Claudia Gray's Blog

This week, I'll be giving away ANOTHER prize pack of five books - including an ARC for one of next month's hottest new releases. The prize books include an autographed copy of FOR DARKNESS SHOWS THE STARS by Diana Peterfreund, a scifi retelling of one of my all-time favorites, Jane Austen's Persuasion; 34 PIECES OF YOU by Carmen Rodrigues, which is unrelated to A THOUSAND PIECES OF YOU in any way besides having a fairly awesome title - and involves three friends investigating another friend's death; both SHATTER ME and UNRAVEL ME by the one and only Taherah Mafi; and an ARC of SCAN by Walter Jury and S.E. Fine, a fast-paced alien thriller.

I have these books. You want these books. So how do you win them?

All you have to do is follow me on Wattpad.

(http://www.wattpad.com/user/AuthorCla...)

Eventually, possibly after a reveal on some blogs, the first few chapters of A THOUSAND PIECES OF YOU will be posted there. Until then, I hope to put up some short bits of fiction related to my previous books and short stories. Who knows? I might even bust out some fanfic. Right now I'm still figuring Wattpad out; my account is all of an hour old. Any of you who are old pros at Wattpad, any tips or advice? Things I should look for? And what would you guys most like to see there? EVERNIGHT fanfic, a post-book story about Tess and Alec from FATEFUL? Let me know!

My hope is to follow back everyone who follows me, though I'll have to see how things shake out. For now, just follow me there by Wednesday, June 25, and you're entered to win.

Don't have a Wattpad account? Well, you could create one just for this -- who knows? You might like it and stick around. In the alternative, hang tight; there will be more contests throughout the summer. More books to be had.

First of all, sorry for my long GoodReads absence. I, uh, might have forgotten my log-in info. This is truly embarrassing.

BUT. I am back, and I bring good tidings! The cover for my November 4 release -- A Thousand Pieces of You -- is finally out in the world. Want to take a look?



Isn’t it amazing? This design surpassed my wildest dreams. Very soon, Epic Reads will post an interview with both me and designer, explaining a little bit about how this cover came into being. When that day comes, I’ll link the post here. But for now, let us just look at it. LOOK AT IT.

And the synopsis, for those of you who might not have seen it before:

Cloud Atlas meets Orphan Black in this epic, dimension-bending trilogy by New York Times bestselling author Claudia Gray about a girl who must chase her father’s killer through multiple dimensions. A Thousand Pieces of You explores an amazingly intricate multiverse where fate is unavoidable, the truth elusive, and love the greatest mystery of all.

Marguerite Caine’s physicist parents are known for their groundbreaking achievements. Their most astonishing invention, called the Firebird, allows users to jump into multiple universes—and promises to revolutionize science forever. But then Marguerite’s father is murdered, and the killer—her parents’ handsome, enigmatic assistant, Paul— escapes into another dimension before the law can touch him.

Marguerite refuses to let the man who destroyed her family go free. So she races after Paul through different universes, always leaping into another version of herself. But she also meets alternate versions of the people she knows—including Paul, whose life entangles with hers in increasingly familiar ways. Before long she begins to question Paul’s guilt—as well as her own heart. And soon she discovers the truth behind her father’s death is far more sinister than she expected.

I’m going to have lots more reveals — about swag, my super-sekrit Firebird trilogy board on Pinterest (soon to be made public, with hints and spoilers lurking in the images) and much, much more. But for now, a contest!

Tell me what YOU think about the cover image — what it means, what you like, even what you don’t (if applicable). You can tell me lots of ways: Post a comment on the ATPOY entry here at GoodReads, tweet about it (tagging me, of course), posting the image on Pinterest with your thoughts (it’s on my “inspiring images” board for now) or just commenting on my pin of the image, or just say hello in the comments on my blog. I’d love to hear from you! (I’ll be sure to check every single venue to get all the entries, but if you’re at all worried about me seeing them, feel free to post links in comments to this post. If you muse on more than one venue, you are entered more than one time.)

Do this before Monday, June 2, and you will be entered to win a prize pack of five (count ‘em, FIVE) YA books. The grand prize winner will win REBEL BELLE by Rachel Hawkins; PERFECT LIES by Kiersten White; THE WINNER’S CURSE by Marie Rutkowski; an autographed copy of BORN WICKED by Jessica Spot5swood; and an autographed copy of LEGEND by Marie Lu! Since the Epic Reads interviews will probably be posted before June 1, I’m not giving the prize to the guesser who comes closest; the winner will be chosen at random.

One caveat: I normally make all contests open to anyone around the world. However, postage rates are KILLING ME. So I can’t offer the five-book prize package to anyone outside the US. So sorry — but I’m not closing the contest to you! If you’re outside the US and I pick you as the winner, you will instead win a $30 gift certificate to the online bookstore of your choice. The prize pack will then be offered for another contest, another day. I want everybody to have a chance for some kind of goodies.

And remember: A THOUSAND PIECES OF YOU comes out Nov. 4 in the USA, and a few international releases are already set with others soon to come.

