Open Book Thread: Midnight Never Come
Jun. 23rd, 2008 11:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swan_towerQuick reminder: the contest running on the official website for Midnight Never Come goes until midnight GMT on June 30th. All six questions have been posted now, and for every one you get right, your name is entered in the drawing for a $500/£250 gift voucher.
Onward to the purpose of the post.
Consider this the official Open Thread for Midnight Never Come. If you have any comments you'd like to make about the book, questions you'd like to ask, feel free to do it here. Want to inquire about some historical detail? Find out why I chose to do something a particular way? Point out to me some anachronistic words or phrases I failed to scrub out before publication? This is the place. I'll be linking this post on my website, so if you haven't read the book yet, you can always come back here later.
(People can and do e-mail me, but I figured I'd try doing this publicly, where people can see what, if anything, others have to say.)
Onward to the purpose of the post.
Consider this the official Open Thread for Midnight Never Come. If you have any comments you'd like to make about the book, questions you'd like to ask, feel free to do it here. Want to inquire about some historical detail? Find out why I chose to do something a particular way? Point out to me some anachronistic words or phrases I failed to scrub out before publication? This is the place. I'll be linking this post on my website, so if you haven't read the book yet, you can always come back here later.
(People can and do e-mail me, but I figured I'd try doing this publicly, where people can see what, if anything, others have to say.)
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no subject
Date: 2008-06-25 01:24 am (UTC)Why pick that period, with Walsingham half-there?
no subject
Date: 2008-06-25 01:44 am (UTC)Colsey . . . he's one of those characters who goes in randomly because okay, Deven is a gentleman, he needs a servant. His personality happened by accident, which is how I like it. And he ended up being enough of a personality that he needed his moment in the plot. I substantially re-wrote the scene where he dies because the first time, he got gacked kind of pointlessly, and I really felt he deserved better than that.
(Ranwell, on the other hand, was stuck in during revisions, because I discovered Gentlemen Pensioners were required to have two manservants and three horses. [I also added a horse.] So if he's Manservant Barely Appearing In This Book, that's why. The offstage conflict between him Colsey is there to explain why Ranwell doesn't get to do anything in the story.)
no subject
Date: 2008-06-25 02:36 am (UTC)I really liked Colsey's personality. Territorial servants don't show up nearly enough.
I think I would get the Walsingham thing better were I more into Elizabethan things than I am. I can see where it is useful, I can see how you have made it useful, but my first response is not, "Oh, that's a wonderful way to use Walsingham's death!" but, "So why'd she kill him?" This is not terribly optimal for historical fiction.
Also, I really like that you don't have Deven meet Lune and fall in love, but have him fall in love and then be Betrayed! horribly Betrayed! followed by the realization that hey, she is the woman he loved, she's just also this other woman. And Lune, who has been pretending love, finds a partner instead.
There are so many ways you could have screwed that up, and you didn't hit a one of them.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-25 02:44 am (UTC)I hope, at least, that people who think "So why'd she kill him?" will at least go on to think, "Probably because that's when and how she dies." But if you're not up on the history, then no -- making use of when and how he dies won't cause any particular glee.
As for Deven and Lune, you remind me: when I worked out how that relationship would go, my subconscious insisted on calling their confrontation in the orchard the Big Misunderstanding, borrowing a term particularly used in romance fiction. But it isn't a Big Misunderstanding, and that's what pleased me about it: Deven is, in fact, entirely justified and right to be suspicious of Anne. (Though he misses his mark slightly at first, through no fault of his own.)
