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10 days, and helping Pakistan

Ten days until A Star Shall Fall hits shelves. The last pre-publication goodie will come in a few days, but I have something else for you: another Onyx Court secret history auction. The community is raising funds for relief after the flooding over there, so I’m offering “authorial fanfic” of the Onyx Court series; you pick the historical person or event, and I tell you what the faeries had to do with it.

(Confidential to CEPetit: if you want an actual story about that thing you mentioned over e-mail, now’s the time. <g>)

The auction runs until next Saturday. Unlike previous comms, the offers and bids are entirely conducted as comments to a single post, so I’m currently on page 12; follow the link above to find my offer.

If it goes for the “Buy It Now” price, I may follow up with a second offer. We’ll have to see.

Holy Boggan Deathmatch, Batman!

Spent most of this evening working on a sekrit costume project.

In all those hours, there was only one outbreak of profanity.

Dude, this never. happens. Normally I’m swearing before the first hour is up. But I was probably a good four hours in before I busted out the four-letter words, and it only lasted a few seconds, and the thing is almost done, and it looks awful perty, and if the one thing I’m really worried about doesn’t happen then this will have been the most successful Boggan Deathmatch ever. (Not that any of its predecessors constitute a terribly high bar to clear.)

Many thanks to khet_tcheba, my guide and partner in crime, without whom this would not have gone nearly so well.

(And no, you don’t get to find out what the sekrit project is. Not yet, anyway. I promise there will be pictures after it’s been put to its intended use.)

Return of the Littlest White Belt

Started kobudo today, which means I’m a white belt again. We began with sai (class always begins with sai, I think), and I went off to the side with a brown-belt senpai to learn the basics; then a little while later, the sensei had everybody switch to bo — except me. Which was fine: I said, and I meant it, that I was perfectly happy to spend the entire class in the corner practicing yoko-buri, the basic flip-out-flip-back move. I have to get that down before I can do anything else competently, including the other sai basics, so I might as well get started.

In fact, I have a virtuous plan in my head where I do ten yoko-buri at each level (gedan/low, chuudan/middle, and joudan/high) every day for the next week or so. We’ll see if it happens, but it would mean vastly better progress if it did.

Feels like a good start so far, though it was a little depressing to have another sensei tell me I’ll probably be catching my sai on my sleeves until I’m a blue belt or so. Overcoming that error faster is high on my list of goals, I think. 🙂

The Littlest Green-and-White Belt Gives the Gimpy Feet the Finger

Despite the broken toe, I went to my belt test on Friday. Yeah, possibly that wasn’t the best idea, but I’m annoyed enough by the time I missed due to the ankle surgery; the thought of waiting until September to test because of my stupid pinky toe was just not acceptable. (Not to mention that missing class Monday and Wednesday to let the bone start healing produced a noticable downswing in my mood; I’m book-stressed right now, and need my exercise to counter.)

I was particularly eager for this test because moving to the lowest degree of green belt (green with a white stripe) means I get to start kobudo, which is weapons training. Sai and bo mostly — the little hand-held tridents and the staff — though sometimes they break out the tonfa or the nunchaku. My only weapons experience is with Western rapier-and-dagger fencing, so I’m very keen to see how other things work. Plus it means I’ll be getting more like four hours of exercise each week, rather than two, and that is not a bad thing. In fact, if I can manage to have a pair of functioning feet for any real length of time, I’m hoping to go back to the SCA fencing practice on Sundays, too.

So I’m being careful, but I’m back in class. I’ll try to keep my weight off the outside of my foot until it’s been at least three weeks, and definitely keep the toe buddy-taped that long or longer; then we’ll see how it’s doing. Fortunately, in the immediate future I’m likely to have several new kata to practice (karate and kobudo both), so my attention’s going to be more on learning the sequences than refining my footwork. But any way you slice it, I’m not going to let a bone that tiny prevent me from getting my exercise. I am tired of this gimpy-feet business, yo.

more review bouncy

Marissa Lingen on A Star Shall Fall.

I’ve already admitted to her in private, and don’t mind repeating here, how relieved her review made me. Why? Because she’s a scientist, and I’ve been biting my fingernails over how the way I handle science in this book will be received. I’ve got at least two major factors complicating it, one being that I’m actively trying to grapple with the issue of how magic and science interrelate (or don’t), and the other being that I’m doing it in the context of eighteenth-century science, which is fascinatingly wacky all on its own. And right now I’m trying to deal with the nineteenth-century ramifications of the ideas I set up in Star, which means it’s a relief to know it’s worked for at least one reader of that sort.

I knew I was setting myself up for this challenge. Back when I decided Midnight Never Come would be the first in a series, and that the books would take place in different centuries, I knew I had a chance to do something you don’t often see in faerie fiction: not to show fae as totally stuck in the past, nor as completely modernized, but going through the process of change. Science & technology is a big part of that, though not the only one, so I knew I’d have to deal with these questions, and that it wouldn’t be easy . . . just as Ashes taught me why you don’t see more English Civil War-era fiction out there (because it’s bloody COMPLICATED, is why), I know why more authors don’t try to mash these ideas together.

