to whet your appetite

Tor.com has posted an excerpt from A Natural History of Dragon.

It consists of Isabella’s foreword and (if you click through to the second page) a bit of her early life, including the episode termed “an unfortunate incident with a dove.” Also, one of Todd Lockwood’s pieces of interior art for the book!

No, this doesn’t bring the release date any closer (it’s still February) . . . but it’ll give you something to nibble on until then. 🙂

Also — and I could have sworn I posted about this before, but I’ve looked and can’t find it — A Natural History of Dragons is available through Netgalley at this point. So if you’re a reviewer set up with them, you can get your hands on the book now. One of life’s little perks . . . .

two follow-up things

I forgot to mention that from now through December 17th, Dear Author has a coupon for Lies and Prophecy, offering $1 off purchases of that book at Book View Cafe. Get it while the getting’s good!

Also, last week I participated in BVC’s blog series Celebrating Ursula K. Le Guin. That link will take you to all the posts for the week; mine, “No Need to Apologize,” tells the tale of The Language of the Night and how that collection changed the direction of my life.

Welcome to Welton, and other BVC offerings

If I’d been smart, I would have this ready to go a few months ago. But: “Welcome to Welton,” the prequel novella to Lies and Prophecy, is now available as a proper ebook from Book View Cafe. It’s free for the downloading, as either epub or mobi; you can also still read it on my site.

Other things have been coming out from BVC as well; I can only blame the madness of November for me being remiss in posting about the October releases. So here is two months’ worth, for your delectation:

Including something from Ursula K. Le Guin – that I helped proofread!

a set of very interesting questions

I could see giving this to physics students as a brain-bender. (In fact, I won’t be surprised if it turns out somebody already has.)

In the first scenario, I believe — operating on the remnants of my physics knowledge — that it would accelerate downward. Gravity still acts on the rod; it will move, and the bits of it that pass through the blue portal re-emerge from the orange one with their momentum conserved, so it’s (I think) functionally no different from letting it fall a really long distance. Probably it will achieve terminal velocity at some point.

In the second scenario, I think the rod would accelerate the other way? But I’m not sure. The falling orange portal would push some of the rod back out the blue portal, which pushes more into the orange portal, and you’ve basically got the same situation as in #1, except in the other direction. But the part I can’t figure out is what happens when the orange portal comes to rest atop the blue one. (Or even not directly atop it — you could stop any distance away that is less than the length of the rod.) Does the rod bend? There’s no longer enough room for all its length between the portals, so I feel like it must, but I’m not sure how the force for that works out. (And actually, if the rod is allowed to move as in scenario #1, then I think you get this problem right away. Because then the rod is trying to come and go from both portals at once.)

In the third scenario, I think that if the portals are shot as depicted in the diagram, you’ve made a weak projectile. Move the orange portal, and now the rod falls through the floor and out the wall. (If you’ve let it build up momentum via the first scenario, then maybe it’s not so weak.) But that assumption depends on what I think is an as-yet unanswered question in the games, namely, what happens if a portal goes away while something more solid than a beam of light is athwart the boundary. I’m presuming it severs the object in question, so that you’ve basically made an ordinary piece of pipe with a solder in the middle, which then falls through the blue portal. I’m not sure we ever saw that issue in action during the game, though, at least not as a puzzle. (Probably people have left turrets or cubes balanced on the portal boundary and then shot a new one; my guess is they fell to whichever side had the majority of their mass. But that may just be a coding default, rather than a conscious choice on the part of the designers to say that portals can’t slice objects in half.)

It’s been years since I thought about this stuff, though. Tell me, O internets: where have I got it wrong?

a smattering of reviews, and also some links

I am not, unfortunately, allowed to quote the whole Kirkus review for A Natural History of Dragons yet; they paywall it until two weeks before the book’s pub date. I can, however, share this line: “Told in the style of a Victorian memoir, courageous, intelligent and determined Isabella’s account is colorful, vigorous and absorbing.” And they really liked the whole memoir-style-pov thing. (Which is good, because it’s one of my favorite things about writing this series.)

