I have three days left

Goal for today: finish “Mad Maudlin.”

In order to do this, I have to remind myself that this is a hack draft. Not the same thing as a bad draft, which is what I have of “Chrysalis”; the problem here is not suckage. It’s that the story needs to be run past several layers of expert consultants, who can tell me how to make the technical aspects go, and only when that’s done will I be able to address the matter of story craft. In theory it would be more efficient to get expert advice first, then write the story, but in practice that hasn’t worked; first I have to nail down my ideas in a form other people can understand. Otherwise my questions are all too vague and hypothetical, which makes getting useful answers hard. So I’m hacking out the general shape of the story, and once I have that I can get my experts to tell me where I’ve gotten their respective fields wrong. Their answers may well change the path the story takes to its destination, but by then I’ll have a firmer handle on what that destination is.

That’s the theory, anyway, and it’s gotten me farther through the draft than my original approach did. And if this works, there’s hope yet for Catherine’s unwritten story. It would be nice to get a few of these things off my list of unfinished ideas.

progress of the gimpy feet

Today I downgraded myself from Vicodin to large doses of Advil. This has the virtue of fewer side effects, and also slightly less efficacy — yes, that latter is a good thing, as it means I’m less likely to overreach myself, walking around more than I should.

But I’ll go back to Vicodin for the night. I haven’t managed properly uninterrupted sleep yet, and am hoping for better success this time.

epic pov

A topic of conversation from ICFA: I’ve noticed that one of the things which makes it hard for me to get into various epic-fantasy-type novels lately is the way point of view gets used. As in, there are multiple pov characters, and shifting from one to the other slows down my process of getting invested in the story.

But hang on, you say; why “lately”? Why didn’t that bother you in your epic-fantasy-reading days of yore?

Because — and this was the ICFA epiphany — the epic fantasies of yore weren’t structured like that. Tolkien wasn’t writing in close third person to begin with, but he pretty much just followed Frodo until the Fellowship broke at Amon Hen; he didn’t leap back and forth between Frodo in the Shire and Aragorn meeting up with Gandalf and Boromir over in Minas Tirith and all the rest of it. David Eddings’ Belgariad, if I recall correctly, is almost exclusively from Garion’s pov, with only occasional diversions to other characters when the party splits or Eddings needs to briefly show a political development elsewhere in the world. My recollection of early Terry Brooks is much fuzzier, and I’ve almost completely forgotten the one Terry Goodkind book I read, but again, I don’t recall their narratives being multi-stranded from the start.

Even the Wheel of Time, which is pretty much the standout example of Many Points of View, wasn’t like that initially. The first book is all Rand, all the time, until the party splits; then it picks up Perrin and Nynaeve for coverage; then it goes back to Rand-only once they’re back together again. Eventually the list gets enormous, but you start out with just your one protagonist, and diversify once the story has established momentum.

The examples I’ve tried lately that present multiple povs from the start — Martin, Abercrombie, Reddick, others I’ve forgotten — are all more recent. And with the exception of Martin, I’ve had a hard time getting into them. Because character is my major doorway into story, and if I’m presented with three or four or five of them right at the start, I don’t have a chance to build investment in anybody. Martin is probably the exception because his different points of view overlap; the characters are not off in separate narrative strands, but rather interact with one another. It’s less fragmented.

Mind you, it’s funny for me to be criticizing this approach when I appear to have an obsession with dual-protagonist structures in my own books, and my pairs are not always connected at the start of the story. But I think this is a new development in the subgenre of epic fantasy, generally speaking, and it might explain why I’ve been less interested — despite the fact that the new epic fantasies often have more originality going on than the books I loved as a teenager. They jump around too much, try to present me with too many threads at the outset. I’d rather read a story that starts small, then builds. I’m curious to know what other people’s mileage is on this particular question, though.

less dead than expected

Oddly, what’s laid me low is not so much the surgery and Vicodin, but the cold I picked up a few days ago. So in addition to antibiotics and painkillers, I’m also dosing myself with antihistamines and decongestants, and observing with some entertainment the war between Vicodin (may make you drowsy!) and Sudafed (never lets me sleep well).

