Author: claudia

So, now that SPELLCASTER has been out in the world for a couple of weeks, I’ve heard feedback from readers — most of it happy, thank goodness! — but there’s one thing that keeps coming up that I have to admit I don’t see at all. Several reviewers have said that SPELLCASTER ends on a cliffhanger. To which I have to ask — really? Does that count as a cliffhanger?

** POTENTIAL SPOILERS AFTER THIS POINT OBVIOUSLY**

I am an author who has written cliffhangers before, as those of you who have read HOURGLASS know. I live on your tears. I am without mercy and possibly without common humanity. (At least, when it comes to ending books. Day to day I am perfectly fine, at least if you are not between me and coffee, which frankly is a risk you took on yourself and for which I think I can’t be blamed.) Will I go there? Yes, I will.

And the thing is, I love cliffhangers, not just as an author but as a reader and viewer, too. The first cliffhanger that stole a shred of my soul was the third-season finale of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” which was back in the days before shows that weren’t soaps even did cliffhangers. We weren’t expecting it. At all. It just came along, and the ride we thought we were on was a roller coaster, and my friends and I actually sat there screaming at the TV for something like 5 minutes after it ended. Horrifying! And I wouldn’t trade that experience for the world. Some of my favorite endings for books and TV seasons since have been cliffhangers of the most daring variety: CATCHING FIRE, or the third season of “Lost”, or pretty much every single episode of the first season of “Alias.”

So as both a creator and fan of cliffhangers, I feel like, well, I know one when I see one. And I don’t think the ending of SPELLCASTER qualifies. No, not everything is completely resolved at the end, and you should have a very good idea of exactly what kind of mayhem is going to break out next. However, the core elements of the story are resolved. Nobody’s life hangs in the balance. We know where things stand romantically. Etc. The loose strings are just there to signal that, yes, STEADFAST is coming (March 2014!)

But I don’t know – maybe I’m too close to it. What do you guys think? If you’ve read SPELLCASTER, would you say it ends on a cliffhanger or not? And what cliffhangers have you loved (or not loved) over the years?

It’s SPELLCASTER day! It’s SPELLCASTER day!

This means the book is finally out there in the world, sitting on bookshelves or curled up in code, waiting to be bought or downloaded. (A few readers have revealed that they found early copies out there — but this is still the official day.)

I think before I was published I thought book release day would be marked by some sort of glitzy party; the reality involved more time spent in airports and on planes, as I was traveling out to my present location of Provo, Utah, to relax a little before tomorrow night’s event. (Have you checked out all the Dark Days events, the days and times, whether or not we’re coming to you? If not, check the News & Events page on my website to get the scoop!)

Right now I long to sink into the welcoming hotel bed and sleep for many hours, but first I have to deliver the final character sketch of the people you’re going to get to know in the SPELLCASTER trilogy. Now it’s time to get to know Mateo  —

Mateo Perez has lived in Captive’s Sound his whole life, but he still feels like an outsider. This isn’t because his dad is a relative newcomer who’s only been around for 20 years; no, it’s because of his mother’s family, which for generation after generation has lived in this same small town.

And generation after generation, they’ve all succumbed to insanity — a strange madness that no modern psychologist or drug seems able to help. It begins with nightmares, and then a deep, unshakable conviction that the dreamer has seen the future. Over time each person either succumbs to despair or gives way to violence. The last was Mateo’s mother herself, who took a boat out onto the ocean and never returned.

Mateo’s dad has always told him that the “family curse” is nothing but small-town gossip. Mateo has tried hard to believe him and leads a fairly ordinary life, helping out in the family restaurant and doing his best to fit in at Rodman High. But now the dreams have begun, and no one — not his best friend Elizabeth, or his dad, or even the beautiful girl he’s just met, Nadia — can keep him from realizing that he truly is seeing the future. That means he’s doomed … because even if Nadia thinks she can help him, he knows from his family’s tormented past that anyone who gets too close will just be doomed too.

 

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By the way, I’m loving the reviews some of you have linked to these posts — feel free to comment with more!

Last week I believed we were three weeks away from the SPELLCASTER launch. Wishful thinking, I guess, because the book will be out one week from today. One week!  Yes, I can get done with my revisions and pack for tour in time, hahahahahaha oh please someone help me.