Also, the original plan was for Lune to go to Deven for help after she gets out of prison, and to therefore be required to confess that she's a fae. This? Was not interesting enough. Telling people stuff is not half so fun as having them find out when you don't want them to. Hence the Cloak Lane scene, when her glamour gets shattered in front of him. (And it let me get him to the Goodemeades, which was useful, since they could actually convince him not to run screaming and/or stab people.)
no subject
Date: 2008-06-25 02:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-25 04:10 am (UTC)More to the point, the Goodemeades were useful for convincing him not all fae were lying bitches and/or murdering bastards. (And for cheerfully meddling in his love life. They knew exactly what they were asking for, when they suggested he give Lune a ride back to London.)
no subject
Date: 2008-06-25 04:27 am (UTC)Drat it, *, I do not need more encouragement to become an Elizabethan theatre nerd. Really. I am half-sick of a particular smugness I see in some Elizabethan theatre nerdiness-- which I realize may not actually be there-- and I cannot learn everything all at once. And here you come with quotes! And spies! And historical context which does not exclude underhill interference!
*I find I want to say Bryn here, and I am not sure if this is right. Ideally, there would be some confluence of names, a nickname that serves for both, but no.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-25 04:33 am (UTC)My Elizabethan theatre nerdiness is amateur in the extreme. I've read only one Marlowe play, and seen none performed, much less anybody else who isn't Shakespeare. But he's got some very quotable lines.
"But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead . . . ."
*I suspect I just made that word up.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-26 06:27 pm (UTC)I've been playing Changeling for years, so it was really interesting for me to see how MNC was changed to become its own work based on fairy lore. I spent half my time trying to translate back to the world of the game, and to an extent I could, but it really let me see how much further you'd taken the story. The depth of your research really shows.
I'm really looking forward to And Ashes Lie.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-26 08:37 pm (UTC)The major bit of Changeling material excised had to do with freeholds. Originally, Suspiria's crime (committed in 1399, not way back when) was to reave and destroy a balefire in an attempt to reopen a gate to Arcadia. Creating the Onyx Hall was her attempt at atonement, but she didn't realize the other half of it would be the choice of what to do with her creation; she reaved it again to destroy the PCs, and thus failed to lift her curse. (That consequences of that plot didn't actually get dealt with in the game until 2006.)
Also, Invidiana was a sluagh, since I couldn't make her a sidhe. Otherwise it would have been a tossup, whether she was Eiluned or Ailil.
Beyond that, though, most of the Changeling material turned out to be closely enough based on the folklore that there weren't half so many things to file off as I expected. Most of the other things that went away (like the Seelie and Unseelie Courts) did so because they're Irish or Scottish in origin, instead of English.
It's great to know I have a Changeling player among my readers! ^_^
no subject
Date: 2008-07-02 12:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-02 02:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-02 03:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-02 03:58 pm (UTC)You had weird splintering going on because of the history leading up to Elizabeth's reign: Edward's was dominated by intensely reform-minded Protestants (including the kind that usually got called "puritan"), while Mary's then whiplashed back to Catholicism. Your average Englishman working on his farm, in the meanwhile, mostly didn't like change, and they'd had a lot of it lately. When Elizabeth came to the throne, she was caught between advisers and certain segments of the populace driving for reform, and advisers and certain segments of the populace driving against reform -- with the threat of civil war if she pushed for too much change.
What resulted was the Elizabethan settlement, and frankly, it has all the hallmarks of a compromise that satisfied nobody. The issue is not that non-puritans couldn't be passionate about religion; the issue is that, at the time, pretty much nobody was passionate about the Church of England. It was a political creation designed to keep England from ripping itself apart; reformers hated it for its Catholic trappings, and Catholics hated it for its insufficient trappings. It served Invidiana's purposes because it didn't have all the time-strengthened traditions of Catholicism, and it also didn't have the active crusading against Satan's hand in the world of puritan belief. A politically-created church suited her quite well.
