jeebus

Whoa. Apparently I’ve picked up something like thirty-plus new readers since I started the “fight scenes” sequence of posts.

Hi, all! And welcome! This has actually put me up over five hundred readers, which is a nice little landmark; I feel like I should do something to celebrate it. Like giving away prizes.

As near as I can tell, alpheratz, you’re Reader No. 500, so you win! And so does everywherestars, chosen by the highly scientific expedient of pulling up my profile, closing my eyes, and sticking the eraser end of a pencil randomly at my screen. E-mail me at marie [dot] brennan [at] gmail [dot] com, and I’ll give you a selection of prizes from my Box O’ Books And Other Things I’ve Written.

(I know that not all of the 517 readers I currently have are necessarily still reading LJ, so if I don’t hear back from everywherestars, I’ll pick another recipient.)

BTW, I mentioned this to alpheratz in comments, but if you’ve read the entirety of the Lymond Chronicles and want onto the filter wherein I’ve been book-blogging the series (mostly just The Game of Kings so far), leave a note here. That particular project is on hiatus, but I have no objection to comments on old posts, so new readers are always welcome.

I bring these things upon myself

For the amount I’m having to juggle who knows what about whom and when they know it (and when they don’t), I really ought to have a mystery novel to show for it.

Instead, I have an Onyx Court book that makes me want to tear my hair out.

Let this be a lesson to all concerned: never inflict amnesia on multiple characters at once. (No matter how good your reason for it may be.)

Ah well. L’Editor liked it — quite a bit — so there’s that stressor removed; I do still need to do a lot of work, but it’s entirely of my own making. Can’t really blame anybody but myself for that.

Oh, hey! The “l’editor” thing reminded me. If you’re a fluent French speaker and could spare me a few minutes of work checking a handful of lines from this story, please drop me a line, either in comments or by e-mail. It isn’t much, but I should probably fix it before this goes to the copy-editor.

Wheel of Time side post: On Women

I promised a while ago that I would make a post about the depiction of women in the Wheel of Time, and have had the result sitting around not quite finished for more than a month. Since I’m about to buckle down for the last push on revising With Fate Conspire, I might as well get this out of the way and off my mind.

Before I get to the complaints, though, let me say a few things about what Jordan does right. To begin with, he passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors. Even in the first book, Egwene, Nynaeve, and Moiraine are all significant characters, and once the story moves off to the White Tower in The Great Hunt, the importance of women to the plot is firmly assured. I can think of a distressing number of recent epic fantasies that don’t do half so well on that front.

Furthermore, the women aren’t there to be damsels in distress. They don’t get captured or tortured or raped, or killed off to upset the hero. Rand’s angst over the death of women aside, I’d have to go searching to find anyone stuffed into the refrigerator; no significant examples of that leap to mind. Heck, most of them aren’t even love interests: Egwene and Nynaeve both have their own romances, rather than being the object of someone else’s, and while Elayne may have been introduced in that role, it isn’t long before she’s doing far more important things.

That stuff is all good. So why do the women of the Wheel of Time get so badly up my nose?

Spoilers, of course. Also ranting.

two good causes

The Carl Brandon Society is fundraising for the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship, which helps send writers of color to the Clarion workshops. It’s a prize drawing; you can purchase tickets for the chance to win an e-reader (one of two Nooks, one of two Kobos, or an Alex eReader). This goes through midnight Eastern on November 22nd, so you’ve got just a few days left to enter.

Also, Pat Rothfuss is again running his Worldbuilders event, raising money for Heifer International. Among the items on offer are a whole lot of signed books, including a pair of In Ashes Lie and A Star Shall Fall, signed by yours truly. There are so many prizes, though, that Pat’s still in the process of posting them all; check out that first link for a list, and for information on how to participate.

Writing Fight Scenes: my philosophy

[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]

So you’re working on a story, and there comes a point where it really ought to have a fight scene. But you’re sitting there thinking, “I’m not a martial artist! I’m not an SCA member! I have no idea how to fight!” Or maybe you’re thinking, “Fight scenes are so boring. I’d rather just skip over this and get back to the actual story.” Or something else that makes you dread writing that scene, rather than looking forward to it with anticipation.

Don’t worry, dear reader. I’m from the Internet, and I’m here to help. <g>

To the first group, I say: the details of how to fight are possibly the least important component of a fight scene. The important components are the same ones you’re already grappling with in the rest of your writing, namely, description, pacing, characterization, and all that good stuff.

