Neve Maslakovic

The Twin Cities. Yes, the winters are long and the summers hot and stormy. Minnesota, because of its location in the middle of the country, misses out on the moderating effects of the oceans. We sit on the 45th parallel north, halfway between the North Pole and the equator (the 45th parallel incidentally also passes through Belgrade, Serbia, where I was born.)

But I digress. Yes, the weather in the Twin Cities can be wild at times. But we have the Loft.

It’s a good place to take a writing class, listen to a reading, or just grab a cup of coffee and sit down with a book.

In their own words:

The mission of the Loft is to foster a writing community, the artistic development of individual writers, and an audience for literature.

Incorporated in 1975 in a space above a Minneapolis bookstore, the Loft Literary Center has grown to become the nation’s largest and most comprehensive literary center. From novels to children’s literature, from playwriting to poetry, from spoken word to memoir, there’s something for everyone at the Loft. Programs include readings by acclaimed local and national authors, classes, weekend genre conferences, competitions and grants, open groups, writers’ studios, and much more. The Loft is located in the award-winning Open Book literary arts building in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

As I was writing my first book, I took workshops at the Loft over the course of a few years and attended a novel-writing conference. Yesterday was the first time I had been “on the other side of the podium”, for my first book reading. This is what greeted me when we arrived:

I couldn’t believe it! They’d taken an unknown newbie writer and put my name on the outside of their building. (With a slight snafu with my first name, which was interesting because it’s usually my last name which gets mangled. The subject of a future post: the trials and tribulations of being an author with a hard-to-spell name.)

The reading itself was a cozy and intimate experience (we didn’t have a ton of people show up, it being St. Patrick’s Day — note to self, don’t schedule talks on holidays) but I enjoyed it very much. I talked a bit about how the book came to be published, read a bit, and then answered some good questions — people were curious about the process of switching from science to novel-writing and also where I got the idea for the story about a culinary writer who goes to an alternate universe.

Anyway, if you live in the area and haven’t checked the Loft out yet, I highly recommend it. It’s a great place for readers, aspiring writers, and authors.

Regarding Ducks and Universes is being released today both in print and on Kindle. I’m so excited, I can hardly sit still! I’ve learned a lot about the publishing business in the last ten months, and one of the most important things that I’ve learned is that publishing a book takes a team of people. So, without further ado, here is the Acknowledgment page (slightly amended) from the book:

Thanks go out to Alex Carr, my editor at AmazonEncore, for being intrigued by the title and pulling out a manuscript languishing on last year’s contest shelf and liking it;

to Jill Marsal, for graciously agreeing to represent me;

to Sarah Burningham, Sarah Tomashek, and everyone at author-team for helping get the word out;

to the art and editing team at CreateSpace for turning a manuscript into a book;

to Mary Alterman and Jo Cravens for many writers’ group meetings, even when the snow was knee-deep;

to the teachers at Woodpark Montessori for imparting many bits of preschool wisdom to my son Dennis as I wrote and edited and wrote and edited;

to my friends and family for all their encouragement, even when they didn’t quite understand why it was taking so long;

to the light of my life, Dennis, for keeping me grounded and for introducing me to many imagined worlds of his own;

and, most of all, to my husband, John, for coming along for the ride and for being steadfastly certain it would all work out in the end.

Thank you, everyone, for helping launch Regarding Ducks and Universes into the world!

Just found out that I’ll be sharing a signing period at Uncle Hugo’s with Lyda Morehouse of the Archangel Protocol and the AngeLINK series fame!

This is great news on two counts:

(a) I get to meet Lyda Morehouse in person.

and

(b) It takes care of my number one fear, that no one will show up and I’d just be sitting at a table all alone with a stack of books. I’ll be able to talk to Lyda, watch her sign copies of the her newest book Resurrection Code for her fans, and get her to sign a copy for me.

The famous Uncle Hugo’s is one half of Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore and Uncle Edgar’s Mystery Bookstore on 2864 Chicago Ave. S. in Minneapolis. The signing will be on March 26th, from 1-2pm. Come on by, it’s shaping up to be a lot of fun.

Less than a week to go till launch day!

First, my thanks to all the readers who posted reviews of the Regarding Ducks and Universes ARCs on Amazon, Goodreads, LibraryThing and other places. Every review helps spread the word and is much appreciated!

