Um.

(Okay, maybe we’re going to write the seance AND the Giant Ridiculous Climax tonight.)

130K! (actually 131K!)

Long-time readers of this blog know that many of my metaphors for writing are related to textiles: weaving, or embroidery, or whatever. Well, the end of this book is presently the narrative equivalent of the test garments I sometimes sew, where I trace the pattern out on the cheapest muslin I can buy and baste the pieces together, then rip them apart and cut them down or stick in extra pieces of fabric and then sew the results back together again, and the whole thing ends up covered in Sharpie ink as I mark where things need to be changed or fitted together or whatever.

The comforting point to this metaphor is, doing that helps me figure out how to go about sewing the real fabric together, so I do a better job the second time around. So I’m telling myself that this “muslin draft” I’ve got going here is okay, because in the revision I will take all those Sharpie marks and translate them into a much better draft. Cyma’s train station scene will go away; Eliza will have that ability I just decided tonight that she needs; I’ll figure out what the hell to do with [spoiler] plot thread that has, at present, completely fallen out of the story. But before I can do any of that, I need to nail down the central points of this ending, and then reverse-engineer them to figure out how they should be set up. So, ragged Sharpie-covered draft it is.

At least tonight was fun writing. Tomorrow, I think we’ll have a seance, and then it’s onward to the Giant Ridiculous Climax!

Word count: 131,042. I might as well go ahead and give this book the trophy for Longest Onyx Court Novel now; I know it will win in the end.
LBR quota: A bit of (hopefully) ringing rhetoric, courtesy of one Eliza O’Malley!
Authorial sadism: Sorry, Cerenel. Of the people in that scene, you were the best mouthpiece for the elitist point of view. At least I gave you a good reason for it.

last of the series

I only just barely managed to get it written in time, but I do have an SF Novelists post this month: “Woman =/= Body,” which is the last (for now) in my series about stereotypes of female characterization.

Same drill as usual; comment over there, no registration needed, though if you’re new I’ll have to dig your first comment out of the moderation queue, so don’t be alarmed if it doesn’t appear immediately.

Fascinating Title Goes Here

The Internet has this magical ability to cough up stuff on whatever topic you’re thinking about, even when you aren’t looking for it*. At the moment, that’s this post by Jay Lake, which led me through daisy-chain of other posts by Seanan McGuire, Edmund Schubert, Misty Massey, and David Coe, all on the topic of titles.

I have titles on the brain right now for two reasons:

1) I just sent my crit group the most recent Driftwood story, which doesn’t really have a name yet, though my tongue-in-cheek dubbing of it as “Two Men in a Basket” might end up sticking just for lack of anything better.

2) I still don’t have a title for the Victorian book.

These two situations have different root causes, I think. Thanks to the first three installments in the series, the Victorian book is hedged about with all these requirements that I should fulfill if humanly possible: it has to be a quote, the passage the quote comes from has to work as an epigraph (ideally for the last part of the book), it should have a verb (ideally at the end of the phrase), etc. Finding a piece of Victorian literature that will fit all the requirements at once is proving much more difficult than I expected — to the point where I may well have to compromise on one or more points, though the perfectionist in me doesn’t want to. For the Driftwood story, on the other hand, the problem is that I don’t have any requirements. It’s a wide-open field, and so I end up standing around in it, not sure where to go.

And it’s made more complicated by the fact that novel titles and short story titles aren’t quite the same kind of beast. Certain things could work for either, and in fact I think you can generally port novel titles onto short stories without too much problem. But short story titles can’t necessarily go the other way. “Nine Sketches, in Charcoal and Blood” strikes me as only working for the short form; “Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual” would NEVER go on a book. Short story titles are allowed to be wordier, because they don’t have to function as a piece of marketing in the way their novel-related cousins do. (Exceptions like The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making are just that: exceptions.) Cleverness in book titles is somewhat limited to humourous work, while a broader range of short stories can get away with it.

