Joan Frances Turner's Blog

Some news of good import: Thanks to a friendly Twitter follower (nobody ever tells the writer these things directly), I have discovered that Frail is now available for (US) pre-order at Amazon. The definite for-real release date: October 4, 2011. So soon! So far away! (ETA: The paperback edition of Dust drops on the same date. Faraway, so close, et cetera!) Eventually I plan to have the first chapter of Frail up for preview but for now, enjoy some jacket copy:

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Since a devastating, morphing plague swept through human and zombie populations, almost everyone who survived is an "ex" these days. Ex-human. Ex-zombie. Both creatures crave flesh, have the strength and speed of predators–and what seems like immortality. Pierced skin and broken bones mend, but their all-consuming hunger never dies…

Amy is the only purely human survivor from her town–a frail. Her mother is gone, but Amy won't believe that she's dead. Feral dogs stalk her, in reality and in her imagination. Amy thinks she's losing her mind. But when an ex-human named Lisa saves her life, a fragile friendship forms, a bond that will save Amy over and over again when she and Lisa are abducted into a makeshift community run by exes who use humans as their slaves.

For a girl used to going it alone, trusting anyone isn't easy, but Amy will have to. She has secrets from her past she can't afford to face by herself, and secrets in her future that will cost her just about everything–including her humanity…

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Since folks have asked, I do expect this one to be available on the same release date in Kindle/e-book format, just as Dust was, or at least I haven't been told otherwise. As the description suggests, Frail shifts over to the all-important human perspective–though what's "human" and what isn't, in this universe, is an open question–while also continuing the stories of several of Dust's characters, and in some cases ending them. To find out about all that, read the book–and to find out what happens to everyone, human and inhuman, in the very end you'll have to read the third and final book in the series. Of course, before you can do that I actually have to write it. This fact suggests I may possibly have ahead of me another busy year.

–JFT, 2/22/11

Hello again! Now that the holidays, the January doldrums and the life-threatening blizzard are all over and there's a lull in my edits, more actual news:

–Frail, the sequel to Dust, has an official release date: October 2011. (Exact precise day of delivery to be announced when the midwife informs me.) This is much sooner than I had anticipated so I am very excited and, as mentioned, neck-deep in edits. Frail, as previously mentioned, takes place in the immediate aftermath of Dust and switches from the undead viewpoint to the all-important human perspective–but as Dust readers already know, "human" and "inhuman" are open questions in this universe. Which makes it all that much more fun to write, even when neck-deep in edits. Many new characters, some surprise appearances by old ones, more northwest Indiana/Calumet region local color and all manner of Significant Mayhem.

–The paperback edition of Dust also comes out this year. Yes! I don't have an official date of release yet, but hopefully soon.

–I can't announce it until the proverbial ink is dry, but there's more news regarding Dust that makes me very pleased, and might please some readers, and perhaps soon I can share it with the world. I'm only cryptic because I love.

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A few weeks ago, I was terribly surprised and flattered to find out that Dust is being taught in a freshman seminar at Dartmouth. No, really, here's proof:

ENGL-007-01 The Weird in Contemp. Novels

Hour: 11 Instructor: Michael Chaney

Description: Why are contemporary novels preoccupied with the weird, the strange, the bizarre? Beyond simply making for good stories, encounters with the weird, the fantastic, and the marvelous in contemporary novels are also commentaries on existence today, theorizing who we are and how we relate to each other. In this course, students will read several contemporary, highly acclaimed novels that stage encounters with the weird. Likely examples include Haruki Murakami's After Dark, Joan Turner's Dust, and Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City. In order to understand how these stories about alternate realities, zombies, and surreal twists of fate intervene on the human condition today, students will also read secondary materials drawn from philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism.

