more Scion tidbits

I’m a bit proud of this idea from the game I’m running, so I wanted to share. It will make the most sense to those who already know the cosmological setup for White Wolf’s Scion system, but for everybody else, I can quote the nutshell description I gave when I posted about my concept for the game:

The underlying enemies in this scenario are the Titans, the parents of the gods themselves. They’re truly impersonal, elemental powers: the “body” of the Greater Titan of Fire, for example, is more or less equivalent to the D&D Elemental Plane of Fire. However, Greater Titans can manifest more concretely as avatars, which are god-like beings reflecting a particular aspect of their concept. Prometheus, for example, is an avatar of the Greater Titan of Fire; so is Kagu-tsuchi, but they embody different things. The Titans aren’t precisely evil, but they’re not friendly to the world, and their influence usually isn’t a good thing.

Got that? So, it mentions in the books that some of the Titans were never bound. Hundun because it’s the Greater Titan of Chaos and can’t be bound; Logos because the Greater Titan of the Word struck a deal with the gods. Etc.

I was trying to decide what to do with the Mississippi River, cosmologically speaking. I failed to turn up any useful info on how tribes along its length viewed the river — no deity names or anything — and I knew “Old Man River” was a relatively late concept, but at the same time it seemed necessary and appropriate to have some kind of unifying entity for use in the game.

What I settled on was this: that Iteru, the Great River, is a Greater Titan, and it, like Logos, struck a deal with the gods way back in Ye Old Mythic Times. Part of its body now serves as the Godrealm for the Pesedjet, the Egyptian gods. (In the game books, Iteru is the name of that realm, and it’s also the Egyptian name for the Nile.) Major rivers around the world are avatars of Iteru, and they individually formed contracts with the gods of early civilizations along their banks: the Tigris and the Euphrates in Mesopotamia, the Ganges in India, the Yellow River in China, etc. Old Man River is just a recent (from the viewpoint of game-time) name for the Titan avatar that is the Mississippi River, which hasn’t had a contract with any society since the decline of the Mississippian culture exemplified by Cahokia. But since this game is in part about the attempted land- and people-grab of a whole bunch of pantheons, you can bet they’re all courting Old Man River’s favor . . . .

Anyway, this is what happens when I let Archaeologist Brain out to play with Folklorist Brain. I come up with ways to mythologize and then translate into RPG terms the frequent pattern of early civilizations forming on the banks of rivers.

Next task: figure out what I’m doing with 1876 New Orleans.

The Diana Wynne Jones Project

Okay, folks. So I mentioned a while ago that I think I’m going to re-read the complete works of Diana Wynne Jones.

How should I go about doing this?

She wrote multiple different series, and a whole lot of stand-alone books. Should I read them in chronological order of publication? That would, in some cases, break up series by rather large amounts. Read all the series first, then tackle the stand-alones, in chronological order or not? Go at it any which way, grabbing whatever tickles my fancy? I’m really not sure how best to approach it. The one thing I’m sure of is that I’ll start with either Fire and Hemlock (beause it made me a writer) or The Lives of Christopher Chant (because it was the first one I read), but recommendations for what to do after that would be welcome.

For the first time, it occurs to me to wonder if my subconscious had The Lives of Christopher Chant in mind when it came up with the title for “The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe.”

more short story!

Pretty much everything I’ve sold lately is coming out this month. Dancing the Warrior, “Love, Cayce,” and now “Coyotaje,” in Ekaterina Sedia’s new anthology Bewere the Night. The TOC includes people like Cherie Priest, Holly Black, Elizabeth Hand, Genevieve Valentine, Marissa Lingen . . . I could keep going, but you can see the whole list for yourself. I don’t have my author copy yet, so I haven’t read it, but I’m pretty excited about this one.

Also, don’t forget about the giveaway for Dancing the Warrior. All you have to do is let me know what your Hunter name would be, and you’ll be entered to win a signed pair of the doppelganger novels.

And now, back to the page proof mines.

A Special Report

I’ve been told I have to repost this from kniedzw‘s journal. Apparently the logic is is “so your readers will know how crazy you are,” but you guys already know that, right? Right. So we don’t need evidence, and we can just move on.

. . . <sigh> No. I know teleidoplex. She’ll come after me if I don’t follow through. Very well, then, I give you a bit of domestic silliness.

