We’ve gotten very sedate with much of our commerce, conducting it behind doors and walls. But many things used to be sold on the streets (and in a few, limited cases still are), so this week the New Worlds Patreon takes a look at that approach! Comment over there.
A new month, a new theme! The lovely backers of the New Worlds Patreon have voted for an economic motif this month, so we’re beginning with a look at periodic (and then permanent) markets. Comment over there!
Subscribers to the M.A. Carrick newsletter got a head start on this, but now Alyc and I are very pleased to tell you all: we have partnered with Dryad Tea to create five Rook and Rose-themed tea blends! They are as follows:
You can buy all of those teas from the links, through Dryad’s website. Note that this isn’t a situation where Alyc and I get a commission or anything; we paid to have the blends developed, and our reward comes in the form of getting to drink them ourselves, heh. (We can attest to them all being delicious! There was extensive testing.) So all profits — and thanks — go to the company that helped make this happen!
I ran into some technical snags with this, but I have finally gotten Ars Historica into a print edition! You can get it through Bookshop.org (my current recommendation for supporting independent bookstores), Barnes and Noble, The Book Depository, or Amazon in the US or the UK. It joins Maps to Nowhere in the tiny but growing library of novella-sized short fiction collections on my bookshelf — my physical bookshelf, I mean — and the others will follow in due course!
The question of who inherits your money/land/title when you’re gone can get . . . complicated. This week, the New Worlds Patreon wades into the tangled thicket of inheritance and succession! Comment over there.
They say the best form of government is a benevolent dictatorship — but of course there are all kinds of problems with that . . . This week, the New Worlds Patreon takes a look at absolute monarchs, dictators, and other individuals who hold supreme power. Comment over there!
Years ago I wrote an essay for my site called “Writer’s Block(s),” wherein I said I don’t find the term “writer’s block” to be helpful.
I stand by that, even though I’ve now gone through a period where, if I were inclined to use that term, that’s what I would have called it.
In 2020 I was hugely productive. Some writers found it very difficult to write last year, but I was in the camp that took refuge from the world by escaping into ones of my own creation. I wrote two novels (The Liar’s Knot with Alyc, and Night Parade on my own), plus ten short stories, three flash, one fanfic, one short story for L5R, various short adventures for Sea of Legends, and my ongoing Patreon essays.
Given that, it wasn’t surprising that after I rounded the corner into 2021, things slacked off. I’d been working really hard, after all, and you can’t do that nonstop forever. I’d already decided to slow my roll on short fiction because I was writing it faster than I could sell it, so taking a break from that wasn’t a problem. Besides, I had The Mask of Mirrors out in January and Night Parade two weeks later, so there was a stretch of literal months where I was doing promotional events every week, usually two or three of them. That eats brain and energy and I know it, so giving myself time off from producing something new was good self-care.
But.
Round about late February, I realized my ability to brain creatively was not regenerating. I’d taken two months off and I still had no more energy for writing than I had before; if anything, I had less. I’d written my final L5R story and a couple of pieces of flash, but for the former I had the benefit of all the existing story momentum and the latter were . . . not impressive. More importantly, I had a story due to an anthology, and I was having the worst time getting it done.
Well, there could be multiple reasons for that. And I knew perfectly well that I had a plot problem in the story which I hadn’t yet solved — so naturally I couldn’t move forward on it. I made myself sit down and I figured out a way around that problem, which let me write a little more . . . but then I ran into a new problem, which slammed me into a second wall.
And then I reached a point where even trying to make myself think about the problem induced a flinch reaction in my brain: god, no, please don’t make me.
This was . . . not good.
If you saw the day in mid-March where I asked on Twitter for cute cat pics and the like, that was the day I realized I wasn’t simply tired, and I wasn’t simply stuck on a bit of plot and everything would be fine once I sorted that out. Something had gone wrong in my head, that merely sitting back and waiting wasn’t going to fix.
