Sign up for my newsletter to receive news and updates!

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

The World of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time

[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome.]

This is a companion book to the series, released after A Crown of Swords, in 1997. According to Wikipedia, it’s considered to be “broadly canonical” — which is to say that it (unlike the RPG) was developed with Jordan’s input, but that any new information it introduced was eligible to be contradicted later on. (Whether or not that happened, I don’t know; I didn’t see anything in my read-through that struck me as being off.)

Interestingly, the reason the book can exist in that nebulous middle zone of accuracy is because it’s treated like an in-world document, written by some unnamed scholar living in the time of the series. This is not done as well as it could be: the scholar is left completely undefined, in terms of who they are and why they’re writing. I know it would have introduced difficulties if they became a person in a specified position — then you’d start wondering how they got that information — but it would have added a degree of flavor that I, personally, would have enjoyed. (As it stands, about all you can conclude is that the writer isn’t Aes Sedai, because the book talks about how the Tower probably has records they don’t let outsiders see.) And it does fall down in a few places; the section on the Age of Legends discusses their achievements with terms like “molecule” and “anti-gravity” and “genetics” that are not, I think, generally known to Third Age inhabitants (nor are they presented as half-forgotten terms from the past). But overall I think the approach works fairly well.

Though in some places more than others.

things that are needed

Two for me, one for somebody else. If you have suggestions for where to find these things, please share in the comments (or e-mail me).

1) A convertible duffel/backpack. Which is to say, a bag that opens like a duffel (down its long axis, rather than on top), but whose straps are intended to be worn as a backpack. I screwed up my hip recently because my karate bag (a duffel) is kind of heavy, and it isn’t good for me to wear it across my body; I can carry it like a backpack, but the straps aren’t designed for that, so they’re less than ideal. I need a replacement.

2) Music from Avatar: The Last Airbender. The TV series, not the movie which tragically never got made. (Wouldn’t it have been awesome, if there were a movie? I’m sure it would have been awesome. What a pity it didn’t happen.) I know there was never a CD release, but I’m told they made a lot of the music available online. I’ve only been able to find it streaming, though — not anything I can download. This is probably because I am pig-ignorant as to how one searches for such things.

3) Beard cover. (This would be the one that isn’t for me.) A friend of mine needs recommendations for a suitable way to cover up beard stubble, that (I quote) “doesn’t feel like spackle.”

. . . with a motley assortment of requests like that, my comment thread is going to look rather interesting. 🙂

Book View Cafe

A few years ago, I started reading Judith Tarr’s horse-related posts at a site called Book View Cafe. I followed the blog, and noticed other interesting people were associated with it: Chaz Brenchley. Sherwood Smith. Ursula K. Le Guin.

This, I thought, looked like a good crowd of people.

Which is why I’m very pleased to announce that I am a newly-minted member of Book View Cafe. It’s more than just a blog; it’s an authors’ collective, doing ebooks and other ventures, all through shared labor. So far I’m still finding my way around, getting a feel for how they do things — getting lost in the (massive) behind-the-scenes infrastructure — and so at the moment you won’t see much from me on the public-facing side of the group. But I hope to have some very interesting things to show you all in a few months.

In the meantime, I’m very grateful to the membership, and hope I can measure up to their fine example!

a meme, because why not

Via alecaustin and mrissa:

1. Go to page 77 (or 7th) of your current ms
2. Go to line 7
3. Copy down the next 7 lines – sentences or paragraphs – and post them as they’re written. No cheating.

I chose page 7 because page 77 happened to fall on a chapter break, and didn’t have enough lines on it to suffice. Appropriately, the incident being related happened when the character was seven years old. From A Natural History of Dragons:

My curiosity soon drove me to an act which I blush to think upon today, not for the act itself (as I have done similar things many times since then, if in a more meticulous and scholarly fashion), but for the surreptitious and naive manner in which I carried it out.

In my wanderings one day, I found a dove which had fallen dead under a hedgerow. I immediately remembered what the cook had said, that all birds had wishbones. She had not named doves in her list, but doves were birds, were they not? Perhaps I might learn what they were for, as I could not learn when I watched the footman carve up a goose at the dinner table.

I took the dove’s body and hid it behind the hayrick next to the barn, then stole inside and pinched a penknife from Andrew, the brother immediately senior to me, without him knowing. Once outside again, I settled down to my study of the dove.

. . . Isabella’s sentences are on the long side. But I’d call that pretty representative of her story. (And yes, she is about to engage in amateur dissection.)

update on the New Tarot

I have to admit, it warms the cockles of my heart that in the day or so after I posted about my friend’s Kickstarter Project for the “New Tarot,” it gained something like seven hundred dollars in pledges. I have no way of knowing how much of that was due to my post, but given that it had been semi-stalled for a little while before then, I’d like to think I had something to do with the boost.

Which is why I’m bringing it up again. See, the project has not reached its funding goal. There are six days to go, and it needs a little less than two grand to cross the line. It would be sad to see the thing come so very close and then fall short, so I thought I’d post a reminder, and encourage you all to spread the word to other people who might be interested. I’d like to see this one hit its mark.

