Archive for the 'Novels' Category

15 Days of Deverry Party Begins Today!

Constance October 28th, 2009

 

 

The Silver Mage

 

 by renowned Fantasy writer Katharine Kerr publishes on October 29th in the U.K. (HarperVoyager) and November 3rd in the U..S. (DAW).

Heralds 15 Days of Deverry

 

The Silver Mage is the final volume in this fantastic Celtic inspired cycle of interbraided lives, personalities and events in the alternate world of Deverry, through eras and generations of Deverry’s historical and chronological time!

 

15 Days of Deverry is an online celebration of the successful conclusion of Katharine Kerr’s vision for this Celtic knot of inter-braided novels. The 15  Days stands for the 15 titles that constitute the cycle’s sequence.***

 

A community at livejournal, deverry15 , has been set up as a clearinghouse where links will be noted. If you post any Deverry related material on your blog, anywhere (not just livejournal), please send the link to: rhi.rose@gmail.com. She’ll be collating the links.

For further information, join the deverry15 community at livejournal or stay here on the DeepGenre 15 Days of Deverry.  Ask questions, join the discussion, and make additional suggestions at both sites.

15 Days of Deverry Party Favors:  Katharine Kerr will provide autographed copies of her books and a signed bookplate designed by Party Committee member, Mary Frey, as prizes in  3 different contests!  (Contests’ Details and Rules follow in a separate entry.)

There is yet more!  A three-way interview-discussion here on the DeepGenre site, conducted among Katharine Kerr, Kate Elliott and Sherwood Smith on what it is like to have spent a long period of one’s professional career writing in a world one has created,  the roman fleuve and how a writer brings such large and long projects to a successful conclusion.

We encourage you to post about your experience reading these books in addition to your your congratulations to the author and her grand vision. You can create entries about how and when you first read one of the books, what attracted you to the series, which of the Deverry heroes ranks #1 in the Hotness Factor,  the overarching themes and structure of the series – or anything else about the Deverry world and books that has affected you.  We hope you all will share your own unique views of Katharine Kerr’s achievement.

We’re very excited by the successful completion of this Grand Fantasy Vision, so we’re throwing this Big Party to celebrate!  All of you are special guests.  Please come!  Post often!  Bring your friends, your dog, your cat and your dragon too!

***Link Here to the Deverry Webpage and the list of titles in the cycle

 

Please check out Book View Cafe, for short fiction by Katherine Kerr and many other fine authors!

 

. . . The 15 Days of Deverry Party Committee:

Constance Ash, Mary Frey, Darcy Javanne Kramer,  Kate Elliott,  Sherwood Smith and Rhiannon Rasmussen-Silverstein

Spoilers: or, The Joy of Reading and Viewing Without Preconceptions

Kate Elliott March 4th, 2009

Some folk cannot abide spoilers–it ruins a book for them–while others read for process not goal and therefore do not mind spoilers.  Now, it makes no never mind to me whether a person hates spoilers, or doesn’t mind spoilers, or checks ahead to see who lives and who dies because the anticipation is killing them.  As I say, let a person be the reader they want to be.

As for me, I personally prefer to read or view for the first time without knowing what is going to happen;  I like to experience the plot “in real time” with all the surprises, setbacks, revelations and shocks that may entail.  I enjoy the experience of my own reactions, and if I really really like a book or film I will read/see it again, which provides yet another experience, the experience of watching the known story unfold and anticipating or recognizing the way the narrative builds and twists.

Others will approach the reading (viewing) experience differently, and that’s as it should be. Continue Reading »

Memo to Hollywood: How to do (and not do) an adaptation

Kevin Andrew Murphy December 31st, 2008

I have just watched The Seeker: The Dark is Rising, a year after it came out (DVR is your friend, except maybe in this case) and I’m gasping in horror at how bad it was, and for no good reason.  You’ve got all the elements that would seem to make a great movie:  Beloved children’s classic as source material?  Check.  Lavish sets?  Check.  Gorgeous costuming?  Check.  Actors ranging from competent to excellent?  Check.  Impressive and appropriate special effects?  Check.  Script by a competent screenwriter?  Um, well, I understand they got the guy who did the adaptation for Trainspotting, which I understand was a decent movie, but….

