by Sandra Gulland | Jun 27, 2013 | Adventures of a Writing Life, Promotion, Publication, The Game of Hope, The Shadow Queen, The Writing Process |
I’m working on the Author Questionnaire for Doubleday’s publication of The Shadow Queen, and that requires quite a bit of time mucking about in my promotional and publication history.
Any day now, I will see the first pass on the book cover: I’m excited. I’m already madly in love with the interior design.
Meanwhile, I’m cranking up the word count on the Young Adult novel about Hortense, going slowly at first. We will have the pleasure of our now 1-year-old granddaughter Kiki, our daughter Carrie and her mate Bruce this long weekend, so I’m only aiming for 50 words a day. Dipping a toe in—that’s all—but it’s important to do it every day. This morning I aimed for 50 and chalked up over 200. I’m very much enjoying exploring this youthful story.SaveSave
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by Sandra Gulland | May 17, 2013 | Adventures of a Writing Life, The Shadow Queen |
Sometimes a silence builds up like a damn: I’ve so much to report I don’t report anything.
So here goes:
Today I sent my Canadian and U.S. publishers suggestions for the cover art for THE SHADOW QUEEN. (Wow: it’s really happening.)
This took all morning—during which there was an earthquake!—and entailed poking around in my old files.
It was moving opening up a file of the original images I had used for building my characters years ago. I’m in the process of “building” characters for The Next Novel (the Young Adult about Josephine’s daughter Hortense), and it was a pleasant reminder of how helpful it can be to scout out character images on the Net. (I used Morgue File.)
Here is the image I selected for Claude (Claudette), heroine of THE SHADOW QUEEN:
I KNOW: it’s a guy, but something in his look spoke to me of Claude, who is a masculine woman.
And then later I found a Rossetti painting that struck me as Claude at court:
I was shocked to see how much alike these two images were — compare their eyes, eye brows, nose, lips. Amazing.
This Sargent painting is my image of Claude at the end of her life: triumphant!
In a few weeks I will get the copy edit of THE SHADOW QUEEN. It will be entirely edited in Word. (With every novel the technology changes, in large part because I am such a slow writer.)
Then, after, I will plunge into writing the first draft of The Next Novel.
Juggling two historical periods is a bit of a challenge. I’m not having much luck making room on my shelves for new books.
The rest, in brief:
- The advance praise for THE SHADOW QUEEN—that is “blurbs”—has been fantastic.
- I’m reading Jane Austen in preparation for The Next Novel. More on dear Jane later.
- Both my husband and I are sick with colds only a few days in advance of a trip to New York. (Grrrr.)
- I began looking through the two boxes of the letters I wrote to my parents, found in their attic after my father died. I read through all of 1969: what a slice.
Lost in Memory Lane indeed.
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by Sandra Gulland | Dec 13, 2012 | Adventures of a Writing Life |
I finally had a Skype meet with a book club at the Carteret Public Library, in Carteret, NJ. This meet had been scheduled long ago by Supervising Librarian Samuel Latini, but Hurricane Sandy conspired to make it difficult. Now, the library is once again up-and-running (yay!), and we were able to have a chat.
This time, however, illness had swept through and only three of the members were able to make it: Joyce, Gail and Stephanie. They had read MISTRESS OF THE SUN, and they had lots of interesting questions. It made for an intimate and lively discussion!
There were, of course, the usual technical problems: my image froze (fortunately not with my mouth hanging open), but I could see them, which was nice, and we could hear each other fairly well.
We kept it to 1/2 hour: and I think that’s a good rule-of-thumb. That gives them time to discuss the meet among themselves after.
All in all: it was just great. I’m always aglow after these Skype sessions. I’ve talked to clubs and high school classes in the US and Canada, and even one in Germany. If you’re in a book club and would like to schedule a chat, email me at sgulland AT sandragulland DOT com or through my website here: http://www.sandragulland.com/contacts/.
OMG, I nearly forgot to mention: I sent off the “final” draft of IN THE SERVICE OF THE SHADOW QUEEN this morning!
by Sandra Gulland | Dec 8, 2012 | Adventures of a Writing Life, The Shadow Queen, The Writing Process, Work in Process (WIP) |
I’ve been ill, slugging away at the “final” draft of The Next Novel in bed.
