Mississippi Personhood Amendment

Originally posted by at Mississippi Personhood Amendment

Originally posted by at Mississippi Personhood Amendment

Originally posted by at Mississippi Personhood Amendment

Originally posted by at Mississippi Personhood Amendment

Okay, so I don't usually do this, but this is an issue near and dear to me and this is getting very little no attention in the mainstream media.

Mississippi is voting on November 8th on whether to pass Amendment 26, the "Personhood Amendment". This amendment would grant fertilized eggs and fetuses personhood status.

Putting aside the contentious issue of abortion, this would effectively outlaw birth control and criminalize women who have miscarriages. This is not a good thing.

Jackson Women's Health Organization is the only place women can get abortions in the entire state, and they are trying to launch a grassroots movement against this amendment. This doesn't just apply to Mississippi, though, as Personhood USA, the group that introduced this amendment, is trying to introduce identical amendments in all 50 states.

What's more, in Mississippi, this amendment is expected to pass. It even has Mississippi Democrats, including the Attorney General, Jim Hood, backing it.

The reason I'm posting this here is because I made a meager donation to the Jackson Women's Health Organization this morning, and I received a personal email back hours later – on a Sunday – thanking me and noting that I'm one of the first "outside" people to contribute.

So if you sometimes pass on political action because you figure that enough other people will do something to make a difference, make an exception on this one. My RSS reader is near silent on this amendment. I only found out about it through a feminist blog. The mainstream media is not reporting on it.

If there is ever a time to donate or send a letter in protest, this would be it.

What to do?

– Read up on it. Wake Up, Mississippi is the home of the grassroots effort to fight this amendment. Daily Kos also has a thorough story on it.

– If you can afford it, you can donate at the site's link.

– You can contact the Democratic National Committee to see why more of our representatives aren't speaking out against this.

– Like this Facebook page to help spread awareness.

London Incarnate

Normally I’m not a big fan of AU crack, which is to say, fanfics where the author has thrown in something totally random (“what if Frodo and Sam became pirates?”) that really doesn’t relate to the original source.

There are exceptions.

This is one of them.

It’s a fic for the new BBC series Sherlock, the one that updates the characters to the modern day. You don’t have to have seen the series, I think, to enjoy the story. But if you’ve read the Onyx Court books . . . yeah. Especially With Fate Conspire. It’s so much of what I think about London, in terms of its history and the relationship between a city and its people, with lots of little details that ring such familiar bells for me. gollumgollum pointed me at it, and I’m so glad she did.

Go. Read. Enjoy.

Vail, here I come

Last year we had lovely weather for much of Sirens — just warm enough in the afternoon to make a walk pleasantly brisk, and (if memory serves) not very rainy at all. This year . . . yeah, not so much. Highs just above freezing, and likely rain or snow.

Ah well. I guess I’ll hang out in front of a roaring fire instead. 🙂

I head off tomorrow, and look forward to seeing some of you there. For all the rest of you, blogging and such will be sparse for a few days. (As if it isn’t sparse at other times, too.)

(Re)visiting the Wheel of Time: Knife of Dreams

[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, but please, no spoilers for books after this one.]

After more than eight and a half years of waiting, I finally get to find out What Happens Next.

I read this last month, but it’s taken me a while to sit down and post about it. See, I’m doing two things now: analyzing the structural decisions and their effects (the general purpose of these posts), but also reacting to new developments in the story. I actually considered making two posts, one for each purpose. This is already an epic enough undertaking, though, that I decided to keep it to one, and see if I can’t handle both tasks.

On the reaction side, then: was I satisfied by this book? No — but I don’t think there’s any world in which this book could have satisfied me. I’ve been waiting for the story to move forward since January 2003, y’all. After the disappointment that was Crossroads of Twilight, this book would have had to walk on water and raise the dead for me to be entirely happy with it. Was it an improvement? Hell YES. (But then, there was pretty much nowhere to go but up.)

I’m going to take this in order, I think, so as to balance reaction and analysis. And it’s going to take a while.

Three reviews and two anthologies

Three recent reviews of With Fate Conspire:

Chris at The King of Elfland’s Second Cousin has some very interesting things to say about the structure of the book.

