Marie Brennan June 9th 2008

Book launch: Midnight Never Come

Here’s what a smart writer does. (i.e. a writer who isn’t me.)

You know you’ve got a book coming out, the first of at least two in a new series. It’s a new direction for you — historical faerie fantasy with healthy doses of political intrigue and some romance — and you’re a little nervous about how people will respond to it, especially people who liked your first two books, but you’re pretty optimistic because you think this book is a big step forward for you as a writer. This means that every little scrap of praise or criticism will hit with far more force than it rationally ought to.

So, being smart, you make sure to write all or at least a substantial chunk of your second book before the first one comes out. You do this because it means dealing with the book launch and all the responses to it won’t psych you out so badly you have trouble writing the next one.

But that’s for writers who are smart. Me? I’m 9377 words into And Ashes Lie, the stand-alone sequel to Midnight Never Come, which hits U.S. bookshelves today. (In the U.K., it’s been out since the beginning of May, when I had yet to write a word.) So my forward progress will be thoroughly hampered by the constant checking of e-mail, poking at Google Alerts and Technorati, obsessive monitoring of my Amazon sales rank, and all the unproductive ways in which writers try to glean evidence of how the public likes their books.

Only if I let it, though. So I’m, uh, going to ignore all of that. Yes. I’m going to go read about the English Civil War and ignore the internets. I certainly won’t be checking for any comments to this post, nosiree.

<hits refresh>

Filed under Uncategorized. You can also use this URL to trackback.