So far, though, so good. Surgery was quick — apparently kniedzw hadn’t even finished his danish in the cafeteria when I arrived in Recovery — and while they gave me crutches to steady me on the journey home, that was just because of lingering anaesthetic effects. I’m walking just fine, if a bit gingerly, with suitable caution because the Vicodin makes me a little dizzy. Fortunately I’m getting by on one pill of the 1-2 they recommend taking; I’ve gotten more pain from elevating my foot (leading to loss of circulation in a couple of toes, leading to pain when I shift position and the blood comes rushing back) than I have from the incisions themselves.

Many thanks to everyone who sent along good wishes, cards, offers of help, etc. The plan for the next couple of days is to take it easy and see if I can wean myself off the Vicodin in favor of ibuprofen. Tuesday I have a follow-up appointment with the orthopedist, and then it’s pretty much just a matter of waiting for the four weeks to be up so I can get out of this boot and start physical therapy. The exciting part’s over; what comes next is boredom.

Department of Things I Didn’t Need

Dear Brain,

I recognize that you’re trying to be helpful and all, and I appreciate it. But it would be lovely if you could offer help with “Mad Maudlin” (which I’m trying to finish) or the Victorian book (which I’m about to start) or That Thing We Can’t Talk About (which I need to do), rather than the opening line for a sequel to a short story I haven’t sold yet.

Just saying.

Having said that, it is a pretty fun opening line.

Dear Cayce,

I know you’re tired of receiving Well-Intentioned Parental Advice, but there are a few things every young woman should know before she goes to Hell.

Back to the things we should be doing . . . .

Love,
Your Writer

Last day of freedom

Tomorrow is the ankle surgery, after which I will be stoned on Vicodin for a while. So if you don’t hear from me, blame the drugs.

Before I go, some linky:

Generic Movie Trailer — oh god, it’s like “Title of the Song.” A hilarious (because accurate) structural breakdown of trailers for the kind of movie that’s trying to win an Oscar, done as a trailer. “And then the music . . . gets . . . hopeful . . . .”

An open letter to conservatives — less funny, but more useful in the long run. Your one-stop-shop for evidence as to what’s wrong with the Republican Party today. Conservatism as a concept, I often think is wrong in the sense of “I disagree with you;” conservatism as it’s most visibly being practiced today in America, I often think is wrong in the sense of “what the hell is wrong with you people?” The letter includes a billion and one links documenting, as it says, the “hypocrisy, hyperbole, historical inaccuracy and hatred” currently afflicting the party’s loudest voices.

Marissa Lingen on “fake swears” — back to the funny. Having recalled it during the course of commenting, I think I will revive “son of a hairless kumquat” as an insult in my repertoire.

“Scientific Romance,” by Tim Pratt — best love poem ever. (At least if you’re a geek.)

Holy hell.

Facebook has shut down the group “People Against Racebending: Protest of the Cast of The Last Airbender Movie,” apparently on the grounds that its campaigning against the whitewashing of the movie constitutes being “hateful, threatening, or obscene [… or that it] attack[s] an individual or group, or advertise[s] a product or service.”

I’ve already got a lot of reasons for not liking Facebook. Now I have a new one. And while I don’t know for sure that the people behind the movie (Shyamalan or the production company or whoever) pushed Facebook to do this, it’s certainly the first and most likely possibility that springs to mind. Because that group’s been around for months, with over six thousand members. Something had to bring it to Facebook’s attention and insist it was a problem. And that something was almost certainly a someone — a someone with a vested interest in shutting down protest.

This? Is not. cool. For all the reasons that Hal Duncan outlines at that first link, and more besides. If anybody hears word of useful things to do in response, please let me know.

Ada Lovelace Day

Sadly, she died well before the Victorian book will take place, so if I manage to include her, it will only be in flashback. But today is Ada Lovelace Day, celebrating women in science, and Finding Ada is maintaining an ongoing list of posts (I think not just from this year, but previous years as well). Lots of fun reading; find your favorite Lady Scientist there, or write about her yourself.

