Sign up for my newsletter to receive news and updates!

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Too little, too late

I’ve been watching a little of the ITV Agatha Christie’s Marple series, and enjoying Geraldine McEwan as Miss Marple quite a lot — she does a lovely job contrasting her mild manner and soft voice with her sharp awareness of murder and what drives people to it. But I’m burning out very rapidly, and not for any reasons to do with the show itself. Instead it’s a matter of genre — and my fundamental problem with murder mysteries.

They are, a priori, about a bad thing having already happened. The best the protagonists can do is to try and deliver justice after the fact.

In a few cases they may forestall a subsequent murder, e.g. in the case of a serial killer going after their next victim. But in many cases shows try to raise the stakes by whacking a second person along the way, so now the detective or cop or whoever is playing cleanup to two horrible crimes. Sometimes more.

I’ve been re-watching Veronica Mars with my husband (who’s never seen most of it before), and while the metaplot of season one is indeed about a murder, the individual episode mysteries are about other crimes. Somebody has been conned out of their money, or a car’s been stolen, or a father has gone missing. I think that’s a large part of why I’m able to take the show in larger doses than I can take murder mysteries these days. In those plots, it’s possible to make people whole — to not just get justice, but to undo or at least significantly mitigate the harm.

These days, I think I need that. I mean, it’s not to say that non-mystery novels don’t frequently involve bad things happening that can’t be put right; obviously they do. But it feels different to me when the entire raison d’etre of the series is to have people die, again and again, with the heroes only taking action after that’s happened.

That mode wears on me after a while, even when counterbalanced by a charming old lady. Which is why I think I’ll be turning to something else soon, no matter how adorable Geraldine McEwan is as Miss Marple.

New Worlds: Germs and Bad Air

This didn’t go up on Friday, but better late than never: medical month continues in the New Worlds Patreon with germs and bad air! Competing theories for what causes disease, which overlapped just often enough to obscure the fact that one of them was wrong. Comment over there!

The RAICES fundraiser returns/continues

UPDATE: I just received copies of the UK trade paperback of Turning Darkness Into Light. I’m offering five of those for $25 each — higher than the usual trade paperback price, but it’s a month before the book’s release, and I figure this is good incentive for people to donate.

Last year I ran a fundraiser for the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services in Texas. Since then, things have only gotten worse, with the United States government operating concentration camps to imprison immigrants.

The fundraiser technically never ended, because it’s always a good time to donate to RAICES. But after a year, it has naturally slipped off people’s radars, so I’m officially renewing it. The plan is the same as before: I’m “selling” books, i.e. you donate the money to RAICES and get books in return.

It goes like this:

1) Peruse the book list below and find one or more books you want.

2) Contact me to verify those books are still available (I’ll update the list, but stock sometimes changes quickly).

3) Once I’ve confirmed, donate to RAICES and send me a copy of the receipt (with your personal information blacked out).

4) I mail you books, signed and personalized if you wish.

I’m willing to ship internationally, but because of the cost involved there, I’ll ask you to PayPal me money to cover shipping expenses. (I’ll cover shipping with in the U.S. myself.)

I’ll note that at this stage my stock is very skewed toward the end of the Memoirs of Lady Trent, and toward foreign-language editions. Sadly I haven’t sold any of my novels to a Spanish-language publisher, but if you have any interest in practicing your German, Romanian, Polish, or Russian, I think any and all embracing of foreign languages is an appropriate response to this kind of xenophobia and bigotry.

Current total (including 2018): $1005

As of it tailing off last year, the fundraiser had netted $790 for RAICES. I’d love to see that clear a round $1000 if possible — can you help us get there?

Doppelganger in a Humble Bundle!

I’m delighted to announce that the two Doppelganger novels, Warrior and Witch, are in a Humble Bundle curated by my agency!

The usual Humble Bundle setup applies: the amount you pay unlocks more books as you go along, until for $15 you get 26 books. It’s an incredible deal, and you’ll get a sampling of a great set of authors, including Aliette de Bodard, Tanya Huff, Simon Green, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Charlaine Harris, Jack Campbell, and more. The bundle is available for two weeks (i.e. ending July 31st), but there’s no reason to wait — get ’em now!

