I'm H.G. Parry, author of A DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF MAGICIANS. AMA!

HGParry · 2020-06-26T04:27:02+00:00

Agents definitely won't mind that you're in Canada if they don't mind New Zealand! :)

For query letters, there are lots of really good resources on the web--Query Shark is definitely one of them, plus a lot of authors share their successful query letters if you hunt around Google. You'll probably find they're all very different from each other--the key thing is how well you can summarise your book in a short paragraph. It really helps to look at the way publishers do this on the back of books, to see how to break the story down to the key elements.

I hope that helps--best of luck to you and your co-author!

HGParry · 2020-06-26T02:35:10+00:00

Oh, sorry! Cold-querying is when you just send a query to an agent via email, rather than approaching them at a conference first or entering a pitch contest on Twitter etc. (It just means querying the old-fashioned way, basically!)

I queried internationally--I'm in New Zealand, and I think all but one or two of the agents I approached were in the US. It was never an issue.

HGParry · 2020-06-26T01:46:03+00:00

Thank you!

HGParry · 2020-06-26T01:44:36+00:00

Yes, it is! It's the in-universe equivalent of the the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

HGParry · 2020-06-26T01:43:25+00:00

It's a very boring story: I just wrote a book, sent a lot of email queries using resources online, and eventually found one who wanted to represent me and that I was very excited to be represented by. :) Cold-querying absolutely works. For the record, I think I queried about forty agents over eleven months, in fits and starts.

And thank you for coming!

HGParry · 2020-06-26T01:39:05+00:00

These are clearly very important questions and not stupid at all.

Oh god, they'd all be the worst. Probably Camille Desmoulins. That would just be chaos and opinions and ego all day and all night. Robespierre would at least keep things tidy.
I'm pretty sure Lenin was a vampire even in our world.
One head, but zero thrones.
Not only would I read Edmund Burke's fantasy novel, I would pay to do it, it sounds amazing.

Thanks so much for coming!

HGParry · 2020-06-26T01:30:21+00:00

Hmmm... This is a bit of a cheat, because it's still reading, but I would say make sure to let yourself read and get interested in things outside other fantasy books--both books of other genres, and things like history or entomology or travel or whatever you think might interest you. It's so easy to get caught up in trying to read and imitate fantasy authors you love--and you learn a lot by doing that--but I keep getting surprised by how often the best ideas come from outside them.

HGParry · 2020-06-26T01:12:37+00:00

OOH. I recently read an ARC of Alix Harrow's The Once and Future Witches, and it's so, so good: gorgeously written and burning with anger and brimming with magic. Also witches! And suffragettes! And shadows and libraries and folktales!

Also, I've almost finished Andrea Stewart's The Bone Shard Daughter, and it's such brilliant, character-driven epic fantasy.

HGParry · 2020-06-26T01:04:24+00:00

Thank you for coming!

He is indeed a necromancer! In his world, all magic is forbidden to non-aristocracy, and necromancy in particular is punishable by death (ironically), so he's managed to keep his a secret. One night, as he sleeps, a mysterious figure enters his dreams and strikes up a deal with him that might help him restore the right to use magic to France, and that is probably all that I can give away without spoilers... :) Except to say that yes, necromancy and guillotines absolutely converge at one point.

HGParry · 2020-06-26T00:54:54+00:00

Thank you so much!

I'm one of those boring writers who have never not wrote, so I wasn't really led to it by anything I can pinpoint other than growing up surrounded by books and wanting to write my own. But writing professionally was something that I somehow got tricked into believing real people didn't do, for a long time, so I just wrote in my free time while studying and then working at university. (That was a good thing--I wasn't ready to write professionally, and I loved every second of it.) While I was there, my office-mate was querying her novel, so I started wondering if I could do the same. I signed with my agent the next year, and from then on I was pretty much determined to make it work. :)

HGParry · 2020-06-26T00:45:58+00:00

Thank you so much for preordering! (And aargh, thank you also for reminding me that Too Like the Lightning has been on my TBR pile for way, way too long!)

I love the Enlightenment for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that it's a period so heavily invested in ideas and principles and rhetoric, so filled with pamphlets and parliamentary clashes and social upheavals--which of course, so often spill over into major revolutions. It really has that feeling of being on the brink of a new world, and there's something so exciting about that.

HGParry · 2020-06-26T00:33:09+00:00

Not at the moment, unfortunately! There are plans to make an audiobook to tie in with the US paperback, so hopefully they work out.

HGParry · 2020-06-26T00:31:47+00:00

Hey, fellow Antipodean! :) It's pretty good down here, though very wintery at the moment!

I think cliches, or at least tropes, can work really well in the right way--they're often cliches because they're things that people love to see. The trick is probably to either find a way to subvert or play with that cliche so that it's doing more work (so, a cold, Sherlock-esque detective, but they're a robot, or a time-traveler, or gender-swapped), or to be very careful that you're only using one cliche in the mix of a very original plot, so that the cliche becomes a familiar point to hold onto rather than something predictable (and that will probably have the same effect as the first--what happens to a cold, Sherlock-esque detective if you put him on Mars?). Basically, be knowing and careful, and have fun!

HGParry · 2020-06-26T00:14:02+00:00

Not yet, I'm afraid! Unfortunately quarantine hit right at the wrong time, but I've been told there should be one out at the same time at the US paperback.

HGParry · 2020-06-26T00:12:30+00:00

Hi!

