In Memoriam: my keychain, 1997-2011

O_O

O_O,

. . . okay, this is ridiculous, I know that, but I am in mourning.

In the summer of 1997, I worked on an Earthwatch project in South Shields, England, doing archaeological excavation on the Roman fort of Arbeia. While I was there, I purchased a keychain in a local shop: a little Roman shield, rectangular and curved, with wings and lightning bolts and a round central boss, painted red and gold. The keychain being rather on the cheap side, the paint began flaking off in short order, but that was okay; the decoration was stamped into the steel, so I just stripped off the remainder of the paint and kept it plain.

This has been My Keychain for, effectively, my entire life. I never bothered with a keychain before then, and I’ve never used another since; I am not the sort of person who keeps twelve tchotchkes strung on the ring. The whole packet right now consists only of house key, mail key, bike key, car key, and the shield.

Or it did, until tonight.

Tonight, when I pulled my keys from my jeans pocket, the ring at the top of the shield broke clean through.

For years, I’ve been worried that some day I would lose my keys — worried not because I’d be locked out of the house, but because the shield would be gone. This is better; I still have it. But my husband can vouch for the utterly tragic look on my face when I realized, standing in the front hall, that it had broken beyond repair.

What will I do?

I’ll keep the shield, of course. The scoring down the center of the lightning bolts and marking the feathers on the wings has nearly been worn off; the curve of the shield has almost been mashed flat. It was never meant to survive thirteen and a half years of constant use. It’s a relic of my first dig, though, and my first solo international trip, and my love of all things Roman; no way is it going in the trash. The real question is what I do about my keys. They’re still on a ring, with what’s left of the chain; the clasp on that is so fused, I may have to cut it off. But I don’t know what I’ll do for a keychain. Do I need one? Do I want one? Maybe I need a mourning period for the old one first. I have no idea what could possibly replace it in my affections.

Yes, I’m mourning my freaking keychain. So what. It was a dear old friend, and I’m sorry to see it go.

more fiction!

It’s just raining stories of mine around here, ain’t it?

Erin Underwood of Underwords has put together a free fiction sampler for 2011, and it includes some stories from Clockwork Phoenix 3, including “The Gospel of Nachash.” So if you’re interested in me, um, fanficcing the Bible? . . . in full-blown King James Version style . . . with sekrit ingredients thrown in . . . then go check it out. And if you’re not, check the sampler out anyway, because I am only one of twenty-seven authors bundled into it, and there’s sure to be somebody else you enjoy.

anonymous Yuletiders are no longer anonymous

The big reveal has happened, and now I can tell you what I wrote for Yuletide.

Before I do that, though — it’s interesting, the ways in which this feels different than linking you to my stories on Beneath Ceaseless Skies or wherever. Those are written for a general audience; as a result, even when they’re connected to a pre-existing text (like the Onyx Court novels), I do my best to make sure they stand alone, and can be read by anybody who’s interested. In the case of Yuletide, though, they’re fanfic, which tends to be heavily in dialogue with the source text, often in ways that bypass the kind of exposition an independent story would need.

Which is a long and overly intellectual way of saying, I have no idea whether any of these stories will mean anything to people who don’t know the sources. Since two, possibly three, of them are on the obscure side, this is me throwing up my hands and going, “I dunno, people, read ’em if you want to.” <g>

And the four stories are . . . .

new audio

In contrast to the happy stories I posted before, here’s something dark and grim for the end of the year: Flash on the Borderlands V, a collection of three flash pieces over at Pseudopod, one of which is my fairy-tale retelling “The Snow-White Heart.” Note that is Pseudopod and not Podcastle; this is the horror sibling of the EA podcast family, and as I have not yet listened to the whole file, I can’t tell you what lurks in the other two stories. (Mine starts with cannibalism and goes downhill from there.) Listen at your own risk.

the internets love me

Now that the AO3 is no longer weeping for mercy, I feel safe in pointing you all at What I Got For Yuletide.

A few days before Christmas, I noticed I had two gifts listed on my profile. My assigned writer had turned in their piece, and some total stranger had decided to write me a little something extra. Not until Christmas, though, did I discover what they were. Remember that crazy crossover idea, the The Nightmare Before Christmas/Hogfather mashup I really wanted but had no guarantee I would get?

Dear Readers, I didn’t just get one story of that sort; I got two.

My assigned writer produced “‘Twas the Night,” in which an unexpected midair collision between two sleighs leaves Discworld’s Death and Halloweentown’s Jack Skellington debating the nature of reality while Sally and Susan Sto Helit team up to fix the problem. A bit less than six thousand words of awesomeness, featuring guest appearances by characters from both stories, including (eeeeee!) the Death of Rats.

Then! Somebody else browsed the list of prompts, saw what I had requested, and wrote me “The Ill-Advised Skeletal Exchange Program,” wherein Death and Jack Skellington are pen-pals and arrange a temporary swap. Sally is Helpful, and Susan is Not Amused, and the Death of Rats shows up again, because he’s just too awesome to leave out.

