Archive for the ‘the magician king’ Category

Julia’s Name; Etc.

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011

The people have spoken! And they all disagree with each other!

Which is as it should be. But you’ve narrowed down the list considerably, while still leaving some discretion to the author (me). Thank you.

Of the finalists, I was sorely tempted by Ogden, since it has nice associations (Ogden Nash) and a perfect etymology (the Internet seems to think it’s an English name that originally meant ‘oak valley’). But would anybody really name a child Julia Ogden? It doesn’t quite trip off the tongue. I always get stuck in the middle — those adjoining vowels, with a glottal stop (or whatever it is) in between them.

Julia Pierce got several votes, but it’s just a little too … Brosnany for me. Dryden is nice, but I agree with whoever pointed out that it’s too close to ‘dryad.’ Barbour — also nice, but it’s an Iconic British Lifestyle Brand, and I have a coat by them, and I can’t name Julia after a coat. Reese: that’s my accountant’s name. See above.

Bottom line, I’m going with Wicker. Short, sweet, euphonious, distinctive, natural but not too dryad-y. I know no coats or accountants named Wicker. Yes, there’s the association with The Wicker Man, now permanently tainted by the wickedy-wack Nicholas Cage remake, but I can get past that. Julia Wicker.

Let’s say Ogden’s her middle name. It’s a family name. Thank God that’s settled. Julia Ogden Wicker.

I have no other news to relate. The Magician King appeared on some year-end best-of lists, which made me very happy. I gave some interviews. I’m spending a lot of time plotting out the last Magicians book, scene by scene. I’m about 3/4 of the way there — I want to have a really solid plan in place by the end of the year, so I can then go to Australia and write the hell out of the thing. (That’s not a figure of speech. I’m really going to Australia. It’s summer there.)

It  sounds kind of prosaic, but outlining is a big part of the process for me. I’m not an improviser: I like to have a lot of the structural interconnections in a book mapped out before I start writing. Then I can switch them around and add more as I go — it’s like the book is a brain, and it’s forming little neuronal pathways (neurologists, feel free to write in with everything that’s wrong with that analogy). That’s part of the point of novels for me: they’re little worlds where everything is woven together with everything else, everything is linked, and everything pays off.

Except a few things that are artfully placed to remind us that in real life, hardly anything pays off.

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The Naming of Julia; John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

The other day on Twitter a reader — whom the court will refer to as @FredaLisgaras, since that is in fact her name — asked if Julia had a last name. And of course she does. But I don’t know what it is, because it’s not in the book.

It’s funny about characters’ names: you know they have them, but unless the narrator supplies them, or somebody for some reason says them out loud, which is surprisingly rare, (see p. 20 of The Magicians, or p. 118 of The Magician King) they don’t tend to come out.

(My narrators tend not to say the characters’ last names because I write in what people sometimes call “close” third-person narration, which means that even though theoretically they’re different people, the narrator’s persona and point of view are closely identified with those of the character whose story they’re telling. And people don’t tend to think about their own last names, or the last names of people they know well. Henry James called this narrative technique “focalization.” I don’t know why I know that.)

Anyway, for whatever reason Julia’s name has never come up, so I suggested that people submit nominations via Twitter. Here’s what came in, in no particular order:

Barclay
Lennox
Dubravka
MacDara
Ogden
Dryden
Chase
Briscoe
Lyndon
Willoughby
Bailey
Stasiulis
Pierce
Wang
Lee
Sen
Das
Garcia
Morales
Morgan
Miner
Roth
Grant
Lyons
Gideon
Lawson
Gresham
Skrenes
Masters
Droyne
Anning
Ballard
Burroughs
Gale
Liddell
Nesbit
Goldman
Schmulia
Tadrus
Garrison
Gulia
Cotler
Magwitch
Navelgazer
Nolan
Pasternak
Wicker
Grosswoman
Marsden
Galen
Carter
Barbour
Grey
Pryor
Reno
Morgenstern
Martin
Wall
Street
Lancaster
Canerdy
Eddings
Bower
Layard

If you’ve got a preference (or another nomination), cause it to be known in the comments. Let’s make some canon!