I can’t wait to hear your thoughts…

If you follow me on Twitter (and you should), you know by now that I am a huge fan of the Maisie Dobbs mystery series by Jacqueline Winspear. Although I don't tend to read tons of mysteries, some friends recommended these to me and I got hooked but good. Maisie's combination of determined practicality and occasional mysticism struck me as unusual and compelling, the cases she investigates are satisfyingly twisty, and her personal life is written with such an extreme level of restraint that it only makes me wilder to find out whether any of these guys stand a chance against Maisie's fierce independence. Yet when I began looking for fellow fans of the books, whether in person or online, I kept running into an objection: "Oh, she's just a Mary Sue."

As you guys no doubt know, the "Mary Sue" is a term from fanfiction. It refers to an original character, nearly always female, who is a stand-in for the author, who soaks up attention that would normally be given in fanfic to the characters from the source text, and who has so many gifts/talents/admirers and so few flaws that she is both unbelievable and insufferable. It is my firm belief that Maisie Dobbs is no Mary Sue.

There are fangirl reasons I could give, and will briefly: Maisie has plenty of flaws, which are not only left for the reader to notice but are brought up by the characters once in a while, and often belatedly realized by Maisie herself (such as her meddling in her employee's lives, or her tendency to brood). Not every character in the series admires her -- just ask Inspector Caldwell.

But the real logistical reason Maisie Dobbs is no Mary Sue is because she is not in fanfiction. The main reason fic readers get annoyed with Mary Sues isn't their idealization, as a fair bit of fanfic idealizes the canon characters almost past the point of recognition. No, the reason the Mary Sue is annoying is because she's not supposed to be there. You're not reading Star Wars fanfic to hear all about Han's spunky kid sister, the purple-eyed telepath who, at the age of 15, already pilots her own ship that's even faster than the Millennium Falcon. You're reading it because you want to hear about Han, Leia, Luke and the gang from the movies.

Therefore, to me, no character in an original work can be a Mary Sue in the first place. It would be ludicrous to say that Maisie Dobbs is taking up all this time in the Maisie Dobbs series. So why do people say it?

Well, my good friend Marina once said, "Some people throw the term Mary Sue at any female character competent enough to walk home in the rain without drowning." Or, more generally, we don't want to let female characters just be awesome.

Is there an element of wish-fulfillment in Maisie Dobbs? For sure. She was a domestic servant whose intelligence was discovered by a benevolent employer, who put her way through school. She lived through dramatic events in World War I. Now she's a single female PI in interregnum London. And she even has ... I can't get into this without spoiling the twist in the first book that made it such a delight for me, but let's say Maisie has a few more cards to play than the usual investigators. And a few rather winning men have paid attention to her over the years, from the cheerful Andrew Dene to the dashing Simon Lynch to the melancholy Richard Stratton (i.e., everyone's favorite ... except Maisie's, so far.) So she's got a whole lot more going on than the average person.

Which is what makes this an interesting series of books. Which makes her an intriguing character.

Seriously, let's look at another character by way of contrast: Jack Reacher. Mr. Reacher is the lead character of a series of novels by Lee Child that have sold as many copies as there are molecules in the sun. He's a graduate of West Point, a richly decorated Army vet who has become a mysterious drifter and righter of wrongs. So unencumbered is he that he owns nothing, just a toothbrush and some ID, and simply discards and replaces clothes cheaply as needed. At the age of six, he had already been studied by Army docs who marveled at his inability to feel fear, and he himself says he lacks "the remorse gene." He's 6'5" and muscular even though he doesn't really work out. He has a fascination with mathematics. He has the uncanny ability to know what time it is, no matter whether waking or sleeping, and so needs no alarm to wake himself up. He's talented in several martial arts. He can break someone's neck with one hand, or kill with a single punch to the chest. He's the only non-Marine to win the US Marine Corps International Rifle Competition. His mother always called him "Reacher" instead of Jack ... need I go on?

And Jack Reacher is a hero. Everyone knows he's all about wish fulfillment, but the difference is, nobody cares when it's a guy. A male character can be this over the top and win the love of thousands upon thousands of readers, be featured in a movie (regrettably ill-cast with Tom Cruise) and even show up in an admiring mention by Stephen King in one of his books. Meanwhile, Maisie Dobbs thinks with satisfaction that she's going to be able to pay her mortgage this month, and apparently the response of a lot of readers -- female readers, alas -- is "Who does she think she is?"

I want to be clear; in no way am I putting down Jack Reacher, a character who is clearly much beloved, or Lee Child, an author I greatly respect.* Nor am I saying the Maisie Dobbs books are perfect; like every other book ever written, they have their flaws. What I'm saying is, women should get wish-fulfillment characters too. Maisie Dobbs works hard on her investigations, deeply questions her own motives, sometimes makes mistakes and goes down blind alleys, knows she picks out frumpy clothing but has no time to worry about it, and in many other ways acts like an entirely believable human being. Can we maybe let her meet slightly more handsome, available Englishmen than sheer statistics would suggest? Can she have a couple of talents that not every single person in the world shares?

