more linky

Both of these are at least tangentially writing-related.

First, the humor: “Six Writers Who Accidentally Crapped Out Masterpieces”

Second, the analysis: Daily Kos on Dollhouse. Not normally a place I look for writing about TV, but I found it an interesting post. Truth is, I haven’t been watching Dollhouse, not because I think it sounds bad, but because I think it sounds like a concept that’s doomed to failure given the environment of TV production, and I don’t want to get attached to it only to have it pulled out from under me. But I suspect the analysis given there isn’t far off the mark. It doesn’t automatically negate the criticisms I’ve also heard — just because Whedon is trying to do this kind of thing doesn’t mean he’s succeeding — but I’m thinking of opening a betting pool as to how many papers on Dollhouse there will be at next year’s ICFA.

What a fascinating modern age we live in.

On the one hand, this is fascinating, and a great example of using modern technology to collate information usefully and accessibly.

On the other hand, I’m not sure how good it is for anybody’s peace of mind to be able to hit “refresh” on a map of swine flu cases.

Still — fascinating. And more interesting to me than the CDCEmergency Twitter feed.

odds ‘n ends

“A Tiny Feast” — The first paragraph made me think it was not my kind of story, but then I read on. The New Yorker does occasionally publish fantasy . . . .

More on Strunk & White — since the last piece I linked to had gone behind a paywall by the time I got around to doing so. Five perspectives on the book, none of them entirely flattering.

About that used copy of Ashes — Or rather, about other books in the same situation. Definitely there’s something a bit whiffy about the whole affair, though I couldn’t say for sure what’s going on.

Supposedly it takes five things to make a post. I guess that makes this 60% of a post, then.

Happy International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day!

Yes, folks, I’m doing it again. In fact, I’m doing it even more than in the past two years: I’ve decided to toss up, for free, on my website, all of my fiction published prior to the end of 2006.

Two things swayed me in this decision. One is the relative lack of value in the reprint rights. If anybody was going to put these in a Year’s Best anthology, they would have done so, well, years ago. I’m lazy about marketing the reprint rights to magazines, and (given the situation) my likely payoff on it is low anyway. And I’m not exactly at a point where anybody’s looking to put out a collection of my short fiction.

The other is that I’ve come across a couple of blog posts in the last year to the effect of, “here’s Marie Brennan’s website, she’s got some of her short fiction up there for free, and reading through it makes me want to buy her novels.” I gotta figure, that’s a good thing. And sure, that isn’t necessarily a reason to add more, but — see point #1 above.

So here you go, a (small) bonanza of my older stories:

The rest of the stories from that period are already available, either because I posted them in previous years, or because they’re still in the online archives of their respective magazines. The one exception is “White Shadow,” my first short story sale: since that’s in an anthology, I don’t feel I should post it with the rest.

Speaking of anthologies, though — I’ve submitted all of these pieces to AnthologyBuilder (which already has a couple of my stories), so as soon as those get processed, you should be able to have them printed in a POD collection of your own design. There isn’t quite enough yet to make an entire Marie Brennan collection, but it’s getting there. (Think of it like iTunes for stories, and you’ll have the general idea.)

For more technopeasantry, go here.

Excitement! Of a furnishings sort!

This is what a thousand bucks looks like:

Which, by my standards, is a grotesque amount of money to spend on a chair. But I’m trying to think of it less as “a chair,” more as “an investment in the future of my musculo-skeletal system.” (And probably some nerves, too.) Good office chairs are ‘spensive, and good office chairs with cervical support? I’m lucky the one I liked best turned out to be the cheapest one I was looking at.

I need to take care of my health, and that means putting an end to this chronic shoulder tension and increasing problem with lumbar stiffness. I should have made a purchase like this years ago, honestly — it isn’t like grad school doesn’t involve equally large amounts of time at the computer — but it was the full-time writer thing that made me finally bite the bullet. No more cheap chairs scrounged from used furniture stores. This is new, and well-made, and about the only thing it doesn’t do is give me a massage while I work*.

And man, you know you’re kind of a geek about your work life when the purchase of a new office chair is a really exciting event. <g>

*Though I do have one of those Homedics pads.

