this one’s for all the gamer geeks

Tonight’s Random Game Concept that sprang up in my head:

(Old) World of Darkness game, cross-genre. Let the players make any kind of PCs they like — Kindred, mages, changelings, mummies, whatever, and you play a short prologue.

Then the barriers get torn down. All of them. The walls between this world and the Umbra, Shadowlands, Dreaming, Yin and Yang Worlds, all the rest of it.

And you run the rest of the chronicle as a post-apocalyptic Exalted game.

It’s a new Mythic Age, not the one from the Exalted books. You’re throwing out all the setting information, so you don’t have to worry about why your ex-mummy Solar Exalted is cooperating with an ex-mage Sidereal, etc. You get all the fun of apocalyptic world destruction, with GIANT MAGIC POWERS, a legitimate reason why the PCs might be able to really reshape all of reality. It would be EPIC BEYOND WORDS.

. . . I think I want to run this.

And sixty thousand words!

So, after a very difficult decision (in which I had to convince myself that buying extra icon space on LJ would only lead go overload in the long run), I have settled on not one but two winners for the A Natural History of Dragons icon contest. First, scottakennedy, for something wonderfully period (though I may ask you to switch the text just as soon as I make up my mind what I want!), and second, pathseeker42 for hitting a target she didn’t even know she was aiming at. From the book:

When I was seven, I found a sparkling lying dead on a bench at the edge of the woods which formed the back boundary of our garden, that the groundskeeper had not yet cleared away. With much excitement, I brought it for my mother to see, but by the time I reached her it had mostly collapsed into ash in my hands. Mama exclaimed in distaste and sent me to wash.

Our cook, a tall and gangly woman who nonetheless produced the most amazing soups and souffles (thus putting the lie to the notion that one cannot trust a slender cook) was the one who showed me the secret of preserving sparklings after death. She kept one on her dresser-top, which she brought out for me to see when I arrived in her kitchen, much cast down from the loss of the sparkling and from my mother’s chastisement. “However did you keep it?” I asked her, wiping away my tears. “Mine fell all to pieces.”

“Vinegar,” she said, and that one word set me upon the path that led to where I stand today.

If found soon enough after death, a sparkling (as many of the readers of this volume no doubt know) may be preserved by embalming it in vinegar. I sailed forth into our gardens in determined search, a jar of vinegar crammed into one of my dress pockets so the skirt hung all askew. The first one I found lost its right wing in the process of preservation, but before the week was out I had an intact specimen: a sparkling an inch and a half in length, his scales a deep emerald in color. With the boundless ingenuity of a child, I named him Greenie, and he sits on a shelf in my study to this day, tiny wings outspread.

Compare that to this:

Yeah, you see why I had to take both.

So congrats to you two! E-mail me your mailing addresses (send them to marie {dot} brennan {at} gmail {dot} com) and I’ll get ARCs of Fate on their way toward you shortly.

Sixty days!

I will send everyone off into the weekend, and the month of July, with a nice big chunk of With Fate Conspire, in which we meet Eliza and Dead Rick both.

New material begins here, or you can start back at the prologue if you prefer. Be sure to keep clicking through; I’ve posted several scenes!

Now also seems a suitable time to mention that Marissa Lingen has beaten Harriet Klausner to the punch, posting the first review of With Fate Conspire. No spoilers, so you can read it without fear!

Results of the icon contest for A Natural History of Dragons will go in a separate post, because you’ll be getting a little treat there, too . . . .

On Women and Fighting

wshaffer linked to an interesting column over on McSweeney’s titled Bitchslap: A Column About Women and Fighting. The posts range around quite a bit, from actual combat-related thoughts like A Short and Potentially Hazardous Guide to Sparring Strategy (which might be of interest to the “writing fight scenes” crowd — I promise, I haven’t forgotten about that) to more philosophical things like “On Impact” to pretty good social commentary like “Dressing Up, Looking Down.”

Some of the things she says bother me, because it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that she acknowledges herself to be a woman with a shitty temper, and that her behavior is not necessarily a model you should follow. But it makes for interesting reading regardless.

Listening Through

Does anybody else do this?

