Said and Unsaid
I was thinking about dialogue on the Greyhound bus ride home the other day. I have borrowed many a good line from strangers on public transport—the gem of that trip was 'Have you been to the bathroom in Baltimore? I felt safer in prison'—and sometimes these lines are so good they sound like they HAVE to have been made up.
Here's an example. I wrote the following, and my editor asked me to change it because she couldn't imagine anyone actually speaking this way:
Every so often I get a craving for the kind I can't find at night. You know the sort of man I mean: a vegetarian Buddhist in thrift-store corduroys, doesn't drink, rarely pays a visit to the barber. Last time I found one I was coming home on the PATH train at half past six on a Sunday morning; he boarded with a friend, both with twelve-speed bicycles in tow. I knew I had to have him when I heard him say, "You know when you're riding down a country road and come upon the skeleton of a barn? I love that." He didn't notice me then, but I made sure he left his pocket journal on the train...
Yes, I heard a guy say that, word for word. I loved how much that offhand remark told me about his personality, and the well cared for bicycle at his side reinforced my impression. I didn't go home with that boy, but Eve sure did.What can really make good dialogue, though, is all the things that go unsaid. Here's another exchange I scribbled down on Monday afternoon:
HE: So...are you going to be around long enough for us to go out?
Something about being on a Greyhound bus gets me really horny. You'll do.
SHE: I don't think so. I'm too old for that shit.
I'll talk to you across the aisle, but there's no way in hell I'm going back behind the dumpster with you at the next pit stop.
HE: Yeah, I don't do the bus thing either.
[a moment later]
But I can cook up seafood better than you can buy it at the harbor.
I'm gonna pretend like you didn't just shut me down. In fact, I'm gonna give you one more chance, because I haven't met a woman yet who could resist my crabcakes...
This reminds me of nights in the study room back in grad school, when Seanan would write two lines for every one line of dialogue he composed: one for what was coming out of the character's mouth, and the second for what he was actually saying. Dialogue--reading it, writing it, overhearing and 'appropriating' it—is one of the most delightful aspects of being a storyteller, and doing it well makes it just as satisfying for the reader.
Blurbs and other fun stuff
Fun book stuff is starting to happen! Petty Magic recently got a couple of lovely blurbs from two of my favorite authors:
A charming curiosity shop of a novel, packed to bursting with secret histories and glittering marvels. With Petty Magic, Camille DeAngelis has given us a glimpse into a strange and enchanting world. It's dangerous good fun, and well worth getting lost in.—Jedediah Berry, author of The Manual of DetectionLove, magic, history, witches: it's all here, between the covers of this lovely book. Updike might have written it, if he'd had a better sense of humor.—Daniel Wallace, author of Big Fish and Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician
(Also, in case you missed it, you might want to read my post about how Daniel has inspired me.)The other exciting thing is this profile published Thursday in my local newspaper, the Burlington County Times! [Edit, 2013: alas, no longer online.]I'm also working with the designer of these two fabulous websites to come up with a brand-new blog; more about that later.
Operation Mincemeat
World War II offers us far more interesting, amusing and subtle examples of intelligence work than any writer of spy stories can devise.
In Petty Magic, I refer to a couple of the most spectacular World War II hoaxes, both of which were part of a larger deception plan, Operation Barclay--constructing sham army camps to fool Nazi reconnaissance, and planting phony intelligence documents on a corpse in uniform. It took several incredibly imaginative, 'corkscrew-minded' intelligence officers to hatch each of these plots, and in my novel I give all the credit to my magician-spy, Neverino. These hoaxes were first devised not by a magician, but a novelist!
The hoax involving a corpse in uniform was codenamed Operation Mincemeat (Churchill had forbidden the use of obvious or jokesy code names, but apparently no one listened to him), and it's the subject of a riveting new book by British journalist Ben Macintyre.
To begin regaining control of Europe in the summer of 1943, the Allies first needed to take back Sicily--and the Germans were just as aware of its strategic importance. Taking advantage of Hitler's 'Balkan fixation' (because the Third Reich got most of its raw materials from Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia), the Allies would convince him that they were planning to invade Sardinia and Greece instead, and that Sicily was the phony target.