Next time: the verdict.

p.s. Apropos of nothing, I have to take a second to mention John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, which I’m almost done reading. (I sometimes get advance copies of books; it’s one of the things that makes my life good.) The other day I posted on Time.com about seven books I’m looking forward to in 2012, and I didn’t mention Green’s book, because I wasn’t looking forward to it. I’d heard his stuff was good, but I’d never read it myself, and because I’m a suspicious and distrusting person, I didn’t take its goodness on faith. Then I picked up The Fault in Our Stars. I am totally devastated by this book. I cried when I read it, and I never cry. You don’t want to throw around phrases like “instant classic,” but I can see this book sitting next to The Catcher in the Rye. It’s that good.

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Canada, a Concept Album, Book Court, Other Things Starting with C

Wednesday, September 7th, 2011

This blog post is lacking in any of the Aristotelian unities, but I’m just going to have at it anyway. Take that, Aristotle.

– Here’s an interesting thing. You can send a postcard from Fillory at this website. Even if you’re not actually in Fillory. This may qualify as mail fraud, I’m not sure. At any rate the stamps are gorgeous.

– I’m reading tomorrow night — that’s Thursday night, Sept. 8 — at KGB alongside two fantastically distinguished writers, Lily Tuck (who won the National Book Award for The News from Paraguay) and Francisco Goldman. What were they thinking? I’ll ask them.

– I’ve got more readings in the works: in the immediate future there’s one at Newtonville Books in Newton, MA on Sept. 15 with Sven Birkerts, and one at BookCourt in Brooklyn on Sept. 28 with a player to be named later. Two fantastic bookstores.

– Still more readings: I’ll be touring Canada in October. I’ll be at the Calgary WordFest, which starts October 11th, then I’ll be at the Vancouver Writers Festival, which starts October 18th. Then I’ll be at the Toronto International Festival of Authors starting October 25th.

– Somewhere in there I’ll also be appearing in Austin, TX twice. Texas is not in Canada, though.

– Finally, if you want to have your brain melted a bit, check this out. A new album by a band called Fiction that is — what? Inspired by? Let’s just say it’s not unrelated to The Magicians. And here’s what else: it’s pretty damn good.

Actually it’s kind of amazing.

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Normality Has Been Restored

Monday, September 5th, 2011

“Anything you can’t cope with is therefore your own problem” – Trillian, a.k.a. Tricia McMillan, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Gratuitous picture of Zooey Deschanel

I’m back from tour. The Infinite Improbability Drive is off or at least idling. The list of things I can’t cope with is still worryingly long.

A word about tour. Tour was great. Actually it was amazing. There was a whole new vibe out there. When I went on tour for the paperback version of The Magicians, I saw maybe twice as many people as had come out for the hardcover version. Something had changed. But this time something had really changed. This time I got, like, 5-10 times as many people as for the paperback. Let me tell you, that means a lot to a writer.

(Also increasing: the amount of e-mail I get. I’m really, really sorry I’m so crap about answering it. The math of it is all wrong: the busier I get, the more e-mail I get, and the less time I have to answer it. It should work the other way.)

I was also surprised by how tough the tour was on me and my family — my being away for that long. Sophie has to pick up a lot of slack when I’m away, and it’s not like she doesn’t have her own professional gigs to deal with. It’s tough to strike a balance. I don’t how much it bothers Halcyon, who’s 1 and therefore still kind of one with the universe in that way that babies are. But Lily (7) basically welded herself to my leg the minute I got home and refused to let go. And I knew how she felt. Maybe I’ll take her with me next time.

I’m not going to do a big roundup of the reviews. Google will do a better job than I will, and it gets paid more than I do. Suffice to say that they’ve been good! And that it’s been interesting watching reviewers and their reviewing organs try to decide whether The Magician King is literature or fantasy or art or entertainment or trash or whatever. (Correct answer is: yes.) Though I will cop to being happy that The New Yorker, that pillar of literary culture, did a short but nice review (this link is pointless unless you subscribe to the magazine, in which case it’s pointless anyway. Sorry.)

And now onwards and upwards! Or at least energetically sideways! There are more projects in the works, which I’ll announce when I can. I have plans for a third and probably final Magicians book. I know how it starts and how it ends, and a certain amount about the middle bits. Damn those middle bits.

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The Tour: OK Now It’s Really On

Tuesday, August 16th, 2011

This isn’t really the start of the tour. The tour already started. Last week I did a couple of readings in New York and another in Boston.

