Marie Brennan's "In Ashes Lie," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Marie Brennan's In Ashes Lie and Midnight Never Come.

The entry begins:

I'm very bad at visualizing faces, so I do occasionally try to "cast" my characters, in order to have a reference point to work from. In my Onyx Court series of London-based historical fantasies -- installments so far are the Elizabethan Midnight Never Come and Civil War-era In Ashes Lie -- I've had variable luck with finding suitable choices.

Michael Deven, the human protagonist of Midnight, was the first one I cast. My choice for him is a younger James Purefoy, whom I first saw playing Edward, the Black Prince, in A Knight's Tale. (Without the scar he sported in that movie, though.) Good-looking, but not excessively Hollywood-pretty, and unlike some actors, he doesn't look weird in a historical context. Lune, the faerie protagonist, took much longer; it's hard to find a human with the right kind of delicacy. I only recently settled on Olivia Wilde, most famous as Thirteen on House M.D. She's got an austere beauty that's pretty close to what I had in mind. As for Invidiana, the cruel faerie Queen, I've never found anyone suitable at all. Strangely, Hollywood seems to have a shortage of women who are both inhumanly gorgeous and utterly terrifying. If you dressed up Sleeping Beauty's Maleficent in Elizabethan clothing, though, you'd come close.

For the sequel, In Ashes Lie, I knew even before I wrote Jack Ellin that he looked like...[read on]

Learn more about the books and author at Marie Brennan's website.

My Book, The Movie: In Ashes Lie and Midnight Never Come.

--Marshal Zeringue