A while back, I guest-blogged for jimhines, posting about the irrationality of fairy tales. Now I’m back for a second round: this time I look at legends, which not only make more sense, but are more closely related to fantasy.
Comment over there, either on the LJ post or its WordPress mirror.
Now that everybody’s had time to send me icons . . . alessandriana, you’re the winner! Many, many thanks, and as you can see, I’m already using it. If you send your mailing address to me (marie {dot} brennan [at] gmail {dot} com), I’ll get the ARC on its way to you.
Of course, those of you who have gotten ARCs have only gotten the story. (And a not-fully-revised version of the story, at that — though at this point I’ve totally lost track of what I changed after they got printed.) You don’t have the lovely, lovely cover, and you don’t have what showed up in my inbox today:
The interior art.
See, back when I was developing this pitch, my agent suggested that I make Isabella an artist. Life drawing was — and still is — an important skill for natural historians. The idea clicked, and then I had a pie-in-the-sky hope: could I convince my publisher to include sketches in the book? Sketches of Isabella’s own work?
Tor agreed, and so not only is Todd Lockwood doing the cover, he’s producing ten rougher, black-and-white drawings that will be scattered throughout the novel. It is perfect. They aren’t all done yet — a few are still in the “preliminary sketch” stage — but the ones I’ve seen are utterly fabulous. And it will add so much to the book, being able to have the artwork in there, supporting the idea that Isabella is drawing everything she sees in Vystrana.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to sneak any previews of that to you guys before the book comes out. But I wanted to let you know that my beautiful, beautiful cover is not the only Lockwood art this book will have; the purtiness continues inside. I can’t wait to see the finished product.
A timely post for once! And also a better list than I had last month, by far.
It got an official, shiny reveal on Tor.com today. Several people there have already mentioned the D&D Draconomicon, and that’s no accident: Todd Lockwood’s line drawings in that book were one of the elements that inspired this series in the first place. So when I found out he was going to be doing the art for MY book . . . .
You can imagine my reaction. ^_^
And, the usual drill: I need an icon! And I have no Photoshop skills! If you make me an LJ icon out of that cover, and post it in the comments, I will pick one and send the winner my final ARC of A Natural History of Dragons. (Final for now; I’m sure I’ll have more later.) The book itself won’t be out until February of next year, so you’d be getting quite a jump on everybody else.
Now if you’ll pardon me, I need to go off and make little eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee noises to myself for a while longer.
This month’s SF Novelists post went up on a weekend, and then I forgot to mention it in the rush to get ready for Fourth Street. But the wonderful thing about the Internet is, the post is still there, just waiting for you to read it! Exceptions are the rule.
Comment over there; no login required; first-time commenters will be slightly delayed while I fish them out of the moderation queue.
Last weekend I went for the first time to Fourth Street Fantasy, a Minneapolis con that apparently ran for many years, died out, and was resurrected five or so years back by a local fan, rising from the dead to be more awesome than ever*.
(*I never went to the old version, so this description is based entirely on how awesome I found the con as it is now.)
If you are anything resembling local — or even if you’re not — you should think about checking this one out. It’s small (in the 100-200 attendee range), but the sort of smallness that allows for good, intensive conversation with cool people. And with alecaustin putting together the programming, there is no shortage of fodder for such conversations. He has said before that he’s tired of the introductory, freshman-level nature of panel topics at many conventions, and wants more upper-level or graduate kinds of subjects. Thus it was that my three panel topics this weekend were: politics and complexity of same in fantasy (which delved into some of the nitty-gritty of what is necessary to do good, believable political complexity in fiction, and what historical examples one might look to for inspiration and instruction), “blood, love, and rhetoric” (using the Player King’s speech from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as a jumping-off point for talking about violence and “domestic narratives” in fantasy), and . . .
Okay, so they have this tradition. You know how sometimes when you’re at a con, the panelists will either digress wildly onto some unrelated topic, or teeter at the edge of such a digression before regretfully declaring “but that’s another panel”? Well, Fourth Street keeps a list of those “other panels,” and for the last programming slot of the con, picks one of them to be the special last-minute topic. I ended up getting tapped to talk about “why we want stories about divine-right kings” on Sunday afternoon, and had to cudgel my brain into talking about the origins of state formation in early agricultural societies (and what this means for the stories we tell). Despite the fact that I was nearing unto mental exhaustion by then, and had to throw every ounce of remaining energy into holding my own against Steven Brust and Beth Meacham (executive editor at Tor), along with Caroline Stevermer and Mary Robinette Kowal, I think it went fairly well.
If you weren’t at Fourth Street, you can still get in on a piece of the fun: they made the very sensible decision to keep track of all the books mentioned on each panel, and have posted the list for everyone’s delectation. (It also includes some quotes from the panels.)
Anyway, excellent con with excellent people. I’ll be a few days yet regenerating the dead brain cells, but on the way home I had several pieces of the next novel shuffle themselves into something like a line, so clearly something is still working inside my skull. Now I just need to spend some quality time working up a map, since I can’t figure out the politics of Nsebu and Mouleen and the Labane and the places that don’t have names yet if I don’t know where they are in relation to one another.
[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.
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. 🙂
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!
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.)
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.)
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!
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.
>_<
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.