I’ll be listening to a piece of music, something I’ve heard plenty of times before — frequently it’s a track from some film score, though other kinds of music can do it, too. Then suddenly, my ears shift focus, in much the same way I imagine those “magic eye” pictures resolve from meaningless noise into meaningful shapes (I actually can’t see those worth a damn). I find myself listening through the music to a layer I never noticed before.

I don’t know if that makes any sense. It would be easier to explain in person; I would put a piece of music on and wave a hand in the air to illustrate which harmonic line I’ve switched focus to. (It’s always a harmony; the melody is what I’m listening past.) Not infrequently it’s something the bass elements are doing, because they more often provide the foundation or embroidery to the melody in the treble — but sometimes it’s a high counterpoint I never really noticed before, or something in the middle registers that was somehow tucked away inside all the other things I’d heard before.

(I sometimes wonder if the way my brain processes music qualifies as synaesthesia. I often conceive of it in spatial or kinetic terms, and I was annoyed when I found out that “texture” didn’t mean what I wanted it to, musically speaking. Individual sounds have texture, goddammit, although it isn’t the same as the texture I feel with my fingertips. I guess I mean “timbre,” but my brain insists that no, if it mean timbre it would say timbre, and what it said was texture.)

In other words, I shift my attention to an instrument or line I hadn’t noticed before — but it really feels like I’m listening through to it. As if the rest of the instrumentation was the reflection on a glass window, and I just now managed to look past that into what lies behind the glass. It just happened to me a moment ago, sparking this post — “Pageant,” from the Cirque du Soleil show Kà, for anybody who’s curious; there’s a bass counterpoint that suddenly leapt out at me — and if you can do the trick, Michael Kamen’s score for Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves is a lovely, lovely thing to listen to, especially the track “The Abduction and Final Battle at the Gallows.” That’s the first piece that ever refocused for me, and I still love to close my eyes and follow all the different layers as they come in and out.

But yeah. I’m almost certainly not the only one who does this, but I sometimes wonder, and isn’t that what the internets are made for? I’d love to hear how other people experience music in general, whether you process it in terms of other senses or whatever. Tell me I’m not alone in being weird. 🙂

The DWJ Project: Deep Secret

I was about to read The Merlin Conspiracy when I remembered that it’s technically part of a series, of which this book is first. I have no idea whether it’s necessary to take them in order — I’ve only read The Merlin Conspiracy once, years ago — but I figured I might as well.

Deep Secret is the first of two Magid books, which take place in a multiverse setting that isn’t the Chrestomanci one (though you could probably find a way to graft them together). The worlds exist in a Mobius loop/infinity symbol configuration, one half of which is “Ayewards” and magically positive, the other half of which is “Naywards” and magically negative. In the middle is the Koryfonic Empire, straddling eleven worlds and going downhill fast. The entire thing is supervised in a fashion by Magids, who serve a collection of entities referred to as the Upper Room, who are sort of godlike, to the extent that their nature is ever made clear.

Rupert Venables, the most junior Magid, is having to deal with two problems at once. First, he has to find a replacement for a more senior Magid who just died (though Stan hangs around as a disembodied voice to help him out). Second, as junior Magid he’s in charge of the Koryfonic Empire, even though he lives on Earth, and the Empire is having some rather serious problems. His efforts to pick a replacement keep being interrupted as he gets dragged away from Earth to deal with problems on Koryfon — but, as the laws of narrative efficiency would lead you to expect, it turns out those two problems aren’t as unrelated as they seem.

Much of the pleasure of this book comes from its setting. You see, Rupert decides to simplify his Magid search by pulling all his candidates together in one place. The requirements of a magical node, the balancing of fatelines, and a mundane excuse to lure the people there mean that everybody winds up at a science fiction convention in Wantchester. And so the book is filled with lovingly-observed details about con culture: all the weirdness and friendliness and administrative drama that such events bring. (I seem to recall hearing once that the hotel — where, thanks to magical disturbances, one can make endless right-angle turns without ever coming back around to the elevator — was inspired by an actual hotel used by some con in Britain, probably one DWJ had been to. All I can say is, we’ve got one of those here in the States, too.)