Textbook(s)Required: The City and The City China Mieville Del Rey ISBN-13: 978-0345497512 Never Let me Go Kazuo Ishiguro Vintage ISBN 978-1-4000-7877-6 After Dark Haruki Murakami Vintage 978-0-307-27873-9 Atmospheric Disturbances Rivka Galchen Picador ISBN -13 978-0-312-42843-3 Dust Joan Frances Turner Ace 978-0-441-01928-1 Shades of Grey Jasper Fforde Viking 978-0-670-01963-2 Chronic City Jonathan Lethem Doubleday 978-0-385-51863-5

That's some incredibly flattering company, needless to say, and it was even more flattering when the professor invited me to do a Q&A with his class a couple of weeks ago. Many interesting questions ensued, including but not limited to the book's conception of "race" (human vs. inhuman) and racial conflict, the role local geography plays in the plot (any time I get to ramble at length about my backyard is always a good time, well, at least for me), language and communication–and all their attendant failures–the challenge of writing personality-challenged characters, the conception of spirituality, and my favorite zombie movie–though whether it qualifies as such is still up for debate–Carnival of Souls. If anyone from the seminar is reading this: I had a lovely time talking to all of you, and thank you so much for the invitation and your notes of thanks–it really was my pleasure. Of course, all this means that though Dartmouth is my undergrad alma mater's unofficial arch-rival I now have to stop regarding it as Bears fans regard the Packers, but then, we all know that life is pain.

That's all for the moment, but hopefully more on the above in short(ish) order. As the sidebar sayeth, in the meantime you can find me on Facebook and Twitter.

–JFT, 2/9/11

Still in that quiet period when the holidays are impending and book revisions haven't started yet. Nonetheless, a bit of news:

–Thunderbirds are apparently go, which is to say that Frail–the sequel to Dust, at least that's its working title as we speak–is officially under contract and, barring unforeseen delays or acts of [insert deity here], will see the light sometime in 2011 or 2012. When I have a more specific publication date I'll post it, but for now I'm still just excited they bought the book and waiting to see what my editor has to say about the first draft. Let us all cross fingers that some of what is said is good. Yes.

–There's still time this week to win a copy of Dust, courtesy of the nice people at Number One Novels. And if you already have a copy, you can sit back, enjoy the interview and come away knowing more about my misadventures in looking for an agent and trawling the Social Security database than you ever imagined possible.

–Dust made its official debut in Great Britain on Thanksgiving Day, and I am terribly pleased to say that it made the Telegraph newspaper's "Books of the Year" list. (Scroll down to the "Amanda Foreman" section to see my name and other nice things.) You'll notice it's listed amongst the young adult novels and, even though it wasn't marketed as such, being read as YA is perfectly keen with me: I love both YA and full-fledged A books equally well and, as with most literary categories, the barriers are permeable as all getout. Also, I am never going to object to being listed alongside the likes of Suzanne Collins, in any case.

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And that's it for now, besides a reminder that you can follow me on Twitter for shorter, more frequent outbursts if you like, and otherwise just watch this space. Happy holidays to everyone, both impending and belated.

–JFT, 12/8/10

Hello, your author is still alive–battered and bowed by an impending book deadline and an impending work deadline, both of which are impending all at once, but, here and breathing nonetheless. I am superstitious about talking about the second book until contracts are officially signed, so, here are some other people's books I've recently read and enjoyed which you might as well:

(FTC disclaimer: I received no remuneration for recommending these books)

–Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music, Rob Young. A survey study of British folk, folk-rock and psychedelic music from the turn of the last century to this one. You can read my long, embarrassingly effusive review of it in the blog entry just previous.

–The Children's Book, A.S. Byatt. Sprawling study of a fractious British family from the late Victorian era through World War One, but actually a cautionary tale of how stories and storytelling can save us for a while, then turn around and destroy us. I have less than no interest in Victorian history–steampunk makes me sneeze–and I still deeply enjoyed this and all the educational asides about the era.

–Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese. Set in Ethiopia–with some side trips to India and the Bronx–the story of orphaned twin brothers discovering their destiny as healers. A long, eloquent love letter to both Ethiopian culture and the medical profession, and a good old-fashioned ripping yarn to boot.

–White Teeth, Zadie Smith. Yes, I am the last person on Earth to read this, in fact. I still prefer Hanif Kureishi but it was still very good.

–A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell. Go read this. Yes, it's twelve books and four volumes long. Read it anyway. You'll thank me. And you'll understand why when I was originally reading it, half my Twitter feed from beginning to end was my yelling in utter disbelief, "WIDMERPOOL!"

–Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel, Lynda Barry. Read this with the lights on, and then seek out every possible collection of her Ernie Pook's Comeek you can find. You'll thank me.

–Kensington Gardens, Rodrigo Fresan (trans. Natasha Wimmer). Surreal, twisty-turny tale of children's novelist Peter Hook, child of sixties rock royalty and Peter Pan obsessive, intertwined with the actual story of J.M. Barrie and the Llewelyn Davies boys. I just started this one but thus far it is exceedingly and trippily good.

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Dust is at last count in over 350 library systems, including Alaska (hello, Wasilla!), Hawaii, the UK, Germany and Australia. That's a very trippy thought in and of itself, being all over the world when there hasn't even been a foreign edition of it released yet, but planetary domination was right there in the original contractual riders so I'm not complaining in the least.

–JFT, 10/21/10

As mentioned in the previous entry, slightly scarce lately as my deadline on the first draft of Frail, the sequel to Dust, is mid-November, and there's really very little witty you can say when immersed in (battling, drowning in) a first draft of anything: There, that bit of the outline's done! Now some more! Eked out four paragraphs today! Any minute now! I drank Earl Grey tea when I finished Chapter Sixteen, now I've switched over to Yoo-Hoo! I can't think anyone actually cares so it stays under my hat. However, I did also recently finish reading a book I really liked, so let's talk about it instead: Rob Young's Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music.

(FTC disclaimer: This is an unsolicited review of a book I purchased myself. No money, gifts, etc. exchanged hands for it.)

I love music, and without it my creative brain goes on strike–ironic as I can't actually do the writing with music on as it's too distracting, but there we are. Having recently discovered Last.fm about six years after everyone else (you can visit me there if you like), I stumbled through a series of happy random-track accidents from a lot of repetitive, sterile, dreary post-punk–discovering in the process I didn't actually like Joy Division all that much, there's just that feeling you're supposed to (though I'll never give up The The)–over to huge treasure troves of British and American folk, acid folk, psychedelia, experimental and other things that felt far more interesting. (This is an expression of my own tastes, not some assertion of an objective truth. If you love Joy Division, don't take it personally.) Like many new-minted fans I went looking for more and more bands that might sound like what I'd just discovered I liked, and that led me to Rob Young's long, encyclopedic, idiosyncratic study of "visionary" British music.

"Visionary music," by Young's definition (I don't know whether the phrase is a deliberate callback to visionary/outsider art, but actual outsider music is, mostly, a different animal than this), incorporates trad folk, Marxist/left-wing protest folk, psychedelia, psychedelic rock, acid folk, folk-inspired electronica, experimental art-rock and neopagan music, just to name a few. Ultimately, though, it's about a state of mind, a uniquely British conception of psychic identity and escapism: Unlike the United States with its myth of the endless frontier, British looks inward to find itself, to an Edenic landscape that harkens continuously, to a greater or lesser degree, back to the past and to an ideal of Britain that, much like the politically contested "real America," arguably never existed at all.

This is a long, roundabout way of saying that Young, an editor at the excellent British music magazine The Wire, has written a highly interesting survey of twentieth-century British folk and folk-inspired music, starting with the folk music preservationist Cecil Sharp and the pastoral compositions of Delius and Vaughn Williams, progressing through the political folk of Ewan MacColl, trad revivalists like the Young Tradition, the high-water psych/folk/psych folk flowering of the sixties and early seventies (I was pleased to see him second my great like of the Incredible String Band)–and, following folk's self-indulgent decline and death at the hands of glam rock and punk, its sonic/psychic revival in artists as diverse as Julian Cope, Kate Bush, Aphex Twin and Current 93. The artists he mentions are mainstream as Donovan, the Beatles and Richard Thompson, and as obscure as Comus, Mellow Candle and Magnet (the one-off house band for one of my favorite and apparently visionary films, The Wicker Man). If you're new to this music and had no idea at all of the social or aural history behind any of it, as I didn't, it's fascinating reading.

