As soon as I’m fed and dressed, I’ll be wandering down to the bookstore to pick up A Memory of Light, whereupon I will finish what I started in the summer of 1995: the story of the Wheel of Time.
It will take me a few days to read and post about the book, but to mark the occasion itself, I figured I would step back and talk briefly about “The Strike at Shayol Ghul”.
I’ve been scarce around here, I know; that will likely continue through January, owing to promotion for A Natural History of Dragons + crunch time on the sequel. (Alternatively, working on those things will drive me stir-crazy, and I’ll start posting here every two hours. We’ll see.)
Due to LJ’s ongoing problems, I’m working on finally implementing my plans for a locally-hosted WordPress blog (which would then crosspost to LJ). Until I get that up and running, though, I’ve created a DW account, largely because it offered a convenient way to import (read: back up) all my content from LJ. This is the obligatory test post to see if crossposting is working as it should.
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/569195.html. Comment here or there.
A Happy New Year to all. I spent mine with my brother and sister-in-law, just having a quiet evening, which was about my speed this year. I hope yours was pleasant and enjoyable, too.
Since authors on the Yuletide stories have been revealed now, herewith the list of what I wrote:
Nobody guessed right this year, though one person guessed directly wrong!
You have more chances than usual this year to guess what I wrote for Yuletide. If you guess right, you get, uh, bragging rights? And, I dunno — let’s say I’ll mail you a cover flat of A Natural History of Dragons if you want one, since I have a whole stack of them now, and no idea what else to do with them. 🙂
If it seems like I’ve fallen off the face of the planet . . . well, you’re not wrong. I got sick with a cold just as I was on my way home for Christmas, and have basically spent the last week alternately sleeping, coughing, and eating everything in sight, with a brief pause to open presents. So, y’know. Not a lot of energy or brainpower for other things.
I’ll be back, um, eventually. Am recovering, but at an annoyingly slow pace.
The world does not appear to have ended, though depending on your time zone it still has a few hours in which to get that done.
Of course, we’re making use of the Long Count thing in a game I’m playing in, because fantasy can deliver the things reality fails to follow through on. Since I’ve been pointing my fellow players at it, this seems as good a time as any to remind the world that I once wrote an article on Mesoamerican calendars for Strange Horizons. It’s been eight years since I really studied the topic, but as an introductory article goes I think it holds up pretty well. (Barbara Tedlock, one of the anthropologists I cite, actually e-mailed me to say she thought I had done an excellent job of summarizing the part about Mayan daykeepers — I’m still pretty proud of that.)
Anyway, happy new b’ak’tun to you all, and may the next sun bring good things and joy.
As with the Kirkus review I mentioned before, I can’t quote the whole Publishers Weekly review at you, and it’s behind a paywall. But I can give you a snippet:
Brennan’s stand-alone novel […], written as Isabella’s memoir of her youthful adventures, and beautifully illustrated by Todd Lockwood, is saturated with the joy and urgency of discovery and scientific curiosity. […] Brennan’s world-building is wonderfully subtle, rendering a familiar land alien with casual details.
They pick up on several of the little things I am doing with the setting, which makes me bounce in my chair. Oh, and did I mention it’s a starred review?
Also, Nadine at Sci-Fi and Fantasy Book Reviews praises the book for “Whimsical language, funny remarks by the narrator, and a love for science and dragons that touches the reader as much as the heroine,” and also loves Todd Lockwood’s art. I have to say, getting him to do the illustrations might just be one of the best things that has happened to a book of mine in, um, ever. ^_^
I suspect the trickle of reviews will start to ramp up pretty quickly in the next month. Also, I am going to be freaking everywhere on the internet in February and March; there’s a blog tour scheduled that will have my typing the tips of my fingers off (right while I’m finishing the second book — not good planning on my part). I’ll try to keep the links collected so this doesn’t turn into me spamming LJ with “pay attention to meeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!”
In the meantime, I’m off to write the bit of the novel that I have dubbed “Amateur Therapy Hour.” I think this might be meaner to my characters than any of the diseases I’ve inflicted on them . . . .
(I hate the word “blogosphere,” and yet I use it. Go figure.)
I’m up again at Book View Cafe, talking about the folktale style, continuing my foray into the folkloric roots of fantasy. (And also of alliteration, apparently.)
I also have a new post up at SF Novelists: The End Is Nigh, reflecting on the impending conclusion of the epic — in book number, word count, and sheer publishing history — Wheel of Time series.
Comment over there!
A Game of Books is 23 hours and about $6200 from its goal. (Which sounds like a lot, but when your goal is over $100,000, it isn’t much.
To me, the interesting part of this project is not the nutshell blurb:
Imagine a game where you – the reader – are the main character, and every book you read earns you points and rewards. The Game of Books is a game for adventurous readers where the books you read earn you points based on what they are about.
Though given the potential of games to work as a motivator for activities of all kinds, that isn’t a bad thing. (This is intended for distribution to “libraries, parents, and teachers,” which seems entirely appropriate.) But no, what draws my attention is a later bit:
The Game uses the cutting-edge technology of the Book Genome Project – which uses computers to analyze books for thematic and writing style make-up, similar to Pandora.com, but for books – to track what themes and experiences a reader encounters in each book.
Patrick Rothfuss has talked about this, both on his blog and elsewhere. If it works, that kind of thing could be awesome. Will it work as advertised? I don’t know; I haven’t had a chance to try it. But I’d love to see somebody take a crack at it. We increasingly need a method of finding our way through the vast ocean of material out there, and reader reviews are, for a number of reasons, just not going to cut it on their own.
So take a look at their site, and if you like what you see, chip in some cash. Just make sure to do so before their time is up!
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 . . . .
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.
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!
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?
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.)
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.
[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.
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.
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:
