Answers, Round Two

Continuing with the open question thread. Head over there if you want to add anything to the list.

***

teleidoplex asked, If somebody were to ship your characters, what would be the _most wrong of all wronginess_ ship you could possibly imagine, and why?

A corollary to this: if someone were to write a crossover between the Onyx Court books and another series, what cross would you most want to see, and what cross would make your soul shrivel and die in your body?

Oh good lord.

Okay, crossover first. I actually discussed at one point with matociquala, but never followed through on, the two of us running a joint fanfic contest for her Blood and Iron/Ink and Steel and my Midnight Never Come. Because they are Elizabethan faerie fantasies that almost but not quite step on each other’s narrative toes, and it just sort of seems natural to see what might happen when you overlay one on the other.

What would make my soul shrivel and die? I dunno, really. Possibly my brain is protecting me against the answers, because I can’t think of anything that seems suitably awful. But then, I’m not very good at the crossover thing to begin with: either my brain mugs me with the perfect idea (e.g. Hogfather/Nightmare Before Christmas) or it turns up a total blank. I’d probably vote for some really bad Elizabethan faerie fantasy, but I try to avoid reading those, so I can’t name one suitably awful. Maybe a time-traveling crossover with, like, Mercedes Lackey’s modern-day elf-punk urban fantasies, just for the tonal disconnect.

Most wrong of all wronginess ship . . . well, let’s avoid things that are wrong in the “that person is underage, yo” way (not that there are a lot of kids in my stories) and try for brain-melty wrongness instead. Leaving short stories out of it — because I’m too lazy to think through them all — let’s go with Nadrett (from With Fate Conspire) and the Goodemeades (from any point in the series timeline). Because, just, what? No. (I was going to pair them with Invidiana, but really, if you tilt your head at the right angle and squint, that one could maybe make sense. Nadrett, on the other hand — no. Just no.)

***

tooth_and_claw asked, Are you coming to visit Bloomington anytime soon? 😉

Bloomington, probably not. GenCon, possibly, as it would be a much more effective bang for my plane-ticket buck. A lot will depend on how next summer shapes up.

***

sandmantv asked, What is a villain?

I’ve talked about this issue before, but that was mostly from the angle of “why I prefer to write antagonists instead of villains.” For me, I think the break point has to do with whether the character in question believes they’re acting for the greater good, or knows they’re acting selfishly and doesn’t care. The nobleman who thinks sheep need a shepherd can be an antagonist, even if he’s horribly mistreating his peasants. The nobleman next door who truly only cares about his own pleasure can be a villain, even if his peasants are actually better-off than his neighbor’s.

I don’t know if that makes any sense or not outside of my own head, but in here, it works.

Answers, Round One

I forgot to mention, when I said you could ask me questions, that you can, if you wish, ask me more than one. So, y’know. If you blew yours on the Cathars or something, or even if you didn’t, you’re welcome to ask more.

(Yeah, I knew as soon as I put the Cathars into that list, that at least one person was going to jump on it.)

Having said that, I guess I might as well pick out the heresy-related questions and answer those first.

***

arkessian asked, So, the Cathar heresy then…

Most of what I know about them, I got from Stephen O’Shea’s book The Perfect Heresy: The Life and Death of the Cathars. Which is eminently readable, in terms of its writing; it hooked me by describing the variation of accents within modern France thusly: “Whereas the hubbub of cafe debate in say, Normandy, sounds like a mellifluous exchange between articulate cows, the tenor of the same discussion in Languedoc is akin to a musician tuning a large, and very loud, guitar.”

I’m not a very good judge of whether it’s a good history of the Albigensian Crusade, for the aforementioned reason that this is basically the only thing I’ve ever read about it. I liked it, though, and felt it did a very good job of conveying why Catharism (which is, of course, not what its adherents called it; they just thought of themselves as “good Christians”) was a threat to the foundations of medieval monarchy, not to mention papal authority. And it horrified me with tales of just how that war was conducted, which I think is about the right result.

