Despite being pissed off at the day’s events, I have written 1352 words of novel and a 1157-word fanfic for Yuletide. And it’s not even ten-thirty yet! I think I’ll take a break, then once again tackle a certain short story. (The one that’s trying to kill me.)
This time they took BOTH bikes. From inside a locked garage, wheels in U-locks, chained and locked to a pillar, and under a sheet to boot, just so nobody would glance through the garage bars and see a tempting target.
I fucking give up.
I owe teleidoplex a post for the meme-type-thing she tapped me for, but that one will require a fair bit of thought and effort from me, so in the meantime, I’m going to do something frivolous. 🙂
By way of yhlee on Dreamwidth: Tell me about a story I haven’t written, and I’ll give you one sentence from that story.
(Or possibly more.)
In the meantime, I’ll be over here, figuring out how to arrange my novel to include a semi-kidnapping.
I was going to say that I should just learn enough Hebrew to be able to read a dictionary usefully, but then it occurred to me that this request requires at least some knowledge of grammar, which is probably more Hebrew-learning than I can really spare the time for at present. (Though the main point still stands, which is that learning the alphabet would be a handy thing for me to do.)
Anyway. Point being, I need more assistance from the Hebrew-speaking members of my audience. How would you say “those sent forth”? As in (and yes, I’m getting my terminology from Wikipedia, here), the plural of the Qal passive participle for whatever the nearest verb is for “to send forth.”
In other words, I’m trying to end up with a word along the lines of pĕrûshîm, but with a different verb. Any suggestions?
Breakfast was in the hotel crypt again (because it was included with the room, and also very tasty — though wow, Polish breakfast includes a lot more in the way of savory foods than I’m used to seeing at that time of day), and then it was time to defy jet lag and set forth.
I made a miscalculation in planning this trip, though. I didn’t realize that Polish museums, like theatres, are frequently closed on Mondays. As it turned out, this made very little dent in our plans (since there was enough to fill an entire day with regardless), but it was annoying.
Having done one of the labors of Hercules in culling my Poland photos from roughly 1300 down to 59, I should get around to that whole trip report thing. But it’s likely to take multiple posts, so this is only the first installment.
We flew to Poland via Frankfurt, which I think may challenge Heathrow for length of odyssey from one gate to the next. Seriously, it is the most inexplicably complicated mess of hallways, stairways, escalators, elevators, slidewalks, and tunnels I’ve ever seen. Plus a five-minute bus ride to the plane itself — no really, I timed it. Two minutes in, I asked Kyle if we were driving to Poland. Four minutes in, I said they were taking us to a ditch at the edge of the airport, where they would shoot us for holding up the departure. (Our flight from San Francisco took off an hour late.)
Since I just put Chekhov’s hang glider into this story, I thought I would share with you guys some of the items scribbled down in my notebook, on the page designated for Cool Things What I Intend to Put Into the Second Dragons Book:
And some other things that would be too spoilery to share.
Mind you, Isabella is looking over my metaphorical shoulder and objecting strongly to my classification of malaria as a “cool thing” (she’s no happier about the prospect of me replacing it with yellow fever), but narratively speaking, it qualifies. 🙂 (Confidential to kurayami_hime: at least it’s not the plague!)
I’m still working on stringing all this stuff together into a book, rather than a collection of things I think are neat, but hey. There are worse ways to build a novel than throwing awesome bits of setting at the page. (It’s more or less how I built several of the Onyx Court books, and that seems to have worked out okay.)
Way late, but that’s because I came home with a cold and then, just as I was recovering from it, contracted a different one! Yay! Wait, not yay. Anti-yay.
Saba: Under the Hyena’s Foot, Jane Kurtz. This was a startlingly political book. It’s part of the Girls of Many Lands series, which is the “rest of the world” companion to the American Girl thing, i.e. the dolls you may have seen. It takes place in Ethiopia in 1846, and features kidnappings, assassinations, and palace coups — in other words, a lot more in the way of political intrigue than I would have expected out of an “intermediate fiction” doll tie-in book. They’re all written by different authors, so the quality is undoubtedly all over the place, but I note that Laurance Yep wrote a Chinese book for the series (Spring Pearl: The Last Flower) and Chitra Banerjee Divarakuni wrote an Indian one (Neela: Victory Song), so I’m inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and say they’re worth checking out.
