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?)

FUCK.

You would think that if you kept your bike chained to a post inside a locked garage beneath your townhouse complex, it would be well-enough secured that you don’t have to worry about it being stolen.

You’d be wrong.

buh . . . but . . . WHY?

Just put in a DVD of a Japanese film (Ichi).

The music playing on the menu screen is a Japanese-language rendition* of “The Wind that Shakes the Barley.”

Just . . . what? The hell?

Aaaaand now it’s playing over the credits. I am very curious to see if the plot of the film somehow mirrors or makes use of the events in that song. (Minus, one presumes, the specific Irish context.)

Jesus! It doesn’t just sound like Lisa Gerrard, it is her voice!

Okay, I’ll stop live-blogging the movie’s musical choices now.

*I’m presuming that’s what they’re singing. Can’t understand the lyrics enough to be sure. The melody, however, is unmistakable.

link salad is putting Firefox on a diet

Yeah, there were two other writing-related links I forgot to include in the original post (and the follow-up post).

First, The Periodic Table of Storytelling, built from TV Tropes. There’s some entertaining stuff in there.

And second, this post over at 2D Goggles? Yeah. That is so very much what it’s like, sometimes. (Both writing and running an RPG, now that I think of it.) Especially the bit with the tiger. <evil grin>

And then, because it seems a waste of a perfectly good link salad to stop at the writing-related material:

“The Possibilian” — a fascinating article about David Eagleman, a leading researcher on brain function and how we perceive time. His take at the end, on science and religion, is particularly engaging; there’s something to be said for celebrating how much we don’t know, and could potentially learn.

What makes a body obscene? — tooth_and_claw and anybody else who really digs androgyny/playing with gender perception/etc. will dig the image. The story of what happened to the magazine is also particularly interesting.

Poor Jane’s Almanac — a fascinating tale of Benjamin Franklin’s sister, and what it meant to be a woman in the eighteenth century.

Okay, that’s enough for this round. Now hopefully my tab groupings will be a little less absurdly overcrowded.

A long-delayed report

I mentioned some time ago that Bear McCreary, composer of the score for Battlestar Galactica, had released a book of piano arrangements from that show. After squeeing over this, I promised to report back once I’d had a chance to test them out . . . but I forgot all about it, until yhlee gave her own report. So here, much delayed, are my thoughts, on both the arrangements and my own experience with two sessions of playing.

So, um. First. My skill at playing piano? Not what it used to be. I took roughly seven or eight years of lessons, but that ended around 1993. I continued to play casually while I lived at home, but haven’t had regular access to a piano since 1998. Kept playing French horn until 2001, which means I can still read treble clef without too much trouble — mostly; once you get up into the ledger lines I have a lot more trouble, since horns rarely go above a high G — but gah, bass clef. When I sat down to try out these arrangements, I was actually having to do the thing where you go “Okay, that space is C, so this is E, G, okay, the note is an A-flat.” Really. My sight-reading ability warmed up with renewed use, but it’s still verrrrry slow.

The really funny part, though, is the extent to which I still have certain reflexes, but they don’t work right anymore. I’ll be going along, eyes on the music, okay now that left-hand chord is a fifth — but my hand doesn’t quiiiiiiite remember how it should position itself for a fifth, so I hit a sixth instead, and then have to stop and look at the keyboard to figure out why the music sounds terrible.

Mind you, this being Bear McCreary, sometimes the reason it sounds terrible is that I’m playing too slowly. And that’s where we get into the arrangements, instead of my butchery thereof.

See, the reason I love his music is its complexity. He has lots of odd, syncopated rhythms, weird harmonies that aren’t quite what you’d expect, extensive use of both the high and low ends of the staff, etc. And it turns out that all those things I like when I’m listening . . . become a nightmare when I have to play them. How do you count this bit? What the hell is that note three ledger lines below the staff? Is the chord crunchy because I overlooked an accidental, or because it’s a deliberately discordant suspension that would sound a lot better at tempo? At my level of non-skill, it can be surprisingly hard to tell.

I haven’t attempted everything yet; my focus has been on my favorite pieces. To rank those in order of difficulty:

“Roslin and Adama” (simplified) — with a bit more practice, I’d be able to play this one just fine, and probably upgrade to the non-simplified version soon after.

