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julesjones did this and I want to also, so, simply, here it is. I adjusted some of the questions, comparing her version and Justin Bog's original.
1. What is the working title of your book? Drummer Boy. There's no reason to change it that I could imagine. Though in my head I refer to it as not-Poland.
2. Where did the idea come from for the book? Several sources.
(1) There's an unfinished story on fictionpress called "Unrelated Royalty," which has the situation of a king marrying a pregnant widow who subsequently dies, leaving her son growing up in the royal household without any actual status. I used a duke, and then because I have a realistic bent I started thinking about why the kid wouldn't have the status he should get from his father, and so on.
(2) Landscape and Memory, which is about Greater Lithuania, which greatly overlaps Greater Poland: Language Hat's running discussion of the polyglot nature of Eastern Europe, The Golden Bough, and everything by Carlo Ginzburg.
(3) All the military history discussions I'll never have anymore with the nice fellow I married, and especially certain bits I recalled from things he told me when he was alive: the Polish cavalry meeting the tanks in battle, the general perfuckedness of the World War One eastern front, the persistence of the use of drummers in battlefield communications well after the advent of telegraphy . . . the earworm phrase the law of uneven development.
(4) My own family background is four ways not-Polish, so there is a certain symmetry to me writing a book that is not-Polish. -- Do you want to know the ways? a. Though my father's father's family identified as German Americans, my surname is Sorbian, which is a Western Slavic language that overlaps Poland,Germany, and the Czechoslovakian region. b. My great-grandmother's mother was from the Amber Coast, which is sometimes Poland and sometimes other countries in history, but was apparently German at the time she left it to be a hurdy-gurdy girl in the California Gold Fields (she didn't get that far because of --)c. My great-grandmother's father, the ship's carpenter the mother eloped with instead of going on to the gold fields, was from Gdansk during a period when it was called Danzig, so therefore not Polish. And d.My mother's family was all Jews from Vilnius, which they pronounced Vilno and spelled Wilnow, and which was supposedly in Russia at the time they left there, but they always said it was in Poland (glances at historical atlases leave me with a headache and more questions than answers).
(5) When I figure out why I suddenly discovered that my protagonist has green markings on his skin in the shape of a willow tree, and that he is special to the trees, I will be surprised, or something. Honestly, I don't know where that came from. I wasn't thinking about The Lorax at all.
(6) Everything I write is influenced by Jakobowski and the Colonel, so.
(&) Friday night folkdance class, especially monthly live music night where I just stare at the drummers all night.
3. What is the one-sentence synopsis for the book?
The son of a prince, sold by his foster brother the Duke's son to be a drummer in the imperial army, survives the trenches against all likelihood, to become an urban Lorax according to his true familial destiny.
4. What genre does your book fall under? Either it's a fantasy or magical realism. Is it steampunk? When you read about the mobile telegraph transmitter on a crudely self-propelled wagon, you might think so. Despite the prevalence of dukes and princes, it is not at all a silver fork novel.
5. What other books would you compare this to (inside your genre)? Well, it's nothing like Ash or Grunts -- other fantasies with archaic warfare in them -- and it's nothing like The Lorax. It owes a little revulsion-effect "I want to write the opposite of that" to The Painted Bird.
Well, none of that is inside the genre except the Mary Gentle books.
6. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? There's a bit of a romance, though it is not central: talking animal earth dieties (a sow, a cow, and perhaps a bear! Triple Goddess!) -- a pile of scary folklore, class interactions, some upstairs-downstairs stuff, a couple battlefields, culture class, juvenile misunderstandings, plague, delayed industrial revolution, a fading empire, many different kinds of music, and of course drums and drummers. Also fiddles and the occasional bagpipe.
And also pirogies and an appalling local liqueur.
I left out questions about actors to play the characters, publishing plans, and other things that apply to finished work. I do plan to submit it through traditional channels, because I do think of it as a regular print book.
julesjones did this and I want to also, so, simply, here it is. I adjusted some of the questions, comparing her version and Justin Bog's original.1. What is the working title of your book? Drummer Boy. There's no reason to change it that I could imagine. Though in my head I refer to it as not-Poland.