Unspoken, Sarah Rees Brennan. YA update of the old “gothic” genre. I was mildly distracted by the part-Japanese protagonist being named “Kami” (though there’s an explanation for it in the story), and early on I felt like the peppiness of the narrator’s voice was at odds with the gothic mood. But the peppiness settled down as the story went on, and the explanation for the name came along, and I ended up quite enjoying this one. The premise — and this comes out early enough that I don’t think it’s a spoiler — is that Kami has always had an “imaginary friend” in her head, a guy named Jared that she talks to all the time. And then Jared shows up. Because he’s a real person. And one of the things I liked best about the book was how this was not a Wonderful Thing, but a shocking development neither of them can quite cope with, because they’re not what each other expected and yet they know each other really well and it’s really traumatic to lose something that was both a deep source of comfort and a constant risk of being thought genuinely delusional by those around you.
Fair warning, though: the book, while it does resolve the central mystery, leaves a whole mess of things dangling for future plot development. So if you are looking for a nice tidy satisfying package of a book, this is not it.
Wieliczka: Historic Salt Mine, Janusz Podlecki. Very short book, mostly consisting of photographs. A souvenir of this place, which I will be reporting on soon if I ever get around to blogging about the Poland trip.
The Jews in the Time of Jesus: An Introduction, Stephen M. Wylen. A discussion of what first-century Judaism was like, and its relationship both to modern Judaism and modern Christianity. I’ve studied the early Church before, and that entailed a bit of talking about Judaism, but this was kind of the other side of that picture. It’s not wholly focused on the first century and its aftermath, though: in order to make that part make sense, it starts with a very concise little potted history of Judaism in general, which I also needed and was grateful for. (Things like “the Babylonian Exile” are more than just phrases to me now.)
Writing-wise, I kind of wanted to smack the author. He has a tendency to write in short, declarative sentences. The sentences I’m using here are examples. This gets tedious after a while. Also, there’s a very didactic tone in places, like where he patiently takes you by the hand and explains that the “pious Jewish” interpretation of X and the “pious Christian” interpretation of X are not the same as the “secular historical” interpretation of X, and I’m like, no shit, Sherlock. Occasionally I feels he fails as a historian, too, like when he says “The Pharisees were much more important when [the Mishnah and the New Testament] were being written than they were in the time of Jesus and the Temple” (okay) and then later says “The attention [the Pharisees] receive in [the New Testament] tells us that they really were important in the time of Jesus.” Um. I think your editor missed something there, sir.
Despite those nitpicks, however, overall I found the book quite useful.
This was the month of Not Finishing Books, either because I quit on them or because I only needed to read pieces or because I hadn’t finished them yet. (November has already featured the completion of two books I started in October.)
And now I convince myself not to go fall asleep again.
As a reminder, you have until I wake up tomorrow morning (10 a.m. PST, more or less) to buy books and raise money for the American Red Cross. Full details are at that link, for anybody who missed them before and/or needs to refresh their memory, but I’ll repost the list of what’s available (and what’s been taken) here:
Please, please, get more of these books off my hands. 🙂 Tell your friends, post to the Twitbooknets, whatever.
For those of you who have made purchases, thank you, and I’ll be shipping things out soon. (My plans on that front have been derailed by one cold segueing into another, with the result that I haven’t exactly been getting out of the house lately.)
It sounds like an exaggeration, but after the litany of attempts this year to suppress the vote — ID requirements, shortened or eliminated voting hours, changes in polling places and the number of machines there, striking voters from the rolls — I really don’t think it is. If you’re an eligible voter in the U.S., please go vote.
Nobody here will be surprised to find that I think you should vote for Obama. Of the two candidates, he’s the one who stands for economic fairness, women’s equality, QUILTBAG rights, corporate oversight, and not just bombing the snot out of any country we decide we don’t like. But fundamentally, I care most about us having a functioning democracy. Go vote. Even if you live in a state that’s guaranteed to go red or blue in the presidential election, there are state legislative positions, local offices, ballot initiatives, and more in which your opinion really does matter. Go vote. Please.
I need some technical assistance from a person familiar with WordPress (specifically, WP themes and how they work), and also CSS. Anybody willing and able to volunteer? Comment here or e-mail me at marie{dot}brennan[at]gmail{dot}com.
