And thank you, thank you to everyone who entered the Faerie Winter paperback contest! Reading your blog posts, tweets, fb posts, tumblr posts, google+ posts not only helped spread the word about the paperback, but also just made me smile. 🙂
Happy reading, and happy spring, to you all!
I’m also over at Suvudu with five true things about Faerie Winter this week.
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A couple weeks ago I talked about my attempts to write a Bones of Faerie sequel from Allie’s point of view. It was sort of working and sort of not, but I wasn’t too worried about that, since all my first drafts are incredibly rough.
When the time came to talk with my editor about a sequel, I told him how excited I was about telling Allie’s story. And he said two things.
First, he pointed out that it was Liza’s story readers would want and expect to return to, because they’d want to pick up where Bones of Faerie left off. From talking to readers since Bones of Faerie‘s release, I knew this was true, but I also knew–thought I knew–that Liza was just too powerful for another book, much as I wanted to see more of her, too.
But then my editor also asked: “Have you thought about what it would look like if Liza weren’t so powerful? What sorts of problems might she be discovering, so that things aren’t quite as easy as they appeared they would be?”
I hadn’t, not really.
Even though this is, of course, is how we tell stories: however powerful a character is, we give them challenges that are equal to–or greater than–that power. I knew that, but in the way one does, I also didn’t know, or had forgotten. Because I hadn’t truly thought about what it would be like, if I upped the stakes, and gave Liza bigger challenges than in the last book, even though no matter who my protagonist was going to be, this new book needed new and bigger challenges.
So I thought about Liza’s magic, and what forces might be stronger than that magic. I thought, too, about the challenges that living with such powerful magic might create. And I thought about something else: the fact that even if she’d made it home safely in the last book, Liza’s emotional arc wasn’t complete, and there were all these tensions, especially with Liza’s mother, that I’d get to explore more deeply if she was the protagonist of a second book.
I realized that not only could I write a book from Liza’s point of view, but also that I very much wanted to. I started writing, and through my usual series of rough drafts Liza’s challenges came clearer and clearer, and they included not just the magic-hostile humans she’d dealt with in Bones of Faerie (and who she could indeed handle now), but also some extremely human-hostile faeries who’d survived the war, and who Liza was not at all prepared to deal with. (These included, by the final draft, the queen of the Faerie, who I’d been sure had died in the War–but it turns out the Lady of Air and Darkness cannot be felled by something so simple as the end of the world.) There were new challenges inherent in Liza’s world itself, too, because in this new book it was winter now, a sort of winter Liza had never before seen and, well, winter isn’t the sort of thing one can easily fight with magic.
Pretty soon I’d stopped wondering how any danger could pose a real challenge for Liza, and had started wondering just how Liza was going to survive to the end of the story. (It was a near thing.)
And now, of course, I can’t imagine the story any other way. Because once a book is finished, it becomes in some sense true, and so I’ve moved from wondering how it should happen to knowing how it did happen.
And it’s very much Liza’s story, after all. 🙂
I have a post up today at Tor.com on running away to Minneapolis … I mean Bordertown.
There’s still time to win copies of the paperbacks of both Faerie Winter and Welcome to Bordertown here.
School Library Journal reviews Faerie Winter (meant to blog this one earlier): “Faerie Winter is a beautifully crafted tale, peopled with believable characters and overflowing with dramatic plot twists. But perhaps the most exceptional quality is the vivid imagery that plunges readers into the story and keeps them enchanted throughout. Fans of both fantasy and dystopian fiction will devour this one.”
Rachel Ann Hanley reviews Thief Eyes.
I’m now linkblogging at jannileesimner.tumblr.com (Opinions welcome about whether I should continue to share those random links here as well.)
The contest to win copies of all my books by spreading the word continues until April 20. Enter here!
Here’s the teaser Random House included in the front matter of the new edition:
I felt my skin and bones burning, melting, shifting. I turned from a cat into a wild dog as the Lady’s magic poured through me, from a dog into an eagle, from an eagle into a slithering snake. I roared and howled, shrieked and hissed, as faster and faster I changed. For an instant I was human once more, kneeling naked in the mud and clinging to the Lady’s hand as an icy wind raked my skin, and then I was changing once more, slowly changing to immoveable stone. The Lady’s gaze met mine, and in her eyes I saw winter unending and the knowledge that spring was nothing more than a story. “All things must end,” she whispered.
I hope those of you reading Faerie Winter for the first time enjoy it!
