Continuing our discontinuous series of “blog tour” posts featuring fellow members of the Codex Writers online community ….
Today we talk (so to type) with Leah Cypess, author of Mistwood (published last year in hardcover and coming out in paperback in April).
Mistwood is the story of an ancient shapeshifter bound by a spell to protect the kings of a certain dynasty. And of a confused girl found in a forest who is told she is that ancient shapeshifter, even though she can’t remember anything about her past. Possibly they’re the same story … possibly not. She’ll have to figure it out while protecting the current prince, navigating his intrigue-filled court, and making sure nobody finds out that she has lost both her memory and her powers.
(Mistwood cover art. Click to enlarge.)
We appreciate Leah taking the time to answer our questions about how she turned her idea for Mistwoodinto reality.
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When you first conceived of Mistwood, did you start working on it right away, or did you set the idea aside for a period of time?
I didn’t conceive of the book as a whole so much as I conceived of the first scene — an image of men riding into a misty forest in search of a supernatural creature. I started writing that first scene as soon as I thought of it, and continued working on the book pretty regularly after that (with “regularly” modified by the fact that I was in law school at the time).
Wow, law school and novel writing at the same time — how did that work? How long did it take to write the book and then to shop it around?
Since I was in law school when I started working on Mistwood, I had many interruptions along the way — including a revision request from an editor for a previous manuscript, and then working at a law firm, which was a rather large interruption.
I finished a basic first draft over three years, where “basic” means “scattered throughout various notebooks I used to bring with me on my morning commute.” After two years of working at a law firm, I quit and spent some time writing full-time; during the first few months of my full-time stint, I finished both Mistwood and another manuscript I had been working on.
After some thought, I decided to submit the other manuscript first, because it was about vampires and I was under the impression that vampires were hot. Turned out that by the time I started submitting, vampires were no longer hot, and I got a bunch of rejection letters saying, essentially, “Good story but we’re sick of vampires.”
One of those rejection letters, from an editor at Greenwillow Books (HarperCollins), was very detailed and included a request that I send her future manuscripts. So I sent her the query and first two chapters of Mistwood, a manuscript I hadn’t looked at closely for over a year. She sent a request for the full about a month later, and then emailed me two weeks after I sent it to say she was interested in the manuscript and wanted to show it to the other editors.
What major obstacle did you have to overcome while working on Mistwood, and how did you overcome it?
My biggest obstacle was that I wrote the book over the course of three years and in a very disjointed fashion. When I finally gathered together all the various pieces, it turned out I had written some scenes that completely contradicted each other, others that were out of order, and had written at least one scene twice! Piecing it all together in a way that made sense was rather headache-inducing. I could never have managed it without the help of critique groups (I sent it through Critters a total of four times!) who could point out things like, “Your heroine made the same shocking discovery twice,” or, “but she already knew that in Chapter Four!”
What was the biggest surprise you got out of working on this project? Is there anything in particular you hope your readers get out of the finished work?
As someone who worked for 15 years to get a novel published — and who had the experience of watching a manuscript be considered by a publisher for two years before being rejected! — I was very pleasantly surprised by how fast it happened once it happened. (Though publishing is still a very slow business, overall; that patience I acquired has come in handy more than once.)
The most important thing I want my readers to get out of any of my books is a great reading experience. But I also hope that experiencing my main character’s dilemma might help someone who is faced with difficult choices.
You’ve got a new novel coming out soon … what did you learn from Mistwoodthat you applied to it?
My new novel, Nightspell, a stand-alone companion novel to Mistwood, will be published in May 2011. The first draft of Nightspell was mostly written by the time I sold Mistwood, but I learned a lot from the revision process for Mistwood — mostly about keeping scenes tight and clarifying characters’ motivations — that I applied while revising Nightspell.
(Nightspell cover art. Click to enlarge.)
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Leah’s 15-year odyssey to publication is a great example of perseverance, and an inspiration to those of us who are working and writing, and writing and working.
A little about Leah: She used to be a practicing attorney in New York City, and is now a full-time writer in Boston. She much prefers her current situation.
(Leah Cypess. Click to enlarge.)
Leah published her first short story (in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine) while still in high school, and a mere 15 years later, finally sold her first novel. Mistwood was published by HarperCollins (Greenwillow) in 2010; Leah’s second novel, Nightspell, will be published in May 2011.
Mistwood‘s paperback release is April 26th, and Nightspell will be released in hardcover on May 31st.
For more information, visit Leah’s web site at http://www.leahcypess.com/.
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