Books read, May 2012

The title of this post only barely merits the plural.

Bayou Arcana: Songs of Loss and Redemption, various authors and artists. A graphic novel, collecting stories by a slew of (male) authors and (female) artists, all centered around a Louisiana bayou, “one of the seven sacred hearts” of the world. (According to the afterword, some of the other hearts are in the Outback, the Amazon, and Tibet, and there will be volumes for them, too.) I felt a few of the stories in here were a bit too brief and/or elliptical for their punch to really hit me, and I’m kind of meh on some of the art — but then, that is frequently my feeling on graphic novels as a medium. I liked this one enough to want to read the next volume, now that the core characters have been set up, to see where they go from here.

Deeds of Men, Marie Brennan. Yeah, my own novella. A quick re-read for the purposes of refreshing my memory on a few things.

. . . and we’re done.

So where did this month go?

A lot of it went to illness. Not to delve into the gory details, but I had a minor procedure done early this month that will hopefully address a chronic issue that is possibly at the root of my sleep problems (and therefore my generalized fatigue); it is, unfortunately, the sort of procedure that makes things worse before it makes them better. If it does the latter at all. I should know one way or the other by the end of June. And then copy-edits landed on my doorstep, and there was KublaCon (at which kniedzw and I ran our LARP), and then con crud.

I started a number of books this month, some of which I abandoned, some of which I hope to finish soon. But the only ones I actually finished were a graphic novel and my own novella. Which is pretty pathetic. Next month I start seriously noveling again, and I also have Fourth Street — but as far as leisure reading is concerned, my count pretty much has nowhere to go but up.

more tarot coolness

I’ve been meaning to post this one for a while: another friend of mine is also doing a tarot-oriented Kickstarter Project, for a “sequel” of sorts to the traditional deck. I have to say, I find the approach of this one rather shiny:

The Major Arcana of the Tarot proper are often understood as the way-stations of a “Fool’s Journey” towards self-knowledge and self-mastery. The Major Arcana of the New Tarot are meant to encapsulate a second and more outward-focused leg of that journey, in which the newly enlightened Fool steps out into the world to explore and to make his dreams a reality.

I especially like the new suits and their meaning. It’s a fascinating act of symbol-creation, that really makes the ears of my inner folklorist perk up.

The project is over halfway to its goal, but still has some distance to go, with eleven days left. Head on over and take a look. As with the Urban Tarot, you can lend your visage to a card, or pick from a variety of other rewards. Help get this one over the line!

MIA, and a call for corrections

I’ve been very absent from here lately due to busy-ness and illness; KublaCon was last weekend, and kniedzw and I ran our one-shot LARP, which went very well I think, but now I have Con Crud and that isn’t much fun. Especially since I have work I need to do.

But! I am breaking radio silence to say that I’ve gotten the page proofs for the mass-market edition of A Star Shall Fall. This is my chance to correct any errors that made it through me, my editor, me again, my copy-editor, me again, my proofreader, and me yet again in the trade paperback edition — and believe me, there are some. I know of two instances of a duplicated word (“an an” in both cases), and one place where the line “Galen’s mouth gone dry” is missing the word “had,” and the arithmetic error on page 171. If you’ve spotted any others, please let me know!

Brief Hebrew question, again

I need a Hebrew word/root for “trick” or “lie.”

(Ultimate goal: to end up with some “Zedekiah”-style invented name that tells those in the know that the bearer is actually a liar.)

Two reminders

1) The first of teleidoplex‘s costume auctions are ending soon — like, in about six hours. (Others have a bit longer to run.) Take a look, bid while you can, help her go to Clarion West!

2) I’m reading at SF in SF tomorrow night, with Ysabeau Wilce and Erin Hoffman. Hope to see some of you there!

This month at SF Novelists

I missed posting last month, for which I am kicking myself. (I also missed last December. Other than those two occasions, I have posted every single month since August of 2007. Whoa.)

But I’m back this month, with a new bit of musing on “The Effect She Can Have.” Usual drill: comment there, not here, no registration required, but have patience if you’re a first-time commenter and your words get delayed in the moderation queue.

inadvertent internet bankruptcy

>_<

I just closed Firefox with the intent of rebooting it, because I’d opened some things that were making it laggy.

When I relaunched the program, it did not restore my tabs. Nor did it let me have the “Restore Previous Session” option. Nor did it list anything under “Recently Closed Tabs.”

They’re just gone.

Well, um, I guess that’s one way to clear out my browser? I’ve managed to remember some of what I had open, but not all of it — not by a long shot. Like, less than 50%. Some of the things I know I had open, I can’t recreate well enough to pull them up in an address bar. The rest, I don’t even remember what they were. Which I guess you could argue means they weren’t that important to me . . . but that isn’t actually true, since some of them were things I had open for reference purposes, and it annoys the snot out of me to have them vanish.

Grar.

Costume sale! For a good cause!

My friend teleidoplex has won herself a place in Clarion West, which is totally awesome.

But Clarion, regardless of direction, is kind of expensive — and that is not so awesome.