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In my last Faerie Winter post I talked about how in my first attempt at writing a sequel to Bones of Faerie, I attempted to tell the story from the point of view of Kimi the plant speaker, a minor character from Bones of Faerie–and then decided as a more major secondary character, Allie would be a better point of view, especially since I’d decided to put her father’s life in danger. I loved Allie, the young healer who’d run away to follow Liza in Bones of Faerie. I wanted to know more about her.
By this time, my non-Faerieverse Iceland novel, Thief Eyes, was sitting on my editor’s desk and Bones of Faerie was nearing its release date, so I had more time to dedicate to the Allie version than I’d had for the Kimi one. I thought writing Allie would be easier than writing Kimi, because I knew Allie better, but actually the reverse was true: I knew Allie from the outside, but struggled with getting to know her from within.
Here’s the opening of my Allie draft of Faerie Winter, which I may have been calling Tangled Magic or may have been calling just “Allie’s Book”; I no longer remember for sure:
I can feel your skin grow. Did you know that? I can feel the old skin–thinner than old paper, dry as old leaves–sloughing away. I can feel the new skin–stretchy like rubber bands from Before must have been, until they all turned brittle and snapped–push in and take its place. I can feel the itchy place where old skin and new skin meet. It’s my favorite new thing. I don’t even have to touch you, though I do have to get pretty close. Then I reach out, with the thinnest tendril of my magic–thinner than a cat’s whisker, thinner than I could even manage a year ago–reach for your bare wrist, or maybe a your fingertip. Of course, if you flinch away, or even just tell me not to, I stop. This isn’t like during the War. We know better, now, than to use magic without permission. I can feel you breathing, too, no matter how quiet you try to be … I’m a Healer. Before you speak a single word I can know, somewhere deep inside me, that all is well. Or if it isn’t well, if your breathing is a little too tight, your skin growing a little too fast? I can fix it. I have to fix it. If I don’t, it’s my skin that feels all itchy and tight. Healing is what I do. Dad says my Mom was in med school before the War with the faerie folk, and that healing must run in the family. He smiles a little sadly when he says it. Me too. Mom died the same day I was born. So anyway, when I saw Kimi covered in Virginia creeper, I knew she wasn’t in trouble, not really … =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
I loved the from-within view of what healing felt like, but I felt like something was missing, too, some essential Allie-ness. Looking at this now, I can also see there’s less forward motion than in Kimi’s draft. Still, I pressed forward, doing what I always do when a book lacks forward motion: keep writing until I find it.
In this draft, Kimi’s plant magic still gets out of control, and Allie’s father Samuel still almost dies when the plants attack. Samuel winds up in a coma instead, and Kimi winds up insane and unable to turn off the voices of the plants, and Karin decides she needs to take her damaged student to Liza’s town and from there to Faerie, where plants no longer grow and so can’t speak to her, in hopes Kimi will regain her sanity there. Caleb, Allie’s teacher, sends Allie with them, because he’s scared Allie will kill herself pushing too hard with her magic to try to save her father. Josh, a scattered-acting fire speaker who was crushing on Kimi and who Allie crushed on in turn, went with them.
I wrote 16,000 words in all of this draft. I wasn’t sure what would happen once our characters got to Faerie, but I was sure I’d figure it out, just like I’d figure out the voice of the story, which was slower to gel than for Kimi’s much shorter draft.
Bones of Faerie came out. (Yay!) I did signings. Readers began to ask me about a sequel (joy!), and I told them I was hoping to write one, and that it would be from Allie’s point of view.
Readers loved Allie, and they were polite about the idea of a sequel from Allie’s point of view, but I began to realize that many of them instinctively wanted more of Liza’s story. I was still sure, though, that Liza’s story was through. I kept struggling to find Allie’s story instead.
And then the time came for my editor and I to talk about a sequel. (Double yay!) I explained how I saw this as the book in which we returned to Faerie, and also how I saw it as Allie’s story, and why.
And then he said a few things that made me realize maybe this wasn’t Allie’s story after all.
I’ll talk about how I finally saw that Liza’s story wasn’t anywhere close to over after all–that she had story and arc that not only could be told, but wanted to be told–in my next Faerie Winter post.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Dad said that Before music didn’t have to be played–you just flipped a switch and turned it on, just like with a lightbulb. You had to play it the first time, of course, but then you could catch the playing, and listen to it over and over again. That sounded kind of boring to me, and also kind of scary–what if you got it wrong that first time? Everyone who listened after would hear your mistake, forever and ever. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Matthew held me as I sobbed myself out. He could have told me that Caleb knew what he was doing; he could have reminded me that Caleb had saved his own life. He said nothing, just let me cry. Matthew’s magic was as a Shifter, but sometimes I thought his real talent was for just knowing when to be there. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= “But it’s a plant!” Josh said.
