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News
So I flung myself weeping on the (virtual) neck of my Marketing Person about the awfulness of the PEGASUS issuu excerpt (citing, among other things, some of the comments on the blog thread here and thank you all very much for taking the time to respond) and look what she has done for all of us!!!!
http://www.scribd.com/doc/36512923/Robin-McKinley-Esampler
I think this one is hugely, hugely, HUGELY better, and I hope you will agree, which is to say I hope it looks better on all your computers too.*
Now then. On to my NEWS.
I HAVE A BRITISH PUBLISHER.
PENGUIN UK** HAS JUST BOUGHT PEGS I & II***
Let the feasting and diverse merriment begin.
* * *
* Maren adds, for the comfort and succour of people like me: you might want to mention that the zoom buttons are at lower left under the page image. Also right next to the zoom buttons is a drop-down menu where you can switch to “book” (layout).
** Yes, I’m published by a division of Penguin USA in America. This apparently has nothing to do with anything except that they talk to each other. But all publishers talk to each other. I have no clue, so don’t ask.
*** So I’d better get back to it. I’ve got at least two more sentences in me tonight before I fall face forward into my Green & Black’s.
Ask Robin
So I’m hearing from people who have read the ARC of PEGASUS and really liked it. Which is great. Tell all your friends and relatives*. Leave it lying** around suggestively and when harmless, innocent people pick it up saying, ooh, what a pretty cover, tell them how much you liked it. And that pub date is 2 November.
What is not so great is that I’m starting to get the hysterical and panic-stricken emails from people saying, you HAVE to do a sequel! I know you never do sequels! YOU HAVE TO DO A SEQUEL!
Sigh.
What’s worse is that the three people who emailed me this week to tell me that their lives will be ruined if I don’t write PEG II all claim to be blog readers. Um. Well, I do go on a bit*** and I’m not surprised if not everyone remembers everything I say† but this is a writer’s blog, and it exists because I was told that writers have to have blogs, and I’m assuming that people read it because they know my books and while they may find themselves horribly compelled by the details of bell ringing and hellhound wrangling and the blood loss attendant on being a rose gardener, still, if you’re going to retain anything from the quantities of fluff I produce nearly every night, I would expect it to be news about my books.
Like, for example, that PEG II is in the works—really that PEG II has always been in the works. That originally PEG I & II were one book, and then it kept going on and on and on so I whacked it in half and shined up the first half and called it PEGASUS. Then I went back to what had therefore inadvertently become PEG II. I wouldn’t dream of leaving everyone, most particularly Sylvi and Ebon, in the mess they’re in at the end of PEGASUS. And while all of you who know that I am somewhat vitriolic on the subject of compulsory sequels will snigger and accuse me of face-saving semantics, no, I honestly do not see PEG II as a sequel. It’s all the same story. P-Z of the Compact Oxford English Dictionary isn’t the sequel to A-O; it’s the second volume of the dictionary. It’s like THE LORD OF THE RINGS. It’s all the same story. THE TWO TOWERS isn’t the sequel to FELLOWSHIP; it’s books three and four of six.†† Tolkien himself wanted LOTR published as a single physical book and resisted having it chopped up into three, till his publisher told him it’s three or nothing.
So. Anyway. Relax. PEG II is coming. †††
Why aren’t there e-versions of your books?
Another popular query and another heavy-sigh producer from me.‡ Well, there are e-versions, a few, and there will be more, eventually, but I don’t know when. The thing is that the digital revolution has caught everyone on the hop, including those gigantiliths, traditional publishers. Maybe some of the little publishers are rabbiting more easily, but gigantiliths don’t have much hop in them, and their attempts tend to crack pavements and cause tall buildings to fall over. My digital existence is further complicated by the fact that I am owned by not one but two gigantiliths, and as I understand it, every publisher has its/their own idea of how electronic-rights packages should go, and they generally don’t play well with others. And no, I don’t have any idea why lots and lots and lots of other authors have their entire oeuvre readily available on line and I don’t. But that’s the way it is. And while it’s always tempting to blame publishers for everything‡‡, they are genuinely not just being contrary Luddite morons. They’re looking at a situation which suggests that they are going to have to invest huge amounts of money, time and ingenuity into a whole new way of doing what they do and end up earning less money for it. This is not a prospect to fill anyone’s heart with joy and step with lightness.
