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.)

ジェットで出るの

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 . . . .

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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!

And then there were thirteen.

I generally count a night’s work as belonging to preceding day, even though the clock says otherwise, but in this case I wanted to be sure I finished before we technically passed over into August.

A Natural History of Dragons is done, at 86,174 words.

(God, I love writing a shorter novel for once.)

regarding Norway

Via fjm and Charlie Stross, a number that puts the tragedy in Norway into perspective: 80 people dead out of their population is the equivalent of 5000 out of the United States. (Though the final number may have changed since that was posted.) That’s the scale of loss Norway has suffered.

And it’s a very, very targeted loss. The “summer camp” was a political one, organized by the social-democratic Labour Party. The youths killed there were politically engaged, passionate about their cause. Some of them might well have been potential Prime Ministers, Members of Parliament, movers and shakers in the Labour Party’s future. It’s like killing thousands of the most committed Young Democrats, or Young Republicans.

As most people know by now, Breivik is not an Islamic terrorist (contrary to the utterly unfounded assertions made by various media figures, at least in the United States, immediately following news of the attacks); he is a self-identified right-wing Christian who opposes multiculturalism and the spread of Muslims in Europe. This post, and this quote from it, sums up the inequality of the reactions based on who’s to blame:

“[T]hey’re now pleading for the world not to do what they’ve spent their careers doing — assigning collective blame for an act of terror through guilt-by-association.”

And this one . . . this one just makes me want to punch people in the face.

But you know what gives me hope? A quote, whose source I have now lost, from (I think) the Prime Minister of Norway, to the effect that “the proper response to an attack on democracy is more democracy.” Amen. I hope the Norwegians don’t surrender their ideals because of this terrorist’s actions.

In which I pretend to be a statistician

Since there’s recently been another round of discussion about gender balance (or imbalance) in SF/F, I thought it might be a nice time to collate a bit of data I’ve been wondering about for a while.

Generally people tend to perceive a particular group as being gender-balanced when it’s about 25% female, and if you get up to 40%, they think it’s dominated by women. So it’s useful to ask myself: if my instinct is that a short story market — in this case, Beneath Ceaseless Skies — publishes a lot of women, am I right?

Cut to spare you lots and lots of numbers.

Two things about Sirens

shveta_thakrar is hiring herself out as a copyeditor and proofreader to raise money to go to Sirens this fall; read her post for more details. (You can also just donate directly if you wish.) You all know I think Sirens is a wonderful, wonderful event, and I’m going back this year myself, so if those services sound useful to you, pop on over there and let her know.

Which brings me to the second thing. Just yesterday I was bemoaning the fact that I have so few costuming opportunities these days, compared to when I lived in Bloomington. Then it occurred to me that I have an absolutely smashing opportunity coming up this fall: the masquerade ball at Sirens!

The theme for Sirens this year is “monsters.” I could costume as one of those, or as somebody who hunts the same. The sensible thing to do would be to raid my closet and re-use a costume I already have — but who wants to be sensible? And really, the only monster-type thing I have is my old Hel costume, but I am damned if I’m going to repeat the makeup and hair you see in that icon; it was a bad idea once, and I’m not stupid enough to do it twice. I have a couple of other options, but one isn’t exciting and the other doesn’t count as “re-using a costume” so much as “re-using an accessory and buying a new costume to go with it.”

This is where you, my faithful LJ readers, come in. Who or what should I dress up as? Get as creative as you like; just remember that a) I’m not going to cut or dye my hair and b) whatever I do has to be easily transportable via plane. Suggest as many things as you feel inspired to, and let me know if you think somebody else’s suggestions sound good. I promise there will be pictures afterward. (And, er, I’ll get around to posting the pics I have from last year. I swear I will.)

Have at it!

The DWJ Project: The Magicians of Caprona

In Verona Caprona, the families of the Montagues Montanas and Capulets Petrocchis have been feuding since, well, forever. To make matters worse, although they’re the most powerful spell-making families in Caprona, the virtue seems to be going out of their work; their spells are failing, right when an alliance of Florence, Pisa, and Siena is threatening Caprona’s borders. As with Romeo and Juliet, it’s up to the kids to bridge the rift their parents won’t cross — though in this case it involves less death, more Punch and Judy shows.

