In which my cover is blown

For most of 2019, I’ve been walled up deep in my writing cave, working on two secret book projects.

As readers of Publisher’s Weekly will know, my cover already has been blown on one of them. I’m working on a YA biography of one of America’s first female cryptanalysts, a woman who has fascinated me for years. The book is called SECRETS & SPIES: THE HIDDEN LIFE OF CODEBREAKER ELIZEBETH SMITH FRIEDMAN.

It took me more than two years to find the right way to tell Elizebeth’s story, but I’m glad I persisted, because researching and writing this book has been a glorious experience so far.  A high point was my visit to the wonderful Marshall Library in Virginia, which holds 22 boxes of Elizebeth’s papers, including love letters, encrypted telegrams, and her college diary. My editor is the lovely Lee Wade of Schwartz & Wade, and Random House plans to publish the book in 2021.

My other WIP has been hush-hush till now. But today I’m happy to announce that there’s going to be a third Ra the Mighty mystery. RA AND THE CROCODILE CAPER will be coming to you in Fall 2020!

Juggling two books has made for a fraught six months, and I expect the next year will be pretty pressured, too. I’ve been working very long hours. But I couldn’t say no to either book because I love them both too much.

Luckily it’s working out pretty well. I’m tired but happy, and Elizebeth’s story of war, love, and madness is so intense and all-absorbing that it’s been good to have a little comic relief from Ra.

Wish me luck as I dive back into my writing cave!

 

Excited and scared

The first-pass proofs for the next Ra mystery have arrived, and as always the first glimpse gave me a jolt of excitement. It’s going to be a BOOK. You’d think I’d have realized that some time ago, and of course there’s a sense in which I have. But there are many months, when I’m deep in drafting, when a book is all mine, and sharing it with the world seems a distant prospect (and sometimes an unlikely one). But that time is over now for The Great Tomb Robbery. Now that it’s typeset and the illustrations are in and you can see the cover page, it’s incontrovertible: this book is on its way into the world.

Like Little Red Riding Hood in Into the Woods, I’m “excited — / Well, excited and scared.”  Or maybe I’m more like Little Red’s mother, who probably had some of the same complicated emotions. Who wouldn’t, sending a child into the woods? Will she be all right? Will people be kind? Will she find her way?

Yet both books and children need to find their way into the world, and with luck they’ll find friends and have adventures that you never foresaw. At any rate, that’s what I hope for with The Great Tomb Robbery.

Still, it’s hard not to worry about all the pitfalls and misfortunes that can befall a good book. So it was especially wonderful to hear some great news about the first Ra book last week. The Mystery Writers of America have named Ra the Mighty an Edgar Award Nominee for Best Juvenile Mystery.  There are seven wonderful finalists in all, and I’m thrilled that Ra is among them — doubly so, since I know that humor is often overlooked when it comes to awards.

But there’s work to do yet on those proofs. So now I’m headed back to them.

 

 

 

Change of seasons

The season is changing, and I’m changing along with it. Now that Ra the Mighty is out in the world, and the copyedits for Ra #2 are with my editor, I’m free to work on other things.

Spotted on my morning walk

Much as I’ve loved hanging out in Ancient Egypt, I’m excited about my other works-in-progress, too.  Part of the pleasure of being a writer is having the chance to explore many stories.

Given my love of history, my projects often involve some time-traveling, so I’m strapping on my hat and buckling down for an interesting ride.

 

What music taught me about writing

I’m celebrating a book birthday today! It’s the official pub date for the final book in the Chantress trilogy, Chantress Fury.

I had to work hard for this book. For a slow writer like me, the deadline pressure was overwhelming. And yet there was so much that I truly loved about writing Chantress Fury. With Lucy at the height of her powers, I could finally unleash the Wild Magic of the sea, forcing Lucy to confront wily mermaids, terrifying sea monsters, and a flood that threatens to drown all England. I also had secrets galore to unveil, many of them woven through all three books. And in the midst of all these twists and turns, I wanted Lucy to make a deep emotional journey, one that ends in her understanding more fully who she is and where she belongs.