If you aren't a newcomer to this school of music, however, or if you like your music criticism more objective and methodical, Young's book and his free-floating definition of "visionary music," exciting and inspirational though it was to me, might threaten to drive you crazy. There's a few arguments in the reviews at that Amazon link that are worth reading, as they go back and forth concerning Young's critical choices and the accuracy of some of his statements–I can't speak to any of that, being a newcomer as noted who still needs to read much more, but caveat emptor. If you're like me, though, and find the personalized Lester Bangs school of music criticism enthralling I predict you'll enjoy it.

Some readers also took issue with the book's chronological pattern, circling continually in each chapter back to the past and then forward again instead of strict linear progression. However, I think that was exactly the point. Young questions repeatedly, and with reason, the accuracy of any "traditional" British folk music or customs–musical, social, religious–noting how a single singer's changing the lyrics of a folk song to better suit himself means that pure oral preservation is a futile task. This, of course, is exactly why the work lasts: the introduction of diverse genetic strains strengthens and revitalizes the traditional, assuring it's not just a dead thing stuck in amber. The past influences the future, musically and culturally, and the future has echoes in the supposed past: Kate Bush may not be a folk singer by any strict definition, but songs like "Oh England My Lionheart" echo the British visionary picture of itself, a harkening backwards to a fantasy ideal that changes so continually to suit the times, the music, the individual that you can't even rightly call it nostalgic.

Or, as Young notes in the passage on Gerald Gardner's school of Wicca, does it really matter if it, or any particular piece of music, is "authentic" as long as it satisfies a certain psychic craving in those drawn to it? (Lord Summerisle himself, in The Wicker Man, acknowledged his great-grandfather made the Nuada-worship all up for ulterior reasons, but that hardly mattered to his descendants.) Ultimately, Young seems to suggest, everything we hold dear to our self-identity as a culture is ultimately just a state of mind.

This is a much longer review than I ever planned to write, but then I enjoyed the book greatly and the index alone is serving as an excellent new listener's primer (and a viewer's primer–he mentions several British films with a "visionary" or apocalyptic edge, including a very intriguing-sounding Alice in Wonderland telefilm, that I need to add to my list). To see more from Rob Young, and for some further bibliographic suggestions, visit the Electric Eden website. And now, I suppose I have to go back to writing my own book. Sadly I don't think I could convince my publisher that deadlines are a mere state of mind.

–JFT, 9/28/10

A lot of news today, even more than I was expecting. To wit:

1. Dust is out today, at long last, in hardcover and e-book formats. This still doesn't seem like it's actually happening to me, it must all be somebody else, but there's actual proof that it is. Exciting? Yes.

2. This has apparently hit Publisher's Marketplace already, so I think I'm allowed to post it here. That author's bio which...

Launches of various things are launching as we speak, so here's a tiny self-promotional roundup:

–The unabridged audiobook of Dust is out today, in CD and Audible download formats. The reader is and while I haven't listened to the audiobook yet, she sounds close enough to "my" Jessie that I predict good things. (In case you were wondering, no, I really don't know why the audiobook is out before the hardback and e-book editions–I'll chalk it up to Contractual Corporate Things...

It's a frabjous day, because I now have the third and (I believe) final Dust trailer to show off to everyone. Forthwith:

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I have it On Authority that the production company had a lot of fun making these, which pleases me because this is my favorite one yet and as a result of watching all three in a row I've got child-of-the-eighties nostalgia oozing from every pore. If you're not from the U.S. or are too young to remember the actual Partnership for a Drug-Free America PSAs these...

I got this in the mail last week and got all excited and then promptly forgot to post it, so here it is:

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Dust, the real honest-to-God not-an-ARC hardback, kindly sent to me by my lovely editor Michelle Vega, Liberty of London bedspread background sold separately. It exists! They weren't just kidding! I don't know how well the photograph shows this, but the metallic burnish on the title letters isn't foil-shiny but instead somewhat muted; this pleases me immensely, as it puts me in mind of s...

Dust-related publicity homework, ginormous humongous revisions on the outline for a second book, and looming writing deadlines of another sort for my day job have distracted my blogging brain this week and postponed any lengthier entries, but if you're mad to hear me talk this is still your lucky day. Here's some interviews of me out and about, discussing Dust, maggots, cancer, xenophobia, Batman, family psychology, Greek mythology and other, not entirely random topics:

–Interview at The...