Is there some secret about the short story Marsh-magic? It seems to only exist in the anthology Silver Birch, Blood Moon‡‡‡, and it’s rarely included in any lists of what you’ve written. Are there any other hard-to-find short stories you’ve written?
Secret? Why would it be a secret? I just rarely write for anthologies—not because I wouldn’t like to, but because I have this little problem about short stories.§ Also I am a slow, slow, slow writer and I’m probably still thinking about whether the heroine’s horse is a bay or a chestnut and still awaiting the arrival of the plot from the terminally laggardly Story Council when the deadline whistles past my ear.§§
Some day I’ll do another collection§§§, and I’ll put Marsh-magic in it, the way The Healer, Touk’s House and The Stagman were scooped up and put in A KNOT IN THE GRAIN. And no, I don’t off hand remember any other low-profile short stories that need to be brushed off and brought back into daylight, but I don’t always remember the things I really ought to remember: birthdays, dental appointments, the belt I left at the cobbler’s two months ago (only recalled at 3 am), due dates of library books. . . .
* * *
* especially the ones who work in the ordering departments of bookstores, libraries, schools, etc.
** Note: LYING. Not LAYING. Grrrrrr.
*** A bit! A bit! Yes, I said a bit!
† I don’t begin to remember everything I say.
†† Plus appendices. And, ahem, footnotes.
††† I did get a follow up email from one of them saying, Never mind. I took a few deep breaths and the scales fell from my eyes, and lo! There was PEG II.
‡Although not nearly as heavy as for frantic demands for PEG II. That one’s a real headbanger.
‡‡ Very very very tempting
‡‡‡ http://www.amazon.com/Silver-Birch-Blood-Ellen-Datlow/dp/0380786222
§ See: over half my novels have started life as short stories. It makes me a little jumpy about starting a new short thing, in case it isn’t.
§§ As the sainted Douglas Adams said, I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.^
^ Yes, this is one that appears in the quote thingy in the top right-hand corner of the blog. I’m always very happy to see it.
§§§ After EARTH and AIR ELEMENTALS have appeared. After.^
^ Yes. Peter reads the blog faithfully.
Beam
See what came in the post today.* The Penguin-Putnam autumn ‘10 catalogue. Yaaay.
PEGASUS gets a double page spread which is deeply cool, and we already know the cover art is splendid. And I love the ‘dump’ (aka 9 Copy Floor Display) with ‘their special bond threatens the very foundations of the kingdom’ in flashy print across the top and Ebon flying down the corner.
But my evil cowishness is overwhelming me just a trifle and whose bright idea was it to set the excerpt entirely in italic so you can’t tell the difference between the narration and the silent-speech which is supposed to be in italic?** All right, all right, it’s only catalogue copy.
And then we have: 
. . . There are more lines and subdivisions and imprints and blah and whatever than I can keep track of, but I am a little confused by the fact that SUNSHINE has Speak on its spine and its copyright page: ‘This edition published by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group USA’ but appears in the Firebird pages of the catalogue. Whatever. It can say it’s published by the Chocolate Fireguard Press so long as it gets in the shops.
Sigh. I don’t always see catalogue copy, and this edition of SUNSHINE was smashed through at the (ahem) speed of light at something beyond the last minute, so I didn’t see catalogue copy, and I’d much rather they got the book out there so I’m not really complaining. But I always fret about the requirement to give the plot away to make people want to read any book . . . one of my favourite things is a book by a favourite author or that comes so highly recommended that I DON’T HAVE TO KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT IT when I start the first page . . . and I wish they hadn’t used Con’s name here in the copy. Sunshine herself doesn’t learn it till the end of the first part, you know? And she learns it in a very specific way which, if somebody hasn’t already frelling told you, should give the first-time reader a little frisson. . . .
Oh, and for anyone who hasn’t thought of this yet, if you click through on the photos and then click again on the little magnifying glass icon, the text is all perfectly readable.