This book takes place in the same world as The Lives of Christopher Chant and Charmed Life (the same specific world — Twelve-A), but is more like Witch Week or Conrad’s Fate in that it uses Chrestomanci for a side character. This one is generally happier than either of those; among other things, it goes the opposite direction from the usual pattern of neglected or abused children, and puts our characters into huge, boisterous, occasionally contentious but entirely loving families. I especially love the way that fantasy gets integrated into the family dynamic in an understated way: aunts and cousins popping out of the woodwork to help or interfere with things isn’t a coincidence, it’s a function of the magic that underlies them all.

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to the spoilers we go.

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one step closer

Here’s a stage I’ve never had before, in the book-publication process: I just received a stack of covers for With Fate Conspire. Like, the paper wrap for the hardcover. It’s like a real book, just without the book! And that will be coming soon. (I am so excited, y’all.)

And speaking of excited, here’s what Publishers Weekly had to say:

Gifted storyteller and world-builder Brennan returns to the Onyx Court, a faery city that coexists with London, in her fourth historical fantasy (after 2010’s A Star Shall Fall). As the Onyx Court is threatened by 19th-century advances in technology, the faeries and humans increasingly come into conflict. Eliza O’Malley is caught between the two worlds, both of which are often cruel and indifferent to her desperate search for her childhood friend, Owen, who was captured by the faeries seven years before. Unless Eliza can find Dead Rick, the dog-man who betrayed them, Owen will be lost to the faery kingdom forever. Series readers and fans of the Tam Lin myth will be captivated by this complex and vibrant depiction of a magical Victorian era.

The funny thing is, I honestly didn’t think of the Tam Lin overtones until I read this, though obviously they’re there.

Onward to the shelves . . . .

The DWJ Project: Witch Week

The back cover of my copy of Witch Week calls it “a wild comic fantasy from a master of the supernatural.”

Um.

There are certainly funny bits in this book. (The mop-and-hoe incident comes to mind.) But “wild comic fantasy”? On a micro scale, Larwood House manages to hit almost every abusive-boarding-school trope there is: never warm enough, dreary food, teachers ranging from neglectful to cruel, and all the student-level nastiness you would expect. On a macro scale, the world is one where witches are still burned at the stake, and since half the students at Larwood are witch-orphans, that means half the characters live in fear of the inquisitors coming after them. You know how I’ve been talking about the way Diana Wynne Jones’ books contain these hard edges, but buried in a way that lets you deal with them on your own terms? The hard edges here are scarcely buried at all. I think Witch Week is a very good book, but I almost never re-read it, because I can’t lose sight of how grim it is.

Which is not to say it’s unrelentingly bleak; it isn’t. (I don’t want to scare off anybody who hasn’t read it already.) But you may spend a goodly chunk of the time outraged, before the narrative gets to the point where it says “you know how this world is really messed-up and wrong? Yeah. That isn’t an accident; it’s the real conflict underlying everything else.”

Onward to the spoilers.

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holy cow, they liked it

You have to be a subscriber to Kirkus Reviews to see the whole thing (or, y’know, have a publicist who shares it with you) — but here is a quote from the (ahem) STARRED REVIEW I just received:

Brennan’s grasp of period detail is sure, as the Dickensian squalor of most mortal sections of the city has its mirror in the teeming desperation of the Goblin Market. Despite the cast of thousands, many of the characters have real presence, and after a slow start the plot coheres and swirls forward into a series of tense and surprising conclusions. An absorbing finale to a series that has grown richer with every installment.

There’s been a general pattern of reviews of the series echoing that last phrase, and I have to say, I’ll take that graph, thankyouverymuch. I guess maybe from a sales perspective it would be better to have an amazingly awesome first book, and then tail off afterward (presuming your readership doesn’t all vanish), but artistically? Hearing that I’ve done better with each attempt is very satisfying.