Swan Tower

On the bright side, I almost have a complete novel.

6647 words tonight. I'm too sick of sitting at the computer to look up whether that beats the giant marathon I did at the end of MNC. I'm closer to the end than I was then, though; all I still have to write is the epilogue.

And a half-finished scene I glossed over because I'm still not sure what bit of folklore to stick in there. I think we may cut that out for now, and put it back in if I find something appropriate. (Because I have a long-standing habit of insisting that I cannot declare a novel done until it has no holes in it. And I want to write the epilogue last.)

Anyway. Bedtime came and went hours ago. Time for me to do the same.

Three parts revised. Three days' worth of London burned down. One hundred twenty thousand, three hundred and thirty-six words.

I'm nearly done.

Observations: I have lots of great epic battle music. "Holocaust" not only was a word back then, but originally meant a sacrificial offering that has been completely burnt, which is a fabulous thumbs-up to me using it here. I am spoiled by the internets, getting mad at them for not giving me a high-enough-resolution image of Hollar's 1658 plan of St. Paul's Cathedral for me to clearly read where Sir Christopher Hatton's grave monument was. (What do you mean, I have to actually go to the library? And that I can't do so at one a.m.?) I am, however, pleased all over again by history's obliging tendency to drop perfect bits of story in my lap. St. Faith's was right where narrative logic says it ought to be, and I didn't have to go at all out of my way to smash Sir Francis Walsingham's grave.

Destroying things is fun.

(Even if I'm running out of ways to describe stuff burning without just repeating myself over and over and over again.)

I finished revising Part Two last night (in a marathon session made possible by the fact that it's been revised once already), but here's the real landmark:

I've killed a pen.

Yes, dear readers, I have taken so many notes for this novel that they have single-handedly killed a pen. The thing was new when I took it to London. But in the midst of scribbling down some details about how the wells and conduits in the City were running dry in the Fire, I noticed my ink doing the same thing. So we just took a break to walk to the store and buy a new one.

(Because I couldn't just go to the ammo box and pick out another. Why? Because our stuff isn't here yet. But the latest forecast is that it should be arriving tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed.)

I'm just hoping I don't run out of notebook before I'm done. That would be very inconvenient.

Revisions of Part One are done. At least in the broad, chainsaw, "this scene can just die already" sense.

Tomorrow? I start blowing shit up.

This?

Was not supposed to be a 4200-word night.

In fact, I think I even promised kitsunealyc that it wouldn't be.

But, um, that promise, it got broke real good. There are just bits of story that you cannot stop in the middle of, and this turned out to be one. Not because of explosions -- the usual excuse -- but because I really didn't enjoy going some of the places I had to go, and once there, I'd rather just stay and get it all done with. Suffice to say that we are at the height of the Great Plague, at this point, and I feel obscurely that I owe it to the hundred thousand Londoners who died to do everything in my power to communicate just how horrific that was.

Horrific enough that people committed suicide rather than wait for the plague to finish killing them. Horrific enough that they threw themselves into the mass graves, already wrapped in their winding-sheets, as if they were corpses before they even died.

Imagining that is not exactly fun.

4200 words for seven scenes, most of them deeply unpleasant. It's a good thing tomorrow's scene will be . . . not exactly enjoyable, but a breath of air after this suffocating passage, because otherwise I'd be sorely tempted to take the day off. And then perhaps another, and then moving eats me alive, and the next thing I know I'm behind schedule and out of the novel's headspace.

I'm making good progress, at least.


Word count: 85,888
LBR quota: What do you think?
Authorial sadism: See above.

Historical serendipity strikes again. I chose Antony's ward more or less at random; basically I decided to put him on Lombard Street, which meant either Langbourn or Candlewick, and I chose the former. Turns out -- if I'm correctly translating from a modern map of ward boundaries; King William Street wasn't there back then -- the first City plague death in 1665 was in Antony's ward.

I should double-check this in Stow, but not tonight.

It may look like I've been cherry-picking reviews that speak positively of Midnight Never Come, but the truth is I post everything that makes a substantive comment on the book. (I don't figure you all want to see every post that mentions it in passing; possibly you don't even want to see what I do post.) Anyway, as if to prove that, this roundup is a mixed-to-negative bag -- for some reason I hit a run of less enthusiastic reviews lately.

occultatio read it right after finishing Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles, which is the fastest way I can think of to make my book suck. I will be the first in line to admit that, by comparison with her, my writing is lightweight. But if I work very hard and eat my vegetables, one day I may grow mighty enough to equal her first novel. (Pardon me while I go cry again over the fact that she was that damn good right out of the gate.)

meganbmoore liked it in the end, but found the opening overly political and slow-going.