2. Where did the idea come from for the book? Several sources.
(1) There's an unfinished story on fictionpress called "Unrelated Royalty," which has the situation of a king marrying a pregnant widow who subsequently dies, leaving her son growing up in the royal household without any actual status. I used a duke, and then because I have a realistic bent I started thinking about why the kid wouldn't have the status he should get from his father, and so on.
(2) Landscape and Memory, which is about Greater Lithuania, which greatly overlaps Greater Poland: Language Hat's running discussion of the polyglot nature of Eastern Europe, The Golden Bough, and everything by Carlo Ginzburg.
(3) All the military history discussions I'll never have anymore with the nice fellow I married, and especially certain bits I recalled from things he told me when he was alive: the Polish cavalry meeting the tanks in battle, the general perfuckedness of the World War One eastern front, the persistence of the use of drummers in battlefield communications well after the advent of telegraphy . . . the earworm phrase the law of uneven development.
(4) My own family background is four ways not-Polish, so there is a certain symmetry to me writing a book that is not-Polish. -- Do you want to know the ways? a. Though my father's father's family identified as German Americans, my surname is Sorbian, which is a Western Slavic language that overlaps Poland,Germany, and the Czechoslovakian region. b. My great-grandmother's mother was from the Amber Coast, which is sometimes Poland and sometimes other countries in history, but was apparently German at the time she left it to be a hurdy-gurdy girl in the California Gold Fields (she didn't get that far because of --)c. My great-grandmother's father, the ship's carpenter the mother eloped with instead of going on to the gold fields, was from Gdansk during a period when it was called Danzig, so therefore not Polish. And d.My mother's family was all Jews from Vilnius, which they pronounced Vilno and spelled Wilnow, and which was supposedly in Russia at the time they left there, but they always said it was in Poland (glances at historical atlases leave me with a headache and more questions than answers).
(5) When I figure out why I suddenly discovered that my protagonist has green markings on his skin in the shape of a willow tree, and that he is special to the trees, I will be surprised, or something. Honestly, I don't know where that came from. I wasn't thinking about The Lorax at all.
(6) Everything I write is influenced by Jakobowski and the Colonel, so.
(&) Friday night folkdance class, especially monthly live music night where I just stare at the drummers all night.
3. What is the one-sentence synopsis for the book?
The son of a prince, sold by his foster brother the Duke's son to be a drummer in the imperial army, survives the trenches against all likelihood, to become an urban Lorax according to his true familial destiny.
4. What genre does your book fall under? Either it's a fantasy or magical realism. Is it steampunk? When you read about the mobile telegraph transmitter on a crudely self-propelled wagon, you might think so. Despite the prevalence of dukes and princes, it is not at all a silver fork novel.
5. What other books would you compare this to (inside your genre)? Well, it's nothing like Ash or Grunts -- other fantasies with archaic warfare in them -- and it's nothing like The Lorax. It owes a little revulsion-effect "I want to write the opposite of that" to The Painted Bird.
Well, none of that is inside the genre except the Mary Gentle books.
6. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? There's a bit of a romance, though it is not central: talking animal earth dieties (a sow, a cow, and perhaps a bear! Triple Goddess!) -- a pile of scary folklore, class interactions, some upstairs-downstairs stuff, a couple battlefields, culture class, juvenile misunderstandings, plague, delayed industrial revolution, a fading empire, many different kinds of music, and of course drums and drummers. Also fiddles and the occasional bagpipe.
And also pirogies and an appalling local liqueur.
I left out questions about actors to play the characters, publishing plans, and other things that apply to finished work. I do plan to submit it through traditional channels, because I do think of it as a regular print book.
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I just read an email from 2005 when I mention I was reading Proud Tower by Tuchman and she mentions a copper willow tree in the garden at Chatsworth, I first thought she meant a purple leaved one but it's made of copper and water comes out of its leaves. I love that. I've not found a picture of it but I should look again. So the willow tree reminded me of that.
A group called Women in Timber tried to get the Lorax banned from the local library quite a while ago now. The logging is long gone and the theatre showed the movie!
Um, thought there was more, but for some reason I'm just having a surreal day.
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I think someday I ought to re-read the book, but I couldn't finish it at the time because it was dealing with a tiny bit of truth that I felt there was no advantage to me knowing. Yes, they do these things, sometimes, I wanted to say: but what I want to know is, how does it come about when they don't?