I’ll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes

I must issue public thanks to my boy: this morning he delayed me a minute or two in leaving for class, and as a result, I was still at home when the doorbell rang and the FedEx man delivered my Shiny! New! Laptop!

Since one of the first things I’ll be doing with it is carrying it off to London for use in researching my Elizabethan fairy fantasy, I think it only appropriate that the computer be known as Puck.

Let’s just hope that doesn’t encourage it to play tricks on me.

(For the curious, Puck is a Sony VAIO SZ-440. It weighs just a hair over four pounds, and is lovely and sleek, though I’m having to learn to navigate Vista, which is a little annoying.)

for the feminist writers

This is mostly aimed at those reading my journal who participate, professionally or non-professionally, in the sf/f writing community. Over at the SFWA LJ community there’s a post discussing sexism and racism in SFWA, and a little way down into the comments, I’m having a dicussion with a few other people about the problems that exist in the community, if not in SFWA as an organization. It’s the kind of thing where I would very much appreciate input from other writerly-types with a background in feminism, especially because of a thought I just posted there. Having noted that “I’ve been to cons where fellow con-goers discreetly warn young female attendees about which (older male) writers to stay away from,” I said the following to Karina:

If I were more of a confrontational person, I might really like the notion that we stop passing this stuff around sotto voce, and put up a public list somewhere online. The shitstorm that would set off would be unbelievable, but on the other hand, keeping it discreet makes it our (young women’s) problem to deal with, rather than theirs (the old and not-so-old men’s).

I’d never thought of it that way before, but I think it might be true. And it also says a lot about the ways in which women aren’t supposed to be confrontational; I really can’t fathom actually following through on that idea, since I can imagine the damage it would do to my social reputation in the field.

If you’ve got a dog in this fight, please, come on over and offer your views. The SFWA community is open to all and sundry.

getting it right

A recent discussion with vschanoes over on ellen_kushner‘s journal resulted in me watching Aliens again tonight. Aside from all the other things the movie does really really well (seriously, it isn’t just a sci-fi action/horror movie, it’s a well-constructed sci-fi action/horror movie), I was reminded of how well it handles Ripley as a strong character.

Hell if I can remember where I saw this, but somebody recently was talking about the way a lot of movies seem to mistake “strong woman” for “woman who kills things.” The two aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, but the latter does not define the former. Ripley isn’t strong because she uses a gun to kill aliens; she’s strong because she picks the gun up and learns how to use it. She’s strong because her reaction to problems is to find a way to handle them. Her nerve isn’t unshakeable — we see her scared, more than once — but fear doesn’t stop her, and ultimately, her psychological resilience is her true strength. The willingness to pick up that gun, or get in the loader, or go back down into the facility because Newt’s down there somewhere and might still be alive; to go with the colonial marines in the first place because the only way to get rid of her nightmares is to face them again. That resilience is why she survives, when a lot of more physically badass marines bite the dust.

(Yes, from another perspective she survives because she’s the main character, and those marines aren’t. I’m speaking from a position of in-story logic. And she’s the more interesting main character because of that logic.)

Which of course means you can have strong female characters in stories with no violence at all. They just attract our attention more when the situation is extreme. Picking oneself up after a bad divorce is one thing; facing down an alien queen is quite another.

Ripley and Sarah Connor are similarly cool characters, and I don’t think it’s an accident they date to around the same time. I just wish it seemed less like Hollywood forgot what it knew back then.

MNC Book Report: two works by Katharine Briggs

I’m falling a bit behind on reporting my research, so I’ll cover these two books in one post. They really belong together, anyway.

The one I read first was The Fairies in Tradition and Literature. It’s a good focus on British Isles fairy-lore (as distinct from fairy-tales), and Briggs is pretty good about flagging the region a given detail belongs to, for which I am very grateful; I’m specifically after English fairy-lore here, as opposed to the much more well-known Scottish and Irish and even Welsh materials, so it’s good to know where I should be drawing my mental boundaries.

This book is organized mostly by issues, with chapters like “The Host of the Dead,” “Fairy Plants,” “Changelings and Midwives,” and so on. The big benefit for me is that this gave me the perfect way to think about recurrent tropes in fairy-lore, and how I want to reinterpret them for the purposes of my own work. I have certain ideas now, for example, about why exactly fairies were so fond of certain human foods, and what it is about gifts of clothing that seems to piss off brownies.