In other words, can we allow a female character the chance to be even just a smidge larger than life, the same way we allow male characters to be? I'd like to think so.

(Sometime soon I'll blog - as others have done - on the insidious "annoying" applied to virtually any female character, with no reason given, and yet virtually never applied to male characters with the same flaws.)



*Several years ago I attended Thrillerfest, at which Lee Child was one of the featured authors. Another featured author was Sandra Brown, who moved into thrillers after many years of success writing romance. I got to Sandra Brown's talk a little late and so hurriedly slipped into the very back row -- where I was startled to see Lee Child sitting next to me. Here's this guy who's sold more books than the next 10 NYT bestsellers put together, who writes manly-man books ... and not only was he listening with attention and respect, he was taking notes. A lot of male writers automatically disdain women who write romance. Well, not Lee Child.

A very thoughtful reader sent an interesting email asking about the writer/editor relationship, and about the drafts you send in while writing a series. I suspected other aspiring writers would be interested in the answer too, so I'm answering it here. (I, uh, failed to ask permission first, so that's why I am keeping the reader anonymous for now; however, if you are willing to be known, oh ingenious reader, say the word and I'll edit this post to credit you!)



The letter:

Hopefully a quick question here: How polished does your first draft
have to be for a second book in a series, or the third, etc.?

Let me clarify: I am well aware that when you're in the query process,
you should be presenting your best first impression--and nothing helps
but a carefully edited manuscript!

However, once you get an agent and said agent sells your first story
and a potential sequel (or a second standalone novel) to a publisher
*insert shiny contract here*, does your publisher/editor expect a
similarly, well-edited manuscript for the potential sequel (or a
second standalone novel)?

For instance, when you submit (or did you already? xD haha) in
Spellcaster #2: Steadfast, will your editor want the same level of
high edits s/he received for Spellcaster book 1? Or is there a leeway,
especially if you turnaround your manuscript earlier than a deadline?
Or if you have a close relationship with your editor (as in you worked
with him/her on previous manuscripts)?

I'm nowhere near submission to agents for my WIP, but this is a
question that's been bothering me... I figure I might as well learn as
much as I can from the industry. And who better to ask! :) #kissingup

Thanks.

P.S. 'Evernight' is still the only series I devoured back-to-back.
First of all, thanks for the awesome email, and I'm so glad you enjoyed the EVERNIGHT series. Now, onto your questions.



The answer isn't either/or, I think. As you work forward in a series, you get more leeway AND you try to hand in the best possible version of your book. Your editor is your partner in the process; you want her feedback and her input, which means you expect to make some amendments based on her insights into the manuscript. OTOH, your editor is not yours alone. Even if you are her top priority, you are almost certainly not her only author. She's got dozens of manuscripts begging for her attention, whereas you just have the one. You need to polish the hell out of your draft to make sure that your editor's attention can be reserved for the big-picture stuff you won't catch, instead of the problems in the story you could have dealt with on your own.

(And yes, there are ALWAYS going to be flaws in the story that the author can't see. When you've lived with a book for months and months, you lose sight of certain things -- believing you explained something that seems obvious to you but is never actually spelled out for readers who'll need it, the fact that you've telegraphed a coming plot twist so boldly that you might as well have put it on a 50-foot blinking neon sign, or even a character's eye color undergoing a mysterious, non-paranormal change.)

So where does the leeway come in? Well, most authors take their time writing their first book -- you might have edited and polished that baby for three years. Now you've got 11 months for the sequel ... and during those 11 months you're also expected to build a Twitter/blogging platform, go over copyedits, and keep living your life. It's harder! I don't think there's an editor in the world who doesn't understand second-book jitters.

Also, as you say, you build a relationship with an editor as you work forward in a series, and this allows for a little collaboration earlier in the process. (Depending on the relationship you've got -- some editors are very close with their writers, others less so, and neither approach is necessarily better or worse.) This doesn't mean handing in a less-polished draft, at least for me; however, I have occasionally been able to reach out to an editor during the writing process to get her thoughts about something that's bedeviling me. For example, when I was writing STEADFAST, I thought I knew what the ending of the book would be. I'd pitched it to HarperTeen when I originally pitched the series. So they knew what they were getting, I knew what I was writing, and everybody was happy ...

...until I wrote the book and realized it ended a different way entirely.

Within a day of that realization, I emailed my wonderful editor, Sarah Landis, and simply told her what I was thinking. If she was deeply committed to the original ending, or simply thought my new ending sounded deranged, she would've spoken up then so we could discuss it. I didn't want to write an ending my editor wouldn't appreciate -- and if we disagreed, better to have the discussion right away. That way I could either see the error of my ways or get her to see the error of hers BEFORE I took the book down that path. Instead, happily, Sarah loved the new ending as much as I did. That gave me the confidence to plunge in and finish STEADFAST the way I knew I needed to.

There are other ways in which writers sometimes get a little leeway that wouldn't be given when you're presenting that first book. People get sick. Family members have crises. Sadly, getting published doesn't provide lifetime protection from bad stuff happening. Editors understand that you might not be 100% at the top of your game when the rest of your life is falling apart. In a case like that, maybe you seriously miss a deadline, or hand in a draft rougher than you ever thought possible.