As for the Cathars themselves — well. I don’t agree with a lot of what they thought (I tend not to agree with any religion that views the world as inherently bad, and escaping it as the ideal goal), but I am pleased by some of the odd pragmatism that can crop up when you believe in the transmigration of the soul. Okay, you should be a hard-core ascetic trying to leave this fallen world behind . . . but if you’re not ready for that in this lifetime, maybe the next. Also, maybe you were a different sex last lifetime, so really, how much does it matter what sex you are now? Europe might be a fascinatingly different place if the Cathars had somehow managed to win out. But they didn’t — they got rather brutally obliterated instead — so that sort of makes me feel automatically sorry for them.

***

mrissa asked, What I want to know about the Cathars is why they didn’t use their heresy as an excuse to get more names. They seem to have kept using the same three or four names for everybody. This is not an ideal system, I feel.

Well, it was the thirteenth century, which I believe was the height of the Great Nomenclatural Famine in Europe, so there weren’t enough names to go around to begin with, and of course Innocent III moved very quickly to cut off their baptismal supply lines. But that didn’t bother the Cathars nearly as much as he intended it to, because of that whole reincarnation thing; they preferred to limit themselves to a small pool of names, because it increased the odds that you would bear the same name from one lifetime to the next. And, with any luck, the sheer boredom and lack of variety would encourage people to let go of their attachment to this sinful world all the sooner. So it was kind of a win-win for them (unlike the bit with the swords).

***

And with that, I sleep.

Birthday Egotism, Level 31 edition

Long-time readers of this journal know I have a tradition of “birthday egotism” posts, wherein I stave off any birthday-related depression by making myself post, without deprecation or qualification, about the awesome things I’ve done in the last year.

This year, I find myself less in the mood for that — though not for any depressive reason. (I am, for example, damn proud of the fact that one of this year’s achievements was the completion of the Onyx Court series, ridiculous levels of research and all.) Instead, I think I’ll indulge in a different kind of egotism, and make this an Ask Me a Question post.

You can ask about anything: writing, reading, gaming, sewing, movies, music, travel, favorite breakfast foods, my opinion of the Cathar heresy. I’ll put the answers in new posts.

And now, I’m off to enjoy my first day of being level 31. (With thanks to yuki_onna, from whom I believe I stole the phrase.)

Bookday plus one

I neglected to mention before that With Fate Conspire will be a Main Selection for the Science Fiction Book Club’s holiday catalogue. That means all four books of the series have been picked up by the SFBC, which makes me really happy.

Woke up this morning to an e-mail containing my Booklist review; I can’t link to it, but I can quote Frieda Murray:

Brennan’s research is impeccable, and her pictures of a London not too well known on this side of the pond are first-class, as is the weaving of the human and fae settings. Her characters, both major and minor, are well drawn and memorable. Brennan’s own fans, historical-fantasy fans, and lovers of classic fantasy will find this a must-read.

Also, I’m featured over at Mindy Klasky’s blog, as part of the “Inside Track” feature, wherein authors go “behind the scenes” of their books. If you’d like to see me talk about the waltz I did with dates in this book, head on over there.

Let’s get Conspiring!

Thaaaaaaat’s right, folks . . . it’s the street date for With Fate Conspire.

I don’t mind admitting that I’m a little nervous about this one. I have a lot of reasons to be: it’s the end of the series (at least for now), which always raises the questions of “did I stick the landing?” Also, it’s my first hardcover release, which brings extra hopes and expectations. Also also, well, let’s face it: this is a rough time for the publishing industry, what with Borders going belly-up. Nobody really knows what that’s going to do to sales figures, but it’s going to be rocky, that’s for sure.

Which is by way of introducing a small plea: if you intend to buy this book, then sooner is better than later and in a store is better than online (unless you’re buying the ebook, of course). And if you like the series, tell people about it. (Heck, tell people about it even if you don’t like it! My ego will survive.)

Onward to the reviews!

Liz Bourke at Tor.com approves of the working-class and Irish bent of the book.