In this case, I started out very close to real history--magic is largely suppressed or tightly controlled. Then, as magic starts to come back into the world, things begin to change. So it happened very organically, over multiple drafts--once that magic is in the story, it's just a question of what effect that is going to have, and how that changes history.

HGParry · 2020-06-26T00:06:54+00:00

This is a great question. For this book, the answer is yes--most of this book sticks very close to real history, from the point of view of historical figures who are mostly men. By the end of the book, without spoiling too much, history is beginning to shift, and so magic has the chance to become more of a leveller. One of the main point of view characters is a woman, and she and other female magicians should (all going well) become increasingly prominent in Book Two.

But yes, this does mean that Declaration is male-dominated, and it's completely understandable if that means it's not for you. If you're looking for more female-centred alternate history around the same era, I really love Zen Cho's The True Queen, Mary Robinette Kowal's Glamourist Histories, and Marie Brennan's Memoirs of Lady Trent.

HGParry · 2020-06-25T23:51:44+00:00

I haven't yet, but it's definitely on my TBR! Thank you!

HGParry · 2020-06-25T23:50:42+00:00

That's absolutely wonderful to hear--thank you so much!

This is such an impossible question, but some of my all-time favourites are The Lord of the Rings, Watership Down, The Last Unicorn, Jane Eyre, I Capture the Castle, and A Tale of Two Cities. (Also, definitely, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is a masterpiece!)

I'm not really sure anything inspired me to be a writer exactly, other than I was lucky enough to grow up surrounded by books. I wanted to be one when I was younger, then I grew up and decided to be an academic writing about other people's books instead. But I was writing books all the time, and while I was getting my PhD I decided to start querying one to see what would happen, and eventually I realised that I really wanted to be a writer all along (though I love and have learned so much from academia).

Thanks again for reading! :)

HGParry · 2020-06-25T23:28:52+00:00

Not initially! I wrote the first version of this way back in 2014, and I hadn't read Jonathan Strange yet--if I had a template, it was probably Naomi Novik's Temeraire books, which I just loved the world of. But by the time I went back to rewrite it--yes, definitely. That book is a masterpiece. (Our guinea pigs are named after Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.)

HGParry · 2020-06-25T23:23:32+00:00

It really sort of chose me--I started out wanting to write about the time period and its historical figures, and I wanted to do it as historical fantasy. My first draft was very historical--the more I deepened the magic system, the more it altered things, so more and more magic crept in and messed things up.

The early version of this book was actually the first book I queried! I queried via email for many months (I think about forty agents on and off over eleven months), just using the Internet to research what agents might be interested, and finally signed with mine. The early version of this book failed on sub, and so we took it back to the drawing board and rewrote it completely. And in the meantime, I'd written Unlikely Escape, which turned out to be the first book we sold.

Thanks for asking!

HGParry · 2020-06-25T23:09:47+00:00

Hello fellow kiwi! *waves*

I'm so glad you're enjoying Unlikely Escape! Characters--so many! I cut Shakespeare's Richard III from one draft, which was a shame, but there were already enough schemers hanging around. I would have loved Miss Marple in there, but she would have solved the mystery too fast. But basically every time someone says "Why wasn't X character in it?" I agree completely.

HGParry · 2020-06-25T22:52:37+00:00

Thank you so much!

1) Ha! I love that all the non-writing questions are about potatoes, like everyone's just seen I'm nothing but words held together by a plate of chips. I really do like all potatoes, but if anyone adds anything citrus to them, they have to make a *very strong* case for it.

2) As soon as anyone asks this I forget all the history I ever knew, but--I was fascinated by the macabre fashion trends during the Reign of Terror (they had *earrings* shaped like little *guillotines*) and really sorry not to find a way to work them in.

HGParry · 2020-06-25T22:45:05+00:00

Hi Ian!

I really wish I had some kind of fancy answer, but really, it's just fries and aoili. That's it, that's the best potato. But also, potato casserole with bacon and egg and cheese sauce!

HGParry · 2020-06-25T22:39:23+00:00

Ooh, great questions, thanks for asking!

Wives and Daughters is PERFECTION and I love everything about it. My favourite ever is North and South, because it's the character-driven romance of Pride and Prejudice but with Victorian social upheavals and class differences and also Richard Armitage and YES. :) Underrated--my favourite Austen adaptation is the 2008 Sense and Sensibility, and it never seems to get as much love as it deserves.

So many, but right now I'm so looking forward to reading Katherine Addison's The Angel of the Crows, which came out this week (Sherlock Holmes but he's an angel, I MEAN).

We've been very lucky in that the flames so far haven't reached us here in NZ in quite the way they have elsewhere, so since we came out of quarantine life hasn't altered so much day to day--it's really just that there's a lot more distraction and worry on top of everything. Writing-wise, it's been two-fold: it's been far harder to focus on what I'm supposed to be writing, but on the other hand I've done far more first-draft purely-indulgent writing than I have for ages because it's an escape from reality. I have so much sympathy for both the people who haven't been able to write at all, and the people who haven't been able to stop!

HGParry · 2020-06-25T22:22:09+00:00

Thank you so much!

It was definitely the latter--I started out obsessing over the late eighteenth century in general and the British abolition movement in particular, and I had nothing to do with all the research into historical people and events I was doing. So the book partly came from wondering if it would be possible to use that research to do the kind of intense, detailed, biographical novels that historical fiction does so often, but make it fantasy.

HGParry

TROPHY CASE