But you save it for a case like that, you know? You take that leeway only when you absolutely can't do anything else. Your best bet is always to take charge of your own manuscript and polish it as much as possible before it goes in.

Do you guys have any other big publishing/writing questions you'd like to ask?

Since we’re now coming right up on the release of SPELLCASTER, I thought it might be a good time to introduce you guys to the characters in the story. First up: Verlaine Laughton.

Verlaine fulfills the role of the “best friend” — at least, she does in SPELLCASTER. As the trilogy develops, you’re going to see Verlaine develop as well, and ultimately she becomes a kind of second lead in the series. This is partly because I wanted to write a series that was more ensemble-driven than my previous books, and partly because the more I worked on the concept, the more I realized that Verlaine has her own story to tell. While her friendship with Nadia opens Verlaine’s eyes to the world of magic, Verlaine faces her own challenges, must stand up to her own enemies, and (starting in book 2, STEADFAST) will have her own romance.

(Personally, I think Verlaine’s romance with Character-To-Be-Named-Later is at least as epic as Nadia and Mateo’s. I can’t wait for you guys to see STEADFAST, too! But that’s in spring 2014 — )

Just looking at Verlaine, you know she’s different. Yes, she’s the third-tallest person at Rodman High (including the members of the varsity basketball team). Yes, she indulges in her love for fabulous vintage clothing, dressing in outlandish and colorful outfits every day (though she does wear Converse, as period shoes are hard to find in a woman’s size 11.) But the first thing that would strike you about Verlaine is her hair, which — even though she’s just 17 – has already turned completely gray. In fact, it began turning gray when she was a small child. Now Verlaine wears it long and silver down her back. Lots of people think this is really weird, but privately Verlaine thinks it’s actually beautiful. Her name? Also weird. One of her grandmothers was named Elaine, the other Vera, and her parents namesmushed it; she likes to think that if they’d known “Verlaine” was also the name of a famous poet who died of syphilis, her parents might have made another choice. But what does it matter? She thinks it sounds pretty, and besides, nobody else even remembers her name.

Because, after a while, you might see that Verlaine is also incredibly lonely. She’s set apart from everyone else — at school, at her newspaper internship, really from just about everyone in the world besides her family. No matter how hard she tries, Verlaine remains the Girl Everybody Forgot.

Nadia’s arrival in town promises to change everything for Verlaine. At last it seems like she’s a part of something, and Mateo & Nadia are the first people to include her in what seems like forever. Yeah, it turns out they have to fight a vast and powerful evil — but at least it’s exciting, for a change. However, what starts as an adventure for Verlaine quickly turns scarier, as she learns that the dark magic at work has done unspeakable damage to countless lives … maybe including her own.

Verlaine is a character I care about deeply – and so far, early readers of SPELLCASTER have made a point of saying how much they connected with her. I think we can all relate to the pain of being left-out, the fear of being forgotten. Verlaine is profoundly lonely, but she refuses to let that define her. One of the things I’m most looking forward to with SPELLCASTER’s release is seeing what you guys make of her, and whether you’ll be as eager to see her role expand in later books as I’ve been to write it.


What are some of your favorite “best friends” in YA novels? Have you ever wished for some of them to get leading storylines and/or books of their own?

**

Also! I've started doing some video blogging. Still learning the ropes, but if you want to check out my channel, you can see one of the first two vlogs and let me know what you think ...

http://www.youtube.com/user/AuthorClaudiaGray

(Originally posted on my website blog on Jan. 27 -- you might want to follow me there instead! www.claudiagray.com.)

It is a truth universally acknowledged — at least, acknowledged by every source I could find online — that Jan 27, 2013 is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen’s PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. There are other novels from that time that are still remembered today, even highly regarded by critics, but virtually none continues to … for lack of a better word, LIVE. Thousands of people all over the world read PRIDE & PREJUDICE every year, purely for fun. Adaptations of the story (whether that’s the traditional Colin Firth style or “The Lizzie Bennet Diaries”) are popular year after year. That’s pretty stunning if you think about it — that one of our favorite stories was written by someone who lived before photography. Before regular train travel. The person who wrote so beautifully and intelligently about love and courtship was someone who never married. The person whose stories have achieved worldwide acclaim never left her home country – not even so far as Wales or Scotland. It doesn’t matter. Never did.



So what do we learn from Jane Austen? What do her novels and her life have to tell those of us who aspire to publish stories half as beloved as hers?

1) Work on your pitch letter.

Jane Austen’s works are so universally associated with the Regency era of their publication that we often forget her first three novels (SENSE & SENSIBILITY, PRIDE & PREJUDICE and NORTHANGER ABBEY) were written in the 1790s. Although she edited these novels between then and publication, they didn’t change that much; the first efforts to publish her work came in 1797, when her father tried to get a publisher interested in PRIDE & PREJUDICE.

Let’s just review really quickly: It was SIXTEEN YEARS before she got that book into print.

