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how obscure can I get . . .

. . . before the Elljays cannot answer a question for me?

I need help from somebody who has on hand a translation of the Black Book of Carmarthen that is NOT Skene’s. (Because apparently that one is very inaccurate?) There’s a specific poem I need, not too long, and it would be dandy if I could get it sooner than my next trip to Stanford’s library. Comment here, and I’ll drop you a message via e-mail with the name of the poem I’m after.

the reposting thing

I’m a little baffled by the appeal of crossposting one’s LJ comments to Twitter or Facebook, but anyway, it’s definitely a bad idea that you can do that with comments on somebody else’s LOCKED post (complete with links back to that post). So if you want to disable that for your own journal, it’s easy to fix in the LJ settings, and there’s also a poll going that apparently has gotten the attention of at least one of the LJ Powers That Be.

Sing it wth me! Second verse!

Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday to me . . . .

Yep, that’s right: the release date for my fifth book and the anniversary of my birth ended up back-to-back this year.

I’m going to steal a page from (I think) Cat Valente, and sink not into the WOE IS ME I’M THIRTY MY LIFE IS OOOOOOOOOVER idiocy modern pop culture insists is the proper response, but rather say, woot! I’ve reached level 30! In other words, treat this as a thing to be celebrated. I have increased in experience; I have more skills on my character sheet, and in a few days I’ll be taking a new feat that I think will be very fun indeed.

Longtime readers of this journal know I have a tradition of staving off any possible bad mood by making an “egotism post” on my birthday, listing everything cool I’ve achieved in the last year, without hedging or qualification or mention of things I didn’t quite pull off. (Sparked by a year in which my birthday was kind of a shitty day overall.) I thought about doing that again this year — maybe a “lifetime retrospective” version, rather than just the past twelve months — but you know, I think I’d rather re-purpose a meme from a while back, and solicit flattery from the internets instead. So in the comments, tell me what cool things I’ve done —

— with one condition.

I want them to be hilariously, outrageously false.

Make stuff up. The more over-the-top, the better. Remind me that I once stole the Seven Stones of Power from the Seven Dragon Guardians to re-assemble the Necklace of Immortality and save the Star-Eyed Empress from the creeping poison of the Lord of Doom. Or whatever. And because of the pairing with Book Day — not to mention the outpouring of book love on yesterday’s post; I’ll be getting back to you guys in comments there soon, but it’s been fabulous reading, keep it up — and inspired by Laura Anne Gilman’s own birthday book giveaway, I will send one random commenter, not one of my books, but one of the books I love beyond all reason. Possibly this will be Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones, which is the book that turned me into a writer. Possibly it will be Tam Lin by Pamela Dean, which had a formative influence on the first novel I ever finished writing. Possibly it will be The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett, the only author to turn me so green with envy I basically can’t write for a few hours after reading her stuff. Or something else, maybe. I haven’t decided yet; I’ll see what the winner is interested in. But I think sharing a book I adore is a dandy way to celebrate my thirtieth birthday.

Along with a tasty Japanese lunch, some light reading, a wander in the sunshine, and absolutely no work today. So I’m off to enjoy that. Ta!

celebrating in style

What did I do to celebrate Book Day?

I wrote 2,312 words of a scene I’ve been looking forward to since <checks e-mail records> June 25th.

See, Dead Rick? I promised it would end eventually. And now you get to RIP PEOPLE’S THROATS OUT.

Don’t say I never gave you anything nice.

Crack Addicts (not so) Anonymous

Over on Dreamwidth, Toft has posted about discovering the crack that is Mercedes Lackey (specifically, Valdemar).

It’s prompted an outpouring of squealing fangirl love in the comments — I suspect it’s mostly fangirls, though there may be the occasional fanboy in there — with frequent deployment of CAPITAL LETTERS to properly channel the commenters’ sentiments. I’m in there with them; I, too, was once a twelve-year-old girl, and Lackey’s books once occupied a beloved position on my bookshelf.

Some of them still do. When I packed up to move to California, one of the things I did was go through our bookcases, pulling and re-reading out the things that were there because I’d loved them when I was in junior high. The idea was to say farewell, to squeeze out those last, precious drops of nostalgia and then free up shelf space for books that are, well, better. In a few cases, though, the nostalgia was still going strong — and those books, I kept.

Understand, it’s not that they’re good. It’s that they’re crack, and furthermore crack which, for whatever reason, still has the power to affect me. Yes, Vanyel is Emo McAngstyPants, and THAT’S WHY I LOVE HIM. The fact that Dirk and Talia and Kris refuse to have the one simple conversation that could end all their suffering is not a FLAW, it’s WHY I SHOWED UP FOR THE BOOK. Drizzt Do’Urden could give Vanyel a run for his money on the emo front, with bonus chunks of unadulterated inner monologue OF WOE (plus awesome fight scenes!). David Eddings may be writing the same series over and over again, but in the Belgariad/Malloreon instance it’s a series that features smartass characters being smartasses to one another and I could watch that ALL DAY, YO. And Robert Jordan . . . well, I dumped his books because they take up too much damn room, but I’m making up for it in other ways.

