So, I was channel-surfing last night and landed on the video for the Black Veil Brides song, In The End. Which I immediately loved. And which just seemed so incredibly Mallory-ish that it made me smile.
Also, it’s an excellent air-guitar song.
If you want to see the awesomely overblown video (where do they plug in their equipment out in the desert?!) you’ll find it here (I’ve not been able to get it embed, annoyingly), or if you just want to listen, you can click on the unofficial static video I have managed to get to work…
I like back-story. I believe all characters should have one: whether it ends up on the page or the screen, or whether it stays in a notebook or in their creator’s head. Our past makes us what we are, and I tend to believe the same is true of people who are completely made-up too. (And I have the Notebooks Full Of Crazy to prove this when it comes to my own writing. Mallory had a back-story before he got anywhere near his guns…)
Anyway, I’ve been enjoying some of the fanficesque character mash-ups I’ve found on Youtube lately.
The rules seem to be pretty simple: take a character in a film, and use other films featuring the same actor to build a backstory for your choice.
Some of them are mental. Some of them are nothing short of brilliant.
Ages ago, I posted the “David’s Initiation” video I found, which sets up STAND BY ME as a prequel to THE LOST BOYS (what did I say? Brilliant) and now I’ve got a new favourite:
Everyone is Clint Barton Undercover:
How cool is that? They’re all Hawkeye!
The sound’s a bit of a shambles, but frankly, I don’t care. Bonus points for the clever use of Samuel L. Jackson there. Seriously.
The reason I’ve been so quiet lately? Oh, nothing. It’s just… well.
REBELLION’s finished, at least in first draft and has survived its first reading by Other Half.
And now I’m all:
It is only the first draft, and there’s lots of work still to do – but even so, it feels like victory.
This will doubtless turn to utter despair, and reaching for the gin once my editor Jon gets his hands on it (and that’s just his reaction…) but at just over 100,000 words in this version, it’s by far the longest thing I’ve ever written – and when I started, I genuinely didn’t realise how much I would enjoy being back with Alice, Mallory and Vin. Which I did. And I do.
I still have to make my own passes on it, and that’s before we start the real heavy lifting of making it fit for actual human consumption… but I’m happy.
I was made even more happy, as it turns out, by discovering that Book Chick City have made BLOOD AND FEATHERS both their December “Book of the Month” and one of their “Books You Should Be Reading Right Now.” I love the BCC site, so this is a big deal.
(Dean? If you would…?)
I’ll stop now. I promise.
And as it’s my birthday tomorrow – when I’ll be turning the grand old age of 22 (ha!) – I’ll leave you with this. A while back, the excellent Hub Fiction published my Lovecraftian Anglo-Saxon mash-up story, “And the Northmen Brought Their Gods.” It’s now available as a podcast to stream or download, thanks to the lovely team at Dark Fiction Magazine.
It finally got me. I’ve been tagged in the Next Big Thing meme (shout-out to Danie Ware, Paul Kane and Elspeth Cooper, all of whom cornered me and memed me into submission, as has the lovely Janet Edwards).
The idea is to answer a few questions on whatever it is you (the Tag-ee? The Be-tagged?) happen to be working on and then to pass on the tag to five other people. Think of it like Ringu, only with writers crawling through your computer screen.
Lovely mental image, isn’t it? Anyway. Let’s get on with things, shall we?
What is the working title of your next book?
At the moment, I’m working on BLOOD AND FEATHERS: REBELLION. Which is, fairly obviously, the follow-up to BLOOD AND FEATHERS, which came out in August this year.
Where did the idea come from for the book?
REBELLION being a direct sequel to B&F, it largely sprang from the fact that the characters’ stories weren’t finished. Alice wasn’t done, Mallory wasn’t done and Vin, well… Vin’s so scatty he’d probably forget if he was done. I wanted to open up the world – after all, we’ve only really seen hell so far – and to spend some more time with those characters, as well as to bring new ones into play. The angelic war’s been going on forever… and there’s a lot more to it than Alice knew.
What genre does your book fall under?
Like B&F, REBELLION likes to lurk on the borders. It’s closest to urban fantasy (certainly this time around, there’s an actual city…) but there’s elements of fantasy and horror in there too. What it isn’t is paranormal romance. By the way, I’m quite taken with “featherpunk” by way of sub-genre, if anyone feels like running with that…
What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
Ah. The best / worst question. I have fairly strong views on who’d be ideal for most of the characters… and several of them, I’m not sharing. This is largely because I like the idea that everyone has a slightly different mental image of Alice, or Vin, or Mallory – and that, technically, none of them are wrong. The Mallory you have in your head might look and sound completely different from the one in mine – but that’s the way it should be. It doesn’t make your Mallory any less “Mallory” than mine. So I’ll keep those three to myself, but I will tell you about a couple of others.
Michael, in an ideal and perfectly perfect world, would be Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. It’s funny, because I’d had a very clear mental image of Michael right from the get-go, which is a couple of years back… and the first time I saw a photo of him, he fitted exactly.
A new character who appears in REBELLION is the Earthbound angel, Castor – and him, I’d love to see played by Jamie Parker (who’ll be familiar to anyone who saw the Globe’s Henry V this year.) You should totally follow him on Twitter, by the way – @DickLeFenwick.
Finally, the one that everyone who’s familiar with my own Twitter feed (or, well, me) will have been waiting for. The Archangel Zadkiel – he’s mentioned in BLOOD & FEATHERS, but doesn’t appear in person until REBELLION.
Jeremy Renner.
Happy now?
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
With the Fallen wreaking havoc in the world and on humanity, the Archangel Michael is determined to destroy Lucifer once and for all – whatever the cost – and Alice, Mallory and Vin will be called on to sacrifice more than they ever imagined possible…
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
I’m represented by the gorgeous, talented and lovely Juliet Mushens, and REBELLION will be published by Solaris Books in the summer of 2013.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
Ask me that when I’ve finished it… which should hopefully be sometime in the next couple of weeks. If all goes to plan, it’ll have taken a few months. But that’s only a first draft. Getting to a cleaner version will take another month or so of tinkering on my part, and that’s before my fantastic and long-suffering editor Jon gets his hands (and his red pen) on it!
What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
The easy answer is that it’s like BLOOD AND FEATHERS. I’ve been told that one’s comparable to SANDMAN SLIM, which I’ve not read yet but certainly will do. The easiest (and probably most useful) comparison to make is with the TV show SUPERNATURAL – we seem to overlap in a lot of ways, much to my initial despair. I’d written most of B&F before I started watching that one, so you can imagine how I felt when I got as far as season 4…
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
The first book, in a way. There was that, and there was somewhere I went. I was on holiday with my family – while B&F was on submission to Solaris, funnily enough, and I had no idea whether they were going to want it or not – and we went somewhere that made me start thinking. You can’t take me anywhere…
There was also this, which has (in my head at least) become an informal theme tune for Michael. Because if this doesn’t make you think of angels, nothing will.
Not only is the video utterly extraordinary, if REBELLION had a sound, that would be it.
What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?
Someone described BLOOD AND FEATHERS as “post-Bourne angels”. REBELLION has more of them, interacting much more widely with the world, with the Fallen and with one another. Oh, and you might just get to find out what’s in all those notebooks that Mallory keeps knocking around his floor…
So that was relatively painless. (The photo of Renner helped, right?)
I’m going to pass on the meme by tagging five people to write their own post in a week’s time – but as this is me, I’m going slightly off-piste and tagging someone who’s not an author, but an editor. In this case, that’s Jared Shurin of Pornokitsch, and one of the people behind the Pandemonium anthologies.
I hadn’t intended to (a) pop back on here quite so quickly, or (b) turn this into an unofficial “Hell Tourist Information Week” (which sounds so Screwtape-y that I refuse to believe Lewis didn’t already do it), but sometimes you find stuff that’s just a bit too cool to leave out.
So, following yesterday’s video of the door to hell, I now give you your map.
They say there’s a different version of hell for every soul who ever lived, and that may well be true. Medieval artists sure liked their representations of hell, but I certainly don’t think I’ve ever seen two that looked exactly the same as one another… especially not in the case of Jake & Dinos Chapman’s “Hell”, which I remember seeing as part of the Sensation exhibition years ago.
When I was coming up with mine, I went back to Dante, mostly. There were a few other places I looked for inspiration, but more of that another time: if anyone’s interested, I can do a separate post about hell in BLOOD AND FEATHERS….
Another post on the same site as the topography one poses the question “What does hell sound like?” – and that’s an interesting thought. Again, in my own version, it’s very, very quiet for the most part… but if you could record it, what do you think you’d get? (First person to say “Rebecca Black” gets a very stern look and has to go sit at the back of the class for the rest of the day).
I say “album”. What I actually mean is 8 hours‘ worth of ambient music and sound which ranges from mildly unsettling to really quite alarming by way of absolutely stunning… but is altogether genius. You can stream it, or download it for $1… but I’d recommend the streaming option wherever possible. Mostly because you’re looking at over a GIG of space…
So. Your own personal hell. If you were Dante, and could take a guided tour, what would you expect to see (or hear)?
So, who wants to hear me talking? No, really. On the off-chance you’ve not had enough of my wittering on here, you can actually listen to me waffling on (with the lovely Stephen Aryan trying to steer me vaguely in the direction of sense…) on the first Head Space podcast, which went up yesterday.
I’ve tried to listen to it (to idiot-check it, at least) but I haven’t yet been able to make it all the way through. It’s the sound of my voice, you see – I sound so much posher than I thought, and so terribly, terribly British! From what I could gather on Twitter yesterday, pretty much everyone feels exactly the same when they hear their own voices recorded. Is there anyone out there who sounds like they think they do? Or prefers the sound of their voice the way others hear it? Terrifying.
There have been a couple more reviews of BLOOD AND FEATHERS: one from Elitist Book Reviews, which was very cool and incredibly insightful (if a touch spoilerish in that last paragraph… consider that fair warning if you want to go in pretty cold…) who called it, amusingly, an “anti-Twilight” and said:
This is urban fantasy, colored in plenty of shades of blood-spattered moral gray. Morgan’s angels are vengeful, ferocious, and downright psychotic.
You can read the full review – spoilers and all - here.
A Fantastical Librarian has also posted a review, which is fab – and quite rightly mentions Pye Parr’s gorgeous cover art. I think my favourite part of it was this:
if it were possible to enter a book and explore its universe on your own, we could just walk in there and find it fully formed.
I’m enormously grateful to everyone who takes the time to review the book, and to put their reviews online – and I’m obviously over the moon that it seems to be getting such an encouraging reaction so far. It means a lot.
In other news, Americans! I believe we are now a “GO” for publication… which means you should be able to find BLOOD AND FEATHERS… well, everywhere. So spread the word and catch an angel. Before they get away.
To celebrate, the Qwillery invited me on to the site to talk a little bit about the book, about writing, research and inspiration. They’re also running a giveaway, so if you want to win a copy, head on over and enter.
So now, not only do I have books, I have bookmarks for them too. They’re extremely pretty (rather like the cover…) and generally lovely and I keep fanning them out across my desk and cackling at them. I may have stroked one or two. I’m not ashamed to admit it. Well, not entirely ashamed. However, some of the ones which remain unstroked will be coming with me to the launch on Thursday, so if you want one then make sure you let me know.
You can also win one… and, indeed, a copy of BLOOD AND FEATHERS to go with it over on Goodreads, where we’re running a giveaway to celebrate launch week. If you’re entering, good luck!
I also promised something extra this week, what with the impending launch and whatnot (cue: shivering, trembling and generally gibbering like an idiot. Whether that’s with joy or fear, I’ll leave you to decide…).
So, with that in mind, here’s an Easter-egg of sorts for you: a (very) short story featuring one of the characters from BLOOD AND FEATHERS. It’s not an extract from the book, but is rather an idea I had while I was working out some of the backstories for everyone, so it’s a little rough and ready, but hey. It’ll stay up on the other site, on the “Bonus Features” page, hopefully along with a few more bits and pieces when I get the chance to put them there! In the meantime, enjoy….
THE NIGHT WATCHMAN
They look oddly innocent while they sleep: stripped of their uniforms, their endless kit, their weapons, and curled into close-eyed crescents beneath thin sheets, the soldiers of the Royal Corps of Signals could almost be children again. Some mutter through their dreams and shift in their beds before settling, the darkness covering all the things that they’ve seen.
And while they sleep, a single soldier walks among them; patrolling the narrow bunks in silence.
Few of them pay any attention to him by day – drafted from another regiment after the last batch of green-on-blue attacks, he keeps himself to himself. They’re friendly enough towards him, of course: it doesn’t pay to be rude to the only man awake while the whole unit’s getting some shut-eye, but they have more important things on their minds than making friends with the new guy. Things like keeping themselves and each other alive.
It suits him just fine, the brown-eyed soldier who moves in his uniform like he was born in it. This way, no-one comments that they’ve never seen him sleep; no-one questions the wisdom of bringing a stranger in to watch them. And if they should hear the sound of feathers rustling just around the corner, they simply shake their heads and put it down to the desert wind.
They’ve watched him strip down his gun in silent awe because his hands move over the parts faster than any of theirs could: twisting, pulling, sliding until they are little more than a blur.
He doesn’t join in the banter, doesn’t wait for the mail drops like they do. They’ve never seen him queue for the satphone, never seen him with a picture of his girl… and if they ask he just looks at them with those sad eyes of his and smiles.
Even if he isn’t one of them, things have been easier since he arrived on the base. No longer afraid to sleep, they’re feeling fresher – better than they have done in months. Morale is higher and even the heat and dust and that quiet fear that each dawn could be the last no longer weigh on them. For the first time since their tour began, they have hope.
They call him their ‘Guardian Angel’ – the one who watches over them while they sleep.
Guardian angel.
They have no idea…
(with thanks to John, for the bit I didn’t make up… )
It’s been a really exciting (and busy) couple of days, and I can’t quite believe how fast they’ve gone. Or how fast the release date for BLOOD AND FEATHERS is hurtling towards me!
The biggest thing for me, amongst a few big things, is that the first review for the book came in, and I’m absolutely thrilled. My Bookish Ways said:
… expertly weaves fantasy and horror elements into a creepy, exciting, roller coaster ride of a book. Lou Morgan’s angels aren’t warm, fluffy, and halo’d, either. They’re fiercely beautiful warriors, and distinctly “other.” The angel mythos is fascinating and rich, and the author has laid the groundwork for what promises to be an explosive sequel
Basically, this brought a huge smile to my face – and not just because it’s a lovely review. It’s because it’s the first sense that other people have read the book: people I don’t know and who don’t know me, and that it’s now out there on its own. Being its own thing and standing by and for itself. It’s terrifying exciting. And it’s wonderful. The fact that the first review I’ve seen is also so positive just adds to the whole thing.
Kristin, who runs My Bookish Ways, was also kind enough to invite me to waffle on about all manner of things from medieval art to Prince Hal to angels via the City of London, and you can read that here.
If you’ve not yet had enough of me waffling (some of you have tremendous stamina, I know) then you can also join in the Friday Five fun on Pornokitsch. Every week, they ask a couple of people to choose 5 of something, and this week it’s… yep, you guessed it: angels.
I particularly love that Castiel has made 2 out of the 3 lists, proving that he really is All The Awesome. It also reminded me of something I found on Etsy yesterday which I reallyreallyreally want:
I was going to blog yesterday – really, I was – but I went to see The Dark Knight Rises in the morning, and frankly, by the time I got home, I was ruined. All you’d have had was an essay on why I want to live inside Christopher Nolan’s head. Because I do.
If you haven’t gone to see this yet, do. Like its predecessors, it’s dark and brooding and often chaotic; it’s ambitious and clever and beautifully acted and shot… and as an ending to the trilogy, it manages to pick up, to revisit, themes and ideas from both previous parts. And the final few scenes are perfect. I wouldn’t have wanted it to end any other way.
(It was also fantastic to see Senate House back as a location – like Nolan, I studied English at UCL and I’m very familiar with that particular building and its place in both history and fiction. It did look a *bit* different this time round, though…)
Anyway. You’re going to get plenty of me now. Sorry.
Possibly the most exciting thing is that I’m featured in this month’s (September, issue 225) SFX Magazine as their “New Author”, talking about the Fallen, my influences and why Supernatural is one of my favourite shows. The BLOOD AND FEATHERS launch at Forbidden Planet on the 2nd is also on their monthly calendar, which is basically amazing and has brought me out in a huge grin.
Secondly, this won’t be news so much as More Stuff About Things You Already Know Because I’ve Rattled On About Them Before… but Solaris have now announced the final line-up for MAGIC, which will be out later this year, and includes my story “Bottom Line”. The authors involved are absolutely incredible, and include some of my very favourite writers right now – it’s a huge honour to be included and I’m very excited about the whole project.
I’m also guest-posting over on Book Chick City today as part of their “Author Top Ten” series – in my case, talking about my favourite heroes and anti-heroes. The emphasis is on action (this being me) and we tour the heroics variously of Gladiator, Drive and The Hurt Locker, by way of the ubiquitous Dean Winchester and Roland Deschain. Swing by BCC and feel free to comment, add to or generally mock my list.
Finally, I’ve added a couple more sneaky character updates to the list on the BLOOD AND FEATHERS site – including the first of the major characters. The remaining ones will be going up over the next couple of days, and there might even be something a bit different on there next week: you never know…