***

Date: Fri, 8 Apr 2011 19:37:27 -0400 (EDT)
From: swan_tower
To: kniedzw
Subject: A Special Report from the Castle N Laundry Commission

some Friday fun

I almost used a writing icon for this, then realized it really ought to be the Roman d20.

For your Friday delectation, issue #22 of the Intergalactic Medicine Show has gone live, containing my story “Love, Cayce.”

Dear Mom and Dad,

The good news is, nobody’s dead anymore.

Yeah, this would be one of the goofier stories I’ve ever written. Letters to home from what amounts to the kid of some D&D adventurers, giving her parents a series of heart attacks as they find out what their wayward offpsring has been up to.

I’ve got to say, props to Dean Spencer, who appears to have done the art: this story got slotted into the issue’s lineup on very short notice, which means he must have put together that painting on even shorter notice, and yet it matches the story quite precisely. Once you orient yourself — the dragon is up and the elf is down — that becomes the scene where Shariel is falling off a thousand-foot cliff, pursued by a dragon, and casting the spell I wasn’t allowed to call “Feather Fall” because it would have been a copyright violation. πŸ™‚ Nice work!

The rest of the TOC includes stories from Aliette de Bodard, Tony Pi, Brad Torgersen, George Lippert, and David Lubar, along with other goodies. Aliette’s story in particular got some gorgeous art. Check it out!

desk query

(Yeah, I’m posty today. It happens.)

I’d like to hear from anybody out there who uses a standing desk, either of the static or adjustable (i.e. sit/stand) type. My present desk is fine, but it probably won’t survive another move, so I’m thinking of making a new one my “investment in career” purchase for this new book deal. And there seems to be a growing amount of interest in the notion of standing desks — claims for their health benefits ranging from the simply logical to the possible snake oil — so I’m kind of tempted to get one of these, or something similar. If nothing else, it seems pretty well-proven that one of the best ergonomic things you can do is not stay in the same position forever (regardless of how good that position is), so the option to adjust is appealing.

But I’ve never tried to use a standing desk, beyond brief encounters with computer terminals in libraries, so I don’t know if I would like it. Any anecdata on the topic would be appreciated.

borrowed from gollumgollum

This is, hands-down, the weirdest psychology test I’ve ever taken.

Seriously, half the questions had me going “AAAAAAAGHHHH whut?” They make no sense. And it’s all the harder because the instructions tell you not to tie the shapes to “any narrative or storyline,” which is like telling me to breathe without using my lungs. But I persevered, wondering sometimes if I was picking answers utterly at random, and then . . . .

Verbally and mentally fluid, you are refreshing and illuminating to those around you. This is occasionally somewhat discounted by the obvious pleasure that you take in exercising your mental acuity. Although generally peaceful you can often take a verbally aggressive tact in relations with the world, which can often be misunderstood by those around you. Innovative in the extreme, you can often think yourself right out of the correct answer to a given problem. Many times you are referred to as your own worst enemy. You tire very quickly of routine and so make poor clerks or administrative help. You also have no respect for authority and little patience for those you regard as inferior, most especially those in charge. Experimentation is your watchword and can occasionally lead to experience for its own sake and shallow decadence. Your thought can sometimes be scattered and disconnected.

. . . which, um, yeah. I wouldn’t agree on all counts (I’m not so much about experimentation), but it’s close enough to be unnerving. Makes me feel like the test was a bit of flashy misdirection while somebody picked my psychological pocket.

(Especially since I just added, then deleted, a [sic] after “tact” in that diagnosis. It should be “tack.” Grumble mutter </pedant>.)

Anyway, if you feel like melting your brain, the test only takes a couple of minutes — and that’s if, like me, you have to wrestle with the tendency to go “well maybe that big triangle is a ship and then the little one is about to ram no dammit I’m not suppposed to make up stories.” It probably goes faster without that.

huh . . . upgrades

So you know how sometimes Amazon gets a wrong piece of information into its book database? The wrong format, or release date, or cover copy, or whatever.

That didn’t happen here.

With Fate Conspire really is going to be a hardcover.