On the other hand, if I succeed, I’ll have done something that hasn’t been done in a thousand other novels. And that’s worth a few headaches, I suppose.

thoughts on Inception

Saw it a second time tonight (with my brother and sister-in-law, who hadn’t been yet), and have a much clearer sense of the film this time around. Most of the things that were bugging me as inconsistencies turn out not to be; I just hadn’t caught the explanations that cleared them up. (Things like the distinction between the dreamer and the subject of the process — I had assumed they were the same person.)

(Which isn’t a spoiler, if you just flinched, thinking I’d given something away. I’m talking mechanics there, not plot.)

Definitely spoilery thoughts below the fold.

Do not pass unless you’ve seen the film!

Sirens schedule

There is now a proper schedule for Sirens, with times and rooms and everything; look at the bottom of that page for details.

Fortunately, the setup of the schedule — which has blocks for panel etc. programming that are separate from the blocks for other kinds of stuff — means my GoH obligations won’t cause me to miss anything I wanted to do. But sadly, the workshop I volunteered to run is directly opposite a panel about YA that I really wanted to go to. Woe is me!

Oh well; I’ll just have to corner the panelists at other times during the weekend.

Launch party drink contest ends on Sunday. Get your recipes in while the getting is good!

Never underestimate the importance of body language.

Last night I was watching Brick while ironing my gi (fabulous movie, btw; noir set in a high school, and it works), and thinking about how Joseph Gordon-Levitt is one of those actors I don’t often see, but generally enjoy when I do. Then I thought about N.K. Jemisin’s guest post on Whatever about Inception, and a comment in the thread there about JGL, and I realized what it is that gets me about his performances:

He understands how to use body language.

Most guys look good in three-piece suits, but as Arthur in Inception, he doesn’t just wear the suit, he wears the posture that makes the suit look good. In Brick, when he’s been beaten up something like four or five times in as many days and is coughing his lungs out, there’s a shot of his feet stumbling down to the path that will lead him to a very dangerous confrontation — and then he stops, and his feet settle, and then he walks off as if nothing’s wrong. (Gamer-brain says, “that’s what spending a point of willpower looks like.”) He doesn’t just act with his face and his voice; it goes through every part of his body, so that the telling details might be in his hands or his shoulders or something else you maybe don’t even notice, not consciously, not unless you’re looking for it.

I’ve realized this is a common theme among actors I like, the ones where hearing they’re in a movie will instantly get me more interested. Johnny Depp does it, and brilliantly. Cate Blanchett does it, though at the moment she’s about the only actress I can think of who does. (I blame the industry, not the actresses; they don’t often get as wide a range of roles to play.) Paul Bettany does it, and he was the one who made me realize body language was a key point for me, after noticing the subtle physical cues he works into his performance. When Vin Diesel remembers to do it, he can hold the entire screen by presence alone; one of the most bad-ass shots in all of Pitch Black is him simply standing up.

And when people forget to do it, that failure can undermine an entire performance. (Now I’ve got kitsunealyc in my head, ranting about Gwyneth Paltrow’s terrible posture in Emma, that made all her dresses look like sacks.)

This drives me a little crazy because of course I want to make use of this idea in fiction, and I can’t — not exactly. The kinds of physical quirks I’m thinking of work best when they’re done subtly, in the background; in prose, though, I have to describe whatever I want you to see, and that automatically draws your attention to it. Especially because getting the nuance of a gesture or twitch might require an entire sentence of description, when the act itself takes half a second. You have to approach it differently: well, duh, it’s a different medium. I think the equivalent in prose is finding that precisely-calibrated angle from which to describe something, that will carry a whole weight of implied meaning without taking up a lot of space. Dunnett does this brilliantly (as she does so many things), particularly with Lymond’s hands; she’ll say something about his face being caged behind his fingers or whatever and somehow her descriptor manages to make me see everything else surrounding it: posture, white knuckles, the whole ensemble of body language, from that one perfect detail. It won’t always work, because one reader’s metaphoric connections aren’t the same as the next, but it’s the only way I can really see to accomplish what I want.

So, I just have to become as awesome as Dorothy Dunnett. <g>

I’d love other examples of this, either in the form of authors who really pull off physical nuance on the page, or actors/actresses who make good use of it in performance. Do you find it as effective as I do, or are your particular buttons of a different sort?

on a calmer note

Dear Book,

Don’t think you’re safe just because I’m not using the angry kitten icon anymore. That’s Hel up there, and she will cut you.

But we may — may — have resolved the problem. By dint of doing . . . not a lot, actually. Going back to a plan that fell by the wayside, and trying to find some way to insert more downtime at a particular point. Easy enough on Eliza’s side; I just have to find some justification for why Dead Rick’s plot can skip over a month or so. If I can do that, everything else is fine; I don’t have to redate two-thirds of the book or work around historical events or anything of the sort. Just a bit of downtime, and I’m set.

So long as I can find a way to do that. Don’t ask me how; that’s a problem I’ll tackle tomorrow.

