your morning Midnight round-up

[swan_tower]

The major purpose of this is to say that Orbit has announced the winners of the website competition. (If you are one, I think they've notified you by now, but everyone else may not have heard.) Thanks to everyone who participated, and I hope you had fun!

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Review time:

juushika was not a fan of the flashbacks, and found the characters a bit underdeveloped, but liked the book overall.

Two people in Italy also seem to be saying nice things about it, as near as I can tell from Babelfish and my own limited command of the Romance language family. (Hey, people in Italy -- keep talking about it! Then maybe I can make a translation sale there.)

***

Brief quasi-interview piece on Sci Fi Wire, the Sci Fi Channel's news service. John Joseph Adams (better known to some of you as the slush reader for F&SF) interviewed me, then compiled my answers into something more like an article.

There should be a few more coming in the nearish future, too -- but I want to clear these tabs, so here's this stuff, and I'll post again when the other things happen.

Comments

[kendokamel.livejournal.com]

I don't know if you've seen my LJ, but I ran into a very enthusiastic fan over the weekend. She literally squeed. (:

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I had missed that, actually -- I'm kind of skimming LJ most days, alas. Thanks!

[wom-italy.livejournal.com]

Hi.

I work for Wings of Magic, the site that talked about Midnight Never Come. The article says really nice things about your book, indeed. If you want I can translate it roughly for you. I have also a proposal for you. Would you be so nice to get an interview from us? Thanks in advance for the answer and best regards.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I'd be happy to! I presume you mean an e-mail interview, right? It might take me a little while to finish it -- the next month is a bit crazy -- but if you would like to send it along (http://www.swantower.com/marie/contact.html), I'll get to it as soon as I can.

[wom-italy.livejournal.com]

Sure, an e-mail interview. Don't worry, we'll wait. We really appreciate you've accepted and we're really looking forward to it. I'll send the interview to you in the next days. Until then, best regards!

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I look forward to seeing it!

[wom-italy.livejournal.com]

Here is the translations of the article we wrote about your book. I hope you'll enjoy it.

Midnight never come is the third novel by Marien Brennan, aka Bryn Neuenschwander: the book, titled in a really suggestive way, is perfectly aligned with the new tendencies of modern fantasy literature, clinging in part to reality through contaminations with history. Spy-story, action novel and pure fantasy blend themselves in this book, creating an explosive cocktail in which the old England enjoys the reign of the last of the Tudor. But the story of another court, ruled by another woman, will cross paths with Elisabetta I’s one, which will have to defend her kingdom from an unknown and magic power, which ousts rulers and shuffles ethnic groups since the dawn of times. It’s still not available in italian, though you can easily find it in our territory in original language (which is not bad, indeed). In England, cradle of myths and legends – and keen towards stories that celebrate the country in pomp and solemnity – the book has gained in June glorious reviews: the author has even claimed, in a recent interview, to have put really much effort in making the unions and parallelisms between courts the more realistic as possible, instead of inventing them from scratch, and to have done a lot of historical researches in order to avoid that sense of fiction and revision which we can find in the lesser historical-fantasy novels.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I had a lot of Spanish and Latin, so I can more or less muddle through Italian with some help, but it's good to get something more complete.