Happy, Happy New Year: The Wall of Night Book Two—Finished!

Giveaway Result!

Jeanine's post is up so all the giveaways on this post are now closed off--and the winners of the books are:

Onge: for the latest Sookie Stackhouse novel, Dead in the Family,
ThatOneGirlYouKnew: for Kirsten Cashore's Fire.

Congratulations to you both!

And I'll be getting the postcards away today to everyone who has left their postal address on my webmail. :)

Thank you again to you all for participating--and don't forget that next month on 1 February I'll be chatting here on the Supernatural Underground with Beth-Anne Miller about her debut novel Into the Scottish Mist. I'm really looking forward to it!

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I had all sorts of ideas for New Year posts, but today these were all superseded by the fantabulously wonderful fact that I have finished the manuscript for the second novel in The Wall of Night series—working title The Gathering of the Lost.

I know a few of my fellow Supe authors have also been going down to the wire with all sorts of deadlines over the holiday season, but mine has pretty much been that I want to finish the book No Matter What! And what an awesome feeling, reaching that final line and word—until, of course, Book Three (!) But for now I aim to kick back, put my feet up with a glass of something chilled (and probably with bubbles in it) and spend some quality time with both cat and man, both of whom have been just a little neglected of late!

For those of you who might not know, The Heir of Night, which came out in October, is epic or high fantasy, chock full of what Robin Hobb was kind enough to describe as “strange magic, dark treachery and conflicting loyalties.” The Gathering of the Lost carries on this grand tradition, but there is a shift in the action to encompass both more adventure—with knights in armor, quests, tournaments, flights and rescues—as well as romance. Our protagonists are older, you see, and find themselves in a country with a troubadorian tradition of “springtime love” …

Given both knightly adventure and romance, Gathering has been a lot of fun to write. And very interesting in terms of character development, because the central protagonists now have separate story threads to pursue rather than always being together. This does tend to make for more story goodness—and of course, being Fantasy, more world building fun and goodness as the characters encounter different countries and societies within their world.

It all begins, of course, with the blank page, which is both exciting—as I believe Beatrix Potter said, “You never know where it will take you” (or words to like effect)—and terrifying at the same time, and for exactly the same reason: Where will it take you? And once you have launched into the exciting and terrifying, exhilarating and exhausting process of writing a novel, there are not only all those “best words” to be crafted into the “right order” (Coleridge), but (as above) world building and character development, action and subtext, theme and structure—all to be considered and developed, worked and reworked again.

So getting to the end of the manuscript is always a red letter moment. You have such a feeling of achievement as you type in that final full stop. OK, maybe as a writer you never, ever quite stop, because there are always new ideas buzzing around, or spin-offs on the old ones. Finishing the book is more like ‘pressing Pause’: Time for reflection and to take stock, both of where you’ve got to and what you still need to do—as well as what you might like to do beyond this book, and what new projects could potentially lurk just around the corner.

Completing a manuscript on New Year’s Day is particularly significant in terms of that process of both reflection and looking forward. It’s what New Year is all about—and why I am doubly pleased to be posting today and able to share this moment with you. Not just to say “hey, I’ve finished!” which of course I’m over the moon to be doing, but to ask what achievements, big or small, you’re celebrating today, and what hopes and dreams, or concrete plans, you hope to realize in 2011?

I’m hoping to see The Gathering of the Lost in print this year, to finish The Wall of Night, Book Three (working title, The Riven Shield) and start Book Four. For hopes and dreams, I would love to visit the US and UK and get to Rome to see a friend there—a big dream, given the distance form NZ to just about anywhere, but I’m thinking of ways to make it happen and not short change the writing.

So how about you? What are you celebrating and planning, hoping for and dreaming of, this New Year’s Day 2011?

And a very Happy New Year to you all!

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Giveaways

To help the discussion along and just to reiterate my “Happy New Year” to you all, I’ll send a personalized Book Cover’s Postcard (shown left) designed by the artist who did The Heir of Night map, to anyone who comments on this post before the next Supernatural Underground author posts AND emails me a postal address through my website: contact[at]helenlowe.info

And because neither of last month’s giveaway books was claimed (!) I’m putting them up for giveaway again: the latest Sookie Stackhouse novel, Dead in the Family, and Kirsten Cashore’s Fire. [Open to all Supe followers, US or international.]

