Purty pictures!

Now that everybody's had time to send me icons . . . alessandriana, you're the winner! Many, many thanks, and as you can see, I'm already using it. If you send your mailing address to me (marie {dot} brennan [at] gmail {dot} com), I'll get the ARC on its way to you.

Of course, those of you who have gotten ARCs have only gotten the story. (And a not-fully-revised version of the story, at that -- though at this point I've totally lost track of what I changed after they got printed.) You don't have the lovely, lovely cover, and you don't have what showed up in my inbox today:

The interior art.

See, back when I was developing this pitch, my agent suggested that I make Isabella an artist. Life drawing was -- and still is -- an important skill for natural historians. The idea clicked, and then I had a pie-in-the-sky hope: could I convince my publisher to include sketches in the book? Sketches of Isabella's own work?

Tor agreed, and so not only is Todd Lockwood doing the cover, he's producing ten rougher, black-and-white drawings that will be scattered throughout the novel. It is perfect. They aren't all done yet -- a few are still in the "preliminary sketch" stage -- but the ones I've seen are utterly fabulous. And it will add so much to the book, being able to have the artwork in there, supporting the idea that Isabella is drawing everything she sees in Vystrana.

I don't know if I'll be able to sneak any previews of that to you guys before the book comes out. But I wanted to let you know that my beautiful, beautiful cover is not the only Lockwood art this book will have; the purtiness continues inside. I can't wait to see the finished product.

while the cat's away . . . .

A while back, I guest-blogged for jimhines, posting about the irrationality of fairy tales. Now I'm back for a second round: this time I look at legends, which not only make more sense, but are more closely related to fantasy.

Comment over there, either on the LJ post or its Wordpress mirror.

Information Density, or, cramming a fifty-pound sausage into a five-pound sack

alecaustin recently had a thought-provoking post on his LJ, riffing off some recent discussions about the people and issues that are "invisible" in fiction to talk about information density and how you can't fit everything into a story. In particular, there are certain kinds of topics that fit very badly indeed. He has a few examples of his own, but since I want to dig into this issue more deeply, I'm going to use one I know fairly well, which is the English Civil War.

One of the books I read when doing research for In Ashes Lie was called Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642. As the title suggests, its argument is that the wars of the mid-seventeenth century had their roots in the sixteenth -- which is exactly the kind of thing that's hard to convey in fiction, when the cause in question isn't a simple case of "this person was assassinated five generations ago, and we still bear a grudge for that." In particular, I'm going to tease out one economic strand for the purposes of our discussion here. If you're not interested in reading about that sort of thing (if you aren't, I can't blame you), then scroll on down; I'll get back to my point in a moment.

(Fair Warning: my point is long. And digresses along the way.)

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( Causes of the English Revolution, The Nutshell Version. )

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( The U.S. Civil War, or Shelby Foote 2.0 )

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( The Easy Reader approach )

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( The U.S.S. Make Shit Up )

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( Oddly, prophecy never seems to work like this. )

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There are nine and sixty ways of addressing these problems, of course. More than that, really; there's at least one way for each story, and what works in one case may not work in another. You can tell a tightly-focused tale positioned at the exactly confluence of character and plot that will allow you to cover one issue in depth. You can tell a sprawling epic that throws everything and the kitchen sink into the book. You can invent reasons for the impersonal to become personal. You can back off to an omniscient narrator who will explain things to the reader more efficiently than a character ever could. You can be one of those amazing writers who manages to convey in a single sentence what most people would take a paragraph or more to do.

The right answer is the one you can make work for the story at hand.

Which is totally unhelpful to say. But it's nigh-impossible to get specific without specifics to apply it to. I know what I did for my books, and why, and what I would do differently now. I can dissect other authors' books and talk about what I would have done if they were mine. I just can't offer a generalized prescription that will apply to That Book Over There, The One I Haven't Read.

But I can toss my thoughts up on the Internet for others to read, and invite comments. I know alecaustin isn't the only one who has been chewing on this; I'd like to hear other people's thoughts.