There’s also a new review of With Fate Conspire, this one by George Straatman: “As has been the case with its three predecessors, With Fate Conspire is masterful in its depiction of life in London during the era depicted…both from a cultural perspective and from a geographic perspective, Marie paints a precise portrait of what it was like to live in the city during this tumultuous era.”

And finally, a review for Lies and Prophecy, over at The Jeep Diva: “Ms. Brennan does a magnificent job of taking fantasy and weaving it throughout a story of typical college students, trying to find themselves not only in their pursuits of education, but in their personal lives as well.”

Since three things only make three-fifths of a post, I will close out the remaining two fifths with something I’ve been forgetting to link to: my latest BVC entries. I diverted briefly from my discussion of folktale-like fantasy to lay out what tale types are (a subject on which I will have more to say later), and then came back to the point to talk about the grammar of a folktale plot. (Or, to put those posts in jargon shorthand: Aarne-Thompson-Uther, and then Propp. Next up: Luthi! Which reminds me, I need to write that post.)

Wheel of Time Index Post

I’m putting this together now rather than after I’m done with the whole shebang because people (myself included) may want to look back at some of the previous entries before the last ones appear.

I will, of course, update it with the final links as they happen. So if you want something to bookmark, this is one to keep.

Towers of Midnight (analysis)

[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.]

Side note first: the poll results thus far are coming down pretty firmly on people saying that yes, I should read the Prologue to AMoL, and yes, I should blog about it when I do. I must admit, I’m curious why those of you who voted “no” chose that option. Anyway, decisions on that soon. For now, ToM, and the analysis thereof.

For most of the time I’ve been writing these posts, I’ve been analyzing each volume in the context of the rest of the story: the books that precede it, the books I had previously read that follow it, speculation about the books that were out but I hadn’t read them yet. As we round this final corner, though, I find Towers of Midnight almost more interesting in the context of absence: the unknown events of A Memory of Light, and the void that will follow it, the end of the series.

Of course, we may (probably will) get other books. I’ve heard they’re talking about a companion book — something more canonical than the White Book of Lies — and it’s entirely possible that Jordan’s estate will farm out the property the way we’ve seen with Dune. But as far as the series proper is concerned, ToM is the point at which I start thinking, not only about what has happened, but what may never happen.

The list could fill an ordinary trilogy.

wiktory.

OH MY GOD IT’S DEAD THE SHORT STORY THAT WAS TRYING TO KILL ME I KILLED IT INSTEAD HAHAHAHA okay now I have to revise it.

But at least I have a draft.

To Prologue or Not to Prologue

Tor has a long-standing habit of releasing the Prologue to the next Wheel of Time book in advance of the book’s actual pub date, as a teaser for what’s to come. I read those from (I think) A Crown of Swords through Crossroads of Twilight, then stopped because I wasn’t going to touch the series until the end was in sight. And when I came back, I just read the books themselves; no need to play teaser games with the Prologues.

But now, at last, I’m caught up, and the final book hasn’t yet come out. So I put it to you, my blog readership:

Spam blocking

Although the Great Spam Flood of 2012 has subsided, I’m still getting spam comments on a few posts — ones that, unfortunately, I can’t/don’t want to lock completely. (For example, the open book thread for With Fate Conspire; also pretty much every new post I’ve made in the last few days.)

Since several of my regular commenters aren’t on LJ, and sometimes OpenID doesn’t work the way it should, I’ve taken the intermediate step of enabling Captcha on anonymous comments. Hopefully that won’t be too much of a hassle for those of you affected by it.

Niccolo vs. Lymond

As I said in my booklog post, I’ve now read the first book of the House of Niccolo series by Dorothy Dunnett, and it provoked interesting thoughts about how this series compares to the Lymond Chronicles. My thoughts are mildly spoilery for both books, so they’ll go behind a cut, although I don’t think I’ll be saying anything that’s a massive giveaway. (The comment thread, on the other hand, may give away more.)