To enter the draw (which will be via Random Number selection), just add a comment on this post; again the cutoff is before the next Supernatural Underground author posts. As always, you can earn points (i.e. the number of times your name goes into the draw) by:

+1 Posting in the comments section
+1 Linking to this post on Twitter
+1 Linking to this post on Facebook
+1 Linking to the Supernatural Underground or my Helen Lowe on Anything Really blog on your own blog/website.

Just post the total number of points that you’ve earned in your comment. And don’t forget to check back after the closing date to see if you’ve won, or leave an email address where I can get in contact with you.

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Next Month: 1 February

On next month's post day, 1 February, I will be inviting my friend and fellow author, Beth-Anne Miller, to join me here on the Supernatural Underground. Beth-Anne has a brand-new Romance novel, Into the Scottish Mists, coming out from The Wild Rose Press on February 4. So Beth-Anne will be here to tell us all a bit about the book and her path to publication—and I know you’ll all show her your wonderful Supe support. :) Meanwhile, for a sneak preview, you can find Beth-Anne at http://www.facebook.com/bethannemiller17.

SF&F movies: best and worst of 2010

io9, a website devoted to all things science fictional and fantastical, has listed its top 10 best and worst movies of 2010. The lists are notable for me because -- shocking though it seems for a sci-fi writer -- I have seen only one of the movies on the Best list (along with one of the honorable mentions). I've also seen half of one of the movies on the Worst list. I started watching it on a 15-hour flight and it was indeed too terrible to finish.

Looking down the Best list, I'm seeing a couple of movies that I don't want to see because no matter how good they supposedly are, I can't watch horror movies. I just don't have the fortitude to put scary images in my head that I can never get out. But several look really interesting and I can only blame an international move, a book deadline, and a new baby for my lack of movie-watching this year.

Take a look at the list and give me your recommendations! What did you think of these movies? Which ones should I check out on DVD?  Is the new Harry Potter movie really the best one so far? Does Predators deserve its spot at #4? How about Inception at #1? (I've heard mixed reviews of that one.)

For the record, the two movies that I did get around to seeing were both ostensibly children's movies and I enjoyed them both. Toy Story 3 was a lot of fun and had one of the most emotionally draining scenes I've seen in a very long time (although I can't quite get over the fact that the teddy was irredeemable). How to Train Your Dragon was the most cliche-ridden story you can hope to see, a step-by-step guide to writing the Hero's Journey... but somehow it worked.

The Pleasure of Chocolate

   ***** The winner  is JC Jones! *****
JC, please contact me through my website.

** Signed Book Giveaway Ended Jan 5 **

I'll bet  your eyes rested on that photo of chocolate candies before you started reading. C'mon now, be honest. I know mine were focused on it while I was typing this post. I'll also bet you were confronted with chocolate in some form during the holiday. Did you give in? If so, you're like the average American who eats 11.6 pounds of chocolate (about 27,000 calories) a year. We're paltry chocolate eaters compared to the Swiss, who eat twice that amount every year. Of course they do. Swiss chocolate is so delicious and it's so close at hand for them. 

Why does chocolate have this hold on us? I can think of one reason: it's great to pour over various male body parts and lick off. According to the World Atlas of Chocolate, more chocolate is consumed in the winter than at any other time of year, so add a roaring fire to the above scenario.Yummm...

Where was I? Oh, chocolate's hold on us. It has to do with hedonism - the doctrine that pleasure or happiness is the highest good. Chocolate is synonymous with hedonism, as the Aztec ruler Montezuma surely knew. He drank mugs of the chocolate drink xocolatl ("bitter water") before taking on a new sexual conquest. He thought it was an aphrodisiac, hence chocolate + Valentine's Day. This is the same Montezuma as in Montezuma's Revenge, the travelers' disease. I suppose the formula for xocolatl was a trade secret, and travelers got only the bitter water, with no chocolate added.

There are a lot of reasons why chocolate induces pleasure and happiness, other than the aforementioned scenario. The god of Chemistry has been hard at work making chocolate a triple whammy. First, it's naturally caffeinated. Caffeine works on the pleasure receptors in the brain and starts the flow of happy-making chemicals like dopamine. Next (hang on to your seats), chocolate contains a chemical compound in the cannabinoid family, closely related to the active ingredient in marijuana. It produces a relaxing, slightly intoxicated effect. We're not done yet--there's another ingredient in chocolate, phenylethylamine. Notice that "amine" on the end of it, the same as in amphetamine. It's officially a hallucinogen and would produce a high like Ecstasy. That is, if there were enough of it present in chocolate. The amounts of these chemicals are small enough that chocolate isn't a controlled substance. But it does give each of us our own personal little buzz, according to how sensitive we are to the triple whammy. 