AHEM. Maybe we should continue with the character sketches for SPELLCASTER, moving onto our next character — our lead character — Nadia Caldani.

As this is a series about witchcraft, you will probably, perhaps, just maybe have picked up on the fact that the MC is a witch. But she won’t discover witchcraft in the first book, or unlock a secret power she never knew she had. Nadia not only knows she’s a witch but is prouder of it than anything else in her life. Yes, sometimes it’s tough, having to keep something so important a secret … but that’s one of the rules Nadia lives by.  The First Laws of the Craft are sacred, and one of them forbids her to reveal the Craft to any woman who might betray it. Another tells her she may never speak of it, ever, to any man. Her dad and little brother remain oblivious to her powers, even though they’ve had to become closer these past few months.

Why? A few months before the start of the book, Nadia’s mother — her one and only teacher in the Craft — suddenly left the family. Not only does Nadia feel as hurt and abandoned as anyone else would by that, but she also has no further way to progress in her studying. She’s on the verge of this tremendous power, on more or less “graduating” to the level of witchcraft she’s worked for and aspired to all her life, and now she’s just … stuck. Although Nadia is determined to teach herself more, she questions how much farther she can go on her own. She wishes she could find another teacher but isn’t sure how to go about it. And she feels betrayed by her mom, by the friends who didn’t know how to stand by her when she was hurting, and maybe by the whole idea of love. (See, Nadia always thought of her parents as a perfect couple, people who had the kind of marriage everyone dreams of. Her friends always talked about how much her parents seemed to just like each other, while their moms and dads seemed to yell all the time. If that could fall apart, anything could fall apart, right?)

But then her father, hoping to give the family a fresh start, moves them all to the small town of Captive’s Sound, Rhode Island. Nadia doesn’t feel like trying to make new friends, or branch out at all. She’s going to power through her senior year, keep her head down and help take care of her brother Cole, who’s had a rough time since Mom’s been gone. Sounds like a plan.

Of course, that plan goes up in flames the second (I mean, the very second) she enters Captive’s Sound. Nadia immediately realizes a mysterious power is at work here — a magic infinitely greater and more dangerous than her own. She isn’t yet strong or experienced enough to face that, but she has to. There’s no one else.

And she meets Mateo, whose life has also been affected by magic in very different ways, and who may make Nadia believe in love all over again.

(Don’t worry: Mateo’s character sketch will be up soon!)

 

Since we’re now three weeks and one day (!!) away from the release of SPELLCASTER, I thought it might be a good time to introduce you guys to the characters in the story. First up: Verlaine Laughton.

Verlaine fulfills the role of the “best friend” — at least, she does in SPELLCASTER. As the trilogy develops, you’re going to see Verlaine develop as well, and ultimately she becomes a kind of second lead in the series. This is partly because I wanted to write a series that was more ensemble-driven than my previous books, and partly because the more I worked on the concept, the more I realized that Verlaine has her own story to tell. While her friendship with Nadia opens Verlaine’s eyes to the world of magic, Verlaine faces her own challenges, must stand up to her own enemies, and (starting in book 2, STEADFAST) will have her own romance.

(Personally, I think Verlaine’s romance with Character-To-Be-Named-Later  is at least as epic as Nadia and Mateo’s. I can’t wait for you guys to see STEADFAST, too! But that’s in spring 2014 — )

Just looking at Verlaine, you know she’s different. Yes, she’s the third-tallest person at Rodman High (including the members of the varsity basketball team). Yes, she indulges in her love for fabulous vintage clothing, dressing in outlandish and colorful outfits every day (though she does wear Converse, as period shoes are hard to find in a woman’s size 11.) But the first thing that would strike you about Verlaine is her hair, which — even though she’s just 17 – has already turned completely gray. In fact, it began turning gray when she was a small child. Now Verlaine wears it long and silver down her back. Lots of people think this is really weird, but privately Verlaine thinks it’s actually beautiful. Her name? Also weird. One of her grandmothers was named Elaine, the other Vera, and her parents namesmushed it; she likes to think that if they’d known “Verlaine” was also the name of a famous poet who died of syphilis, her parents might have made another choice. But what does it matter? She thinks it sounds pretty, and besides, nobody else even remembers her name.