“Kara Remembers” — a small amount of practice would get me to the point where I could play the primo line of the duet. The secondo part, not so much; see previous statements re: odd syncopated rhythms, and fill in lots of sixteenth notes.

“The Shape of Things to Come” — a much larger amount of practice might bring this one within reach. I blundered my way through the entirety of this one during my second session, nowhere near up to tempo, and was very proud of myself for being able to dust off my musical skills and work out how to count the bits in the last line. (For the curious: it’s in 6/8, and each 3 consists of an eighth note, a sixteenth-note triplet, and another eighth note. Been a while since I had to deal with anything like that.) So this one is achievable, I think.

“Prelude to War” — ahahahaha NO. This one is, shall we say, aspirational. In large part for reasons of tempo: this one contains lots of very rapid sixteenth-notes in a pattern whose name I can’t remember. (What do you call it when you have a three-note arpeggio cycling across a 3/4 measure? GBDG BDGB DGBD. I know there’s a term for this.) Anyway, it’s is currently way out of my reach, though by the time I get to anything resembling competence with “The Shape of Things to Come,” I could probably tackle this one.

I should also try “Passacaglia,” which looks entirely feasible.

In general, I would say this book has been handing me my head. But if you ask me what I think of it . . . well, visualize me clapping my hands together and bouncing up and down with an idiot grin. Probably the best recommendation I can give is that after two sessions of playing at a friend’s house, I’m seriously looking into the possibility of acquiring a keyboard for myself. And not one of yer wimpy little short-range plastic keyboards, either, but an 88-key weighted-hammer machine — a piano that happens to be digital. (I’d get an actual piano, but we have even less space for that than we do for a keyboard, and it would be a pain in the ass to tune/move/etc.) I’ve purchased another book of piano arrangements — Cirque du Soleil music this time, which I can also report on later if there’s interest — and want to photocopy the stuff I left at home, too. So in short, this book has re-awakened my love of playing piano, and I really can’t think of a higher recommendation.

update on parallelsfic

I went ahead and put in some nominations for , with a specific eye toward variety: one Hong Kong source (The Bride with White Hair, an awesome old-school kung fu fantasy flick), one Korean (The Good, the Bad, the Weird, a crazy 1930s Western), one Indian (the Ramayana, because it’s a more manageable epic than the Mahabharata), and one Japanese (K-20: The Fiend With Twenty Faces, aka the alternate-history Art-Deco-punk superhero movie I keep meaning to make a post about). In general I tried to go with the theme of “crazy fun;” the only reason I nominated the Ramayana instead of Om Shanti Om was that somebody had already beaten me to the latter. 🙂

Anyway, I still don’t know for sure if I’ll be participating; you’re required to offer four sources, and so far — apart from my own nominations — there’s only barely enough things listed that I feel I know well enough to write. But nominating isn’t a commitment to participate, so I figured why not.

Nominations are open until the 25th.

The DWJ Project: The Ogre Downstairs

Caspar, Johnny, and Gwinny are none too happy with their mother having remarried, to a man they think of as the Ogre. The Ogre’s sons, Douglas and Malcolm, aren’t very happy with it either. Then the Ogre buys Johnny and Malcolm chemistry sets, and wacky hijinks ensue when some of the chemicals turn out to be magic.

This, like Witch’s Business (aka Wilkins’ Tooth), is in the camp of “books I read once and never went back to.” It’s not hard to see why. This isn’t a bad novel; it may bear a strong resemblance to the stories in Stopping for a Spell, but it’s far better than any of those, probably because it’s longer and therefore has more time to develop its ideas. But there’s no deeper, more fantastical layer — not even the hint of one you get in Witch’s Business. The chemicals that drive the plot never get explained, and their source vanishes at the end of the book, without ever having made more than a cameo appearance in the tale. So basically, this feels more like standard-issue children’s fantasy, less like Diana Wynne Jones.

There are a few characteristic touches, though, discussion of which I’ll put behind the cut.

