Category Archives: Cold Steel

Publishers’ Weekly reviews COLD STEEL (with a star)

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The first review of COLD STEEL (publication date: June 25*) has appeared in the wild, and I’m thrilled to say that it is a starred review from Publishers Weekly.

Here is a link to the actual review (it has mild spoilers).

And here a pair of quotes:

Elliott wraps up her marvelous Spiritwalker trilogy (Cold Magic; Cold Fire) with triple helpings of revolution, romance, and adventure on an alternate Earth where elemental fire and cold mages vie for power, and revolution is in the air.

. . . .

Elliott pulls out all the stops in this final chapter to a swashbuckling series marked by fascinating world-building, lively characters, and a gripping, thoroughly satisfying story.

 

* It is probable that print copies will show up in bookstores a bit earlier, based on the drop for Cold Fire, but ebooks will drop on 25 June.

Cold Steel, Crown of Stars News, & A Reprise: Five Ways of Seeing Andevai (Spiritwalker Monday 21)

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Page proofs of COLD STEEL are complete and turned in.

The over-abundance of orange post-its has to do with a typesetting glitch (which I have been given to understand is already corrected).

This officially is the cleanest set of page proofs I’ve ever gone over. In a 597 page manuscript I personally found only four mistakes (the official proofreader called attention to a couple of other things for a total of perhaps 8 mistakes). The rest are small changes I made because I cannot stop niggling with the manuscript. Substituting one noun because I had repeated a different noun four times. Replacing a slightly clunky line of dialogue with a sharper snarkier one. And so on.

BUT IT IS NOW DONE. In other words, I can’t change anything else even if I wanted to.

Meanwhile, sometime later this week Orbit UK will be announcing the release of all seven of the Crown of Stars books in digital editions. They asked me to write up a Crown of Stars Retrospective post (in whatever manner I wanted to retrospect the series), and composing that short essay took all my post-writing time for the week. So I still have not completed the second part of the post on the Creole of Expedition (Part One here). In fact, I have no Monday post ready to go at all, and thus because I determined to post every Monday like I promised, I decided here today to reprise a post from May 2011 in which I group the most common reactions to Andevai as he appears in Cold Magic into five basic descriptions. I did this because reactions were very divided, and also because I knew once Cold Fire came out, I would likely get a new set of reactions.

Here they are, five ways of seeing Andevai (behind a cut so those who remember the post can, if they wish, skip it): Continue reading →

Short Stories, Deadlines, & the Cold Steel FINAL Cover (Spiritwalker Monday 22)

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This week’s Spiritwalker Monday post was supposed to be The Creole of Expedition Part Two (Part One from last week can be found here), in which I go into detail (and quote extensively from people who know more than I do) about how I “created” a creole specifically for the city of Expedition so the people who live there could have a regionally specific way of talking.

I haven’t had time to finish writing that post because of other deadlines.

1) I am still working my way through the page proofs of COLD STEEL.

Of course I am looking for typos and grammatical mistakes, of which so far I believe I have found only two in quite a long manuscript, which means the Editor, Associate Editor, copy editor, and Sr Production Director have all done an excellent job. There is one odd glitch (marked by the orange post-its) which has to be trimmed out throughout [number strings that got dropped into/left in from some previous cycle of production]. Given the paucity of actual typos, my focus has been making any last (minor) changes such as changing a word or rephrasing a conversation or (in one case) adding a small revelation to the end of a chapter. This massive project is due at the end of the week.

2) A final copy-edit read-through of my short story “My Voice Is In My Sword,” which was originally published in WEIRD TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE (edited by Katharine Kerr & Martin H. Greenberg, 1994) and is being reprinted (together with a new interview) in APEX MAGAZINE‘s February 2013 issue. It’s now done and turned in.

3) Edits on my short story (technically a novelette) for Jonathan Strahan’s FEARSOME JOURNEYS (Solaris/S&S Summer 2013), a collection of original epic fantasy short stories. Due at the end of this week also.

Because of these deadlines, I plan to finish and post the Creole Part Two post — next week.

For this week, have a jpeg of the final cover for COLD STEEL. Note the cut on her cheek.

ETA:

I’ve edited the image below out and asking you to go to the image here (Cold Steel Final Cover).