To the second group, I say: it’s only boring if the author does it wrong.

Cut for length.

Writing Fight Scenes: Introduction

This month’s SF Novelists post is a bit different, because it’s the launching point for a series I’ll be doing over here on LJ for the next indeterminate amount of time.

At Sirens this past month, I did a workshop on writing fight scenes, and promised those who weren’t able to attend that I’d be posting the material online. That begins today, and will be continuing for a while. Check out the aforementioned post for sort of an anecdote-cum-mission statement, then head behind the cut for a bit more about me and why I’m interested in this subject, plus an outline of how I’m going to approach this.

I’ve always loved fight scenes.

for those who haven’t seen it

I was mentioning James Frey’s latest atrocity to a few friends last night, and promised I would point them at the details, so here they are, by way of Scalzi’s blog.

Holy abusive contracts, Batman. It appears that Frey’s crass, opportunistic exploitation knows neither bounds nor shame. I can only hope the public outcry will go far enough to scare people away from signing up to be his factory drones — but sadly, I doubt it will.

don we now our gay apparel

So, I signed up for Yuletide.

In a few years, I have gone from “what’s this ‘Yuletide’ thing so-and-so posted about?” to “wtf, half my friends list is talking about this ‘Yuletide’ thing” to “now I’m the one posting about Yuletide.” If you’re like a me a few years ago, and have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s a quick rundown: it’s a fanfic gift exchange, where participants list types of stories they’d really like to get (source, characters, and some non-binding suggestions as to the nature of the story) and types of stories they’d be willing to write. Everybody gets matched up, and on Christmas Day the stories go live, anonymously; on New Years’ Day the authors are revealed.

What makes this interesting to me is that Yuletide is specifically intended to be for “rare” fandoms — sources for which there isn’t a lot of fanfic already out there. In other words, not your Harry Potters and so on. Some participants take this notion of rarity and run with it, clear off the edge of the map: the list of nominated fandoms includes things like, oh, Plato’s Dialogues. Or the song “Devil Went Down to Georgia.” Or Polynesian mythology. There is a section for twelfth-century historical figures; also ones for 13th-14th, 14th-15th, the 15th century itself, 16th-17th, and the Reformation. Reading the list sends me cycling through bafflement and squee: “I’ve never heard of that” alternating with “I’m not the only person who’s seen K-20: The Fiend with Twenty Faces!”

I signed up because on the shuttle back from Sirens, I mentioned the Nightmare Before Christmas/Hogfather crossover fic I’m convinced the world really needs, and rachelmanija told me I should sign up for Yuletide and ask somebody to write it for me. I’d never really considered participating before then, because calling my involvement with the fanfic scene “minimal” would probably be overstating the case — but in a world where Francis James Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads can be listed as a fandom, why the hell not?

Aside from being curious to see what I receive, it’s going to be an interesting exercise from a writing standpoint. I haven’t often written to a prompt of any kind, and in this instance, I have very little notion what I’ll be asked to write. It isn’t completely an open field; I control what I’ve offered, in terms of fandoms and characters, and this year they added a functionality for additional tags, though that last one isn’t binding. The only requirement is that I produce a minimum of one thousand words about X people in Y setting. The recipient may ask for a particular kind of story, but I’m not obligated to produce it. I’ll probably try, though; the point is to make the reader happy, and that means giving them what they’re looking for, if I can. So this may be an enlightening challenge for me, depending on what my assignment turns out to be.

I have more to say on that front, actually, but we’re supposed to keep mum about what we’ve offered to write, so it will have to wait until Yuletide is over.

Anyway, lately my brain has been craving playtime with stories that cannot possibly be construed as any form of work. This fits the bill pretty well. I’m very curious to see what I’ll be assigned to write . . . .

why I love gaming

In the midst of summarizing tonight’s session to kurayami_hime, I typed the sentence “And then they went and burned down San Quentin Prison.”*

Gaming, my friends, lends itself to gonzo behavior I would never put into a novel. (Other writers might; I’m just not that sort.) Torching San Quentin ain’t no jet-ski down an elevator shaft, but it amused me anyway. Random destruction of public property for the win! Guess that historical preservation thing won’t be happening after all . . . .

*Before one of the players corrects me: the xiuhcoatl was the one that actually burned down the prison. But it was the PCs’ fault that happened, so.