(more…)

The DWJ Project: Witch’s Business

Originally published as Wilkins’ Tooth. I don’t know why the title got changed, unless it was because some marketing person thought the original might be mistaken for a mundane story about Wilkins going to the dentist.

This was Diana Wynne Jones’ first fantasy novel for children (her second novel at all, after Changeover, which I can’t find for less than eighty dollars and may never end up reading.) In it, a pair of children whose pocket-money has been stopped set up a revenge business — Own Back, Ltd. — but run into trouble when the local crackpot turns out to be a witch who feels they’re intruding on her territory.

The premise feels pretty standard for a children’s book, whether fantastical or otherwise — much moreso than her later novels do. The protagonists sort of hope somebody will hire them to get revenge on the local bully, but instead the bully hires/blackmails them to get revenge on his behalf. Their efforts to carry out the job lead to more trouble, things snowball, the kids hit a point where they owe too much to too many people, etc. It’s pleasant reading, but not memorable; I’m not surprised that I’ve never gone back to re-read this one.

The one almost-memorable part has to do with the witch and the Adams family (not to be confused with the Addams family). Another author might have stayed with the simple plot of escalating problems, but DWJ hints at a deeper layer that created many of those problems in the first place. Unfortunately, she only hints: we never get much detail about why the Adamses were cursed, etc. I wish there had been more of that, to underpin the fun with something a little more substantial. But I’ll have more thoughts about that when I report back on The Ogre Downstairs.

okay, not ALL the links

Despite my efforts last night, I missed not one but two of the links I meant to post.

First, a bit belated, the usual link to my monthly SF Novelists post. This time, it’s Worldbuilding, from the ground up, as I talk about the interesting challenges I’m encountering as I work on A Natural History of Dragons. (Comment over there, not here; you don’t need to register, but there will be a slight delay while I fish the comments of newcomers out of the moderation queue.)

Second, Sideshow Freaks has a background post on how I came to write “Love, Cayce” (aka the “letters from a D&D adventurer’s kid” story).

. . . I think that’s it. But just you wait, I’m sure I’ll trip over more I forgot as soon as I turn around.

in which I post ALL the writing links!

Seriously, I’ve got a lot of these piled up.

First: genarti! Congratulations! You have won the “ARC and Desk Delivery Day” giveaway. Email me your address (marie dot brennan at gmail dot com), and I’ll get that on its way to you.

Second, you have a chance to win a complete set of the Onyx Court books by bidding in Brenda Novak’s 2011 Auction, raising money for diabetes research. That runs until the end of the month, so you have about twelve days left to bid. (The prize will ship in summer, when I receive my author copies of With Fate Conspire, or I can arrange to send the first three earlier if desired.) Also, there are lots of other awesome things on offer there, so go browse.

Third, you also have until the end of the month to buy one or more of my stories from AnthologyBuilder, and get a dollar off the cover price. (Fuller details here.)

Fourth, some of you may be interested in , a Yuletide-style fandom exchange for Asian fandoms (e.g. Japanese anime, Bollywood, Hong Kong action flicks, etc). Nominations are open until the 25th, and I’m vaguely tempted to participate; I had fun writing my K-20 story for Yuletide last year. I’m waiting to see how many of the nominated sources I know well enough to write, though, since a lot of the current ones are totally unknown to me.

Fifth, for the language wonks reading this, “Singular ‘they’ and the many reasons why it’s correct.” I am a big proponent of “they” as a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun, largely because it’s one we’ve been using for that exact purpose for centuries now, and it’s a lot more graceful than “he or she” and similar constructions. Mind you, I do find it unsatisfactory for referring to a specific individual who doesn’t fit into standard gender categories; for whatever reason, in those cases my brain seizes up on the apparent plural meaning of the word. (And it’s politer anyway to use whatever pronoun such a person prefers, though that can be hard to do — and the pragmatist in me does wish we could settle on a single alternative, rather than the motley assortment currently in use.) But for sentences like “everyone took out their books,” or referring to somebody whose gender identification is unknown (frex, somebody you only know online), I like “they.” We’re already using it; I think grammar pedants should accept it.

That’s enough for now, I suppose. There may be other link salad-style posts in the future, though; Firefox’s new tab-grouping setup has really encouraged my tendency to hoard these things. :-/