Human agents or double agents can be tortured or turned, forced to reveal the falsity of the information they carried. A dead body would never talk.
So here's the gist: the corpse-with-phony-identification idea originated in Basil Thomson's novel, The Milliner's Hat Mystery, published in 1937. Ian Fleming, the naval intelligence officer who would later pen the James Bond novels, was a fan of Thomson's, and he included it in the "Trout Memo," a list of possible hoaxes that was distributed among the intelligence chiefs at the very beginning of the war. Two other officers in MI5--the eccentric, unassuming Charles Cholmondeley ("Chumly") and the supremely confident lawyer Ewen Montagu--developed the idea and saw it to fruition.
Once the higher-ups at MI5 consented to the ruse, these two officers embarked on an elaborate planning process. St. Pancras coroner Bentley Purchase informed them that the body of a homeless Welshman, Glyndwr Michael, had just been brought in, and Cholmondeley and Montagu spent the next couple of months (with Michael in deep refrigeration) inventing his alter-ego, Major William Martin, complete with love letters and photographs, hotel bills, and snippy missives from his father and bank manager. Cholmondeley and Montagu spent so much time inventing him that they began to feel as if Martin had actually been a friend of theirs.
Cholmondeley, Montagu, and the other planners knew how the Nazis thought--their two biggest flaws (with regard to military intelligence and espionage, anyway) being 'wishfulness and yesmanship'--and if they could allow those phony documents to fall into the right hands, thousands of lives would be saved on both sides.
The operation got off as planned, and by the time 'Major Martin' arrived in Huelva, Spain, he stunk so bad the local forensic pathologist dismissed the inevitable anomalies (the corpse's face and the face on his ID card didn't quite match up; the body was too decomposed to have been in the water only a few days, as his documents attested) in favor of getting the heck out of the room. The body was laid to rest in a Catholic cemetery, and the suitcase and its contents got lost in a maze of Spanish bureaucracy and intrigue before the Nazis finally got their hands on it. The rumor of a Greek invasion spread, and thus began to substantiate itself; Hitler was convinced, and the ruse was complete.
The material is fascinating regardless, but Macintyre does a great job of bringing to life each character involved in the plot of Operation Mincemeat--from the aforementioned jolly coroner of St. Pancras ('He loved Gilbert and Sullivan operas, toy trains, boiled eggs, and his model piggery in Ipswich. He never wore a hat and laughed loudly and often') to the brave submarine commander assigned to the dispatch of 'Major William Martin', Bill Jewell, who only begins to fear for his life after falling in love with a Wren in Algiers. We get a keen sense of each player's desires and ambitions, their private histories and their miserable working conditions.
So why are so many details of the planning of Operation Mincemeat only now coming to light? After the war was over, there was still the possibility of a political backlash were the full story of the hoax to come out. British diplomats had conspired to deceive Spanish officials, so the revelation would have no doubt damaged Anglo-Spanish relations; furthermore, back at home, those who had orchestrated Operation Mincemeat had obtained the corpse by not-strictly-legal means, and exposure would have caused quite a bit of trouble for the coroner and other government offices involved in that particular aspect of the deception.
So, in The Man Who Never Was and on the international lecture circuit, Ewen Montagu spent forty years telling a story that was hopelessly incomplete--for the above reasons, and because Cholmondeley and several others abided by their MI5 oaths of secrecy for the rest of their lives. Macintyre had access to Montagu's personal archives, and along with information that has become available only in the last twenty years or so, he was able to write the most complete account of Operation Mincemeat we'll probably ever have. Its unputdownability is a testament to Macintyre's prowess as a storyteller. Highly, highly recommended.
[Edit: Since I wrote this I found there's another book on the subject that's also come out this year called Deathly Deception: The Real Story of Operation Mincemeat by Denis Smyth. It'd be interesting to compare them.]
I ♥ Angela Carter, part 2
(I ♥ Angela Carter, part 1.)At midnight, especially on Walpurgisnacht, the Devil holds picnics in the graveyards and invites the witches; then they dig up fresh corpses, and eat them. Anyone will tell you that.