But the gist of that original essay is that calling the issue “writer’s block” accomplishes nothing. It’s a description of symptoms, not a diagnosis of cause, much less a cure. I had to figure out why my head had gone wrong, on a global level that went well beyond being in a plot corner with a single story.
I mean, pandemic. That was a pretty obvious culprit. But “pandemic” wasn’t really an answer, either, because there was a pandemic before and I still wrote, and also what exactly about the pandemic was the bit stabbed into my brain? There’s been discussions about the lack of novelty involved in being locked down, which can be particularly deadly to creative work; that seemed like a good angle to investigate. My first-line response was to spend a whole day doing things like working on a jigsaw puzzle, playing piano, and otherwise engaging in activities I hadn’t done in ages, which definitely helped to lift my immediate mood, even if it didn’t fix everything.
What about environmental factors? I figured winter had something to do with it — I’ve known for decades that I don’t respond well to a lack of sunlight — but merely rounding the corner into daylight saving time hadn’t brought the improvement I hoped for, so I got more aggressive about seeking out light. We recently got a swing for our back patio, and the weather was nice enough for me to sit out there, so I started making a point of doing that every day (light + a new place to sit, i.e. novelty). In fact, the trainer I see has a list of elements that play into good health — things like nutrition, sleep, and so forth — and sunlight is on that list, so my “homework” from him for a while was not to lift weights or anything like that, but to get at least twenty minutes on the patio each day.
I also started taking a vitamin D supplement, on the theory that a deficiency in that nutrient has caused sluggishness in multiple people of my acquaintance, and overdosing on the stuff basically requires you to down a whole bottle in one go, so why not supplement for a while and see if that helped.
And that story I was stuck on? Well, I had a deadline, so I did have to push through, rather than just shelving it until I felt better. But I talked to Alyc, who not only helped me work out the problem I’d been stuck on, but made a suggestion for another detail that wound up fixing a problem I hadn’t even gotten to yet. Which unclogged the brain ducts enough for me to get the story done, with a small extension from the editor that gave me time enough away to revise the draft as it needed. So yes, “fix the story” was part of the solution, along with other things. (Full disclosure: I held off on making this post until I heard back from the editor with revisions, because a part of me was afraid that I’d turned in something visibly sub-par. But he’s delighted with it, so I feel much more comfortable publicly discussing the problems I had along the way.)
So here we are, roughly two months after I started trying to figure out what was off in my head and how to fix it. How are things going? Well, in April I finally rewrote a story I’d drafted in 2019 and had meant to redo ever since then (the idea was solid, but the execution was meh at best). And I also popped out a piece of flash I’m quite pleased with. And I started revising another story whose polishing I’ve been putting off. More pertinently, one evening recently I decided I’d done plenty of work during the day and sat down to read . . . only to wind up scribbling notes and even writing material for a side project I’ve got going on. In other words, I was excited enough about that project to spontaneously generate ideas for it when I wasn’t trying to extract them.
That’s what my brain looks like when it’s working right.
Now, I will be the first in line to say that I’m lucky: this problem wound up being relatively quick to resolve. I do not appear to have developed major depressive disorder or anything else that would require medical intervention to fix. My home remedies sufficed, at least for now, and they sufficed in a fairly short time — call it a few weeks before I started feeling like I was on my way out of the pit, and a bit over a month before I felt like I was back on my feet. Not everybody has that easy a time of it.
But I stand by what I said before. If I were to rewrite “Writer’s Block(s)” today (which I may do), it would be to change the presentation of the points there, not the points themselves. I had to dig past the surface of “I’m having trouble writing” and even the surface of “well, pandemic” to get to the potential causes and the changes that might help mitigate them. My first attempted solution (taking time off) didn’t work; okay, what should I try next? If it isn’t just low-grade burnout, if it isn’t all the promotional stuff taking my time and energy, then what is it? What path might get me back to where I want to be?