I’ve said before that my best titles usually show up at the start of the process; my average titles are the ones I stick on after the fact. (I have some bad titles, too, but let’s not talk about those. They’re after-the-fact efforts, too.) What makes a title good? It has to be evocative — which is one of those vague, hand-wavy descriptors I actually kind of hate, but I don’t have a better one that manages to combine the concepts of “striking” and “memorable” and “suggestive of more than it’s saying.” Lots of writers try to achieve evocative-ness (evocativity?) by throwing in nouns that supposedly carry that quality: Shadow. Soul. Dragon. Yawn. My attention is drawn more to odd juxtapositions. Queen isn’t a terribly interesting word, but the contradiction of The Beggar Queen is a lot more intriguing.

And then you have to worry about titles in a series, and how to make it clear these books belong together. I have to say I’m not a fan of the Mercedes Lackey answer to this question: Magic’s Pawn, Magic’s Promise, Magic’s Price; Winds of Fate, Winds of Change, Winds of Fury; The Black Gryphon, The White Gryphon, The Silver Gryphon . . . well, if you dropped all the books on the floor it would be easy to sort the trilogies from one another, but exciting this is not. I prefer Dunnett’s approach with the Lymond books, where the titles may not be individually brilliant, but the running chess metaphor connects them all. This is why the pattern of the Onyx Court titles matters to me, too, because the structural characteristics are what advertise “this is part of that series!”

But you still have to come up with the title. For the Victorian book, I go looking in Victorian literature, but what about stories or novels where the title could be anything? How do you even get started? I swear, sometimes it’s harder than writing the actual stories. If you have any brilliant thoughts, please do share them in the comments.

*By which I mean that our brains have this magical ability to notice stuff that matches the pattern of what we’re interested in. But it’s more fun to say the Internet gets credit.

you brought this on yourself, you know

What’s harder than trying to write wacky made-up faerie science?

Writing wacky made-up faerie science from the point of view of a character who doesn’t know the first bloody thing about it. Especially when the education of your other major protagonist pretty much stops at her knowing how to read.

There are days when I really, really wish I’d constructed this story in a fashion that made Wrain or somebody the faerie protagonist, in Dead Rick’s place.

on reflection

Oh, that’s why I couldn’t figure out how to end the scene last night.

Because it wasn’t time to end it yet; we needed about eight hundred more words of Eliza having that epiphany I thought was going to happen later. And now it’s clear which of the next several bits of story needs to happen first, before we move along to the others. So if you’ll pardon me, I’ll get back to the book.

kitsune_den, thank you for “Owlsight”

Okay, it’s painfully obvious I had no idea how to end the scene when I finally got to it, but right now that doesn’t matter. I have, at last, written the scene that’s been in my head since before I started writing this book: since I pitched the proposal to Tor, at least. And probably earlier than that. If I had to guess, I’d say 2008, but it might be as far back as 2007.

Eliza ended up getting pov on it, which meant she got to do something unexpectedly cool. And Dead Rick got what he wanted, and now all the characters have to do is save the world.

In about the next ten thousand words, theoretically.

Shyeah right. This is so totally going to run long.

Mush!

120K! Actually, 122K!

I keep going backwards and forwards in this book, mucking around with crap in earlier scenes, then slapping words onto the end, and that’s why I’ve netted more than 2K today, not counting the words replacing the ones I cut. I think I FINALLY have a working version of Hodge’s Academy scene, which will be a bloody miracle if it’s true. And the thing in there is paying off on the back end with the new scene I added tonight. We’re getting into the Thrilling Climax now — if I can just wrangle all the parties into position.

Three weeks to deadline, and some heavy lifting to do before then. I’m very excited about what I’ve got here, but I really need a mallet to beat this damned book into behaving itself.

Oh, and if you know anything about dynamite, please do comment on the previous post.