Mind you, that is a particular spin on it, and if there's one place I felt I did insufficient research, that would be it. I said at one point that I really would need a degree in Renaissance theology before I would feel qualified in what I was saying, and it's kind of true. Honest disagreement is entirely feasible. I was just curious what you were disagreeing with. :-)
no subject
Date: 2008-07-02 06:55 pm (UTC)I think it's very easy for us to underestimate the power of the vernacular service because by now most people our age worldwide take it for granted that there will be Christian services in the vernacular available. But I think -- and this is a very Protestant view, I know -- that there was a great deal of power in bringing people's worship to their daily tongues. That it brought more power to the people using it, not less. That even as much of the Reformation as the CofE represents made the people stronger, not weaker. And I wouldn't have taken that spin in part because I feel pretty strongly about that, and partly because I feel that there are some unfortunate attitudes about what Christianity "really" is and who "really" counts nowadays that this sort of unintentionally underlined for me.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-04 01:24 am (UTC)The thing I wanted to get across, and maybe didn't, wasn't that Latin was special and the vernacular wasn't. The prayers get their power from two things: devout faith and/or accumulated habit, for lack of a better word. The Latin prayers are older, and therefore have worn sort of a metaphysical channel through which the effect can flow. Deven, being not a terribly passionate Protestant himself, got better results with the traditional method, but if you had put (say) Walsingham down there, he would have flattened them all with English.
So yes: just because people weren't passionate about the CoE was not meant to imply that this extended to vernacular Protestantism in general. Far, far from it.
midnight never comes
Date: 2008-08-22 06:17 pm (UTC)Thanks again
Craig in Hoboken, NJ
Re: midnight never comes
Date: 2008-08-22 06:29 pm (UTC)Re: midnight never comes
Date: 2008-09-22 09:02 am (UTC)I particularly liked the fact that you needed an angel to fight Hell and the only one who could help was Dr Dee. I would've liked to know more about what happened between him and his fae scryer though.
My favourite line: "She moved in an invisible sphere of her own disgrace."
Joanne
Singapore
Re: midnight never comes
Date: 2008-09-23 02:01 am (UTC)John Dee and Edward Kelley are a great pair to read about. In some ways Kelley's the more interesting character; it's an open question whether he was conning Dee, or whether he believed in the work the two of them did. I focused on Dee because a) Kelley wasn't in England at the right time and b) he was more about alchemy than the angelic work, but came across a line in a biography where Kelley said something about faeries -- the quote Dee gives from him in the novel, of course. Once I saw that, the whole backstory to that historical relationship suggested itself to me.
Re: midnight never comes
Date: 2008-09-23 02:11 am (UTC)Actually, I also didn't quite get why the Goodmeades were so attached to Suspiria. Or is it just a melodramatic Brownie thing!?
I think it's supercool that you studied folklore. Sometimes I wish the Chinese had more of legends of the sort to explore. They tend to be more spirits and ancestors that you don't want to offend. Not as interesting as pucks and faery courts!
Re: midnight never comes
Date: 2008-09-23 02:18 am (UTC)Though they are also melodramatic little brownies, yes. :-) Gertrude especially. Rosamund's a bit more level-headed.
I suspect you could do equally good fantasy off the Chinese material; if you go digging through the primary sources of the British Isles, a lot of it boils down to creatures you don't want to offend. We've built a whole framework of fantasy on top of that, though, so that now it seems natural to write novels about it all. I don't see any reason someone couldn't do the same with Chinese folklore. In fact, I wish more people would!
Re: midnight never comes
Date: 2008-09-23 02:28 am (UTC)PS. And I love how you worked Kit Marlowe's quote in. XD
no subject
Date: 2008-09-03 10:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-04 08:11 am (UTC)Midnight Never Come: Wow!
Date: 2008-10-02 04:56 am (UTC)I am an avid reader of anything Tudor. I prefer the Tudor period where Henry 8 and Anne Boleyn are featured, most, but I enjoy reading anything from any part of the Tudor reign. I've become something of an amateur historian regarding that period, particularly where H8 and Boleyn are concerned, so I have a pretty good idea of the history around the period of Elizabeth I, from that perspective. Not only am I finding the historical fact solid, but I love the added dimension of the Fae, and am turning some of my self-education efforts to learning about this area of folklore. I just love the ingenius way you have fused these two worlds of existence. What I love most is the way you have managed with the politics and the social dynamics of both worlds. I think it gives the story a very realistic spin because it keeps the "romance" of the era intact yet gives a great perspective of what it might have been like to really live in these times, as either a Fae or a mortal. I picked this book off the shelf to read because of it's relation to the Tudors, but I love it just for itself! I am absolutely going to read the second in the series, and probably more of your material besides. Love what you did! I have discovered a new writer to follow. Thanks for lending your creative talent to the world!
