Circles redux

At Bookslut, Colleen Mondor has some kind words about The Magic Circle in an end-of-year roundup.

(Alas, I remember saying to B. sometime last year something like "I think this novel might really be a big deal!" In fact it sank like a stone and was barely reviewed, though I got some very nice feedback from actual readers. The world is telling me to be a critic and essayist rather than a novelist, I think - and indeed it is my resolution for the coming year to write at least an essay or two after the manner of Hazlitt!)

4 shots

from Thursday's event at Books & Books. It is a truly beautiful store, you get a good glimpse of its glories here! (Thanks to Danielle Ebanks and colleagues for hosting and pictures - click for a bigger image.)

Dangerous games

Nice article from the weekend section of the Cay Compass - not available online, but here's the scan. Publicist for Books & Books has gone all out! (Not sure you can get a readably large version, but try clicking?)

Take five

Five facts about The Magic Circle. Thanks to Matt Staggs for the invitation to contribute!

Playlist!

This is something I'm really excited about - it's not quite "Lunch with the FT," which remains my pinnacle idea of desirable publicity that is still in the realm of the possibly attainable, but in my head it is one of the things I have always wanted to do for a novel I'm publishing, and marks some kind of having arrived! Thrilled to be included in the Largehearted Boy Book Notes; I love the format, and enjoyed working within the constraint of playlist and commentary. It includes many of my favorite songs, and also my new theory about how the Smiths song "Cemetry Gates" is really about live-action role-playing....

Conferences

are the most tiring single thing I do: much more tiring than endurance events, as those do not involve nearly so much human contact! I am claiming a human-free evening, and am going to go and skulk somewhere with something along lines of book/burger/beer in a bar far enough away from the conference hotel that I won't get sucked in to joining a table of fellow eighteenth-centuryists! Who are delightful, but I have not read a book since Wednesday, that's not good for my mental health. Conference is going very well, it's highly worthwhile, only it always puts me into state of collapse...

Also: my blog post about The Magic Circle is up at the Kindle Daily Blog; before the Book Culture event the other day, Ron Hogan interviewed me for an installment of The Handsell.

In other news: more rabbit show-jumping! (Via Brent.) If you only click on one link in this post, it should definitely be this one.

Or this, on a rather different note: very good hawkcam at Cornell this year (they would make short work of those bunnies).

Light reading around the edges: two quite good mysteries by M. J. McGrath, White Heat and The Boy in the Snow; two books for the Handsell recommendation process, David Bell's Cemetery Girl and Will Lavender's Dominance; Amanda Davis, Wonder When You'll Miss Me.

Frenetic morning

Finished writing my paper at the crack of dawn, printed it in the business center and had very good conversation at the "Novel Experiments" panel - bought sandwich to bring up to room for Reddit chat (I want to run mid-afternoon and need to eat now if that's going to happen), only to find that my room key was no longer working! Mild panic ensued, as that was about when I was supposed to be logging on to the site, but a bellman from the main lobby came up with me to let me in (their key machine is down too!), and I am here and ready to go. All of which is to say come and ask me a question at Reddit from 12 to 1!

If you are in the neighborhood

come to Book Culture for my reading at 7 this evening....

Pre-drop

The Kirkus review is here. Official publication at twelve midnight, at which point you can get it here (for Kindle or for "real"). It probably won't be stocked in most bookstores, but your local store should be willing to order a copy for you if you prefer to get books that way, and here's a Powell's link for another option.

I am in Cayman till Thursday, and still haven't seen finished copies of the book (I think a box is waiting for me in New York), so it all seems slightly unreal. Will hope to see some of you at Book Culture a week from tomorrow. I've been writing bits and bobs for various guest blog posts and so forth, and I was looking back through old Light Reading posts (= external hard drive of the brain) for when I first read Julius Chambers' journalistic expose of abuses at the Bloomingdale Asylum.

That took me down the rabbit hole: I read back through all of the posts with the tag THE BACCHAE ON MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS.

I started serious reading and research for the book in July 2010, which was a difficult month for other reasons; I started drafting it in December 2010; I had a full draft a couple months later (and also little cat Mickey, a happy addition to the Morningside Heights household), but I had to wait until the summer before I had enough time to pull it all together.