Julia at All Things Urban Fantasy liked it enough to run out and buy the rest of the series, which is always encouraging. 🙂

And a snippet from Faren Miller at Locus: “For more tales of a London based on history as well as sheer invention, try With Fate Conspire and its predecessors. Instead of the old-style fantasy of quests through green fields and dark domains, Brennan makes the most of one extraordinary city.”

Also, BCS has released The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Year Two, which includes my Driftwood story “Remembering Light.” You can download it in your choice of ebook format, from a whole variety of sources.

And it isn’t available yet, but you can preorder the Intergalactic Awards Anthology, Vol. 1, which includes another Driftwood story, “A Heretic by Degrees.” That one’s print, and will ship in mid-December.

Amazon is not the good guy

I’ve piled up four links in short order that detail some of the problems with Amazon, and why, despite an increasing insistence in their PR that they’re your ally, they’re on the side of the consumer, they’re your friend against those meanie-face businesses like publishers . . . they are not the good guy. At best, they are a guy, who will sometimes help you and sometimes screw you over. (The problem is, a lot of the “help” is of the sort that evaporates as soon as they’re in a position to screw you over.)

So, the links:

Cat Valente first, on the notion of book subscriptions, and how Amazon keeps muscling their way toward monopoly.

Next Borderlands Books (San Francisco indie bookstore), on their sketchy business behavior. (Scroll down to “From the Office” to find the relevant part.)

And then, Anand Giridharadas in the NYT, on the fraying of decency, and what Amazon does to achieve such low prices and fast shipping.

Finally, just as a chaser, the privacy issues with the new Kindle Fire.

I won’t deny that Amazon is useful. I still order things from them occasionally. But I’ve taken my book business elsewhere whenever possible — Powell’s, IndieBound, and local stores — and I am not looking forward to the Brave New World in which everything is published through Amazon, for reading on an Amazon device, so that Amazon knows everything I do, with Amazon deciding how much I pay for that material or get paid when people buy what I wrote, because they’ve ground all their competitors out of existence.

It’s like a hybrid of 1984 and Snow Crash. Stephenson was almost right about corporations ruling the future; his error was in using the plural.

The DWJ Project: Black Maria (aka Aunt Maria)

Like Witch’s Business/Wilkin’s Tooth, I’m not sure why this book got retitled. My guess is they wanted something that might at least vaguely signal fantasy, as Aunt Maria could be any kind of book at all, but it doesn’t work very well; the book makes only one use of the phrase, in the first paragraph of the book (comparing their family situation to the card game Hearts, aka Black Maria), and to a U.S. eye it otherwise calls up weird, semi-racial connotations. Or at least it does for me, because fantasy so often uses “black” to signal “evil.”

Anyway, the book. It falls into the “somebody is utterly horrible under the guise of being perfectly reasonable; long-suffering protagonists put up with it for too long” sub-genre of Diana Wynne Jones’ books, but as I’ve said in previous posts, it works better here than it does in the short stories. Telling that story at book-length means other aspects come in, diluting the horrible behavior and making it less unrelentingly awful. (Though it’s still plenty awful. Aunt Maria, so far as I’m qualified to tell, is a master of the Manipulation Handbook.)

The general setup for the plot is that Mig and her family (mother and brother) get suckered into spending their Easter holiday visiting — read, waiting hand and foot on — Aunt Maria, who is actually the aunt of Mig and Chris’s recently-deceased father. When they get to Cranbury-on-Sea, they find the town is deeply weird, with zombie-like men, weird clone-like orphan children, and a bevy of old ladies who seem to form some kind of ruling cabal. They rapidly figure out that the surface niceness covers some stuff that isn’t nice at all.

Spoilers!

Reminders: chat and giveaway

#TorChat on Twitter starts in an hour or so; I’m @swan_tower there, and will be fielding questions about steampunk and With Fate Conspire.

Also, you’ve got about twelve hours to enter the giveaway for A Star Shall Fall over on GoodReads.

Writing Fight Scenes: Basic Principles of Fighting

[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]

After (another) hiatus, I’m ready to dive back into the “writing fight scenes” project.

When we last left this discussion, I said I was about to get into the craft issues of how you put a fight scene on the page, but on reflection, there’s one more practical thing I want to cover first, for people without a background in any kind of combat, and that’s the basic principles of fighting. These are things you want to keep in mind when you imagine how your characters are moving, so you don’t end up describing what a more experienced reader will instantly recognize as bad technique.