This is the most beautiful book I own.It's the first U.S. edition of The Bloody Chamber (published in 1977), a collection of deliciously creepy retellings of classic fairy tales and legends like Bluebeard's Chamber, the Erlking, and Beauty and the Beast. The heroines of these stories are brave and sensuous and morbid; the collection's usually pegged as 'feminist fairy tales' but they're so much more fun than that label lets on.
One of my favorite stories is 'The Lady of the House of Love'; as you read it you can totally imagine yourself as the 'beautiful queen of the vampires', alone in the gloom of her ruined chateau:
Closely barred shutters and heavy velvet curtains keep out every leak of natural light. There is a round table on a single leg covered with a red plush cloth on which she lays out her inevitable tarot; this room is never more than faintly illuminated by a heavily shaded lamp on the mantelpiece and the dark-red figured wallpaper is obscurely, distressingly patterned by the rain that drives in through the neglected roof and leaves behind it random areas of staining, ominous marks like those left on the sheets by dead lovers. Depredations of rot and fungus everywhere. The unlit chandelier is so heavy with dust the individual prisms no longer show any shapes; industrious spiders have woven canopies in the corners of this ornate and rotting place, have trapped the porcelain vases on the mantelpiece in soft gray nets. But the mistress of all this disintegration notices nothing...
The prose throughout is beautiful and evocative and pleasantly disturbing. There's an awful lot of romanticization of death in popular culture these days--(enough already with all these cheesy vampire sagas!)--and while the stories in The Bloody Chamber are often preoccupied with sex, death, and decay, this is not at all the indulgence of some teenybopper goth fantasy. Her beauty is a symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness.Like I said, I am rationing the oeuvre of Angela Carter, although I suspect I have already read her best novel—Wise Children, her last, published in 1991. If you've never read her, The Bloody Chamber might be a good place to start.
What's a beldame?
When people ask me about Petty Magic, I usually use the word 'witch' even though my narrator hates that word with a red-hot fiery passion--just because 'witch' is quicker to understand. (There's an old-school witch on the cover, too, spiriting a little girl away on her broomstick--but this is ironically appropriate.)
Think of us as sibyls or seraphs--fearsome, oh yes, but more or less benevolent.
Eve and the other beldames in Petty Magic live at least twice as long as ordinary women but age half as quickly. They can turn themselves into animals, travel thousands of miles in a twinkling, or render themselves invisible, but they get worn out and need to sleep and recharge just like anybody else. They can be sweet and solicitous like fairy godmothers, or...not. And they tell lies, so they say, only to keep the men in black from locking them up.Because Eve is more superwoman or benign enchantress than vindictive old hag, I wanted a different word for her. In Coraline, Neil Gaiman refers to the 'other mother' as a beldam, as in 'crone' or 'witch' (the word comes from Middle English--bel, grand, and dam, mother, grandmother being the original meaning). In the dictionary 'beldame' is only listed as an alternate spelling, but in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" (written in 1819, revised in 1820) Keats's beldame is from the French, a 'beautiful lady'--that is to say, a sorceress.
She took me to her elfin grot,And there she gaz'd and sighed deep,And there I shut her wild sad eyes--So kiss'd to sleep.And there we slumber'd on the moss,And there I dream'd, ah woe betide,The latest dream I ever dream'dOn the cold hill side.I saw pale kings, and princes too,Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;Who cry'd--"La belle Dame sans merciHath thee in thrall!"
The belle dame is a dangerous woman--a fairy, or a sort of banshee--who, in medieval legend, would lure men into an enchanted forest and make them lose all desire for anything else, even to go on living. The poem harks back to the chivalric tradition, in which 'women were to be loved from afar and to be considered unattainable.'
Archetypes aren't terribly interesting unless you can somehow subvert them (or better yet, subvert and reinforce). Can a 'dangerous woman' have (mostly) good intentions? Maybe not Keats' beldame...but definitely mine.(A version of this entry appeared on Read It Forward.)