Do you have any chocolate stories you'd like to share? (Keep it decent.) Something where you think chocolate influenced you one way or another? Are you a chocaholic? 

Post a comment and I'll draw a random winner for a signed copy of Sacrifice: Mortal Path Book 2! Giveaway ends January 5th, my birthday. 

Hearing voices

This is my first post on Supernatural Underground, due mainly to sloth on my part and a paralyzing fear of saying something stupid on the Internet. (Which, I realize, is what the Internet is for, but bear with me here.) But, faced with the choice between posting and digging out from under the metric crapton of snow that has fallen on Boston, I'm finally posting.

So of course, I'm going to talk about something not-quite-normal: hearing voices.

Some characters appear because I need someone in that place in the plot, and they rapidly become more than a placeholder. Some characters come out of blending ideas together -- wouldn't it be cool if someone like X did Y -- or out of the shuffle-and-change-partners dance that makes up the first few stages of revision for me.

And some characters -- particularly Evie, the protagonist of Spiral Hunt, Wild Hunt, and Soul Hunt -- are immediately present when I need them, speaking just over my shoulder. Evie was really the spark that drove these stories: I had some ideas of what mythology to play with, how I wanted to fiddle with certain ideas, and it was as if she stepped out of the back of my head, arms crossed, head tilted to the side as if to say Yeah, that'll work, so what's going to hit us next? And let's wrap this up soon; there's a Sox game tonight.

I don't know how many other authors have this experience, of hearing a character's voice so strongly that it's as if the character is relating the story and I'm only writing it down. Granted, this changes as the story changes, but her voice remains constant. Even when I hit difficult patches, places where I had to reconfigure the whole plot so that it wouldn't fall over in the slightest breeze, writing those sections wasn't the hard part. (That would be revising.) So long as I had Evie's voice in mind, her reaction to the situation and her narration, I could compose without too much trouble.

For a long time I thought this was because Evie's story is told in first person. Another character from my short stories, Charles the valet, has a similarly present voice for me (sometimes to my detriment; it's very easy to rattle off a page or so in his voice and then realize I forgot to add the important information in that scene), and since he's a first-person narrator, I thought that might be the reason. But there are other characters whose voice was absolutely clear, even as I was writing them from another's perspective. Boru, from Spiral Hunt, was very clear in my head, which was a disquieting experience to say the least. Another character stepped forward just as I needed her: Venetia Brooks-Parsons, who appears in Soul Hunt, made her presence known as I reached that point in the story and automatically commandeered that chapter. While I doubt anything short of a bulldozer could have kept Venetia in the background for any amount of time, it was still a little startling to have her speaking so clearly through the story.

So it's not simply a matter of perspective. I think some of it has to do with what characters push our buttons, which ones are loved, which ones come out of the depths of our subconscious with a story to tell. And I suspect that's why I've enjoyed writing Evie's stories so far.

I'd be curious to know if other writers have the same experience, and if there's some common thread between the characters that speak in our heads. I think I've had other authors' characters colonize my head as well -- do other readers have this reaction too? Who's speaking up in your mind, and whose voices do you hear?

(And for the record, I was very tempted to title this post "Do You Hear What I Hear," but I suspect it would have gotten me a stern talking-to. Holiday puns can only go so far in our household.)

Christmas Traditions

Good morning, lovely, and happy Boxing Day to you all! Was your Christmas fabulous? Mine was, and we're still celebrating over here at Chez Karina. We have leftovers to nom on, presents to find homes for, cats to cuddle and a rabbit who has enjoyed nibbling away at all her wicker ornaments.

And I think I'll convince the mancandy to go out and get my favoritest seasonal thing in the whole world—apple pie. (Well, all right, second only to a fine bottle of Bailey's to put in my coffee and hot cocoa.)

And what better way to spend the day after Christmas? Why, with my third favorite seasonal thing ever, and a tradition I've picked up along the years: Christmas anthologies!

Because I don't have enough books in my shelf, I always have to add a few more every Christmas. Along with the usual suspects—like Cherry Adair, whose Undertow is releasing on Tuesday!—I have a weakness for Christmas anthologies. Especially ones featuring hot guys with Christmas accoutrements.