It’s hard to generalize about every style of fighting out there, but I feel relatively safe in saying they all share one core principle: maximize your ability to hit the other guy, while minimizing his ability to hit you.

There are various ways to do that.

Me at 140 characters or less

So my publicist finally found a way to prod me into getting off my butt and joining Twitter: from 4-5 p.m. EST tomorrow, I’ll be participating in the #torchat discussion of steampunk, alongside Lev A.C. Rosen (@LevACRosen) and George Mann (@George_Mann), with Ay-leen the Peacemaker (@writersyndrome) running the show.

But ignore the bit where that post says my username is @marie_brennan; I inconvenienced my publicist by changing it after making my account. It’s @swan_tower instead, for consistency with my LJ and website names.

I’ve been on Twitter for a little less than a week now, dabbling my toes in the water and getting a feel for what I can say in the space allotted. (Answer: not much.) This is going to be a particular challenge tomorrow, I think; if people ask interesting questions, my impulse is going to be to respond with a paragraph. Wish me luck!

Series Writing: A Conversation with Jim Hines (part one)

Jim Hines (jimhines) and I have been friends for a while, and so when he and I both wrapped up four-book series this summer, I suggested to him that we might have a conversation about the challenges of writing — and most particularly ending — a story that stretches across multiple books. We’ll be sharing the results of that conversation with you today and tomorrow, the first half here, the second half over on Jim’s site.

Who are we? Well, Jim is the author of seven fantasy novels and more than 40 published short stories. He’s written about underdog goblin runts, ass-kicking fairy tale princesses, and is currently writing about a modern-day librarian who pulls ray guns out of SF books. He’s also a moderately popular blogger, and caretaker of various fuzzy beasts. As for me — if you’re not already aware — I’m the author of six fantasy novels and more than 30 published short stories, which puts me just a little behind him. I’ve written about people split in half (mystically, not with an axe) and faeries hiding out underneath London, and I’m currently writing about a nineteenth-century gentlewoman who travels around the world to study dragons and get into trouble, not necessarily in that order. I am a mildly popular blogger, and alas, have no fuzzy beasts to take care of — unless you count my husband.

Our most recent books are, respectively, The Snow Queen’s Shadow and With Fate Conspire.

Without further ado . . . .

***

Marie: There are a million books out there that will tell you how to write a novel, but I’ve never seen one that tells you how to write a series. Nobody tells you how to do that; it’s something you figure out the hard way, after you’ve got a contract — no pressure! And it’s hard enough figuring out what to do in the middle, but sticking the landing . . . that’s the real killer.

With Fate Conspire was really my first experience with ending a series. You had the goblin trilogy, so at least you’d done this once before; but me, all I had under my belt was the doppelganger duology. Those weren’t even conceived of as a series, not originally; I wrote the first book to be a stand-alone, ending on something major happening, and then built the second around how people reacted to that event. It was a before-and-after model, which is relatively simple — kind of like one long book. The Onyx Court series, on the other hand, was very different. Each plot stands more or less alone, but there’s a certain amount of thematic and character arc across the four, which I felt needed to pay off in a satisfying fashion — but without making the book something that would only make sense to people who had read the whole series.

How about you? What was it like writing Goblin War, versus Snow Queen’s Shadow?

Jim: Don’t you love writing a sequel to a book you never planned to write a sequel for? Goblin Quest was similar, very much written to be a complete, standalone book. I like to joke that of course I planned it all out and knew exactly what I was doing for all three books, but that would be total dung.

Writing the second goblin book was difficult. Ending the series was even harder. Even if each book could stand completely on its own, I was still ending a series. Expectations were higher. I wanted something big, something that brought a sense of closure.

I think closure was my biggest concern. I love that people e-mail me and try to convince me to do another goblin book, but generally it’s because they love the characters, not because they feel like they’ve been left hanging. There needs to be a payoff, like you said. And before I could figure out how to write that payoff, I needed to figure out what the underlying themes and questions of the series were.

Unfortunately, I generally don’t figure out my themes until after the fact … if ever. With the princess books, I was halfway through book four when it clicked that I’d spent the whole series deconstructing and challenging “Happily ever after.” So in addition to wrapping up some plot threads (will T get together with S or won’t she?), I needed something that brought closure to the various ever-after storylines. For the goblins, it was more about survival — so I needed to address how Jig and his fellow goblins were going to survive in the long run.