Why? Well, for one, while her dad meant well, he didn’t know how to present Jane’s work. In the letter he wrote the publishers, he didn’t really describe PRIDE & PREJUDICE at all. There was no summary of the plot, not even a description of the work as a romance or a comedy of manners. No wonder the publishers never even looked at it! One of the most beloved books in the English language didn’t find a publisher at first because it wasn’t presented correctly. No wonder it can happen to the likes of us, too.



2) If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

The first book Jane Austen sold for publication was NORTHANGER ABBEY, then titled SUSAN. In 1803, the publisher paid her 10 pounds, promised to bring it out soon and went so far as to advertise the book. And then … nothing.

Just nothing.

It was 1809 before Jane Austen’s brother wrote to suggest to the publishers that they bring it out already, or at least give it back to the author, so that she might seek another publisher. The publisher responded rather acidly, saying they’d given no specific publication date; they owned the rights, and if the author wanted them back, she could repay them the 10 pounds. That wasn’t an insubstantial amount of money back then, and Jane Austen couldn’t get her own novel out of publishing limbo.

This is the point when a lot of people would get discouraged. She’d gotten rejections. Then she got an acceptance that turned into a publishing nightmare. A decade had gone by, and she still wasn’t getting published. I’ll admit it: At this point, I’d probably have given up, because I lack the self-confidence. You have to think that even she had a few moments of doubt.

But she also had friends and family who kept begging to borrow the manuscript of P&P again. And again. And again. (Imagine her handwriting the entire thing over and over again, so as to have more lending copies.) Jane Austen ultimately believed in her work enough to revise and try again. When SENSE & SENSIBILITY was finally published in 1811, it was an immediate success, and everything changed.

(She finally paid those 10 pounds to get NORTHANGER ABBEY back. Her brother only informed the publisher that this was by the now-bestselling author of PRIDE & PREJUDICE after the fact. Served them right.)



3) Don’t worry too much about trends.

Austen was worried about NORTHANGER ABBEY having been on the shelf for so long. Even the title change from SUSAN came about because another book with the same title had been released in the interim. The biggest problem was that she wrote the novel as a parody of a popular genre of novel back in the 1790s, the Gothic novel. Gothics were sometimes spooky, sometimes supernatural, often melodramatic and always (at least in intention) thrilling. But Gothics weren’t as popular by the 1810s. She felt sure the book was now out of date and that nobody would now understand the references or the jokes. And yet people are still reading and enjoying NORTHANGER ABBEY today, more than 200 years after the specific pop-culture trend they were written to parody.

Why? Well, the most important element of the answer, I think, is that trends change but elements of human nature remain the same. Catherine’s naivety might be different in specifics, but we all recognize elements of it in ourselves. To this day, very few of us wouldn’t be caught up in the romance and mystery of an ancient castle — or confused by the manipulations of people by the Thorpes. The book isn’t about Gothic novels; it’s about letting your imagination run away with you, and about letting fantasy get in the way of a less colorful, but more meaningful, potential reality. Because that part of the story continues to be absolutely true, it doesn’t matter that we no longer immediately understand the passages making fun of THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO. The truth is what we respond to.

If your novel has that core of truth to it — if we understand the characters’ motivations because we recognize them in ourselves – specific publishing trends won’t stand in your way forever.



4) No matter what, you will never please everybody.

Occasionally you run into a critic who sniffs at Jane Austen for being cozy or middle-class or dull. Most of this is pure contrarianism; some of it is sexism, as these days Jane Austen is seen as a writer who appeals mostly to women (as though literally millions of men had not read and enjoyed the novel too). But there are people the novels just plain don’t reach. This doesn’t mean these readers are wrong, only that not everyone enjoys this novel, or for that matter, any novel.

This was always true; Jane Austen kept a book of “Reactions” to all of her novels, mostly comprised of friends and family who had read it. She had the rare privilege of friends and family who would tell her honestly what they thought — sometimes too honestly, like the friend who wrote of EMMA that, halfway through, she “fancied she had got through the worst of it.” Her sister Cassandra argued with her about the ending of MANSFIELD PARK; apparently Cassandra felt it would be more interesting if Henry Crawford were to be truly redeemed by his love for Fanny and win her heart, instead of Fanny waiting for Edmund to finally wake up. (Janeite though I am, I’m not 100% sure I disagree with Cassandra.)

One thing I had to tell myself before my first novel, EVERNIGHT, was released was that I had not written the magical first book in the history of books that would be beloved by everyone. I convinced myself of this by going through Amazon and reading the one-star reviews of books like WAR & PEACE, LOLITA and, yes, PRIDE & PREJUDICE. No book, no matter how delightful it might be to millions of people across generations and even centuries, is going to be loved by everyone. Not Jane Austen’s. Not mine. And not yours. So you can’t let the bad reviews get you down. Those opinions aren’t invalid; as a writer, you just have to hope they’re not the majority!