And just in case the new SUNSHINE isn’t in your local bookstore***, I didn’t show you the back of it, did I? I LOVE THE GLITTER. THE GLITTER IS SO WONDERFUL.
And this is the amazingly hot new jacket art for the trade paper sized edition of CHALICE coming out this autumn. This is a flat so called which is just what you think it is: the flat of the jacket before it’s been bent around a wodge of pages. The new CHALICE flats arrived a few days ago and gosh aren’t they pretty–and I’d seen the art for the front, but I hadn’t seen that excellent deep violet back inset–and then to my total stomach-curdling horror I saw the line they’d slapped in above my name on the front: Newbery Award winning author.
This is a hot button with me I’m afraid. My Newbery Medal is over thirty years old, for pity’s sake, and while it’s true that a Newbery never goes away, it’s not the defining experience of my career either–and the ‘kidlit’ label is not popular with me, and has got even less popular with the advent of the Printz, which is specifically for YA, and makes the Newbery in comparison look even more kiddie lit than ever. So the rule for McKinley is that you can put the frelling Newbery on the back cover (which they had also done already: lighten up, guys) or inside the front cover but not on the front cover.
Meltdown of McKinley. It’s a flat, that means the jackets are already printed, there’s nothing anyone can do. But I fired off a pathetic, drooling plus heavy blood loss email to Merrilee, who contacted the editor who’s overseeing all this . . . and, may she be tattooed all over with the lovely golden glitter off the new SUNSHINE (which she’s also responsible for, just by the way), SHE SAID THEY COULD FIX IT. So it’s now going to say something like ‘best selling and award winning’****. But the really funny thing is . . . look at the catalogue version of the front: National bestselling author.
The ways of publishers are mysterious. But I’ve got three really great covers here. Yaay.
* * *
* Yes. I can use a little cheering up.
** The evil cow is also going to point out that even the 2nd of November is November, not October, and it’s not an October book, it’s a November book.
*** Shame! Shame!
**** Snork. I can also make a cherry pie.
Rabid Wolverines
IT HAS BEEN A RABID WOLVERINE OF A DAY.* I don’t want any more days like this, okay? Also I need more sleep. Obviously I was having a Precognitive Night last night about the day to come because I kept shooting awake out of lurid and complex dreams, listening for the heavy wet squishy footfalls on the stairs and the low macabre rumbling noises and the awful smell and . . .
So I’ve had three, not one, not two, but three significant publishing traumas today, for each of which people should die, but probably won’t**. I’ve had COMPUTER MEN HERE FOR ALMOST FOUR HOURS AND MY EMAIL STILL DOESN’T WORK RIGHT.*** It’s still hot, and both hellhounds and I are heatsick†, and, speaking of sick, I have a very seriously ill friend I need a day off to go visit and neither of my dog minders is answering her phone messages.
And EMoon posted this to the forum last night, in response to Blank Spots:
Oh, YES. When one of mine grinds to a halt, it’s because I got pushy and went merrily on doing what I wanted and Not Listening. That is exactly why there’s a discrepancy between (older book) and (what really happened and must happen in a book that’s forcing its way up into midbrain.) I had the right sort of idea, but the wrong time. In that case I won…nobody reading that book at the time could tell there was a problem looming…and if I hadn’t gone back to that world, they (and I) wouldn’t find out. But I have, and it’s a story that demands to be told, and therefore…
You’re scaring the bejeezus out of me here. I hadn’t planned to drop Damar like a . . . rabid wolverine, that’s just what happened, and thirty years later with Approximately Four†† Third Damar Novels waiting in the wings, I’m uneasily aware that I know things about Damar’s history that I wot not of thirty years ago and not all of them fit and maybe I could write a nice book on flower arranging or something instead.
And that’s entirely aside from the fact that PEG II is driving me one might say BARKING. Or daft as a brush. I love that phrase. Daft as a . . . BRUSH?††† Right. Okay. I am being driven daft as a barking mad brush.‡
But otherwise…when things go blank, I know to go back …feeling my way along the story-strand until I find where my bright ideas diverged from the living wood and I grafted plastic on instead.
I adore this image. Aside from the fact that it is scintillatingly accurate.