(Thank you everybody who came. So far they’ve been big, sweaty, standing-room-only readings with tons of questions, which is the kind I love. It especially meant a lot to me at Brookline Booksmith, a store I used to haunt in my awful lost post-college years, when buying a hardcover was enough to bust my food budget, but I would do it anyway. Now not only have I read at Brookline Booksmith, I’ve been in the back. I’ve seen the break room. Bookstores are their own kind of Narnia)

But today the tour starts in earnest. I fly to St. Louis, a city where I do not think I have ever been before. I’m reading tomorrow night at the public library. Come out! We’ll nerd it up.

A map of the Neitherlands. More Amy Billingham brilliance ...

And yes, there is an official tour name. Someone came up with it in comments, possibly on Facebook, and it was tremendously witty, and I’ve forgotten it completely. But it was awesome.

From St. Louis I go to Reno for WorldCon. I’m doing all the usual WorldConny things – it’s all on some celestial WorldCon schedule somewhere – but we’re also doing Magicians-themed parties Thursday night and Saturday night. If you’re at WorldCon, I require you to stop by and partake of free alcohol. I’m also hosting a nerded-up version of University Challenge on Thursday afternoon, featuring teams from Hogwarts, Brakebills, Miskatonic and Unseen University. We still have a couple of openings, so if you want to play, drop me an e-mail.

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The Cat is Out of the Bag, and the Cacodemon is Out of the Tattoo

Friday, August 12th, 2011

The Magician King is out, and I am three events into the tour. Though it hasn’t really started in earnest because I haven’t gotten on a plane yet. Or consumed my first Ativan.

The reviews so far: really really good. NPR, the AV Club, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, Tor.com, SF Signal…I haven’t actually read them, because as pathetic as it sounds, I can’t read any of the media coverage at all, not one word, or I will be consumed with anxiety the way a niffin is consumed by magic. (See what I did there…)

Another gorgeous piece of fan art by Cecilia Bohlin

(Actually I did read the Washington Post review. Sing along with Morrissey: “I’ll never make that mistake again … ”

If I were a responsible author without a day job I would aggregate all the interviews I’ve done — CNN, CBS, Huffington Post, Daily Beast, Wall Street Journal, etc. — into one handy guide. But I’m just not that guy. I do want to call out a few things though. One is a post I did on Tor.com that’s a guide to the semi-hidden allusions in The Magicians. I also wrote an essay about the process of writing The Magician King for Fantasy Matters — it’s here.

Also I wrote an introduction for a new deluxe edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with a beautiful cover by Ivan Brunetti. Probably you’re not lacking for copies of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But if you are, I recommend this one.

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The Number One Jam of the Summer: The Magicians Theme Song

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

The Magician King is officially out today.

I think “tumult of emotion” is the appropriate cliché for how I feel right now.

But that shall not distract us from the task at hand. A bunch of things are going to get announced here over the next few days, but of that bunch this is probably the thing I am most excited about. I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHERE TO BEGIN.

I’ll begin in 1997. That’s when I first got into Nerf Herder, the world’s premier power-pop nerd-rock outfit. Their specialty is setting the woes and joys of the nerdy life to melodies that are just pure pop bliss – “Mr. Spock” is a favorite of mine. They’re also famous for having done the theme song to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but let me tell you, their catalogue runs deep. These guys got me through some rough periods.

I’ve never met their frontman, Parry Gripp, but I’ve interviewed him a couple of times over the years, so I have his e-mail address, and I sent him a copy of The Magicians when it came out. A few months ago — it was in April — I e-mailed him and asked him if he’d do a theme song for The Magician King, which at that point I was almost done writing.

He said yes. I will never know exactly why, but he said yes.

I’ve spent most of the time between then and now just staring at my Gmail waiting for the song to arrive.

Parry sent through the rough mix last week. I had absolutely no idea what to expect, but whatever I expected was completely blown away and destroyed by the real thing. It’s just so damn cool. I have listened to this song about 90,000 times since then.

Now you can listen to it too:

And unless I’ve scrod up the HTML, you should be able to download it here:

I Wanna Be a Magician

 

 

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Slouching Toward Bethlehem

Friday, July 29th, 2011

I don’t know whether I’ve ever produced more words, just by volume, than I’ve done in the past two weeks. Essays, interviews, journalism, radio, etc. etc. I am a processor of words.

