another brief missive, from near the end of the con

OH HOLY GOD THE OTHER THING WORKED, TOO.

(The other thing, in this case, being my costume. Pictures will follow. Only the crown bit was the subject of the Boggan Deathmatch a while ago; the rest, I paid someone to make, because sewing it myself while also finishing With Fate Conspire would have required paying a lot more money in psychiatrist bills.)

Early breakfast tomorrow, then shuttle back to Denver, flight back to home. This has been fabulous, and there will be a detailed report.

brief missive from mid-con

OH HOLY GOD IT WORKED.

(The stunt I alluded to before? I read a selection from With Fate Conspire . . . complete with RP and cockney accents. One attendee with a British mother said that if she hadn’t heard me speak in my natural voice, she wouldn’t have known I was American. This is pretty much the best seal of approval I could hope for.)

(I still don’t know that I’ll try that stunt in public again, though.)

BCS shout-out

Popping in briefly from Sirens (so far: it’s fabulous) to say that it’s the second anniversary of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, which they’re celebrating with a double issue. (And some really lovely artwork, too.)

Anybody who’s read this journal for a while knows my love for BCS. They publish my kind of fantasy, the kind that has richly developed or evocative secondary worlds, ranging in style and content from the American frontier to Mesoamerica to Enlightenment France to India to Japan. And they do podcasts, too. From my personal experience, I can say the editor, Scott Andrews, is great to work with, and I’d go on with the praise but I haven’t eaten yet and I should probably fix that before I fall over.

So instead let me just nudge you in the direction of the site, encouraging you to read, and to support BCS if you enjoy what you find. Bringing you this kind of fiction ain’t cheap, and while they’re a non-profit, they do need money to function. So if you like what they’re doing, and want to see it go on for another two years or more, think about helping out.

Back to Sirens I go . . . .

concerning radio silence

I turned in a novel, and then my sister left for Japan, and then I had a house-guest, and now I’m heading off for Sirens. So the lack of posting is likely to continue for a few days yet; I may post updates during the con, but in all likelihood you’ll get the story after the fact. (Among other things, I have a keynote address to finish writing, a reading to practice that requires a certain stunt, and a workshop to plan out. So that will have me busy in my off moments.)

I am nervous and very excited. This is my first time as a Guest of Honor; I can only hope I do justice to the role.

I finally finished Avatar.

After much hiatus-ing along the way, I’ve finally seen the entirety of Avatar: The Last Airbender. (TV series, natch — not the Shyamalan film. Though I laughed and laughed at how the episode “The Ember Island Players” seemed to presage the movie’s awfulness.)

I very much enjoyed the show: the characters, and most especially the world it takes place in, which has all kinds of nifty little details squirreled away in the corners. Apparently Nickelodeon is planning a new twelve-episode series to air next year — set seventy-five years later, focusing on Korra, a Water Tribe girl who’s the new Avatar — and I am very much looking forward to that.

It was interesting, though, watching a show which fundamentally was written for a kid audience. I read a decent amount of YA, but this was aimed at a demographic aged 6-11 (according to Wikipedia), and they play in a whole different ballpark. I could feel the difference: the show still grapped with interesting and sometimes difficult ideas, but the way it did so was . . . simpler.

Which feels like a criticism, maybe even a dismissal, and that’s the part I find interesting. I can’t find any words to describe what I’m thinking of that don’t sound like pejoratives. It’s simpler. The answers come more easily. They aren’t explored in as much depth.

But that isn’t a bad thing. How many adults got hooked on that series? I’m nowhere near the only one. Just because we weren’t the intended audience didn’t mean we couldn’t enjoy it. If it didn’t reach quite the same depths of grief and heights of joy as, say, Dorothy Dunnett, that’s okay; I was shouting at the TV screen anyway, which is a good sign that I cared. The story may have been simpler, but it wasn’t lesser.

