Thursday, October 4, 2018

Daemons Discuss - Podcast: Bonus Edition! | A General Review of Time's Convert

A UK/US edition end-page mash-up. *UK edition comes in three colors, blue/witch, red/vampire, yellow/daemon

Bonus Edition - The Trifecta

Description: It's been a couple of weeks since Time's Convert has come out, and we figured it was time to discuss this book. This is a general overview; chapters discussion deep-dives are to come once we get through the trilogy! WARNING: SPOILERS live on this episode. If you've not read this book yet, pushing "play" will be at your own risk. Enjoy!

SPOILER ALERT! We (The Daemons) approach this podcast with an assumption that the listener has read All Souls universe books, including the trilogy (A Discovery of Witches, Shadow of Night, The Book of Life), and  Time's Convert + snippits from The World of All Souls. If you haven't, and you don't mind, we certainly don't mind!  😊  Let's do this. *Note - this podcast is labeled 'explicit'

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1. Show notes:

For newcomers to the series:- We'll start with the basics: The books in discussion are A Discovery of Witches, Shadow of Night and The Book of Life.  Together they make The All Souls Trilogy by Deborah Harkness.
- Our Daemon Guides to the All Souls Trilogy are available for download: ADOW, SON, TBOL

Deb's newsletter - The Blast; subscribe on her website
- If you'd like a ready-reference from the author herself, be sure to download the All Souls Real-Time Reading companion (free e-book at online booksellers via Penguin and Headline books).
- Deborah Harkness usually conducts a real-time reading on her Facebook Page (starting in September), and shares her posts across social media. Check out her website for all of her social media links, and of course all that she has to offer her readers! Be sure to sign up for her newsletter while you are there!
- To see what's available on the web as far as the All Souls universe fandom, check our links page.

In this episode: ⚠️WARNING! There are spoilers! We are chatting about Time's Convert, and doing a general review of the book and sharing our impressions of the some of the events and characters in contained it it. Chapter reviews will come when we get to this book!
  • Special thanks . . .
    This podcast is brought to you by our Patrons! To become a patron all you need to do is visit us at Patreon.com/DaemonsDiscuss and become a member. See what level tier you'd like to join us! All tier levels will receive access to our exclusive Daemons Discuss! The Aftershow podcast.
  • Thank you to our Patron sponsor, Leslie Planitzer! 
  • Thanks goes to our Discussers: Lauren, Teri, Michelle & Christine!
Other information:
Don't forget . . . Ask a Daemon! It has to be a voicemail, a Speakpipe, or a voice memo. Rules as follows:
  • No, you can't get out of this by writing an email! We want to hear your voices! Do via Speakpipe, call us on voicemail (360) 519-7836, or email us your voice memo to DaemonsDiscuss (one word) at gmail (dot) com.
  • Keep your message short and tight - between 1 and 3 minutes, please! Val has enough of a time editing the three of us (as evidenced by this episode -- it's an adventure!).
  • Give us your name and where you are located -- just your first name is perfectly fine!
  • Ask us anything, or give us your All Souls story (how did you come to the books/TV show)
  • Deadline: 20 October 2018
Time's Convert Q&A with Deborah Harkness (courtesy of Viking Books)

Q: Once the All Souls Trilogy ended with THE BOOK OF LIFE, did you immediately have the idea to do a spinoff? How did that idea come about?

A: I knew I had many more stories to tell about the characters, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to tackle them. Marcus’s story was far more complicated than I imagined it to be, as it turned out. I had originally set out to write about Matthew’s time in Tudor England before 1590, but that also turned out to be more complicated than I imagined. So I worked on both of them at more or less the same time. TIME’S CONVERT just reached the finish line first.

Q: TIME’S CONVERT centers on Marcus and Phoebe, and Marcus’s life before he became a vampire. Did you think about Marcus’s origin story when you were writing the trilogy, or did everything come to you when you started writing this book?

A. I thought about Marcus’s origins all the time. It was impossible to think about Matthew as a character without delving into what kind of father he was, and considering what kind of son Marcus was. Even though in the trilogy Marcus and Phoebe tend to be characterized as “minor characters,” in my opinion there is no such thing. Every character I write has the same amount of backstory, the same amount of detailed thinking required, the same application of imagination to their individual problems as Matthew and Diana do.

Q: As a scholar and professor of history, your life has been about research. What kind of research did you do for TIME’S CONVERT? Was it different than the research you did for the trilogy?

A. The research for Time’s Convert was different in the sense that I couldn’t draw as much on research I’d already conducted for teaching and my scholarly books. I usually end my courses around 1750. Marcus wasn’t born until 1757. So I while I definitely knew something about the period I write about (roughly 1750 to 1810), I had a great deal to learn. Once I realized how much work I needed to do, I tackled it like any other scholarly research project: I read historical monographs written by experts; looked at lots of images and material objects; and steeped myself in the primary sources of the period. The title of the book, for example, comes from a line in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense—Marcus’s favorite book.

Q: What was the most fun part of writing TIME’S CONVERT? The most surprising?


A. The most fun part was being a student again and learning a lot more about eighteenth-century history than I did previously. The most surprising thing for me is how complicated the eighteenth century is. It’s very difficult to get an overall grasp of a particular moment because there are so many distinct voices that offer up different perspectives.

Q: Your first book, A Discovery of Witches, has been adapted into a TV series airing in the UK this fall. What has it been like seeing your book come to life on screen?

A. It’s been fascinating. The process of making television is very like the process of writing a book. You have to imagine all sorts of possibilities, go through multiple versions of the final version before you discover the one that works, and survive months of editing and revising. In the end you just have to cross your fingers and hope that you got more of it right than wrong.

Q: Are you able to tell us what you’re working on next?

A. Right now I’m working on recharging my creative batteries. This involves reading widely, listening to lots of music, and doing very normal, everyday activities like walking the dog, spending time with horses, cooking, and decluttering my house of the piles of stuff that grow to mammoth proportions when I am busy writing. I have a lot more ideas for stories from the All Souls universe, but I also have a number of other projects that I’d like to tackle, too. As always, whichever characters shout loudest get the bulk of my attention. I’ll be as eager as you are to see what develops next.
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Credits/Copyright Information * Intro music: "Ghost Dance" (edited down to second chorus) by Kevin Macleod, licensed for use by Creative Commons.
* News intro: by AwesomeMusicVideos21; provided for fair-use/royalty-free.
*  Outro music: Rimsky-Korsakov - "Scheherazade Symphonic Suite for Orchestra Op.35 - IV. Allegro molto," Public
domain/copyright-free. 
* "Save it for the Show" segment introduction voiceover by Devyn Grendell  
* Cover art (+ all variations associated w/ it): © Daemons Domain 
* The term "unofficial" is explained in our disclaimer located in Terms of Use - item 14.
* The Daemons Discuss podcast is hosted and produced by the owners (Angela, Jean and Valerie) of Daemons Domain and can also be found by entering the url http://www.DaemonsDiscuss.com in your browser, (listed on the various podcast syndicates like iTunes, Stitcher, etc.) which will redirect you back to the parent site, Daemons Domain.
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* Our episode titles are a loving tribute to the show "Friends" just 'cause we love Friends and - let's face it - it's easier! Here's how one of the show creators explains their reasoning:
Jeff Greenstein: "When Marta & David & Jeff & I did 'Dream On', we used to spend a lot of time thinking about titles, because they were on-screen at the top of each episode. On "Friends", we decided that was a waste of time. We figured, why not name each episode after the thing that people will ostensibly be talking about around the water-cooler the next day?"
This was a Daemon Production

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