Karin said softly, so softly it sent a chill to my bones, “And you are a boy, yes, and I’ll see neither of you harmed if I can help it.”
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When I finished writing Bones of Faerie, I knew it was too soon to start working too hard on a sequel (first because I didn’t know if Bones of Faerie would sell, then because I didn’t know whether any future books in that world would sell), but I knew that I wanted to write one. Liza’s world haunted me, as surely as the opening scene that had led me to discover it once had.
It took me a long time to work out whose story that sequel would be, though.
Okay, it seems obvious to me now: all three books of the Bones of Faerie trilogy need to be telling Liza’s story. How could they not? But after finishing Bones of Faerie, I was very sure, for a while, that Liza’s story was done. Oh, sure, there was room for things to still happen in her life, but I felt like her arc had landed just where it needed to and that anything else was beyond the scope of the story–and also like by the end of the book Liza had become too powerful for a sequel. How could anything pose any real threat to her, as she stood at the end of the first book?
Those of you who have read Faerie Winter can take a moment to laugh now. 🙂
But back in the days after finishing Bones of Faerie, right before and after it sold as a standalone book, it was obvious to me I needed a new protagonist, and I decided on … Kimi.
You remember Kimi, right? Well, okay, maybe not. 🙂 Kimi is the girl in Bones of Faerie who complained about not having magic while her brother and best friend (that would be the healer Allie) both did, and who foolishly plunged through the plant Wall protecting her town in a fit of frustration and rebellion. When I wrote that scene–Kimi’s only scene–I wondered at first how Kimi could get through the Wall, which is carefully controlled by plant-speaker Karin. Liza wonders this, too, and comes up with her own explanations, which, as it turns out were wrong. Meanwhile I worked out the truth: Kimi was a new plant speaker, though she did not know it yet. And the next book would be her book.
Unlike Liza, Kimi had grown up in a town that embraced magic, and so she would be everything Liza wasn’t: fearless, in love with magic, filled with attitude, wearing thorns in her hair and probably dressing in black as well, and hating Liza, who readers would see only as a secondary character, because Kimi saw Liza as having taken Allie away from her. It all made sense to me.
Here’s an excerpt from the opening to what I imagined to be Kimi’s story, which for a while I actually was calling Thorns in Her Hair.
The green briar crept up my hand, cool green tendrils caressing my fingers, cool green vine spiraling up my arm. Thorns brushed my skin, too gently–just too gently–to draw blood. More tendrils burrowed through my sleeve, knitting their green threads into the coarse brown wool ones. Leaves tickled the back of my neck; the vine wrapped round and round, a living, breathing necklace. “Stop,” a voice whispered. But the voice wasn’t mine, and it wasn’t the briar’s, so I didn’t have to listen. I trailed my flower bedecked fingers down my other arm, inviting the vine to follow, feeling the power grow as thorns tangled wool. I stretched my hands toward the sun, knowing they needed sun to grow. “Stop.” Sweaty hands grabbed mine; I sent thorns and stems against their grip. “Kimberly!” The briar released me, green turning to winter brown and leaves and stems and thorns all fell dead to the earth. The power released me. I had no leaves, no flowers, no roots. I had nothing but my own human skin, pale beneath the evening spring sky. Why did Karin always stop me just as things were getting interesting? I pulled my hands away and glared up at her, glared past her at a wall of green vines that stretched toward the sky. Those vines didn’t die, not even in winter, now that we have winter again. The ground beneath them shivered a little; the dead green briar disappeared beneath into the soil, where they would melt back into dust, and one day grow again. But not today. “I was fine.“ “Kimberly.” Karin looked back at me, through silver eyes no more human than the briar was. “Look at your hands. I looked. Thorns had dug into my palms, and they bled, even though I was the one who’d called those thorns to defend me. Karin’s palms, of course, didn’t bleed at all. “I think,” she said softly, “that we need to work more on control.” “You always think that.” “Perhaps there is a reason. Enough for now.” Karin brushed her hair back from her face. Hair clear as glass; if you held a strand up to the sun, the light would shine right through. When I was little, I tried to dye my own brown hair that color, not understanding my hair would never look like Karin’s did. “You’ll get it,” she said. “It takes time, is all.” Sometimes I wonder whether she thinks I’ll ever get it. Because I’m only human, after all. “I think I did all right.” I rubbed my arms; the wool itched against them, and I realized the thorns had cut them, too. I longed to have those thorns back again. A little blood seemed a small price to pay, for magic. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
“Grow,” I whispered to the plant. “Grow.” Power thrummed through the vine; small white flowers bloomed along the stem, along the back of my hand. Tendrils caressed my ears, wove their way into my hair. Any moment I would take root. Any moment I would share that pulsing power. Already I could hear my own heart out the same time.