We have to ask ourselves these questions. Simply waiting and hoping the problem will go away on its own will only fix a minor subset of the possible causes; some of the others may get worse, as the failure to produce exacerbates the stress. Sometimes you need to crack the whip over your own head, and sometimes that will only drive you deeper into the hole. Sometimes you won’t know what works and what doesn’t until you try.
But you can try, and eventually — hopefully — find your way back out again.
Even though kings and queens are human beings like everybody else, they can’t always afford to seem like it. The New Worlds Patreon is taking a look at royal dignity and its role in maintaining a government — comment over there!
These are all from another friend, meaning that I am branching out into new territory! Not a single BPAL scent in the lot.
* Citrine (NEST)
Described as “lemon blossom, lotus flower, and freesia with the essence of morning dew and hints of precious woods.” The lemon freesia of its early stages was kind of nice, but it gets generically floral over time, so meh.
* psy_cou (Nomenclature)
Described as “coumarin (which is apparently used a lot in pipe tobacco), cardamom, juniper berries, coffee, incense, saffron, oud, and palo santo.” It’s sharp in the bottle, possibly from the juniper, but dulls a lot in application, and then I think I must have largely been getting the saffron and maybe the cardamom? Because I mostly smelled like Indian cooking. Overall I found this one hard to parse, and it’s not for me.
* Flowerhead (Byredo)
Described as “angelica seeds, lingonberry, Sicilian lemon, dewy tuberose, rose petals, wild jasmine sambac, fresh amber, and suede.” This goes into the category of “floral, but I don’t mind.” I never picked up much of the non-floral notes after the lemon faded early on, but I’m holding onto it to test against the other inoffensively floral scents I’ve kept.
* Special Moments (Catherine Malandrino)
Described as “citrus peel, plum, peach, honeydew, rose water, pink cyclamen, jasmine, white musk, amber crystals, and vanilla bean.” The honeydew helped hold down the floral here; it’s fairly clean-smelling, and I’ll try it again.
* Fantasia (Anna Sui)
Described as “pomelo, pink pepper, raspberry, praline, floral notes, cypress, and Himalayan cedar.” This one went SUPER mild, super fast; the pomelo vanished as if it had never been, and I was left with lingering traces of those floral notes. Doesn’t really have enough personality to be interesting.
* Like This (Etat Libre d’Orange)
Described as “Indonesian ginger, pumpkin, tangerine, immortal flower, Moroccan neroli, rose, spicy notes, vetiver, woody notes, musk, and heliotrope.” I forgot to take notes on this one, but I remember it being another sort of complex and confusing one, and while it wasn’t bad, it was also not really to my taste.
* Angel (Mugler)
Described as “Calabrian bergamot, red fruits, praline, ethylmaltol?, patchouli, and vanilla absolute.” Despite living in the Bay Area, I don’t really have a good grip on what patchouli smells like — or rather I didn’t, until I tried this perfume. My sister loathes the stuff and made faces every time she sniffed my wrist. I didn’t find it objectionable, but all I really got was patchouli and vanilla, and I find that unengaging.
* Gin Fizz (Lubin Paris)
Described as “bergamot, lemon, mandarin, juniper berry; iris, galbanum, orange blossom, rose, jasmine; lily, benzoin, iris, vetiver, oak moss, and white musk.” Another inoffensive but uninteresting perfume: it also fades quite fast, and is just sort of vaguely clean floral.
One ruler, that is. This week, the New Worlds Patreon starts taking a look at those monarchies you see so often in science fiction and fantasy. Comment over there!
The Cloud Roads, Martha Wells. First of the Raksura books, and I was a little bit ambivalent about it. I love the worldbuilding and all the stuff built around the Raksura being a different species, but it’s challenging to write a book about a loner main character who spends much of the novel with one foot out the door, wanting to get away from the people around him. But the setting was interesting enough to keep me engaged, and the first volume ends on a note that probably means Moon won’t be acting quite so much like a cat that doesn’t want to be held.
Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World, Patricia Crone. Recommended on A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, this is an overview of the commonalities found in pre-industrial states, just by dint of their technological constraints. It definitely has its shortcomings (it’s moderately good at looking at parts of Eurasia that aren’t Europe, but less good with Africa, much less the New World), and most of what it discusses is stuff I’ve picked up by osmosis through reading about the societies themselves, but it works well as an overview you could hand to someone who hasn’t spent decades osmosing that stuff. (Also, the shade Crone throws on Europe at the end is a truly astonishing thing to behold. Her thesis is that Europe industrialized because it so comprehensively failed at finding stable solutions to the problems of a pre-industrial society, and her summation of that failure gets vivid.)
Piranesi, Susanna Clarke. What a peculiar book! Five pages in, I wasn’t sure I was going to finish, partly because of the random Capitals the narrator scatters throughout his Text. Fifty pages in, I wanted to hoover the entire thing up, and I couldn’t even tell you why. I acquired it because I have an idea for a “weird house” story, and it turns out what I’ve got in mind is absolutely nothing like this, but I’m not sorry I read it. (Also, kudos to whoever designed the case for the hardcover: if you take off the slip jacket, the front and back covers and the spine have a marching series of columns of varying heights that spell out PIRANESI. It’s really pretty.)
Aru Shah and the Song of Death, Roshani Chokshi. Second in the Pandavas series from Rick Riordan Presents, this introduces a third Pandava sibling (along with, of course, new threats to deal with). I don’t find this series as congenial as some of the others from that imprint; the narrative voice just doesn’t work as well for me. Not that I think there’s anything wrong with it — but as I’m not the ideal reader, and I’ve established there are other series I like better, I may not continue on.
Never Have I Ever, Isabel Yap. A collection of short stories that range in tone all the way from a really sweet romance that’s the most San Franciscan thing I’ve read in a while (it’s about a queer guy who works in tech and also has a part-time job at an occult store on Valencia) to some outright horror. A few of the stories end on a bit more of an unresolved, literary-style note than is my preference, but I liked the collection overall. The author is Filipina, and several of the stories involve that setting and/or elements from that folklore; the latter sent me down some excellent new rabbit holes on Wikipedia. (If anybody has recs for English-language books on Filipino folklore, please share them! It’s not an area I know much about at all.)
Sins of Regret
Winter’s Embrace
Wheel of Judgment
Mask of the Oni Four short adventures written for Legend of the Five Rings. I’ve read very few adventure modules overall, and the ones I’ve looked at in the past were all for Pathfinder, so it’s interesting to see how a totally different game approaches the medium.
Daily Life in the Inca Empire, Michael A. Malpass. I have a vague idea for a short story set in Incan history, so this is the first of several books I’ve acquired on the culture, and also the oldest, being from 1996. (Which really doesn’t feel like it’s twenty-five years ago. O_O ) It’s from the same series as the Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia that I read back at the start of 2020, and while it isn’t quite as much of a slog as that one was, it’s still pretty dry going. I hope some of the others will be more flavorful? But I got useful information out of it regardless.
From Kuan Yin to Chairman Mao: The Essential Guide to Chinese Deities, Xueting Christine Ni. This got recommended during one of my Flights of Foundry panels. It goes through sixty some-odd deities in a little over two hundred pages, so none of them get more than a few pages apiece — but in that time, Ni manages to pack in details on the historical and/or mythological origins of each deity, how they’re worshipped now and/or in the past, where major temples can be found, what kinds of offerings you can make to them, which novels/TV shows/movies/video games they show up in, and sometimes even how to cosplay as them. And yes, Mao is genuinely included in the list of deities; he isn’t in the title just for rhetorical value.
* The Apothecary
Described as “tea leaf with three mosses, green grass, a medley of herbal notes, and a drop of ginger and fig.” I keep wanting to like scents in the “green” category more than I do, simply because it’s my favorite color (and yes, I’m aware that the color and the smell are not actually related). This one was only temporarily green, though; it goes from “lemony ginger tea” through the green phase to being just too floral for me — not sure which element that was coming from.