Cat Barson at Steampunk Chronicle reviews the book for fans of steampunk, and mostly likes it.

Sarah at Bookworm Blues hasn’t read the previous books in the series, and also isn’t a fan of faerie fantasy, but still enjoyed this one.

Also, I have the Big Idea slot today at John Scalzi’s blog Whatever (which previously hosted a Big Idea for Midnight Never Come). And finally, SF Signal has included With Fate Conspire as one of the three contenders in their most recent Book Cover Smackdown.

Now I need to decide whether my professional duty to go see my book in the store is strong enough to overcome the incredible soreness of my quads . . . ah, the downsides of biking for such errands.

(Re)visiting the Wheel of Time: New Spring

[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 from Knife of Dreams onward.]

It occurs to me that it’s no longer accurate to title these posts “Revisiting the Wheel of Time,” since from here on out I’m not re-reading stuff; I’m reading it for the first time. But calling them “Visiting the Wheel of Time” sounds odd, so we’ll go with the parentheses approach.

The schedule, of course, has been one book every two months — but Crossroads of Twilight being the wasteland that it is, and New Spring being so short (it isn’t really; it’s 122K, which is perfectly respectable, but svelte next to the usual doorstops), I decided to “double up” for this round. It was the right decision; there isn’t really enough here to make me feel it would be worth that kind of pace.

It’s an odd book, really, and occupies an odd position in the series: a prequel written while Jordan was mired in the deepest part of the bog. It started out as a novella, then got expanded to a novel; I know I read the original version, but don’t remember exactly what it consisted of. (Did it start with Lan’s arrival in Canluum? I feel like it might, since that starts with a line about “new spring,” and it’s also where Lan comes back into the story, after being largely absent for the first 200 pages.) Sometimes novellas get expanded by tacking on more material before or after — and I’m pretty sure that’s at least a big part of what happened here — but I don’t know if the novella material also got expanded or altered.

I’m also not sure who the book is intended for. New readers? There’s so much in here that doesn’t get explained in the least, like who the Aiel are and why the rest of the continent is at war with them; I don’t even think the story gets around to explaining what exactly happened to Malkier until near the end of the book. Current readers? There’s too much explanation of things that were made abundantly clear long ago, and on the flip side, there just isn’t enough in here that’s new — that isn’t expansion of things we’d already been told about in the main books.

Is it possible for an author to fanfic his own work?

a sewing question for the internets

I keep feeling there’s some obvious way to make this simpler, but I don’t know what. Maybe you, O Ever-Wise Internets, do.

I have a circular piece of fabric that needs be sewn onto the surface of another, larger piece. The circle is small (diameter ~3 inches) and has raw edges. Dealing with those is the issue at hand. Bonus points for a solution that minimizes the hassle if I have to remove the circle at a later date and transfer it to a new piece of fabric.

Here are the possible solutions I've thought up.

photo organization software

Dear Internets,

What is your preferred program for organizing photos on your computer?

(‘Cause I need something better than what I’ve been using, stat. What I have been using = uh, nothing, actually, just the Windows file system.)

Thanks,
Nearly One Thousand Photos From Japan

Tadaima.

<is back>

<iz ded>

At some point — when my brain has congealed once more out of its current liquified state — I will post not only about my trip to Japan (which will likely take several posts) but about bilingualism and the difficulties thereof. Because I am freaking exhausted, y’all, and only part of it is the jet lag; a much larger part is the effort of spending twelve days attempting to function in a language for which I have only marginal speaking/listening ability and even less reading.

(A lot of you probably have the same impulse I do, which is to read any text put in front of you, because it’s there. You wind up wishing you could turn that damned impulse off when the text is in scribbles the average local five-year-old could read more quickly than you. But you can’t. Or at least I couldn’t.)

