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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
. . . I talk about the art of writing female characters.
Turning off comments here; have your say over there instead. You don’t need an account.
I can’t embed this, so you’re going to have to click through.
For my money, while the performance is undoubtedly worth watching, the thing that makes this video gold is watching all the reactions, both before and after she starts singing. If you put this scene in a movie, I’d call it way, way over the top — but when it’s real life, it’s just amazing.
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.
These days I tend not to set an alarm for myself, which means I get to wake up gradually and naturally, rather than being catapulted out of sleep.
During this process, my brain randomly wanders along various topics, which often include bits of writing. And sometimes it offers up interesting ideas.
But there’s “interesting,” and then there’s “ooh! i know! vivisection!”
. . . it’s even worse because that’s a good idea for its context. Kind of perfect, actually. But brain, please to be waiting on the vivisection-related suggestions until I’m more awake? Please?
Actually, it’s not so much Brit-picking as a British copy-edit. Any chance I could get a volunteer to read over a lengthy document (~35 pages, single-spaced; aka 20K words) with an eye toward correcting it to British spelling and usage? Genuine copy-editing experience preferred, but in the absence of that, I’ll be more than happy to work with an enthusiastic hobbyist.
I’ll find something to reward you with. Probably an early copy of In Ashes Lie, if I can wheedle one out of Orbit UK. Or I’ll just mail one of my US copies, when I get them.
Drop me an e-mail (mention any relevant credentials) if you’re interested. Marie dot brennan at gmail dot com. Turnaround time on this would need to be about a week.
Since I posted the excerpt late, and since the schedule would have had me posting this one on a weekend, I decided to wait until today. But now you can head on over to Flickr and see my photos from my research trip last year.
The Ashes pics are fewer in number than the Midnight ones because I inadvertently left my camera cable at home when I went to London; this mean I couldn’t download my photos to my laptop, which meant I was limited to the capacity of my (rather small) SD card. I kept having to delete my poorer or less important shots to make room for new ones. But you can see several of the locations that will be appearing in the novel, or at least whatever’s currently standing on their sites now, plus other things representative of the period.
They are also pegged onto a map, if you want to know where those things are.
I’ll put the important one first: a lengthy article on Dubai that frankly just turns my stomach, presenting both the dark underside and the artificially bright topside of that city. I presume not everybody in Dubai is like the Emiratis and expats quoted there, but that’s the image of Dubai I’ve seen marketed: a sunny playground for shopping and leisure, to be enjoyed by the wealthy — just don’t ask what’s propping it up.
The second one’s smaller, but closer to home: apprehension about Pixar’s latest, Up. Why the apprehension? Are they worried it will be a flop? No; in fact, everybody’s pretty much assuming it will be a critical and commercial success. But probably it won’t be as big of a hit as (say) Toy Story, and (perhaps more to the point) it doesn’t have all the merchandising opportunities of that film, and so nevermind that Pixar has yet to release a single film that could be termed a critical or commercial flop; some corners of the industry are worried that Pixar’s films aren’t as lucrative as they used to be, and this is a problem. Not that they aren’t profitable; they are. But that they aren’t always increasing in profits.
I find that outlook diseased. Here we have a rock-solid company that has, since its inception, turned out quality entertainment that also brings in a nice, healthy return on the investment of making it. But hits, it seems, aren’t enough; they must be mega-hits, and ever-growing in size, or Wall Street will flip out.
Can you say “unsustainable model”? I can.
Anyway. I’ve had those tabs open in my browser for a couple of days, but I decided not to rain on Easter Sunday with them, so you get them today. Enjoy. So to speak.
I don’t know if this theory is correct, but I frankly consider it a more likely explanation than “Amazon’s executives got lobotomized and decided to institute a PR disaster over Easter weekend” —
http://tehdely.livejournal.com/88823.html
Short form is, some organization (no idea who) may have mobilized to flag certain content on Amazon until an automated feature kicks in to remove it from the rankings. It would explain the bizarre selection of items hit, and also why the initial response of Amazon flacks was to say they’re de-ranking “adult” content — if this theory’s right, that’s exactly what they’re doing, but they hadn’t yet realized somebody was gaming the system.
And Easter weekend is a sadly unsurprising time to see positive LGBT* content hit in such fashion.
So. We’ll see what develops. But this makes a lot more sense to me than this being some kind of actual corporate decision on Amazon’s part.
*Or whatever form of abbrevation you prefer. Man, I hadn’t realized just how many permutations of initials that cluster of ideas had until I started seeing posts about this incident all over my flist. What the heck is the (QQI) add-on?
The ghost-prince story is still refusing to tell me what I should do with its newly-sprouted Significance, so I suspect that idea, which was going to be last month’s story, will get pushed back again in favor of something else.
We’re going to see today if that “something else” can be a new Driftwood story. Something about getting more direct fanmail/fancomments from readers for the eponymous work than for any three other stories I’ve published makes me enthusiastic about the prospect — I can’t imagine why. <g>
Time to dig out the various fragments and see if I can poke any of them into growing.
. . . is that as I’m sitting here trying to whack another hundred words out of this piece, something in the back of my brain is pointing out that by doing so, I am in fact reducing my income.
Because I am, after all, paid by the word.
Of course, it’s a tradeoff. If that hundred words makes the difference between an editor buying or not buying, then I should go ahead. But does it?
Don’t ask these questions. That way madness lies.
Off to chop out some more words . . . .
1) Wake up to find something has gone wrong.
2) Realize something else has gone wrong, too.
3) Have the second wrong thing be fixed by your wonderful husband (or other suitable figure).
4) Feel much better about Wrong Thing #1, simply because it doesn’t have company anymore.
Mind you, it would be better still without Step 1, but apparently you can’t have everything.
I’ve been looking forward to this. Today, “Driftwood” went live at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, as part of their fourteenth issue. This is in the same setting as “A Heretic by Degrees,” and it’s my hope that I’ll get another Driftwood story completed (I have several in various stages of started-ness) some time this year, preferably sooner rather than later.
Somewhere — I forget where — I came across a review of “Heretic” that said the reviewer would love to see me do a novel in the setting. I don’t think I could ever write one; it would run too strongly counter to the entire concept of Driftwood, which is about fragmentation. But a story collection? That, I could do. At least in theory. I need a lot more stories before I can think about it, though.
Maybe I’ll try to work on one today.