New Worlds: Disease

My lovely Topic Backers for the New Worlds Patreon have selected “medicine” as this month’s theme — which was supposed to begin with a different essay, only halfway through writing it I realized that a) it needed to be two essays and b) I had also started in the wrong place. So we begin with disease itself, and the mind-boggling extent of its effect on our history and our world. Comment over there!

Moderation in all things

The more time passes, the less patience I have with the notion that “a real writer writes every day.”

Try subbing in some other words there and see how that sentence sounds. “A real teacher teaches every day.” “A real programmer programs every day.” “A real surgeon performs surgery every day.” These are all patently absurd. The teacher, the programmer, and the surgeon are all better at their jobs for not going to work every day. For taking some days off.

I wonder if what’s going on here is a weird collision between the romanticization of ~art~ and the #@$*%! “Protestant work ethic.” On the one hand you have this sense that writing, or any art, is a ~calling~. And if it doesn’t call to you every day, why, then, you’re not a real writer, are you? On the other hand you’ve got Max Weber frowning over your shoulder and questioning whether what you’re doing is Real Work — so you have to silence him by keeping your nose to the grindstone every day, without respite, because otherwise clearly you’re just a good-for-nothing layabout.

(I’d like to pause and appreciate the value of the tilde for indicating a kind of vaporous awe around a word. Italics just don’t convey the same effect, and neither do quotation marks.)

Writing is Real Work. It may be fun work (a thought that would probably horrify the Calvinists Weber had in mind), but it requires effort, concentration, hours of your life. Some days it’s easier than others. But it’s also weird work, in that sometimes the most vitally useful thing you can do is go for a walk or wash some dishes, because while you’re not looking, your brain sneaks off and figures stuff out. When people ask me how many hours I work each day or week, my response is to give them a baffled shrug, because there aren’t clean boundaries around it; I’m definitely working while I’m drafting a story or answering emails or going over page proofs, but I also may be working while I’m vacuuming the rug or brushing my teeth or reading a book. Which means that days in which I’m not at the keyboard may still in some fashion be work days — but thinking of them that way is pernicious. If an idea comes to me, awesome, but in the meanwhile I’m going to have a life.

Because contrary to what corporate America wants us all to believe, we can have lives outside our jobs, and we should. We will not just be better employees for the time off; we’ll be better people, too. And that’s just as true of writers as it is of anybody else.

Substitute for fennel bulb?

I’ve been given a nice-sounding recipe for pork tenderloin braised in white wine and elderflower liqueur with thyme, red onion, and fennel bulb. But I’m not a huge fan of that last item — what would the chefs among you recommend as a replacement? With or without altering other ingredients (e.g. a different herb, if something else would harmonize better).

Note that due to allergies and/or dislikes, mushrooms and squash are both out.

Three Things meme

There’s been a meme going around where people give you three random things to talk about. Mine, from Larry Hammer, are:

1) Feathers

The “swan” thing goes back a long way, and stems from the fact that people who know German but not Swiss German often think my legal last name has something to do with swans. Possibly that’s why the family coat of arms has swans on it? Anyway, I didn’t want my website to be mariebrennan.com because at the time I expected to go into academia, studying science fiction and fantasy, and I wanted a site that could serve for both purposes. (In fact, the first incarnation of it had two distinct halves, one for each part of my work.) My thoughts drifted to swans, and then the phrase “Swan Tower” popped into my head, and it sounded good.

As for swans themselves, I like how they’re beautiful and elegant and can break your leg with their wings. I played a swan pooka several times in a Changeling game, but she was more the dream of a swan than the physical reality of one; if I were doing it now, I might try to stat her in a way that reflects the dichotomy.

Also, my husband is allergic to feathers.