Short form: Japan was indeed, to borrow a phrase, “oh-kamis-why-is-it-so-humid-melty-death-hot,” but also awesome. I got to revisit a few places from my 2002 trip, and see a lot more new places, and there will, of course, be pictures. Major, major thanks go to starlady38 and kurayami_hime, who served as our interpreters and guides, which I think is the only reason my brain didn’t go into full-bore shutdown from language fatigue; both of them are hella more fluent than I am, and also guided me and kniedzw to an abundance of sights and experiences (the light-up at Kiyomizu-dera! Punk kaiseki! Beach party! Takarazuka!) that we would not have found our way to alone. We are grateful little ducklings.

And now to finish getting crap out of the way, so I can go to bed when this current spate of energy runs out.

Also!

Almost forgot this. (Technically it’s now the 11th where I am, but I’m pretty sure it’s still the 10th for most of you, so it isn’t exactly late.)

The last excerpt from With Fate Conspire is up; one last scene apiece for our protagonists. You can read those, or start at the beginning and read the whole thing.

(But be warned: the excerpt skips over some intervening bits, so as to focus on Eliza and Dead Rick; when you pick up the book, don’t overlook those!)

Twenty days and counting . . . .

a quick open letter from the land of vacation

Dear Dad,

Thankyouthankyouthankyou for teaching me how to do the whole f-stop adjustment thing. OMG. I’m finally able to take the kind of artsy, short depth of field pictures I’ve been trying to achieve since, oh, 1997 or thereabouts. And some of the results are AMAZING.

Love,
your now exceedingly trigger-happy photographer-daughter

(P.S. to everybody else: if you have to come to Japan during the summer, aim for Obon; the special events make up for the way you melt to death in the heat and humidity. If any of my shots from the light-up at Kiyomizu-dera come out, they alone will have been worth all the suffering.)

ゾェットでć‡șるぼ

So many icons, and yet none that are appropriate for Japan. Well, have Neuschwanstein instead.

Heading out tomorrow morning for vacation. Like, an honest-to-god, picture-taking, sightseeing, hang-out-with-starlady38-and-kurayami_hime kind of trip. We’ll be hitting Kyoto, Fukuoka, and Nagasaki, and I will find out if I’ve buffed my Japanese language skills up to survival level or not (my guess: not), and it will all (I hope) be lovely.

. . . I don’t feel remotely ready. But as I’ve been telling various people, I think that’s because my brain’s baseline standard for international travel has become “London trip,” which is not a good comparison at all; by the time the fourth one of those rolled around, I could pretty much do it in my sleep. Last time I was in Japan was 2001, and it was for five days. Also I speak, like, 1/1000th of the language. So yeah, it looks less manageable. But I remind myself: so long as I have my passport and a credit card, most problems can be surmounted.

Back on the 18th. Until then, blogging will be sporadic at best, though I’ll do what I can. And there will be pictures afterward, oh yes, there most definitely will.

Signal Boost: Return of the DDoS

Originally posted by at Signal Boost: Return of the DDoS

For those wanting to know more about the recent DDoS attacks, yes, it looks like it was the Russian government trying to shut down the dissidents again.

As I said last time, while it’s frustrating not to have access, LJ is a lot more than a social network platform. From the article:

“LiveJournal isn’t just a social network. It’s also a platform for organizing civic action. Dozens of network projects and groups mobilize people to solve specific problems — from defending the rights of political prisoners to saving endangered historic architecture in Moscow.”

So while I know many are considering the move over to Dreamwidth and other such sites, supporting LJ is a way we can help support those who use it for more than a writing/roleplaying/social venue.

Also, as a FYI, LJ is giving paid users effected by the outage two weeks of paid time as compensation.

(I don’t know if my addendum is going to get carried over with that “Boost the Signal” button — which, btw, is a beautiful little device — but yeah. While I am likely to be fiddling around with my blog setup in the near future, I am not abandoning LJ, and one of my reasons is what’s described above. This isn’t a situation of “LJ sucks,” it’s “LJ is used heavily used in Russia for political activism, and those who don’t like it keep attacking their platform.” Perversely, therefore, every time they attack it, I get more determined to stay. I will likely set up something on my own domain, because I really ought to have my own blog directly under my own control, but right now, I have no intention of leaving LJ.)

