Meet Me at CONjuration

I didn't anticipate returning to Atlanta until next year's Dragon Con, so I was surprised and delighted when I received a last-minute invitation to CONjuration, a fan-driven convention celebrating all things Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and other magical literature, movies, and experiences. It's being held November 4 - 6 at the Marriot Century Center in Atlanta, Georgia.

I've scrambled to acquire more copies of The Hidden Icon and also to assemble chapbooks of The Two Sisters to disseminate. I am positively stoked to be sharing a table in the vendor hall - aptly named Diagon Alley - with Lee Martindale, and trying to figure how many goodies I can squeeze into my suitcase along with clothes and a Yule Ball gown. Priorities, friends.

I'll also be on a few panels.

• Saturday, 4:00 PM, Tail and Tongue: Don' t Step on the Worms - Grima Wormtongue and Peter (Wormtail) Pettigrew both get a bad rap. Yes, they were pawns of their evil lords. Yes, they betrayed their own kind. Could they really help it or were they victims, too? Did their deaths give them any redemption or did they just confirm their roles as tragic characters and tools cast aside by their masters?
• Saturday, 6:00 PM, Stranger Things: The Magical Influences - Drawing from such influences as Dungeons & Dragons, Tolkien, Magic: the Gathering, Stephen King, and the movies made by Chris Columbus and Steven Spielberg, the supernatural, enchanted elements of Stranger Things fairly drip from the screen! The series’ surreal atmosphere is propelled forward by humanity’s lack of understanding of the paranormal. The unknown science is magic!

In addition to some seriously cool programming - really, I don't know how much I'll be willing to stay at my vendor table because everything looks so fun - there are opportunities to win House points, live performances, and of course, a Yule Ball. I am also over the moon excited to meet Juliet Marillier, who will be launching and signing her latest book at the event, and whose writing has been influencing and inspiring me for more than a decade.

So, if you're in the Atlanta area, I don't think you'll want to miss this, and I won't want to miss you.

What's in a Name?

Writing as a teenager, one of my favorite things to do was to name characters using the handy baby name bible passed on to me by my cousin. I loved looking up what a name meant and largely made my decisions that way - though I could also search by country of origin, astrological sign, season, or famous folks who shared a name. If I was feeling real crafty, I could choose a name and change a letter or two: the height of creativity in my late teens.

Now that that the internet is a thing and I'm not cramming a week's worth of searching and fooling around on the computer into one class period, I've got a lot more resources at my disposal in selecting the perfect name for my characters. Whether it's naming my latest gaming avatar or current favorite narrator, there are as many opportunities to be unique as there are risks in duplicating what someone else has already done. The work is practically being done for us these days.

But there's still something about selecting a character's name that feels like it ought to be organic, at least for me.

In The Hidden Icon, I wanted both Eiren and Gannet to be named for birds. I wish I could tell you that I had a really cool reason why this was, but I'll be honest: I did not. I wanted there to be something immediately connecting the two characters, identifying some kinship between them. Names are vital things: they're given to us, but they also principally define how we first think of ourselves and how we connect to others. Being the mother of small children and often in the company of other small children, I can tell you, names are a pretty big deal. You tell a small child she's "silly" and she'll insist, "No, I'm INSERT NAME HERE."

In the first draft, Eiren was simply 'Wren.' I later changed the spelling of her name to be more fantastical, which feels so lame to admit, but it's true. I've had some delightful (for me) conversations around the pronunciation of her name, and I've been surprised by the variety. Some folks have normalized it, assuming it's pronounced AIR-en, others EYE-ren. In my head, it's always been EAR-en, but I've truly got no dog in this fight. I just love that there is a fight.

Her sister, Lista, was also originally named 'Chantal,' which I changed because I wanted something more grounded. Morainn's name was different in the first draft, as well: she was Morrigan, which obviously has a lot of connotation I later wanted to avoid. There's some bird stuff there, too - you'd think I'd planned it.

As I'm writing, I often have to come up with a name for a character on the spot - and I do it quickly, often with the intention of changing it later. I like to lean on names that have the flavor of the setting the characters are in, and just like my oh-so-ingenious teenage self, my best (and possibly only) trick is mixing up a few letters to create something that's unique to my world. I tend to poke around and try things out until I settle on something that just has the right feel, just as one does when naming children, really.

Bonus about naming in books? No arguments with my husband. The characters are all mine.