Because, after a while, you might see that Verlaine is also incredibly lonely. She’s set apart from everyone else — at school, at her newspaper internship, really from just about everyone in the world besides her family. No matter how hard she tries, Verlaine remains the Girl Everybody Forgot.

Nadia’s arrival in town promises to change everything for Verlaine. At last it seems like she’s a part of something, and Mateo & Nadia are the first people to include her in what seems like forever. Yeah, it turns out they have to fight a vast and powerful evil — but at least it’s exciting, for a change. However, what starts as an adventure for Verlaine quickly turns scarier, as she learns that the dark magic at work has done unspeakable damage to countless lives … maybe including her own.

Verlaine is a character I care about deeply – and so far, early readers of SPELLCASTER have made a point of saying how much they connected with her. I think we can all relate to the pain of being left-out, the fear of being forgotten. Verlaine is profoundly lonely, but she refuses to let that define her. One of the things I’m most looking forward to with SPELLCASTER’s release is seeing what you guys make of her, and whether you’ll be as eager to see her role expand in later books as I’ve been to write it.

 

What are some of your favorite “best friends” in YA novels? Have you ever wished for some of them to get leading storylines and/or books of their own?

The madness of Mardi Gras has ended here in New Orleans; the streets are filled not with revelers but with very tired and penitent people. So I have put away my pith helmet and wigs for another year, and return to answering your writing questions. Today I thought I’d go over a few “quick answer” Qs, so here we go:

 

From Bridget H.: What are your favorite scenes to write in your books? Is it the action, romance, day-to day, or sad scenes that you like best?

There’s not really a “type” of scene that I like best. Each of them can go really wonderfully, or be really difficult; it all depends on what else is going on in the story. (Though I have learned the hard way that action scenes take about three times longer to write than any other kind of scene. Making something fast-paced is a very slow process, ironically enough.) If I were going to generalize, I would say that my favorite scenes are the ones where the characters’ most powerful emotions and/or defining traits come forward, where the center of the scene is the most compelling aspect of the character. That’s been different kinds of scenes at different times. In HOURGLASS, for instance, I loved the scene where Dana helps Lucas and Bianca as they leave Black Cross; I felt like so much of Dana’s personality, and Lucas’ deep friendship with her, came through there — and I would call that an action scene. In FATEFUL, maybe that’s the scene where Tess first realizes Alec’s secret; that shifts from an action scene to a very contemplative one. One of my favorite scenes in SPELLCASTER is actually a moment between Nadia and her father, which doesn’t directly impact the central plot but shows a lot of why Nadia is the kind of person she is.

My least favorite kind of scene? Exposition. Sometimes you have to have this. It is NEVER easy to work into a narrative in a clear, engaging way that doesn’t slow down the plot. And if I could say one thing that might spare aspiring writers great pain: The number of characters in an exposition scene must be as small as possible. One or two characters if you can swing it. Several people getting talky in a room = the hardest thing to write, ever.

 

From Emily: What do you believe is the best line you’ve ever written?

It doesn’t sound like anything on its own, but I really like a chapter-ending line in STARGAZER: “They were dancing.”

 

From Carrie: Which of your characters from any of your books would you most like to spend the day hanging out with?

I think Vic would be a lot of fun, and Ranulf too if he can come along. Balthazar, Tess, Alec and Verlaine (from SPELLCASTER) would also be interesting (and also possibly less likely to get me into trouble than Vic? Or maybe not, now that I think about the trouble I have in fact gotten all of them into over the years.)

 

From Latoya: When writing has a character ever done something that surprised you? If so, what was it?

I’ve had a few surprises, though the surprises have tended to be less “things the characters did” and more “how the characters felt.”  For instance, in STARGAZER, when Balthazar first began talking about his past, his emotions were much rawer than I’d anticipated — his anger and guilt came to the surface more powerfully than I had thought they would. Understanding that about him played a huge part in how I wrote him (and Charity) from then on. And Tess startled me in FATEFUL by being so determinedly matter-of-fact about what’s going on. Yes, it’s thrilling to be on the Titanic (at least, at first) and terrifying to learn that werewolves exist, but her sense of herself — her trust in her own good mind and instincts — never wavers, and I loved discovering that. As for SPELLCASTER (coming March 5! I cannot say this enough), Nadia was a very mysterious character for me at first, and I felt like I had to learn who she was page by page.