Your turn! What themes did you find yourself struggling to resolve in book four? And I’m curious, was there a point where it just felt too big? Writing one book is overwhelming enough, but when you’re talking about four books worth of story and characters and setting and details…

Marie: Closure is exactly the kicker, isn’t it? I got the same thing in response to the doppelganger books, people wanting me to write a third one. I won’t be surprised at all if I get the same thing after With Fate Conspire. (In fact, I hope so. Otherwise it might mean I’ve ticked my readers off so thoroughly they’ve given up on me . . . .)

In my case, it’s complicated by the fact that I may actually continue the Onyx Court series someday. Each book takes place in a different century, the sixteenth through the nineteenth; it would be cool to add the twentieth and twenty-first to that sequence. But right now that’s just a possibility, and not one that will be happening any time soon. So I had to approach Fate with the mentality of, this is it. This is the end. How do I make it satisfying?

It helped a bit that when I decided to write sequels to the first book, I knew right away what some of the series’ over-arching structure would be. There’s actually three layers to it, which sounds very fancy when I think about it. Midnight Never Come (#1) and A Star Shall Fall (#3) share the characteristic of being more interpersonal, while In Ashes Lie (#2) and With Fate Conspire (#4) are driven by larger-scale conflicts: ABAB. It’s also AABB, in that the first two books take place pre-Enlightenment (an important sea-change in society) and have Lune as one of the major protagonists, whereas the later books are more “modern” in feel and focus on other characters. And finally, it’s ABBA: Ashes and Star form a pair around the Great Fire of London, whereas Midnight and Fate are about the creation and dissolution of the Onyx Hall. I also knew, as soon as I sketched out the progression of the series, that its focus would gradually slide down from the royal court of Midnight Never Come to the lower classes of With Fate Conspire.

But all of that didn’t help me very much when it came time to plot out what was actually going to happen in the fourth book. Before I started writing, I sat down and did something I should have done from the start, namely, made a list of all the characters and locations and so on that had appeared in the story so far. Then I had to decide which ones were going to return in book four. My reflex, as you might be able to sympathize with, was to include ALL of them. There are two problems with that: first, it leaves no room for new stuff to be added, and second . . . this is supposed to be a book about the final days of the Onyx Hall. Lots of people are dead or fled, bits of the palace have disintegrated out of existence, etc. If everybody’s still there, it isn’t very convincing, is it?

Honestly, though, I think the biggest squid to wrestle came from history itself, rather than my own narrative canon. You want to talk “too big”? Try Victorian London on for size! They called it “the monster city” for a good reason. And I wanted to include a variety of stuff, not just the usual upper-class tea parties: Fenian bombings and the construction of the Underground and photography and dockworkers and evolution and all the rest of it. For everything I managed to work into the story, though, there’s four more that just didn’t fit, no matter how cool they were.

Did you feel the same impulse to go back to people and places we’ve seen before? Or did you have a lot of new things you wanted to incorporate? And whichever route you went, how did you try to ensure that you don’t (as you said) leave people hanging? Wanting to see more of the characters you love is one thing, but quitting while there are still unanswered questions or unresolved conflicts is another.

Jim: See, that’s exactly why I don’t write books set in Victorian England…

***

Speaking of “unresolved,” we’ll break there, and you can pick up part two on Jim’s site tomorrow. (I’ll advertise the link once it’s up.) Feel free to post questions either here or there!

Review and giveaway

The Library Journal‘s opinion of With Fate Conspire:

Brennan’s characters breathe life into a landscape rich in detail and vibrant with imagination. This title should please fans of Mercedes Lackey’s “Elemental Masters” series and Elizabeth Bear’s “Promethean Age” series.

And if you’re a Goodreads user, you can enter a giveaway there to win one of ten copies of A Star Shall Fall. It ends on the 22nd, so don’t forget!

ridiculous costumes for your weekend entertainment

Picked these up from wshaffer: the “national costumes” from the Miss Universe beauty pageant.

2009: “This is in no way safe for dial-up, or for your sense of a just and rational universe.”

2010: “Since I have a different criteria than the judges of the pageant – they enjoy ‘bras that look like eyeballs’ and I enjoy ‘Icelandic schoolmarm’ – I wasn’t sure exactly how to go about picking a winner of my own.”

