{"id":39645,"date":"2021-08-10T14:44:23","date_gmt":"2021-08-10T18:44:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/?p=39645"},"modified":"2022-01-08T17:03:21","modified_gmt":"2022-01-08T22:03:21","slug":"kevin-hearne-five-things-i-learned-writing-paper-blood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/2021\/08\/10\/kevin-hearne-five-things-i-learned-writing-paper-blood\/","title":{"rendered":"Kevin Hearne: Five Things I Learned Writing Paper & Blood"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s only one Al MacBharrais: Though other Scotsmen may have dramatic mustaches and a taste for fancy cocktails, Al also has a unique talent. He\u2019s a master of ink and sigil magic. In his gifted hands, paper and pen can work wondrous spells.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\\But Al isn\u2019t quite alone: He is part of a global network of sigil agents who use their powers to protect the world from mischievous gods and strange monsters. So when a fellow agent disappears under sinister circumstances in Australia, Al leaves behind the cozy pubs and cafes of Glasgow and travels to the Dandenong Ranges in Victoria to solve the mystery.<\/em><\/p>\n

The trail to his colleague begins to pile up with bodies at alarming speed, so Al is grateful his friends have come to help\u2014especially Nadia, his accountant who moonlights as a pit fighter. <\/em><\/p>\n

Together with a whisky-loving hobgoblin known as Buck Foi and the ancient Druid Atticus O\u2019Sullivan, along with his dogs, Oberon and Starbuck, Al and Nadia will face down the wildest wonders Australia\u2014and the supernatural world\u2014can throw at them, and confront a legendary monster not seen in centuries.<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s better in person<\/h2>\n

When researching a setting for a novel, Google Maps is nice in a pinch, but never better than actually being there. But if you\u2019re writing during a pandemic, it\u2019s super difficult to research any settings beyond your front doorstep. Especially if those settings are in Australia, which would be a honkin\u2019 long (and miraculous) walk from Canada.<\/p>\n

I had planned a trip to Australia in April of 2020 to make sure I could describe everything accurately in Paper & Blood<\/em>, because there\u2019s a different climate and ecosystem, independently evolved plant and animal life, and a charming accent to soak up. But air travel pretty much shut down at that time for reasons we all know, and my research trip got canceled like a gift subscription to Cauliflower Monthly<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Luckily, I was able to rely on the next best thing: Awesome Aussies helping me out. Two authors, Amie Kaufman<\/a> and Nicole Hayes<\/a>, were kind enough to take both still photos and videos of the areas I was interested in, and their literal legwork helped immensely.<\/p>\n

Nicole did some driving around Glen Waverley for me, a neighbourhood outside of Melbourne, and that helped me with a crucial chapter involving wizard vans.<\/p>\n

Amie took some friends on an actual hike in the bush for me, heading out to the Dandenong Ranges where the majority of the novel\u2019s action takes place, and her videos were simply invaluable. I owe so many details of the area to her. She also walked through Fitzroy Gardens (in Melbourne) and up Clarendon Street for me, following the path Al and Buck take in Chapter 3.<\/p>\n

Could I have written the book without those contributions, and relied on the Internet? Sure. But it wouldn\u2019t have been the same book.<\/p>\n

Always ask the locals how stuff works<\/h2>\n

Australians have organized themselves to meet the challenging (and frequent) dangers they face. The Victoria SES (State Emergency Service) is quite a bit different from emergency services I\u2019m used to in the US and Canada: Here one usually calls 911 and the appropriate police, fire, or ambulance service gets dispatched, and if it\u2019s anything medical in the US, yeah, you\u2019re gonna be billed for it later. But the SES holds underneath its umbrella an association of volunteers who get trained to assist in certain roles, and they are called to local areas to help find missing hikers, or perhaps provide aid in the aftermath of a natural disaster like fires or floods. The SES, therefore, in all their orange-jumpsuited glory, would have been called in to help search for missing people in the bush of the Dandenong Ranges, along with uniformed police. I would not have known that (and therefore presented an unrealistic situation) if I hadn\u2019t spoken with Amie about it.<\/p>\n