The second book is British Folk-Tales and Legends, and it makes a good companion to the first. Redacted from a longer version called The Dictionary of British Folk-Tales and Legends, it’s basically a collection of primary sources (sometimes simplified or summarized, sometimes given in their entirety, dialect and all), organized once again into categories. A bunch of the sections I skipped entirely, like “Fables and Exempla” or “Jocular Tales,” but there are categories for black dogs, bogies, devils, dragons, fairies, ghosts, and giants, all of which are quite handy. And a great many of the stories in here are referenced in the other book, so it’s nice to have it on hand for cross-referencing. Bonus points to Briggs for having the right attitude about her categories: they’re there to help the reader find what they’re looking for, but she acknowledges where appropriate the difficulty of distinguishing one type of story from another, and the ways in which they continually muddle up one’s boundaries.

I’ve got one more Briggs book coming my way, The Anatomy of Puck, which should specifically focus on the fairy-lore of Shakespeare’s time. With that, I should be more or less set with my fairy research, except for one out-of-print book that costs something like eighty dollars for a used copy, which I will probably check out from the IU library at some point.

Which year, which year?

The difficult thing about choosing to set Midnight Never Come late in Elizabeth’s reign is that there’s a six-year span or so where a little fluctuation earlier or later means gaining or losing some really interesting people, and also interesting events. Mary Stuart dies in 1587, Leicester in 1588, Walsingham in 1590. Dee returns from the Continent in 1589, and leaves for Manchester in 1595. Marlowe dies(?) in 1593. Shakespeare’s in London by 1592, but nobody seems to be sure when precisely he got there, and his writing career doesn’t really get going until later. The Armada gets defeated in 1588. Spenser writes the initial version of The Faerie Queene in 1590, and while his vision bears absolutely no resemblance to Invidiana’s court, I can make ironic use of that fact.

Mind you, I think this will be the most time-complex thing I’ve ever written, since I suspect it will contain at least a few flashback scenes; I’ve already put together one from 1554, and there may be others. Certainly I’ll probably end up writing them, just to get matters straight in my own head, and then if they don’t go into the book maybe I’ll toss them up on the website as freebies. But no amount of flashing back will change the importance of when the main events are taking place, and that requires some thought.

1590, I think, will be the answer. It means no Leicester, alas, but I do get to have Essex instead, and that’s a potential source of fun. It also means I can have Walsingham for a while, and then get him out of my way. (Bastard would probably defuse my plot if I gave him half a chance.)

So let’s call it 1590, and go from there.

SFWA lunacy

I liked this icon (courtesy of deedop — it’s available to take, right?) slightly better than timprov‘s “Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Wretch,” though the phrase in that one’s good, too.

Where, you ask, did these phrases come from?

From this little rant. Will Shetterly posted it, but the thoughts aren’t his, so don’t flame on him. And oh, skip the first half to two-thirds of it. The actual content starts around the “In another way, too” paragraph.

So read that. And then reflect that the fellow writing it is the current vice-president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

He’s an SF writer, and he hates the Internet.

And that, in a nutshell, is why younger writers see SFWA as an irrelevant waste of their time and money. Also why we younger writers need to join en masse and drag the thing kicking and screaming into the next century.

(No, I haven’t joined yet. But I’m going to, and soon. And boy howdy is it going to be interesting if Scalzi gets elected president.)

oh dear

You remember when, a little while ago, I referred to John Stow’s A Survey of London, Vols. 1 and 2 as More Than I Ever Wanted to Know About Elizabethan London, Vols. 1 and 2?

Looks like I should amend that to More Than I Ever Wanted to Know About Elizabethan London and Printed With Unmodernized Spelling to Boot, Vols. 1 and 2.

Sample:

Thames the most famous riuer of this Iland, beginneth a little aboue a village called Winchcombe in Oxfordshire, and still increasing passeth first by the university of Oxford, and so with a maruelous quiet course to London, and thence breaketh into the French Ocean by maine tides, which twice in 24. howers space doth eb and flow, more than 60. miles in length, to the great commoditie of Trauellers, by which all kind of Marchandise bee easily conueyed to London, the principall store house, and Staple of all commodities within this Realme, so that omitting to speake of great ships, and other vessels of burden, there pertayneth to the Citties of London, Westminster, and Borrough of Southwarke, aboue the number is supposed of 2000.