TV Gift: Pushing Daisies

I don’t often get into sitcoms. (Or comedy movies, but that’s a separate matter.) Within the last six months, I tried two — Arrested Development and Better Off Ted — and both were funny, very cleverly written, certainly good examples of the genre . . .

. . . and I just didn’t care.

I would watch an episode, and enjoy it while I was watching, but when it ended I felt absolutely no impetus to go on. I didn’t crave more. I didn’t feel any curiosity as to what happened next — well, sitcoms are often highly episodic in their structure, and I’ve made no secret of the fact that I adore a good arc-plot. For me to get hooked on a show whose purpose is primarily comedic, I need something more.

Apparently that “something more” is “dead bodies.”

A friend gave us the first season of Pushing Daisies, and my friends, I have found my comedy show. Not my drama-with-funny-bits — those, I have plenty of — an honest-to-god sitcom about a pie-maker who raises people from the dead (and then puts them back . . . most of the time). His two companions are a private detective who uses him to question murder victims, and a childhood sweetheart he raised and then didn’t put back. Who he can’t ever touch, because if he does she’ll kick the bucket again, this time permanently.

It turns out I really can be bought that easily, by a fantasy component and a bit of gallows humour. Because most of what this show does, is also done by other shows; there’s silly names, implausible characters (the agoraphobic sister aunts who used to do synchronized swimming as the Darling Mermaid Darlings), plot twists out of left field, etc. All the stuff I don’t care about it when other shows do it. But throw in a few dead bodies, some drugged pies, and the matter-of-fact way in which Emerson and Chuck exploit Ned’s ability, and suddenly all that other stuff stops bouncing off my brain and starts sticking.

I still don’t adore it with the heat of a thousand adoring suns — well, not yet, anyway; we’re only four episodes in. My taste runs too much to the drama-tastic end of the spectrum for that, probably. But I suspect I’ll want to buy the second season, and that’s a remarkable achievement in itself.

(Confidential to akashiver — if memory serves, you were trying to push this show on me ages ago. I can only say two things: you were right, and mea culpa for not listening sooner.)

Once upon a time in the West . . . .

I mentioned early this year that I was running a Scion game set on the American frontier. Well, it recently occurred to me that the players have gotten far enough into the story, and uncovered enough of the metaplot, that I can now divulge publicly what the game’s about.

To follow this, you need to know three things:

1) Scion is a game about playing the half-mortal children of gods in the modern world, starting out as “heroes” and ascending in power and fame to become demigods and (if you survive) eventually gods in their own right.

2) 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.

3) One of the Scion books included material for how you could do a WWII-era game. In this, they proposed that Columbia (of the U.S.), Britannia (of the U.K.), and Marianne (of France) were all sisters, daughters of Athena sent out as an experiment in governance. It also proposed a Yankee pantheon, made up largely of tall-tale figures (Paul Bunyan, John Henry, etc), headed by Columbia and Uncle Sam.

So here’s what I did with those three things . . . .

U.S. history, as seen through a mythological lens.

Words: On Sayin’ It Rong

There’s a conversation I have occasionally with fellow reader-geeks, about the words you know perfectly well from books, but almost never hear in conversation. The words you think you know how to say . . . until one day you’re forty-one and find out that all this time, you’ve been doing it wrong.

My personal go-to example for this is “chasm.” I was in my twenties before I discovered that ch is not pronounced as in “chair,” but rather as in “chord.” How was I supposed to know? It’s not as if that word gets used in everyday speech. “Debacle” is another one; like many people, I spent a long time putting the accent on the first syllable (DEB-ack-el) rather than the second (deh-BAH-kel). My sixth-grade teacher nearly cracked up when, during the health unit, I asked a question about kah-PILL-aries, rather than KAH-pill-aries — capillaries.* I don’t think I was ever in the pronounce-the-b camp for “subtle,” but I know a lot of people who were.

I correct myself when I can, of course — but the problem isn’t doing the correction; it’s knowing that you need to in the first place. To learn that you’re pronouncing something wrong, you generally have to hear the correct pronunciation in use, but of course we have these problems to begin with because the words so rarely get spoken. (Plus, when you hear it, you shouldn’t assume the other guy has it wrong; you have to second-guess yourself, and figure out who’s right. Sometimes it will be you. Sometimes it won’t.) You can’t just ask, “what words am I pronouncing wrong?” You don’t know. And unless a friend of yours keeps a list of words they’ve heard you mangle, nobody else is likely to have the answer ready.

