When Carrie sent this to me over Thanksgiving, I almost fell over. This is the third (of four, thus far) anthologies that Carrie and I have done together, and we used to joke about our names being on a cover together.
Ta-Da!
This is the first anthology I’ve ever done where my name has been on the cover. And I’m in such fabulous company! Carrie! And Jeanne Du Prau (City of Ember) and William Sleator! William Sleator, guys. I read him when I was a teenager. I was so sorry to hear of his recent passing. In fact, the last time I was home in Florida, I dug out some of my old William Sleator titles. I know most people love The House of Stairs for its creepy dystopian goodness, but I love The Spirit House, which is…. hmmm. It’s a paranormal romance, but not the way they do them these days. And it has a Thai twist.
The collection is edited by the excellent (and phenomenally enterprising) Paula Guran. Here is the list of authors: Jeanne Du Prau, William Sleator, Neal Shusterman, Carrie Ryan, Diana Peterfreund, Carrie Vaughn, Maria V. Snyder, Nisi Shawl, Kiera Cass, Jesse Karp, Seth Cadin, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Steve Berman, Amanda Downum, John Shirley, and Elizabeth Bear.
You heard it here first, people. Actually, this is the ONLY place you’ve heard it, as the listing for this book is pretty much wrong EVERYWHERE, from its title (most places say it’s “thirteen” tales, when clearly, it’s fifteen) to its release date (March, not December), to the list of authors included in the collection. This is the right list. I know, because I’ve read the book.
And it’s AWESOME.
(Actually, since I just spent ten minutes learning how to edit Goodreads entries, it’s right at Goodreads, too.)
I play this game whenever I get my anthology covers, trying to imagine if they could secretly be illustrating the story I wrote for the antho. Not so much for Zombies vs Unicorns and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, vol. 5, because there are neither zombies nor spaceports in “The Care and Feeding of Your Baby Killer Unicorn”, which is about a suburban girl and her pet monster. However, I liked to claim that this cover from Kiss Me Deadly was appropriately veil-y and could, theoretically, be illustrating either my unicorn-hunting nun or her fine lady costar:
Don’t tell me those are wings. They’re veils. VEILS, I tell you!
But there is no imagining that the image on the cover of Brave New Love illustrates what’s happening in my story, “Foundlings.” First of all, that girl looks nothing like any of the characters in my story. And a distant city never gets hit my a magenta lightning storm.
I cannot, however, speak for the things that happen in other people’s stories.
For the record, “Foundlings” is a stand-alone story. It does not connect to the unicorn books, nor to For Darkness Shows the Stars. (Since the anthology was originally scheduled for release last summer, I thought that was too soon to introduce anything about my new world.) However, and this is some fun trivia, it is one of the oldest ideas I’ve ever sold, since I originally got the idea for the world that informed the events of “Foundlings” back in 2002.
Also, “Foundlings” is the first thing I wrote when I came back from maternity leave. This will be amusing to you later.
I am holding in my hands an advanced reader copy of what will be my eighth published novel: For Darkness Shows the Stars. It is a gorgeously designed book, filled with special fonts and curlicues and tiny touches of fabulousness that work in concert with the text to create an atmosphere of otherworldliness.
I love book design. I love books where it is clear a lot of care has been taken with the design, to create something a little off the beaten path, a signature look for that book which is instantly recognizable. I’m a bit spoiled, since my first series was handled by a team at Bantam Dell for whom book design was not a lost art. My first editor had been trained up by a boss who had originally come from the design side of the publishing business. And thus, I got things like this:
And this:
And this:
And, unbelievably, even this:
I was not aware how unusual it was to have a book designed with such attention to detail, and to the various and sundry non-text objects that existed inside.
I honestly think it adds to the experience.There are those for whom design is merely a distraction — they want nothing between them and the words. They want the pages and the words themselves to disappear. These are the readers for whom the Kindle revolution and the death of book design doesn’t matter. They want to be able to change the font at will — they don’t care where page breaks occur. They aren’t interested in the idea that someone went to the trouble of choosing that font, that layout, that arrangement, to create a mood and a world for the reader.
I am not that reader. I love some good design. Some recent books where the design knocked me off my feet are:
Want to Go Private, by Sarah Darer Littman, where the police reports and such are set off from the text and look like words on a “dark” computer screen.
The Midnighters series, by Scott Westerfeld, in which the fractal lore symbols signifying each type of midnighters were designed by Scott and inserted in the text to show who is narrating that section. (I’ve heard some folks have even gotten tattoos of their favorite symbol.
the little zombies and unicorns and the cartoon-style author names in Zombies vs. Unicorns. (True story: there was once a plan to print all the zombie stories on black paper, but it proved too hard to read.)
the black “moon phase” chapter dividers in Andrea Cremer’s Nightshade. SUCH a brilliant idea.