2) Polyhedra

Thanks to RPGs, I interact with a much wider range of these than most people do. šŸ˜› d4s are caltrops (don’t drop them on the floor); d6s are kind of boring; d8s rarely seem to get used; d10s are fun to arrange in different patterns while I’m listening to someone else’s scene; d20s really like to roll off whatever surface I’m using, so when I’m playing Pathfinder I roll in a shallow dish instead of on a book or table. Alas for the poor d12, used even less often than d8s; a friend of mine once swore they were going to design an RPG that used nothing but d12s. We also own some weird things, like d2s from the PolyHero Dice Kickstarter campaigns, or a single giant d30.

I find it fascinating that there are d20-shaped artifacts from (I think) ancient Rome, that we’re not sure what they were used for.

3) Angst

I try to avoid this? On the whole I tend to be fairly level-headed, so while I can get stressed or depressed about things, there have only been a few times in my life that I’d characterize as angsty — and adolescence mostly wasn’t one of them, for which I’m eternally grateful.

Having said that, I often go on kicks of listening to thoroughly angsty music, and can have a lot of fun with this in stories, whether I’m reading them, writing them, or playing them in an RPG. Twisting the knife is fun . . . as long as it’s in a fictional person’s flesh.

If anybody wants to give me three more, I can do more of these posts — though depending on how many I get, no guarantees that I’ll make it through them all.

What a difference technology makes

I’ve spent the last two days holed up in our den, which the lowest part of our split-level house and rather cavelike — therefore the coolest room we’ve got. Our thermostat caps out at 84 degrees Fahrenheit, so I can’t say for sure what temperature it’s been in our dining room, but whatever the answer is, the top floor — which holds both my office and the bedroom — was hotter. Much hotter.

I grew up in Dallas. Highs in the high 90s were a totally normal feature of my childhood summers. But that was a place where nearly everybody has air conditioning. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area? Not so much. And living in a house without A/C means that when our temperatures spike, the experience is very, very different.

The extent of that difference got hammered home to me yesterday, when I’d been at the (air-conditioned) chiropractor’s office. When I walked outside in the late afternoon, it felt . . . not nice, exactly. But familiar. And pleasant enough. Yes, it was very warm, but my subconscious said “that’s okay.” Which was very different from how I’d felt leaving my house an hour and a half earlier; then I was going from a sweltering indoors to a sweltering outdoors, barely any contrast at all, and vastly more unpleasant. I know I’ve lost soem of my heat tolerance (I used to do marching band in Texas, navy blue wool uniform and all), but a lot of it is also just the artificial environment. Give me A/C, and I still don’t mind the heat all that much. Without it, though . . .

Let’s just say I’ve learned a lot about low-tech measures against the heat, from keeping blinds closed that we normally open for light (and angling them upwards to reduce the amount of direct sunlight that enters the room), to occupying myself with books instead of heat-emitting laptops, to the dance of opening windows and turning on fans once the temperature outside drops below the temperature inside.

NEW WORLDS, YEAR TWO is now in print!

If you like having your writing references in hard copy and not just pixels, you may be glad to know that you can now buy the print edition of New Worlds, Year Two! And now is a great time to become a patron of the series — I’ll soon be sending out the next poll for what topics I should address, and of course all patrons get weekly photos. It’s patron support that is keeping New Worlds strong, and I thank all of them for it!

Lessons in people pictures

Over Memorial Day weekend I was hired to do candid and portrait photography at a three-day LARP (one my husband plays in, which I’ve played in before, but not regularly).

This was . . . an adventure.

See, my usual attitude toward people photography is “I will wait here with my camera poised until you get out of the frame.” My tastes, as you can probably tell, lean firmly toward architecture, objects, and landscapes. Sometimes I can’t avoid having people in the picture, and every so often they add a great deal to the image — the dude in the punt in Cambridge (though I wish the two up on the wall weren’t there), or the guy walking in front of the church in Basel — but people are rarely if ever the reason I’m taking the picture.

(more…)

L5R novella!

I have been sitting on this news for A YEAR AND A HALF.

Not too long after relaunching the game Legend of the Five Rings (and its associated story), Fantasy Flight Games announced that they would be doing a line of related novellas, one per clan. Since most of the stories I’ve been writing for them have been about the Dragon Clan, I leapt on that immediately, with a pitch for a story about a character I helped develop for the story in the first place.

cover art for THE ETERNAL KNOT

The monks of the Togashi Order are known for their wisdom, their strength, their mystery, and the superhuman powers they gain from their unique tattoos. For Togashi Kazue, completing her training is only the beginningā€”discovering the true power of her enigmatic tattoo may be the true test.