And you know, there’s something wonderful about seeing people admit their love for crack, whether it’s stuff they adored in childhood or just picked up recently. So have at it in the comments: what do you love, not despite its ridiculousness, but because of it?

This is officially a SHAME-FREE ZONE; no need to preface your comments with “These books are so bad, but –” That part goes without saying. Just tell us what books you adore, against all reason. Unleash the power of your caps-lock key because lowercase letters AREN’T ENOUGH TO CONTAIN YOUR LOVE. Admit your addiction to emo soulbonded sparklepony hurt/comfort Mary Sue wish-fulfillment CRACK.

You know you want to.

Tube Map of Science

Okay, this is just about the perfect thing for me to come across on the launch day for A Star Shall Fall.

Courtesy of Jay Lake, it’s a history of science rendered in the form of a map like the London Underground: the colored lines represent different branches of science, scientists are stops along the lines, certain scientists are “transfer points” between multiple fields, there’s even zones to divide the history by century. It’s a wonderfully creative way to represent the idea; heck, now I want to see bus transfers or equivalent added on, to show where a given person was particularly influenced by someone else. You could probably make a number of tweaks to the thing, but the concept as a whole is just awesome.

Sing it with me!

Happy Bookday to me, Happy Bookday to me . . . .

Actually, Happy Bookday to all of you, if the release of A Star Shall Fall was something you were looking forward to. As of today, it ought to be on the shelves of discerning bookstores everywhere (in the U.S. and Canada, anyway).

Now seems a dandy time to link once more to my essay on the merits of buying a book from a bookstore, rather than from an online seller. If you have a choice of which way to go, choose the physical store; it will help keep me in business as a writer, just a bit more than an online sale would. (E-books are a whole different game, of course.)

Or, if you’d like to try and get a signed copy direct from me instead, you have two ways to do it (both of ’em with fairly good odds). First, you can participate in the discussion threads on the community: the fifth and final thread is up today, asking about the city of London, and previous threads are here, here, here, and here. I didn’t realize there would be a fifth question today, so I’m extending the deadline on this giveaway a little bit, to the end of the day on Friday; any comment left on one of those threads before then will make you eligible to win a copy of the book.

Second, you can read “And Blow Them at the Moon” (an Onyx Court short story over at Beneath Ceaseless Skies) and join in the discussion for that in their forums. For this giveaway, you have until the next issue goes live at the end of Wednesday next week.

If you’re looking for other goodies, like my London photos or the soundtrack for the novel, all of that is on my site.

Aaaaand I think that’s it, at least for now. If anybody needs me, I’ll be here in the corner, alternately bouncing and chewing my fingernails off . . . .

I’m perfectly capable of speaking for myself.

Kate Elliott on authorial intent.

Word.

I’m smart enough not to respond publicly to reviews, of course; that pretty much never ends well. But if you want to know which ones get up my nose the worst, it’s the ones that make unfounded declarations about what was in my head while writing. If you read a particular thing out of the story, fine — far be it from me to say ur doin it wrong. But please don’t claim you know why I did things that way.

Mind you, the line between the two isn’t entirely clear. Sometimes — as Kate’s contrasting examples show — a lot of it comes down to phrasing; if you say “it seems the author felt X,” that creates a different impression than “the author felt X.” This is one case where I think it’s a good idea to use qualifiers for your assertions, even though in other circumstances it’s better to just say things directly. And, of course, if you’ve been reading my blog or an interview with me or whatever, anything I say there is fair game for use later; your review can say “because Marie Brennan is concerned with not taking events out of the hands of the real, historical people who were involved, she does Z” — though even there, it would be better to say you presume there’s a causal relationship, because when you get down to it I may have forgotten my own agenda and done Z simply because it looked nifty, or the rest of my plot required it.

Talk all you like about the product. What you say may sound very odd to me; I may blink in surprise at the cool thing I apparently did without noticing, or wonder exactly what novel you read, but in the end “the book” is the product of a chemical reaction between the words on the page and the contents of the reader’s head, and I only control one half of the ingredients. The contents of my own head, on the other hand, do not belong to the reader, and so I would prefer that reviewers phrase any speculation as speculation. Don’t be the guy who went around telling people what Ursula LeGuin “intended” with the Earthsea books. Don’t presume to speak for the author. If I’m going to bite my tongue and not tell you how to read my work, don’t tell me how I wrote it.

last chance to bid

I’ll be at a wedding tomorrow, so this is your final heads-up (from me, anyway) that the auctions end tomorrow. Lots of great stuff on offer over there, and a chance to win your own bit of Onyx Court secret history in the name of flood relief. Go forth and do good!

there’s always one more thing to fix

It didn’t even occur to me that part of the American-ness of the copyediting for the Onyx Court books was the order of dates: August 26, when the British would be more likely to order it as 26 August.

