Devon Monk: Magic to the Bone

Title: Magic to the Bone
Author: Devon Monk
Publisher: Roc
Paperback: 368 pages
ISBN: 978-0451462404

1. First off, congratulations on the big novel sale! Give us the elevator pitch. What’s your book about?

Forget the fairytale hocus-pocus, wave a wand and bling-o, sparkles and pixie dust crap.  Magic, like booze, sex, and drugs, gave as good as it got. Using magic means it uses you back, and every spell exacts a price from its user. Usually the price is pain, but sometimes when Allison Beckstrom uses magic it does more than make her hurt.  It takes her memories. Some people get out of paying the price by Offloading the cost of magic onto an innocent. Then it’s Allie’s job to identify the spell-caster. Allie would rather live a hand-to-mouth existence than accept the family fortune—and the strings that come with it. But when she finds a boy dying from a magical Offload that has her father’s signature all over it, Allie is thrown back into his world of black magic. And the forces she calls on in her quest for the truth will make her capable of things that some will do anything to control…

2. Most new novelists have an interesting story to tell about their journey to publication. What’s yours? Did you use an agent? Make sure to tell us about the day you found out you’d sold a book.

MAGIC TO THE BONE started out as a short story.  The anthology editor liked it, but did not buy it.  I was kind of relieved when he rejected it, actually, because I was pretty sure it wasn’t really a short story.  It was the first chapter of a novel.  I sent the short story (now a revised first chapter) to my agent, telling her I thought it would make a good novel.  And after reading it, she emailed asking how quickly I could get it done.  Unfortunately, I never got her email.  By the time I checked back in with her, the holidays had rolled around. I promised her I would have the finished book in her hands by the end of January. 

I handed the book in on time.  My agent read it, and loved it.  Then she got married.  She took some much deserved time off for the wedding and honeymoon and pretty soon, it was summer.  Sometime in late June, I got the call.  My agent told me we had an offer on the table.  She also told me that the book was going to auction.  A couple weeks later (after a holiday and people had returned from vacation) we accepted a three book deal from my wonderful editor at Ace/Roc.

During those weeks, my family and friends checked in with me to ask how things with the book were going.  The afternoon I got the final call from my agent, and accepted the contract with Ace/Roc, my sister, best friend, and brother all stopped by to see if I had any news.  I broke out a bottle of sparkling apple cider, and the four of us, barefoot in my kitchen, toasted to the amazing good luck that had come my way.  It was such an exciting and surreal moment, something I’d been dreaming about and working hard toward for years.  I didn’t know if I should be terrified or exited.  And I have to say that right now, with my first book finally out there in bookstores, I feel exactly the same way–terrified and excited.    

3. Do you have another book in the pipeline? What are you working on now?

Book two in the series, MAGIC IN THE BLOOD will be out May 2009 with book three (as yet untitled) to appear in November 2009.  I’m currently finishing book three.  As soon as that’s done, I’ll spend the winter months writing a different sort of fantasy novel I’ve been dying to dig into that is not a part of the MAGIC series.  

4. What’s your process like? Morning writer, night writer, or something in between?

I guess I’m an all-the-time, anytime-I-get-a-chance writer.  I feel most alert in the morning, so it makes sense I should write then, and I do.  But when my kids were younger, I always wrote after midnight.   So I do that too.  Does that make me “something in between” or “something all over the place?”

5. There seems to be an unusually high percentage of writers who own cats. Here at The First Book, we’re doing a study to find out if there’s a direct relationship between writing success and cat ownership. Do you own a cat? If so, tell us about him or her. If not, tell us what you have against cats.

I love cats, but they make me sneeze.  We do have a sweet Australian Shepard mutt we brought home from the Human Society a few years ago.  I have also been known to keep lizards as pets.  The upside to a scaly friend? No sneezy fur.  But while a lizard can out-aloof a cat, they are a little trickier to cuddle and just don’t have the same kind of purring power.

Adrian Tchaikovsky: Empire in Black and Gold

Title:  Empire in Black and Gold
Author:  Adrian Tchaikovsky
Publisher: Tor
Paperback: 612 pages
ISBN: 978-0230704138

1. First off, congratulations on the big novel sale!  Give us the elevator pitch.  What’s your book about?

Empire in Black and Gold is your simple, everyday story of the encroach of a conquering empire, and the people who are trying to stop it. Or not. The human protagonists of Empire are the “insect-kinden”, and they live in a world where giant invertebrates have wiped out most of the animals that we might recognise. To come to terms with these new predators, people have forged a kind of spiritual link with them, which has allowed human civilisation to develop, but has also given people access to insect-like abilities: flight, hive minds, speed of reaction, greater endurance and the like. The various tribes of the insect-kinden have come a long way from that, and the world that the Wasp Empire is set on taking over is a world of industry, politics, steampunk machinery and espionage, a long way removed from the elves-and-dragons drudge that the words “heroic fantasy” might normally conjure up.

2.  Most new novelists have an interesting story to tell about their journey to publication.  What’s yours?  Did you use an agent?  Make sure to tell us about the day you found out you’d sold a book.

It has been a long, hard toad. I’d been writing for publication for around fifteen years, working on a book, finishing it, submitting it, and getting the slew of rejection letters, over and over. It’s a rotten business,
frankly, and by the start of last year I was getting to the very end of my perseverence. Then my submission of Empire reached the Mic Cheetham Agency, and Simon there was good enough to read through and spot something in it he liked. After that, he and I tinkered with the book a fair bit, and some time later he was able to place me with Pan Macmillan. From my experience I’d say an agent’s inside knowledge of the industry is a huge help. I was at work when Simon called me to tell me he’d got the book sold, working through the
middle of a legal case. I didn’t get much more work done that day, frankly.