First off, let me make one thing clear: Departure from the source material is fine.   The Wizard of Oz dumped the scene in the Dainty China Country from the movie adaptation because it was boring, extraneous, and painfully lame.  Glomming the Good Witch of the North and Glinda the Sorceress of the South together makes sense from a dramatic perspective, though making her a bubbly airhead was a bit much (although the MGM version does have her fans).  Having the Wicked Witch of the West be responsible for the poppies is fine for purposes of drama, and having them be foiled by snow as opposed to field mice is likewise fine for purposes of staging.  Mary Norton’s The Magic Bedknob and Bonfires and Broomsticks do not contain Nazis, musical numbers, a young Miss Price, or magical football matches with talking animals–though all of these things are very fun in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, a movie I adored as a child and had to thank for introducing me to the equally good (if significantly different) book.  And Alfonso Cuaron’s version of A Little Princess took numerous liberties with the original novel, including but not limited to moving the setting from London to New York, making Becky black instead of Cockney, and most significantly, having Sarah’s dad not be dead of bad investments in India but instead poisoned by mustard gas and MIA in WWI.

The difference here is that The Wizard of Oz, Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Cuaron’s A Little Princess are all great movies.   The reason The Seeker isn’t is not because elements were changed, but because elements were changed for the wrong reasons and the wrong way. Continue Reading »

Publication basking: Busted Flush here, latest Wild Cards novel

Kevin Andrew Murphy December 9th, 2008

I got my author’s copies of Busted Flush yesterday, the latest Wild Cards novel which I wrote part of. I’d seen bits and bobs of the other author’s sections during the writing phase, for character approval and to see that we were on the same page, but this is my first chance to read the whole thing together and I’m enjoying it. So far I’ve read Melinda and Caroline’s sections at the beginning, then skipped ahead to reread parts of what I wrote (since there’s no plot surprises there, but there’s the fun of seeing your words in actual print).
Busted Flush cover shot
I’m not certain how many other authors do this, setting aside a day for enjoying the book when it comes out. Lots of times I know it hasn’t worked out, due to life, deadlines and other realities (and today not so much either, since I’m having a friend over to help install a new hard drive in the new computer and attempt to transfer what files were saved from the dead one), but when it happens, it’s nice to be able to just sit back and bask.

P.S. As a small update, there’s now an interview with me and the rest of the Busted Flush authors up at Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist for anyone who’d like to read it.

For Love of A Vampire: Twilight & True Blood

Constance July 30th, 2008

O noes!

Twilight’s got all the cooties: romance, girl and YA — no Harry Potter adulation for this series.   Shoot, it’s as bad as Sex and the City, except – it haz shoes? It should haz belly dancing.  Does it?  Myself does not know,  not being a romance fan nor generally a YA reader. (I am a fan of belly dancing, and for long time now.)

Salon dot com analyzes.

[   No wonder the media has heralded Twilight as the next Harry Potter and Meyer as the second coming of J.K. The similarities, however, are largely commercial. It's hard to see how Twilight could ever approach Harry Potter as a cultural phenomenon for one simple reason: the series' fan base is almost exclusively female. The gender imbalance is so pronounced that Kaleb Nation, an enterprising 19-year-old radio show host-cum-author, has launched a blog called Twilight Guy, chronicling his experiences reading the books. The project is marked by a spirit that's equal parts self-promotion and scientific inquiry -- "I am trying to find why nearly every girl in the world is obsessed with the Twilight books by Stephenie Meyer" -- and its premise relies on the fact that, in even attempting this experiment, Nation has made himself an exceptional guy indeed.    ]This is an interesting piece, though, because it attempts to track similarities, if there are any, and contrasts, which there certainly are many, among Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the Harry Potter series and the Twilight series, and their audiences.


Another quote:

[  If Harry Potter has a vampire-loving, adolescent female counterpart, it's Buffy Summers. ]  Continue Reading »

Jumpstart

Madeleine Robins April 29th, 2008

I have an erratic career path.

My first four books were written between 1976 and 1981; book number five took another two years to write (I went to the Clarion SF Writing Workshop; I moved from Boston to New York; I worked part time and then full time, I fell in love, I fell out of love.  Life, right?).  I also started writing SF and fantasy short stories.   When I turned in my last romance (in 1984) I kept writing short stories and started noodling around with a story which grew into a book.  It took me more than ten years to finish that book (worked freelance, picked up my acting career again, fell in love, got married, started working at Tor Books, had a baby, went back to work again, left Tor, left the job after that, edited comics for three years, had another baby).  I sold the book on a partial manuscript while I was still working at Tor, and was more than half-way through it–but it still took what seemed like forever to finish.  After I turned in The Stone War I got a chance to do a work-for-hire novel based on a Marvel Comics superhero–Daredevil.  I wrote that book in about six weeks, from a fiendishly tight outline (remind me sometime and I’ll tell you the hoops you jump through to write tie-in novels) and it was fun.  Then I wrote Point of Honour, and almost immediately afterward, Petty Treason.