What I wanted to write about when I first thought of this blog post was why Jane Austen’s novels are so great. I asked people on Twitter to contribute their thoughts, thinking a consensus would emerge – but it didn’t. Virtually every person gave a different answer to the question of what they most remembered from PRIDE & PREJUDICE. Lizzie’s wit, Darcy’s willingness to break society’s rules (or our willingness to break them if it meant getting him!), the incredibly great first-proposal scene: These all got votes. I think maybe the answer that came closest to mine was Emma’s; she wrote, “a love that no one ever expected to happen.” I think we respond very powerfully to the idea of being surprised by desire – and surprising others in return.

But really, PRIDE & PREJUDICE defies a simple explanation of its popularity. There are countless ways that people respond to it, and love it. I couldn’t sum them up in one blog post, or a dozen. I’m not the person who could sum up PRIDE & PREJUDICE; it’s bigger than that, bigger and better and more deeply connected to whatever it is we love most about stories. What compliment could I give that would outweigh that?

So happy anniversary, not to Jane Austen but to us. We’ve had 200 years with this delightful novel, and I’d be willing to bet that 200 years from now, PRIDE & PREJUDICE will still have readers, and love.

(This post went up at www.claudiagray.com a couple of days ago - these days, I need to manually repost here.)

First things first: The winner of the ARC of Lauren Oliver’s REQUIEM is … Cady! Congrats to Cady, who’ll be getting her copy in the mail very soon. But I want to thank everyone who entered, because I now have a TON of great questions to answer both here on the blog and in the vlogs I hope to get going very, very soon. (Like, tomorrow, if I can figure out how to work the camera.) (Editor's note: Three days later, and I am still working on the camera.) And if you didn’t win this time, don’t despair, because our next contest gets going in the next few days.



I thought I’d kick things off by answering Cady’s question: How do you come up with your characters? Not just names, but personality, hobbies, etc. How do you keep them from being “Mary Sue”s?



Characters emerge in very different ways for me. Often I get asked whether character or plot comes first, and the fact is that, for me, they tend to develop one another. I probably think of a premise originally (witchcraft is a secret, which is a problem for a witch who is trying to learn). Then I ask myself what kind of character would be most troubled by this (a very dedicated and talented witch, abandoned by her mom and teacher). I keep batting that back and forth; every new thing I figure out about the story informs who the central character should be, and every new element of that character’s personality adds potential dimension to the story that’s being told.

Still, even when I have all the “facts” together about a character’s role in a story, it can take a while for that character to fully emerge for me. Or not. Every once in a great while, that character just comes to life in the very first scene: Balthazar did this in the EVERNIGHT series, as did Tess in FATEFUL. But more often, I find I have to write a character a little before they announce themselves. I had to write almost all of EVERNIGHT before I fully understood who Lucas was. Nadia took her own sweet time while I was writing SPELLCASTER. (This is one reason her name changed so many times; she’s elusive, that one. She doesn’t reveal her private self to a lot of people, which I knew, but I hadn’t realized she’d even be secretive with me!)

But as I wrote my way through the story, Nadia’s personality came through. For instance, she spends a lot of time helping to take care of her younger brother, Cole. Sometimes she resents it — but a lot less than I’d expected, less than I would have at her age; mostly she enjoys the time she spends with him because she knows he truly needs her. That made me realize that there’s a very caring, gentle side to Nadia, but it’s not one she speaks about or lets most people see. She doesn’t sit around telling Cole he’s adorable and she loves him; instead, she makes him Mickey Mouse pancakes and checks in his closet for monsters. She has this softness and generosity, but she expresses it all in terms of the concrete ways she can help the people she cares about with their problems. Ultimately I realized this would be an issue Nadia and the other characters would deal with throughout the SPELLCASTER series. Sometimes Nadia comes across as bossy or unsympathetic to other people’s problems: None of that is true. Mateo is one of the first to realize how Nadia channels her love for other people — she has to feel like she’s doing something for them. He helps teach her that sometimes just being there for someone is enough. That’s a really key part of the series, one that rises from character, but it’s nothing I’d ever have planned in advance. It came to me as I wrote, and as I got to know Nadia.

As for Mary Sues: I’m enough of a fanfic nerd to feel like any character in original fiction shouldn’t really be called a “Mary Sue” — but these days, a Mary Sue is often used for an overly perfect female character who has skills, gifts, and beauty far beyond the norm, with few or no flaws to provide balance. (The flaws, if given, are “cute” flaws like klutziness or a heart-shaped birthmark.) While the Mary Sue is a real thing, and a thing to avoid, I feel like that term gets overused a lot now … and in a way I really dislike. (Though not, I should add, by Cady.) Way too many people throw the term “Mary Sue” at any female character who has strong skills, a dominant personality, a lot of plot time devoted to her, or who (in my friend Marina’s words) “can find her way home in the rain without drowning.” In other words, virtually any strong central female character is, these days, at risk of being called a “Mary Sue” by someone. Never let anyone get away with that — and let’s never do it ourselves. Female characters should never have to apologize for being at the center of events any more than a male central character would. And we should never find ourselves raising the bar for female characters — judging their flaws more harshly or questioning their gifts more cynically — beyond the standards we have for male characters. Characters are well-rounded or they aren’t; the events of their lives are believable, or they’re not. Whether or not that character is female shouldn’t have anything to do with it.