Meet Me at Imaginarium

Excitement! I'll be participating in the Imaginarium Convention this coming weekend, 7 - 9 October, in Louisville, Kentucky. I've been trying to attend this convention pretty much since it began, and my babies kept being born and preventing me from doing so. If you're local to the area, it looks to be a pretty fabulous event for reading, writing, gaming, and cosplay. I'm on a few panels with some cool folks and I'm practicing my jokes so they aren't lame. Except, my rehearsed jokes are possibly lamer than the spontaneous ones.

My schedule:

• Friday, 5:00 PM, Slow Down, Hot Stuff! - If you’re into waiting a solid six hundred pages before characters jump into bed together, instead savoring meaningful glances, heated accidental brushing of hands, and lots of dancing around feelings, have we got some book recommendations for you.
• Friday, 8:00 PM, Author Signing in Vendor Hall
• Saturday, 11:00 AM, How to Fracture a Fairy Tale - Fairytale and mythic retellings are a popular storytelling device – some might say too popular. How do you pull it off in a way that feels fresh and interesting?
• Saturday, 5:00 PM, What's In a Name? - How to create names for your characters that fit your world’s language and culture.
• Sunday, 1:00 PM, Bad Boys (and Girls)! - The anti-heroes, the lone wolves, the ones so bad they are good. Why do we like the bad boys and anti-heroes sometimes more than the white knights?

Guys, I bought the good treats for my signing and will have paperback copies of The Hidden Icon available for sale - the very same editions you can no longer buy on Amazon, or ever again, as it will be re-released along with the second book next year. Consider yourself bribed.

What's Your Fictional Type?

I definitely have a "type" when it comes to fictional characters. These are the sorts of folks who I wouldn't find myself associating with in real life: they'd be unbearable to be around, impossible to talk to, or just intimidating as hell. But on the page or the screen? It's true love. The Strong, Silent Type

Dudes who are supremely self-contained, whose moods occupy the eye of the storm until they are the storm itself, who communicate volumes with their eyes alone... it's no surprise I love them, right? One of the first - and possibly most embarrassing - fictional crushes on this sort of fella was Conner McDermott from Sweet Valley High: Senior Year. When you identify strongly with bookish, rule following Elizabeth Wakefield as a teen, it's kind of hard not to fall for the boy you 100 percent shouldn't. But, this archetype is an interesting one, and has appealed to me the longest possibly because I want to believe there are hidden depths to everyone... or want to justify my tendency to lose my tongue in the company of quiet, steely-eyed, handsome dudes. Noteworthy SSTs: Bran from Son of the Shadows, Mr. Darcy, John Thorton from North & South.

The Scoundrel

I really ought to know better about this one, and while I've certainly crushed hard on some real-life troublemakers in my time, I much prefer the fictional variety. No consequences with those - and no need to confront the reality that you neither can nor should try to change who someone is to accommodate your love of law and order. This guy can make a girl laugh even when he's about to get her killed. I've not found many mischievous book characters I find believable or likeable, which makes me worry about attempting to write this sort of person myself. But I'm sure someday I'll try. Noteworthy miscreants: Han Solo, Sky Masterson, Malcolm Reynolds, Rosto the Piper from Tamora Pierce's Terrier and Bloodhound.

The Boss Bitch

I want to be her and I want to be her best friend. She's tough, smart, and capable. There's not a day in her life she's taken shit from anybody. I like that these women are strong, physically and emotionally, and I swear half the reason I've been working out lately is to be more like the fictional women I admire. I doubt my capacity to ever write this sort of woman, though, because I am, regrettably, too much of a pleaser. I blame being raised in the Midwest, and, as my best friend recently pointed out to me, the sort of person who apologizes when other people bump into me. Noteworthy bosses: Katniss Everdeen, Beka Cooper from Terrier, Bloodhound, and Mastiff, Garth Nix's Sabriel, Aeryn Sun.

So, who's your type?

The Email, the Email, What-What, the Email

If you remember Strong Bad checking his email, then we should be friends. Even if you don't, really. You're here and that's enough to make me want to spit in my palm and put 'er there.

But, in the interest of doing the writerly thing and rekindling joy one inbox at a time, I'm launching an email newsletter. I can promise irreverent blog posts, quotes from what I'm reading, first peeks at new projects, and foolish things mined from the internet. You can even turn the lights on and off as you read, if you're into that sort of thing.

I am also actively interested in what you'd like me to write about. A dear friend of mine recently provided me with a fabulous list of questions to go on, but the best things are those that delight, that surprise, that begin conversations you didn't even know you wanted to have. I dig collaboration, so, have at me.

All new subscribers - which is to say, at this point, every subscriber - will receive a link to download a new folk tale as told by Eiren in the sequel to The Hidden Icon. Which I should hopefully get to talk about pretty soon, too.