I also quite like both Rupert and Maree Mallory, the other major protagonist in the story. Rupert takes a while to warm up — the first few pages aren’t as immediately engaging as in most of DWJ’s books — but Maree has a strong narrative voice. And this is a more adult book than most of hers; I think Rupert is twenty-six and Maree is twenty, and certainly there’s more in the way of swearing, sexual overtones, and explicit violence than I recall in the others. (Certainly it’s on the long side, compared to most.) All in all, I quite like it.

But I do have a couple of quibbles, plus some more spoilery things I like, which will go behind the cut.

Spoilers ahoy!

The DWJ Project: Eight Days of Luke

This book is the reason I can never quite believe that Loki is evil.

See, it was my very first introduction to Norse mythology. I’d long adored D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, but had not yet encountered its northern counterpart. (I think the edition of this novel I read back then had an afterword explaining who the gods were, or all the reveals at the end would have flown totally over my head.) Thanks to Diana Wynne Jones, I’m subconsciously convinced Loki’s a sweetie who never really meant to hurt anybody.

It’s also the last of my top tier of favorites, which means I did a book recommendation for it yonks ago; read that for a plot summary.

This was her fourth book published (third fantasy), and as fjm said in the comments to Witch’s Business, it’s the first one to really feel like a DWJ novel. Not just because of the neglected kid protagonist, but because the fantasy isn’t random; it’s a meaningful layer to the story, and not entirely shiny. Luke may not be a villain, but he isn’t quite what you’d call good, either. He’s far too pleased with his own cleverness and power, and not inclined to think about the cost to others unless somebody reminds him.

As I stray into specifics…

Green Lantern: actually doesn’t suck

The money I paid to see Green Lantern would have been well-spent just for the character of Carol Ferris, who is probably the best female character I’ve seen in a superhero movie in quite a while.

The rest of the movie is, contrary to what I’d been led to expect, not terrible. Yes, the central idea is goofy (glowing space cops who use the green energy of willpower!), and yes, the “good guys” make one monumentally stupid decision partway through the movie, and there are smaller details in the story and script I would have tweaked. But Hal Jordan, the main character, is not nearly the “dur, I’m a man-child who can’t take anything seriously” disaster the first trailer seemed determined to advertise him as, and the central theme is better than some I’ve seen lately.

And Carol Ferris. She is smart, and competent, and not terribly interested in Hal’s bullshit (though she’s interested in him sans bullshit), and she does actual useful things. Not the best actress in the world, and there’s one thirty-second scene where I would have rewritten all of her dialogue, but it was the only sour note; the rest of what they did with her, I liked a great deal. Spoiler cut:

So’s I can list specifics.

70 days and counting . . . . .

It is now seventy days until the release of With Fate Conspire, and that means it’s time for more goodies.

Ten days ago, it was the first excerpt; now it’s my research bibliography. (Not the most thrilling thing in the world, I know, but chock full o’ Victorian-period material, if you need that kind of thing.)

Also, because I’ve been too swamped to do anything more with this until now, I’ll go ahead and say the contest mentioned last time is still open. I need an icon for A Natural History of Dragons — something, y’know, natural historian-y and dragon-y — and if yours wins, I’ll send you an arc of Fate.

Save me from my lack of Photoshop skills, Obi-Wan Internetobi; you’re my only hope!

lessons from the stolen bike

No, I don’t have my bike back. I don’t expect I ever will; if it shows up one day, it will be by a coincidence of police work and sheer random chance, and I’ll probably donate the thing to some charity. But I have a new bike now, which means that I’ve had a fresh reminder of how some asshole came in and stole the old one, but at least I don’t have to be pissed off every time I think of an errand to run and then remember I have no way to run it.

I want to talk about what I learned from this. But it’s not going to be a list of “I should have done X, Y, or Z,” because you know what? Fuck that noise. It smacks of “it’s my fault my bike got stolen,” because all the precautions I took were not enough precautions, or the right precautions. Or maybe I shouldn’t have owned a piece of easily stealable transport in the first place. Frankly, that kind of logic can bite me.

What I want to talk about is the stuff others may not know, the stuff that made my investigating officer call me “the perfect victim.” Not in the sense of being somebody crime was bound to happen to, but rather the kind of person a cop hopes to deal with, and rarely does.

In other words, if crime happens to you, then here are some things you might want to bear in mind.