The DWJ Project: The Pinhoe Egg

Last of the Chrestomanci books.

Marianne Pinhoe comes from one of several “dwimmer” families, who practice a kind of magic that they keep hidden from Chrestomanci and his establishment. Doing that gets harder, though, when Gammer — the old woman who rules the Pinhoes — loses her wits, and a war ensues between the Pinhoes and the neighboring Farleighs. Marianne also gives Cat Chant a strange egg from Gammer’s attic, which leads to further trouble.

I quite like this one, though not to the degree that I like the ones I read as a kid. It’s . . . pleasantly comfortable, if that makes sense. I enjoy seeing Cat now that he’s found his feet, and Marianne is fun, too, especially since she’s got the “large, boisterous family” thing going on that we saw in The Magicians of Caprona.

As for the spoilers . . . .

(more…)

save me from my “friends”

So I fear it may have been lost in the DDoS attacks on LJ, but I’m looking for suggestions as to what costume I should wear to the Sirens masquerade ball. The theme is “monsters,” and so far, the only idea proposed — by some people who claim to be my friends <g> — is that I should dress up as Sarah Palin. I therefore look to you, oh Other LJ Readers Besides Those Two, to give me some better alternatives.

I like costuming a lot; I just don’t have any good ideas right now. And depending on what I settle on, I’ll need some lead time to prepare it, hence asking now. Any thoughts?

clearing the browser decks for the trip

If five things make a post, I think I have several posts here.

LAN party for a new game bars women rather than make the men behave — money quote: “Why are you protecting the assholes among you, gentlemen? Why do you value their participation so much that it’s worth creating a space so “dangerous” for women that they must be banned from the premises? What do the assholes bring to your experience that is so irreplaceable? Is the game better when you can throw around vicious descriptions of rape and sexual assault? Does winning feel more awesome when you can hammer your opponent with anti-gay slurs?”

How to Land Your Kid in Therapy — I think there’s some definite truth to the notion that trying to make childhood perfectly happy just creates problems later on.

JSTOR “theft” and problems with academic publishing — I learned about fiction publishing before I got anywhere near the academic side, and was appalled to discover I’d be expected to give up my copyright.

Why Is Fantasy Always in a British Accent? — I admit I fall prey to this, too. Regardless of the actual linguistic reality of what, say, an Elizabethan accent sounded like, in my head, “American” accents didn’t exist before a couple hundred years ago at most, and therefore it’s weird to use them for settings older than, say, the steampunk era. (Also, not unrelated: have you noticed that in American film, British accents can stand in for pretty much anything foreign? Italian, Arabic, whatever. Though I was fascinated by the way that Enemy at the Gates gave the Russian characters British accents, and the Germans American ones.)

Teaching About Race: 101 — so, if you scroll down a ways, the post includes photos of people born before 1930, and asks you to assign a race to each one as if you were a census-taker back then. (The answers and explanations are in the first comment, further down.) It’s a fascinating glimpse into how those categories were and are constructed.

The Decent Human Being’s Guide to Getting Laid at Atheist Conferences — which of course applies to a lot of other contexts, too. Posted in light of the Dawkins flap.

The Republicans Exit History — Roger Ebert sums up a lot of my thoughts.

News Redux — some very, very good points about the crappy layout of the New York Times website, and news sites in general. I don’t agree with everything there, but it’s a good start.

Boobs Don’t Work That Way — the first Tumblr I’ve felt compelled to subscribe to. Lots of horrifying failures of anatomy, like this one, with the occasional bit of useful instruction or gender-flipped examples. (If that last one makes you want to spork your eyes out, well, that’s about right.)

Tropes vs. Women #5: The Mystical Pregnancy — if I could find a place to link to that showed the whole video series, I’d do it. Lots of good points about the way women get depicted in narrative, and the problems with same.

A reminder that an artist friend of mine does good work.