Second, this week we have the signed copies of Regarding Ducks and Universes going out to the Goodreads giveaway winners. One to Canada, two to Great Britain, and seven to various corners of the U.S. Winners, be on the lookout for the book in about 7 to 10 days, depending on where you are.

Finally, below is the Q&A going out with the press release, with the “Q” part courtesy of the great Sarah Burningham of Little Bird Publicity.

Q: Most science fiction writers don’t have a background in real science, but you graduated with your Ph.D. from Stanford’s renowned STAR Lab. How did your scientific work influence your fictional writing? Did working in science inspire you to write?

Neve Maslakovic: When I first tried my hand at writing fiction, I found that the process is a close cousin of scientific research—you come up with an idea, sit down at your desk (or in your lab), work at it, spend time thinking, backtrack, try a different approach…neither one happens neatly and both are very creative endeavors. Science is guided by observation and deduction, of course, while in writing REGARDING DUCKS AND UNIVERSES my aim was to make the novel a fun read and a bit thought-provoking at the same time. Ultimately, though, you’re just tinkering with ideas until you hit upon something that works and feels right. I don’t feel I’ve moved wholly away from science; on the contrary—scientists and academic settings inhabit my stories.

Q: You were born in communist Yugoslavia and have lived all over the world. How did your travels impact the creation of Universe A and Universe B in REGARDING DUCKS AND UNIVERSES?

NM: I love to travel, both in person and virtually, by reading about real places or by writing about imagined ones. Sometimes a place that’s only a little different than what we’re used to can be more disconcerting than a place that’s hugely different. To that end, I wanted Universe A and Universe B to be ‘next-door’ kind of universes to ours and to each other; the laws of physics are the same and people don’t have five arms, but in Universe B ordinary things like paper books and Ferris wheels seem out of place to A-dweller Felix Sayers, who’s come from a more technologically and environmentally oriented society. So he’s a little baffled by San Francisco B, especially as it seems that someone is trying to kill him.

Q: What made you decide to set REGARDING DUCKS AND UNIVERSES in San Francisco?

NM: I think writers, even ones of speculative fiction, always end up writing about their lives and the places they’ve been, even if only in some extended sense. I was in California for twelve years, and, like all the places I’ve lived, it’s become a part of me. And San Francisco, in particular, is such a unique and interesting city, a city of innovation, a literary city. A perfect setting for basement-lab experiments with universes and for an encounter with a paper book for the first time.

Q: What can we expect to see next from you? More science fiction? Or maybe something travel-related?

NM: As a matter of fact, the novel I’m currently working on is going to be both science fiction and travel-related. I don’t want to say too much at this early stage, but let’s just say that this time there are no ducks, but there is an Australian didgeridoo. And Fibonacci numbers. And cheese, lots of cheese. And time travel.

Every blog needs a name and this one’s is Yabput. 

A bit of an explanation is in order.

To the right of this post, under the little blurb about Regarding Ducks and Universes, is a concise definition:

Yabput (n.) yaab-poot
Yet another branching point in the universal timeline.

So far so good. It kinda, sorta makes sense. Especially since at the top of the page it says: Yabput: Neve’s News and Updates. What it means is that every time I write a post about a book giveaway or an event or even just jot down a thought for the day, I feel like a universe (as per the many-worlds interpretation) just might be branching off… That is to say, there are other universes in which I’m too lazy or too busy to post or am in bed with the flu, but in ours here I am.

So this is exciting news — we’ve gone ahead and scheduled the very first “official” book reading for Regarding Ducks and Universes. It’s going to be held on Thursday, March 17, at 7:00 p.m. at the Loft Literary Center. That’s in the Open Book building here in downtown Minneapolis. (Map below). The event will be free and open to the public.

I’ll do a talk and a reading, followed by a Q&A session and book signing. I’m looking forward to it, it should be fun. Come on by! Bring lots of questions!

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For those of you who don’t know it, the story of how Regarding Ducks and Universes came to be published goes something like this: I entered the manuscript in the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. The novel made the semifinals. It didn’t win. About a year later, in late May of 2010, as I was revising and sending queries to agents (with very limited success), I got the offer from AmazonEncore, the new imprint of Amazon. The book will be published both in print and on Kindle on February 22.

