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The Story Revealed
Final guesses on the novella I finished last week included “Haitian loa” and “kitsune” — both incorrect. But then two people guessed correctly! So when I get home, tooth_and_claw and sarcastibich, I’ll send you a list of what books I have on hand, and you can tell me which ones you want signed and mailed to you.
This was actually even harder of a question than I thought, because it turns out that one of the giveaway details has never been mentioned on this incarnation of my LJ. If you conducted a search (which wshaffer almost did), you would have had to do so on my old blog, the one I was using up until 2006. The number of people who have been following me since all the way back then is quite small . . . hence admitting this was a difficult challenge, one I didn’t necessarily expect anybody to get. The best chance for the rest of you was to have a good enough memory to remember that I linked to one of those songs last year — in fact, precisely one year to the day before I posted it again as part of this series. That, I believe, was the last time I said anything on here about Ree Varekai.
I mentioned her before and during my tour last year, because music had put her back into my head, and I found that the core of the concept still held a lot of power for me. Enough power that I started poking at it . . . and coming up with a cosmology where she could exist without copy-pasting the game world she came from . . . and then working out a plot for a novella that I really need a title for, so I can stop thinking of it as the “proof of concept” story where I’m test-driving my idea to see if it works. And then during this tour I decided to buckle down and try, and now I have a draft of the novella and this is a thing that might actually happen.
So what were the clues? Well, that fourth song was from the Cirque du Soleil show Varekai — that’s why it wound up on Ree’s game soundtrack, because of her name. (I didn’t realize I hadn’t posted her full name since the old journal. Mea culpa.) The third one, as I said, I linked to precisely one year previously; it’s also from her soundtrack, and stood for the moment when she hit utter rock bottom, just before the transformation that made her whole once more. The other two are recent additions to her score: “Bad Moon Rising” for the way her fatalist aspect is linked to the lunar cycle, and “I Will Not Bow” just because it fits. That’s what she sounds like when her fatalist aspect is dominant over her survivor aspect, when a pragmatic understanding of the obstacles has become “fuck everything; I’ll just take you all down with me.”
If you didn’t guess, don’t feel bad — you basically have to know Ree to guess most of those songs are pointing at her. (Both of the people who did guess were players in that game.) But hey: the bright side is, now I have all kinds of other things that apparently you all think I should write about! :-)
As for the novella, I don’t know what will happen with it. I need to revise it, and then see about trying to sell it somewhere. News on that when I have any to share.
Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.
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And don't bother mailing me a book . . . I'll be seeing you soon enough!
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For my organizational purposes, let me know which of these I should keep out for you when I go to repack the author-copies box:
Guerriere, mass-market paperback (French translation of Warrior)
Hexenkrieger, mass-market paperback (German translation of Witch)
Doppelganger/Hexenkrieger, hardcover (German omnibus translation)
A Star Shall Fall, mass-market paperback
With Fate Conspire, hardcover
A Natural History of Dragons, advance reader copy
A Natural History of Dragons, hardcover
A Natural History of Dragons, US trade paperback
A Natural History of Dragons, UK trade paperback
The Tropic of Serpents, hardcover
The Tropic of Serpents, US trade paperback
The Tropic of Serpents, UK trade paperback
Voyage of the Basilisk, advance reader copy
Voyage of the Basilisk, hardcover
Voyage of the Basilisk, UK trade paperback
Zombies: More Recent Dead (anthology containing "What Still Abides")
Talebones #31 (magazine containing "The Twa Corbies")
Looking forward to you guys being out here!
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