(This mini-rant brought to you by the person who attempted to tell me, with a straight face, that Hermione Granger was a Mary Sue. HULK SMASH.)

I wish I had more concrete advice for you on how to construct a character, but — as with most things in writing — there’s no one right way. Thus far, all my characters have introduced themselves to me in different ways; they’ll probably go right on doing that. I think as long as you’re asking who your character is in the context of your story, keeping yourself focused on developing these elements together, you’re probably on the right track.

I very much hope you've checked out my website's new look in the past couple of days. Not only do I think it's SUPER SPIFFY, but that's also the only way (for now) you can check out the sneak preview of SPELLCASTER way before the March 5 release date!

If you have taken a look at the new home page, you've seen that my designer and I decided to tie together pretty much all of my social media: You can see my latest blog post, my latest news, what I've just Tweeted and the last few images I've posted to Pinterest and Tumblr. This has led to an unanticipated (though in retrospect inevitable) focus on James McAvoy on the home page ... but the point is that now the main area of the site is hopefully a place to catch up on pretty much everything I've got going on. It's not static; it changes almost hourly, and I like that a lot.

(Though for some reason, the Twitter can take a long time to update if and only if the last thing I tweeted is really embarrassing. Beautiful quotes about writing from Mario Vargas Llosa? Gone in a flash. Me horrified that I was accidentally flashing bra strap? UP ALL DAY. It's like it's blush-sensitive, or something.)

It's a newer frontier to me than it ought to be, really. I've been online since before the beginning, tweeting away, so on and so forth. And when you publish your first books, that's what you hear, over and over: "Get out there! Create a platform! Make yourself heard!" But the day to day of it -- you know, it's tricky. I never, ever wanted to be one of those people who refuses to tweet or blog anything except links where you can buy my book. This is not because I don't want you to buy my book, but because I think that always comes across as both pushy and kind of fake. So I've tried very hard to be myself online.

However, you guys aren't following me to hear more about my bra straps. (Or maybe you are. There could be a few of you out there. The internet is a strange place.) You guys want to hear more about the writing, about books I've read, and so on. Which means that I haven't just changed how I'm presenting the information I put out there -- I'm changing what I put out there.

All that said, some things will remain the same. Mr. McAvoy will continue to make a few tasteful appearances. I will keep on geeking out about "Hunger Games" and "Harry Potter" and the like. I will continue to do embarrassing things from time to time, and probably will continue to tweet about them before thinking better of it. And I will continue to have CONTESTS. Such as ...

WIN LAUREN OLIVER'S REQUIEM!

Yes, it's an ARC of the much-anticipated conclusion to the DELIRIUM trilogy. It won't be in bookstores until March, but you could have your copy next week if you win. How do you enter?

1) Ask me a question either here at the blog or via Twitter about writing, about SPELLCASTER, anything authorial. (If you don't already follow me on Twitter, you can now do so via my home page at www.claudiagray.com.) I want to put more of this info out there, but I want to answer the questions you guys are really interested in!

2) Do this before Tuesday, January 22, when I will pick a winner. The winner is the only person who gets the ARC of DELIRIUM; I hope to answer nearly all of your questions.

3) Yes, you can be from anywhere (I will ship internationally), but if you enter via the blog, be sure to include an email address where I can reach you if you win.

That's it, and good luck!



(More is coming soon -- for instance, my first forays into video blogging. Remember how I said I would still do embarrassing things?)

One of the most common questions you get asked as an author is, "Where do your ideas come from?" It's slightly maddening for me, because -- like a lot of writers -- I don't really know. You get a glimmer of inspiration here, have a weird dream, read an op-ed in the newspaper, see an old 80s music video, and then three weeks later suddenly there's a story in your brain that isn't directly linked to any of the above but wouldn't have come into being without them.

Take, for instance, last March. I was touring in the US, Australia and New Zealand for BALTHAZAR's release. Those of you who follow me on Twitter/Tumblr will be shocked, shocked, to know that one of the last things I watched on DVD before leaving for the trip was "Atonement." I watched for the McAvoy, but what lingered in my mind was both the image of a high-strung, rail-thin girl who yearned for something beyond the ordinary, and one of the deeper themes, the idea that our inner realities are so often hidden from one another until too late.

And then there were days and days in hotel rooms, on airplanes. Dan Wells and Lauren Oliver, who are both as wonderful as traveling companions as they are authors, were pretty much my only constants in the US as we went from cold weather to hot weather, mountains to desert to seashore. That sensation intensified as I went to Australia, and my longsuffering publicist became the only person I saw day to day as I went to places even more unfamiliar to me.

Meanwhile, of course, with all that airplane time, I'm reading up a storm. I read NICHOLAS & ALEXANDRA, and a couple of novels set in pre-revolutionary Russia. I read a nonfiction book about rogue waves.

I rewatched "Iron Man" in a hotel.

Someone at an event asked me about my favorite books as a child, and one of the ones I spoke about was the glorious A WRINKLE IN TIME.

And through that weird alchemy that every writer knows and nobody can explain, a story started to happen.