Also, shveta_thakrar is more than two-thirds of the way to her goal for Sirens, and is offering up some stories.

Okay, I think that’s enough to keep Firefox from crashing out of sheer overload. (Your brains may be another matter.)

yes, I do mean to use that icon

Looks like Tor is doing a giveaway for A Star Shall Fall on their site. All you have to do is leave a comment on that post there. So if you’re looking to pick up the book, go forth and comment! (They’re actually giving away three copies, it looks like.)

Also, in Fate-related news, this in from the Romantic Time review: “Appealing characters, a fully realized historical setting and more than a touch of steampunk flavoring collide to create a book that is difficult to put down.” So that’s pretty good.

And now I go back to preparing for my trip.

Books read, July 2011

A lot of short things, a lot of re-reads; it was about all I had the brain-power for. But it adds up to a reasonably respectable-looking list.

The Merlin Conspiracy, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

Warlock at the Wheel, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

Sense and Sensibility, adapted by Nancy Butler and Sonny Liew. Comic-book adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel. Not entirely successful; it depends way too much on captions to explain stuff, and (naturally) the dialogue bubbles tend to the extremely wordy side. But I’ll say this for it: I felt like it told the story about as completely as the film adaptation I’ve seen did (the one with Alan Rickman et al). That’s pretty good, for something this length. (I haven’t read the original novel — I know; I know — so that’s the only metric I have.)

Charmed Life, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

Conrad’s Fate, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

Tokyo Babylon, vol. 2, CLAMP.
Tokyo Babylon, vol. 3, CLAMP.
Tokyo Babylon, vol. 4, CLAMP.
Tokyo Babylon, vol. 5, CLAMP.
Tokyo Babylon, vol. 6, CLAMP.
Tokyo Babylon, vol. 7, CLAMP. The Parallelsfic exchange reminded me that I’d started a re-read of this manga series a while ago, so I went back to it. Tokyo Babylon is urban fantasy in a way that not many urban fantastists try to achieve: it spiritualizes the way the city (in this case, Tokyo) chews people up and spits the bones back out again. It isn’t happy, as that description might suggest; it’s extra not happy once you get into the character-level metaplot. But the individual stories resolve . . . not hopefully, I guess, but well. The episodes basically all concern Subaru using magic to lay ghosts to rest, and his empathy and patience are kind of beautiful.

Crossroads of Twilight, Robert Jordan. Discussed elsewhere.

Wyrd Sisters, Terry Pratchett. So I started reading Sourcery twice and kept getting distracted from it; the beginning just didn’t hook me. I’m sure it’s a perfectly fine book and I’ll go back to it someday, but for now, I said “screw it” and went ahead to the book with Granny Weatherwax and Shakespeare and other such fabulous things. This is probably my favorite Discworld so far, simply because I want to copy down into my quotes notebook entire paragraphs of Granny Weatherwax thinking about theatre and words and art and truth.

Pride and Prejudice, adapted by Nancy Butler and Hugo Petrus. Another comic-book adaptation; this one was written before Sense and Sensibility, but I read it second. I found it the less successful of the two, but that may be because I know the source better. The intro talks about how Butler knew she’d be pilloried if she changed around Austen’s story too much; me, I wish she had, to make it work better within the medium. Then she might have avoided the heavy reliance on captions and two-panel scenes and all the rest. (On the other hand, it could be a stellar case study in why a faithful adaptation is not necessarily a good one. If that sort of thing is useful to you.)

Witch Week, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

Ovid, David Wishart. I nearly bounced off this on the first page because the first-century Roman narrator called the woman who came to hire him a “tough cookie.” But it ended up being a nicely intricate (and well-researched) historical mystery — “mystery” of the political sort, rather than the evidence-and-prosecution sort; it revolves around Emperor Tiberius’ refusal to let Ovid’s ashes be returned to Rome — so if you aren’t turned off by mythological and historical allusions rubbing shoulders with hard-boiled detective tropes, I do recommend this one. And there’s more in the series, too.