So I’m left wondering, what makes that trick happen? What’s the secret technique that makes a nice, simple story for children (Avatar, Harry Potter) into something hordes of adults enjoy? Was it the characterization? Again, that didn’t have the depth I might expect from an adult show — but it was compelling; I giggled and cheered and wailed at the characters not to do the stupid thing I knew they were about to do. Was it the world? Maybe we were all just starving for a full-blown setting that wasn’t the usual familiar medieval Eurofantasy. I’d be curious to hear from people who loved the show: what was it that drew you to it?

(Be spoiler-free, if you can.)

::falls over::

Draft of With Fate Conspire is off to the editor. I have formally decided I don’t have to look at it again until after Sirens is over, which means I’m on vacation (from this book, at least) until October 11th.

I go fall down now.

oh holy god at LAST.

Through random bloody chance and the favor of the gods of procrastination, the Victorian book, my assembled ladies and gentlemen, HAS A TITLE.

Can I get a drumroll?

<rolllllllllllllll>

With Fate Conspire.

Unless you are my husband or moonandserpent, you do not know — and do not want to know — how much Victorian literature I read through in search of something I could use. This one was lovely but had the verb at the front (and therefore looked out of place with the rest of the series); this one had the verb at the end but the quote it came from only fit the book if I tilted my head at a particular angle and squinted; this one was gorgeous but didn’t fit no matter how hard I squinted; this one was out of period; this one fit the pattern but wasn’t a great title. (Children, learn from me: nevereverever constrain yourself to this kind of highly patterned titling scheme.) I kept on plowing through poet after poet after architecture writer after novelist, trying to find something.

And then I sat down yesterday to read Tim Powers for procrastination, and I found my title.

The funniest part is, the epigraph he used came from a source I’d already gone through, and gotten nothing from. I mentioned some random bloody chance, right? The edition Powers quotes is earlier than the one I’d read, and has a different phrasing. “With Him conspire” is not a line I would have used. But Powers used an earlier edition, and I stared at the epigraph thinking, could I . . .?

I could. I can. My editor has given it the thumbs-up. On this, my last day of revising before I send the draft off to him for comment, my quest has ended. The Novel Formerly Known As The Victorian Book is now With Fate Conspire.

thoughts on steampunk

If you’re interested in steampunk, Nader Elhefnawy has a well-thought-out article on it up on the SFWA site.

I particularly like the way he acknowledges the role of nostalgia without automatically dismissing nostalgia as something that must always be inherently bad. Yes, the steampunk vision of the past conveniently overlooks the less-attractive parts of the period, but the flip side of that coin is that it valorizes the attractive, selecting out qualities we may be losing/have lost in this day and age and trying to resurrect them. Plus, Elhefnawy puts the current era in context with the past in a way I found very eye-opening, characterizing this as the post-apocalypse of the Victorians, with WWI as the apocalypse.

Interesting stuff. I recommend reading it.

For level 30, I took the Flying feat

By the way, this is what I did for my thirtieth birthday:

It’s called “indoor skydiving,” and it is FABULOUS.

My understanding is that the setup was invented to help skydivers train. You can also do it for fun, though. A giant fan beneath the wire trampoline blows enough wind upward to lift a person who’s perpendicular to the flow, simulating the effect of free-fall. The trainer is there to catch and adjust you; it can be hard to stabilize if you’ve never done it before, so you sink down or drift into the wall. Once you get the hang of it, they may spin you, or (in the case of our guy) latch onto you at shoulder and hip, put themselves into free-fall, and then take you zooming up into the shaft above, dropping down until you almost hit the trampoline, zooming up again, down again, maybe spinning as you go . . . .

OMG.

SO. MUCH. FUN.