When buying your first house/apartment you often hear this bit of advice: Don’t get emotionally attached to any single house, even after you’ve put in an offer. Too many variables, too many things that can change suddenly. It turns out a similar warning holds for a book: Don’t get attached to the ARC cover.

I had gotten quite fond of the big, perky, yellow duck that squats on the cover of the Advance Reader’s Copy of Regarding Ducks and Universes. However, the book’s publisher, the good folks over at AmazonEncore, after some consideration, suggested that that cover felt “unfinished” and “didn’t reflect the depth of the book.” So they sent me a pdf file of a new one. What did I think?

It took me about a day to come to this conclusion: By golly, they’re right. The new cover is better. More intriguing, more indicative of the book as a parallel-universe mystery. “Fun, mysterious, dramatic,” my friend Mary Alterman said. “It pulls you in,” Jo, another friend from my writing group, commented.

In a previous post, I’d merrily informed the giveaway winners that there’d only be minor changes between the ARC, the warts-on version of the book, and the final product. A handful of typos to be fixed, I wrote, a small goof with a date, a runaway case of italics, some small edits in the text, that was all. No major changes, I said. Wrong I was.

So in with the new:

Writing a novel is making a thousand little decisions, some requiring a day of thought or more, but most of them made right on the spot, with no lifting of fingers from the keyboard: Will your protagonist have long hair or short? Do his sleuthing on a foggy day or a sunny day? Pilfer sourdough bread starter, as instructed by his boss, or not?… Many, many daily decisions — a myriad of them, you might say. Which brings me to the topic of today’s post. Myriad. Is it a noun, an adjective, what?

It was more than a point of grammar for me as I wrapped up the final edit of Regarding Ducks and Universes. In Universe B, as it happens, they use Ancient Roman units of measurement: stadium (just over 200 yards) and libra (about 0.7 pounds and where, incidentally, the modern pound gets its abbreviation of lb). But what of myriad?

In our own universe the original Greek word started out with essentially the same meaning it has now (abundant, numerous, countless) according to Gullberg’s Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers. The word later acquired a more specific meaning — it denoted the number ten thousand. (Tens, hundreds, thousands, myriads…) As it made its way into English via Latin, myriad lost its mathematical meaning, much like decimate no longer means reduce by (exactly) a tenth.

Numbers do come up in Regarding Ducks and Universes a lot: house numbers, cups of tea drank, the number of people in the world, that kind of thing. I had small numbers, I had big numbers, but none of them* happened to be exactly 10,000. I briefly though about using myriad myriads (as Archimedes did when estimating the number of grains of sand), but that seemed kind of awkward. So I took the easy route: myriads of Bygone Times Sourdough Bread Makers in Universe B implies what it usually does, an unspecified large number.

Oh, and the word can be either an adjective or a noun. So it’s perfectly fine to say I hope my next novel doesn’t require a myriad of edits.  It’s also fine to say And that it sells myriad copies.

—-

*Curiously, I ended up having the number in the book after all: ten thousand libras, for the mass of a typical Universe B car. When writing a novel this kind of thing happens all the time.

The first giveaway of copies of Regarding Ducks and Universes has officially wound down — we had over a thousand people enter (1144 to be exact), a number that is not unusual for Goodreads, but which still staggered me! I’ve never done a giveaway before and it’s nice when people think your book sounds like something they might want to read. So I’ll have the pleasure of mailing four copies to various corners of the United States and one to the north of Great Britain.

A reminder that these are the ARCs (the Advance Reader Copies) going out. There won’t be any major changes in text between the ARC and the finished product. Minor changes, yes. Between the publisher’s proofreading and mine, we’ve found a handful of typos (titled instead of tilted, wondered instead of wandered), one small goof with a date, an ampersand that mysteriously changes shape throughout the book*, and a runaway case of italics. I’m also sneaking in a minor tweak here and there ’cause that’s what I like to do, edit, and this is my very last chance to do so after five years of work on RD&U.

So, winners, be on the lookout for the books (after I figure out how best to package them). Everyone else, be on the lookout for the next giveaway — signed copies of RD&U — which I’ll do as the book launch date nears.

My thanks to everyone who entered and to Goodreads!

Update:  *The mysterious changing of the ampersand shape didn’t turn out to be mysterious at all, but merely the result of a font change from normal type to italics, i.e., not an error at all. My bad.