It was a tall order. Especially under deadline.

Part of what pulled me through was the very thread that had carried me into the trilogy in the first place: music. Singing with my choir, playing the piano, warbling with my family – these gave me energy and perspective to face what was an incredibly challenging year.

But the importance of music went even deeper than that. My childhood was full of music, and much of what I learned then has stood me in good stead with writing, too:

1. Practice. My extraordinary high school music teacher used to tell our choir that if he had to pick between talent and hard work, he’d pick the hard worker every time. This made a huge impression on me, and I think it’s true of writing, too. If I’ve learned anything from music over the years, it’s that practice matters.

2. Sharing. Making music by yourself is wonderful, and writing for yourself is, too. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that both can be lifesavers. (At least they have been for me.) That said, there is a special magic in sharing your music and writing with others. Both can be terrifying (again, I speak from experience) but there’s something very powerful about sharing what matters to you. And you don’t have to play at Carnegie Hall to benefit. Making music with friends in your living room will do it, and so will sharing a story with a good critique group.

3. A Tolerance for Mess. I’m a neatnik by nature, so it pains me to admit this, but music and writing both thrive on a certain amount of chaos. If you’re challenging yourself, you’re guaranteed to hit points where everything feels like a mess. Maybe you can’t hit the weird high notes in your new song. Maybe your poem falls apart in the middle. Don’t despair! Just keep working.

4. Judgement. You need discernment to get better at both music and writing, so when your gut tells you that something isn’t working, pay attention. And yet at the same time you must remember that you are not always the best judge of your own work. Especially when you are in the middle of it.

5. Loving Your Work. The work is easier if you’re doing what you love. Of course, there comes a point with almost every piece (writing or music) where the passion cools, at least for a while. For me, it helps to pull back and remember what made me fall in love in the first place—those blues chords in the bass line, the character’s voice in the novel—and see if there’s any way to work a little more of that into my daily practice.

What about you? Is there something you love that’s taught you about writing, or about living? I’d love to hear.

 

 

Three for one!

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Chantress Fury

Oh, your poor neglected blog! You got pushed out of the nest by Book 3, didn’t you? This year, and especially this summer, Chantress Fury demanded all the words I had to give, not to mention all the energy and time and life-force. Truly, this book took everything. It finally went off to my editor on August 15th, and I’ve been recovering ever since — greatly helped along by my editor’s lovely note saying that the final draft was wonderful. (Such a relief!)

At some point I hope to have more words for new books — and yes, for blog posts, too. But for the moment, what I have to share are pictures.  Today lovely Alyssa Susanna is hosting the cover reveal for Chantress Fury over on her super blog, Eater of Books. It’s actually a TRIPLE cover reveal, as Simon & Schuster is changing the look of the entire trilogy. I’ll post a couple snapshots of the new covers here, but do go and check out Alyssa’s blog post to see the covers in their full glory, and to enter the international giveaway of the first two books!

Gift books and transformations

It’s publication day! And my books have made it across the Atlantic: the paperback of Chantress, and the brand new hardcover of Chantress Alchemy. It’s wonderful to hold them in my hands.

 

Every once in a while, some writers get a “gift book” — one that comes together quickly and with much less angst that usual, one where the story seems to know from the get-go what it wants to be. That was my experience with Chantress Alchemy.

That didn’t mean I hardly had to lift a finger, or that I never made mistakes. I put in long hours, and there were weeks where I lived more in the story than I did in the real world. But mostly this book was a joy to write.

Maybe that’s because it was about alchemy, which is something that’s fascinated me for ages. It’s also about the transformative power of friendship and love, and about the way our weaknesses can sometimes make us stronger — all things I deeply believe in.

But then again, I always write about things I care deeply about. (I’d never find the strength to keep at the writing, otherwise!) So in the end I have no real explanation for my gift book. Which I think is the nature of the beast. All you can do is be grateful when it happens.

At the moment, I’m wrestling with book three, which alas, is not a gift book. Although there’s a lot I love about it, it’s been hard work, and I’m having to finish it on a very tight deadline. So that makes me all the more grateful that the stars aligned for Chantress Alchemy.

