grown up in wealth, privilege, self-discipline, and the conviction that his beloved family’s magical talents are the gods’ gift to a troubled kingdom. But a family tragedy begins a spiraling downfall that sweeps the young sorcerer into a life he had never imagined. Banished to the crude society of a bustling necropolis, Lucian’s task of becomes the key in two murder investigations which threaten to upend the war for Navronne’s crown and unravel the very foundations of pureblood life.

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Before I go on, I want to tag those who are next up on this branch of The Next Big Thing.

Diana Pharaoh Francis is the author of two fantasy series – the Path series and the Crosspointe Chronicles – and the fabulous Horngate Witches urban fantasy series.  I’m jealous when I report that not only does she write exciting adventures, but she is also a professor of English at the University of Montana, rider of horses, wife, mom, and exceptionally fun person to hang out with at a science fiction convention.  You have never met a professor like Di!

Cindi Myers has authored more than forty novels, spanning romance, historical, western, and women’s fiction.  Her work is consistently excellent, and she is the most focused and productive writer I know.  I go hang out with her on mountain retreats just hoping to absorb some of her professionalism.  Again, it just isn’t fair that she’s gorgeous, generous, and a great teacher.

Mindy Klasky is the author of fantasy, urban fantasy, paranormal chick-lit novels, and under her alter ego, Morgan Keyes, a fabulous new YA fantasy called Darkbeast.  A reformed lawyer and law librarian, Mindy sat alongside me on our first ever convention panel – My First Novel at the 2000 Chicago WorldCon.  Our first books had come out one month apart, from the same publisher, and as women of other professions, we bonded immediately.  Now with twenty-eight novels between us, I guess our panel was a success - our friendship certainly is!

Compared to these three, Linda Joffe Hull is just a newbie.  But her first novel, The Big Bang will likely leave all of us genre writers in the dust. Library Journal describes it as "a fun, sexy suburban soap opera with a touch of mystery." I’ve known this book since it was a baby, and believe me it is like nothing else out there.  Neither is Linda, who is also fun, smart, and sexy!

 

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And now back to the NBT questions:  

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
I've worked with agent Lucienne Diver of the Knight Agency from my first sale thirteen years ago. Dust and Light will be published in 2014 by New American Library/Roc Books.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
Knowing how unlikely it is that I'll reach the end of the story before my deadline of June 2013, it will have taken me a year and a half. I would love to think I could be a third of the way into the second (as yet untitled) volume of the duology by that time, but I'm not placing any bets.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre? My books have been compared to those of Robin Hobb, Guy Gavriel Kay, Mary Stewart, and Lynn Flewelling.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
My favorite authors of my favorite kinds of stories - murder mysteries, historical political intrigues, and world myths. The heart of Dust and Light is the interweaving of two mysteries - the strangling death of a young street urchin in the royal city and the savage massacre of a wealthy family by rampaging fanatics. The resolution of these mysteries leads my hero to dangerous discoveries about the fundamental nature of pureblood magic in Navronne.

What else about the book might pique the reader's interest? These books are not a sequel, but a parallel story to Flesh and Spirit and Breath and Bone, involving entirely new characters. (Dust and Light actually begins a bit more than a year earlier than Valen's story.) One will be able to read either pair first. But for those who've already read the Lighthouse books, there will be some "Easter eggs" – references to some old friends and places. I think that will be fun. Read more of this post!

Demons and Shapeshifters

I am a guest blogger today on Authorial, agently, and personal ramblings, which is my agent, Lucienne Diver's blog. The topic? Gargoyles, and Demons, and Shifters, Oh My!

In my offering, I list my four rules for story development, especially when incorporating some fantasy trope like shapeshifting or the fae or demons. And these four are...

1. Make things really bad for heroes (could you have guessed this?)
2. Make things different than in other stories
3. No black and white
4. Reverse it all

I illustrate these points with the rai-kirah books.

Over the past week, Lucienne has hosted guest blogs from a number of her writers who do shapeshifters and demons and other beasties - including Lynn Flewelling, Faith Hunter, and Susan Krinard.


Read more of this post!

Getting Published

Just got an email from a reader/aspiring writer asking some fundamental questions about this writing business. As she said, there is so much information on the internet, she doesn't know where to start. So let's cover a few of Cindey's questions:

What's the best thing to do in order to get published?

Write great stories. This is not facetious. Many people can think of a great story. But to write one, you have to learn the craft of writing: how to write dialogue, how to write great openings, how to vary your sentence structure, how to avoid common pitfalls like "telling" instead of revealing character and plot through action and dialogue. There's a long list. Reading good stories, reading articles or blogs about writing, going to workshops, getting together with other aspiring writers and learning together, and writing, writing, writing - those are all good ways to learn the craft (reading and writing being the most important!)

I read somewhere that getting an agent could help better than not having one.

This is an age-old argument. A first time author can sell novel length work without an agent, but it is hard, and in today's tightening publishing market, it's probably going to get harder. Yes, "selling" your work to an agent is just as hard as selling your work to a publisher, but you will probably want an agent to negotiate a contract offer for you anyway. And if you can't interest an agent in your work, you'll have difficulty interesting a publisher. Opinions do vary on this. I actually got an editor interested first and then submitted through an agent. I was glad I had her to help me through it. You don't need an agent for short stories, just a source of markets (see ralan.com for an example) and a lot of stamps, envelopes, and cover letters. (Learn how to write a professional cover letter.)

I also read that I could send in a proposal first & not have the book written just yet. Then if there was interest in the book, the publisher would then want the book written.


This can work for non-fiction. You can structure a book proposal by writing a chapter-by-chapter outline and a query letter, explaining your qualifications for writing the book. You would also need to write the first few chapters to include in your proposal. There are many good descriptions of non-fiction book proposals out there. Look at books like Writers' Market or How to Get Happily Published, or the websites of reputable writers and agents. (See Pub Rants link in the margin.)

For fiction and a first time writer, a book proposal is not going to fly. Editors want to see not only that you can write, but that you can finish a whole book. Ideas, sad to say, really are a dime a dozen. Once you've been published you may be able to sell books on proposal, but not (OK, never say never) as a first time writer.

Where do you start?

Write the book. Revise it. Revise it again, until it is the best it can be.

Once you think your book is ready (and this means you've had serious writers and readers - not just your friends - read it and give you feedback) start looking at Preditors and Editors, and Writer Beware to learn about the pitfalls waiting for naive writers. (I've got links in the margin here.) Read the articles in Writers' Market and do research at places like Agent Query (link in the margin, too.) Find some online communities for writers - Absolute Write, Making Light, and the sff.net forums. And I highly recommend agent Kristin Nelson's well-written blog Pub Rants. Read her archives about what agents look at, what makes them stop reading, how to write queries, and so forth.

Hope this helps, Cindey, and all of you! Read more of this post!