The Creole of Expedition: Part One, Setting the Stage and Asking the Question (Spiritwalker Monday 23)

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When I began writing volume two in the Spiritwalker Trilogy, Cold Fire, I knew the plot would take my protagonist, Cat Barahal, to the Caribbean. Because the Spiritwalker books are a version of alternate history, I also knew that the 19th century Caribbean in this universe would have a different power dynamic from the 19th century Caribbean in our own world.

For one thing, in the Spiritwalker world the Americas were not colonized by the European powers. (As it happens, the European powers as we know them do not exist.) Among many other consequences, this meant that the Taino and other peoples who populated the Greater Antilles were *not* devastated by disease, forced labor, slavery, and various attempts to erase and subsume their cultures. They continued to expand and thrive.

I had already established (if not explicitly in book one then in my own notes) that a fleet from the beleaguered Empire of Mali had reached the Caribbean two centuries before the main story begins and founded up a settlement. With these refugees from Mali came also Phoenician sailors and merchants, and later they were joined by Roman sailors and merchants and immigrants as well as by Celtic immigrants, Iberian immigrants, and other people who had left Europa for one reason or another to make a new life elsewhere. Clutches of trolls, the feathered people, had migrated south from their ancestral homelands in North America.

Together these settlers had established Expedition Territory as a small autonomous territory within (and with the permission of and through a treaty with) the greater Taino empire, which I decided had by this time absorbed all the islands greater and lesser of the Caribbean.

In the Spiritwalker world, Europans refer to the area as the Antilles rather than the Caribbean. I used Antilles in preference to Caribbean because I felt it would be more clear to readers that the cultures they would meet here would not be the same as the cultures many in the USA and elsewhere most often refer to as “the Caribbean.” The word Antilles has its own long history, and with a Latin (Romance language) based etymology and what is possibly an origination in old Iberia, it fit well enough the altered history.

However, it also made sense to me that, given the several centuries’ separation and with the slow sea travel of the time and with a different blend of languages present within Expedition, the speech of the people in Expedition would be noticeably different than the speech Cat had grown up with in her own home city of Adurnam.

I don’t talk about this in the text (and I realize that it is contradiction regardless because I am writing in English), but in Adurnam *theoretically* the basic Latin foundation of the common language is heavily influenced by local Celtic and Bambara dialects with elements of Phoenician blended in. Cat also speaks a modern version of the Punic dialect that would have developed in Qart Hadast (Carthage) and later adapted to Gadir (Cadiz) where the Hassi Barahal family has made its base for many generations, but I never had time to deal with her multi-lingual capabilities because it doesn’t really come up in the story. She would also have studied a “schoolbook” form of Latin which would be known among all literate people and which would be in general use for correspondence. This “formal Latin” is the foundation for the common trade language.

My assumption had to be that many people who live in cities speak more than one language and understand multiple dialects as a matter of course, and that villages who are governed by legal clientage to a mage House or princely clan will have at least some members of the village who can speak their masters’ language as well as communicate with outsiders and people passing through in a local pidgin version of the trade language. Only in the most isolated villages would you find monolingual people, and even then there would surely be peddlers who came through periodically bringing with them goods, stories, and bits and pieces of the outside world in the form of scraps of a more cosmopolitan language.

Regardless, once Cat reached Expedition it was clear she would hear a language that she could partly understand but which would sound very different to her ear. Even if I presupposed (as I did) that in the Antilles Latin had retained its place as the basis for the common trade language with a strong Phoenician secondary influence, the other secondary influencing languages would be present in different proportions. In Expedition, Celtic dialects would be weak while a variant of what is Bambara in our world would be strong. Additionally, because the dominant culture in the region is the Taino Empire, the language of the Taino would certainly have made its mark on the language that developed in Expedition even if it did not replace it, and many people would speak both the creole and “standard Taino” as a matter of necessity.

As I worked on Cold Fire, I had to face this crucial question: Do I use a creole to represent the local language of Expedition or do I write people’s speech to be indistinguishable from Cat’s own?

Using a creole would create several significant problems.

One, of course, is simply the extra effort for a reader who is not familiar with the creole to read and parse (for example) “dat is di way dem chat” as opposed to “that is the way they talk.” There is a certain amount of learning curve to get comfortable with the vocabulary, grammar, and rhythm of a creole, and that is a lot to ask of a reader.