Accompanied by the experienced monk Togashi Mitsu, Kazue embarks on a journey to learn the power of the newly acquired knot design on her forehead. When Kazue discovers the danger her tattoo poses to others, she contemplates the unthinkable. But she soon learns that attempting to deny her destiny is the truly dangerous path.

For those of you not familiar with L5R, The Eternal Knot is a reasonable entry point: it doesn’t require you to know anything about the setting or the ongoing story. It does very clearly take place in a world that’s much larger and more complex than this particular narrative needs, and there are some threads left dangling at the end in a way that is obviously bait for future fiction, but the story it tells is self-contained. So if mystical tattooed monks sound like your jam, you can pre-order it here!

New Worlds Theory Post: Exposition, Pt.2

The question of how to gracefully work expository detail into a story was too large to address in a single essay, so the discussion that began in March continues today, with character, scene, and plot-level methods of integration.

If you’ve been enjoying the New Worlds Patreon, please consider becoming a patron! You’ll get weekly photos and can opt for a variety of other rewards, like ebooks, voting in the monthly topic polls, bonus behind-the-scenes content, and more. I post the essays on Book View Cafe rather than restricting them to patrons only because I like the broader range of discussion that becomes possible — which is especially key when I’m trying to give a sample of the different ways things have been done throughout history and around the world — but it’s support from my patrons that make the whole series possible. I never could have embarked on this project without that support, so I thank each and every one of them.

Spark of Life: D.B. Jackson on TIME’S DEMON

A while back, I started up a series of guest blogs called “Spark of Life,” where authors could talk about one of my favorite parts of writing: those moments you didn’t plan for, where it seems like your characters or your plot have taken on a life of their own. I got busy and fell out of arranging these posts, but I’m reviving it now — starting with a post from D.B. Jackson that resonates so hard for me. In my case it was a line earlier in the same book, rather than a previous one . . . but I seriously don’t know how I would have pulled together the final confrontation in Warrior if it weren’t for a totally unexpected line I’d written a couple of months before.

***

David says:

cover art for TIME'S DEMON by D.B. Jackson The Spark of Life moment I had with my newest book, Timeā€™s Demon, the second volume in my Islevale Cycle, actually began with a throwaway line in book one, Timeā€™s Children. The circumstances take some explaining, so please bear with me.

The Islevale novels are time travel/epic fantasy. They are set in an alternate world that is home to Walkers (my time travelers) and humans who wield several other sorts of magic. As the title of book II suggests, it is also home to various sorts of demons ā€“ Ancients, as they prefer to be called ā€“ including Tirribin, or time demons. Tirribin appear as children, though they live for centuries. They feed on the years of humans, and since they consume years as they spend them, they never age. They are predators ā€“ canny, dangerous, but also childlike in their capriciousness, their curiosity, and the fact that they can be distracted from the hunt with a riddle. Better make it a good one, though . . .

Walkers and Tirribin share an affinity for time, and so Walkers donā€™t have to fear time demons quite the way other humans do. Early in book I, when one of my heroes is still training to be a Walker, she befriends a Tirribin named DroĆ«, and mentions this to one of her instructors. The instructor warns her of the dangers, even for a Walker, of interacting with any Ancient. ā€œYou know Tirribin can be dangerous. One is said to have killed a trainee many years ago, before I came to Windhome.ā€

Thatā€™s it. That was the line. I had no particular incident in mind when I wrote it, although I believe that somewhere in the depths of my hind brain I knew that I would use the thread later.

Skip forward to my work on Timeā€™s Demon, the second book. I knew that I wanted DroĆ« to figure prominently in this novel ā€“ hence the title. I also knew that I wanted to give some vital back story on one of my other key characters: the assassin, Quinnel Orzili. Orzili is not a Walker, but rather a Spanner, someone who uses magic to travel great distances in mere moments. Spanners, like Walkers, are trained in Windhome.