2011: “For some reason, there is a large Miss Universe contingent that forgets, every year, that this contest is coming up, and they make their costumes the night before. This year it was elevated to an art form of sucking, to the point that many of them walked the entire stage with an earnest expression of ‘What the Fuck, Seriously.'”

Warning: not drink-safe. Clear the keyboard area of all hazards before clicking through.

The month, on SF Novelists…

Those who would like an insight into my research process should head over to the SF Novelists site, where I speak in defense of Wikipedia.

Usual drill: comments here are closed, go comment over there instead, no account required, but first-time commenters will have to be fished out of the moderation queue, so please be patient.

The DWJ Project: Puss in Boots

Another slight entry. (I almost combined it with the post on Yes, Dear, but decided to keep all the books in separate posts, for the sake of organization.)

This is a straight-up retelling of the “Puss in Boots” tale, with no particular alteration that I could spot. My copy, which I think was produced for World Book Day, has some nice running illustrated borders at the top and bottom, and small images of the characters scattered throughout. It’s moderately attractive, and so if you want to own a copy of this story, and prefer Diana Wynne Jones’ style to Perrault’s (which, really, why wouldn’t you), then it’s worth having.

The DWJ Project: Yes, Dear

Not much to say about this one. It is, to the best of my knowledge, the only straight-up picture book Diana Wynne Jones ever wrote. That being a genre I’m almost completely ignorant of, I’m more or less completely unqualified to judge whether this one’s any good.

The story, such as it is, concerns a girl who finds a magic leaf, but nobody in her family will believe her about it. The artwork is pleasing enough. If you have a small person in your acquaintance and you want to get them started on DWJ as early as possible, you might have use for this book; otherwise, it’s far too slight to really be appreciated in the same way as her other work.

Followup on “Say Yes to Gay YA”

A few days ago, I linked to a piece by Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith about an agent’s request that they remove or straighten a gay protagonist from their book.

Their article didn’t name the agent or the agency, but today Joanna Stampfel-Volpe at Nancy Coffey Literary & Media Representation came forward (on a site hosted by agent Colleen Lindsay [edit: former agent]) to say that she is the one in question, and furthermore, that “there is nothing in that article concerning our response to their manuscript that is true.”

[Another edit: Joanna Stampfel-Volpe is speaking on behalf of the agency, but herself is not the agent involved in the incident. I apologize for the misreading, which managed to persist through me reading not only her post, but a vast number of comments on both rachelmanija and sartorias‘s journals. Ironically, I’d have less editing to do if I’d stuck with my original draft, where I started out referring to “the agent,” without a name. But then I decided that if I was doing the authors the courtesy of calling them by name, I should do the same for the agent. My error, and I am editing the remainder of this entry to fix it.]

Brown and Smith stand by their original article.

So this has just turned into a case of “they said, she said.” Which has, naturally, made many people leap to conclusions on one side or the other: “Oh, I knew that story sounded fishy from the start; clearly the agent is telling the truth” or “the agent is a lying homophobic liar.” Since it’s doubtful anybody has a recording of the phone call where all of this went down, actual proof is hard to come by. I do think, however, that it’s possible to apply logic and draw at least a few tentative conclusions.

First of all, Brown and Smith didn’t name the agent or agency, and specifically said they didn’t want this to be a witch-hunt against one person; lots of other people have come forward with stories of similar things happening to them, and the statistics on queer representation in YA support the idea that publishing has a problem with non-straight characters (and non-“mainstream” characters in other respects, too: non-white, disabled, etc). The overwhelming focus of their post was to call out for agents, editors, readers, and writers to try and reduce the barriers against diversity in the genre.

Stampfel-Volpe chose — presumably with the permission of The Agent In Question (hereafter TAIQ) — to identify the agency publicly, and both she and Lindsay spend most of their focus on TAIQ and the writers, rather than the larger issue; they accuse Brown and Smith of “exploiting” her. They do call for general diversity as well, but in the end, you can kind of play bingo with that post; for example, Lindsay says TAIQ is a friend of hers, and not a homophobe. Note that the post on Genreville explicitly said TAIQ may or may not entertain personal feelings of homophobia; Brown and Smith don’t have any basis for judging that. You don’t have to hate gay people to contribute to the ways in which they get silenced. It can happen even if you like them, because that’s how institutionalized prejudice works.