Meanwhile, both my current publisher (Penguin) and my principal previous publisher (Harpercollins) are updating their web sites to include more individual author stuff, and they want photos.‡‡ And someone, who shall remain nameless for the simple, straightforward reason that I can’t remember who it was, suggested action photos. So over the last few days we’ve bailed repeatedly on Hellgoddess and Hellhounds because Peter keeps freaking out over the camera, and the only even quarter decent one has me wearing an expression that you might expect of a woman watching her husband having a nervous breakdown with her camera in his hands, but is perhaps not quite what one wants on a publisher’s author page.
Tonight Anthea was pressed into service for bell ringing action photos, and . . . no, no, no, it’s late, I can’t face it. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next week. Maybe I’ll post the one of the hellhounds straining for the shrubbery‡‡‡ and me hoping that both Peter and my camera are going to get out of this one alive and . . .
* * *
* With a minor footnote concerning the ringing of Cambridge, which, bewilderingly, progresses. It’s still not good, but after a day like today I was expecting ringing rounds to be challenging. Meep.
The monthly district practice^ is near here this month, so I may overcome my natural bashfulness^^ and go along. The spotlighted method of the evening however is London, which is another frelling surprise method, like Cambridge, and I was having a moment of madness about whether I should try to learn it . . . when I can’t really ring Cambridge yet, McKinley, get a grip.^^^ On the way back from Little Warbling tonight I asked Niall what London Surprise was like. Oh, it’s all right, he said with the glamorous indifference of someone who rings pretty much anything a conductor may have a yen for. Gaah. Really more to the case is whether whoever is conducting the district practise would let me have a go.^^^^ If it’s Wild Robert . . . I’d better study London.
^ Which is pretty much what it sounds like. Once a month a tower within the given district—a different tower every month—holds what’s called district practise on their usual practise night, but it’s advertised in the district schedule, the idea being that a lot of people that aren’t their regulars turn up, and particularly that extra good ringers show up, so the locals can have a chance to ring stuff they may not be able to with the home crew. There is usually a fancy method of the evening too, announced with the rest, so you can swot up in advance if you want to have a go, and is kind of the thank-you to the good ringers for showing up.
^^ Ie my natural tendency to go to pieces among strangers.
^^^ On a bellrope, presumably.
^^^^ See: natural tendency to go to pieces among strangers.
** And which I do have enough sense not to dilate upon in a public blog, so you’ll just have to let your imaginations run riot.
*** It’s better. We think. Maybe.
† Chaos the worst, then me, then Darkness. Note that I am sparing you the grisly details.^ Peter is fine. Peter, except when he’s being carried off to hospital in the middle of the night, is always fine.
^ Although I don’t know if theirs includes bad dreams about smelly things on the stairs.
†† Depending on how you count. It might be six.
††† Ah the British. Never mind. They invented full-circle method bell ringing.
‡ Not to mention my biological confusion, since Damar doesn’t have wings and pegasi don’t bark.
‡‡ As does calico-reaction. Don’t forget calico-reaction lj, which is going to be reading SUNSHINE next month, and wants a photo to go with the essay I’m writing about How I Came to Write SUNSHINE cough cough cough cough cough. Well, I’m writing about writing and about SUNSHINE, and that’ll have to do.
‡‡‡ They frelling caught one of the local cats a few days ago. This is one of the little snags about hellhounds: they are that fast. Cats used to normal dogs think an ordinary feline sprint will get them away from any mere canine. Wrong. Hellhounds are, however, more interested in the chase than the catching, and soft mouthed, and the cat gave a wriggle—and yes, I’m extremely glad that’s all it gave—at the moment that I stopped standing there like patience on a monument and hit the brake on the damn leads—Chaos was the one with his actual mouth around the actual cat at the time—and hellhounds stopped and looked at each other and said, oh, that was interesting . . . and now come boiling out of the door at the mews hoping for more cat action every time.
At last
So I was hanging out this morning with the hellhounds. In my underwear. Not a lot of underwear. If I lean against the Aga in the cottage kitchen and am well draped with hellhounds, I can pretend that it’s MAY and WARM. I’m in a getting-going-slowly* in the mornings phase. And the hellhounds are always up/down for some supernumerary lying in drifts. I had Radio Three going. There was sunlight. There was tea. Mmmmm.