The Wind in the Willows, part 2
Especially for you, Paré:
And a better view of the stairs:
Can't even see the house from the street, but I want to live here so bad.
Witchcraft, Magic & Alchemy
It's high time we had some more witchy stuff on here!Witchcraft, Magic, and Alchemy by Grillot de Givry has got to be the weirdest book I have ever cracked. The publisher's product description is somewhat misleading:
From raising the dead to foretelling the future, this historical tour of the occult offers a captivating exploration of sorcery and ceremonial magic. Prepared by a noted French historian, it ventures into virtually all of the classical arts, with 375 rare black-and-white illustrations derived from paintings, illuminated manuscripts, sculpture, and architecture.
The author doesn't actually approach the material with the objective eye of a historian; he writes about necromancy and love philters and suchlike as if he actually believes in all this stuff. I can't decide if he's brilliant or cuckoo.
It is also very easy, according to several Black-books, to become invisible by carrying the heart of a bat, a black hen, or a frog under the right arm. A more elegant method is to wear the Ring of Gyges on your finger; you can then become visible or invisible at will simply by turning the stone inward or outward. This ring must be made of fixed mercury; it must be set with a little stone to be found in a lapwing's nest, and round the stone must be engraved the words, "Jésus passant ✠ par le milieu d'eux ✠ s'en allait." You must put the ring on your finger, and if you look at yourself in a mirror and cannot see the ring it is a sure sign that it has been successfully manufactured.
How nutty is that? There's plenty more where this came from, but I left the book at Seanan's when I was moving out of Galway and forgot about it while I was in Tipperary, so further excerpts will have to wait.
Great Book #44: The Wind in the Willows
'It's my world, and I don't want any other. What it hasn't got is not worth having, and what it doesn't know is not worth knowing.'The Wind in the Willows is one of those classics I really don't know why I never read. Now I wish I'd read it as a child, because as I was listening to the Librivox recording (with a variety of readers, most of them excellent) I kept thinking too much like an adult:A toad riding a horse! Rats and moles eating bacon and lobster! Field mice singing Christmas carols! How silly!I also wish I didn't know anything about Kenneth Grahame, thanks to "The Tragedy of Mr. Toad." [Recently it has been pointed out to me what a rubbishy newspaper the Daily Mail is, so I apologize if 'Femail,' etc. offends anybody.] As I was listening, I did often think about how this book was the most substantial thing the love-hungry Alastair ever got from his father...at least according to the article.But setting all that aside--this really is a lovely book, full of beautiful descriptions of nature and the changing of the days and seasons.
As he sat on the grass and looked across the river, a dark hole in the bank opposite, just above the water's edge, caught his eye, and dreamily he fell to considering what a nice snug dwelling-place it would make for an animal with few wants and fond of a bijou riverside residence, above flood level and remote from noise and dust. As he gazed, something bright and small seemed to twinkle down in the heart of it, vanished, then twinkled once more like a tiny star. But it could hardly be a star in such an unlikely situation; and it was too glittering and small for a glow-worm. Then, as he looked, it winked at him, and so declared itself to be an eye; and a small face began gradually to grow up round it, like a frame round a picture.
Most of the episodes in The Wind in the Willows emphasize that true friendship occasionally entails a bit of personal sacrifice, and that loving your friends for who they are doesn't mean letting them go off and make outrageous fools (or menaces) of themselves. This is all communicated quite nicely without bonking children over the head with 'the moral of the story.' That said, I bet everybody looks forward to those chapters following the exploits of the incorrigibly conceited Toad, because the other animals are too sensible to be anywhere near as interesting.
'Glorious, stirring sight!' murmured Toad, never offering to move. 'The poetry of motion! The REAL way to travel! The ONLY way to travel! Here to-day--in next week to-morrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped--always somebody else's horizon! O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my!''O STOP being an ass, Toad!' cried the Mole despairingly.
Toad's gleefully insane obsession with motor-cars, his imprisonment for auto theft and his flamboyant escape and subsequent adventures while impersonating a washerwoman--these passages are even more enjoyable than all the poignant bits about Rat and Mole's particular friendship, though I feel a bit guilty saying so.