It isn’t impenetrable . . . but it will be slow going.

good starts to a D&D game

My first roll of the entire campaign: natural 20.

My first roll in combat: confirmed crit.

Our first kill: a (young) green dragon.

Our first loot: omgawesome.

I love killing dragons. ^_^

oy, research.

As I just said to the boy, I feel like I’ve e-mailed half the population of London now with research inquiries. So far we’ve contacted Hardwick Hall (okay, not in London), Hampton Court Palace, the Globe, the Worshipful Company of Armourers and Brasiers, and the Tower of London, though that last one bounced and I need to figure out why. I’ve also made my hostel reservation. The Museum of London I don’t have any questions for; I probably don’t need a reservation for the Thames River Boat to Hampton Court; Lambeth Palace appears to be almost never open to the public (since the Archbishop of Canterbury still lives there), so I will only be photographing the exterior of the Tudor brick gatehouse.

Oy, research.

If the Londoners who specialize in the Elizabethan period hang out together, I suspect they will make jokes about the crazy American novelist who’s been querying all of them.

I still need to look into Westminster Abbey, Whitehall, and various things in Southwark. And yes, this is well in advance of my trip, but I figure the people I’m hoping to ask questions of will be happier if I contact them early.

I’M GOING TO ENGLAND!!!!!

London, mostly. But also a jaunt up to Derbyshire to see Hardwick House. There’s probably an Elizabethan manor closer to London, but I’m not sure I can pass up the chance to see Bess of Hardwick’s actual house.

I’M GOING TO ENGLAND!!!!!

I realized a moment ago that I haven’t been out of the country since 2002. Which necessitates the world’s smallest violin playing for me — oh, woe is her; she’s twenty-six and she’s only been to the British Virgin Islands, Costa Rica, England, Ireland, Israel, and Japan — but it’s a bit sad to trade approximately once-a-year overseas trips for multiple-times-a-year domestic trips, especially when the domestic trips mostly mean the hotel the conference or convention is in.

So, yeah. May 22nd to May 29th, flying out of Chicago, so buzzermccain, if you’ve got Internet access again, be warned that I’ll be taking you up on that crash space.

I’M GOING TO ENGLAND!!!!!

Edited to add: Okay, so, trying to type a post while on the phone with kurayami_hime doesn’t work so well. I should clarify that I am going to England as research for Midnight Never Come, not that you all probably didn’t guess that anyway. I’m going for a week, and will spend most of the time in Central London, Westminster, and Southwark, with the aforementioned jaunt to Bess of Hardwick’s house, and things like a riverboat trip to Hampton Court Palace, which still has some Tudor-period architecture left, though not much. (On the other hand, it means I get to float down the Thames. Yay!) Anyway, I’ll post more details about my exact plans when I have them more concretely formed. Right now, I’m still giddy. ^_^

I’M GOING TO ENGLAND!!!!!

art in context

First, go read this article, about an experiment the Washington Post conducted on the D.C. Metro.

No, really — go read it. The entire thing, if you can, and watch the video clips. There’s some good stuff in there. Not just the incident they staged, but the variety of things they learned from it.

Have you done that? Okay. Then come inside the cut. I want to discuss this, but not out in the open, where people will be tempted to read my comments before they’ve read the article.

(more…)

that whole resolution thing

At the beginning of the year, I set myself the challenge of writing a short story a month.

First off, I need to remind myself that I didn’t challenge myself to write a good, saleable story a month; sometimes one produces a clunker, after all. So I am hereby officially accepting the fact that I didn’t actually finish “Kingspeaker” until the beginning of March, and my February short story was “Schrodinger’s Crone.” Doesn’t matter that SC actually needs to be a poem; I wrote it first as a story, and if it’s a bad story, oh well.

Which is me telling myself that I can officially not kick myself over the fact that “Once a Goddess” (theoretically my March story) isn’t done. “Kingspeaker” was my March story. This is my April story.

