Brittany Maresh

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Connection Terminated: History

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At it’s core, in it’s current draft, Connection Terminated is about the way things end. Lives. Stories. Games.  But it’s also about how things go on – how we deal with legacies, on living based on what came before and on what will come after.

For me, that always loops me back around to history,  a subject that is so complicated to us.

I always think of Alaska as having both the longest and shortest history of any of the states.When put in context of America – of the United States – we’re so, so new. We’ve only been a state for a little while, and we didn’t have kingdoms before we were a state.

But then, we have Alaska Native history, which reaches back before there was time, to the point where it’s not a history anymore but a mythology, or maybe legend. In fact, most of it is legend – oral stories passed down for generations, fantastic details that now are just unreal.

In writing, I have a hard time imagining living somewhere that has a history that blends with the legends, where certainty about some things but not all things is the norm. The idea of that sense of history – of previous lives having passed in that very house, or neighborhood, or city – fascinates me.

A strong history is like a haunting, but without the ghosts.

Maybe the same could be said about a strong story.

Connection Terminated: Major Life Shift

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For the past nine years I’ve worked in some capacity or another for Dr. Ping-Tung Chang, 2010 United States Professor of the Year and fairly brilliant math professor.  He’s an impatient, bossy person. He’ll call me 96 times a day or more on my day off to badger and bully me in to doing just one thing for him that day. He’ll send angry 3: 00 a.m. e-mails in broken terrible English to people he’s mad at and then ask me to write polite apologies and restate his argument in better language the next day. He’ll agree to meet up at 8:00 a.m. and then be angry I’m not there by 6:00 a.m. – or worse, drop by to get me.

He’s eaten my time like it’s cotton candy for years.

Now that he’s no longer eating my time, I’m not quite sure what to do with it all. I still expect him to call six times in the middle of a movie. To show up hours earlier than we agreed. I’m looking forward to adjusting to it, though.

2015: Connection Terminated: Names

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A small confession about character names:

One of my best friends is a fairly popular young adult author. She’s got more than a dozen books out. More than a few fans. She’s got books in every library I’ve ever visited. As you can imagine, she’s used more a few names over the years to fill out her books. Cool names. Tough names. Soft names. Names from exotic locales, and historic names, and the sort of names that top baby name charts.  Off-beat names, too.

She uses so many that it’s hard not to overlap, when I’m writing. I don’t go out of my way to avoid it, even. Not with the first draft. I don’t think about it.

Still, draft one of Connection Terminated overlaps on three names. Not for important characters – they’re side characters in both her work and mine – and the characters are nothing alike. They’re not even the same species, let alone the same character type. Still, it bothers me.

You’d think I’d be used to naming a character only to find she’s used the name, but it weirds me out every time.

2015: Connection Terminated

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Welcome, 2015. The year of writing, editing, and polishing Connection Terminated.

I was talking to a few friends the other day about how terrifying I find the idea behind my novels. Being booted from the internet, kicked off, connection terminated, permanently and unexpectedly? That’s one of the scariest things I can think of. There are so many people I adore and care about that would never know what happened to me, that would wonder, and worry, and have no way to follow up on finding out.  And I’ve been on the other side of that, too. I used to play a MUD back in the day, and we had two people disappear after 9/11. They didn’t log back on.  Everyone speculated and worried about what might have happened, but we didn’t know. We didn’t get confirmation for months that they’d been killed. That they were never going to log back on. I remember every time I logged back on for months, someone would ask if anyone had heard from either of them. They weren’t even friends, in real life. Just two people who happened to work in the same building and play the same game online who both vanished on the same day.

To me, that’s terrifying. That’s lay up at night thinking about how easy it is to just vanish level terrifying.

Or maybe it’s cyber-stalking, instead of being booted from the internet. How easy it is to put together all the little pieces of your life and figure out who you are, where you’re from, what your schedule is. To find you, and you’d never know, because they could be anyone. That guy from your MMO. The girl on your Twitter feed. The kid you argued with on the forum the other day. The old man you laughed at for not being able to figure out Vent. Sure, they’re just digital. Until they’re not.

That’s scary, right? And maybe a little exciting.

2014: Terms and Conditions

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I dedicated most of 2014 to working on my final draft of my young adult novel Terms and Conditions. I wrote flash fiction about the side-characters. I researched plot points. I was absolutely obsessed for essentially the entire year.

Not a bad way to spend a year.

Book Cover Tag

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One of my writer-friends, December, tagged me to do this. It’s not normally my style, but I’m way past due on an update, and it’s as good an excuse as any. What can I say, I’ve been writing and editing like mad.

1. What are your 6 favorite book covers?

I could have picked a million different books. Harry Potter and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and just a million fantastic book covers didn’t make the cut because I know everyone’s already seen them.

  1. Dualed byElsie Chapman (art done by Michael Heath – yes, I liked it so much I looked it up)
  2. Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein – particularly the US Hardcover edition (though they’re all wonderful)
  3. Faery tales and Nightmares by Melissa Marr
  4. Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire
  5. The Replacement by Brenna Yovanoff
  6. Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver
  7. Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott – the paperback
  8. Bad Girls Don’t Die by Kaite Alender
  9. The Splendor Falls by Rosemary Clement Moore – not the purple one
  10. For the Darkness Shows the Stars by Diana Peterfreund

Making this list was torture. Fortunately, I’ve got a Pintrest dedicated purely to pretty book covers and lovely reads. Unfortunately, I can’t just say “all of them.” I do favor covers with a slight creep factor. Bonus if the girl’s dressed.

If I made this list tomorrow the only thing that I know would stay the same is Dualed. Seriously, it’s my favorite book cover of all time.  I would kill to have a cover like that. It has symmetry without being mirrored, shadows that don’t match the bodies but in deliberately and creepy and fulfilling ways, it would have been easy for this to be a really dark, gloomy cover and it’s not, it’s lovely. I love it.  And the artist has an amazing portfolio seriously go look.

2. What’s your opinion of morphed covers (in a series the publisher changes the cover style in the middle of the series)

The only thing worse than a canceled series is a series where the books change mid-way through, and no longer match on my shelf. I will admit to having stopped following a series because of this. Just as bad is when the book changes shape or size, too.

3. How important is the book cover?

You’ll never sell a book to me on the cover alone, but a good hardcover will guarantee I make a priority of picking up the book as soon as I can – because so often the paperbacks are just a touch less lovely to look at. A great example is the O’Dwyer trilogy by Nora Roberts. I’m not a girl who typically reads romance novels, but the covers are so pretty and have these lovely details. I bought all three (and if you like romance, I understand they’re quite good – even if you don’t, they paranormal aspect is neat).

4. Why types of book covers draw you in?

Covers that telegraph the marketing department is looking to target people who like the sort of things I like – dark, spooky, and girls with actual clothes.

5. What are your book cover pet peeves?

Headless bodies. So many women are reduced to bodies on book covers, and I really hate that.

6. Do you like short descriptions or long ones?

Some publishing companies have better summaries than others – it’s impossible to say long or short, because length is in no way an indicator of how effective it will be.  I would say instead that it needs to have some sort of hook instead of just a bunch of positive reviews or quotes. I need to have some idea of what the story will be.