It’s kind of awesome to get that news right after I posted about the celebration of my five-year anniversary of Realio Trulio Being a Novelist. πŸ™‚ And it prodded me to stop waffling over the lovely, lovely icons you guys made for me and finally pick one, with victory going at last to airo25. (This was a hard decision, y’all. So props to everybody else who made me an icon, too.) airo25, e-mail me your address at marie [dot] brennan [at] gmail [dot] com, and I’ll make a note to send you an ARC of Fate when they come in.

My first hardcover. Maybe I can use that to stave off the tedium of the page proofs, which arrived yesterday. πŸ™‚ Whee!!!!!

Not a third book, but it will have to do.

Five years ago this month, my first novel was published, under its original title of Doppelganger.

In celebration of that anniversary, I dusted off — by which I mean “rewrote from the ground up” — an old novella related to that series, and sold it to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. The first part of Dancing the Warrior just went live, and the second part will be going up in two weeks, with the next issue.

But wait! There’s more!

You can enter to win a signed set of both doppelganger novels (the new edition, wherein they are known as Warrior and Witch). I’ll be giving away two sets, one for each half of the story. All you have to do is comment on the story thread, telling me what your Hunter name would be. Full rules are here; the important bit is that you do need to be a registered forum user, so that we can properly identify entrants. But registration is quick and easy.

Five years. Jeebus. Where did they go?

Natural History research

So, I mentioned before that I have a new series.

It will surprise nobody who’s been around for the Onyx Court books that I intend to do a bit of research. πŸ™‚

NOT AS MUCH AS BEFORE. (Thank god.) But there are some things I want to read about, to get some good material for compost into my head, so this is the first of a couple of posts asking for recommendations.

The first topic up is, of course, the discipline of natural history. Can anybody recommend a good biography of Darwin, something that focuses on the fieldwork end of things? His education, the voyage of the Beagle, that kind of thing; I’m less concerned with what happened after he published his theories. Or books on other natural historians, or the development of the field. I’ve got a few things to read already, but knowing the internets, it’s entirely possible that somebody reading this post has a random love for the topic of nineteenth-century natural history, and knows exactly what I ought to be reading to understand it. If that’s you — or if it isn’t, but you know a couple of things you’d recommend — speak up in the comments.

If you’re not familiar with this topic at all, stay tuned; there will be other requests to come.

Subscriptions!

An Archive of Our Own has, after much anticipation, reached a point where they can implement subscriptions. This means that AO3 users can set their accounts up to be notified when a writer they like posts a new story. (I have no idea if I’m likely to post anything before next Yuletide, but the nice thing about subscriptions is it’s no big deal if I don’t; you just won’t get notifications. I’m faviconrussian_blue, if you care.)

I’ll have to see how this particular implementation of the idea works out in practice, but man, I still want something like it for pro fiction. Obviously it’s harder in some ways to implement — the AO3 is a single database; a short story subscription manager would have to scrape updates from a bunch of different online magazines — but if there was a central service I could use to be alerted when short story authors I like publish something new, something along the lines of an RSS reader, I would sign up so fast my keyboard would be smoking.

But I wouldn’t know where to begin in coding something like that. So I sit here and make begging eyes, and hope that if I mention it enough times, the idea will spread until it lands in the brain of somebody who can do it.

Apparently this is Amazon’s day to post Surprise Cover Art.

Hey, look! I seem to have finalized cover art!

Y’all know what that means: it’s time for another “please make me an icon, because I suck at image manipulation” contest. Something featuring a crop or resizing or whatever of that cover, plus the title, like ceosanna did for A Star Shall Fall. Winner will get an ARC of the book when I have one, or a copy of Star, according to their choice.

Eeee! I can haz cover!

a few Japan-related things

We’re in the final day over at , and bidding on my short story offer is up to $100. If you want a story written to your prompt from Japanese history or folklore, now is your chance.

Also, my friend unforth is doing a 1000 Cranes Project over on her craft blog. There’s a link there for one of the cranes being auctioned on , but with 999 cranes to go after that, there’s plenty of room for all.

And finally, this is kind of an awesome story about heroism during the tsunami. The post is written in a tongue-in-cheek manner, but with all due admiration for the courage and resourcefulness of Hideaki Akaiwa.

A Seed of Hemlock

Diana Wynne Jones has passed away.