* Gingerbread Wolfman
Described as “gingerbread, honey, molasses, pulverized chestnut, powdered sugar, nutmeg, and hazelnut.” Ugh, no — this mostly came through as molasses, and the more time passed, the more burnt the molasses smelled. It would have been okay but not amazing without the burnt note; with it, I wanted to get away from my own arm.
* Last Tavern at Town Gate
Described as “vivid red musk streaked with sleet, hearthsmoke, a glimmer of lemon rind and yellow amber, and oak-aged whiskey.” This was very complex! I had a hard time teasing the notes apart, except for the usual pattern of the musk dominating after a while. It’s interesting, but it wasn’t for me.
* Kitsune-tsuki
Described as “Asian plum, orchid, daffodil, jasmine and white musk.” Starts off plum and daffodil, maybe with some jasmine later on. It’s floral, but surprisingly not off-putting?
* Event Horizon
Described as “black opium, labdanum, opoponax, black orchid, and benzoin.” It reminded me a little of Darkness, in that my sister again said that I was clearly going to the opera; I think that’s the opium note. It’s heavy, a little sweet, a little floral; later on she called it “very very fancy bubblegum,” which I think might be the opoponax? It’s interesting enough to try again later!
* Maiden
Described as “white tea, carnation and damask rose.” Somehow this manages to smell almost lemony in the bottle, turning into tea + rose as it dries. The scent is fairly steady, and I kind of like it?
* Paladin (RPG Series)
Described as “white musk, sweet frankincense, bourbon vanilla, white leather, and shining armor.” Like Gingerbread Wolfman, this got more ugh over time. It’s generic cologne at first, and then I think basically leather frankincense later; I did not like it. (I’m starting to think leather notes will just be not for me overall.)
* Blood Rose
Described as “voluptuous red rose bursting with lascivious red wine and sultry dragon’s blood resin.” I’m not positive if I’ve encountered dragon’s blood before; people on the BPAL forum theorized that it was in Wolf’s Heart (the one that smelled like laundry detergent on me) and Sanguinem Menstruum, but the official descriptions don’t say for sure. So I can’t tell whether the sweet aspect here is coming from that, or from the red wine. But it sheds the oddly sugary effect it has early on to become quite pleasant; this and Maiden are two rose scents I actually kind of like, at least enough to hold onto them and compare again later.
. . . and in looking up Blood Rose, I discovered BPAL has a perfume called Black Rose, which of course I have to try. I’ve ordered a sample!
One of my projects for 2021 is to start working my way through my backlist of BVC titles and get the majority* of them into print editions. That project starts now, with Maps to Nowhere!
It’s a slim little paperback, about the size of a novella, and you can get it now from Barnes and Noble, Book Depository, Bookshop.org (which, btw, has become one of my favorite places to order from — it’s the latest development in supporting independent bookstores), or Amazon US or UK. (Full disclosure: I get a commission from sales through the Amazon US link. Which is nice, but did I mention I really like Bookshop.org?)
The others will follow in due course — with the asterisk up above being that some titles (Never After, Monstrous Beauty) are too short for print editions, while others In London’s Shadow, The Doppelganger Omnibus) are too long. But the rest are Goldilocks-approved, and over the next year or so, I hope to roll them all out!
It being a fifth Friday, the New Worlds Patreon has a theory post for you! This week we’re looking at change over time, and the extent to which we may mis-perceive how fast and/or inevitable that is. Comment over there!
* Bengal
Described as “skin musk with honey, peppers, clove, cinnamon bark and ginger.” This is a perfectly pleasant spice-based scent, mostly dominated by the cinnamon — I only ever got the clove at the outset, and a slight astringent hint from the ginger. Nothing wrong with it, but not enough a standout for me to feel it needs keeping.