Second, there’s the question of why the agency responded publicly. Apparently rumours have been flying behind the scenes, people asking whether TAIQ was the one. There was nothing in the original post, or any public follow-up that I’ve seen, which could possibly have produced those rumours. This creates two immediate possibilities: first, either Brown or Smith gossiped privately before Stampfel-Volpe took it public, or second, that other people have had similar experiences with TAIQ, and speculated based on those experiences.

We can’t answer this one; tracing those rumours to their origin is a lost cause. But as a data point, I offer up this: nowhere, publicly or privately, have I seen Brown and Smith provide a single detail, other than that it was a female agent at an agency that has repped a bestselling YA dystopia, that could have given away TAIQ’s identity. (And yes, I have plenty of evidence to back up both those claims.) This doesn’t disprove the gossip theory, but it does give a data point against it. As for the other, I have no evidence either way. I’m open to other possibilities as well.

Finally — as some people have noted on Stampfel-Volpe’s post — there may be a middle ground here. As I said before, institutionalized prejudice works in less-than-obvious ways. It’s possible the conversation could have been phrased in a way that TAIQ did not see as reinforcing homophobia, which nevertheless could be heard that way. Without the exact words, we can’t judge for ourselves. But I will say, for my own part, that I have a hard time believing this was, from the agent’s side, purely an issue of craft, and not of the marketability of queerness. If the pov in question “didn’t contribute to the actual plot” (Stampfel-Volpe’s words), then how could that be solved by making him straight? If she didn’t actually suggest making him straight — if that’s a misinterpretation — then how could Brown and Smith have subsequently heard anything that could be misconstrued as “if this turns into a series, later on you can show that he’s gay”? And how could the misunderstanding have persisted past Brown saying his sexuality was a moral issue she would not back down from?

Looking at it logically . . . the only thing I can conclude is that either Brown and Smith are outright lying — maybe as a publicity stunt, because they haven’t yet found representation for the book (as various people have begun to accuse them of, over on the agent’s rebuttal post) — or the agency is trying to do very inept damage control for an incident that was, in its outlines if not every detail, more or less like the Genreville post describes. As you can probably guess from my analysis above, my money is on the latter. Is that based partly on personal knowledge of one side and not the other? Sure. I know the authors; I don’t know the agent. I judge them to both be experienced professionals unlikely to manufacture a hissy fit because one particular book hasn’t sold yet. But even without the evidence I’ve seen and you haven’t: one side was careful not to make this personal, and the other side was not. One side offered summaries of what both parties said in the conversation; the other omitted the authors’ responses from their summary. Heck, one side had two people involved, and the other had only one. I know people’s opinions can reinforce each other, but there had to have been a moment where Brown and Smith spoke to each other after the phone call to share their opinions. I’ve heard nothing to suggest either of them started off by saying “I’m not sure that’s what she meant,” and was eventually talked around to the other’s interpretation. If their interpretations matched up from the start, that’s at least a minor form of fact-checking.

When all’s said and done, though, my real conclusion: go read the Genreville post again. Skip the parts about the agent; read the parts about the difficulty in getting non-straight, non-white, non-“mainstream” characters through the filter of authors’ brains, agents’ judgement calls, editors’ purchasing power, bookstores’ support, and readers’ inclinations, all the way to the public eye. That, more than any one book or agent or incident, is the part that matters.

Due to ridiculous amounts of spam (months after and unrelated to this incident), I have locked comments on this post.

I promised to post it ages ago . . . .

. . . so here it is at last, my costume from Sirens last year:

This was for both the masquerade ball at the end of the conference, and the A Star Shall Fall launch party beforehand. I described it as “non-specifically Lune,” in that it’s her colors and an Elizabethan style, but not me trying to actually dress as her.

(The other person in the photo, incidentally, was one of my two frontrunners for winner of the costume contest, until somebody solved my problem by mentioning that she was staff and therefore ineligible. Alas, I can’t seem to find a shot of the actual winner, who dressed as an aspen fairy, and was gorgeous. But the one you see there — her armor! It’s made from a cut-up-basketball! And she brought a RAPIER!!! <swoon>)

So yeah. That was my costume. I paid somebody to make it for me; I’ve had the fabric and design planned for ages, but never had the time (nor quite the gumption) to attempt something that difficult. This, my friends, is why god invented SCA costumers. 🙂

Now I just need to find more excuses to wear it . . . .