It’s all part of the process of “launching” a “book,” which is a weirdly abstract though not unenjoyable activity. Sometimes you wish you could just smash a bottle of champagne over it and say, there, done, launched. I have a doc in my Google docs, prepared for me by Viking, that lists all the Magician King-related things I’m doing over the next month. It’s 22 pages long.

I also have another doc listing the things I’m doing that I haven’t told them about.

[The above image -- it's a Brakebills South crest -- is one of a whole slew of Magicians-related designs done by an absolutely brilliant DC-based artist named Amy Billingham. It's all going into the CafePress store...]

It’s work. I’ve become that guy who brings his MacBook Air on the subway to grab some extra writing time on the way to and from the office. But it’s the kind of work you want. It’s the kind of work I fantasized about having to do when I was 20, Snoopy-style — “here’s the world-famous author … ” This while lying on the roof of my doghouse.

What else? I spent last weekend at Comic-Con. I don’t exactly enjoy Comic-Con as such. When I’m there I’m there to work, and while I’m there, I’m always working. But I do get to see people I don’t see anywhere else. Random House gave a party on Thursday night, and if you stood at the bar — and I did — you could take in, without turning your head, George R.R. Martin, Patrick Rothfuss, David Anthony Durham, Christopher Paolini, Scott Westerfeld and Charles Yu. Among others.

And Christopher Paolini was riding a mechanical bull.

Reviews and other mentions of The Magician King have been popping up online. So far the response has been … pretty great. But I’m spazzy about this stuff, and I’m mostly not reading them. I killed the Google Alert I used to have on myself two years ago. I don’t need any more information about myself. I get more than enough of that just by being me.

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Finished Books Arrive; An Author’s Prayer

Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

The first finished copy of The Magician King arrived today.

(It is impossible for me to experience this without thinking of the last scene in Back to the Future, where Marty McFly’s dad gets his finished copies of A Match Made in Space.)

The book looks like this:

It’s hard for me to believe it, but it’s about to start making its way out into the world in that weird, furtive way that books do. Bookstores will accidentally sell it early, and copies will show up on eBay, and leak out from the warehouse and such. Then it’s officially on sale August 9.

(And of course some people have been reading ARCs and galleys. If you’ve done this, remember the galley is not a finished draft. I know I say that too often. But that draft really is pretty rough compared to the real thing. The real thing is smooth, man. Or smoother anyway.)

And then feedback will start making its way back to me. Trade reviews, Amazon reviews, GoodReads ratings, sales data, over-the-transom e-mails. It’s already starting.

(more…)

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An Interview with the Cartographer: The Making of the Magician King Map

Thursday, June 23rd, 2011

Roland Chambers is the author of two excellent books that are excellent in very different ways: one is a children’s book called The Rooftop Rocket Party, and the other is a biography of Arthur Ransome called The Last Englishman.

He is also a dear friend of mine. He’s also the fellow who made the gorgeous, full-color maps for The Magicians and The Magician King. (You can see them here and here.) Here’s a close-up of one of the details he did for the Magician King map:

So beautiful. How does he work? He does one make a map for a fantasy novel? Let’s find out. Over Gmail chat!

me: is now good?

Roland: yes fine

me: OK, we’re doing this. question one: how’d you learn to be an illustrator? art classes? self-taught? pact w/ the devil?

Roland: I doodled a lot at school, that was about it. I wish I’d gone to art school though. Sometimes.

me: Did you have particular illustrators whose stuff you liked, and wanted to emulate?

Roland: Yeah. The first illustrations I really liked were the ones in the D&D Monster Manual and the one with the gods and demi-gods. They were amazingly cool to me at the age of 10 or 11, though it meant all my figures had ridiculously narrow waists and usually wore helmets, which meant I was a late starter on faces. Next up was Gerald Scarf, because he was insanely good at faces, well at everything really. He could turn anything into anything else – Enoch Powell for example (a racist British politician) as a fluttering Union Jack. Amazing. But I could go quite a long time reeling off people I admire.

me: I had some very un-sacred feelings about some of those demi-goddesses.
(more…)

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