Cut for length.

random linkage

This article is very long, but I found it made for fascinating reading. (Pair with these images to get a sense of what’s going on in the vicinity of Old River Control.) I’ve known for quite a while about the whole “the Mississippi changes its bed” thing, but I didn’t realize that it is very specifically trying to do so right now, and has been for several decades, and furthermore the article gives me a very clear sense of both what the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has done to stop it, and what the costs of those attempts are.

It isn’t cheerful reading; you walk away with a realization that it isn’t just New Orleans, it’s pretty much all human habitation in the Mississippi River Delta that just maybe, from a purely pragmatic standpoint, shouldn’t be there. And I don’t know what we can do to fix that, short of throwing our hands up in the air and saying bye-bye to the region. But it’s very interesting stuff.

Er, I missed one hundred. Let’s go for eighty-one instead!

I’ve been so occupied with other things that I completely missed my usual “one hundred days until publication” landmark. Also ninety days. Eighty is tomorrow, but that’s the weekend, so let’s go with eighty-one days, and give you your first excerpt from With Fate Conspire!

“You were unable to stop them.”

In other news, I made it to forty thousand words on A Natural History of Dragons last night. I need an icon for that series, so let’s do a combined event here: post an icon (or even just an image) in the comments that you think would be appropriate for the adventures of my !nineteenth-century lady naturalist, and the winner will get an ARC of With Fate Conspire.

And I’ll try to keep on track better from now on. <guilty look>

Books read, May 2011

Last month was both busy and tiring, so not nearly as much reading got done. Most of these have their own posts, too, so this entry will be short. (Short enough, in fact, that I’m not going to bother with a cut.)

Stopping for a Spell, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed here.

Dogsbody, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed here.

Winter’s Heart, Robert Jordan. Discussed here.

Witch’s Business, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed here.

Hagakure, Yamamoto Tsunetomo, trans. William Scott Wilson. This is a translation of selections from a rather famous seventeenth-century Japanese text on how to be a samurai. But it dates to the early part of the Edo period, which means it comes from one of those points in time where what being a samurai meant was in flux: Japan was (relatively speaking) at peace, so now the expectation was starting to be that samurai should be Confucian gentlemen as well as warriors. Furthermore, Yamamoto — the guy whose sayings are collected here — had not seen much war (at least by the standards of the period immediately preceding his), so you have to weigh that into the balance with his declarations about how it’s grander to throw your life away for your lord than to kill the enemy for your lord. (I found myself raising an eyebrow at him a lot.) A lot of what’s in here comes across as flat-out crazy to a modern American mind, but trying to understand the mentality behind it is a very interesting exercise.

The Ogre Downstairs, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed here.

The Dragon-Seekers, Christopher McGowan. Research for A Natural History of Dragons, and many thanks to elaine_thom for recommending it. This is a social history/collection of biographies about English fossilists in the decades leading up to the publication of On the Origin of Species. There were a few things in the introduction I looked askance at; the writer is a paleontologist rather than a historian, so the context is occasionally a bit weak. But I appreciated the reminder of how people of this kind all knew each other and worked together (or at cross-purposes), and I very much appreciated McGowan’s attention to the role played by quarry-workers and other non-specialists, without whom the fossilists would not have been supplied with things to study.

Revisiting the Wheel of Time: Winter’s Heart

[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 Crossroads of Twilight, as that’s the last book I read before starting this project.]

Took me a while to get around to posting this one. I actually read the book last month, but my notes have been sitting around for a few weeks now — possibly a sign that I’m running out of steam. This is the ninth book, after all, and I’ve been doing this since January of last year; after a while, momentum does become an issue. (Doesn’t help that the next book is Crossroads of Twilight. I think I may have mentioned how little I’m looking forward to that one, once or twice. Or three times. Or more.)

But anyway. Winter’s Heart. Which is, indeed, better-shaped than the previous book, though still suffering the characteristic problems of the Bad Three.

So let's get on with it.

things I am remembering while watching Game of Thrones

It’s been a long time since I read the books. I think I’ve been through each one twice, except for A Feast for Crows, which I read when it came out, and that was the last I touched the series. And I decided — just before they announced the No Really We Mean It This Time publication date for book five — that I’m going to hold off until the end is in sight, so that means I’m fuzzy on a lot of things.