You may be put off when you find out what your money gets you. My husband bought a group package for me and some friends/family; we each were allotted two one-minute flights. Doesn’t sound like much — but trust me, that’s a lot of free-fall. One of our group fell sick and didn’t come, so I got his extra time, making for two two-minute flights, and holy god by the end my pecs were tired. It’s like lying on your back, holding a heavy weight juuuuuuust above your chest, for one (or two) minutes at a stretch. (Since I, for some ballet-related totally inexplicable reason, found it more natural to bend at the hip rather than the knee – as seen in this photo — I also ended up with sore glutes. I’m pretty sure I would have just traded those for sore quads instead, though, had I made the effort to drag my knees down.) By the time my second two minutes were up, I was more than ready to be done.

If you have any desire to fly, you should absolutely try this out. Especially if, like me, you’ve had enough ankle-and-knee problems that leaping out of a plane (or rather, landing after such a leap) is just asking for trouble. It will make you giddy with joy.

holy *shit*.

It’s boggling enough that for the first time since I started writing the Onyx Court series, there are photographs from (nearly) the period in which I’m writing.

Every so often, one of them hits me like a punch to the gut:

YOU USED TO BE ABLE TO SEE ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL.

I knew this, of course. There are all kinds of references, and even paintings, to how the churches of the City used to soar over everything around them, rather than being lost in the cracks. But holy shit. Not just the dome, not just the western towers, but the body of the church. Visible. In more than glimpses caught between the buildings that crowd around it.

Obviously this photo was taken from the roof of a nearby building (or else something in the vicinity of Blackfriars was decidedly taller than everything else around it). You can get semi-decent shots of the cathedral even now, if you could persuade one of the places at the top of Ludgate Hill to let you onto their roof. But nothing with this kind of sight-line and openness, because these days, too many buildings rise higher than the top of the cathedral steps.

It really is a window into the past. The late Victorian period — this photo was published circa 1891 or 1892 — but also more than a hundred years before then, ever since Wren built the new cathedral, because the buildings would have been mostly about that height. Paste in an image of old St. Paul’s, with or without spire, and you’ve got a good idea of what the area looked like centuries ago.

For a London-history geek like me, this just blows the top of my head off.

after-action report

The reading went swimmingly. Quite a good number of people in attendance, and the stories went over well. For the curious, my final choices were:

1) “The Wives of Paris” — even if nobody had voted for it, I might have read this one, just because I’ve been looking forward to doing so for ages. As it also got a goodly number of votes in the poll, my desire had some justification to back it up.

2) “A Heretic by Degrees” — lots of votes for the various Driftwood options. I didn’t get the new story revised, so opted for this one instead. Especially because Borderlands readings are about the only opportunity I get to read longer stories; usually time constraints prohibit it.

3) a selection from A Star Shall Fall — if you’ve read the book, I did the two scenes where Irrith goes hunting in what Ktistes claims is a bad patch but isn’t really, and finds the, er, special room. (Circumlocuting so as to avoid spoilers.)

Now, back to the revision mines.

Clearing the Slate: usernames

Continuing my effort to clear out my Firefox tabs and my brain, let’s talk about usernames.

yuki_onna posted about this a little while ago, and I have to say I’m on her side. But first, let’s talk about the original poster’s argument.

I feel like pretty much everything he says can be turned around from a positive into a negative. True, on Facebook you don’t have the problem of signing up only to find your customary username has already been taken. Instead you have the problem of signing up with a name that’s maybe shared by 7,142 other people. An improvement, or only a differently annoying issue? Also, he says you don’t have to use your real name, just a name — but hang on, isn’t that essentially the username thing all over again, except without the restriction that it must be unique? And maybe a requirement that your chosen name has to come in two parts (e.g. Pony McRainbow). If you can still use a made-up name, you still have the problem he describes, of realizing belatedly that somebody you know in person and somebody you know online are actually, y’know, the same person.

But that has an easy fix. If you want your legal name associated with your pseud, put it in your profile or wherever. If you want to keep them separate, you can.