Jeri Risin
Tudor-Writer-Wanna-Be
Re: Midnight Never Come: Wow!
Date: 2008-10-02 06:24 pm (UTC)Since I'm working on a review of it right now, I'll go ahead and plug Elizabeth Bear's Ink and Steel and Hell and Earth, which are likewise Elizabethan faerie fantasies. She probably did even more research than I did, if only because she had more time in which to do it, and I think she gets the life of the times very well.
Midnight Never Comes
Date: 2009-03-21 11:49 pm (UTC)I would like to comment about Midnight Never Comes. My name is Jon Bedingfield and as a hobby I research family history, as my father did for thirty years before he pass on. I use a lot of his prayer work to advance my research. The reason I am telling this to let know were I am coming from.
I found website through a link on the http://www.faerieworlds.com and I was reading information about your book Midnight Never Comes and found that many parts of the book included some of my family history. On The Court page for example: Queen Elizabeth I while a prisoner at the Tower of London Sir Henry Bedingfield was Constable of the Tower. Second Dr. John Dee was a distance relative through my great Uncles second marriage to my aunt who was my grand mothers sister, and was the father of Frances Dee, an American actress in the thirties and forties. I personal never met them, but my father had. Third Robert Beale is distantly related through my son-in-law Wesley Bell. His great great grand father changed the last name from Beale to Bell when moved they to the United States. I find it very interesting how many members of my family had played a very important part in your book and the history of England.
Re: Midnight Never Comes
Date: 2009-03-23 09:09 pm (UTC)Wow! You know, I made a deliberate choice to have as many of the mortal characters be real people as possible -- but it never really occurred to me that any of my readers might be related to them! That's fascinating. I recognize the Bedingfield surname from my research, too, though Sir Henry didn't end up in the book.
I must say, you win the prize for boggling the author. :-) I hope I didn't do an injustice to any of your distant relatives . . . .
no subject
Date: 2009-11-30 08:38 pm (UTC)I read Midnight Never Come as part of the Sirens 2010 reading list (I went last October and have already registered for next year) and loved it! You've managed to weave some of my favourite things together: English history, cities, political intrigue and fantasy. I'm a bit of a faerie newbie--I've read Holly Black's Tithe books a few years ago but they definitely need a re-read and are more YA besides--so I had a lot of questions about the faerie culture. So thank you for a delightful read! It was wonderfully plotted, and I loved how you blended historical figures in with your tale. That part reminded me a little bit of George Macdonald Frasier's Flashman books :)
I'm also really happy to learn you're an anthropologist--I'm only just completing my anthropology studies, and I see a lot of cross-over in anthro and literature (fantasy especially). I was thinking about writing my thesis on the construction of culture in fantasy, but I settled for reading practices of children instead.
I've put In Ashes Lie on my Christmas list, and can't wait to see what comes after. I poked around on your site and saw you're currently working on a Victorian one... I love how you've made all these the same series. Do you know if you're going to write one after the Victorian book? If so, which era? (WWI?) I have to admit, I'm hoping a little bit you'll write The Onyx Court into the present day.
Faye
no subject
Date: 2009-12-05 07:19 pm (UTC)Glad you enjoyed it! The series may or may not continue on past the Victorian period; it depends on a number of factors, foremost of which is whether I can come up with good premises for more books. (A time period does not a premise make, unfortunately.) If it does, though, there will be one book set during the Blitz, and then yes -- one in the modern day.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-05 07:36 pm (UTC)