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.

Crack Addicts (not so) Anonymous

Over on Dreamwidth, Toft has posted about discovering the crack that is Mercedes Lackey (specifically, Valdemar).

It’s prompted an outpouring of squealing fangirl love in the comments — I suspect it’s mostly fangirls, though there may be the occasional fanboy in there — with frequent deployment of CAPITAL LETTERS to properly channel the commenters’ sentiments. I’m in there with them; I, too, was once a twelve-year-old girl, and Lackey’s books once occupied a beloved position on my bookshelf.

Some of them still do. When I packed up to move to California, one of the things I did was go through our bookcases, pulling and re-reading out the things that were there because I’d loved them when I was in junior high. The idea was to say farewell, to squeeze out those last, precious drops of nostalgia and then free up shelf space for books that are, well, better. In a few cases, though, the nostalgia was still going strong — and those books, I kept.

Understand, it’s not that they’re good. It’s that they’re crack, and furthermore crack which, for whatever reason, still has the power to affect me. Yes, Vanyel is Emo McAngstyPants, and THAT’S WHY I LOVE HIM. The fact that Dirk and Talia and Kris refuse to have the one simple conversation that could end all their suffering is not a FLAW, it’s WHY I SHOWED UP FOR THE BOOK. Drizzt Do’Urden could give Vanyel a run for his money on the emo front, with bonus chunks of unadulterated inner monologue OF WOE (plus awesome fight scenes!). David Eddings may be writing the same series over and over again, but in the Belgariad/Malloreon instance it’s a series that features smartass characters being smartasses to one another and I could watch that ALL DAY, YO. And Robert Jordan . . . well, I dumped his books because they take up too much damn room, but I’m making up for it in other ways.

And you know, there’s something wonderful about seeing people admit their love for crack, whether it’s stuff they adored in childhood or just picked up recently. So have at it in the comments: what do you love, not despite its ridiculousness, but because of it?

This is officially a SHAME-FREE ZONE; no need to preface your comments with “These books are so bad, but –” That part goes without saying. Just tell us what books you adore, against all reason. Unleash the power of your caps-lock key because lowercase letters AREN’T ENOUGH TO CONTAIN YOUR LOVE. Admit your addiction to emo soulbonded sparklepony hurt/comfort Mary Sue wish-fulfillment CRACK.

You know you want to.

Tube Map of Science

Okay, this is just about the perfect thing for me to come across on the launch day for A Star Shall Fall.

Courtesy of Jay Lake, it’s a history of science rendered in the form of a map like the London Underground: the colored lines represent different branches of science, scientists are stops along the lines, certain scientists are “transfer points” between multiple fields, there’s even zones to divide the history by century. It’s a wonderfully creative way to represent the idea; heck, now I want to see bus transfers or equivalent added on, to show where a given person was particularly influenced by someone else. You could probably make a number of tweaks to the thing, but the concept as a whole is just awesome.

Sing it with me!

Happy Bookday to me, Happy Bookday to me . . . .

Actually, Happy Bookday to all of you, if the release of A Star Shall Fall was something you were looking forward to. As of today, it ought to be on the shelves of discerning bookstores everywhere (in the U.S. and Canada, anyway).

Now seems a dandy time to link once more to my essay on the merits of buying a book from a bookstore, rather than from an online seller. If you have a choice of which way to go, choose the physical store; it will help keep me in business as a writer, just a bit more than an online sale would. (E-books are a whole different game, of course.)

Or, if you’d like to try and get a signed copy direct from me instead, you have two ways to do it (both of ’em with fairly good odds). First, you can participate in the discussion threads on the community: the fifth and final thread is up today, asking about the city of London, and previous threads are here, here, here, and here. I didn’t realize there would be a fifth question today, so I’m extending the deadline on this giveaway a little bit, to the end of the day on Friday; any comment left on one of those threads before then will make you eligible to win a copy of the book.

Second, you can read “And Blow Them at the Moon” (an Onyx Court short story over at Beneath Ceaseless Skies) and join in the discussion for that in their forums. For this giveaway, you have until the next issue goes live at the end of Wednesday next week.

If you’re looking for other goodies, like my London photos or the soundtrack for the novel, all of that is on my site.

Aaaaand I think that’s it, at least for now. If anybody needs me, I’ll be here in the corner, alternately bouncing and chewing my fingernails off . . . .

