OH MY GOD THIS STORY WON’T BLOODY DIE
(How much won’t it die? I wrote more than 4300 words on it today. Which were added to the rather sizeable amount I had already. And I am nowhere near done.)
(Novellas. Man. I am here to tell you, they suck.)
Congratulations to my friend Von Carr, whose short story “Sister Jasmine Brings the Pain” placed second in the Intergalactic Medicine Show readers’ awards. You can read the whole thing at that link; it’s a humorous post-apocalypses* tale featuring a heavily armed nun as the main character. What more need be said?
(All of the winning stories are available until April, I think, if you want to see what else won.)
*Yes, I meant that to be plural. To quote the story: “In the old days people had — maybe — worried about one apocalypse. At most, two. Global Warming and an ice age. Vampires and zombies. Nobody had expected all of the apocalypses to happen at once.”
So in my SF Novelists post, I made a mention of how a lot of romance novels don’t work for me because they’re often too focused on the hero and heroine, to the exclusion (or at least sidelining) of other characters. And that reminded me that I had some thoughts I’d meant to post, about why, despite giving it a good shot, I don’t think I’ll ever be a romance reader.
Before I get into those thoughts, however, let me say up front: the tl;dr version of this is not “romance novels suck.” Anyone using the comment thread to bash the genre wholesale will be invited to do their bashing elsewhere. This is about why I’m the wrong reader for the genre.
The reason, in short form, is this: I don’t find them all that romantic.
Man, I’m having a much harder time remembering to think up topics for my SF Novelists posts (and get them written on time) now that I’ve stopped doing the “writing women” series. Anyway, this month I muse on ensemble casts, and why I like them.
As usual, comment over there; no reg required, though if you’re a first-time commenter I’ll have to fish it out of the moderation queue.
Me, I prefer open-ended waiting, because then I can generally put the subject from my mind and move on to other things. But if I’ve been given a timetable, then I’m constantly distracted, and I get nothing done.
Yes, I’m waiting for something right now. Yes, I’ve been told it will happen sometime soonish. How did you guess?
[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]
My apologies for the hiatus; I’ve been busy, and this is another one of those posts that requires me to pull together a bunch of things I don’t normally think about consciously, ergo requires more brain-power than I was able to muster for a while there. But let’s get back on the wagon, and ask ourselves the next important question: where are the combatants fighting?
As with the question of who’s fighting, this often has a simple answer that turns out to have more packed inside it than you might think. Unpacking that can be useful for two reasons: first, well-placed description can bring the scene to life for the reader, and second, it can influence the course of the fight.
So, what aspects might you want to consider in setting your scene?
So I’m hauling laundry out of the dryer, and my brain randomly decides it wants to distract itself from the tedium by figuring out how to hack an RPG system to run a Wheel of Time game.
I have no intention of actually running a Wheel of Time game, mind you. But as I said to kniedzw, I think it’s the fanfic impulse gone sideways; there’s stuff I really like about the setting, but also stuff that really annoys me, and a game would give me a way to mentally inhabit my preferred version of that world — maybe even critiquing it in passing. I have no concept for such a game, and probably nobody to play in it anyway (since it would go best with people who know the series), but every so often my brain likes to play with mechanics, and today was one of those times.
Yeah, sure, there’s already a rulebook for it. It’s d20, people. Which may be the Official System for Epic Fantasy Gaming — but it’s abysmally unsuited to handle the magic paradigm presented in the novels. Anybody with an interest in system hacks or running their own Wheel of Time game is invited behind the cut to see how I would do it.
This video contains everything that is good and right about the world.
Sunshine, green grass; grace and athleticism on display.
An’ a kitty.
Seriously, it’s both adorable and gorgeous. Watch it.
日本に行くよ!
Having bought the plane tickets yesterday, I can now say with confidence that kniedzw and I are going to Japan!
I’ve been once before, briefly (over spring break my senior year of college); he’s never been. We’ll be heading down to Kyushu, where kurayami_hime is currently living, then enjoying about a week and a half of sightseeing in Kyushu and western Honshu. Our exact plans haven’t yet been nailed down, but are shaping up to include Nagasaki, Kyoto, and points in between.
If you’re familiar with that area, feel free to recommend things in the comments: sights to see, hotels or ryokan to stay in, etc. We’ll be there during Golden Week, so this will need to be the kind of trip that’s planned in advance, with reservations secured ahead of time.
(True story: when I was in Japan before, I arrived right when cherry blossoms were blooming in the Kansai region. kurayami_hime and I had vaguely planned to stay in Kyoto for three nights, starting on a Wednesday, but when we got to the city and went to make a reservation at a ryokan, there was a sign above the desk warning us “NO VACANCIES IN KYOTO FRIDAY OR SATURDAY NIGHTS.” The entire city was sold out. So we stayed two nights instead of three, and that’s how I ended up going to Takayama, which had not been on my original itinerary.)
Now I’d better get to work dusting off my language skills. It’s been a long time since I really tried to speak Japanese . . . .
At this point, Swan Tower should be navigable again. This is not the same thing as pretty; there are various bits of formatting that need to be adjusted for the new layout, plus bad decisions of mine that were invisible in the old look but become glaringly, appallingly obvious (not to mention ugly) now that the background color has changed. It will take me some time to deal with those. But at least you can get at stuff again.