This year's was Hot for the Holidays, a paranormal extravaganza featuring shapeshifters, knights in shining armor, Fae on the run, and lots of Christmas magic.

I love Christmas. I love what it represents, and I love what it means to families and children and lovers. I love stories set around Christmastime and I can never get enough, so I hope that publishers will continue to put out these heartwarming stories year after year, so I can devour them by the twinkling lights of my Christmas tree.

What about you? Do you have a favorite Christmas tradition? A favorite book you read 'round the holidays, or perhaps a trip you take to view the lights in your city? What's your favorite Christmas story ever?

Karina Cooper is a paranormal romance author for Avon. The first of her Dark Mission series, Blood of the Wicked, will be available in May. She's a Christmas fiend and gets twitterpated around Christmas lights, and don't let her lie—she always gravitates towards holiday anthologies that feature a sexy Santa on the cover. She's easy like that.

Merry Christmas!

Congratulations to the three winners!
Kelly of Oregon, Karyn of Canada, and Cindy from NY!!
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I'll be back Jan. 25 with more books to give away! Hugs!!

So I'm imagining you all tearing into your presents and squealing with joy over the lovely clothes or Ipad or Kindle you just received-- but wait! There's something missing!

A vampire. Didn't you want one of those for Christmas? Your husband will never know. You can hide your vamp in the basement. He's easy to take care of. You don't have to cook for him. He never snores. He might need a little blood every now and then, but donating blood is a good thing, right?

Santa to the rescue! Three lucky commentors will receive signed copies of All I Want for Christmas is a Vampire! So please leave a comment, then enjoy your day! Merry Christmas!

THE WHISPERING EYE...

The Forest of Hands and Teeth
Wicked Lovely
City of Bones
Shiver
The Hunger Games
Firelight
Hush, Hush
Beautiful Creatures
Matched

(Can you tell I'm a Young Adult author???)

Sometimes even before the cover image, the title is the first impression we have of a book. And whether we want to admit it or not, they’re important. HUGELY important. And you know what? I kinda suck at titles.

Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE the title of my first book. Love, love it, and maybe even want to marry it. But it was an accidental title, a placeholder title that ([insert sarcasm font here] with my vast knowledge of the publishing industry) I was sure the publisher was going to change anyway. THE BODY FINDER…it was what my main character could do, not a well thought out title of a YA novel. I even had a short list (a VERY short list) of alternates, just in case I was consulted in the matter. But that’s the weird thing…I wasn’t consulted. Because my publisher—the editorial staff and Sales & Marketing—they loved the title too. Thus, THE BODY FINDER it was.

And I was left standing there going: “What the hell just happened…?”

For book two I was more careful. Thoughtful. I spent a lot of time thinking about what meaning I wanted to convey. I weighed the feel of the book and the path that my main character took. And I came up with the perfect title. My agent loved it, and my editor too. Close your eyes and imagine it: *waves hand dramatically*

THE BEAUTIFUL DEAD

It had everything, it was evocative and dark and a little mysterious…

Umm, yeah, well apparently it was the perfect title...for a series of books already out in the UK. And it was way too close to Francesca Lia Block’s book (also by HarperCollins) titled PRETTY DEAD. (I only wish someone would have told me before I bought the domain name: www.thebeautifuldead.net!)

So it was back to the drawing board. And then one day I was going through my edits and I came across a line in the manuscript that stood out to me: “…the desires of the dead.” And that was it, my title: DESIRES OF THE DEAD. Another accidental title. But, again, I love it. And again, a possible impending nuptial. (What can I say? I’m fickle like that!)

For my current project, it took me a LOT longer to come up with a title...pages and pages (and weeks and weeks) of brainstorming. I S-T-R-U-G-G-L-E-D with it! I knew it when I found it, but it was a long time coming.

But in the meantime, one morning after watching the movie Role Models, I woke up and my husband had renamed my document “THE WHISPERING EYE” as a joke. If you’ve seen the movie you’ll get the reference. (If you haven’t, then you’re on your own to figure it out.) But I wonder what my editor would have thought if I'd sent it in like that. I can just imagine the Sales & Marketing meeting for that one. I’m guessing it would have been fairly controversial…

So, I want to know what titles you love and why. And if you’re a writer, I wanna know how you’ve come up with your titles.

Because this title thing, it daunts me. Like I said, I sort of suck at it…