I might get this one done *before* the end of the month.

“Remembering Light”

I had about 700-800 of that already, from some work about a week ago; the rest is new. And this is, in fact, a new Driftwood story. I’m having fun riffing off the random idea I came up with for the world this one centers on, extrapolating the consequences of it. Yay for putting sunlight at the heart of a story.

Probably could finish this in two more days — possibly one — I just need to figure out how to steer the characters to the idea that got this story rolling in the first place. And decide whether I’m trying to stick that extra strand in there or not.

writing-ish things

Important one first: John Klima of Electric Velocipede is looking to move some stock and help out his finances to boot. Head on over there to see what’s on offer — back issues of EV, plus chapbooks. If you’re looking for my fiction, issue #13 is the one you want; that has “Selection,” which might very well be the oddest short story I’ve ever written. It also has Rachel Swirsky’s excellent “How the World Became Quiet: A Post-Human Creation Myth,” which I suspect some of you would really dig. (If you perked up at the word “post-human,” then yes, I mean you.)

Sillier, but very true: a rant against Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. I’ve become more jaundiced about that book over time, so it’s good to see my jaundice backed up with some evidence.

And a distinct moment of oddity: someone on Amazon claims to be selling a copy of In Ashes Lie for the low, low price of $1,000 dollars. Yes, that’s a comma, not a decimal point (and yes, that’s American-style notation). No, I have no idea what’s up with that. Even if they’ve gotten ahold of an early copy, a thousand bucks??? WTF, mate.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled whatever you’ve been doing.

web help needed

I need the assistance of someone who can code a web-form type thing for me — basically, something which will ask people for their e-mail addresses, give them the a chance to opt in to a few things, and then send them along to a different URL when all of that’s done.

Any takers?

Today’s ponderable

I’d like to talk about portal fantasies. Or rather, I’d like you to talk about them.

By that term, I mean the stories where people from this world go into another, more fantastical world. Narnia, for example. Once upon a time, these seem to have been more popular; now, not so much. And if I had to guess, I’d say that’s at least in part because of the way a lot of them were transparent wish-fulfillment: Protagonist (who is an emotional stand-in for the author, though only in egregious cases a Mary Sue) goes to Magical Land where things are more colorful and interesting than in the real world. And maybe they stay there, maybe they don’t.

Talk to me about the portal fantasies you’ve read. Which ones stick in your mind? What was your response to them, both as a kid and now? Which ones did the wish-fulfillment thing extra transparently, and how so?

(Yes, I actually have a special interest in the bad examples of this genre. In fact, if you approach this entire question as an academic curiosity of the structural sort paired with a authorly eye toward writing a deconstruction — not a parody — of the tropes, you’ll be on the right track.)

Portal fantasies. Talk to me about ’em. Good, bad, ugly, laughably naive. What’s your take?

back on schedule

Today, you again get a Midnight Never Come tidbit, to whet your appetites for In Ashes Lie. (I have to get variety in here somehow.)

This time, it’s a look behind the scenes at the relationship between the novel, and the game it’s based on.

(It should go without saying, but: DO NOT FOLLOW THAT LINK IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THE BOOK. Spoilers abound. In abundance. Of aboundishness.)

While I’m at it, I’ll also link to something that’s been up on my site for a couple of days now: the first piece of Marie Brennan fan-art that I’m aware of. (tooth_and_claw — I don’t feel I can count commissioned or Memento-inspired pieces, or you’d be the first.) It’s a portrait of Lady Lune, painted by the British artist Mark Satchwill. The original is sitting on my desk as we speak, because of course I’m going to buy it — what kind of ego-stroked author do you think I am???

Enjoy, and I’ll have something else for you in ten days.

Words I Cannot Spell, #17

Jeapordize Jeopordize Jeopardize.

I rarely make use of Wordperfect’s little “is this the word you’re looking for?” box, but man, I need it for that one. Every time.

atarashii kata o narau!

Today I had, to quote Lymond, a damned carking afternoon — but then I went to karate and instead of doing sparring (which I was very much not in a state of mind for), I got to learn pinan nidan, which is the next kata in the sequence.