[picture the following shrieked by a huuuge British guy with painted-on warts]:I'm being attacked by a cushion! AHH! I'm being attacked by a shoe! AHH! I'm being attacked by my foot! AHH!
—Toad in the Masterpiece Theatre version of "The Wind in the Willows"
I ♥ Shaye
Something really crappy happened in the publishing world last week.Let me back up. From the day I got my Mary Modern book deal (14 March 2006--can't ever forget a date that important), I felt really happy to be a part of Shaye Areheart Books. Shaye and Sally (my editor on Mary Modern) always made me feel not only that they loved my book, but that they cared about me personally. I got the impression that it wouldn't make one bit of difference to Shaye if I never made a bestseller list, so long as I kept telling good stories.Now, this sort of thing happens quite a bit--CEOs and other folks in lofty positions occasionally get ousted in publishing just like any other business--and I don't want this to turn into an anti-corporate rant or anything. (Well, all right: I composed the rant, and have just hit 'delete'.) I just wanted to ask that when you pick up a hardcover copy of Petty Magic this fall, stop and look at the colophon on the spine. It ought to have been a steaming coffee cup, with SHAYE AREHEART BOOKS written underneath.
Recap
I've been back from Yaddo several days now, and it's all starting to feel like a marvelous dream. To be able to write and read all day in a quaint little sun-lit study with no interruptions whatsoever, and a plastic lunch pail packed with a sandwich and fruit and carrot sticks wrapped in wax paper; to go for a run in the woods, or lay my yoga mat out on the back porch, and listen to the birds and the squirrels going about their business in the trees; to meet up with new friends at dinner, and play games in the pool house and have wine and snacks by a fire in a cozy sitting room, and to go back to work for a little while afterwards, if I felt like it...the whole experience was magical, it really was. One Saturday I laid in bed all afternoon reading Neverwhere--even ate my lunch in bed--and I didn't feel one bit guilty about it!As I said, I was a little nervous about going without internet access, but it actually felt really good to be unplugged and unreachable, unless I wanted to be (and I did quickly check my email a couple times a day, usually after breakfast and before dinner). And of course I was meeting so many interesting new people that I wanted to get to know them all better, rather than spend much time on the computer in the evenings. Everyone--staff and residents--was so incredibly kind and friendly!I know each person's experience of an artists' residency is going to be a bit different, and I think we were all looking to gain slightly different things, but for me the social aspect was almost as important as the actual work. We talked for hours about books (our own, and others'), and art, and pop culture, and shared horror stories from our childhoods, and I went to bed every night just feeling really, really content. I was fortunate enough to give my first-ever reading of Petty Magic after my new friend Nova read from her forthcoming novel, Imaginary Girls (look for it, summer 2011...it's going to be amazing!)--and even more fortunate afterward to be able to have one of those marvelous conversations with her that would, the next morning, allow all the disjointed bits of my fledgling novel to click into place. I love that kind of conversation--one you can look back on as a real turning point.So, if you are reading this and thinking of applying to Yaddo, I have one piece of advice: DO! If you haven't published a book/had a show/whatever yet, don't let that stop you; part of what makes Yaddo so awesome is that they bring together writers and artists of all levels of experience.
Yaddo in Pictures, part 2
The stairs at West House; two views of my study; reading on the back porch on a sunny afternoon; a walk in the woods.
Yaddo in Pictures, part 1
A neo-gothic pile; the gardens (which are open to the public); Katrina's room; another view of the mansion; one of the gargoyles in the dining room (gosh, that sounds familiar...)