1) As a reminder, the book sale will be running until next Thursday morning. I should mention that my goal is to downsize my stock until it actually fits once more in the official Box of Author Copies. And, um. We’re not there yet. <gives stacks of books the side-eye>
2) Pati Nagle is donating $2 per sale from her book Dead Man’s Hand to the Food Bank of South Jersey for the remainder of this month.
3) On a different charitable front, the Strange Horizons fund drive is in its last few days. All donors get entered into a draw for these prizes, which include a full-color ARC of A Natural History of Dragons.
4) Speaking of ANHoD, mrissa has a lovely advance review of it up on her blog. (I think this is perhaps slightly less of a tailored-for-mrissas book than A Star Shall Fall was, but apparently not by much.) Also, a review of Lies and Prophecy, which I’ve been meaning to link to for a while.
5) Finally, I’m blogging at BVC again today, on what makes a folktale. Go there to guess what makes some fantasy seem fairy-tale-like, even when it isn’t actually retelling a fairy tale.
(I really ought to have a classics-related icon for posts like this. Any suggestions from the audience?)
There’s a scene in Diana Wynne Jones’ novel A Tale of Time City wherein Vivian, who is an ordinary girl from WWII England, is assigned to translate a text written in the “universal symbols” of Time City. She does an entertainingly bad job of it, and gets mocked by her tutor.
I probably wasn’t supposed to take that as inspiration, was I?
See, years ago, when kurayami_hime and I were taking Latin in high school, we were given Catullus 3 to translate, along with a vocabulary list to look up before we began. The first word on that list was passer, which, according to my dictionary, meant “sparrow” (the poem being a mock-eulogy for his girlfriend’s dead bird) . . . and also “flounder.”
Inspired by this, and also by the number of our classmates who had mis-translated a line of Ovid’s about “small things capture the minds of young girls” as “girls like to capture small animals” (they mistook anima for animal), kurayami_hime and I produced the following travesty, which our Latin teacher promptly stole, posted on the board, and only gave us photocopies of several years later; the original remains in her possession.
I’m going to take care of two problems here today:
1) I would like to raise funds for the American Red Cross in the wake of Hurricane Sandy,
2) I have way too many author copies around the house, that I’d like to get rid of.
So we’re having a book sale here at Swan Tower. Comment on this post, or e-mail me at marie{dot}brennan{at}gmail{dot}com, and I will sell you the following books at the following prices, including autographs and (if you request it) personalization to you or another person of your choice.
Note that the prices are a bit higher than they might otherwise be, to ensure that packaging and shipping doesn’t take too big a bite out of the Red Cross donation total. (I will send books overseas, too, but since this is for charity, I will probably ask you to kick in a few bucks extra to cover the increased cost of shipping.)
Please spread the word wherever you think people would be interested. I’ll try to keep this list updated in a timely manner, so that you’ll know how many books are left of each type. ETA: Total raised thus far = $245
The sale will run for one week (so, through next Thursday morning, the 8th of November).
One of the things HRSFA did when I was in college — and still does now — was celebrate the Coming of the Hour (in the fall) and the Going of the Hour (in the spring), when the god Chronos, in his benevolence and cruelty, bestows or takes an hour away from us poor mortals. The ceremony lasted for one hour, from 2 a.m. until 2 a.m. (fall) or from 2 a.m. until 4 a.m. (spring), and most definitely did not end with us burning a cardboard clock in Harvard Yard. Because there is no open flame in the Yard. <nods>
Anyway, I must have been a good girl this year, because Chronos is bestowing the gift of the hour upon me twice. Poland switched their clocks last weekend, and the U.S. is doing it this upcoming weekend.
All hail Chronos, whose generosity I rather desperately need these days. (Now if you’ll pardon me, I’m going to go contemplate passing out, in the hopes that I can kill this cold with sleep.)
1) I am so very, very glad that I flew from Krakow to Frankfurt to SFO yesterday, rather than connecting anywhere in the U.S. (Not even just the East Coast: the problems there have screwed up routing and plane supply all over the place.) We did have to divert half an hour further north to avoid the winds, but that’s minor compared to what could have happened with a different route.