The ornate frames on the chapter openers of Jessica Spotswood’s upcoming Born Wicked. (Actually, that whole book has droolworthy design. The soft-touch cover! The coppery foil title! Jess wants me to give her her ARC back but I may just conveniently “lose” it.)
But design can also be divisive. (Cf. the “black pages” for ZVU.) Anything that makes the book hard to read is going to bother people, and people have different metrics for “hard to read.” For instance, I loved the idea of the “frozen” blue text in Shiver, but I heard a lot of complaints about the green and red texts of the subsequent novels hurting people’s eyes.
Design is something you lose when you read the ebook version. My “Shiver” is on Kindle. The text is kindle text.
I often wonder if my love of book design is related to my love of metafiction and metatextual interpolations (this, I am told, is the proper name for the doodads peppering my first series). The Secret Society Girl series lent itself specifically to unusual design, as it was filled with metatextual interpolations, which was a style I employed heavily in that series (lists, footnotes, emails, text messages, letters, etc) and not so much with any book since.
I have been in love with such storytelling flourishes all my reading life. From Nabokov’s footnotes to Clarissa’s “mad papers” to simple epistolary novels, I love the idea of books that are more than just books — that are little puzzles on the page — story and more than story, too.
How will such elements survive the coming ebook revolution? When you read something with footnotes on a Kindle, it requires hypertext to flip you there and back. With Secret Society Girl on Kindle, the “Hello My Name Is” sticker is transferred like a picture, but you lose the “electronic” look of the text messages and the “script” of the letters. My early-gen kindle is black and white, but I wonder if the new colored ereaders show Shiver’s text in blue. I have NO idea how they do Clarissa’s mad papers.
When you realize that Richardson was pulling this kind of stunt in the eighteenth century, before we even had a rightful understanding of what a novel was and certainly before this kind of thing was as easy as setting up text boxes in your computer document, it’s even more impressed. Of course, he owned the printing press and so employed the poor printer he was causing this headache. Ah, Richardson, you cruel taskmaster.
(I know I talk about Clarissa a lot on this blog. I talk about Clarissa a lot in general. I loveClarissa. I don’t know a whole lot of other people who have read it, or even seen the BBC version they did with Sean Bean as Lovelace. I don’t remember anything else about it, except Sean Bean as frickin’ Lovelace, people! That is a triumph of casting. I can’t actually even picture the Lovelace who lived in my head now. All I see is Bean. Anyway, if you haven’t read it or seen it, or know anything about it — let’s just say it’s approximately 2,000 pages long, it’s completely epistolary, it’ll take over your LIFE as it did me my second semester senior year in college, and it will forever change the way you, a costume drama loving, historical romance reading, Jane Austen obsessed female individual looks at her heretofore romanticized past. In short: sucked to be a woman for most of recorded history.)
Where was I? Right, book design.
For Darkness has gorgeous book design. Guys, even the font. I drool. And I cry, too, because I know a lot of people are going to buy it as an ebook. Which is nice, I guess — any way they read it, plus I get nice royalties for ebooks — but they’re going to miss out on some of the design. The slightly unusual font. The curlicues around each page number. (Can’t have ‘em if you don’t have pages.)
Like look at this freaky Snow White adaptation. Not loving KStew as a Joan of Arc-y Snow White, but Charlize Theron rocks my socks as the evil queen. Plus — wowsa, the imagery!
In this trailer, I’m seeing shades of Dementro’s Kisses AND Elizabeth Bathory (the Blood Queen of Transylvania). Anyone else?
Then, just for balance, we’ve got a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT adaptation of Snow White, the Julia-Roberts-as-queen Mirror Mirror. (In passing, clearly the “queen” is the meaty role in both these films, as This trailer seems bizarre to me, like it was all a bet on Funny or Die or something. Amirite? Like it’s not a real movie? Also, how many shots of a castle balancing precariously on a stick-thin penninsula cliff over a lake can we handle?
This appears to be the year for Snow White remakes.
And, in another vein entirely, the trailer for Pixar’s BRAVE. Yay, warrior girls! However, is it me, or is this trailer completely mum on WHAT, precisely, this darn film is about?
And then, last but certainly not least, the trailer I have watched approximately twenty-bajillion times already this week. How. Awesome. Is. This. Movie. Gonna. Be?
For what it’s worth, the ones above don’t look like any unicorns in my book (kirins, which the shape most resembles, are dark in color), but the second one is a zhi with an oddly shaped horn.
Unicorn taxidermy. Who knew?
Of course, I studied a lot of taxidermy (and even cryptotaxidermy, which is what we’re looking at here) when writing Rampant, because of the Bucephalus tableau in the cloisters rotunda. I know a lot of people are into taxidermy these days, though it is not my personal aesthetic. Though I am a bit swayed by things like this:
Note to family and friends: do not, under any circumstances, get me this for Christmas. I’m already a little nervous that my house has begun to look like this:
One of these days I shall photograph my unicorn collection for you all. But not today, as I’m behind on my NaNo goals.
Thank you all so much for your enthusiasm about my new book cover. Since I’ve been getting a lot of questions about it, I thought I would create a central place for asking and answering.
Here are some of the most frequently asked questions:
Q: What is this book about?
A: So glad you asked:
Generations ago, a genetic experiment gone wrong—the Reduction—decimated humanity, giving rise to a Luddite nobility who outlawed most technology.
Eighteen-year-old Luddite Elliot North has always known her place in this caste system. Four years ago Elliot refused to run away with her childhood sweetheart, the servant Kai, choosing duty to her family’s estate over love. But now the world has changed: a new class of Post-Reductionists is jumpstarting the wheel of progress and threatening Luddite control; Elliot’s estate is floundering; and she’s forced to rent land to the mysterious Cloud Fleet, a group of shipbuilders that includes renowned explorer Captain Malakai Wentforth—an almost unrecognizable Kai. And while Elliott wonders if this could be their second chance, Kai seems determined to show Elliot exactly what she gave up when she abandoned him.
But Elliot soon discovers her childhood friend carries a secret—one that could change the society in which they live…or bring it to its knees. And again, she’s faced with a choice: cling to what she’s been raised to believe, or cast her lot with the only boy she’s ever loved, even if she has lost him forever.
Inspired by Jane Austen’s PERSUASION, FOR DARKNESS SHOWS THE STARS is a breathtaking romance about opening your mind to the future and your heart to the one person you know can break it.
Q: When is it coming out?
A: June, 2012
Q: Who designed this cover?
A: The design team at Harper Children’s.
Q: Is it a series?
A: No, it’s a standalone novel. I know that’s a tad unusual in the YA world these days, and especially unusual in this brave new world of “dystopias” — yes, I’m using liberal quote marks — but I’ve done two series now and I wanted this book to stand alone, like Persuasion itself does.
True story: Back when I was deciding about the different species of unicorn I was going to use in Rampant, there were a few names floating around that I never did get to use. One of these was licorne (the other was monoceros). In the end, I decided there wasn’t too much difference between the European legends from Germany (einhorn) and the ones from France (licorne). And licorne and unicorn sounded similar enough that I went with einhorn to describe my graceful, white, deerlike European species of unicorn. I’m sure if my books were translated into German, we’d have to come up with an alternate name for the “einhorn” species.
“The Care and Feeding of Your Baby Killer Unicorn” in Zombies vs. Unicorns does not differentiate between the species by name, so we’re cool in any and all translations. In fact, I have taken care not to digress into a species-specific discussion in any of my unicorn short stories, since you’re dealing with a limited wordcount, and I always go into the story assuming the reader has never read my books.
FWIW, Venom and Flayer are zhis (as is pointed out in Ascendant), while the unicorn that attacked Wen’s cousins was a kirin. In “Errant,” Enyo is a zhi, and the unicorns in the forest are einhorns. In my upcoming story, “The Hammer of Artemis” — well, that’s a surprise.
I am participating in NaNoWriMo this year, though I think, officially, I’m cheating. Because I’m working on an already-started book, which is, according to the NaNo rules, “punishable by death.”
Seriously, that’s what it says.
However, in chatting about this with Carrie the other day, we came to the conclusion that published authors can cheat at NaNoWriMo, firstly because we’ve already achieved the stated goals of NaNo, which is to get off your butt and write already, and secondly because the chances we’re able to start a new book from scratch precisely on November 1st is… not so much.
Who am I kidding? I think anyone can cheat at NaNo. The point is to write, right? Get to 50k. Everything else is details.
In the end, I decided it was better for both me and the universe (and my buddies in WRW, for whom I am this year’s NaNoWriMo coordinator) that I do it this way than not do it at all. No harm, no foul.
So what I did decide to do was count everything I’ve already written in the novel as zero. And since I have, I’m estimating, about 50k left to write on the novel, it’s perfect. So, starting from zero on November 1st, I now have, this lovely Friday morning, 7,773 words. I need to write another 2400 today to stay on track, since I suspect I won’t get much of a chance to write on the weekends.
Anyone else doing NaNoWriMo? I’m “dianablue” on the site. Friend me and we’ll cheer each other on!
I play this game whenever I get my anthology covers, trying to imagine if they could secretly be illustrating the story I wrote for the antho. Not so much for Zombies vs Unicorns and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, vol. 5, because there are neither zombies nor spaceports in “The Care and Feeding of Your Baby Killer Unicorn”, which is about a suburban girl and her pet monster. However, I liked to claim that this cover from Kiss Me Deadly was appropriately veil-y and could, theoretically, be illustrating either my unicorn-hunting nun or her fine lady costar:
