Writing News
Dec. 1st, 2024 02:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerA new month! Time for updates about various writing projects!
1. I am putting the finishing touches on Deck the Halls with Secret Agents, the story about two rival spies, a Soviet and American, whose twenty-year rivalry culminates at a Christmas party thrown by an upper-class English doofus at a French chateau in 1991. Copy-edits must be completed! The blurb written! The cover finished! But soon it will be published.
2. There will indeed be a Valentine’s Day follow-up, Valentine Spies, in which the upper-class English doofus confesses his love to his butler, who is actually a spy who has been reassigned now that the Cold War is over. (The upper-class English doofus’s parties were somehow spy adjacent and allowed for the gathering of intelligence, hence the butler-spy. We will not dwell on the logistics of this.)
In fact, the butler was supposed to leave BEFORE the Valentine’s Day party, but insisted on staying because (a) it is against professional butler etiquette to abandon one’s employer right before the big Valentine bash!, and (2) he’s secretly in love with the upper-class English doofus, who of course would never look at him that way etc. etc., but even so the butler doesn’t want to let Biffy down on a personal level.
3. Will there be a Halloween follow-up, you ask? Yes there will! Of course Biffy and Stephens have to throw a Halloween party. The chateau is no longer technically a spy rendezvous, but news hasn’t trickled out to all the spies yet, and at least one is going to show up bleeding, wounded, and wearing a carnival mask…
4. Stepping away from spies for a moment. I would also like to write a spin-off novel about Michael, Caleb’s friend from The Sleeping Soldier, but I’ve been struggling, and I’ve realized that this is in part because The Sleeping Soldier is not so much a fairytale retelling as a thought experiment with some fairies ex machina.
This means that any plot that involves, say, Michael turning his investigative journalist talents on the fairies will inevitably blow away the worldbuilding coherence like a puff of air on a dandelion clock. The fairies must remain inexplicable troublemakers. Is it possible to do this in a sequel? Poor Michael may be doomed to remain the forever single supportive friend.
1. I am putting the finishing touches on Deck the Halls with Secret Agents, the story about two rival spies, a Soviet and American, whose twenty-year rivalry culminates at a Christmas party thrown by an upper-class English doofus at a French chateau in 1991. Copy-edits must be completed! The blurb written! The cover finished! But soon it will be published.
2. There will indeed be a Valentine’s Day follow-up, Valentine Spies, in which the upper-class English doofus confesses his love to his butler, who is actually a spy who has been reassigned now that the Cold War is over. (The upper-class English doofus’s parties were somehow spy adjacent and allowed for the gathering of intelligence, hence the butler-spy. We will not dwell on the logistics of this.)
In fact, the butler was supposed to leave BEFORE the Valentine’s Day party, but insisted on staying because (a) it is against professional butler etiquette to abandon one’s employer right before the big Valentine bash!, and (2) he’s secretly in love with the upper-class English doofus, who of course would never look at him that way etc. etc., but even so the butler doesn’t want to let Biffy down on a personal level.
3. Will there be a Halloween follow-up, you ask? Yes there will! Of course Biffy and Stephens have to throw a Halloween party. The chateau is no longer technically a spy rendezvous, but news hasn’t trickled out to all the spies yet, and at least one is going to show up bleeding, wounded, and wearing a carnival mask…
4. Stepping away from spies for a moment. I would also like to write a spin-off novel about Michael, Caleb’s friend from The Sleeping Soldier, but I’ve been struggling, and I’ve realized that this is in part because The Sleeping Soldier is not so much a fairytale retelling as a thought experiment with some fairies ex machina.
This means that any plot that involves, say, Michael turning his investigative journalist talents on the fairies will inevitably blow away the worldbuilding coherence like a puff of air on a dandelion clock. The fairies must remain inexplicable troublemakers. Is it possible to do this in a sequel? Poor Michael may be doomed to remain the forever single supportive friend.
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Date: 2024-12-02 08:04 pm (UTC)If only I can think up a story for Michael! Something also slightly magical but NOT in a way where we're going to dig into/undermine the "worldbuilding," such as it is...
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