But the real issue is on the horizon: Midnight Never Come. (And the wedding.) I don’t know if I’ll be able to write a short story a month while also writing a historical novel with lots of research. (And planning a wedding).

I might be able to, were it not for the fact that many of the short story ideas on hand also require research. “Hannibal of the Rockies” (which is technically on ice at the moment) requires me to know about elephants, Siam, the Civil War, and nineteenth-century mountaineering. “Mad Maudlin” needs research into mental health care. “The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots” might pass, since half of it’s the same research I’m doing for MNC anyway, but “Xie Meng Lu Goes on Pilgrimage” and all the subsequent stories I want to write for it require me to learn about imperial China, and what I presently know about imperial China would fit comfortably in a thimble. Etc. The stories that don’t need research mostly aren’t developed enough to be written yet.

I had a secondary goal for this year, though, which was to get a new story out the door each month. This isn’t the same thing as writing a good, saleable story a month because I have a small backlog of things I’ve written but not revised. So I think I’m revising my intentions: the submissions will be the real priority, and the writing will be something to aim for but not freak out if I fail to achieve it. I have two non-researchy things I can write in May and June, and then I can let myself slide in July, August, and September if I need to, picking myself back up in the fall, after the novel’s turned in and I’m officially hitched.

This sounds wise. Whether or not it will happen remains to be seen. But ultimately, the point is to aim for it; any progress I make toward the goal(s) means I have more short story production than I’ve had in the last year or two, and that is a Good Thing.

the story behind the story

When I announced Midnight Never Come as my next novel, I made some allusions that, for some of you, need expansion.

Or, to put it a different way, I need to apologize for (on the surface of it) committing one of the cardinal sins of fantasy writing: I’m writing up a role-playing game.

Generally, of course, that phrase indicates something along the lines of “an elf, a dwarf, and a ranger walk into a dungeon . . .,” and in such cases it is rightly despised; god only knows how many bad queries agents and editors see that are thinly-disguised writeups of D&D campaigns, even when they aren’t working on the Forgotten Realms. But of course game systems have come a long way since D&D debuted, as have the uses to which people put them, and this particular instance is about as far away from the dungeon scenario as one can get.

Last year I ran my first RPG, a one-year (okay, ten-and-a-half-month) tabletop game based on White Wolf’s system Changeling: The Dreaming. In a very tiny nutshell, the idea of the system is that faerie souls have survived into modern times by taking refuge in mortal bodies, and that when the mortal host dies, they reincarnate. So I ran a game that went through 650 years of English history — backwards — going from 2006 to 1916 and so on back to about 1350, and then back to 2006 to finish up the plot. For structural reasons, I called it Memento, after the very intriguing Guy Pearce movie.

The 1589 segment of the game grew like kudzu. It didn’t run any longer than the others (three sessions), but by the time I was done, its background and consequences stretched the entire length of the game, from the time of the Black Death through to nearly the last of our 2006 sessions. And at the heart of that web of action and reaction, folly and consequence, was Invidiana, Queen of the Onyx Court, who ruled the fae of Albion for a period of time mostly overlapping Elizabeth’s reign.

Midnight Never Come is not really a Memento novel; the overarching plot that spanned all that time (which was basically a 650-year alchemical experiment) will be absent, and many of the outlying tendrils of Invidiana’s plot will be pulled in, to make a more compact story. But she wouldn’t leave my head, and neither would a lot of the characters surrounding her, and I gradually came to realize that it wouldn’t be all that hard to file off the Changeling-specific serial numbers and make it an independent story about curses and dark pacts, lost memories and betrayed loves, Machiavellian intrigues and faerie/mortal politics. And while the proprietary ideas that belonged to White Wolf will be gone, those were never the central part of it anyway; the most important bits will still be there, and that’s why I can make it a novel. It was very nearly standing on its own two feet to begin with. (Hell, I’d thrown in so many things that violated White Wolf canon, half of it was hardly recognizable as Changeling anyway.)

So there you have it: I am committing RPG novelization. I pray you all forgive me.

I would adore this weather, were it not for three things: 1) the hail may have damaged my car, 2) the hail nearly damaged me, and 3) tomorrow the temperature is dropping straight into the pits of hell.

Norse hell. The frozen one. (Because hell, apparently, is like home.)