Word count: 122,086
LBR quota: Blood. And Dead Rick loves me for it.
Authorial sadism: Aside from the Horrible Thing I Can’t Tell You About . . . Dead Rick not getting the specific blood he wants. (Not yet.)

I love the questions I ask for research

I need some kind of yardstick by which to gauge the destructive potential of one stick of dynamite. Presuming it was jammed into a device built largely of sturdy wood nailed together, how large of a device could the dynamite effectively destroy? (For values of “destroy” that equal “render it completely inoperable, such that the thing can’t really be repaired.”)

I know that’s a very imprecise description, and I’ll be getting imprecise answers, but it would be nice to know if one stick would be enough to trash, say, a car-sized target, or more, or less.

rounding up the week

More collated linky, and then maybe next week I’ll get around to posting about Ada Lovelace and her wings.

Another guest-blog: me at Tiffany Trent’s LJ, talking about researching in order to get things wrong.

More “And Blow Them at the Moon”: the giveaway is ended (Scott will be picking a winner soon), but if you’d like to listen to the story, the podcast version is now available. I enjoyed this recording immensely — like, meant to just check it out, but ended up listening to the whole thing — because Scott arranged for a British reader, who does a marvelous job with the accents. He even does a Cornish accent for the knockers! Or something I presume is a Cornish accent, anyway! (I have no idea what they sound like. Which is Reason #17 why he’s a better reader for the story than I am.)

Further reviews of A Star Shall Fall: Mark Yon at SFF World, which he sums up as “An ambitious tale and a pleasing triumph. Wonderful.” His comments make me very happy. Watch out for borderline spoilers near the end of the review, though. Locus also had a very good review, though it isn’t online, but this bit is pretty quotable:

There’s a sly brilliance to Brennan’s ongoing tales where the city of London moves through history . . . A Star Shall Fall has room enough for intellect and emotion, great issues as well as an array of individuals and personalities: self-mocking wit, bluntness, and ardor among others. As fear of the Dragon mounts, humans and fae come together in powerful scenes that both reflect and find ways to transcend the gap between beings with such very different experiences of Life and Time.

Finally, another public appearance for me: I’ll be down in SoCal on October 23rd for the SCIBA Author Feast and Trade Show (yes, it’s really called that). SCIBA is an independent booksellers’ association, so this is an industry event rather than a fan one, but if any of you will be there, be sure to say hi!

Er, that’s only four things. Uh. Here, have cats in an IKEA store.

The Littlest White Belt Is Still a Ballet Dancer at Heart

In kobudo, I have begun learning bo (staff) kata. Shihan randomly had one of the senpai teach me the second bo kata last week; I’m trying to hold onto that sequence in my head just ’cause I don’t want to forget it, but today one of the sensei mercifully retreated a step and taught me the much less complicated first kata.

But they both begin with the same preparatory movement, and this is where my ballet training reasserts itself with a vengeance. It’s a bit complicated to describe, but there’s a point at which the bo is held vertically in front of your right shoulder, with your right hand gripping it low and your left hand gripping it high, over your head. You lower the left hand in an arc, sweeping it outward rather than down the front of your body; then, when you begin the kata, you sweep it back up the same path to grasp the bo again, before moving into the first strike.

To all the ballet dancers who just said, “Oh, you mean like a port de bras” — EXACTLY.

Guess whose arm immediately defaults to a gentle curve, whose hand turns to make an elegant line? If you pointed at me, give yourself a gold star! It’s like when I try to say something in French, and my accent is so Spanish it would give your average Parisian a coronary. I’ve hunted down and trained out a lot of my ballet habits over the last two years — in shizentai-dachi, I no longer rotate my foot outward into fourth position before stepping through; I’m learning not to tuck my butt under in shiko-dachi — but wow, do I still go first to ballet assumptions when doing something new. It isn’t even a simple matter of reminding myself before I begin the motion; if I don’t keep my attention on my hand every inch of the way, it goes straight back to what it knows best.

