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.

FYI

If you can’t access my website for a little while, it’s because the host is having a downtime this evening.

Back on the horse.

Okay, so my previous attempt at book-blogging Queen’s Play failed miserably, helped along by the insanity that was 2008. But I’ve had the book on my desk for a few weeks now in an attempt to get started again, and a friend just tried to sic eclectician (aka “Stone Cold,” from his Assassin days) on me as motivation, so in the interests of not being murdered by a combat librarian, I’m officially announcing a new attempt.

For those of you with no idea what I’m talking about, here’s the original announcement, complete with link to my recommendation for the Lymond Chronicles. So far I’ve made it through the first book of the series; Queen’s Play is the second volume. (It’s also my least favorite, which is part of the reason for the stall. I have trouble remembering I liked it much better the second time I read it. If this were The Disorderly Knights, though, I would have blogged the whole thing a year ago, in record time.)

Anyway, if you or a friend of yours has read the whole series, drop me a line, and I’ll add you to the filter for the posts. Do NOT ask to be added if you haven’t read through the end of Checkmate; there are spoilers like whoa, both in my posts and in the comments, and I don’t want to ruin it for anybody. But otherwise, the more the merrier.

Good-bye, April Fools.

My LJ was remarkably quiet today, and featured a dearth of attempts at jokes. From this I conclude that most of you were hiding from the Internet, afraid of being suckered in.

(The only one that actually got me today? An announcement that Norm Coleman had conceded the Minnesota Senate election. I wish.)

Anyway, now that’s over, have a bunny! Or, to be more precise, a baby fennec hare. Dear moonandserpent: don’t click on that link until you’re seated in a comfortable chair, because it’s going to turn you to a puddle of cuteness-induced goo.

a followup on the karate criticism thing

Not so much “criticism I deal badly with” as a surfeit of riches: having three sensei and one senpai, in the span of three days, come up to offer me four different bits of advice on the same two kata moves.

To be fair, I brought it on myself. Having gotten that eye-opening pointer on Monday, I decided to practice it today — which meant I was repeating those moves when one of the sensei started watching me, so of course the pointer she offered had to do with them. Then I have two things to practice, which means I’m still working on those two moves when the senpai comes along, which means she gives me a pointer about them, and now I’m practicing three things when the other sensei decides to see how I’m doing . . .

So the bunkai is that it’s kind of a soto uke, and I need to open my hip out and then drop it forward for the double-punch, and make sure my zenkutsu dachi is wide enough, and think of my back when I chamber so the punch rebounds forward.

Or something like that.

Four different bits of advice, all of them good. But at this rate I’m going to spend the next month doing just those two movements, trying to assimilate all that good advice, and getting more piled on me every time somebody wanders by. <g>

Wiktory!

On my way to bed, my imagination suggested that perhaps the Plan involved cross-dressing half-orcs, and, well, the story’s done now.

4,149 words.

But still no title, dammit.

One day left . . .

. . . in which to finish my March story. Will I make it?

Hard to say. The last line of tonight’s writing was “We have a Plan” — which is very nice for my characters, but I wish I knew what that plan is.

Total length estimate has been revised downward; it might even be shorter than that. Funny things often should not overstay their welcome.

They should, however, have titles. And I have no idea what to call this one. It isn’t allowed to be “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh,” and “Dear Mom and Dad” (the current filename, because it’s the first line of the text) is not a whole lot better, but everything I’m coming up with sounds too much like “Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual.” (In other words, most of my possibilities start with the phrase “Letters From.”) Possibly we will have to go with something in the vein of “The Adventures of” and then figure out what to put after “of.”

I hate being this close to ending a story, and still having no title for it.

Anyway. Enough D&D-style silliness for one night. Bedtime, and maybe when I wake up tomorrow I’ll know what the characters think they’re going to do about their problem.

The continuing adventures of the Littlest Yellow-And-A-Half Belt

Haven’t posted about karate in a while. (Still need a karate icon.) I belt-tested a while ago and got my yellow-belt-with-black-stripe, but they didn’t have any in my size, so I’m still running around in a yellow belt. (Am tempted to take a sharpie to it.) Two down, lots to go, but I’m enjoying the sense that I am progressing. I’ve got enough awareness of my own movements to be able to feel how I’m improving, and it’s kind of intriguing to observe.

Intriguing, and occasionally frustrating. Not because I’ve hit any kind of plateau, but because I’ve progressed far enough to run afoul of the one respect in which I take criticism badly: I hate being told I’m screwing something up when I already know that. Point out a flaw I wasn’t aware of, and I’m delighted, but bring up me one I’ve been kicking myself about for weeks? That’s the one thing I react badly to, in the sense that it just encourages me in my (occasionally counterproductive) habits of self-castigation. And now I’m aware enough of certain flaws in my work to hit that point.

On the other hand, the sensei tonight, after giving me a few eye-opening pointers on kihongata san, told me I did “beautiful kata.” Which, coming from a teacher you respect enormously, is enough to put you walking on air for a couple of minutes. At least if you’re me.

I need certain muscles back. Except that it probably isn’t even “back;” I can’t say for sure I ever really had much strength in my hip abductors, since dance almost never had me taking my leg out to the side in anything other than a rotated position (which shifts a lot of the work onto the glutes and the quads). So, okay, I need to get those muscles strong, because even if high side and roundhouse kicks aren’t anything you would use in a real fight, I’m asked to do them in class, and I ought to have good form. And the ab work we do for the belt tests is coming perilously close to making my quads give out (long before my abs do), so that’s something else to fix. And, y’know, the whole pushups thing. Stupid upper body strength. Or rather, lack thereof.

I am a looooooooong way from doing the one-armed pushup seen in that icon.

But I like feeling myself become familiar with a different style of movement. I can’t wait to get my orange belt, at which point I might be able to learn pinan nidan, the next kata; it’s very different from the ones I know already, and I expect I will learn a lot from it.

Dammit, I lost my bet.

I’ve been wagering since about 1998 that the Wheel of Time would end up being thirteen books long. Looks like I’m wrong.

Official Tor press release.

Brandon Sanderson, who’s finishing the series, on how he’s ended up doing four times as much work as he signed on for.

I never believed, from the moment Jordan announced the series would end at twelve, that it could wrap up that fast, and I was right about that. But my money was on thirteen, and even that turns out to have been optimistic. (There’s something hilarious about the line in the press release, that “somehow it seems fitting that what began as a trilogy will also end as one.” Trilogy, my foot.)

At some point, I will write a lengthy post or two about my history with this series. Suffice to say that I do intend to read the end, and in fact I will almost certainly re-read the series one final time on my way to that end. I have that much investment left in it, though not much more.

But man, I do NOT envy Sanderson, who almost certainly got paid a flat fee for finishing the series, and is now having to crank out three books instead of one, all of them longer than the original estimate. While also keeping up with his own books. The man is insane.

FINALLY!

I’ve been in California for seven months, and I finally felt my first earthquake.

What’s funny is that it didn’t feel like what people told me it would. In fact, it happened twenty minutes ago, but I wasn’t sure it was an earthquake until just now, when the USGS map updated. More than anything, it felt like a reeeeeeeally big gust of wind came along and knocked my building a bit sideways, like when you’re in a car and a semi goes whooshing past — but I seriously doubt any gust of wind is big enough to make this entire row of townhouses rock like that. Sure enough: earthquake. 4.3, ESE of San Jose.

I know I’ve experienced a billion and one earthquakes since coming here, but none of them big enough that I noticed them. Now I have. I can mark that off my checklist.