The problem was, I had too many plot threads and I wasnā€™t sure how they all connected. I was still following my heroes from book I, including the young woman who receives that warning from the instructor in Windhome. I had DroĆ«ā€™s story. And I had Orziliā€™s narrative threads as well ā€“ the backstory and the ā€œpresentā€ story. All of these plot lines needed to be included in the book and I knew that for this middle volume to work, for it to feel complete and at least somewhat self-contained, all of its disparate storylines needed to cohere in some way.

As it happens, all of the Islevale books, including the third volume, Timeā€™s Assassin, which I am completing now, have defied my attempts to outline them. Iā€™m a plotter ā€“ I like to plan my narratives in advance. I always write with an outline. Or I did, until this series. Itā€™s ironic in a way: Here I am writing time travel, which is incredibly complicated on its own, in a sprawling epic fantasy with multiple plot threads and point of view characters. If ever I needed to outline any set of novels, these were the ones. And I just couldnā€™t do it. To this day, Iā€™m not sure why. Different novels demand different approaches, and these books demanded that I wing it.

So I was writing the early chapters of book II, in which I explore Orziliā€™s backstory, and DroĆ« shows up. I hadnā€™t planned to write her into this part of the series, and I still donā€™t know what made me do it, but the moment I re-introduced her to my readers, I knew: DroĆ« was, in fact, the Tirribin who killed a trainee, and that trainee was Orziliā€™s friend. The boyā€™s death at the hands of a time demon sets in motion the key events that lead to Orzili becoming an assassin. That event, first mentioned in a throwaway line in the first book of the series, becomes a key moment in my story arc ā€“ the nexus connecting my heroes in book one, my title character for book two, and the key villain for the entire series.

Plotting a novel, or a series for that matter, is an inexact undertaking. Even when we can outline, even when we think we know precisely what should happen, our characters have a way of surprising us. That is both the joy and the challenge of writing fiction. We want our characters to do and say the things that advance our narratives, but we also want them to act and sound and feel to our readers like real people. And often that means allowing them the agency to do and say things we donā€™t expect. I hadnā€™t known that DroĆ« would show up when and where she did in Timeā€™s Demon. But when she did, it breathed new life into the entire novel. It was the spark I needed to make my plot points come together.

***

From the cover copy:

Fifteen-year-old Tobias Doljan Walked back in time to prevent a war, but instead found himself trapped in an adult body, his king murdered and an infant princess to protect.

Now joined by fellow Walker and Spanner, Mara, together they much find a way to undo the timeline that orphaned the princess and destroyed their future. But arrayed against them are assassins who share their time-traveling powers, and hold dark ambitions of their own. And Droƫ, the Tirribin demon on a desperate quest for human love, also seeks Tobias for an entirely different reason.

As these disparate lives converge, driven by fate and time and forces beyond nature, Islevaleā€™s future is poised on a bladeā€™s edge.

D.B. Jackson is the pen name of fantasy author David B. Coe. He is the award-winning author of more than twenty novels and as many short stories. His newest novel, Timeā€™s Demon, is the second volume in a time travel/epic fantasy series called The Islevale Cycle. Timeā€™s Children is volume one; David is working on the third book, Timeā€™s Assassin.

As D.B. Jackson, he also writes the Thieftaker Chronicles, a historical urban fantasy set in pre-Revolutionary Boston. As David B. Coe, he is the author of the Crawford Award-winning LonTobyn Chronicle, as well as the critically acclaimed Winds of the Forelands quintet and Blood of the Southlands trilogy; the novelization of Ridley Scottā€™s movie, Robin Hood; a contemporary urban fantasy trilogy, The Case Files of Justis Fearsson; and most recently, Knightfall: The Infinite Deep, a tie-in with the History Channelā€™s Knightfall series.

David has a Ph.D. in U.S. history from Stanford University. His books have been translated into a dozen languages. He and his family live on the Cumberland Plateau. When heā€™s not writing he likes to hike, play guitar, and stalk the perfect image with his camera.

You can find him on Twitter @DBJacksonAuthor, or on Facebook as DBJacksonAuthor or david.b.coe.