I would do the same, but I have to run about a million errands before I lose the use of one leg on Friday. So I’m off to do that.

a genre question

I’ve started reading Dorothy Sayers recently, and it made me reflect on something.

In the genre of romance, the vast majority of the writers, and especially the big-name ones, are women — to the point where (so I’ve heard) a man who decides to write romance will almost invariably do so under a female pseudonym. In fantasy and science fiction, the big names in genre history skew male instead, and we still have periodic slapfights about insufficient recognition for female writers.

In mystery, it seems to me that there’s something more like balance.

You still get splits along subgenre lines; noir is more associated with men, cozies with women. But in the genre as a whole, if you start lining up the big names both past and present, you’ve got Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett and Dorothy Sayers, Elmore Leonard and Sue Grafton, and many, many more. There are a lot of acknowledged and admired female writers, without mystery/crime/detective fiction being viewed as inherently a “female” genre.

Or maybe not. I’ve taken occasional dips in the mystery pool, but it isn’t a genre I read extensively. So tell me if I’m wrong. But it really does seem like mystery, of all the genre categories out there, does the best job of balancing this factor. Does anybody else think the same?

on a brighter note, ICFA was great

I was going to post some lengthy ruminations about travel problems and how people respond to them, but y’know, I’ve lost steam on it. I’m currently parked in the lobby of my hotel, since they have free wireless, comfortable furniture, peace and quiet, and nobody tripping over my suitcase, none of which the Atlanta airport can supply. So now seems like a nice time to talk about ICFA.

First things first: the Super-Sekrit Awesome Jacket was a resounding success. I bought this thing last summer and test-drove it at the Dickens Fair in November, but the real idea was that I was going to debut it publicly at the ICFA banquet. There will be pictures eventually, I’m sure — even if I look like a radioactive ghost in most of them; ye gods have I gotten pale — but in the meantime, I can say that it is a black brocade jacket of Victorian appearance, wide-necked with satin lapels, a narrow double-breasted closure just below the bustline, and then tails in front and back. I wore it with an underbust corset (since the front is cut high enough that it needs some kind of waistcoaty thing to look right), a semi-vintage shirt, and a long skirt, and got many admiring reactions. Unfortunately, as it came from Black Peace Now, which is the goth end of a Japanese fashion boutique that has an outpost in San Francisco, nobody is likely to be able to buy one for themselves.

Other than that, I read “The Last Wendy” and got fewer laughs than usual, but I think we just had a non-laughing audience; Eileen Gunn said the same thing about her story, which was quite funny. Then I socialized a bunch and hung out by the pool (when it wasn’t raining) and went swimming, which I kept thinking of as My Ankle’s Last Hurrah, seeing as how it’s about to spend four weeks in a plastic boot. The socializing was also key, as I won’t be going to karate for a couple of months (thus removing two social events per week) and may not be able to drive while I’m in the boot (thus removing my ability to get to where other people are).

It was a good ICFA, too. The topic this year being “Race and the Fantastic,” it provoked a lot of good papers and discussions, and Nalo Hopkinson’s luncheon speech was amazing. Sunshine and seeing friends aside, this is what I really love about ICFA: the chance not only to geek about SF/F, but to do so in a critically thoughtful way, among people who won’t look at you funny if you bust out the theoretical jargon. (My jargon is on the rusty side, of course, but still. I like to flex it occasionally.)

That’s pretty much it for con-reportage, I suppose. (Confidential to people who saw me obsessively checking e-mail while I was there: alas, no dice. Got my reply this afternoon, and will be sending the story elsewhere once I get home.) Now I continue to entertain myself for another four hours or so, until Airtran’s one daily flight to San Francisco rolls around.

Well, I made it as far as Georgia.

3:30 p.m. — leave Orlando hotel.

1:15 a.m. — arrive in Atlanta airport hotel.