All that said, I just finished writing STEADFAST, which is the sequel to SPELLCASTER and the middle book in that trilogy. That was one of the very few cases where the characters did suddenly do things that surprised me, altering the ending considerably. So anything can happen!

 

From Sonya: How do you balance family and writing?

This difficult feat is one I have mastered by staying single. Works like a charm, guys.

More seriously, I’m not one of the best to answer this! But I see fellow authors like Aprilynne Pike, Melissa Marr & Kiersten White balancing family demands and writing like champions, so apparently it can be done. They leave me in awe!

 

Hope you guys saw my first video blog on YouTube and Facebook; if not, well, I should have another up in a couple of days …

It is a truth universally acknowledged — at least, acknowledged by every source I could find online — that Jan 27, 2013 is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen’s PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. There are other novels from that time that are still remembered today, even highly regarded by critics, but virtually none continues to … for lack of a better word, LIVE. Thousands of people all over the world read PRIDE & PREJUDICE every year, purely for fun. Adaptations of the story (whether that’s the traditional Colin Firth style or “The Lizzie Bennet Diaries”) are popular year after year. That’s pretty stunning if you think about it — that one of our favorite stories was written by someone who lived before photography. Before regular train travel. The person who wrote so beautifully and intelligently about love and courtship was someone who never married. The person whose stories have achieved worldwide acclaim never left her home country – not even so far as Wales or Scotland. It doesn’t matter. Never did.

 

So what do we learn from Jane Austen? What do her novels and her life have to tell those of us who aspire to write stories half as beloved as hers?

1) Work on your pitch letter.

Jane Austen’s works are so universally associated with the Regency era of their publication that we often forget her first three novels (SENSE & SENSIBILITY, PRIDE & PREJUDICE and NORTHANGER ABBEY) were written in the 1790s. Although she edited these novels between then and publication, they didn’t change that much; the first efforts to publish her work came in 1797, when her father tried to get a publisher interested in PRIDE & PREJUDICE.

Let’s just review really quickly: It was SIXTEEN YEARS before she got that book into print.

Why? Well, for one, while her dad meant well, he didn’t know how to present Jane’s work. In the letter he wrote the publishers, he didn’t really describe PRIDE & PREJUDICE at all. There was no summary of the plot, not even a description of the work as a romance or a comedy of manners. No wonder the publishers never even looked at it! One of the most beloved books in the English language didn’t find a publisher at first because it wasn’t presented correctly. No wonder it can happen to the likes of us, too.

 

2) If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. 

The first book Jane Austen sold for publication was NORTHANGER ABBEY, then titled SUSAN. In 1803, the publisher paid her 10 pounds, promised to bring it out soon and went so far as to advertise the book. And then … nothing.

Just nothing.

It was 1809 before Jane Austen’s brother wrote to suggest to the publishers that they bring it out already, or at least give it back to the author, so that she might seek another publisher. The publisher responded rather acidly, saying they’d given no specific publication date; they owned the rights, and if the author wanted them back, she could repay them the 10 pounds. That wasn’t an insubstantial amount of money back then, and Jane Austen couldn’t get her own novel out of publishing limbo.

This is the point when a lot of people would get discouraged. She’d gotten rejections. Then she got an acceptance that turned into a publishing nightmare. A decade had gone by, and she still wasn’t getting published. I’ll admit it: At this point, I’d probably have given up, because I lack the self-confidence. You have to think that even she had a few moments of doubt.

But she also had friends and family who kept begging to borrow the manuscript of P&P again. And again. And again. (Imagine her handwriting the entire thing over and over again, so as to have more lending copies.) Jane Austen ultimately believed in her work enough to revise and try again. When SENSE & SENSIBILITY was finally published in 1811, it was an immediate success, and everything changed.

(She finally paid those 10 pounds to get NORTHANGER ABBEY back. Her brother only informed the publisher that this was by the now-bestselling author of PRIDE & PREJUDICE after the fact. Served them right.)

 

3) Don’t worry too much about trends. 