84 Charing Cross Road
I never knew a book could be such a joy to the touch.While we were in London Deirdre was saying what a wonderful book (and film) 84 Charing Cross Road is, and how sad it is that a Pizza Hut is on the site of that venerable old bookstore. Then when we were back in Galway she surprised me with a copy of the book, which my mother seized and devoured as soon as I got home. It took me a couple months to get around to it, but wow--what a great book it is!Thank you again for the beautiful book, I shall try very hard not to get gin and ashes all over it, it's really much too fine for the likes of me.A vivacious New York writer, Helene Hanff, sends a letter in 1949 to a secondhand bookshop in London asking for help locating a few obscure titles, initiating a correspondence that lasts almost twenty years. The book is by turns hilarious and poignant; Helene is quick with the zingers (I don't want to give too many away here), but when she hears that meat and eggs are still severely rationed in post-war England, she orders a food basket to be delivered to the staff at Marks & Co. for the holidays. Her primary pen-pal, Frank Doel, is all stereotypical British reserve at first, but it's clear just how much he comes to treasure her friendship. Your heart aches every time he asks when Helene will finally make that long-awaited trip to London.From where I sit, London's a lot closer than 17th Street.My edition contains both 84 andThe Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, the diary Helene kept during her sojourn in London in the summer of 1971. (Ordinarily I refer to authors by their surnames, but Helene is too much a kindred spirit for that. Reading this book is like making a new friend.) I got a heady feeling when she visited The George, that great old pub I told you about back in January, because I was there with Deirdre. What can I say, I get a kick out of little connections like that.Another connection that really floored me: while Helene is in London, Leo Marks introduces himself as the bookshop owner's son, invites her out to dinner, and his wife later paints her portrait in Russell Square. LEO MARKS! Codemaster for the Special Operations Executive! How awesome is that? (See page 299 of Petty Magic; or just click here).
'Tell me,' said Leo. 'You've written a beautiful book. Why haven't we heard of you before? What was wrong with your earlier work? Too good or not good enough?''Not good enough,' I said. And he nodded and went on to something else, and I think that's when we became soul mates.
Part of the reason why 84 Charing Cross Road and The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street (and all her other books, too, no doubt) have resonated with so many readers is this marvelous feeling of kinship across time and space. Helene felt it for Donne and Pepys and John Henry Newman, and we feel it for her.
Quick Dispatch
1. This place is AMAZING. The people are lovely, the place is lovely, and I'm getting a load of work done.2. New rule re social networking: I'm only logging in to accept friend requests and follow people back. I can justify this because I don't want to lose track of new friends.3. Silly Mealey. Nobody gives a crap if you check your email in the middle of the day.4. Not that I'm checking my email in the middle of the day. Because I'm not.5. I will admit to a nap though. And I wrote 400 words afterward, so even the nap was productive.
Going Dark
I'm leaving for Yaddo today, and I've promised myself there will be no blog-reading, tweeting, or Facebooking while I'm there. Wild with anticipation, of course, but there's also a whiff of 'trial by fire' about the whole thing: either I have the most productive month of my life, or I go completely potty from internet withdrawal. (There is internet access, just not in the studios, and I know I won't be sneaking into the WiFi area during working hours for fear of being seen. Sometimes shame is a very good thing.)
(What I'm packing: a copy of Mary Modern for the Yaddo library, some Petty Magic ARCs, one of the Moleskine notebooks Elliot gave me for Christmas, lots of looseleaf paper and gel pens, and a bunch of great books for research and/or pleasure. There's also a book of Dürer etchings--I thought I might use them for inspiration, you know, just sit and ruminate on "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" until I start getting ideas. I'll let you know how that little experiment goes.)If I can get some good photos (and permission, when needed) I'll be sure to post them (after 4pm!), and in the meantime this thing is set to auto-blog: more photos from Eastern Europe, great books, and some random nerdy stuff.
Galley giveaway winners!
Thanks to everyone who entered the contest! I drew names over coffee on Friday morning, and the winners were @AngelaPardue, @angelynnodom, @eheinlen, @melistress, and @chickwithbooks. The galleys are going in the mail today.(That's my WIP bucket bag from MadebyLoumms. Their bags are ADORABLE and very well made!)
Petty Magic Teaser & Galley Giveaway
The galleys have landed!