(I’m kind of afraid of the expression on Shihan’s face if he ever catches me doing that. I suspect it will be some flavor of baffled amusement, and I will want to sink through the floor out of embarrassment.)

Ah well. I’ve only been doing bo kata for two classes; I can’t expect to lose the habit that fast. But I’ve opened up my own private betting pool for how long it will take.

Charles Babbage and the Devil

Maybe I don’t have enough brain to be sparing any for posting some of this stuff, but dangit, I want the change of pace.

So, Charles Babbage, who I mentioned last post. Difference Engine yeah yeah Analytical Engine sure we’ve all heard about those things. If you read 2D Goggles, you’ve also heard about his one-man war against street musicians, which is a bit less well-known.

Did you know that as a kid, he tried to summon the Devil?

True story, at least according to his autobiography (which is kind of this random string of anecdotes; he says at the beginning that everybody kept after him to write his memoirs or something, and this was the only way he could interest himself in the project). Apparently wee!Babbage began to doubt the existence of the Devil, because it just didn’t make sense to him. Nor did it to a lot of Victorians, for that matter, as they started to get all scientific about their religion and demand that it make rational sense. Anyway, wee!Babbage questioned the existence of the Devil, and then he thought about all those stories where Faustus or whoever summons Satan to make a pact with him, and so wee!Babbage decides to do the same thing — minus the pact. He’s not out to damn himself, people; he’s just conducting an experimental inquiry as to the existence or non-existence of the Devil. Failure to show won’t prove non-existence, of course, but if the Devil poofs into his magic circle, well. Wee!Babbage can thank him for his time and send him away, question answered and immortal soul secure. Surely God won’t hold a little Devil-summoning against him, not when it’s for Science!

I have no intention of writing a “Babbage made a secret pact with the Devil” story — though now that I think of it, “Babbage didn’t make a secret pact with the Devil and that’s why he was constantly pestered by street musicians” is kind of an entertaining concept — but that anecdote amused me. Almost as much as the one about how he and a friend used to sneak out of the dormitory of their boarding school late at night in order to go study. And when one of the other boys wanted to join him they said no, he couldn’t, because he would just want to play. Which led to hijinks involving the kid tying successively thicker bits of string between his thumb and the dormitory doorknob that wee!Babbage kept cutting with his pocketknife until the night the kid, determined to know when he was sneaking out, used a chain.

Wee!Babbage may have been a little crazy. It seems to have been endemic to the period.

Anyway, consider this the book report for Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, which mostly ended up being irrelevant to my research, but was an entertaining read.

Edited: Comments are now closed because of ridiculous ammounts of spam.

I hope five things really do make a post

I hope that one of these days I will regenerate enough brain to post about a bunch of things piling up in my head: Ada Lovelace, Babbage’s childhood attempt to summon the devil, the manga I’ve been reading lately, etc. But that day is not today — not if I want to also get my writing done at a reasonable hour — so let’s just get on to the reminders and such.

First, something unrelated to A Star Shall Fall: if you missed it over the holiday weekend, I’m the most recent guest on Jim Hines’ “First Book Friday” series, talking about Doppelganger.

Second, tchernabyelo, you’re the winner of the birthday giveaway! Since you clearly don’t need to be introduced to the Lymond Chronicles, you can have your pick of either Fire and Hemlock, or Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, or (if you already know and/or have both of those books) something else entirely, which we can discuss in e-mail. Drop me a line at marie [dot] brennan [at] gmail [dot] com with your mailing address and your preference.

Third, kinderjedi is the winner of the Sirens discussion giveaway. Same instructions as above, except that your prize is a signed copy of A Star Shall Fall.

Fourth, if you envy kinderjedi their win, you have a until the end of the day Wednesday (where I think “end of the day” is defined in a vaguely East Coast U.S. fashion) to leave a comment on the BCS forum thread for “And Blow Them at the Moon,” after which I will pick one commenter to receive a signed copy of the book.