And someone knocked on the door. GAAAAH. Scramble into nearest three articles of clothing. Try not to think about hair. Hellhounds are baying: is it fun? Will it run? Can we chase it?
It was the frelling meter man. He looked at me warily.** I looked at him unenthusiastically. There are two meters, electric and gas. You can more or less get to one—the one behind the water butt. There’s usually a bag of compost or two in front of it but it’s not life-threatening or anything. The second one . . . not only is it inside the greenhouse so I have to go round and unlock the door and let the meter-reader in, but it’s behind my pot stash. All of you gardeners out there know what that means. And this is a tiny greenhouse, so every inch of space is piled several feet deep.*** GAAAAAAAAH.
So after I’d climbed over the tiered ranks of little green things and struggled through to the greenhouse and opened the door, I found the meter reader looking at a Large Cardboard Box sitting on the bags of compost in front of the outside meter. Wha’? I said intelligently, it still being early as far as I was concerned, and barely halfway through my first cup of tea. I wondered if you knew that was there, said the meter man in the kindly, soothing way you speak to brain-damaged hamsters.
No, I said, feeling like a brain-damaged hamster. You know they usually put a note through my door saying they’ve left something. . . .
This was what was in it. 
I comfort myself that it can’t have been there long because I’ve been bringing in cartons and caskets of mail-order little green things the last few days. But they could have put a note through my door.
Seriously cool, huh? It really is. † And those iridescent stripes—the cover glitters. It is soooo cool.
I don’t know how well this will show up on your computer, but the glitter is in flakes and facets, and if your screen will let you, you can see them here.
And while yes, I’m bragging, I love the way they’ve kept the design going inside too, and twiddled with the type. And the little curlicues on the cover itself are pressed or stamped, so you see their shadows on the reverse, and that’s cool too.
And look at the last page . . . 
* * *
* Frelling, frelling, frelling ME. I have to hope this isn’t just the thrice blasted dental anaesthesia or I’m in a lot of trouble about my new titanium choppers.
** I think there’s probably a note on my file about me, mornings, hellhounds, etc.
*** With stuff, okay? The plastic pots are in front of the meter—at least they’re relatively easy to move, even if the where is a problem. The clay and ceramic pots are on the other side. Then there are the piles of pot-saucers and –trays, and pot feet. Four hundred and sixty-two kinds of plant food, fertilizer, supplements, tonics, bracers, analeptics. Tools. Every tool you’ve ever imagined except the one you want when you want it. Trugs, buckets, bags, rolled-up fleece from winter^; and I’ve lately had to shove all the stuff that used to be on the shelves back to make room for seedlings. . . . If you’re a gardener, you know. If you’re not a gardener, well, gee, that’s really sad. Except for the bruises.
^ Which is OVER. Over, over, OVER.
† And it almost didn’t happen at all. We had almost no lead time and then there were extraordinary amounts of ball-dropping, I think chiefly because there was no clear chain of command for a new edition of an old book from a different imprint—and this one was, furthermore, going backwards: my books usually get published first as YA and then move on to adult. SUNSHINE started life as adult and is now being rebranded as YA^. So first it almost didn’t happen at all, and then it was rescued at the last minute . . . and given a cover that . . . um. I could see that it was sharp and cool and flashy and up to the minute and all that and I HAAAAAATED IT. It was so not SUNSHINE. SO. NOT. So I had a total hissy fit, the art department retired in confusion, and I thought that was the end of the matter. Drearily I thought this, bandaging the foot I had just shot myself in. But . . . no. I would have had to run away and live on an atoll if my book went out there into the world with that cover.
And then they came up with this one, at about a minute and a half to midnight. I’m the one suggested the bleeding letters . . . but they just pulled this entire concept out of the air somehow. And I loved it. And it’s even better in person.
^ slightly over my semi-comatose body: I know that teenagers read it, which is fine, but with the Newbery hanging permanently over my head like a large dark kidlit cloud in the shape of Miss Minchin, I am twitchy about making it clear that SUNSHINE is not for Great Aunt Gladys or your eight year old niece even if she does have a precocious vocabulary.