Trinuviel at FantasyBookSpot loved the premise and structure, but the execution just did not come through for her. Despite that, I recommend you go read her review if you like digging past the surface; she clearly knows her way around the Tudor period, and says many intelligent things about my structural choices.

And then a glowing review, to wrap this set up: Lory Hess at the Green Man Review stayed up way past midnight reading it. (And made my day by being the only person so far to make mention of the alchemical allusion at the beginning of Act I. That was a shout-out to my Memento peeps.)

***

Here's the funny thing about Trinuviel's review, which I'd like to discuss more. As I said, she knows her history, and brings up the motif of doubling in Elizabethan thought, connecting that with my mirroring of Elizabeth and Invidiana.

If I were smart, I'd let you believe I planned that all along. Truth is? I didn't. At the time that I thought up Invidiana, I had no idea that doubling was a thing back then, and I'd never heard of the king's two bodies. I came across it later, certainly -- I don't think I could have done that much research and missed it -- but even then, it never occurred to me to turn around and connect that to the idea already in place.

All the things she says about the way the doubling plays out were most definitely deliberate, but the idea itself was a felicitous accident. Which is something I've wondered about ever since I started writing seriously enough to think about the kinds of things we tend to say in English classes and research papers: how much of what we see in a story is deliberate? This gets into the whole "the author is dead" notion in literary criticism, and I'm on the fence about that. On the one hand, being an anthropologist and a writer myself, I always want to know about the person behind the words, the ways in which the author and the context of creation can shed new light on the story you read. On the other hand, sometimes you can find perfectly legitimate meanings in a text that were created completely by accident. It's why I'm always careful to phrase things as "you can read this out of it" unless I know for a fact that the author put it in there on purpose.

At any rate, her comments are food for thought -- especially since I'm currently trying to decide how seventeenth-century fae, influenced by contemporary mortal ideas, might handle the issue of legal justice. I think we have a tendency to cut our fantasy creations slack, to behave as if absolutism and arbitrary sentencing are somehow more attractive when they're done by a faerie, but this strikes me as a fine time to poke holes in that idea. (Now I just need to figure out how to follow a different model without making it mundane and boring.)

2896. Because I am very bad at stopping in the middle of the 'splody. And then another 39 more, because I'm also bad at stopping 37 words short of my next benchmark.

Well, I wanted to hit 60K before Conestoga. I just didn't mean to do it tonight.


Wordcount: 60002
LBR quota: Blood. It goes well with 'splody.
Authorial sadism: Well, I had to come up with a reason they couldn't just solve all their problems that way.

Favorite bits: Yay for crispy moths, conveniently timed changes in the lieutenancy in the Tower of London, curious horses, cameo appearances by Scottish fae, and knowing that particular peep has your back.

Amazon UK has an item listed called Midnight Never Come: And Ashes Lie: Bk. 2, which apparently is 384 pages long and coming out next June.

I would like to know where they buy their crack.

***

Apropos of that, though -- today my editor gave the go-ahead for this book to be longer than the last one, because I feel like I'm short-changing my own story, trying to cram it in too small of a sack. The pros reading this will have already leapt ahead to the immediate corollary concern, which is what that means for my deadline. Answer? Heck if I know. I intend to still make it.

I'd better, if the book is supposed to be out by June 4th . . . but they'll have to shrink the typeface to get it on 384 pages.

***

Also, I just spent ten minutes wandering around my house trying to find the reference book I needed. That's the Royal Exchange, that's Pride's Purge, that's Whitehall, that's the wrong book on Westminster . . . . I think one of the next packing stages will be clearing off the bottom shelf of my research bookcase and letting these books just annex it already, because the piles around the house are getting stupid.

Mush!

It isn't even 8 p.m., and I've already done my writing for the day. Because I just felt like doing it, instead of reading or whatever.

That's a nice feeling, and not one I've had much of lately.

(Mind you, the desire was born of pure sadism. Last night I started an Antony scene that I've been dying to write, because it's just so mean.)


Word count: 48090
LBR tally: Blood, of the metaphysical kind.
Authorial sadism: I've had enough time to think through the consequences of some of the things I've established in this and the previous book. Much to Antony's detriment.