* Not a Perfume (Juliette Has a Gun)
The name of this one refers to the fact that it’s just straight-up cetalox, which is one of the forms of synthetic ambergris out there. So, uh, if you want to know what ambergris smells like, here you go? I haven’t been a huge fan of it in blends, and I certainly don’t like it enough to want that to be the only thing I smell like.
* Gentlewoman (Juliette Has a Gun)
Described as “neroli, bergamot, coumarin, almond, orange blossom, musks, ambroxan” (that last being another synthetic ambergris). This one goes into the not-sweet orange family until the ambroxan takes over. Interestingly, although my sister has not generally been a fan of ambergris, she turned out to like this one.
* Decisions, Decisions (Imaginary Authors)
Described as “tuberose, sarsaparilla, geranium, labdanum, jasmine sambac, raspberry, and sweet suspense.” With this, I have reached the end of their catalogue! I have literally tried every perfume Imaginary Authors makes (barring any which were discontinued before I started this project; some of the ones I’ve tried have since vanished from their website, so that’s a possibility). I think this was dominated by the labdanum — that’s a note I hadn’t really learned to recognize before trying this, but there was something sort of bitter and sort of warm, in a way that reminded me of chocolate without actually being that. Maybe the raspberry came through a little, too? But I’m not sure that wasn’t my brain grasping at straws, trying to figure out how to label what was actually the labdanum.
(I’ve managed to induce a remarkably vivid scent flashback in myself just writing this one up.)
* Marshmallow Snow
Described as “soft poofs of chilled marshmallow,” which honestly isn’t very helpful. In the bottle it’s evergreen, which somebody on the BPAL forums opined was probably spruce, and something almost . . . fruity? The fruity note persists for a bit as just a ghost of sweetness in the evergreen, and then some baking spices arrive to join the party, with the spruce or whatever it is staying around to keep this from becoming too cloying. I don’t know yet whether I like this or Thieves’ Rosin better, but either way it’s a very good scent for the Christmas season!
* S.C. 59 (Phlur)
Described as “mint, lemon zest, orange flower, and amber.” Unfortunately, this one wound up unpleasantly floral, though it started out very promisingly as mint and lemon. Might be fine for them as likes floral, but that ain’t me.
* In Dubiis Libertas
Described as “golden amber, smoked vanilla, benzoin, and blue cypress.” In the bottle and wet, this had a hint of something sharper that cut the vanilla and amber — possibly the cypress, but benzoin is one of those notes I don’t really grok yet — but alas, it lost that and just became vanilla and amber. Like Bengal, this is perfectly pleasant, but at this point in my sampling that isn’t enough to make me say it’s a keeper.
* Hanami (Phlur)
Described as “fig, bergamot, hazelnut, white florals, sandalwood, vetiver, and musk.” Another that’s fine but forgettable. Floral citrus at the outset, picking up an earthier note for a bit that was too faint for me to be sure whether it was the fig or the hazelnut, and then it predictably settled down into the warmth of sandalwood and musk.
The April tour of the New Worlds Patreon through interpersonal violence wraps up with protection from same, in the form of bodyguards. Comment over there!
Late in 2019, I got an email inviting me to be the Author Guest of Honor at JordanCon in April 2021.
. . . yyyyyeah, obviously that didn’t go as planned.
But! JordanCon will be happening this year, and it will even be an in-person event, the weekend of July 16th-18th. Now, I imagine several of you are thinking that’s on the early side to be doing this kind of thing, and you’re not wrong — so it’s important to state up front that the con staff are taking stringent precautions around this. I don’t just mean requiring masks at all times (though that, too): they’re requiring proof of full vaccination no less than two weeks before the con (with medical exemptions handled on a case-by-case basis), along with daily temperature checks at the event. They’ve reduced capacity and won’t be having features like the con suite, room parties, or other things that involve people unmasking and/or being shoved into very close proximity with each other.