The provisionally final version I had in August 2011 (I accepted an offer from a publisher near the end of the calendar year) underwent significant subsequent revision right down to submission of the final version in July 2012, including a frenetic eleventh-hour rewrite of the final section from third-person to first-person voice. The story is basically one of regular bronchial ailments and brutal insomnia punctuated by the production of quota and a series of revisions that are always optimistically conceived and undertaken but that turn out not to have solved fundamental problems with the manuscript.

Writing a novel is not easy, I am happy with how this one came out but I think it will be wise if I don't write one again for quite a while!

(On the other hand, though, the intellectual excitement of the research and the thinking and the discovery of how things will really fit together properly is unbeatable, there's nothing else like it. I think that despite my resolution not to, I am pretty much stuck on writing another novel one of these days - but it will be good if it's a couple years before the next really compelling idea strikes, zombie apocalypse premise notwithstanding....)

Events

I will shortly get around to putting these events in a sidebar on the blog, with links to the relevant sites, but thought I would share them here first. Really everyone is welcome at the book party, only it is not OK to post someone's personal address on the internet like this, so write me at my Columbia email if you would like more details on that! (I will be sending out invitations via Facebook and email later this month.)

4/2 Book event/Q&A
Book Culture
536 W. 112th St. (near corner of Broadway)
New York, NY
7pm

4/9 Party in NYC, 6-9pm, email me for details

4/13 Reading, Writers With Drinks
The Make-Out Room
3225 22nd St., San Francisco, CA
7:30-9:30pm (doors open at 7)

4/17 Book event/Q&A
Rose Contemporary Fine Art Gallery
492 Congress St., Portland, ME
http://www.rosecontemporary.com
8-9:30pm

I'm definitely open to doing more events if opportunity arises, so if you are in a position to facilitate something along those lines, let's consult - but with the proviso that because Amazon's literary imprint is the publisher of The Magic Circle, a lot of the independent booksellers that normally would host readings etc. for this kind of book are not so keen! I think that's a pity, but of course I understand where they're coming from.

I will also be doing some kind of a blog tour, and would love to answer interview questions or write guest posts in late March or April, so please do get in touch if that's something you might be interested in.

(Postscript: I got a very good review from Kirkus, which won't be available for free online for another couple weeks, but the Amazon advance reader reviews are distinctly negative! Those are through the Amazon Vine program, and we will hope that reviews by people who actually purchase it are better. If you do read it and enjoy it, I request with only minor shame, please think about writing a review there or at GoodReads to let other people know? You won't be able to post a review until after March 26, the official publication date.)

OK, that's it for self-promotion, for now at least....

Galleys!

Cover!

It is very exciting - good blurbs are coming in (there were no blurbs for my YA novels, not sure why), and I saw a mock-up of the cover earlier in the week.  Wasn't sure if it was legitimate to post it here, but it's now up at the Amazon site, so I think I can share it!

Another MAGIC CIRCLE teaser

Again, courtesy of the copyeditor...

Places, character names, titles of works, authors, brand names:

30 Day Shred

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

agnès b

Aldous Huxley

Amsterdam

Anna

Annabelle

Arne Jacobsen

Bergdorf

Beth Orton

Blade Runner

Bloomberg

Bloomingdale Asylum

Bloomingdale’s

Bookforum

Broadway

Brooklyn Lager

Bryn Mawr

Buell Hall

Bushmills

Butler Library

Bwog

Cadmus

Candy Land

Carl Schurz

Chelsea Piers

Chippendale

Columbia University

ConEd

Croton Aqueduct

Daniel Schreber

Daryl Hannah

Death of a Salesman

Dionysus

Elizabeth Bishop

Euripides

Fiestaware
David Brenner

Firefly

Flatiron Building

Fortinbras

Foursquare

Fraser

Frederick Law Olmsted

Friedrich Nietzsche

Gatorade

Ghostbusters

Golden Bough

Grant’s Tomb

Guerlain

Hamlet

Harlem Plain

Hudson River

Hulk

I, Claudius

Ibsen

iPad

Jillian Michaels

John D. Rockefeller

John Jay

John Loudon McAdam

Kashi

Kate Spade

Ken Saro-Wiwa

Kent Hall

Kipling

Lajos Kossuth

Lemon Pledge

Lenox

Lois Duncan

Lower Merion

Lucy

Lululemon

Malbec

Marlboro Lights

Martin Ericsson

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Mary Renault

Max Soha

Mayor Giuliani

McKim

Meade

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness

Milton Bradley

Miss Julie

Mogi

Mont Blanc

Morningside Drive

Morningside Park

Mr. H––

Murphy’s Oil Soap

Narnia

Narnian

Nike

NYU

Oedipus Rex

Old Bay

Pentheus

Peter the Great

Pisticci

Playmobil

Plutarch

Polaroid

Pook’s Hill

Prada

Pris

Pushkin

Randall Jarrell

Riverside Drive

Riverside Park

Robespierre

Rosa Luxembourg

Ruth

Sakura Park

Samuel Tilden

Semele

Siân Hughes

Sophocles

St. John the Divine

St. Luke’s

Stalin

Star Trek

Streetcar Named Desire

Summer of Fear

Sun Chips

Terrance Hayes

The Bacchae

The Bell Jar

The Birth of Tragedy

The Blue and White

Tiffany

Tocqueville, Alexis de   

Tse

Tumblr

Twister

Urban Outfitters

White

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Wikipedia

Wind on the Moon, the

Y.

Zeus

Style sheet teaser

Courtesy of my excellent copyeditor, and with assistance from the Chicago Manual of Style and Webster, The Magic Circle in a nutshell...

Words and spelling if alternatives exist or CMS or Webster differs from text:

Absolut

Asian American

backstory

Benthamite

Berber

boiler room (Webster)

brick red

Brobdingnagian

bûche de noel

catty-corner (variation)

cover-up

crèche

crisscrossing

Dickens, Charles

dog-eared

dreidl (alternative spelling)

earbud

e-mail

exposé

Foucauldian

frisson

game master (CMS)

hauntology

inhering; inhere

Internet

larping

late-afternoon

Livejournal

living room

low carb

ludic

madhouse

maquillage

MFA (per Webster)

mica

multisided

namaste

nitpicky

outwards (secondary)

PhD

photoshopped

pocketknife

postdoctoral (per CMS 7.85)

present-day (adj.)

prorated

reemerged

Renaissance Fayre

ringleading

ringleted

Sanning eller konsekvens

sauteed (alternative spelling)

schist

scuff mark

self-contained

self-possessed

self-sustaining

setup

shape-shifters

spin the bottle

stained glass

stalkery

sugar-free

super glad

temper-stricken

Thebes

through line

towards (secondary)

trebuchet

tricorder

Twister

villanelle

vinyasa

V-neck

Yggdrasil

Celebration!

My book has an ISBN!

This goes some way towards consoling me for jaw pain...

Update

OK, that's good, I have now finished the three-hour work session that I really should have had before I put that messy marked-up tea-stained manuscript away for some weeks.  All old revisions are typed up, and I'm printing out the full draft so that I can work on the hard copy rather than on-screen (no internet distractions, and gives me a better sense of proportion about how parts relate to whole, pacing, etc.).  I have a good new set of comments from Ed on the rewritten first half, too, so I think I'll start with that/those.

This revision will happen, come hell, high water or histamines....

(One obstacle to single-minded focus, aside from question of regular teaching and other academic responsibilities, is that I need to go to San Antonio for four nights next weekend for ASECS, which will be demanding: I am giving a short paper and am also on a roundtable, but it's more the travel and the socializing that knock you out!)

Will shortly go out for a run - it is if possible an even nicer day today than yesterday!

Head back in the game

I was very glum yesterday: I had had such visions of productivity in the way of pages and exercise for my spring break, and in the event it is fully halfway over and I have essentially done no pages and no exercise!  Debilitating insomnia on Saturday and Sunday nights, and then on Monday morning it came clear to me that really I wasn't just having the stomach-ache and slight queasiness of insufficient sleep, but really a minor stomach ailment that led to me spending the day in bed.  Didn't even feel well enough to read a book, which is saying something.  Stomach-ache has finally lifted this morning, fortunately, and I think I will run for an hour later on.

In short: I guess I've just been working too hard, and that my plans for the break (it's only one week) were unrealistic.  Just now I am finally about to dig in on the dreaded novel revisions.  Need to get my head back in that game!  This, unfortunately, is quite literally (only it was on the chair visible in the background - I have just transferred the stack to newly cleared desk) the state in which I left it: I put it aside a month ago when pressures of work became too great.  Today will be devoted to figuring out where the hell I left off and trying to reduce the pile of papers I actually need to attend to.  It will be good, really....


Some tabs to close:

Access all areas?

Tradecraft for the aspirational publishing reporter.

The virtues of writing a textbook or synthesis at mid-career.

Last but not least, a strong list of finalists for the Young Lions Fiction Award at the New York Public Library!