Thursday, July 24, 2008

Richer than the Queen

Not too far into The Explosionist, a murder takes place in a fancy Edinburgh hotel room. When I was writing the scene, I decided to set it at the alternate-universe version of one of Edinburgh's real-world luxury hotels - and some time afterwards, I was very delighted to read the stories about J. K. Rowling checking into a hotel to write the final scenes of the Harry Potter saga, because the hotel she stayed at was the exact same one that made an appearance in my novel!

Now the rooms she stayed in have been renamed the J. K. Rowling Suite, and you can book the suite yourself for £965/night - that's close to $2000 at current exchange rates...

Here's the hotel's website, and here's a longer story at the Telegraph. Many thanks to Wendy for the link!

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Danger areas

The big showdown at the end of The Explosionist takes place in a dynamite factory on the Scottish coast.

Though the novel takes place in an alternate version of history that's different from the history of our own world, lots of things are in fact quite similar, and this factory existed (for real!) in our world also. Here is the 1897 magazine story about the Nobel Dynamite Factory at Ardeer that I found most useful for research purposes...

(Hmmm, once upon a time I had a link online to a facsimile of the original article, which gives a better feel for the period - I cannot find it again now - but I am grateful to the administrator of that site for having made the full text accessible!)

This picture appeared in the original article, and if you've read my novel, it will be easy for you to see how it - along with the accompanying description of young female factory workers getting searched for any metal they might have on them before going into the nitroglycerin house, where a single spark could lead to lethal consequences - fed into the scene I envisioned:

My father was in Scotland as I was finishing the novel, and he made an expedition to the site to take some pictures. It was a working factory well into the twentieth century (here's a good article on dynamiteur Alfred Nobel's Scottish enterprises), and for a brief period a few years ago, it seemed as though the site would serve as the location for a permanent exhibition called The Big Idea, on the history of invention in general and Nobel prize-winners more specifically. But the project closed down - here's a description of it in its heyday - and the pictures my father took speak of the devastating but beautiful effects of the passage of time.









(All pictures courtesy of Ian H. Davidson. Thanks, dad!)

Thursday, July 3, 2008

Changes

Today I'm blogging at HarperTeen's Myspace page. My topic: an unexpected problem I'm having with the sequel to The Explosionist!

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Out in the world

Today is the official publication day for The Explosionist. Welcome!

My plans for this blog have not yet fully materialized--the more pressing job for the summer is to write the sequel to The Explosionist!--but I'm thinking I'll post here a couple of times a week during the first months that the novel's out there in the world.

You're also very welcome to drop me a line at theexplosionist@gmail.com, or to look in and say hello on one of my other blogs.