The Magicians of Caprona, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Jules Verne. I don’t think I’ve ever read any Verne before, though I know of his work pretty thoroughly. This made for a fascinating read, in that you’re 40% of the way through the book before they even start her descent; everything prior to that is a) discovery of the notion and b) the logistics of getting from Germany to an obscure mountain in Iceland. And then at that, they don’t even make it all the way to the center of the earth! But it reminded me a lot of the Golden Age SF that came later, with its scientist-heroes and unabashed willingness to spend pages on the discussion of scientific theories.

His Majesty’s Dragon, Naomi Novik. Re-read, because I needed to get my brain into nineteenth-century-dragon gear early in the month, and then didn’t finish it until the month was nearly over. It remains a very fun read, especially if you’re fond of Patrick O’Brian and his ilk; the blending of the Napoleonic Wars (and the British naval mindset therein) with dragons is just cool.

Traveling for a chunk of this month, so I expect the next list will be shorter.

The DWJ Project: Mixed Magics

Like Sophie, I am remorseless, but my remorselessness lacks method: I failed to actually determine whether there was a particular subset of the short story collections I could obtain so as to cover all the short stories, with a minimum of duplication. As a result, I’ve already read two of the four stories here in Warlock at the Wheel, and technically I also read “Stealer of Souls” on its own, since I ordered the World Book Day edition of that before I realized it was in (and subsequently ordered) Mixed Magics.

Anyway. “Warlock at the Wheel” and “The Sage of Theare” I’ve reported on. As for the other two stories:

“Stealer of Souls” pleased me all out of proportion by answering the morbid question that’s been lurking in the back of my head for years: what happened to Gabriel de Witt? If he still had eight lives left when Christopher was a boy, then it must have taken a heck of a lot of dying to get rid of him between then and Christopher’s tenure as Chrestomanci. Turns out it’s more or less like I thought, to whit, once you get old enough your lives just start slipping away via the same natural causes that everybody else suffers from. You don’t get extended life or anything, just more chances to bounce back. And it makes sense to me that, being as old as he was, and passing in that fashion, he would abdicate and let Christopher take over. (So for a little while there, they had three nine-lifed enchanters around. Man, knowing that we’ll never get any more of these books has apparently stuck my brain in fanfic gear, because now I want a story about the one time Gabriel, Christopher, and Cat had to team up to lay a smackdown on something.)

Oh, you want me to talk about the actual story? I liked it, though I kept being irresistibly distracted by the fact that the guy was calling himself Neville Spiderman. It was good to see some follow-through with Tonino, and the whole thing with the souls was suitably creepy. Not the most memorable, but not bad, either.

“Carol Oneir’s Hundredth Dream” scratched the “so what happened with Oneir, anyway?” itch, though only tangentially. I liked it for its commentary on storytelling and creativity, and also for watching Christopher be a politely sarcastic bastard (which pretty much never gets old for me). I think I wanted it to be longer, so it would have more space to develop things, but what we got was pleasant enough.

Thirty, or rather Twenty-Nine, Days

I didn’t want to steal any thunder from yesterday’s announcement, so you get your Fate-related goodies today.

This time, it’s the soundtrack! Just the listing thereof; I haven’t had a chance to try and set up an iTunes mix. Also, the usual caveat applies, that although none of the track titles have outright spoilers, they do provide hints of where the story is going; read at your own risk.

But wait! There’s more!

Backing up for a moment to Midnight Never Come instead, you can now buy a print of Avery Liell-Kok’s portrait of Invidiana (as seen to the right, there) from her shop on Etsy. There’s lots of other great art there, too, including some painted parasols (which might appeal to a few of you), so I encourage you to take a look through it all, and see if anything catches your fancy.

I’ll be out of town when the next spot in the countdown rolls around (which will feature the last bit of the excerpt), so it may be a bit delayed — not sure what my internet access situation will be. I’ll try to get it up at something like the right time, though. In the meanwhile, enjoy!