Australian slang is fun as heck<\/h2>\n

In very<\/em> general terms, you can shorten a noun, slap an o or a y on the end of it, and call it good. Thus football becomes \u201cfooty,\u201d and a bottle shop (which is what they call liquor stores) is a \u201cbottle-o.\u201d My favorite, however, is \u201cunco,\u201d the shortened version of uncoordinated, usually used to describe someone (or one\u2019s self) with low dexterity, as in \u201cI\u2019m too unco to hop on a skateboard without fear of death, mate.\u201d I feel unco pretty much all the time, so I was delighted to find the perfect word for my daily existence.<\/p>\n

Spelling doesnae matter in some cases<\/h2>\n

Scots slang continues to enchant me, and it has no settled orthography\u2014in other words, however you decide to spell something, you\u2019re not wrong. One of my favorite Scots words for a fight is \u201cstooshie,\u201d which can also be spelled \u201cstushie\u201d (or any other way that gets the phonetics across). It\u2019s an adorably cute word for folks crunching fists into the teeth of other folks. But proper place names in Scotland do not necessarily follow the rule of spell-it-how-it-sounds-and-go-about-your-day. \u201cMilngavie,\u201d for example, is pronounced with just two syllables, like \u201cmil-guy,\u201d and absolutely no attention is paid to the n and the v in the middle there. For this reason, I included a pronunciation guide in an Author\u2019s Note at the beginning of the book. It\u2019s not required reading, but it might make the reading go a bit easier when I use terms or spellings that are outside standard usage.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t try to replicate Scots exhaustively because it might have been exhausting to read, but I wanted to use enough to get the flavor of the language across, and I owe heaping piles of thanks to Stu West for that, a Glaswegian who now lives in Canada.<\/p>\n

A vastly entertaining side effect of becoming familiar with Scots language is that I\u2019ve been really enjoying Scottish noir mysteries, because when Stuart MacBride writes \u201cYou look like someone left a jobbie in your corn flakes,\u201d I know what he\u2019s talking about.<\/p>\n

Making good choices<\/h2>\n

This book was written from March to August of 2020, during a time when we were huddled in our homes and actually thought the pandemic might be over in a few weeks, which turned into a few months, and\u2026haha, yeah, we\u2019re still in it, because almost every time an elected leader had a chance to make a choice in the interest of public health, they made a choice in the interest of business or politics instead. It got me thinking about how the choices we make can have dire consequences, and we can run from them sometimes, but dang if they don\u2019t catch up to us eventually. So Paper & Blood<\/em> is full of people thinking about their past decisions and how they want to shape their future with new choices. One, in particular, is a figure last seen in The Iron Druid Chronicles. I don\u2019t want to spoil anything, but how this figure tries to reinvent who they are by making new (perhaps better?) choices was one of the key delights in writing this book. And, by the way\u2014you don\u2019t have to have read the Iron Druid Chronicles, or even Ink & Sigil<\/em>, to enjoy this book. There\u2019s a handy recap of Ink & Sigil <\/em>in the beginning, and everything else is pretty self-explanatory. So I hope you decided to give it a read and are happy with your choice.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Kevin Hearne is the New York Times bestselling author of the Iron Druid Chronicles, the Ink & Sigil series, the Seven Kennings trilogy, and co-author of the Tales of Pell with Delilah S. Dawson. He loves dogs, trees, and nature photography, and often quests for street tacos. When not writing novels, he writes snail mail with a fountain pen and plans road trips he can’t possibly take right now.<\/p>\n

Kevin Hearne<\/strong>: Website<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Instagram<\/a><\/p>\n

Paper & Blood<\/strong>: Indiebound<\/a>\u00a0| Barnes & Noble<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Kobo<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Chapters\/Indigo<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Amazon<\/a><\/p>\n

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There\u2019s only one Al MacBharrais: Though other Scotsmen may have dramatic mustaches and a taste for fancy cocktails, Al also has a unique talent. He\u2019s a master of ink and sigil magic. In his gifted hands, paper and pen can work wondrous spells.\u00a0 \\But Al isn\u2019t quite alone: He is part of a global network […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-39645","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-theramble","8":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pv7MR-ajr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39645"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39650,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39645\/revisions\/39650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}