Folklorist Brain is entirely fascinated to see the differences and similarities that result when two writers produce their own takes on the same prompt. Yuletide Brain is bouncingly happy to have gotten an extra gift. Anybody who’s interested is welcome, nay, encouraged to share in the bounty; go read the stories, and if you get a 502 error just try again later, when the archive has once again staggered to its feet.

(I can’t tell you yet what I wrote for Yuletide; that has to wait until after New Year’s, when the authors are revealed. Until then, I’m having to sit on my hands not to respond to the comments I’ve received so far. If anybody wants to play the “guess what I wrote?” game, though, your clues are that I wrote four pieces, one over 4K, two in the 1-2K range, and one less than 1K for Yuletide Madness; none are for novels, and no two are in the same fandom or media type. Also, no RPF: the modern stuff squicks me and the historical stuff was too much like work. Given that there were over three thousand stories produced for Yuletide 2010, though, and I have no pre-existing track record of fanfic for you to base your guesses on, I don’t expect anybody to spot my work. If you do, I’ll find some prize to give you.)

a holiday treat for you

Looking for something to read while you hang out with or avoid family? Author Stephanie Burgis has put together a project called December Lights, with various authors providing free reprints of short stories. And not your gloom-and-doom short stories, either, with grim amoral heroes and inexorable zombie apocalypses, but little bits of light for this season of darkness*.

My contribution to the project is “Lost Soul,” one of my Nine Lands stories. The full list is here, and there’s more to come before the month is out. Enjoy!

*Unless you’re in the southern hemisphere. But you guys could still use more light, right?

in-flight wireless, facilitating Yuletide silliness

So I discovered I have longer to write “Coyotaje” than I thought, which means I was able to let myself stop pushing on a stone that really doesn’t want to roll yet. Still need to get the thing written soon, but as long as that one wasn’t moving forward, I let myself write a silly little treat for Yuletide, above and beyond the story I was assigned. The recipient is somebody I don’t know in the slightest — which pleases me, because there’s something delightful about total strangers writing stuff for each other. Friends writing stories as gifts is also nice, but when it’s a stranger, it’s all about shared love for the source. Somebody else going, “omg, you’ve seen/read/heard that, too? Isn’t it fabulous?”

After the brain-drain that was With Fate Conspire, this is, indeed, what I needed. Stories as play, without having to put on my professional hat. December is a good time of year for recharging, and I can feel myself getting excited about other things now. We’ll see how much I can get done before the calendar ticks over.

Right now, though, I’m on a plane, which was okay for polishing that Yuletide story, but not terribly good for drafting something new. Plus, I’m very sleepy, and can’t let myself nap. Time to find someway to keep myself awake.

an unexpected victory

After all the doomful predictions of how it would die in the Senate, it appears that the repeal of the U.S. military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy toward gays has passed.

Dear Congress: thank you for my early Christmas present. It’s about bloody time.

just in time

I almost didn’t get this month’s installment written in time — only finished it a few hours before the thing went live — but my posting streak at SF Novelists is unbroken. That’s right, folks, it’s the sixteenth of the month, and that means I’m blogging over there, this time on the topic of responses, reviews, criticism, and critique. Comment over there, no account needed, but if you’re a first-time commenter I’ll have to fish your reply out of the moderation queue before it will be visible.

an odd metric

I don’t particularly have issues with my weight. (I couldn’t even tell you what it is, with a margin of error smaller than five pounds; we don’t own a scale.) But I will admit that I have some issues with my composition, by which I mean the lean-to-squish ratio of me is skewed more toward the latter than I would like, and sometimes that also means issues with my shape.

Last night, however, I got vivid proof that my general shape has not changed all that much in the last fifteen years or so. Going through the costume closet, in a (not entirely successful) attempt to cull its contents a bit, I dug out and tried on all the old dance costumes I’ve been holding on to.

And they all fit.

They didn’t necessarily look good on me — some of them I don’t think ever looked good, on anybody — but I got them on, and without putting the spandex to much of a test. And these are things I wore when I was fifteen and dancing eight hours a week. To which I say: dude. I would not have predicted that.

Mind you, this put a crimp in my plan to chuck out lots of costumes that don’t fit me anymore, because they do fit. I’ve chucked the truly ugly ones instead, the things that only look vaguely right when put in motion, on a stage, a healthy distance from the audience, but that’s only half or so of the total. (I should get rid of more, especially now that I’m not involved in a Changeling game where random dance costumes come in handy for playing a swan maiden or water elemental or whatever — but I can’t bring myself to do it. I might need them someday.) But it was an encouraging experience, and only firmed my resolve — pardon the pun — to do more things to increase the lean percentage of me. Today I rode my bike for the first time since my ankle surgery in the spring, and in the future intend to run as many of my errands as I can that way, weather permitting. My glutes may hate me for it today, but they’ll thank me eventually.

aaaaand . . . . GO!