(more…)

NaEverythingWriMo

My senior spring of college, I was taking three courses, one of which was my thesis tutorial. After I’d turned that beast in, I was down to two courses, one of which I was taking pass/fail. In other words: I wasn’t very busy. So — because that semester was also my last chance to write material for this award — I decided to see how much I could write in the final two months of college.

The answer ended up being “a novel and six short stories in seven weeks flat,” which is a total I don’t expect to equal again. But I spent most of November as a spinster hermit (kniedzw being in Poland for three weeks after I left), so I figured, as long as there was nobody around to look at me funny for working at all kinds of random hours and not having a social life, I might as well see how much I could write in the month of November.

As it turns out, I managed 59,144 words. (Which annoys me a little, since I thought I had hit 60K that final night. But apparently I did some math wrong in there.)

It isn’t NaNoWriMo. I will almost certainly never do NaNoWriMo; I don’t need the event to make myself write a novel (duh), and I know the pace would result in me writing a bad novel if I tried. Only 30,492 words of that is book, i.e. my standard working pace. The rest, the other 28,652, is a combination of other things: substantial blog posts (like the nearly 4K I wrote for my first ToM entry), promo stuff for A Natural History of Dragons, Yuletide material, progress on the short story that’s trying to kill me, the beginnings of a new Driftwood story, etc.

Even changing up my focus like that, 59K was a lot to churn out in thirty days flat. I’m not a slow writer, but I’m also not one of those people who can do 4K days for an extended period of time. It was, however, good to work on gear-shifting between projects — that’s something I’m not great at, and could benefit from improving. My short story production has fallen off substantially these last couple of years, because it’s hard for me to get my head out of whatever the current novel space is and find some kind of flow on a totally different setting and characters. There are more reasons for that than just gear-shifting, of course; it also has a lot to do with the increased investment my short story ideas are requiring, research and other things. But still and all: gear-shifting is a good thing to work on.

So that was my November. I still have two thirds of this book to go, so it’s going to stay busy around here for a while. But all in all, a nicely productive month.

(Re)Visiting the Wheel of Time: Towers of Midnight (reactions)

[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.]

The question of how to divide up these posts has always been a thorny one, since (as I said for The Gathering Storm) it’s impossible to keep all analysis out of my reactions, and all reactions out of my analysis. It might be fairer to say that this is the post about the characters, and the next one will be the post about plot and how Towers of Midnight fits into the bigger picture. Fair warning, though; that means this post is really long. There are a lot of characters, and a lot of them get to do noteworthy things in this book.

So, having said that, first things first:

!!!!!!!!!!!eleventy-one!!!

when in doubt

I have this tag for posts, “when in doubt.” It refers to the old writer’s axiom, “when in doubt, send in a man with a gun.” Not literally a guy with a gun, necessarily, but something to shake up the plot, jolt you out of whatever rut you’re stuck in or route you around whatever wall you’re facing, and make it possible to move on with the story (in a more interesting fashion, hopefully).

Well, right now I have a bit of plot I need to figure out and haven’t yet, plus I’m exhausted from waking up at 4 a.m. (Thanksgiving travel, how I hate thee). So I sat down and thought, “okay, I can splice in this bit, and hopefully that will get me up to my word count for the day, but a) it’s going to be hard work with my brain this dead and b) I don’t know where I’m going after that.”

Instead, I gave a character malaria.

When in doubt, send in a mosquito with P. falciparum.

Jubilee

I mentioned it before in a link post, but it deserves one of its own, and an update.

Rolling Jubilee is a project to bail out ordinary people instead of businesses. It’s using a quirk of our financial system (the ability to buy debt for less than its value) to take a small amount of charity and do a much larger amount of good — about $20 for every $1 donated. In so doing, it pushes back against the notion of debt as an inescapable moral burden, a moral failing, that should pursue people beyond the point of reason.

As of me posting this, the site’s meter says it has raised $412,368, which is enough to abolish $8,252,175 of debt.