Yes: slugging. I find this final stage of taking a comma out and putting it back in (and more, I admit) somewhat tedious. I’m simply transferring my scribbled edits to a computer file, and I never (ever!) do this without thinking: could I contract this out?
The answer is: no. There are always mysteries that only I can solve. And, in truth, it is a pleasure to be so far along in the writing process to be obsessing about commas.
But I didn’t come here to complain, rather to share was looks like an inspiring blog: Brain Pickings, sent to me by a friend. Here’s a New York Times article on it. Cool. Tell me what you think.
And just so you know: I’m fully recovered. Every time I’m in the final stages of a novel I become convinced that I will die before it’s finished. Now, when that end-of-life conviction comes over me (and I wasn’t all that sick!), I think: Ah, almost there.
How do you respond in the final stages?
[Illustration: “Cork,” from the wonderful blog BibliOdyssey. Chosen for its many layers, so much like the process of building a novel.]
by Sandra Gulland | Nov 16, 2012 | Adventures of a Writing Life |
In addition to finishing The Unlikely pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce—a wonderful novel—I finally worked my way through the Oct. 15 issue of The New Yorker. I have quite a bit to say about Harold, but the NYer must come first: my husband has been waiting for the hand-over.
This was an exceptionally writerly issue. First, a profile of the religious right-wing writer Lynn Vincent, “Lives of the Saints.” Vincent gives a writers’ workshop on “The Sacred ICPID”: an acronym for I couldn’t put it down.
She’s into formulas, and, being a former math major turn novelist, I particularly liked this one: (B+C-I-P)n, which translates: (Butt + Chair – Internet – Phone) times the number of words you can write without breaking a sweat. Her magic number is 350, the number of words she aims to write twice a day. There’s something about that concept that appeals to me. It’s not nearly as intimidating as 1000 words in one go, which is what I aim for when I’m cooking.
And then there was a lengthy profile of the divine Hilary Mantel, “The Dead are Real.” This article, by Larissa MacFarquhar, had quite a bit to say about historical fiction.
“Historical fiction is a hybrid form, halfway between fiction and nonfiction. It is pioneer country, without fixed laws.”
“It has difficulty distinguishing itself from its easy sister the historical romance. It is thought to involve irritating ways of talking, or excessive descriptions of clothes.”
One of the wonderful things about Mantel winning two Bookers—the first for Wolf Hall, and the second for Bring up the Bodies—is that it plants the Historical Fiction flag firmly in the land of Literary.
I am full of admiration for Hilary Mantel’s work. Having read both novels, I’m tempted to read them again in anticipation of the third and final volume. I have heard that she works in an office lined with corkboard, onto which she pins index cards of scenes. I long to know how she manages the depth and freshness of detail that she does. The wit and the humor!
“I like filing systems. But the whole process of writing novels is the opposite of that—it’s do not label, do not define, do not decide, leave everythign loose. You have to say to yourself, I take my hands off, I let my unconscious work for me. It’s desperately uncomfortable!”
She is a writer with a huge brain. “… I know that books can be got onto the page by craft, but the thing that makes a phrase that fizzes on the paper—you always fear that may not be there any longer, because, after all, you did nothing to deserve it.”
Sigh.
At the end of The New Yorker issue was an article on how women became readers: illuminating. I loved this quote from an account of the reception of the novel Pamela by Richardson:
“The blacksmith of the village had got hold of Richardson’s novel of “Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded,” and used to read it aloud on the long summer evenings, seated on his anvil, and never failed to have a large and attentive audience.”
Is that scene not enchanting?
Real-life update: I’m back in San Miguel de Allende now, and most everything is sorted out. (What goes where, etc.) I’ve been working hard on draft 9.0 of In the Service of the Shadow Queen, which I intend to print out tomorrow.
I’ve started a newsletter, which I hope to get out soon: I have Real News! If you’re not on the newsletter mailing list, sign up here.
On Sunday my husband and I will pack for a trip to California to see my soon-to-be-95-year-old dad and the rest of my family for a wonderful U.S. Thanksgiving. Our son is flying out from New York, and our daughter, her mate, her step-daughter and baby flying down from Toronto. There will be twenty-four at the table, and all my dad’s progeny will be there. Thanksgiving, indeed!