You can sign up on my website. Readers can anticipate a bi-weekly email and no more - I have small children, a full-time job, and a nasty sleeping habit that's conflicting with my even nastier writing habit, so. No spam here.

Though I make no promises about canned unicorn meat.

The Devil in the Details

I've yet to work on a larger project that requires any genuine amount of research, though there isn't a thing in the world that can be written without consulting somebody, or at the very least Google, several dozen times.

Even when you're writing in a world of your creation, getting just the right word, the appropriate detail, seems so important. Fantastic worlds still need to feel genuine, and sometimes being sure you've referred to a certain architectural feature correctly, or haven't totally fudged the beer brewing process, feels vital. Your character knows these things. Shouldn't you, too? How can you talk about something you can't quite put your finger on?

But more importantly, how to keep from falling down the rabbit hole and getting sassed by the motley collection of doped up caterpillars that is the internet?

Writing is tricky. Sustaining a habit of writing is even trickier. Part of my writing process has always been leaving what I can't answer immediately, or within a few minutes, to be handled during my first round of edits. Editing is a big job, but I feel less pressure when I'm editing because at least I've got something to edit. I want to run from the blank page a whole lot more. If I stop and dither about with looking things up or finessing the details, I run the risk of falling out of the narrative. So if I can't remember what that fiddly bit crowning a castle is^*, or I don't know what sorts of things besides hops go into a beer, I make a note.

And I keep writing.

Some folks might get hung up on not knowing and won't be able to continue writing, but me, I'm always looking for any excuse to take a little break (the curse of learning to multi-task too well, I think) and if I ever want to finish anything, I just can't.

Side note about notes, mine are easy to Ctrl+F when I'm editing because they're always the same. I use XRUMBLRARX mostly because it is extremely silly but also because even if I only type up part of it, the letters aren't likely to appear next to each other in anything else.

What works for me I certainly can't imagine would work for everyone, but at least there's a little levity in my ignorance.

^*I guessed this and I was right: it's crenellation. Score.

A Word is Worth a Thousand Words

I took a linguistics class as an undergraduate to satisfy my math requirement - formal reasoning, anyone? - and chose as my final project an analysis and presentation of Tolkien's Elvish. I played a truly cool clip of him reciting one of Galadriel's songs from The Fellowship of the Ring, "Namárië." Sweet on Middle Earth and sweeter on etymology, I had long belonged to a group of writers in my first blogosphere who shared my interests. While I wasn't among the devoted few who could actually speak Quenya, I was intensely interested in language creation - so much so that in the earliest of early drafts of The Hidden Icon, I included a great deal more of the language of Eiren's world.

In subsequent drafts, very few of the words of that language would make the cut. Partly because I wasn't confident of my skills, and partly because I ended up building the reality of her world in other ways. But, I had originally framed rules around tenses, pronouns, and verb conjugations, and had a tidy little vocabulary list typed up that was, sadly, lost in one of the many hard drive failures of my college career. I leaned on my purely academic understanding of the Spanish language - having had to pass a class in written translation to earn my Master's degree - and a semester steeped in The Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English. I even went so far as to carve into polymer clay a phrase that was repeated, with some ceremony, several times in the first draft:

Est a'maban du, na'tura ly.

I know it by heart still. But I can't for the life of me remember what it means.

I had some selfish reasons for creating my own language, too, beyond just the fact that it was fun. I did not and do not like the word "princess," and two of the principal characters are royalty. It's a pretty loaded term whose baggage didn't make sense for my story, and I found a way around it with some formal addresses that actually did make the cut: as a member of her kingdom's royal line, Eiren is addressed as Han'dra Eiren, and her brother and father were called by the male equivalent, Han.

Funny thing, I can't recall if the common polite address - Eiren'dra - is in the final draft of the book or not. But I can tell you that dudes are "Han" no matter what.

I think it only makes sense when you're creating your own world to imagine that the people there must speak their own language, or languages, and to wonder how you might work that in or pay homage to it. But there's a point in writing science fiction or fantasy where, at least for me, there are some things you just have to let go for the sake of getting at what matters - the story. Of course they aren't speaking English. Of course they don't keep time the way we do or navigate with the same tools as us or wear clothes in styles we'd recognize but whatever. Eventually I just need to accept that those things they're riding with four legs and shod feet and manes, they're called horses, okay? There are horses on this fictional planet in this fictional universe and it doesn't matter how they got there. There's a suspension of disbelief that is required of speculative fiction readers, and if I'm doing the rest of my job right, hopefully these questions are fleeting, if they occur at all.