I deeply regret, as I knew I would, that I didn’t make it to the special Diana Wynne Jones convention in Britain a few years back. It was my one real chance to meet her, and honestly? If I could meet any writer in the world, I probably would have chosen her. Possibly even if “any writer in the world” is expanded to “in history, too,” because Shakespeare’s cool and all, but what would I say to him? His plays may be awesome, but Diana Wynne Jones is the one who made me into a writer.

It was Fire and Hemlock that did it. Polly and Tom telling their story, within the story about them, and the blurring between the two — it’s a story about stories, in many ways, because among other things the book is about “Thomas the Rhymer” and “Tam Lin,” too. I was nine when I read it, and when I put the book down, one thought stood out clearly, for the first time in my life: I want to tell a story.

I did get to tell her that, at least, via the proxy of Sharyn November, when her (I think) seventy-fifth birthday rolled by. Sharyn was collecting birthday messages, so I typed up the tale of how Fire and Hemlock turned the nebulous storytelling impulses so many children have into a firm intention, and lo and behold I am now a writer. But I would have loved to shake her hand, and to thank her for inspiring me to my purpose in life. I don’t think I write anything like her — I don’t think I write anything like most of the authors I really admire — but it all grew out of the little seed of hemlock she planted in my mind.

. . . to heck with the part of me saying, “um, this would be a huge project and I’m not sure you really have the time.” I think I will undertake to re-read her complete works, and to blog about them as I go. It’s the best tribute I can think to give.

That, and to keep on writing.

declaring internet bankruptcy

I was at FOGcon last weekend and ICFA this weekend, and in between I was busy, with the result that I am irretrievably behind on reading LJ and other such stuff. E-mail I intend to catch up on, but I’m declaring bankruptcy on blog posts; if there’s anything important or cool from the last week and a half that you think I should see, feel free to mention in the comments.

help_japan is underway

Bidding has begun on my short story offer. I forgot to mention before that I will probably try to sell the story, and money from that sale will go to Doctors Without Borders, so whoever wins this auction will get a double return on their buck.

(If you missed the original explanation of the auction, it’s here.)

The situation at Fukushima has me really, really worried. My fingers are crossed so tight they hurt, that the efforts to cool the reactions there will succeed.

This is what preparedness looks like.

A really good post laying out the basics of Japan’s response to the earthquake and tsunami.

The thing we need to bear in mind (other than the fact that Japan is a very long country, and most parts of it are hundreds of miles from the epicenter) is that there is no place in the world better-prepared for seismic trouble than Japan. Read through that post. Read about the checklists. Read about the architecture and the failsafes and the emergency warning systems. This is still a tragedy and a disaster, and no amount of human planning can completely mitigate that; ultimately, the planet is stronger than we are. But this would be a much larger tragedy and disaster if they hadn’t been ready for it. (Even the situation at the Fukushima reactors isn’t as bad as it could have been, though I can’t confirm if the writer of that post is right about the scale of leakage there. I hope he is.)

Remember this, the next time some politician in your locality or nation proposes cutting funding for emergency preparedness, be it earthquake, tornado, hurricane, volcano, blizzard, or whatever. It’s an easy cut to make in the short term, when you’re trying to make a political point about “fiscal responsibility.” But I put that inside sarcasm quotes because what you’re really doing is gambling that nothing bad is really going to happen, and sooner or later, you lose that bet. Japan knows better than to gamble on that; they’re home to some absurdly high percentage of the world’s earthquakes. But other countries — like the U.S. — aren’t so sensible, and places like New Orleans pay the bill.

I want to be more like Japan. I live in California, and I want to believe my state is equally ready for when the Hayward Fault blows. But I don’t think we are.

doing my part, what little I can

There is, as you might expect, another LJ charity auction underway, at . There are many things on offer there, but this one is mine: a short story to a prompt of the winner’s choosing, drawn from Japanese history or folklore.

I’ve set the minimum bid at $50 because unlike the Onyx Court auctions of the past, this time I’m guaranteeing a fully-written short story. Having never offered something like this, I don’t know if that’s too high and I’ve just scared you all off, or it’s too low and you’re going to jack the price way up in bidding. (Since this is for charity, I hope it’s the latter.) Instructions for bidding (or offering) are here, and the auction will run until Saturday the 26th.

Categories of offer: art and artistry, audio work, interesting stuff, food, graphics, words. Go forth and bid, for a good cause.