Second, writing dialogue in a dialect or creole that one is not intimately familiar with is difficult to pull off and easy to do poorly. It may come across as insulting and appropriative, as awkward or demeaning. It may seem to some readers that the speakers of the creole are being made to look ignorant and ill-educated because they are not using grammar “correctly” (although they are in fact using a streamlined grammar rather than standard grammar because a creole has a functional grammar and is not a marker of ignorance or stupidity).

For these reasons, I was extremely hesitant to try to use a creole for the local speech in Expedition. Given that I am not a native speaker of nor intimately familiar with any of the actual Caribbean creoles spoken today or in historical times, how could I possibly write a creole that would feel authentic within the text and would not be disrespectful to indigenous speakers of creoles?

Set against those objections there rose answering responses.

Cat is a visitor to Expedition, not a local. What she hears will sound different to her ear. If I simply wrote people talking the same way she did, the story and her experience would lose much of the sense of being a truly different place from where she grew up. Instead of a foreign city, it would just be her city with a different backdrop. While that would be the safe choice, it would also be the blandest and weakest choice. And it would be disrespectful in a different way.

The actual historical presence and importance to literature, music, culture, religion, and history of the many Caribbean creoles must not be ignored. The Caribbean is a vibrant and vital cultural sea. To not even give a nod to the reality of the Caribbean we know in our world simply because it would be hard to do so seemed wrong to me. As disrespectful and appropriative as it can be to hamfootedly write clunky bad dialogue with precious dialect-isms, it seemed more disrespectful to me to erase the existence of creole altogether.

I knew that, regardless, Cat’s experiences in Expedition would be filtered through her point of view, her limited knowledge, and her presence there as a foreigner. That gave me a little leeway.

In the end, I decided I had to use *a* creole.

My answer was to use not an extant creole–which I could not pull off–but to create a creole for the Antilles of the Spiritwalker world that would echo and draw from the English-dominant creoles of our Caribbean but would have its own blend of borrowed words, rhythms, and grammar and one furthermore influenced by the Taino language and empire that surrounds Expedition Territory.

Does the creole in Cold Fire work? I don’t believe that is my question to answer. For some readers it will work; others will find it problematic or annoying. I did my best, that’s all I can say for sure.

In retrospect, looking back, I would do it again the same way. Not because I think I did it well (or not well) or even necessarily right but because I did what I felt I had to do to make the culture of Expedition feel like a real place with its own history and set of traditions, a culture that has developed over time because of the particular circumstances of its founding, setting, and development.

 

Link to the second part of The Creole of Expedition: Part Two, Defining and Creating a Creole (Spiritwalker Monday 13).

Doggerland, the Ice Age, & the Landscape of the Spiritwalker novels (Spiritwalker Monday 28)

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Twenty thousand years ago Earth was in the grip of an Ice Age (technically we are still in an Ice Age, in one of the interglacial warming periods). Massive sheets of ice covered much of North America, northern Europe, and parts of north Asia and locked up so much water that the contours of the continents were different because the sea levels were lower. As  temperatures began to rise, the ice began to melt and the oceans to rise.

Back in the day, the island we call Britain was not an island but part of Europe. The English Channel did not exist, the Rhine River flowed a lot further south before it reached the Atlantic Ocean, and people lived and probably often thrived on what was then an expanse of land that now lies beneath the North Sea.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image from ScienceDirect.

Coincidentally, the December 2012 National Geographic includes an article about this region, called Doggerland after the Dogger Banks, a shallow area in the North Sea well known to fishermen.

There is a fabulous map at the NatGeo site which I can’t post here, but you totally should go there and look at it (scroll up, for some reason the link deposits you at the end of the page). The graphic clearly displays how the expanse of land changes across time as the ice shrinks and the oceans rise. The shoreline in Spiritwalker falls somewhat close to what is shown here as the year 8000 B.C.E (Before the Common Era), although of course this mapping is educated guesswork.

When I “built” the landscape of Spiritwalker, I wanted enough ice that Britain would be attached to the continent but not so much that most of Europe would be too cold for extensive human habitation.