Ultimately, I felt silly asking readers to learn a new language, even a little bit, to follow parts of the story. Speculative fiction especially, I feel, has a very short window in which to hook readers, and if there's one thing I've learned from some very fine editors, it's that you have to build the strangeness, bit by bit. Frontloading the weird is as perilous as doing so with too much exposition. There are some writers whose world building is spectacularly and unapologetically strange - Octavia Butler comes immediately to mind - but I'm not one of them.

Who knows, maybe the books of the future will allow for some sort of experiential component, a roided-out electronic ink that transforms as you read it, a translation that's responsive to your understanding, your perception of the narrator's intent and trustworthiness. Maybe I'll have the chops then.

Back to Basics

Whenever I find it hard to settle to writing, as I have lately, there are a few things I've found I can do to work around my reticence. It's not writer's block, really, because I've usually got an idea of where I'm going and even a few scenes I legitimately want to have written (if not necessarily the want to write them). And I've got even less of an excuse now, with the bulk of the writing done but for a few scenes to be massaged in amid the usual rounds of edits. I clean my desk. My writing desk is cozied up to our fireplace and there's nothing on it but a lamp and the "good" colored pencils my daughters aren't allowed to scribble with arranged in an open glass container. So, it doesn't take long, and it's sort of a mental cleanse, too, to prepare me to get down to business.

I make myself a drink. Sometimes it's iced coffee with too much milk and sugar. Sometimes it's wine. On a special occasion, bourbon and cider. But having something to sip while I compel my brain to drip, drip, drip words onto the page is essential.

I get back to basics. I put one of my favorite pens to the physical page and just write. It's usually not much to speak of, but it's enough that I can say the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that, that I've written everyday, that I'm making progress. It's enough to get me over the sometimes crippling uncertainty and exhaustion inspired by a blinking cursor. I've learned to celebrate time spent writing, rather than word count, so the reminder at the bottom of my screen of how much I've done and how much I have to go can be debilitating.

And not just because my word count is a vain number, given how ruthlessly slashed it will be when it comes time to edit.

There's also just something about being able to physically hold a piece of writing that's very powerful. I've found that during the editing process, especially, I want to tear a story up into pieces and rearrange it, want to be able to manipulate it with my hands. While I've seen some folks do this to great effect during brainstorming and outlining a longer work, I've never been able to make it happen with something novel-length. Maybe some desperate night, when no amount of coffee or wine or bourbon can help me to make sense of my made-up worlds, I'll give it another try.

But until then, I'll keep doing what I'm doing, day by day, bit by bit.

Eiren Lives and So Does My Pathetic Sense of Humor

Two quick, glorious, gorgeous things. First, are you ready for a cover reveal?

Because I am.

And I'm feeling coy.

Not so coy as to use elipses to excess...

But maybe the enter key.

Because this is worthy of a little silliness.

And a shameless Rocky Horror reference.

Especially when a killer cover waits in store for the patient scroller.

Alright, forgive my old school web games. At least I don't have a glittery tail on the mouse arrow. But it's gorgeous, right? I wish my monitor had a curtain so I could draw it back over and over again in a sort of weird, writerly game of peek-a-boo.

With the cover comes confidence to share the re-release date: September 1. As in, six days from now. Less than a week.

Excuse me while I marvel at my fortune. And work on affixing that curtain in between rounds of edits of The Hidden Icon's sequel.

Good News, Everyone!

I'll admit that optimistic though I was for a future for my writing eventually, I was ready to pack it in for a bit when my publisher closed their virtual doors. There was a whole heckuva lot going on in my personal life that required my attention, and most evenings all I could manage was popping a bunch of popcorn I had no intention of sharing and re-watching Veronica Mars or Enterprise for the zillionth time. I was still writing, sure, but I'd moved on to tinkering with a different project and dreamed of taking it just a little bit easier on myself.

But a fellow author and friend and generally fang-tastic guy Bill Blume was kind enough to offer me an introduction at the press he'd recently signed with, Diversion Books, and I suddenly found myself scrambling to polish the draft of the sequel to The Hidden Icon when they offered to re-release not only the first book, but to publish the next as well.

So this is me formally telling you that there's more to the story, and you get to read it, likely sometime next year. The Hidden Icon has a tentative re-release date much, much sooner, which I'll share once I've got a swank new cover to reveal and all of the semi-certainty that goes with it.

In the meantime, if you, like me, identified more with these guys than this guy when you were a teenager watching Lost Boys, check out Bill's Gidion Keep, Vampire Hunter series. I won't tell you to sink your teeth in because that would be lame, but know that I am totally thinking it.

Feel free to harass me to edit a chapter every time you finish reading one.