Then, two weeks after I turned Petty Treason in in 2002, we moved to California.  My writing path since then has been, um, erratic.  And with the benefit of hindsight and a several-decades-long career, I now realize that my writing history is punctuated by gaps.  Some of them very significant gaps.  I am not, nor do I ever expect to be, one of those 2000-words-a-day-year-in-and-year-out, writers.  But there have been times when I wrote consistently, turning out a book a year or so.  And times when I didn’t, when I felt guilty because I wasn’t writing, or because I wasn’t finishing a book.  Guilt, needless to say, butters no parsnips and is the enemy of the creative process.

But a time has come, at the end of each of these hiatuses, to jumpstart my process and get back to work.  What to do?

Here, in no specific order, are some of the tricks that have worked for me:

  • Retyping the stalled manuscript.  Yes, even at book length.  Maybe especially at book length.  Retyping immerses me in the book in a way that merely re-reading and line-editing doesn’t.  I often find myself adding, branching out, finding the places where I went astray, cutting out wholesale chunks.
  • Writing “cover copy” for the story.  Nothing focuses what you believe are the salient points of a story like trying to convey it in a punchy, convincing two paragraphs.
  • Following The Artist’s Way or some similar program.  The Artist’s Way requires, among other things, that you write three pages, longhand, every morning before you do anything else.  When I was stalled on The Stone War this was one of the things that helped get me moving again.  And you don’t have to follow all the rules the Way suggests: Julia Cameron isn’t going to show up at your house at 6am to make sure that you’re writing before you feed the kids, or that you’re making all your “artist dates.”  The right way to do this is the way that helps you.
  • Participating in a writers’ workshop–one where I have to show up in person (nothing against online crit groups; I just found that having to show up was useful to me) and one in which I focus as much on the critiques I’m giving other people as I do on their critiques of my work.
  • Reading stuff that makes me want to write.  What is that going to be?  Sometimes it’s fiction that, in some way, approaches what I’m trying to do.  When I was working on Point of Honour I was reading The Maltese Falcon, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and The Name of the Rose.  If another writer has pulled off a particular technical trick, I may want to read that work for awe and inspiration.

I am reasonably certain that, however long my writing career continues (until they prise my laptop from my fingers, no doubt) there will be lulls in my creative process.  That means I’m always looking for new ways to jumpstart that process.  Got any you want to share?

How to Write a Novel (Part 2)

David Louis Edelman January 21st, 2008

So you decided to write a novel, you committed yourself to the task, and you agonized your way through your first draft — as described in How to Write a Novel (Part 1). Now one of two things will happen:

John Barth writing 1) You’ll print that sucker out and add a title page. You’ll type up a page dedicating the book to your sister Chloë in Venice, whose steadfast support and witty observations helped you get through the tough parts, and who served as the inspiration for the character of Empress Fögelschmëer (the Younger). You’ll add a cover letter, mail the whole package off to Random House, and watch the royalty checks flow in. Or,

2) You’ll look at what you’ve written and realize it ain’t publishable.

Most writers — even the successful ones — fall into that second camp. And it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Months or even years will have passed since you started, and the world’s not the same place. You’re not the same person. So it’s only natural that the story has wandered onto unforeseen paths. It’s only natural you look back at those early chapters and shake your head and think, How naive that guy was who wrote this stuff.

Don’t despair. Here’s a path (my path) of getting from first draft to final draft. As before, keep in mind that your mileage may vary.

Continue Reading »

How to Write a Novel (Part 1)

David Louis Edelman January 15th, 2008

One of the Ten Commandments of Author Blogging is “thou must write a post explaining how thou writest thine novels.” And so, in an effort to save my immortal writerly soul from scribbler’s purgatory, I’m going to explain my process in easy numbered steps that anyone can follow.

Since I’ve only written two novels to date — Infoquake and MultiReal — and am now in the midst of a third, I can’t say that this is always going to be my process. All I can say is that it’s worked for me twice now, and it seems to be doing just dandy the third time around.

More importantly, I can’t say whether this process will work for you. No two writers write the same way, and sometimes what works for one person will only trip up the next person. Life’s like that. You’ll need to adapt to your own unique circumstances as you see fit.