Europe’s Lost World: The rediscovery of Doggerland by V Gaffney, S Fitch and D Smith (CBA Research Report 160, 2009) provided a great deal of information by some of the scientists at the forefront of this research.

The book also provided a crucial set of figures depicting “Isopollen maps showing changes in vegetation over the postglacial” (in Europe). I needed to know how a late glacial landscape would differ from today’s European landscape in terms of climate zones and vegetation, not just shorelines. For instance, how far north could people farm? Would there be other geographical variations in vegetation zones? What could farmers grow? Some grains can grow in harsher conditions with shorter growing seasons; others need warmer, longer seasons. I never go into detail about issues like this although they are alluded to, and specifically if briefly mentioned in Cold Steel.

The city of Adurnam is actually in what is now the English Channel, south of Portsmouth, on the old paleolithic watercourse of the Solent River, more or less (despite being named after Portus Adurni, the Roman fort at what is now Portchester, a suburb of Portsmouth). The land controlled by Four Moons House lies east of London and Canturbury, in what is now the southern part of the North Sea but which in Spiritwalker is all land. For these landscapes I consulted references like the Journal of Quaternary Science, which has an entire journal volume dedicated to the Quaternary history of the English Channel.

I also wanted to know how melting would occur, how quickly vegetation could “migrate” north, and by what “mechanism” the trolls (the feathered people, that is, the intelligent descendents of troodons) might have survived into the “present day” of the novel while at the same time allowing for human migration into the Americas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image from USGS.

The land bridge between Asia and the Americas was generally ice free during the Ice Age due to climate variables. Called Berengia, this land bridge had a significant population of mammoths and other now extinct mammals. Meanwhile, however, the massive North American ice sheet for a long time cut off Berengia from the ice free southern part of the North American continent.

E.C. Pielou’s excellent After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America (The University of Chicago Press, 1991) is a superb resource for a fantasy writer. It taught me about Berengia’s ice free corridor, conditions in newly deglaciated landscapes, and how plants return to those zones, which they can do remarkably quickly under the right circumstances.

It also taught me about refugia, which are ice free areas, large ones like Berengia and then also small ones: nunataks are ice free zones at high elevations like mountaintops and coastal refugia are small ice free sections of “coastal plain in the lee of high mountains” (Pielou). Some plant and animal species survived in refugia, surrounded by ice and thus cut off from other populations for long periods.

Refugia and nunataks gave me a rationale for the survival of my intelligent descendents of troodons. Also, the existence of coastal refugia made it possible to suggest that humans, after crossing ice-free Berengia either on foot or by boat along the coast, had coast hopped down a string of coastal refugia to the ice-free lower portion of North America (as they may have done in our world). Meanwhile, the ice would have kept the two populations, the small but expanding feathered people population in the north and east and the small but expanding human population in the west and south, from meeting until rather late in this prehistory at which point contact between outlying groups would have brought caution, conflict, cooperation, trade, and eventually yet more complex interaction.

It was easy to find information on Europe and North America–the above referenced books and articles are not the only resources I used–and far more difficult to find information on how the Ice Age affected, for instance, the climate of the Caribbean, something I needed to know for Cold Fire. I did what I could with maps of the sea floor in the Caribbean to consider how the ocean currents would work since the islands of the Caribbean Basin are larger in this alternate landscape, I posited that the hurricane season would be shorter due to water temperature changes, and I winged it a bit.

 

 

Image from Nature

I dredged around to find what I could about world regional climate variation–for instance, although my map of the Eastern Hemisphere doesn’t extend that far south, I posit that Lake Chad in the West and Central Sahel is huge because of the climate making west and central Africa wetter–but mostly I focused on areas I knew I was going to visit in the story.

 

Cold Fire: The Cookie (Spiritwalker Monday 29)

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Some time ago a kind and enthusiastic reader sent me cookies inspired by COLD MAGIC. I wrote about this event and included the recipe for “Cold Magic cookies” on the Orbit Books blog (here).

It’s a wonderful recipe (I have eaten these cookies and they are excellent). Since this is the season for baking (well, okay, every season is the season for baking, but you know what i mean), I thought it time to introduce the equally scrumptious “Cold Fire cookie.”

This recipe was also created by baker and seamstress extraordinaire, Raina Storer.