Which is part of Cat’s point. Facebook wants you to use your real name (and other real information) so you can be more effectively tracked: pinned down, advertised to, your information sold to third-party vendors, linked up with things you never intended to touch. Oh, so you’re the Melanie Dunn whose grocery purchases swing erratically between Hostess snack cakes and green vegetables (better sell you some diet aids!), who’s a registered Democratic voter in Kansas (do your neighbors know?), whose medical history shows a procedure at a particular doctor’s office three years ago (and we can guess what that was). So when you go posting on your blog about how you think bigots should get over the whole Islamic community center thing, rest assured people will have an easy time connecting that with your weight and your political activities and the fact that maybe you had an abortion. Aren’t you glad they know who you are?

False names, whether unique usernames or non-unique pseudonyms, can protect people.

But you know, even if that were taken out of the equation, I’d still like usernames, and my reason is the other part of Cat’s point. Choosing a username is an act of identity creation — one we don’t often get to do in modern American society, or (so far as I’m aware) in other high-tech nations. Your parents pick your name, without any input from you, and changing it is a legal hassle. Nicknames are generally assigned by those around you, though you can try to show up to college or your job in a new city and sell people on the idea that while your name is William, usually you go by Bear. We have very few opportunities to choose something that reflects who and what we are, or want to be — or we did, until usernames came along and gave us a whole new field to play in.

The fantasy writer in me can’t help but think about the mystical power of names, and how the process of choice invests them once more with a whiff of that power. They have meaning. How is that not cool?

Is the meaning sometimes stupid? Of course. You may get to a point where you’re embarrassed to be known as shake_that_bootay. But unlike Aschlyee, who’s embarrassed by her parents’ enthusiastic leap onto the bandwagon of “let’s find a totally new way to spell this name!,” you can put it behind you pretty easily. You can escape your party-hard high school years, major in Classics, get involved in radical politics, and rename yourself alecto_reborn. Then, when you’re tired of being a Fury, go into the business world, and settle down as dahlia_blue.

There have been times and places in the world where that sort of change was normal and expected, where having six names by the time you died was nothing unusual. (Read the Romance of the Three Kingdoms if you don’t believe me.) We’ve reinvented a form of that here, and I for one like it.

Celebrate your username! Tell me the story of why you chose it, whether you’re tempted to change it, and if so, what to.

Things learned from tonight’s revision

1) If a word or phrase isn’t in [square brackets], I should trust that means I’ve already looked up whether it’s in period or not.

2) Scenes are so much more exciting when your protagonist doesn’t play nice.

3) kniedzw gets a funny look on his face when I appear in the doorway of his office and say, “Can I get your help for a second? It’s spousal abuse for fun and profit.”

4) But he is then very good about dragging me across the living room floor so I can figure out where a flying elbow would connect under particular circumstances.

5) I’m still in draft-brain, rather than revision-brain; my subconscious is depressed that all my work has made the book about a thousand words shorter. (Thanks to my first bits of revision being the combination of two pairs of scenes that each really only needed to be one.) But I’m sure it will get longer again, soon enough.

What should I read?

So I’ve got this reading and signing at Borderlands Books on Saturday (3 p.m., if you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area and would like to come). I have a fair bit of time to fill, and so I’m intending to read several different things, as well as answering questions and signing books. I’ll definitely do a bit from A Star Shall Fall, but I’d also like to do a couple of short stories. The question is, which ones?

You know what that means: time for a poll.

Edited to add: I’m disqualifying “Silence, Before the Horn,” “Driftwood,” and “The Last Wendy” on the grounds that I read them during my previous Borderlands event.

oof.

Went to bed early last night, slept gloriously, woke feeling more like a human being. Which is good, because I’ve got a book that needs revising.

To entertain you while I do that: Alyx Dellamonica’s got an interview with me posted on her blog, wherein I ramble on about a whole bunch of things, including the grade-school evolution of me as a writer, and the perfectly legal tax scam I’ve got going. 🙂

Also, a review of A Star Shall Fall, from a place entertainingly named “Elitist Book Reviews.” Their opinion? “This is how Alternate Historical Fantasy should be done.” Awww, yay! And they hadn’t read the first two books of the series — in fact, they didn’t know it was a series when they started reading — so I now have a clear data point in favor of having pulled off what I was trying to do, namely, making the book work acceptably as a stand-alone.