And fifth, if you’re curious about the book itself, Kelly at Fantasy Literature recently reviewed it, so you can see what she has to say.

Oh! Sixth! (Which makes this TOTALLY a post, even if the five six things individually are not all that substantial.) I will be doing a reading and signing at Borderlands Books on September 25th. That’s in San Francisco, for those who are anything like local, and it starts at 3 p.m. I hope to see some of you there!

how obscure can I get . . .

. . . before the Elljays cannot answer a question for me?

I need help from somebody who has on hand a translation of the Black Book of Carmarthen that is NOT Skene’s. (Because apparently that one is very inaccurate?) There’s a specific poem I need, not too long, and it would be dandy if I could get it sooner than my next trip to Stanford’s library. Comment here, and I’ll drop you a message via e-mail with the name of the poem I’m after.

the reposting thing

I’m a little baffled by the appeal of crossposting one’s LJ comments to Twitter or Facebook, but anyway, it’s definitely a bad idea that you can do that with comments on somebody else’s LOCKED post (complete with links back to that post). So if you want to disable that for your own journal, it’s easy to fix in the LJ settings, and there’s also a poll going that apparently has gotten the attention of at least one of the LJ Powers That Be.

Sing it wth me! Second verse!

Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday to me . . . .

Yep, that’s right: the release date for my fifth book and the anniversary of my birth ended up back-to-back this year.

I’m going to steal a page from (I think) Cat Valente, and sink not into the WOE IS ME I’M THIRTY MY LIFE IS OOOOOOOOOVER idiocy modern pop culture insists is the proper response, but rather say, woot! I’ve reached level 30! In other words, treat this as a thing to be celebrated. I have increased in experience; I have more skills on my character sheet, and in a few days I’ll be taking a new feat that I think will be very fun indeed.

Longtime readers of this journal know I have a tradition of staving off any possible bad mood by making an “egotism post” on my birthday, listing everything cool I’ve achieved in the last year, without hedging or qualification or mention of things I didn’t quite pull off. (Sparked by a year in which my birthday was kind of a shitty day overall.) I thought about doing that again this year — maybe a “lifetime retrospective” version, rather than just the past twelve months — but you know, I think I’d rather re-purpose a meme from a while back, and solicit flattery from the internets instead. So in the comments, tell me what cool things I’ve done —

— with one condition.

I want them to be hilariously, outrageously false.

Make stuff up. The more over-the-top, the better. Remind me that I once stole the Seven Stones of Power from the Seven Dragon Guardians to re-assemble the Necklace of Immortality and save the Star-Eyed Empress from the creeping poison of the Lord of Doom. Or whatever. And because of the pairing with Book Day — not to mention the outpouring of book love on yesterday’s post; I’ll be getting back to you guys in comments there soon, but it’s been fabulous reading, keep it up — and inspired by Laura Anne Gilman’s own birthday book giveaway, I will send one random commenter, not one of my books, but one of the books I love beyond all reason. Possibly this will be Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones, which is the book that turned me into a writer. Possibly it will be Tam Lin by Pamela Dean, which had a formative influence on the first novel I ever finished writing. Possibly it will be The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett, the only author to turn me so green with envy I basically can’t write for a few hours after reading her stuff. Or something else, maybe. I haven’t decided yet; I’ll see what the winner is interested in. But I think sharing a book I adore is a dandy way to celebrate my thirtieth birthday.

Along with a tasty Japanese lunch, some light reading, a wander in the sunshine, and absolutely no work today. So I’m off to enjoy that. Ta!

celebrating in style

What did I do to celebrate Book Day?

I wrote 2,312 words of a scene I’ve been looking forward to since <checks e-mail records> June 25th.

See, Dead Rick? I promised it would end eventually. And now you get to RIP PEOPLE’S THROATS OUT.

Don’t say I never gave you anything nice.