I could use a spot of help from somebody who knows their way around Perl. The task at hand is to write a reliable script that can do a multi-line replacement across multiple files in multiple subdirectories — to take X (longish) chunk of text and swap Y chunk into its place.
If you’ve got the skills to do that, and the free time to do it in the next day or so, please drop me an email at marie -dot- brennan -at- gmail -dot- com.
Since this blog is hosted separately from my website, the number of people this will directly affect is probably small, but:
Swan Tower (the website, not the journal) is about to get a major face-lift. As in, probably today. Please disregard the dust, hammering noises, and falling support beams that may occur during the process. I’ll post again here when it’s safe to venture back inside.
You know what I love about reading fiction?
I can do it while walking places.
For the last four years, a large proportion of my reading has been nonfiction, most of it research for the Onyx Court. Which requires my attention to follow complex sentences and complicated arguments, and often I end up taking notes: not very compatible with strolling down the sidewalk. But if the book in my hands is a Dorothy Sayers mystery? I can jaunt off to the grocery store, no problem, and not feel annoyed that the walk is taking up valuable time, because I’m entertaining myself as I go.
No doubt whatever I write next will require some amount of research. But until then, I’m going to do my very best to read ALL the fiction.
[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.]
Back in the day, I think A Crown of Swords was my favorite book in the series. As I’ve said before, it’s the one I waited the right length of time for (enough to build anticipation, not enough to become annoyed); furthermore, it has a lot of Mat, and also some really good moments for both Elayne and Nynaeve. In retrospect, it isn’t as good as The Shadow Rising — which will probably remain the best-constructed slice of this sprawling narrative, unless Sanderson really knocks my socks off — but it’s okay. Its major weakness is probably the fizzle of confrontation at the end. (A lot of people apparently complain about how little time passes during the book, but a) man, that must take obsessive work to figure out, since there are no dates given and b) I don’t care about time so much as plot elapsed. And while this one is firmly in the throes of “too many new plots, not enough resolution,” stuff does happen.)
I’ll get to the plot construction in a minute, but first: exciting news! I think I’ve figured out Faile. But I need other people to check my characterization math, because I don’t have a copy of Lord of Chaos around to see if I’m correctly remembering her behavior there, and I don’t remember what happens later well enough (especially the bits from Faile’s pov).
Okay, I fail at photoblogging. I didn’t get last Sunday’s work posted in a timely fashion, and then this weekend I did a bit of poking at it on Saturday and more on Sunday, and, um, now it’s done.
So you get the rest of the photos all in a bunch, I’m afraid.
I read part of a fic some time ago, and can’t remember the title or the author’s name or even where I read it (though I thought it was AO3) — anyway, the story was a crossover that began with Anyanka (of Buffy) and Lois Lane (of Superman) in a bar, and then pulled in lots of other stuff as it went along. Anybody remember this one?
I’ve decided I want to experiment with the kind of book-log posts I see some of my friends making. No promises as to how long I’ll keep this up, but since I’m looking forward to actually reading some fiction for the first time in forever, it’s satisfying to track how much of it I’ve devoured in the last month.
Within fifteen seconds of being kicked in the head during karate tonight, a part of me was thinking, “I should pay attention to what this feels like, in case I need it for a story.”
For the curious: very brief disorientation; swift (and only partially voluntary) decision that it would be better if I put my center of gravity lower for a few seconds, i.e. knelt on the floor; massive radiating heat from my ear lasting for a good half hour or more afterward. (It’s still red now, an hour later, though not swollen.) Oddly, the most painful spot is actually the skin in the crease behind my ear; presumably that has something to do with the cartilege being mashed by the impact.
(I was not kicked with any great force. Though admittedly, when one’s kumite partner is six foot three, “not with any great force” is still enough to be troublesome. And more than enough to guilt one’s kumite partner with — especially when he is also one’s husband. ^_^)
You know how I recently mentioned that my mental queue of Books I Could Write includes twenty-two entries in six series? It’s more than that, really, when you count the standalones and the things I’ve already written but haven’t sold and son on. Rather than do a first lines meme for short stories (which are kind of guilting me right now), I thought it might be fun to tally up all the openings for the novels. Note that most of these are currently laboring under working titles, and for shits and giggles I’ll include some I think are dead in the water.
A terrifyingly long list, really. And it doesn't even include sequels.
If you are San Francisco Bay Area-local, or capable of traveling here in March, you might want to check out FOGcon. It’s a new con starting up March 11-13, with a theme this year of “The City in SF/F;” having looked at their programming possibilities, they definitely have some interesting and varied ideas for how to approach that topic.
I’ll be there, and will presumably be on at least one panel. Furthermore — I guess it’s official, since it got mentioned in the recent newsletter — I’ll be running one of their writing workshops. Looks like the setup will be stories under 10K, submitted with cover letter by February 15th; default arrangement is for a Clarion-style workshop, with each student reading and critting the other pieces in addition to the instructor’s feedback. Erin Cashier, Jed Hartman, and David Levine are the other instructors, and we’re each getting our own section, so if you have a preference for one or another of us (or want to specifically run away from me), mention that in your cover letter.
(This will actually be the first time I’ve run a workshop like this at a con. But I have taught writing before, for one semester.)
Anyway, if you’re interested, register soon! I hope to see some of you there.