Austen was worried about NORTHANGER ABBEY having been on the shelf for so long. Even the title change from SUSAN came about because another book with the same title had been released in the interim. The biggest problem was that she wrote the novel as a parody of a popular genre of novel back in the 1790s, the Gothic novel. Gothics were sometimes spooky, sometimes supernatural, often melodramatic and always (at least in intention) thrilling. But Gothics weren’t as popular by the 1810s. She felt sure the book was now out of date and that nobody would now understand the references or the jokes. And yet people are still reading and enjoying NORTHANGER ABBEY today, more than 200 years after the specific pop-culture trend they were written to parody.

Why? Well, the most important element of the answer, I think, is that trends change but elements of human nature remain the same. Catherine’s naivety might be different in specifics, but we all recognize elements of it in ourselves. To this day, very few of us wouldn’t be caught up in the romance and mystery of an ancient castle — or confused by the manipulations of people by the Thorpes. The book isn’t about Gothic novels; it’s about letting your imagination run away with you, and about letting fantasy get in the way of a less colorful, but more meaningful, potential reality. Because that part of the story continues to be absolutely true, it doesn’t matter that we no longer immediately understand the passages making fun of THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO. The truth is what we respond to.

If your novel has that core of truth to it — if we understand the characters’ motivations because we recognize them in ourselves – specific publishing trends won’t stand in your way forever.

4) No matter what, you will never please everybody.

Occasionally you run into a critic who sniffs at Jane Austen for being cozy or middle-class or dull. Most of this is pure contrarianism; some of it is sexism, as these days Jane Austen is seen as a writer who appeals mostly to women (as though literally millions of men had not read and enjoyed the novel too). But there are people the novels just plain don’t reach. This doesn’t mean these readers are wrong, only that not everyone enjoys this novel, or for that matter, any novel.

This was always true; Jane Austen kept a book of “Reactions” to all of her novels, mostly comprised of friends and family who had read it. She had the rare privilege of friends and family who would tell her honestly what they thought — sometimes too honestly, like the friend who wrote of EMMA that, halfway through, she “fancied she had got through the worst of it.”  Her sister Cassandra argued with her about the ending of MANSFIELD PARK; apparently Cassandra felt it would be more interesting if Henry Crawford were to be truly redeemed by his love for Fanny and win her heart, instead of Fanny waiting for Edmund to finally wake up. (Janeite though I am, I’m not 100% sure I disagree with Cassandra.)

One thing I had to tell myself before my first novel, EVERNIGHT, was released was that I had not written the magical first book in the history of books that would be beloved by everyone. I convinced myself of this by going through Amazon and reading the one-star reviews of books like WAR & PEACE, LOLITA and, yes, PRIDE & PREJUDICE. No book, no matter how delightful it might be to millions of people across generations and even centuries, is going to be loved by everyone. Not Jane Austen’s. Not mine. And not yours. So you can’t let the bad reviews get you down. Those opinions aren’t invalid; as a writer, you just have to hope they’re not the majority!

 

What I wanted to write about when I first thought of this blog post was why Jane Austen’s novels are so great. I asked people on Twitter to contribute their thoughts, thinking a consensus would emerge – but it didn’t. Virtually every person gave a different answer to the question of what they most remembered from PRIDE & PREJUDICE. Lizzie’s wit, Darcy’s willingness to break society’s rules (or our willingness to break them if it meant getting him!), the incredibly great first-proposal scene: These all got votes. I think maybe the answer that came closest to mine was Emma’s; she wrote, “a love that no one ever expected to happen.” I think we respond very powerfully to the idea of being surprised by desire – and surprising others in return.

But really, PRIDE & PREJUDICE defies a simple explanation of its popularity. There are countless ways that people respond to it, and love it. I couldn’t sum them up in one blog post, or a dozen. I’m not the person who could sum up PRIDE & PREJUDICE; it’s bigger than that, bigger and better and more deeply connected to whatever it is we love most about stories. What compliment could I give that would outweigh that?

So happy anniversary, not to Jane Austen but to us. We’ve had 200 years with this delightful novel, and I’d be willing to bet that 200 years from now, PRIDE & PREJUDICE will still have readers, and love.

First things first: The winner of the ARC of Lauren Oliver’s REQUIEM is … Cady! Congrats to Cady, who’ll be getting her copy in the mail very soon. But I want to thank everyone who entered, because I now have a TON of great questions to answer both here on the blog and in the vlogs I hope to get going very, very soon. (Like, tomorrow, if I can figure out how to work the camera.) And if you didn’t win this time, don’t despair, because our next contest gets going in the next few days.