You’re still in the doghouse, though. I knew you were going to be the biggest bastard of the series — and that’s saying something, after the difficulties I had writing Ashes and Star — but you’ve been outdoing yourself, really. Any time you want to start being cooperative, feel free.

Slightly less inclined to light you on fire, but still thinking about it,
Your Writer

Not *again*.

Dear Book:

I hate you.

No, really. We’ve gotten to that stage of the writing, the stage where I really just want to light you on fire. It happens almost every book (except for the rare ones that just sail straight out of my head — of which you are SO not one), but this time, I really, really mean it. Why? Because I just figured out that I could solve about 90% of my pacing problems . . . by moving your start date back three months.

This falls into the category of “annoying change” rather than “major seismic upheaval,” since most of what I have to do is change the dates on scenes. But that’s about 100K worth of scenes I have to re-date

FUCK I just realized that doesn’t work.

Because there’s a scene that has to happen on a specific date, and that specific date is before what I thought would be the new start date. But there are other events that have to happen on other specific dates, and SON OF A BITCH I HATE YOU.

<beats head into desk>

Never again, people. Never again. I am so very done with this historical fiction thing, where I can’t just decide when stuff happens because history says otherwise. I’ve been doing this for four books, and I will never subject myself to it again*.

I’m sure I’ll find a way through this. But it is going to cost a lot of pain and suffering along the way. (It already has.) And right now, I kinda want to light the book on fire.

No love at all,
Your Writer.

*Of course I’m lying. It’s like childbirth. In a few years, when I’ve forgotten the pain, I’ll probably decide this is a good idea again. But right now, I mean it.

August 11th is Crankypants Day

Continuing the theme from last night, I am having an extremely crankypants day. The cloudy weather isn’t helping; this is the kind of day where I could really use to go sit in warmth and sunshine, and there is neither to be had.

Halp?

Please to be posting good news, or funny anecdotes, or pictures of adorable kittens. I could use it today.

more excerpt, more discussion, more everything!

Twenty days and counting; the last piece of the excerpt has gone up. (Beginning is here.)

Over on the LJ, the discussion of Midnight and Ashes continues with a new question, regarding time and point of view in the novels. The first question, about the connection between the mortal and faerie worlds, is still open; you don’t need to be a con attendee or even an LJ user to jump in.

And speaking of things you don’t have to be a con attendee to do, there are four days left to submit a recipe for the drink contest. There’s been some by e-mail already, and I’m looking forward to trying these things out!

>_

Some nights are simply a bust.

Wrote a few hundred words. Got the sense they were probably the wrong few hundred words. Stopped. Pondered skipping to next scene. Remembered that next scene isn’t the scene we thought was next, because another scene has to happen first. Tried to figure out how to stage that one. Failed. Attempted to step back and regroup. Brain refused. Contemplated doing more reading for the book instead of writing. Brain refused that, too.

Not yet tired enough for sleep. Not sure what to do.

Today’s been one of those days. But it ain’t over until I get sleepy, so I have to find something the petulant three-year-old now ruling my grey matter is interested in doing until that happens.

I doubt it will be anything productive. Because this just isn’t a productive night.

revisiting high school chemistry class

My brain is tired, yo.

I just spent a chunk of time taking notes on a bunch of different early photographic techniques: daguerreotypes, calotypes, tintypes, ambrotypes, the wet-plate colliodion process, the dry-plate gelatin emulsion, albument prints, etc. My notes are a festival of chemical terms I haven’t used since high school: silver nitrate, potassium bromide, pyrogallic acid. And I’m not yet done; now that I have all this stuff noted down, I need to figure out just how I’m going to use it in the context of the story.

What I wonder — and what my sources don’t tell me — is the extent to which the proliferation of substances and techniques was guided by an understanding of the chemistry behind them, and to what extent it was simple trial and error. I wonder what happens if I add honey into the collodion to slow its drying? What if I add beer instead? The book I’m reading points out that these things are hygroscopic, but it doesn’t say whether that was a known characteristic at the time. I think it must have been, but maybe not; guncotton (a key element of collodion) was invented when a guy used his apron to mop up nitric acid, and then his apron exploded. (Not while he was wearing it, fortunately.) Knowledge of chemistry advanced remarkably between A Star Shall Fall and this book, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t still discovering things through sheer dumb chance.

(Skills I have acquired in the writing of this series: it occurred to me I could look up “hygroscopic” in the OED to get a sense of the term’s development. It doesn’t seem to have been used in quite that manner until 1875, a good decade after the experimentation with honey et. So while the quality itself may have been recognized, it wasn’t something they were talking about in those terms — not yet.)

It’s phenomenal, though, watching the speed with which technology developed. Not quite as fast as (say) digital photography has developed today, but still pretty amazing, given the tools they had to work with. And the results are amazing, too; there aren’t a lot of photographs I can use in researching the book — what I really want are London street scenes, and those are vastly outnumbered by a) portraits and b) cartes-de-visite of random foreign landmarks — but dude. There are photographs of my period. It’s the clearest sign I have of how this book stands on the threshold of the modern age.