But watching the TV series, I remember why I like the books. It isn’t because Martin’s writing is Gritty! Epic! Fantasy! Grit for grit’s sake is not pleasing to me. I’ve picked up, and then put down, several other series in that vein. But Martin manages some things that his fellows in the sub-sub-genre don’t, and they are why I hooked onto him and bounced off the others.

Example: characters. There are many unpleasant people in this series . . . and yet, they’re unpleasant people I want to know more about. The absolute bastards are generally intelligent bastards, and I’m keen to see what they do next. The bitter assholes have understandable motivations for their bitterness and assholitude, and some of them preserve a weird core of decency underneath it (which is not the same as a Heart of Gold). People have loyalties instead of Chronic Backstabbing Disorder. I am a reader who generally prefers sympathetic characters; what Martin manages, and many other authors do not, is making me sympathize with people who aren’t very nice. (Exhibit A: Jaime Lannister.)

Also the world. I loves me a good world, whether it’s secondary or built off the real world. I don’t just mean the setting detail, though that’s part of it; the wall of ice and the regional surnames for bastards and Dany eating the stallion’s heart, all that stuff pleases my little anthropological heart. But there’s also the history underpinning it, that makes it feel real instead of a set built just for this story — and the history is both In Ye Olden Days stuff and the intricate network of kinship and alliances that sets up the present moment. Catelyn calling out to the armsmen in the tavern, and Jory reminding Jaime that they fought at each other’s sides once. (I especially love how many of those details the TV show is managing to preserve.)

And, partially underlying those world details, the fact that Martin makes me believe — as so many of his compatriots don’t — that he understands how medieval society worked. How politics work. Money and favors and people passing along tidbits of information; the importance of kinship and ideals, and pragmatism ramming up hard against those ideals. My friends and I are catching up on past episodes, and the conversation between Robert and Cersei just made me so happy, because of the richness it managed to convey. “What’s holding this kingdom together?” “Our marriage.” The trade in daughters isn’t a side note to the important stuff; it’s one of the central posts holding that society up. And Robert’s a shitty king, but he understands war — really understands it, not “the author tells me he does” — so you suddenly see that he isn’t an idiot, just very ill-suited to his current challenges, and it took both him and Cersei to screw up their marriage. That whole scene felt real, because it was based on real understanding, rather than the pale fictional shadow so many authors fall back on.

I know there’s a lot of shocking stuff in his story, and it isn’t to everybody’s taste. But for my own part, I don’t ever feel like I’m being shocked gratuitously — which is not true for many of the other Gritty! Epic! Fantasy! authors I’ve tried. (Note: I speak here of the books, and not HBO, which continues to give me uncomfortable-looking sex scenes I could really do without.) And Martin gives me things to care about, too, even when they’re broken and ugly things and I don’t understand why I care. If I had to put it in simple terms, I might say I feel a sense of empathy in his story, that I don’t feel in his imitators’ work.

Which is a long-winded way of saying I’m really enjoying the TV series, and it’s reminding me of why I enjoy the books, too. I haven’t given up on them; I’m just going to wait until I can enjoy them on my own, more timely schedule.

a question for the embroiderers

I know I have people reading this blog who spin, crochet, weave, knit, and sew; I figure odds are good at least a couple of you embroider.

How would you recommend going about embroidering this figure?

Assume a smallish size — maybe two inches in diameter. I’d love to hear what types of stitch you would use where, in what order, and bonus points for specifying whether it’s what an experienced embroiderer would do, or what a hypothetical embroiderer who used to know about three stitches fifteen years ago might have an easier time with. (Not that we know anybody fitting that description, nosirree.) I’m mostly concerned with making the end result look good; cutting corners to make it less of a pain in the ass is not necessary. 🙂

I’m not even sure how to effectively transfer the design to the material (which is dark grey, and will be embroidered in white) — I’m almost tempted to print it onto thin paper and then just stitch straight over that. Is this a bad idea?

(The whole project is probably a bad idea, for the aforementioned reason of three stitches semi-mastered fifteen years ago. But it’s not like I’ve ever done anything crazy in the textiles department before. kurayami_hime, remember the Greek key belt?)