 

I thought I’d kick things off by answering Cady’s question: How do you come up with your characters? Not just names, but personality, hobbies, etc. How do you keep them from being “Mary Sue”s?

 

Characters emerge in very different ways for me. Often I get asked whether character or plot comes first, and the fact is that, for me, they tend to develop one another. I probably think of a premise originally (witchcraft is a secret, which is a problem for a witch who is trying to learn). Then I ask myself what kind of character would be most troubled by this (a very dedicated and talented witch, abandoned by her mom and teacher). I keep batting that back and forth; every new thing I figure out about the story informs who the central character should be, and every new element of that character’s personality adds potential dimension to the story that’s being told.

Still, even when I have all the “facts” together about a character’s role in a story, it can take a while for that character to fully emerge for me. Or not. Every once in a great while, that character just comes to life in the very first scene: Balthazar did this in the EVERNIGHT series, as did Tess in FATEFUL. But more often, I find I have to write a character a little before they announce themselves. I had to write almost all of EVERNIGHT before I fully understood who Lucas was. Nadia took her own sweet time while I was writing SPELLCASTER. (This is one reason her name changed so many times; she’s elusive, that one. She doesn’t reveal her private self to a lot of people, which I knew, but I hadn’t realized she’d even be secretive with me!)

But as I wrote my way through the story, Nadia’s personality came through. For instance, she spends a lot of time helping to take care of her younger brother, Cole. Sometimes she resents it — but a lot less than I’d expected, less than I would have at her age; mostly she enjoys the time she spends with him because she knows he truly needs her. That made me realize that there’s a very caring, gentle side to Nadia, but it’s not one she speaks about or lets most people see. She doesn’t sit around telling Cole he’s adorable and she loves him; instead, she makes him Mickey Mouse pancakes and checks in his closet for monsters. She has this softness and generosity, but she expresses it all in terms of the concrete ways she can help the people she cares about with their problems. Ultimately I realized this would be an issue Nadia and the other characters would deal with throughout the SPELLCASTER series. Sometimes Nadia comes across as bossy or unsympathetic to other people’s problems: None of that is true. Mateo is one of the first to realize how Nadia channels her love for other people — she has to feel like she’s doing something for them. He helps teach her that sometimes just being there for someone is enough. That’s a really key part of the series, one that rises from character, but it’s nothing I’d ever have planned in advance. It came to me as I wrote, and as I got to know Nadia.

As for Mary Sues: I’m enough of a fanfic nerd to feel like any character in original fiction shouldn’t really be called a “Mary Sue” — but these days, a Mary Sue is often used for an overly perfect female character who has skills, gifts, and beauty far beyond the norm, with few or no flaws to provide balance. (The flaws, if given, are “cute” flaws like klutziness or a heart-shaped birthmark.) While the Mary Sue is a real thing, and a thing to avoid, I feel like that term gets overused a lot now … and in a way I really dislike. (Though not, I should add, by Cady.) Way too many people throw the term “Mary Sue” at any female character who has strong skills, a dominant personality, a lot of plot time devoted to her, or who (in my friend Marina’s words) “can find her way home in the rain without drowning.” In other words, virtually any strong central female character is, these days, at risk of being called a “Mary Sue” by someone. Never let anyone get away with that — and let’s never do it ourselves. Female characters should never have to apologize for being at the center of events any more than a male central character would. And we should never find ourselves raising the bar for female characters — judging their flaws more harshly or questioning their gifts more cynically — beyond the standards we have for male characters. Characters are well-rounded or they aren’t; the events of their lives are believable, or they’re not. Whether or not that character is female shouldn’t have anything to do with it.

(This mini-rant brought to you by the person who attempted to tell me, with a straight face, that Hermione Granger was a Mary Sue. HULK SMASH.)

I wish I had more concrete advice for you on how to construct a character, but — as with most things in writing — there’s no one right way. Thus far, all my characters have introduced themselves to me in different ways; they’ll probably go right on doing that. I think as long as you’re asking who your character is in the context of your story, keeping yourself focused on developing these elements together, you’re probably on the right track.