It’s still going to be fun. We’re looking into ways to do things like stream panels to other rooms and hold outdoor activities; it’s my intent to come up with as many creative things to do that are compatible with social distancing as possible. If you’re able to come, I hope to see you there! And even if you aren’t, note that JordanCon is holding a fundraiser — like many, many organizations right now, they’ve taken a financial hit due to not holding their 2020 event, so they’re working to make sure the con will be able to continue in the future.
This will certainly be a unique GoH gig for me (at least, I hope it remains unique). But I’m looking forward to it!
I failed to schedule this for the publication date — but that’s all right; the book did not go off sale in the last twenty-four hours. 🙂
New Worlds, Year Four is out now! It’s a little croggling to realize my Patreon really and truly has been running for over four years without pause. But I’m quite proud of the body of work represented in the collections so far, and I’m still going strong on the topic of worldbuilding. You can get the ebook now from Book View Cafe (the publisher and host of the essays in their initial run), Amazon (note that I get a commission through that link, though I encourage you to buy from something other than the Bezos Behemoth if you can), Barnes & Noble, Google Play, iTunes, Kobo, Indigo for the Canadians among you, and Amazon UK for the Brits. The print edition will follow in June, if you prefer to have it in dead tree edition.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to polish up this week’s essay . . .
Some adventures this time with a new-to-me perfumer!
* Liquid Illusion (Juliette Has a Gun)
Described as “heliotropin, tuberose absolute, iris absolute, tonka bean, and cetalox” (which the internet tells me is synthetic ambergris). I can smell the almond at the outset, but it’s kind of earthy/salty in a way that I think might be the cetalox (and possibly the iris, depending on whether that’s supposed to be the flower or the root), but it rapidly goes to a slightly soapy tonka/cetalox blend. Do not like.
* Rose Cross
Described as “purest rose with sacred frankincense.” At first it’s exactly as billed. Then it PUNCHES YOU IN THE FACE WITH ROSE. Eventually that dials back to a more faded rose, and it isn’t terrible, but I do not like that note enough to want this.
* Mari Lwyd
Described as “Welsh cakes and ale with a smattering of dried lavender.” In the bottle it had that cloying, sort of buttery note I’ve encountered before, which fortunately didn’t last. Unfortunately, it pretty much just went to cake after that, which I think might partly have been built from musk. I never picked up anything ale or lavender. Meh.
* Invisible Gingerbread Man/Gingerbread Invisible Man
(BPAL appears indecisive about which is the correct name.) Described as “champagne-soaked gingerbread, candied ginger, lemon, and white sugar.” I got the ginger and lemon initially, but I also got soap, and it just got soapier the longer things went on. Blech.
* Oatmeal and Apple Spice Cookies
What it says, plus “brown sugar, nutmeg, and walnuts.” This also had a hint of that cloying note in the bottle, but that went away on application in favor of being very, very apple. The spice comes through later, but I never really got the oatmeal or walnut, and overall it’s just meh.
* Oil Fiction (Juliette Has a Gun)
Described as “tuberose, saffron, and amber.” It amuses me that my reaction to some things is “this smells like perfume” — there’s just sort of a generic, kind of floral effect to some blends. This one wasn’t bad as floral things go, and the amber comes through a bit later, but it’s still not for me.
* Wheatstacks, Snow Effect, Morning
(This is one of the BPAL scents named after a painting, in this case one by Monet, hence the odd name.) Described as “hay, white peach, opalescent musk, orris root, pink carnation, osmanthus, and rooibos.” This once again featured that effect I can only describe as cold — no idea what does that — along with peach. The carnation showed up for a while in the early drydown, and then eventually became peach fading into musk. Not bad, but not interesting, either.
* Bon Vivant
Oh HELL no. This is described as “an effervescent blend of crystalline champagne notes and sweet strawberry,” but there was nothing effervescent about it, and very little strawberry; I smelled like flat champagne. And this one had significant throw, too, so I kept getting gusts of flat champagne coming off my wrist, to an extent that was borderline nauseating.
Would you beggar your kingdom to buy your king back? This week on the New Worlds Patreon, we take a look at hostages and ransoms. Comment over there!