So now, ten months later, I can announce, as my agent and I just did in PUBLISHERS' MARKETPLACE:

Claudia Gray's CAN'T GET NEXT TO YOU, the first book in the Firebird
trilogy, about a girl who must pursue a killer through alternate realities
where she sees all the radically different lives she might have led, and
realizes her target may be far more than the cold-hearted murderer she'd
believed him to be, to Sarah Landis at Harper Teen, in a three-book deal,
by Diana Fox at Fox Literary (World).

The main character, Marguerite, is the daughter of two scientists -- the scientists who developed a way to travel between dimensions. And the man she's hunting is the man she believes killed her father. Some of the worlds she visits are very like her own; others are radically different, whether in a futuristic version of London or a Russia where the tsars never fell from power. But every single leap she takes into the unknown doesn't just get her closer to the truth about what happened to her father; it makes her realize how easily all the people around her could be different. How she could be different, and how hard it is to face what's really within people, both the darkness and the light.

(How do all the above ideas tie in? Some of them -- like NICHOLAS & ALEXANDRA -- are already obvious. Others you can probably piece together. Others I can explain as time goes on -- and still others will remain mysterious to me forever. But I know all those influences from that trip played a role in this story's creation.)

There is SO MUCH I want to tell you guys about this book, and this trilogy. Most of that has to wait -- right now, I'm concentrating on the SPELLCASTER series (and hope you are too, with the release date just two months away!) But I can say that, for me, CGNTY is what a lot of writers call "A book of the heart." That's what you call that story you love, love, love so much that you want to tell it all day, every day, forever. Sometimes a book of the heart is so personal that it's a hard sell, or otherwise doesn't make it out into the world. But I'm very happy to know that I get to share CGNTY with all of you.

One of the most common questions you get asked as an author is, "Where do your ideas come from?" It's slightly maddening for me, because -- like a lot of writers -- I don't really know. You get a glimmer of inspiration here, have a weird dream, read an op-ed in the newspaper, see an old 80s music video, and then three weeks later suddenly there's a story in your brain that isn't directly linked to any of the above but wouldn't have come into being without them.

Take, for instance, last March. I was touring in the US, Australia and New Zealand for BALTHAZAR's release. Those of you who follow me on Twitter/Tumblr will be shocked, shocked, to know that one of the last things I watched on DVD before leaving for the trip was "Atonement." I watched for the McAvoy, but what lingered in my mind was both the image of a high-strung, rail-thin girl who yearned for something beyond the ordinary, and one of the deeper themes, the idea that our inner realities are so often hidden from one another until too late.

And then there were days and days in hotel rooms, on airplanes. Dan Wells and Lauren Oliver, who are both as wonderful as traveling companions as they are authors, were pretty much my only constants in the US as we went from cold weather to hot weather, mountains to desert to seashore. That sensation intensified as I went to Australia, and my longsuffering publicist became the only person I saw day to day as I went to places even more unfamiliar to me.

Meanwhile, of course, with all that airplane time, I'm reading up a storm. I read NICHOLAS & ALEXANDRA, and a couple of novels set in pre-revolutionary Russia. I read a nonfiction book about rogue waves.

I rewatched "Iron Man" in a hotel.

Someone at an event asked me about my favorite books as a child, and one of the ones I spoke about was the glorious A WRINKLE IN TIME.

And through that weird alchemy that every writer knows and nobody can explain, a story started to happen.

So now, ten months later, I can announce, as my agent and I just did in PUBLISHERS' MARKETPLACE:

Claudia Gray's CAN'T GET NEXT TO YOU, the first book in the Firebird
trilogy, about a girl who must pursue a killer through alternate realities
where she sees all the radically different lives she might have led, and
realizes her target may be far more than the cold-hearted murderer she'd
believed him to be, to Sarah Landis at Harper Teen, in a three-book deal,
by Diana Fox at Fox Literary (World).

The main character, Marguerite, is the daughter of two scientists -- the scientists who developed a way to travel between dimensions. And the man she's hunting is the man she believes killed her father. Some of the worlds she visits are very like her own; others are radically different, whether in a futuristic version of London or a Russia where the tsars never fell from power. But every single leap she takes into the unknown doesn't just get her closer to the truth about what happened to her father; it makes her realize how easily all the people around her could be different. How she could be different, and how hard it is to face what's really within people, both the darkness and the light.

(How do all the above ideas tie in? Some of them -- like NICHOLAS & ALEXANDRA -- are already obvious. Others you can probably piece together. Others I can explain as time goes on -- and still others will remain mysterious to me forever. But I know all those influences from that trip played a role in this story's creation.)

There is SO MUCH I want to tell you guys about this book, and this trilogy. Most of that has to wait -- right now, I'm concentrating on the SPELLCASTER series (and hope you are too, with the release date just two months away!) But I can say that, for me, CGNTY is what a lot of writers call "A book of the heart." That's what you call that story you love, love, love so much that you want to tell it all day, every day, forever. Sometimes a book of the heart is so personal that it's a hard sell, or otherwise doesn't make it out into the world. But I'm very happy to know that I get to share CGNTY with all of you.