It’s amazing how easily something like that can improve my mood.

And then I went and had tasty tasty fried rice with crab. So my day is looking fair to have a much better ending than it did a start.

Today’s weird piece of trivia

Paracelsus may have been intersex.

The evidence for it is circumstantial, and depends in part on Oporinus’ description of the man, which is hardly objective. But here, in summary, are the details:

1) Oporinus says Paracelsus had no interest in women, and was probably still a virgin.

2) There were contemporary rumours that he’d been castrated as a boy; certainly people other than Oporinus agreed he had no interest in sex.

3) The skeleton supposedly belonging to him (which matches well enough cranially not to be ruled out) has an “extraordinarily wide” pelvis — which, for those who didn’t teach intro archaeology four semesters running, is one of the major, though not perfectly reliable, methods of sexing skeletons.

4) That skeleton also doesn’t show the characteristics associated with prepubescent castration.

5) Ergo, it’s at least possible that Paracelsus was a genetic male with pseudohermaphroditism, or a genetic female with adrenogenital syndrome.

Like I said, circumstantial. The skeleton might not be Paracelsus’. He might have just been a really wide-hipped man. Etc. But it’s enough that forensic specialists think it’s a possibility.

Our culture so firmly categorizes everybody into male and female that it’s fascinating to come across even circumstantial evidence for a major historical figure being intersex. And it sure adds an extra layer of unusual-ness to an already massively weird man*.

*Or whichever term you’d rather use.

I like it when snark meets activism.

Those of you who don’t follow American political news may not know that the Minnesota Senate race — you know, the one from last fall — is still pending. Norm Coleman is behind in votes, and has been throughout the process, but keeps pressing the appeals and recounts and so on, such that Al Franken (the apparent winner) still hasn’t been seated.

At least one of the factors in operation here is that the longer it takes to seat Franken, the longer the Democratic Party is without their fifty-ninth Senator. Which matters a fair bit on close votes.

Well, somebody came up with an amusing way to give the Republican Party incentive to drop the appeals. To whit: the “Give a Dollar a Day to Make Norm Go Away” campaign.

The idea’s simple: you sign up to auto-donate a dollar a day to the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. They cancel your subscription when Norm Coleman concedes. (If you’re worried he’ll drag this out for months, you can also set it to end at a certain date.) So the longer he hangs in there, the more money’s in the PCCC’s warchest, to be spent against Republican opponents.

This just amuses me. It’s kind of a “life -> lemons, you -> lemonade” kind of approach. And it’s just the faintest bit snarky, too, without being really mean-spirited.

I’ll be curious to see if Coleman files his new notice by Friday (the deadline) or not.

Correction: I got one detail confused with another race, so let me amend this to say: Coleman was ahead on election night, but (iirc) the margin was close enough to trigger an automatic recount under Minnesota law. Franken moved into the lead during that process.

Apparently I’m justified?

Delayed Sleep-Phase Syndrome.

I’m dubious of the value in labeling everything a “syndrome” or a “disorder” or a “condition,” but it’s a pretty apt descriptor of my habits. I can wake up at earlier hours, if I have to. But going to sleep before midnight is hard, unless I’m truly exhausted. And that’s been true for years, now.

And I rather liked this Achewood comic, which (while not exactly my attitude) does to some extent encapsulate my irritation that society treats sleeping late as somehow morally weak — nevermind how many hours of sleep you’re actually getting.

(Diagnosis and comic from toddalcott and comments therein.)

Amazon update

One of the negative features of kerfuffles is that the outrage tends to spread a lot farther than the eventual explanation does. Not that this explanation doesn’t have its own problems, but it’s better than the “lobotomy + homophobia = FAIL” equation people at first assumed.

According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the thing was a consequence of what strikes me as an extraordinarily dumb programming decision. Somebody made an erroneous category-edit in France, and it propagated from Amazon.fr through to all the rest of them. This has more discussion of Amazon’s internal operations, and how errors like this end up happening.

What’s the line about never attributing to malevolence what can be explained by mere stupidity? I suspect Amazon’s site architecture could use some work.