(This post was supposed to go up a few days ago. In some places, it did. But I’m still figuring out the shiny new website, so we have to try this again …)

 

I very much hope you’ve checked out my website’s new look in the past couple of days. Not only do I think it’s SUPER SPIFFY, but that’s also the only way (for now) you can check out the sneak preview of SPELLCASTER way before the March 5 release date!

If you have taken a look at the new home page, you’ve seen that my designer and I decided to tie together pretty much all of my social media: You can see my latest blog post, my latest news, what I’ve just Tweeted and the last few images I’ve posted to Pinterest and Tumblr. This has led to an unanticipated (though in retrospect inevitable) focus on James McAvoy on the home page … but the point is that now the main area of the site is hopefully a place to catch up on pretty much everything I’ve got going on. It’s not static; it changes almost hourly, and I like that a lot.

(Though for some reason, the Twitter can take a long time to update if and only if the last thing I tweeted is really embarrassing. Beautiful quotes about writing from Mario Vargas Llosa? Gone in a flash. Me horrified that I was accidentally flashing bra strap? UP ALL DAY. It’s like it’s blush-sensitive, or something.)

It’s a newer frontier to me than it ought to be, really. I’ve been online since before the beginning, tweeting away, so on and so forth. And when you publish your first books, that’s what you hear, over and over: “Get out there! Create a platform! Make yourself heard!” But the day to day of it — you know, it’s tricky. I never, ever wanted to be one of those people who refuses to tweet or blog anything except links where you can buy my book. This is not because I don’t want you to buy my book, but because I think that always comes across as both pushy and kind of fake. So I’ve tried very hard to be myself online.

However, you guys aren’t following me to hear more about my bra straps. (Or maybe you are. There could be a few of you out there. The internet is a strange place.) You guys want to hear more about the writing, about books I’ve read, and so on. Which means that I haven’t just changed how I’m presenting the information I put out there — I’m changing what I put out there.

All that said, some things will remain the same. Mr. McAvoy will continue to make a few tasteful appearances. I will keep on geeking out about “Hunger Games” and “Harry Potter” and the like. I will continue to do embarrassing things from time to time, and probably will continue to tweet about them before thinking better of it. And I will continue to have CONTESTS. Such as …

WIN LAUREN OLIVER’S REQUIEM!

Yes, it’s an ARC of the much-anticipated conclusion to the DELIRIUM trilogy. It won’t be in bookstores until March, but you could have your copy next week if you win. How do you enter?

1) Ask me a question either here at the blog or via Twitter about writing, about SPELLCASTER, anything authorial. (If you don’t already follow me on Twitter, you can now do so via my home page at www.claudiagray.com.) I want to put more of this info out there, but I want to answer the questions you guys are really interested in!

2) Do this before Tuesday, January 22, when I will pick a winner. The winner is the only person who gets the ARC of DELIRIUM; I hope to answer nearly all of your questions.

3) Yes, you can be from anywhere (I will ship internationally), but if you enter via the blog, be sure to include an email address where I can reach you if you win.

That’s it, and good luck!

 

(More is coming soon — for instance, my first forays into video blogging. Remember how I said I would still do embarrassing things?)

One of the most common questions you get asked as an author is, “Where do your ideas come from?” It’s slightly maddening for me, because — like a lot of writers — I don’t really know. You get a glimmer of inspiration here, have a weird dream, read an op-ed in the newspaper, see an old 80s music video, and then three weeks later suddenly there’s a story in your brain that isn’t directly linked to any of the above but wouldn’t have come into being without them.

Take, for instance, last March. I was touring in the US, Australia and New Zealand for BALTHAZAR’s release. Those of you who follow me on Twitter/Tumblr will be shocked, shocked, to know that one of the last things I watched on DVD before leaving for the trip was “Atonement.” I watched for the McAvoy, but what lingered in my mind was both the image of a high-strung, rail-thin girl who yearned for something beyond the ordinary, and one of the deeper themes, the idea that our inner realities are so often hidden from one another until too late.

And then there were days and days in hotel rooms, on airplanes. Dan Wells and Lauren Oliver, who are both as wonderful as traveling companions as they are authors, were pretty much my only constants in the US as we went from cold weather to hot weather, mountains to desert to seashore. That sensation intensified as I went to Australia, and my longsuffering publicist became the only person I saw day to day as I went to places even more unfamiliar to me.