I’m perfectly capable of speaking for myself.

Kate Elliott on authorial intent.

Word.

I’m smart enough not to respond publicly to reviews, of course; that pretty much never ends well. But if you want to know which ones get up my nose the worst, it’s the ones that make unfounded declarations about what was in my head while writing. If you read a particular thing out of the story, fine — far be it from me to say ur doin it wrong. But please don’t claim you know why I did things that way.

Mind you, the line between the two isn’t entirely clear. Sometimes — as Kate’s contrasting examples show — a lot of it comes down to phrasing; if you say “it seems the author felt X,” that creates a different impression than “the author felt X.” This is one case where I think it’s a good idea to use qualifiers for your assertions, even though in other circumstances it’s better to just say things directly. And, of course, if you’ve been reading my blog or an interview with me or whatever, anything I say there is fair game for use later; your review can say “because Marie Brennan is concerned with not taking events out of the hands of the real, historical people who were involved, she does Z” — though even there, it would be better to say you presume there’s a causal relationship, because when you get down to it I may have forgotten my own agenda and done Z simply because it looked nifty, or the rest of my plot required it.

Talk all you like about the product. What you say may sound very odd to me; I may blink in surprise at the cool thing I apparently did without noticing, or wonder exactly what novel you read, but in the end “the book” is the product of a chemical reaction between the words on the page and the contents of the reader’s head, and I only control one half of the ingredients. The contents of my own head, on the other hand, do not belong to the reader, and so I would prefer that reviewers phrase any speculation as speculation. Don’t be the guy who went around telling people what Ursula LeGuin “intended” with the Earthsea books. Don’t presume to speak for the author. If I’m going to bite my tongue and not tell you how to read my work, don’t tell me how I wrote it.

last chance to bid

I’ll be at a wedding tomorrow, so this is your final heads-up (from me, anyway) that the auctions end tomorrow. Lots of great stuff on offer over there, and a chance to win your own bit of Onyx Court secret history in the name of flood relief. Go forth and do good!

there’s always one more thing to fix

It didn’t even occur to me that part of the American-ness of the copyediting for the Onyx Court books was the order of dates: August 26, when the British would be more likely to order it as 26 August.

But somebody pointed that out over on the BCS forums, so we’ve gone in and changed the ordering on the dates for “And Blow Them at the Moon.” My apologies for the error; we went with British spellings (everywhere we could spot them, anyway), but didn’t think to change the date formatting.

everything but the kitchen sink

For a while now, I’ve been thinking of this novel as the most Tim Powers-ish of the Onyx Court series, where Tim Powers-ness is defined as ramming a bunch of unrelated things together until a plot falls out. So far, some of the unrelated things chucked into here include the Underground, spiritualism, photography, Irish nationalist terrorism, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, the West Ham disappearances, and Bazalgette’s sewers, and now my plot has decided it needs absinthe to function right.

At least for this one bit.

But it’s special absinthe, don’t you know. Because I can’t let the name “the green fairy” pass by untouched, or let or the not-as-hallucinogenic-as-advertised nature of absinthe get in the way of the effect I need. So the French fae have their own version. Are you surprised?

It’s ‘splody time . . . .

<bounce> I’ve been looking forward to this.

“And Blow Them at the Moon” has gone live at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. This is an Onyx Court story (though not the one I sold yesterday), and I am very pleased with how it’s turned out. It also constitutes the last pre-publication goodie for A Star Shall Fall, which comes out (eek) next Tuesday; Magrat, the main character from this story, will be showing up in the novel, too.

And, because chances to win a signed copy of the book are just FALLING OUT OF THE TREES, YO, the editor at BCS has conspired with me to give one away over there: all you have to do is leave a comment on the story thread in their forums. (You’ll need to be a registered forum user, so we can contact the winner.) That runs two weeks, i.e. until the next issue goes live. Together with Laura Anne Gilman’s virtual birthday party and the Onyx Court discussion threads on the Sirens community, you have three, count ’em three chances to get your hands on a copy. And don’t forget, there’s the secret history charity auction, going until Saturday! Bidding stands at twenty dollars, and every bit of it goes to help flood relief efforts in Pakistan.

(I promise actual content will return to this LJ pretty soon. But I’ve got a friend’s wedding this weekend, and the book release next week, so at the moment spare time to write interesting posts is in short supply. If you want reading material from me, have a story.)