But! You can be awesome and help!

In addition to being a writer of much talent, teleidoplex is a veteran costumer. (In fact, she’s one of the people that infected me with the costuming bug when I started LARPing.) And she’s created an eBay store to sell off some of her hoard of outfits, wigs, shoes, and more, with proceeds going toward paying her way to Clarion. Some of the stuff is very costume-y; other stuff is perfectly legitimate street clothing. I heartily encourage you all (at least, all of you with a use for women’s clothing) to browse through it and see if there’s anything you might be interested in.

And if you don’t want stuff, but do want to help her out, there’s a donation button on her website, where you can chip in directly.

Malevolence

(The following post talks about The Avengers on its way to the actual point, but does not give spoilers.)

Interestingly, one of the moments that has stayed with me the most strongly from The Avengers is the speech Loki flings at Black Widow.

He has other Villain Speeches in the movie, of course. But this one stands out for its sheer, unbridled malevolence. He doesn’t say those things out of megalomania or fraternal resentment or any other such understandable motivation; he says them because, quite simply, he wants to hurt her.

I’ve said before that I tend to write antagonists more often than villains. That is, I write characters who think they’re doing the right (or at least the necessary) thing, who happen to be wrong about that. There are exceptions, of course; Nadrett doesn’t give a damn what’s right, only what he can get away with. But I have a harder time writing that sort of thing.

Which means — of course — that I want to study how it’s done. So this is a Recommend Stuff to Me kind of post: what books/movies/TV shows/etc have those moments of pure malevolence, where the character is just trying to hurt somebody? Off the top of my head, there’s Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles (“Stop sidling, my swan. I am going to hurt you, but I am not going to kill you, just yet. You are going to provide me with a deal of merriment still.”), some of Angelus’ moments in Buffy, and pretty much everything the main villains do in Tokyo Babylon and X, but I’m having trouble thinking of more. (Actually, that’s a lie. I can think of plenty of sadistic villains. It’s just that most of them are sadistic in a shallow, uninteresting way, and I want ones that really manage to get the knife between the ribs.)

Where have you seen this done well?

Edited to add: Please to be avoiding spoilers as much as possible. This discussion will necessarily involve a degree of revelation, but if you can use phrases like “the main villain” instead of the name (where the villain is not obvious from the start), etc, that would be much appreciated.

The Avengers

I’m not usually much of a shipper (in the fanfic sense) . . . but I want ALL THE HAWKEYE/BLACK WIDOW FIC NOW.

Ahem. Apart from me loving those two and wanting them to get their own movie, I thought The Avengers was quite excellent. Once I have it on DVD, I may well sit down and try to pick apart just how the writers managed to balance their script. Superhero movies have foundered before on the “too many heroes/villains” problem, but this one did a remarkable job of giving each character a meaningful role, without letting the pacing bog down in side tangents. It’s helped, of course, by the fact that they’re operating off a whole slew of individual movies — but that doesn’t account for all of it, because you can do that and still have a terrible team-up (just look to comic books for proof). This one handled things very deftly, I thought, and I’d love to dig into how.

And now, I crash. Because I survived my first kobudo seminar today (though I’m not sure my feet did), and have earned my rest. 🙂

because ordering from Japan is expensive

I don’t suppose anybody has any clever tips for how to find kimono and obi (and I do mean kimono, not yukata) for non-obscene prices? I’m looking either for stores in the Bay Area or for websites, but between the exchange rate and shipping costs, ordering from Japan tends to make prices obscene pretty quickly — I’d prefer something more, er, local.

This query has been brought to you by eBay’s utter failure to contain what I want, and Rakuten’s tendency to make my eyes bleed with machine-translated Japanese.

Help Us/LJ Support Planned Parenthood

Originally posted by at Help Us/LJ Support Planned Parenthood

Originally posted by at Help Us/LJ Support Planned Parenthood

Originally posted by at Help Us/LJ Support Planned Parenthood

Originally posted by at Help Us/LJ Support Planned Parenthood

Originally posted by at Ode to Planned Parenthood…

Originally posted by at Ode to Planned Parenthood…

Originally posted by at Help Us Support Planned Parenthood

Join us in standing up for reproductive health and education. Planned Parenthood, the organization that delivers reproductive health care, sex education and information to millions of people worldwide, has come under fire in the U.S. lately, with many politicians on both state and federal level seeking to end funding (and in a few cases succeeding).

During the month of May, you can send a specially designed Planned Parenthood vgift to your friends to help support this cause. (And if you need someone to send it to, is always happy to receive gifts!) There are three variations ($1, $5 and $10) for you to choose from, but they'd all look good on your profile when your friends know that you stand by something so important.

                    

Thank you all for your help in our support for Planned Parenthood. This promotion ends June 1, 2012; LiveJournal is not affiliated with Parent Parenthood. For more information about Planned Parenthood, please visit: http://www.plannedparenthood.org/

-The LiveJournal Team

(If you'd like to help spread the word that we're raising funds for Planned Parenthood, you can crosspost this entry in your own journal or community by using the repost button below!)

~~~