Now I’m off to print the miniscript of this thing. Ta!

first of (probably) many

I have so many things piled up in my head, waiting for the time and energy to say them; I decided to start with this one.

There is still discussion going around concerning the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque.” (Which is neither, of course — but “downtown Islamic community center” doesn’t sound as scary, no matter how much the word “community” has been beaten up by those who will say anything to score points against their enemies.) There is still debate about its appropriateness. There is still outrage.

Folks, I am one of those outraged.

I am outraged that this is an issue. That people from thousands of miles away, who maybe have never set foot in New York and never will, have decided it’s their job to tell New Yorkers (of the Muslim persuasion or not) what they can and cannot build in their own city; that so many of them are willfully spreading lies on the subject so as to drum up more fear and hatred. I am outraged that our national response to this situation has skewed so far toward xenophobia, bigotry, and intolerance. I am outraged by this, and the later portions of this, and the attitude so ably skewered by this.

Not only do I want this community center, I want one built on Ground Zero. For real. It would have put me over the moon if I woke up one morning and found the internet blazing with the news that the 9/11 memorial was going to be a tasteful stone carved with the names of those who died, surrounded by an interfaith center dedicated to the peaceful co-existence of Christianity and Islam. Toss in Judaism, too, while you’re at it. With maybe a few wings for Hinduism and Buddhism and Wicca and all the rest. To get to the stone, you have to walk through galleries that explain the basic tenets of each religion, acknowledging the different interpretations that have been put on those tenets in different places and times. (And to get through the last door, you have to pass a quiz? No, no, we’re trying to be welcoming, here.) I want our memorial to that day to be a giant thumb in the eye of everybody on both sides who believes Christianity and Islam are and must be at war, everybody who wants a return of the Crusades. Show our true enemies that their best efforts will not achieve their goals; our commitment to the ideals of the United States is too strong to be broken by lies and fear.

Except it isn’t true. I’m not sure it ever has been; this country stumbles rather than strides toward a more perfect union, bettering itself by accident and the occasional spasm of purposeful change. And sometimes, like now, the spasms yank us in the opposite direction. It’s happened to one minority group after another: blacks, Latinos, Japanese, Chinese, Irish back in their day. All I can do is try to make sure I’m not out-shouted by the bigots, that I speak for tolerance whenever I can, to give the lie to the notion that “Americans” feel this way or that. No matter what the news may say, not all of us think the community center is a bad idea. My only problem with it is that I want more, and I’m afraid we won’t even get a little.

139,446.

It’s messy, it’s ragged, it’s got continuity holes big enough to drive a subway train through, but for the moment, it’s done.

I now have four Onyx Court novels.

Good Christ that epilogue was hard to write. Possibly it sucks. I have no idea. What the hell does one write, to end a four-book series? Especially when one isn’t sure whether this is the end permanently, or just the end for now? How does one wrap something like that up? How many readers will kill me for not showing the [spoiler] they’ll think I should have shown? Will my editor be one of them?

These questions don’t have answers, at least not tonight. Tonight, I back up the file, and sleep the sleep of the novel-completing just.

I don’t even need to fall over!

Pssssh. That was only 2,908 words of writing. I feel like I should write something else before I go to bed; I was expecting to do so much more.

What I wrote was the climax, not the ending: this isn’t a complete draft yet. It probably won’t be for a couple of days; I have this Thing about finishing novels, where the last thing I write has to be the final scene (in this case, the epilogue), and what precedes it can’t have any holes in. There are definitely some holes in what I have at present, at least some of which I’ll have to fill before I can let myself write the epilogue — though some will probably get classed as revision-level problems, to be dealt with later. But right now, I have 133,951 words of book, and it is Very Nearly Done.

No, brain, you don’t have to write something else before you can go to bed tonight. Enjoy your victory, and get some sleep.