I continued on for a while, until Kimi’s magic really did get out of control, and injured Samuel, Allie’s father, who also plays a small (though larger than Kimi’s) role in Bones of Faerie. As I thought about the consequences of Samuel’s injury, which I wasn’t sure he’d survive, I realized I’d gotten this all wrong. The sequel to Bones of Faerie clearly wasn’t Kimi’s story after all.
It was … Allie’s.
So, I started over–my writing process is such that I don’t mind starting over–sure that now I was telling the right story.
I’ll talk about the Allie-POV version of the Bones of Faerie sequel in my next post on Faerie Winter.
I think this calls for a contest. 🙂
There are two prize packs: A novel prize pack (containing every novel I’ve published, including one that I ghost wrote) and a short story prize pack (with several anthologies I’ve appeared in, including Welcome to Bordertown, which comes out in a paperback edition with a brand new cover the very same day).
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The Rules
– Mention in a blog post, fb post, tweet, tumblr, and/or anywhere else online and publicly visible that Faerie Winter comes out in paperback on April 10 (eta: or, alternately, is now out in paperback) and that it’s the sequel to Bones of Faerie (or, alternately, book 2 in the Bones of Faerie trilogy). If you want to say something more about either of the Faerie books, that’d be lovely, though not required.
– Link to the Faerie Winter website
– Come back to this post and link to the places you did both of the above (eta: for fb, if you can’t link, just tag me and tell me you did so)
– (optional, for blog entries) Copy these rules (including this one :-)) to your post, and encourage your readers to enter this contest by doing all of the above in turn, and telling them to then to come back to your blog and link to their mention or mentions
– Deadline is April 20 (at midnight Pacific Daylight Time) and I’ll ship anywhere.
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Entries:
+1 entry for each place your mention of the above appears
+1 entry for each person who enters in turn and responds on your blog to let you know they’ve done so (they’ll still get their entry, too!)
I’ll draw two winners; the first gets to choose which of the prize packs below they prefer
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Prizes:
Novel prize pack:
(Every novel I’ve published, going back to 1996!)
– Ghost Horse (Phantom Rider #1)
– The Haunted Trail (Phantom Rider #2)
– Ghost Vision (Phantom Rider #3)
– A Royal Kiss (ghostwritten for Fran Lantz to her outline)
– Secret of the Three Treasures
– Bones of Faerie
– Thief Eyes
– Faerie Winter
Short story prize pack:
(A selection of anthologies in which my short stories have appeared)
– Leroni of Darkover, edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley
– Aladdin, Master of the Lamp, edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg
– Chicks in Chainmail, edited by Esther Friesner
– Sword of Ice, edited by Mercedes Lackey
– Bruce Coville’s Book of Magic, edited by Bruce Coville
– Bruce Coville’s Book of Nightmares, edited by Bruce Coville
– Gothic, Ten Original Dark Tales, edited by Deborah Noyes
– Welcome to Bordertown, edited by Holly Black and Ellen Kushner
– Plus a copy of Faerie Winter, just because 🙂
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All books are in paperback, except for Secret of the Three Treasures. There may be some yellowing of the older books, and Leroni of Darkover in particular is a bit battered, being more than 20 years old. 🙂
Thanks for entering, and for helping to spread the word!
But I’m writing a new character now (Nate, meet blog readers; blog readers, meet Nate) who has grown up in our world, where the density of things trying to kill him is considerably lower than it is in Liza’s, and where until very recently, the people nearest to him were actually pretty trustworthy. Which means I have to readjust my Liza-set character expectations.
Like in the current scene. Someone says to Nate, “We need to talk.”
Liza-in-my-head thinks: This someone wants information. Information is both a weapon and a thing of value. I must use it, trade with it. Liza agrees to talk, but only in exchange for various things: promises of safety, of food and shelter, of information of her own.
Almost, I let Nate echo these Liza-thoughts. After writing two Liza books in two years, Liza-thoughts are pretty instinctive, a part of me as well as my writing. But I catch myself.
Instead Nate, who is not Liza and who is developing a personality of his own, shrugs and leans casually against the nearest wall.
“So talk,” he says.
“Janni Lee Simner, AB ’89, AB ’89, made a promise to herself when she was 15: She would never forget that she was real. ‘I could tell the adults around me didn’t understand that my life was as real as theirs,’ Simner says. ‘I had this sense I was going to forget something as an adult. But at least I was going to remember that my life was real and everything I felt was real …'”
Because of course if I don’t, her final story remains mine alone, and all we’ve both been through will have been for nothing, after all. 🙂