2) My ideal would be to not leave the house today. Unfortunately, I’m not sure I have enough food on hand to make that work.
3) This rendition of the X-Men, as characters in Edo-period Japan, is pretty awesome. And if I didn’t link to it before, so is the artist’s previous take on the Avengers in the Sengoku period.
4) rachelmanija has posted notes/transcript from her panel on gender roles in The Hunger Games, so if you want to see what I sound like after a full weekend of conning and my brain is leaking out my ears, go read. On the whole, I think it was a really great panel, despite exhaustion on my part. (Warning: spoilers for the whole series, including Mockingjay.)
5) Due to a rollout of AO3 code, Yuletide signups have been extended to 9 p.m. Eastern time tomorrow. Get in while the getting’s good!
There will (I hope) be more extensive trip-blogging after it’s over and done with, but in brief: I leave Krakow at an obscenely early hour tomorrow, after seven and a half days. We got a dusting of snow this morning, that half melted off in the afternoon, but lasted long enough to make the Basilica of St. Mary and the Cloth Hall and St. Florian’s Tower and so on look charmingly picturesque in a way I hadn’t already photographed. So kniedzw and I ran around repeating a bunch of shots, then hid from the cold in some museums, and then — when we couldn’t usefully sightsee anymore — went and watched Skyfall, subtitled in Polish. So ha-ha, I saw it before most of you. 🙂 (Short form: quite good. And surprisingly focused on the personal side, with the Big Threat being more the vehicle that delivered the personal story, rather than the major point of the film.)
I have spent the last two days with a cold I really could have done without, but even with that sapping my energy, it’s been an excellent trip. There will be many photos, and assuming I can muster the will, some chatty posts as well.
First, though, I have to endure a transatlantic flight with a cold. Oh joy.
1) Learn from my error, chilluns. If you’re going to a foreign country, turn off 2-step verification on your Google accounts for the duration, unless you can actually get text messages on your phone while overseas. Otherwise, if your laptop refuses to talk to the hotel wireless, you’ll have to go to great lengths to get internet access long enough to turn verification off so you can check your Gmail on other computers as needed.
2) Things Krakow does very well: street musicians, fall color, street performers of the non-musical kind, hot chocolate, music not on the streets, sausage (so saith the kniedzw), and RIDICULOUSLY monumental altars/shrines in its churches. Also, veneration of Pope John Paul II (shocker, I know).
3) Things I do not do well: sleep on planes, these days. I don’t know where my ability to do so went, but it is gone.
4) I wish I could have come here two years ago, when I could pretend to the IRS that this was research for A Natural History of Dragons. Thanks to folklore (which I will report on in more detail later), there are dragons ALL OVER the place. Including one whose picture I will try to post later, because he’s awesome.
5) Off to Auschwitz tomorrow. Not exactly happy fun vacation time, but it’s one of those things you kind of have to do.
P.S. My folkloric and musical heart is kind of in love with the Heynał mariacki.
(Yes, I know my icon is not of Poland. Hush.)
It occurs to me that if I’ve made any mention here of my upcoming trip, I did so in passing, where nobody was likely to see it (and I don’t remember it). So: I’m going to Poland! On Saturday!
I will be there for about a week, in Krakow and Gdansk. I am, quite pleasingly, the first member of my family to go to Poland; given how much my family travels, this is actually an achievement worth noting. (I beat them to Costa Rica, Ireland, Israel, India, and I think Turkey. Can’t remember if I beat them to Greece or not. They — meaning my parents and my brother — have beaten me to China, Russia, South Africa, Finland, Taiwan, Norway, Malaysia, Sweden, Singapore, Denmark, Hong Kong, Italy, Germany, Japan, Zambia, South Korea, France, Austria, the Czech Republic . . . yeah.)
I intend to take a great many pictures, some of which may get posted here, depending on internet access and my energy level. Try not to break anything while I’m gone. 🙂
Forgot to mention: Yuletide signups are now open. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, there’s a FAQ here that explains a lot. (And also this, but it’s kind of more “entertainingly helpy” than “actually helpful.”)
Signups will be open until the 28th. Further updates will be posted on (official) and (community); also, this post is worth keeping an eye on.
Yuletide is a lot of fun, and includes many things you might not class as “fanfic” in the normal way of things. I encourage people to check it out!