Got my Yuletide story uploaded. Now I have three days in which to try and finish a story for (hopefully) paying purposes. I would have done these things in the opposite order, but the pro piece didn’t actually cohere in my head until tonight; in fact, I was on the verge of giving up and not submitting anything after all.

Working title, “Coyotaje.”

Go.

Revisiting the Wheel of Time: Lord of Chaos

[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.]

In my post on The Fires of Heaven, I said that we were beginning our journey into the swamp of bad pacing.

With this book, we jump into it feet-first.

This is rather worrisome, since my recollection was that this aspect didn’t get really bad until The Path of Daggers (two books from now). I’m hoping that was just when I took off the rose-colored glasses, as the alternative is that the pacing tanks twice: once here, and again there. I’m rather afraid to see the result, if that’s the case. But it cannot be denied that the story starts wandering badly in this book, much more so than previously. Stuff happens — this isn’t Crossroads of Twilight, thank whatever deity you like — but it’s padded out with a whole bunch of crap that doesn’t deserve nearly so much page time.

We get off onto the wrong foot with the prologue. The funny thing is, back in the day, I quite liked the prologues. Remember that I didn’t pick the series up until just before the publication of A Crown of Swords; by then, Tor had gotten into the habit of posting the prologue online, some time before the book’s street date, as a kind of “trailer” to get people excited. It worked, at least for me; the prologues touch base with a lot of characters, reminding you of where they are and what they’re doing, and providing hints of what’s to come.

The problem is, outside of that context — a pre-publication goodie — they really don’t work at all. They fundamentally aren’t prologues, not in any meaningful sense; the only thing separating them from ordinary chapters is their (increasing) length and the number of points of view packed into them. Furthermore, they rarely contain anything truly exciting: their main function is to remind you of the current state of affairs, rather than to launch anything important. The significant content of most of these scenes could be condensed to a single sentence — and not a complicated one at that.

Rather more ranting this time, I’m afraid. But also a few positive notes.

this “early bedtime” thing is for the birds

An attempt to go to bed early last night backfired spectacularly, with me waking up in the wee hours of the morning and spending god knows how long attempting to go back to sleep, before giving up around 7 a.m.

Remember, folks, my usual schedule has bedtime around 3 a.m. and waking up at maybe 11 or so.

I suspect this afternoon will feature a sizeable nap. At least if I want to make it through kobudo and karate tonight without falling over.

On the bright side, the utter screwing up of my sleep schedule has produced the impossible, namely, me getting some writing done in the morning. Since my sleepless brain decided to entertain itself with my Yuletide story, I knocked out just shy of two thousand words when I got up. I probably have another thousand or so to go, putting it pretty near the average for Yuletide fics, if maybe a bit longish. Feels about right to me.

It’s an interesting challenge, writing this thing, trying to match the characters’ voices: the perennial difficulty of fanfiction, and not one I deal with much as a professional writer. And I have an extra challenge in that I’m trying to get one of the characters wrong in a deliberate fashion — but even that is proving complicated, because the manner of the wrongness also has to arise from the source. (I hope that’s sufficiently vague as to not give things away that I shouldn’t.) Suffice it to say, I made it through that part of the story, and we’ll see what I think of the result when I’ve slept. Hopefully by then I’ll have figured out how to do the next bit, too.

maybe it’s the fluoride

They really must put something in the water, because shower-time packs more story inspiration per minute than any other thing I do, and that includes driving.

Which is by way of saying I figured out the entire plot of my Yuletide story while washing my hair, and I am very pleased with it. Hopefully my recipient will be, too. I think I’m managing to play to the ideas they floated in their request letter, while also incorporating some nifty ideas of my own. (And best of all, it’s unlikely to balloon up to a ten thousand word monstrosity. Which is good, since this has to be done by the twentieth.)

Now, do I start work on the story, or spend more time reviewing the source? Decisions, decisions . . . .

Inception in Real Time

From gollumgollum, an awesome video:

Not worth watching if you haven’t seen the movie; most of it won’t make sense, and the bits that do make sense will be spoilers. But if you’ve seen Inception? Watch this video. It beautifully illustrates the time-dilation aspect of the film. (And the vidder did an excellent job editing the “Mombasa” track onto the footage, too.)

a brief note

There will be an audio version of “Two Pretenders” in BCS; that will reportedly go live in January, which is also (I believe) when the print version itself will be published.

Back to drooling on myself, by which I mean prepping for game tonight.

apparently I still have some brain

How excited am I about the project I intend to pitch next to Tor?

Excited enough that I spent part of this afternoon working on the proposal for it, instead of just drooling on myself in a fit of post-novel lethargy. I think that must be a good sign.

Other blogging will return shortly, with fight scene advice, Wheel of Time analysis, and more. But first, I will probably drool on myself for a while.