***

If you’d like to know more about Chantress Alchemy, I’m doing a tour this week with some wonderful bloggers, thanks to the amazing team at Rockstar Book Tours. Today I’m visiting Word Spelunking where I share secrets and photos of the great houses in England that inspired the setting for Chantress Alchemy.

The full tour schedule is here. And the tour includes a giveaway of copies of the book, which anyone in the world can enter!

***

ETA: I forgot to add that the first few chapters are now online! You can find them here.

A writing book recommendation: Views from a Window Seat

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Jeannine Atkins

During my early years as a writer, I used to read books and articles about writing over lunch.  I was housebound by illness much of the time, and the days could be long and lonely, especially when the writing wasn’t going very well.  So in a very real way those books were company – a home-grown version of a masterclass series, my own Algonquin round table.  There in my sunny kitchen, I could almost hear the authors talking to me: Katherine Paterson, Anne Lamott, William Zinsser, E. M. Forster, Gayle Brandeis, Maurice Sendak, Mollie Hunter, Barbara Tuchman, Syd Field, Elizabeth Berg, Madeleine L’Engle, Lloyd Alexander, Barbara Kingsolver, and E. L. Konigsburg.  They gave me the encouragement to get up from the table and try once again to make my own writing sing.

My life is busier now, and those kinds of lunches are few and far between, but I still love to read books about the writing craft.  And now I have a new favorite to lunch with: Views from a Window Seat: Thoughts on Writing and Life by Jeannine Atkins.

Jeannine is a wonderful writer of poetry and children’s books, and her strengths include gifts for metaphor, for uncovering past lives, and for honing in on telling details.  I discovered her blog (also called Views from a Window Seat) when I was a young mother trying to find my way back to a regular writing practice.  It quickly became one of my favorite ports of call.  Since then, I’ve had the delight of getting to know her in person, too – and she’s just as thoughtful and interesting and warm-hearted as her blog is.

Jeannine is always honest about the writing life, sticky bits and all – the confusion, the excitement, the anxieties, the isolation, the delights.  I read her posts and nod and laugh in recognition:  I’ve felt that way, too, I think.

But here’s the most amazing thing about her blog:  It makes me want to write.

So you can see why I’m thrilled to have this collection of Jeannine’s essays.  Drawn in part from the blog, it considers the various seasons and stages of writing: beginnings, middles, revision, and endings.  On pretty much every page, you’ll find wise advice and encouragement, all offered with empathy and humor.  If you’re looking for your own lunchtime masterclass, I highly recommend it.

Thankful Thursday: Here and now

All my life I’ve tended to get ahead of myself.  My eyes slip past today and focus on tomorrow, next month, a year from now.  To prepare myself for what’s coming, I write the longest checklists of anyone I know.  My friends joke that I’m a walking calendar.

You could call it a gift for advanced planning, but I’m not so sure it’s a gift.  In the end, the future is just a guessing game, a lesson brought home to me in my 20s, when I was a grad student and queen of the 7-year-plan.  At that point in my life, I had not one, but three 7-year plans – Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C – which I thought sufficient to cover all eventualities.  But then, right smack in the middle of Plan A, I was struck down by a major illness.  My plans died on the vine.  Instead of earning a PhD, I spent those years learning to walk again and figuring out how to use speech-recognition software so that I could write.

After an experience like that, you would think I would learn.  But the planner inside me has never really given up.  She worries about so many things, that planner, and she figures that if she can just get everything on the calendar, she can keep me on a safe and sure path.  Ever since I signed up to write the Chantress trilogy, she’s had a field day.  This year, especially, the workload and deadlines have been so intense that it’s easy to find myself slipping again into a kind of tunnel vision, where I’m focused only on the next deadline, the next release date, the next set of boxes on the to-do list.