Laid against the debt in the United States, it’s a drop in the bucket. Tuition debt alone is over a trillion dollars; the site doesn’t say how much is owed on, say, credit cards. So it’s easy to look at eight million dollars and think, nice idea, but it isn’t doing much good.

That’s looking at it from the wrong end. I donated $100, which translates to $2000 of effect. For some individual or family out there, that $2000 is huge.

Eight million is enough to fundamentally transform the lives of countless Americans. People who had a serious illness or an unexpected breakdown in their only car or, yes, even people who made bad decisions, and are now being crushed under the weight of a debt burden they’ll never be able to repay. Would I rather wait until they’re out on the street, then donate some cans of food to a soup kitchen? Or would I rather donate that $100 now, and give them a second chance before their lives have been destroyed?

Today is Thanksgiving in the United States. I’m thankful for the fact that my husband and I are on top of our debt; pretty much the only thing we have is my student loans (and they’re small). I have a check at home, waiting to be deposited, for thirty some-odd dollars — payment for a small short story sale. It won’t hurt me one bit to send that money to Rolling Jubilee, and give somebody else six hundred some-odd dollars to be thankful for.

If you can, I encourage you to do the same.

more snippet

Because my life right now consists almost 100% of writing.

“They are solitary hunters, yes?” I asked, determined to make use of his knowledge.

“The females are, like that one there. Males will hunt together sometimes, in pairs or trios, occasionally quartets. Especially if they’re brothers. If you hunt males, you must be certain how many there are, or that last one will be on your head while you’re taking aim at the others.”

I’m modeling this particular kind of dragon on cheetahs, and it’s giving me all sorts of entertaining ideas.

a snippet for your weekend delectation

Mostly I don’t post quotes from works in progress because I have trouble picking good ones that aren’t also full of spoilers. But this, the final paragraph of tonight’s work, entertains me:

Of course, there was the minor problem of the Green Hell being one of the deadliest regions on earth. But my interest was, that evening, still academic; my purpose in coming to Bayembe was to study the dragons of their arid plains. Moulish swamp-wyrms were a minor note — in much the same way that a fisherman’s lure is a minor note in the world of a fish.

Isabella: still fun to write.

not so much five things as everything on hand

1) The Red Cross book sale raised $250 (I added a bit to make a nice round number). Thank you to everyone who a) supported the cause and b) took some of these books off my hands!

2) Speaking of books, I just got the news that the Science Fiction Book Club has acquired A Natural History of Dragons as an Editor’s Pick. Given that they did the entire Onyx Court series as well, this makes me very happy.

3) Speaking of other things related to my job, both Sirens and 4th Street Fantasy are open for registration. I haven’t yet settled my con schedule for next year, but there are good odds of me being at both of these — and whether I am or not, I highly recommend them both to all of you.

4) Speaking of things related to other people’s jobs as writers, Patricia Burroughs is running a costume contest between now and December 4th. This is your chance to play dress-up and win an ebook and a gift certificate. I know some of you are costumer types, so check it out!

5) Speaking of, um, okay, I’m having trouble inventing segues . . . speaking of other people’s jobs as creative people (in this case, art), Robert Scott (he of the Urban Tarot Deck) now has an online store, selling prints not only of various Urban Tarot cards, but other work he’s done. So much pretty stuff . . . .

6) Speaking of things totally unrelated to everything above, I encourage you all to check out Rolling Jubilee. This post does a good job of articulating why I support the project, as does this one. Short form: it’s a way to short-circuit one of the systems that perpetuates and feeds the growing inequality in the United States. And I’m kind of in favor of that.

7) Giving on up on segues, this video is nifty.

8) . . . and that’s all I’ve got for now.

I wasn’t kidding

No, seriously, this short story is trying to kill me. It has taken me two. hours. to write about five hundred words, and that’s with me saying “screw it, I’m going to let this turn into a synopsis, and then go back and flesh it out into an actual story later.” By my calculation, it is going to take at least two more multi-hour sessions before I have something resembling a draft.

Note to the wise: do not, repeat, DO NOT attempt to write a short story in Anglish. I kind of want to light this thing on fire.