What is *wrong* with me?

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?

Brit-picking needed

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.

a (purposely) slightly-delayed goodie

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.

two things that make me angry

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.

a possible explanation of the Amazon thing

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.

One of the oddities of short-story writing . . . .

. . . 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 . . . .

The Swan’s Recipe for Improving Your Day

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.

Woot!

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.

Birdies are twittering madly away outside my window.

(And not in the 140-character sense.)

The seasons here are different from those in temperate climes, and not so distinctly marked, but it’s been a while since I heard birds in the courtyard trees. A small sign of change.

Whoa.

It’s been ten years since The Matrix came out?

This is one of those moments when I wonder where the time went. My memory of childhood is extremely spotty, so you pretty much have to get into the stuff I encountered in late high school or college before I have a “dude, I feel old” moment. But yeah — I feel old. I remember seeing that movie in theatres. (And I went having no idea what it was; thanks to a variety of factors, I’d managed to miss pretty much every bit of advertising that film had.)

Ten years. It was, in certain respects, such a landmark film, and now all of a sudden I’m looking at it as a historical artifact.

Weird.

four hundred people have friended this journal; maybe one of you will know

Is there anyone reading this LJ who has a good familiarity with Middle Eastern history and/or folklore? I don’t mean the ancient past (I got that covered), but rather from the beginning of the Islamic period forward. I am pig-ignorant of that subject, and could use a brain to pick in finding suitable readings for a particular purpose.

If that happens to be an area and time you’re familiar with, please e-mail me off-journal — marie (dot) brennan (at) gmail (dot) com.

Edited to add: Putting the history part in more specific terms, I need good books to read on the later Ottoman Empire. My knowledge of it pretty much ends at the name, alas.

my kind of fiction

After being really busy and falling behind for a while, I’ve finally caught up with all the stories on Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Can I just say how delightful it is to find a magazine that is reliably For Me? I’ve always been sporadic about subscribing to print mags, because I’ve yet to find one that hits my personal buttons consistently enough. I pick up free issues of F&SF at conventions, and a couple of years back there was one where every single story was at least decent, and some of them were fabulous . . . but that isn’t my usual success rate with F&SF. Generally I find maybe one story I like in each issue, which isn’t enough for me to keep up a subscription. (It is probably not coincidental that I’ve sent practically every short story I’ve ever written to them, and not sold a single one.)

Note that this isn’t me saying what they publish is bad. It just mostly isn’t to my taste.

But Beneath Ceaseless Skies, in thirteen issues (with two stories per issue, a couple of them serialized across two issues), has so far had almost a 100% success rate on that front. By which I mean that pretty much every story is at least the kind of thing I want to read, and many of them are both the right kind and good enough to entertain me.

What kind of thing are they publishing? A broad definition of “secondary world fantasy,” in that pretty much the only fantasy they don’t take is stuff set in the modern world. Invented settings are good; historical settings are good; alternate histories are good. But more than that, the editor has demonstrated a clear preference for secondary settings that are different, in exactly the way I appreciate. I think I decided I was really enjoying the magazine in issue #8, with Aliette de Bodard’s Mesoamerican fantasy “Beneath the Mask” and Megan Arkenberg’s creepy Enlightenment-era French fairy-tale piece “Winterblood”. They’ve also had fantasy westerns, Russian-tinged puppet magic, classical-myth arena fighting, and an alternate faerie English Civil War — yeah, that one got my attention. And something in an African-inspired setting! The magazine is already getting well away from the quasi-CelticNorseFeudal trifecta that’s fantasy’s standard; I’d love to see it explore more non-European settings, too. (Based on the evidence, I suspect they’re open to it, which probably means they haven’t gotten enough good submissions of that type. If you have such a story, send it to them!)

Of course, I’m going to be biased in favor of any magazine that keeps picking up my own work <g> — but not just in an ego-stroked way; if they’re buying what I write, they’re (obviously) buying the kinds of stories I’m interested in. Our priorities coincide. They also podcast some of their fiction, so if you’ve got a car commute that doesn’t allow you to read en route, you can give them a listen instead. If you, like me, enjoy rich and interesting settings for your fantasy, they’re definitely worth a try.