In between, a couple of hours of sitting in the Orlando airport, three hours or so sitting on the airplane hoping Atlanta’s weather would stop sucking enough to let us go there, a brief departure from the plane to grab food, a mad dash out to the runway, some more sitting, a quick flight, a bout of circling Macon, a landing, a leisurely and frequently-interrupted taxi to the gate, an unpleasant stay in line with lots of pissed-off passengers with strange ideas of what airlines “should” do when these problems arise (“they have the planes, just sitting around; they should put them in the air!”), a freezing wait for the hotel shuttle, a shuttle ride, a protracted stay in line while the one hideously overworked concierge tries to clear out this shuttle load before the next one arrives, and then an elevator trip and a long hallway to my room.

In a moment, I will investigate the hotel and see if there is any food to be had, and maybe even a hot tub. I’m dubious on both counts, but apparently today has not ground all the hope out of me yet.

This one goes out to Mrissa

Time for my post at SF Novelists again. Up to bat this month: the First Girl Ever. You know, the Amelia Earharts and Alanna of Trebonds that blaze the way into a new field — but more importantly, we’re also talking about what happens after them.

Comment over there, as per usual.

pardon the (impending) dust

The process of website improvement has started. So far, the only change is that I’ve moved the entire site down a level: everything that was swantower.com/marie/* can now be reached at swantower.com/*. Soon — possibly later today — kniedzw will be helping me set up a redirect so that anybody who’s bookmarked a specific page will get bumped along to the new location. After that, the actual revamping will begin.

If you notice anything broken on the site, drop me a line at marie [dot] brennan [at] gmail [dot] com, and I’ll fix it as soon as I can.

How much of a geek am I?

I suspect the answer lies in the way I’m grinning over my latest acquisition, a book called Cockney Past and Present, which was written in 1938 and apparently remains one of the best histories of cockney speech.

Sheer. Brilliance.

From mrissa and janni: Tattúínárdœla saga

In English, The Saga of the People of the Tatooine River Valley. An analysis of how George Lucas’ science-fictional adaptation of a Middle High German epic (the Himelgengærelied or Song of the Skywalkers) differs from the earlier and less corrupted Icelandic saga text.

I do wish Lucas had chosen the Icelandic text for the exchange between Veiðari and Lúkr — much less whiny, much more badass and amusing at the same time. (You’d be hard-pressed to beat the Norse for deadpan reactions to doom.)

more pictures

Okay, I finally got off my butt and finished sorting through my hundred and hundreds of pictures from India to cull them down to the 100MB I could upload in a month — only to discover that I’d hit the limit for publicly-available pictures (200), and if I wanted the oldest ones (the Midnight Never Come research set) to be visible, I’d have to either delete some of what I just posted, or upgrade my account. So I upgraded, and now I don’t have to worry about that 100MB limit.

Oh well. It’s probably better for your sanity and mine that I restricted my choices that sharply; otherwise this could be the Photoset That Never Ends. Instead it’s a selection of the better results. I hope you enjoy.

Since setting up a photo gallery on my own site is one of the things I intend to do with the redesign, please take a moment if you haven’t already and give me your thoughts on what the new look should be.

Impending website redesign

Poll time; please take a moment to answer this, as the more responses I get, the better.

I’m preparing to do a fairly substantial redesign on my website, including (among other things) a visual facelift. I always meant to make it more colorful, but never did decide where I was going graphically — which, as it turns out, is the subject of this poll. I know I want to change the color scheme and provide some kind of image at the top and/or side(s), but I frankly have no idea what that should be. So I’ve put together this handy poll, to see what ideas you all have, and whether those nudge me out of my current waffling and into a useful direction. Check as many boxes as you like; if you like several but prioritize one choice over the others, say so in comments.

Feel free to get as detailed as you like in the comments. (And if you’re coming here from outside LJ, you don’t need an account to comment, though it will help if you sign some kind of name.) This is a mass brainstorming session, basically, so let’s bounce ideas around until something comes out.