Here’s what she has to say about the Cold Fire cookie recipe:

To commemorate Cat’s great consumption of fruit and rum during her time in Expedition, as well as as her time on Salt Island… these cookies combine all these flavors to great effect.  The extracts can be difficult to find, but ultimately they served the best to really deliver the tastes of Cat’s adventures in Cold Fire.

 

The fabulous recipe:

Ingredients:

dough —
2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
16 TB (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened but still cool
1 cup granulated sugar, plus 1/2 cup for rolling dough
1 TB light brown sugar
1 large egg
1 TB pineapple extract
1 1/2 tsp lime extract
1/2 cup minced preserved guava
Maldon salt for sprinkling

glaze —
1/2 cup confectioner’s sugar
2 TB dark rum

 

Preheat oven to 325 degrees

Line two large baking sheets with parchment, or spray with non stick cooking spray.

Whisk flour, baking powder, and salt together in a medium bowl; set aside.

Save the butter wrappers aside.  Either by hand or with an electric mixture, beat butter for 3 minutes until soft, then cream the butter with the sugars at medium speed, until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes, scraping down the sides with a rubber spatula as needed.  Add the egg and pineapple and lime extracts. Beat at medium speed until combined.  Mix in about 1/4 of a cup of the preserved guava, reserving the other 1/4 for garnish.  Add dry ingredients and beat at low speed until just combined.

Place 1/2 cup of sugar into a shallow bowl for rolling.  Dip your hands in water to ensure the dough will not stick to them, and then drop heaping tablespoonfuls of dough into the bowl, coating with sugar, and rolling into balls.

Place balls on cookie sheet, about two inches apart.  Repeat with remaining dough.  Using the butter wrappers, butter the bottom of a drinking glass, then dip in the remaining sugar.  Flatten the balls with the bottom of the class until they are about 3/4 of an inch thick.  Garnish the flattened dough discs with pieces of the remaining guava, and sprinkle small pinch of Maldon salt on top.

Bake until golden at edges, about 15 minutes.  Cool cookies on baking sheets for about 5 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack.

When cookies have completely cooled, prepare glaze.  Combine rum with confectioner’s sugar, and whisk until smooth.  You may add rum or sugar to thin or thicken glaze as desired.  Using a spoon, drizzle glaze atop each cookie.  While the glaze is still wet, sprinkle additional Maldon salt to taste.

 

(me again: I can’t wait to see what Raina comes up with for Cold Steel)

Two Quick Questions re: (Spiritwalker Monday 31.1)

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A quick additional post today to ask you all a question. Two questions, actually.

 

1. I’m finishing up my read-through of the copy-edited manuscript (the copy editor did a very good job overall). I’ll be sending it back to Orbit in a week and therefore will be making any final changes to the manuscript in the new few days.

In COLD FIRE I included an Author’s Note in the front matter of the book that briefly touches on the basic world-setting of the Spiritwalker Trilogy, lists the days of the week and the cross-quarter days used by Cat in order to clear up any calendrical confusion, and talks a little bit about the creole used in Expedition.

For COLD STEEL I’m cutting the discussion of the creole (although I will be writing a post about it that I will also post in the Extras portion of this site discussing the Antilles creole  of my alternate Earth).

Technically, because of the way the layout works, I have a little bit of space remaining in the Author’s Note (because of what I have cut). I don’t have to add anything, but I can add another paragraph or two if need be.

So I wanted to know if you had any specific (world-setting and thus non-spoiler type) question you wish was answered in the Author’s Note that will be found at the front of the book, a short paragraph or two that can be read before starting the novel.

Anyone?

 

2. I have a number of weeks to fill in for the forthcoming Spiritwalker Mondays. A few posts are complete or almost complete and I have as well a list of posts/excerpts I would like to write. Plus a short story or two.

But let me ask you: Is there a particular question about the Spiritwalker trilogy you would like to ask me? If so, do so here, and I will answer it as one of the Monday posts.

On that same vein, as a reader of these Monday posts, are you most interested in posts that directly relate to the Spiritwalker books or are you also interested in more general posts about writing and worldbuilding that may only tangentially reference the Spiritwalker books, such as the one I posted today?

I appreciate your input.