Meanwhile, of course, with all that airplane time, I’m reading up a storm. I read NICHOLAS & ALEXANDRA, and a couple of novels set in pre-revolutionary Russia. I read a nonfiction book about rogue waves.

I rewatched “Iron Man” in a hotel.

Someone at an event asked me about my favorite books as a child, and one of the ones I spoke about was the glorious A WRINKLE IN TIME.

And through that weird alchemy that every writer knows and nobody can explain, a story started to happen.

So now, ten months later, I can announce, as my agent and I just did in PUBLISHERS’ MARKETPLACE:

Claudia Gray’s CAN’T GET NEXT TO YOU, the first book in the Firebird
trilogy, about a girl who must pursue a killer through alternate realities
where she sees all the radically different lives she might have led, and
realizes her target may be far more than the cold-hearted murderer she’d
believed him to be, to Sarah Landis at Harper Teen, in a three-book deal,
by Diana Fox at Fox Literary (World).

The main character, Marguerite, is the daughter of two scientists — the scientists who developed a way to travel between dimensions. And the man she’s hunting is the man she believes killed her father. Some of the worlds she visits are very like her own; others are radically different, whether in a futuristic version of London or a Russia where the tsars never fell from power. But every single leap she takes into the unknown doesn’t just get her closer to the truth about what happened to her father; it makes her realize how easily all the people around her could be different. How she could be different, and how hard it is to face what’s really within people, both the darkness and the light.

(How do all the above ideas tie in? Some of them — like NICHOLAS & ALEXANDRA — are already obvious. Others you can probably piece together. Others I can explain as time goes on — and still others will remain mysterious to me forever. But I know all those influences from that trip played a role in this story’s creation.)

There is SO MUCH I want to tell you guys about this book, and this trilogy. Most of that has to wait — right now, I’m concentrating on the SPELLCASTER series (and hope you are too, with the release date just two months away!) But I can say that, for me, CGNTY is what a lot of writers call “A book of the heart.” That’s what you call that story you love, love, love so much that you want to tell it all day, every day, forever. Sometimes a book of the heart is so personal that it’s a hard sell, or otherwise doesn’t make it out into the world. But I’m very happy to know that I get to share CGNTY with all of you.

One question I’ve already gotten a few times about SPELLCASTER goes like this: “How much research did you do? How much did you read up about Wicca? Did you speak to any real witches?”

The answer is — nearly none, nearly none, and no. Because SPELLCASTER is a fantasy novel about witches, and should not be taken in any sense to say anything about the reality of Wicca, its practitioners, or really any of the religions/habits/etc. that have been called witchcraft. Why? Well, first of all, witchcraft has always excited people’s imaginations. This means that fiction gets woven into fact in so many retellings and legends that, unless you’re fully immersed in that world, it’s difficult to weed out what’s real and what’s not. I don’t want to add to that confusion.

Secondly, real life Wiccans and pagans are SICK AND TIRED of being hauled out to serve as villains-of-the-week on TV shows, etc. I know this because I have friends who practice; while most of them find the bad portrayals more hilarious than anything else, I’ve also seen how annoyed they get, and I don’t blame them.

(Yes, the heroine of SPELLCASTER, Nadia, is a witch — but so is the villain. Her Craft can work either way.)

Finally — and, I’ll admit, most importantly for me — is the fact that using real witchcraft would have been too limiting for me as a writer. Making up my own magic system was fun, and it allowed me to bring in certain themes that I might not have been able to address as well any other way. I wanted that freedom, which meant making it absolutely clear that I was using only my own imagination.

That said, there are a handful of real terms that I used. Probably the most significant one is the term Book of Shadows for a spellbook. (I used it for the following reason: That’s just beautiful.) (Now that I think about it, that may be the only term I used, save for things like “the Craft,” etc., which are a lot less specific.) So I added a bit of dialogue in the book where Nadia says she thinks her Craft and Wicca might once have been connected, but they haven’t been for a very long time. Is that enough? I hope so.

I’d never want to add to the misinformation out there. Hopefully it’s clear that SPELLCASTER is pure fantasy.

(Is that an odd disclaimer for a paranormal novel? Not sure — I still get asked whether I believe in vampires!)

(No, I don’t believe in vampires.)