But life isn’t a tunnel  –  or at least it shouldn’t be.  A to-do list is a good servant, but it’s a terrible master.  So I’m grateful for every single thing that pulls me back into the moment at hand:  a joke from my daughter, a phone call from a friend, the song my husband whistles, the pale butter-yellow of our February primroses, the crispness of red peppers on my cutting board.

When you’re a planner by nature, and your deadlines are on top of you, anything unexpected can feel like disaster.  (There’s a special school play today? The storm blew down the climbing rose? What do you mean, we’re out of milk?)  But in a very real way, it’s those unexpected interruptions that keep me human, that keep me grounded.  I don’t want my head to be always off in the unknowable future.  I also want to live in the here and now.

Summer into Fall

We had a glorious summer this year. And a full one, with visits with much-loved grandparents, days spent in Oxford with dear friends who we hardly ever get to see, trips to Bath and Chesil Beach….

Chesil Beach on a sunny day

…and on a stormy one.

It was also the summer I learned I was a celiac. Which meant changing my diet completely and learning to love quinoa. (Fortunately, I quickly realized that quinoa is GREAT.) We ate a lot of cake while I worked out a whole new way of baking,

Redcurrant cream cake (gluten-free, but you’d never guess)

And now it’s fall (an American word that stays with me, though everyone here calls it autumn). We’ve had a lot of chilly weather this September, which has been great for writing. I wrap myself up in my writer’s cape and spend my days deep in the third Chantress book.

But this week I’ve had to set the new book aside because the page proofs for Chantress Alchemy have come in. I am always tempted to skimp at this stage, because it takes enormous effort to read it for the umpteenth time, word for word, knowing that you can’t make any big changes. But as always, I’m knuckling down and doing the work, because there’s always stuff I catch at the end: little things like a missing “the,” and bigger things like copyedits that have fallen into the wrong paragraph.

One good thing about page proofs is that you finally see your words as they will be in the book, all beautifully laid out. This is the stage where I look and say, “Wow! It’s going to be a real book!”

Title page of Chantress Alchemy

***One last bit of news: I learned this week that an ALA Teen Tastemakers panel for Simon & Schuster chose Chantress as a favorite read. Which means S&S is offering everyone the chance to read the book for FREE on their PulseIt site until September 29th: http://www.pulseit.com/chantress

Roses and juggling

Oh, my stars. Is it really mid-July? I can’t believe it’s been two whole months since I last posted anything here.

The trouble is that I’m juggling altogether too many things – publicity for Chantress, the last edits for Chantress Alchemy, and the start of the third Chantress book. And that’s just the writing part! When I do get a bit of online time, it’s measured in moments, so you’re more likely to find me tweeting than blogging these days.

All things considered, I’ve been fairly productive juggler. This summer I’ve done various guest posts for other blogs, including a fun one about the touchstone images for Chantress, where you can see the Tower of London at night and a chained book and one of the most amazing clockwork pictures ever. I’ve worked on flap copy and other odds and ends for Chantress Alchemy. And I’ve got Book 3 (still untitled) off to a great start. I even squeezed in a radio interview and a short writing retreat in deepest Oxfordshire.

But all the same, I have my issues with juggling. It’s a necessary skill, but you can do too much of it. After one too many nights up in the wee hours, mind racing, I’ve begun looking for ways to center myself and slow down.

I started last month with something I’ve neglected for a long time: meditation. It’s amazing how even five minutes of essentially doing nothing can somehow change everything. I’m starting to say “no” to a whole bunch of things that were wearing me out. Although I still have a heavy workload, I now have a little more time to say “yes” to the things that really make me happy: walks and talks with my daughter, playing the piano, concocting a new flavor of ice cream…

I’ve also been spending more time in my garden. Poor garden! At one point this spring, it was almost as neglected as this blog. But it’s holding its own now, despite this month’s brutal heat-wave. You still couldn’t call it a show garden, but every day it brings me pleasure.

The motto I chose for 2013 is “Fill the well” — and little by little, I’m working out how to do that.

How do you fill the well? I’d love to hear.

A walk around the garden…

…with the friendly neighborhood cat (who is especially interested in the catnip)

Lots of purples this month…

And pinks galore.