Here goes. How to write a novel:

Continue Reading »

New Wild Cards website live

Kevin Andrew Murphy December 16th, 2007

I’ve been mentioning it earlier about the new book coming out, but Tor has just launched the new website for Wild Cards, www.wildcardsbooks.com

There will be more added in the coming weeks, including bio with yours truly, but the preliminary launch is focusing on Inside Straight, which is coming out next month and as with all things publishing, may have early copies in some stores now.

There’s also a newsletter to sign up for and a story from Walter Jon Williams which is sort of the proto-Wild Cards tale.

What’s Wrong with “The Golden Compass”?

Kevin Andrew Murphy December 10th, 2007

I just went to see The Golden Compass, along with a couple other friends, who all decided to see it despite being advised by one friend that the movie made no sense and by another that he didn’t want to see it because he hadn’t liked the book.

I have the book, but on the “I’ll read it when I get around to it” shelf. But it was a nice outing with friends and I wanted to see airships and Nicole Kidman in a series of improbably lovely costumes. And going in with such low expectations, I was not disappointed, except by everything else.

First off, well, my biggest criticism is what I said after the movie was over: “I suppose it will all make more sense after we read the book and watch the expanded version on DVD.” This was after watching a nearly two and a half hour movie, mind you. I’m not certain whether to blame the screenwriter, the film editor or both, but there seemed to be a concentrated effort to shoehorn in every significant scene in the book, regardless of the exposition or transition or set-up for character motivation.

As it stands, the movie has the worst case of “beloved child” syndrome I’ve ever seen. The protagonist, Lyra (and I’m probably wrong on the spelling), wanders around and simply bumps into people who decide to fight and die for her “Just because.” I can understand it with the head witch, since she’s at least got a prophecy to go on, but she’s still canny enough to check out whether the kid can read the Golden Compass. But Sky Captain Wild Bill? I’m blanking on the name of character, but if you took an old American character actor, had him play Wild Bill as conceived of by someone who’d only seen British Wild West shows, gave him a jackrabbit familiar (voiced by Cathy Bates) and then made him an airship captain…well, that’s who we’ve got, who not only immediately takes a liking to this random kid, but offers to take her along in his airship, and also tips her off to the location of an alcoholic talking bear, who is less entertaining than he sounds. The bear decides to follow the kid because she finds his armor, but the only reason they aren’t immediately blown away by the Cossack police is because the sea gypsies keep randomly appearing whenever the cavalry is needed. Even in the middle of the frozen glacial wastes.

Then there’s the Magisterium. I understand it’s supposed to be the unholy spawn of the Catholic church and Big Brother, but if you’re going to spirit away kids to do insane arcane medical experiments on them, there must be a more convenient place than an ice sheet in the middle of the Norway analogue. But more than that, why steal children when you can just buy them? Or get parents to give them to you for free? There must be a few parents who’ve already drunk enough of the Kool-aid that they’d hand over their children no questions asked, rather than steal the child of the well connected sea gypsy matron? Or the kitchen boy from the university where there are loads of nosy people just looking for a mystery to crack?

Of course, the number of brain dead people is pretty amazing. There’s horror movie stupid. Then there’s opera stupid. Then there’s this. One really wonders what the scholars are thinking to let their child of prophecy go running around rooftops with the cast of Oliver at the beginning of the movie. One also sort of wonders whether a world with all sorts of arcane science wouldn’t be able to figure out who poisoned a wine decanter if just by taking fingerprints. And the uspurping Bear King? Does he know that “gullible” is not in the dictionary?

Then there’s the trouble of giving your protagonist an amazingly useful power and forgetting to use it. Lyra gets a Golden Compass, which once she figures it out is basically a deluxe Magic 8 Ball that can answer any question, no problem. So when later in the movie, the wicked Mrs. Coulter says “Lyra, I’m your mother!” wouldn’t it be prudent or least sensible to twiddle with your Golden Compass and ask “Is that psycho really my mommy?” Of course this scene may have been left on the cutting room floor, so it’s not possibly quite at the level of the recent Heroes finale where Peter forgets he can walk through walls if he wants to and instead dramatically uses his telekinesis to rip the door off a bank vault, getting a nosebleed in the process. But still….

I should probably not get into the other troubles but the line “Tell the children to get their warmest coats!” is going to stick with me for a while. You get a bunch of kids who were spirited away to an icy wasteland via airship and you expect them to walk to safety? Of course an electrocuted traumatized child was able to walk all the way to the next valley and hole up in an unheated trapper’s cabin without freezing to death, so I suppose anything is possible, but….

Yargh.

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