Petty Magic goes on sale on October 5th, and is now available to pre-order on Amazon.com! From the back cover:
Petty Magic: In this brilliantly imagined tale of adventure and timeless romance, acclaimed novelist Camille DeAngelis blends WWII heroics with witchcraft and wit, conjuring a fabulously rich world where beldames and mortal men dare to fall in love.Evelyn Harbinger sees nothing wrong with a one-night stand. At one hundred and forty nine years old, Eve may look like she bakes oatmeal cookies in the afternoon and dozes in her rocking chair in the evenings, but once the gray hair and wrinkles are traded for jet-black tresses and porcelain skin, she can still turn heads as the beautiful girl she once was. Can't fault a girl for having a little fun, can you?This is all fine and well until Eve meets Justin, who reminds her so much of a former lover, and one night is no longer enough. Eve spends more and more nights--and days--romancing Justin as her younger self, and noticing the many peculiar ways in which he is so like Jonah, her partner behind enemy lines in WWII and the love of her life. Experts in espionage, Jonah and Eve advanced the Allied cause at great personal sacrifice, and Jonah lost his life. Now Eve suspects that her Jonah has returned to her, and despite the disapproval of her coven, and the knowledge that love with a mortal man can only end in sorrow, she can't give him up. But can she prove it's really him?
I have five galleys to give away. Here's what we'll do: to enter, just tweet (or re-tweet) about Petty Magic. If you re-tweet and follow me (@PettyMagic), you'll be entered twice. Of course, if you are already following me on Twitter then you get two too. (Yep, doing it old-school--I'm picking names out of a hat.) If I happen to draw your name twice (or if you've already been promised a galley), you'll just get the one; not that I wouldn't love to give you an extra to pass along, but these things are in short supply.I'll draw the names on Friday morning. Isn't this exciting?!
Process, part 2
(Process, part 1.)Here's a page from one of my NUIG notebooks. People always seem surprised that I don't write in chronological order, but to me it makes sense (during the rough draft, once the thing has been loosely plotted) to write whichever scene I feel like writing, and stitch them together afterward.
(Click here for a better view.)In this case, I'd only just started the draft in earnest (notice the date up top: 6 October 2004), but I was already working on the graveyard scene that begins on page 218. Some famous writer said that if you know how your novel is going to end before you've written it, then it isn't worth writing at all. Biggest load of baloney I ever heard.
Process
I was sorting through old journals recently, and found some very rough notes for Mary Modern taken before I even got to Galway.
(Better view here. Or just click on the photo.)I thought it might be fun to put up a few pages to give you a glimpse of the story in its earliest stage of development. (I don't know about you, but I eat this stuff up.)
(Better view here.)After all, you've got to start someplace...(Process, part 2.)
Dame Alice
(Here's a bit about the most famous Irish witch, Dame Alice Kyteler, adapted from a Moon Ireland sidebar.)Easily the most colorful character in Kilkenny history, Dame Alice Kyteler was a businesswoman in the early 14th century who gained more money and power with each husband she acquired. There were four in all, and since each died under mysterious circumstances it was inevitable that Dame Alice should be accused of witchcraft. According to Peter Somerville-Large in Irish Eccentrics, Dame Alice allegedly led her coven in parodies of the Mass using dead men's fingernails and the shrouds of unbaptized boys. "She sacrificed nine red cocks and nine peacock's eyes to her incubus, Art, or Robert, who had carnal knowledge of her in the shape of a cat [or] a hairy black dog..."Though formally charged in 1324, her influential friends (her brothers-in-law, mostly) had the offending bishop, Richard de Ledrede, imprisoned for seventeen days. The trial commenced upon his release, however, and Dame Alice and her servant girl, Petronilla, were sentenced to burn at the stake. Dame Alice fled the country the night before the execution, leaving loyal Petronilla to her fiery fate on the third of November, 1324. (Somerville-Large gives the 3rd of September, 1325 as the date of execution.)Alice Kyteler's firstborn son, William Outlawe, agreed to give alms to the poor and re-roof the choir stalls at St. Canice's Cathedral to avoid the gallows. Dame Alice was never seen or heard of again.If this story captures your imagination as it did mine, you'll want to hunt down a copy of Emma Donoghue's The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (Half.com link here). "Looking for Petronilla" is the best of the collection.