But somebody pointed that out over on the BCS forums, so we’ve gone in and changed the ordering on the dates for “And Blow Them at the Moon.” My apologies for the error; we went with British spellings (everywhere we could spot them, anyway), but didn’t think to change the date formatting.

everything but the kitchen sink

For a while now, I’ve been thinking of this novel as the most Tim Powers-ish of the Onyx Court series, where Tim Powers-ness is defined as ramming a bunch of unrelated things together until a plot falls out. So far, some of the unrelated things chucked into here include the Underground, spiritualism, photography, Irish nationalist terrorism, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, the West Ham disappearances, and Bazalgette’s sewers, and now my plot has decided it needs absinthe to function right.

At least for this one bit.

But it’s special absinthe, don’t you know. Because I can’t let the name “the green fairy” pass by untouched, or let or the not-as-hallucinogenic-as-advertised nature of absinthe get in the way of the effect I need. So the French fae have their own version. Are you surprised?

It’s ‘splody time . . . .

<bounce> I’ve been looking forward to this.

“And Blow Them at the Moon” has gone live at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. This is an Onyx Court story (though not the one I sold yesterday), and I am very pleased with how it’s turned out. It also constitutes the last pre-publication goodie for A Star Shall Fall, which comes out (eek) next Tuesday; Magrat, the main character from this story, will be showing up in the novel, too.

And, because chances to win a signed copy of the book are just FALLING OUT OF THE TREES, YO, the editor at BCS has conspired with me to give one away over there: all you have to do is leave a comment on the story thread in their forums. (You’ll need to be a registered forum user, so we can contact the winner.) That runs two weeks, i.e. until the next issue goes live. Together with Laura Anne Gilman’s virtual birthday party and the Onyx Court discussion threads on the Sirens community, you have three, count ’em three chances to get your hands on a copy. And don’t forget, there’s the secret history charity auction, going until Saturday! Bidding stands at twenty dollars, and every bit of it goes to help flood relief efforts in Pakistan.

(I promise actual content will return to this LJ pretty soon. But I’ve got a friend’s wedding this weekend, and the book release next week, so at the moment spare time to write interesting posts is in short supply. If you want reading material from me, have a story.)

Norilana signal boost

You may not know who Norilana Books or Vera Nazarian are, but you’ve heard of some of what they do, because they’re the lovely people who put out the Clockwork Phoenix anthologies.

It’s their fourth anniversary of being in business, and I cannot encourage you enough to go buy something from their site. The CP books particularly, because Mike Allen’s done a fabulous job with them — and I don’t just say that because he’s bought three stories from me — but they’re also the ones who have taken over the venerable Sword and Sorceress series, and I’ve been meaning to pick up Lace and Blade for a while (in fact, I’m doing that now). In short, they have a lot of very nifty books, and Norilana is a great small press. Help them celebrate their fourth anniversary, and check out what they do.

the Onyx Court news keeps rolling in

If you’ve looked at the Onyx Court charity auction, you’ve seen my note about how I may end up writing a short story from the historical prompt the winner chooses. That was, in fact, the outcome of the original auction, for the Haitian earthquake relief; in writing a summary for the winner, I thought of a way to frame it as a short story. So I wrote it, and I sent it out, and now Beneath Ceaseless Skies has bought it! The story is “Two Pretenders,” and I count it as Onyx Court continuity, though it’s a bit different in period and tone from the rest of the series. The winner got to read it a while ago, long before the rest of you, so if you want a backstage pass like that (and the pleasure of knowing you were a part of the process), head over there and put your bid in.

Along with that, the last round of book discussion is up over on , asking about urban fantasy in a historical context. Previous questions about mortal and faerie love, pov and non-linear time, and the interrelationship of the Onyx Hall with London are still open.

And y’know, yesterday I got this big honkin’ box of author copies of A Star Shall Fall, which need to go to good homes. So I’m thinking I might select a random commenter from the discussion posts to receive a copy. Add your two cents’ worth on one of those four posts (or more, if you feel so inspired), and you might be the lucky winner!

Nifty!

My author copy of the German omnibus edition of Doppelgänger and Hexenkrieger just showed up. It’s hardcover, and has new cover art and everything! Verra shiny, sez I.

another question for the dog people

I know there are a lot of factors that will influence the answer to this question — dog breed, environmental conditions, etc — but as a generalized thing, how long after a trail is laid down can a dog follow it by scent?