But the tough ones are often widely shared, and so I throw the doors open to the internet and ask:

What words did you pronounce wrong for a long time? How were you saying them, and when did you find out your mistake?

Because it’s entirely possible that if you post a comment to the effect of, “oh yeah, I said vuh-HEM-ment for ages, until my wife pointed out it’s VEE-a-ment,” somebody else will read this and think, wait, THAT’S how you pronounce “vehement”? So I am furthermore declaring this a Shame-Free Zone; nobody should feel embarrassed for admitting past or present errors. It’s a common failing of readers, that we have big vocabularies we maybe don’t use right in speech. Whenever I have this conversation in person, people bond over it — knowing they aren’t the only ones to have made those mistakes. Share your stories, admit your blunders, and maybe you can save somebody else from the same fate.

*Though I’m checking all of these in the OED as I list them, and now I discover that accenting the second syllable is a valid alternative, though not the preferred one.

Heh.

Last night — fairly late, West Coast time — I noticed that Wikipedia’s article of the day was on the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

Later that same night, I noticed the OED’s word of the day was “gunpowder.”

Huh, I thought, that’s a funny coincide — oh.

Yeah, you’d think (having written a Gunpowder Plot story and all), I would remember Guy Fawkes Day. I can’t even blame it on me being in California, and therefore it still being November 4th when those things showed up; it still hasn’t registered on me that oh yeah, it’s November already.

Jeebus — where did 2010 go?

Anyway, it’s apparently also Diwali, so I hope my friends in many parts of the world are having fun lighting things on fire and making them go boom. (So long as none of those things are, say, the Houses of Parliament.)

medical/law enforcement questions

Do psychiatric facilities generally fingerprint their patients?

If cops were to get hold of bloodstained clothing, how long would it take to run an analysis on the blood? And what information would that give? How about analyzing non-visible blood residue on a knife?

(I’m trying to clear some written-but-not-revised stories out of here.)

Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. (Or in my case, sweep the floor.)

There is a story.

It started out as a fanficcy little speculation on somebody else’s world, and at that stage it lived only in my head. One day the seed attached itself instead to another idea, this one mine, and having done so, it grew.

I tried many times to write it as a short story. Seven times, according to my files, and of those, only attempt #5 was ever completed. But I knew it sucked, and that’s why attempts #6 and #7 happened — continual attempts to cram the narrative into the confines of a short story. Until one day I said, screw this; let’s see how long it wants to be. Whereupon I wrote a twenty-two thousand word novella.

That being a useless length for a young writer with no publishing credits, the novella went into the drawer. Later I brought it out for critique, thinking I might try to sell it after all, but I never got around to revising it. My odds of selling it were too low, and I had this subconscious feeling the story needed more than just a polish. So back into the drawer it went.

Until I found myself with a reason to pick it up again, and a chance of maybe selling it, too. More than seven years after writing the novella, I brought it out for critique again, this time with the knowledge that I would probably do a ground-up rewrite: after all, one hopes I had improved in the intervening years. I knew I wanted to make substantial changes, but what I didn’t know — not consciously, not until one of my readers pointed it out — was that the story had a fundamental flaw at its core. One that made most of the narrative action pointless and unnecessary. The kind of flaw you have to fix, or dump the story.

Tonight, while sweeping the dojo after karate, I figured out how to fix that flaw. And given the story, that was a very appropriate time for such an epiphany.

No, you don’t get to know what the story is. Not yet. But I promise you’ll know within the next six months, whatever the tale’s ultimate fate will be.

Oof.

Got home last night from my family reunion the World Fantasy Convention, which was its usual splendid self. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it’s gotten better over time: a lot of people are con regulars, which means that it’s easy to build up a community of people you know and look forward to seeing each year. Also, I’ve gotten less stressed about being there; I used to worry about the moments where I seemed out of gear, not able to engage with people the way I wanted to, Squandering my Valuable Time There — but these days I just chill out, and lo, the issue resolves itself. Trusting that makes the whole thing a lot easier.

This one was especially good because it featured a lot of meeting up with people I know online, but have never really hung out with in person. time-shark, saladinahmed — heck, I even met jimhines for realz! Not to mention many other wonderful folks I didn’t know well at all, but had great conversations with nonetheless. Also, the location meant a bunch of my B-ton friends were able to come, whether from Indiana or the places they’ve scattered to since, and seeing them was especially nice.