3.  Do you have another book in the pipeline?  What are you working on now?

Well, fantasy used to have a tradition of trilogys, and now has a tradition of enormous sequences. It’s a tradition I fully intend to contribute to. The deal I have with Pan Macmillan is for three volumes, and the second, Dragonfly Falling, is coming out February 2009. The first three books are already written, with the third being edited even now. I’m keen to push the series further, if they’ll let me.

4.  What’s your writing process like?  Morning writer, night writer, or something in between?

Late evening and night writer, always. Left to my own devices I’d still be living like a student, getting up at noon and going to bed in the small houds. The creative part of my mind definitely works best between 10am and 2pm. As for actual writing process, I’m one of those writers that plans a book out beforehand, with a chapter-by-chapter summary of what should happen. Needless to say, the plan doesn’t always survive contact with the enemy.

5.  There seems to be an unusually high percentage of writers who own cats. Here at The First Book, we’re doing a study to find out if there’s a direct relationship between writing success and cat ownership.  Do you own a cat? If so, tell us about him or her.  If not, tell us what you have against cats.

Er… yes, actually. I have an extremely small grey cat originally called Greymalkin, although, in TS Eliot fashion, this is now just “Malkey”. To be honest, he’s more my wife’s cat than mine, or at least if not for her I’d probably not have actually acquired one.

Will Lavender: Obedience

Title:  Obedience
Author:  Will Lavender
Publisher: Random House Inc
Hardcover: 304 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0307396105

1.  First off, congratulations on the big novel sale! Give us the elevator pitch. What’s your book about?

My novel is a campus thriller about a group of students who are faced with a strange puzzle. On the first day of their Logic and Reasoning class, their professor gives them their one and only assignment: find a fictional missing girl named Polly. They have six weeks to find her; if they do not succeed, then the girl will be murdered.

At first the students believe that the professor’s puzzle is nothing but an academic game, but as they begin their research–using clues and doctored photographs the professor e-mails to them–they find that there was a real, unsolved missing persons case that occurred near the college in the 1980s. As the students rush to find the hypothetical Polly and possibly implicate their creepy, mysterious professor in the crime, they realize that they are on a quest to solve a much more dire mystery than they first believed: they may very well be trying to save their own lives.

2.  Most new novelists have an interesting story to tell about their journey to publication. What’s yours? Did you use an agent? Make sure to tell us about the day you found out you’d sold a book.

I really don’t have an interesting story. I queried agents, got representation, got a few bites on the manuscript, and we sold the book. There were plot twists along the way: rewrites, important characters erased from the manuscript, an important title change, one particularly ugly rejection–all the stuff every writer must deal with if he is serious about his novel. But eventually the novel was as tight as I could make it, and it sold in the winter of 2006.

One thing I quickly realized about the publishing process is that the editor is not some mad dictator who wants to eviscerate the manuscript. My editor was great. She worked with me to make the book as good as it could be. One thing that was interesting was that, every time we worked on a change, my editor gave me choices. I expected the process to be something like you might see on that TLC reality show about people who can’t dress themselves: the editor tells you what you need to do, and you do it…or else. But it’s much more painless than that. My manuscript remained mine all the way through, even though it went through pretty extensive changes from the time my agent submitted it to the time it was completely finished.

3.  Do you have another book in the pipeline? What are you working on now?

I’ve found that the second book is much more difficult than the first. I’ve been working for more than a year on book #2 (for comparison’s sake, I wrote OBEDIENCE in two months), and I’m almost finished. Because I’m interested in puzzle-oriented mind games, the plot is essential. And there are times when the plot will just not work with you. It’s like getting to the very end of a Rubik’s Cube: every side is blue save one, and you think you’re close. But it’s an illusion; you actually aren’t that close at all. This is the way my manuscript has worked in the year-plus since OBEDIENCE was sold. I’ve had to work really hard to understand it, to tame it, to find out what might make it interesting to a reader. I’m almost there, hopefully.

4.  What’s your writing process like? Morning writer, night writer, or something in between?

I don’t try and constrain myself to one particular time of day, because I’m worried that I’ll get up one morning and that time will be impossible. (I have two young children, so…) So I write when I can: normally I begin in the morning and go to the early evening, with only the essential e-mail checks and Yahoo! Games breaks every forty-five minutes. Six hours a day, every weekday, pretty much without fail. The only way to really make it happen, I think, is to be diligent and to force the mind into cooperating with your ambition. If I miss a day of writing, it’s like missing a day of exercise: I feel guilty, I feel like I’ve missed out on an opportunity, and I may even feel bloated. This is why getting the butt in the chair is so important, and it’s why I’m a firm believer that if you’re working hard then you should be able to write the first draft of a novel in two or three months.

5.  There seems to be an unusually high percentage of writers who own cats. Here at The First Book, we’re doing a study to find out if there’s a direct relationship between writing success and cat ownership. Do you own a cat? If so, tell us about him or her. If not, tell us what you have against cats.

We do not own any cats at our house, basically because I fear that my young children might saddle them up. My daughter (17 months) seems to love cats, however, and each time we go to the pet store I have to fight the urge to buy one.

Off-topic now, but when is the first great cat novel going to be written. We’ve had Edgar Santwilleylley, we’ve had Racing in the Rain, and of course there’s Marley and that guy who whispers. Who’s going to write the great American cat novel? I’ve thrown down the gauntlet!