And now my voice sounds like somebody raked it over a cheese-grater, because that’s what WFC is to me: the place I go to talk all weekend long, often over the roar of several hundred other people doing the same thing. Then I come home exhausted and halfway to mute and happy.

It’s my family reunion. Complete with hugs and drunkenness and the occasional bits of Personal Drama, and then we all scatter to the four winds until next year. Which in this case will be San Diego; I’m thinking of driving down. It would be a ten-hour drive by the coastal route, but if I can get a co-driver it might be worth it. Heck, I might even take an extra day, stop for the night somewhere along Highway 1, make a bit of a vacation out of it. We’ll see.

Spending October at home is for the birds!

Tonight I leave on my third trip of the month, this one to World Fantasy. The weird thing is, it’s the first time this month I’ll be flying on my own dime; the first trip was my GoH gig at Sirens, and the second . . . last weekend, my publisher sent me here:

About a stone’s throw from the Kodak Theatre, no less. But it isn’t nearly as exciting as you think.

I was not there to meet with a high-powered Hollywood producer about how they want to pay me lots of money to film one of my books. I was there, instead, for the Southern California Independent Booksellers’ Association annual meeting. This is an industry event that brings writers in to schmooze over dinner with staff from local independent bookstores. I’d never done one before, so it was interesting; the authors got fed beforehand, so we wouldn’t have to choose between talking and eating (or end up talking with our mouths full), and then during everybody else’s meal we got shuttled from table to table, chatting up the people there.

Serendipity was my friend at this event. Not on the travel side — two-hour flight delay on the way there, three-hour on the way back, for a flight that’s a little more than an hour long — but with the new friends I made. I got to the hotel just in time to fling myself into nicer clothing and run downstairs, whereupon I got my registration and stood trying to catch my breath, wondering if I would have anything other than the basics in common with the other writers there. (They come from all corners of publishing, nonfiction as well as fiction, children’s picture books to adult.) But lo, I was not standing a full minute before I heard the phrase “historical fiction” come from two women nearby.

I drifted closer.

Then I heard Newton’s name.

I drifted closer still.

Ended up with two new friends. One was a writer of historical fiction, Laurel Corona, who’s bopped all around the timeline even more than I have; her most recent book, Penelope’s Daughter, is set in Homeric Greece, and her next involves an eighteenth-century mathematician, Émilie du Châtelet. The other, Deborah Harkness, is (if memory serves) a professor of history whose debut novel A Discovery of Witches will be coming out soon; it’s about a researcher at the Bodleian Library who comes across an alchemical manuscript that gets her into all sorts of trouble. Oh, and Deborah’s a giant Tudor geek, too.

Nah, we didn’t have anything to talk about.

Best part was, Deborah was at my third table, and so were two women currently reading her novel and loving it. And the table host was a big SF/F fan. So I spent the dessert course geeking about alchemy and how Newton was a complete jackass. Friends, this is what we call success.

Anyway, that was my Hollywood adventure. Now I go off to the much colder environs of Columbus, Ohio. Send me warm thoughts . . . .

I suppose I should post a World Fantasy schedule.

I’m going to be a busy little swan this WFC. I’ve only got one official event:

The West Doesn’t Exist, 4 p.m. Thursday
For all the world is round and most educated people in antiquity knew this — Why is it that in so many fantasies, there are places on the map that you just can not go?

But I’m also part of a thirty-author group event at the OSU campus bookstore from 11-1 on Saturday, signing and doing a giveaway. Furthermore, akashiver is reading, and therinth is reading, and jimhines is reading, and and there’s a giant mass Black Gate reading Saturday night, and I’m supposed to have dinner with my editor in there somewhere, and gahhhhh I can already tell I’m going to be running all weekend. (For values of “running” that translate to “sitting or standing around having fabulous conversations and then realizing I need to be somewhere else and crap how did I get through the whole weekend without ever finding the time to hang out with <insert various awesome people here>?”

So yeah: look for the braid, come up and say hi. Especially if you’re somebody I don’t see very often. (Or have never actually met in person — jimhines, I’m looking at you.)

five things I want

1) I want to write a secondary-world fantasy, where I can Make Shit Up rather than having to bend myself around reality.

2) I want to write short stories again.

3) I want to move forward on some piece of the logjam of ideas building up in my mind.

4) I want to know what I’m doing next.

5) I really, really want to be done with this revision, so I can get on with my life.