The Advent of Scent, Week 11

Now begins the Kurayami Hime Citrus Collection! My sister’s favorite perfume has been discontinued, and while she has enough to keep her going for a while, she’ll eventually want a replacement. We’ve been testing a whole lot of things. Therefore, the theme for this post and the next is going to be “citrus” — a category I haven’t really tried so far!

Lavender Lemonade (Haus of Gloi)
Described as what it says on the tin, “lavender and fresh tart lemonade.” Pretty straightforward, the only variation being that it smells more strongly of lavender early on, then more evenly of both notes later. It’s nice, but on me it also fades unfortunately fast.

Pink Pepper, Orange Blossom, and Lemon Peel
No description, but these trios obviously don’t need it. Peppery in the bottle, and lemon with a pepper edge when it goes on, but as it dries this just turns into pepper and floral. Bah.

Tweedledee
Described as “kumquat, white pepper, white tea and orange blossom.” Wow does this smell like orange Starburst at the outset — it’s exactly that juicy, sugar scent. It acquires a floral tinge over time and keeps the orange (more mellowed, less candy), but the pepper and tea never really come through. It’s not bad, but it isn’t for me.

Falling Into the Sea (Imaginary Authors)
Described as “lemon, bergamot, grapefruit, lychee, tropical flowers, warm sand.” This is definitely citrus, but on the bitter rather than the sweet end. Too bitter for me, honestly, especially since its other aspect is floral, and as usual I’m very meh about that.

Lemondrops (Haus of Gloi)
Described as “freshly squeezed lemon juice with a touch of lemongrass and little hint of honey.” In the bottle it’s very sugary, but it gets a little more tart when it’s applied. After it’s applied, it’s a nice, mellow, smooth lemon that I can only describe as sitting “on a cushion of honey,” so I guess I know why perfumers wind up writing ridiculous metaphorical descriptions for their products. 😛 Not bad!

Soleil d’Italie (Mancera)
My sister ordered a “citrus sampler” from LuckyScent.com, so you’ll see a few random companies appearing in here. This one is described as “pink pepper, cardamom, bergamot, bitter orange, mandarin, lime, aquatic notes, patchouli, rose, vetiver, cedar, ambergris, white musk, and gaiac,” which between you and me I think is waaaaay more notes than a single scent needs. Not that I can really pick them out: it really just smells to me like . . . perfume. Very, very generic perfume. I guess as it dried there was a brief patch where I could maybe pick out something aquatic, and then later something warmer that might have been the musk and/or cardamom, but . . . yeah, it just wound up as slightly warmer perfume. Very boring, and not to my taste.

Shanghai
Described as “green tea touched with lemon verbena and honeysuckle.” Goes pretty straightforwardly from “citrus tea” to “tea and honeysuckle.” I love honeysuckles in real life, but I have yet to find a perfume with that note which I like, so, meh.

Sundrunk (Imaginary Authors)
Described as “neroli, rhubarb, honeysuckle, rose water, orange zest, and first kiss” (because the final listed ingredient in their perfumes is always something randomly metaphorical). Like Falling Into the Sea, we’re firmly on the bitter end here, the zest of the orange rather than its juice. It also is too floral for my taste.

Upcoming events of awesomeness!

It has been bonkers around here for the last two months or so, with a nigh-constant stream of interviews and promotional events. That’s slacking off at last, but there are two more coming up that I want to particularly draw attention to . . .

First, this Sunday, February 28th, we’re getting the band back together! Myself, Alyc, my husband, and two friends of ours from my grad school days (Emily Dare and fellow author Michael R. Underwood) are getting together for a Rook and Rose Blades in the Dark tabletop game. We all used to game together back in Bloomington — and in fact, the only reason I use the past tense there is that Mike doesn’t live out in the Bay Area with the rest of us, so he’s not in our current gaming group. But he’s offered to GM a one-shot game this Sunday, from 6 p.m. Eastern/3 p.m. Pacific until about three hours later, which will be streaming live on Twitch. (My first time doing this kind of thing for an audience, eek!) We’ll be playing members of the Oyster Crackers, an Upper Bank knot of thieves that appear briefly in The Liar’s Knot; I suspect we may run into the Rook. But I have no idea! It’s in Mike’s hands! This feels so weird and so awesome at the same time!

And second, on Wednesday, March 10th, Alyc and I will be doing an event with Tubby & Coo’s, a great independent bookstore in New Orleans. This is set up courtesy of fellow author Bryan Camp, a New Orleans local; we’ll have a reading and a conversation with him. That’s at 6 p.m Central, which is 7 p.m. Eastern and 4 p.m. Pacific.

. . . plus some more interviews, but those are more of a “record it and then it’ll go live later” kind of thing. Oof. Full court press in promoting The Mask of Mirrors has been fun, but it’s also tiring, y’all.

all the audio that’s fit to hear

I’ve managed to accumulate a small pile of audio news for y’all!

The big one is that at long last, the Onyx Court series is getting an audio treatment, courtesy of Blackstone Audio. Midnight Never Come came out last week; you can pick up that one from Apple or from Audible. The rest of the series will follow in due course!

I’ve also been doing a pile of audio stuff with Serial Box, starting last year. So far they’ve put up ten of my short stories and novelettes: “Daughter of Necessity,” “Coyotaje,” “Love, Cayce,” “Once a Goddess,” “The Genius Prize,” “At the Sign of the Crow and Quill,” “Mad Maudlin,” “A Mask of Flesh,” “What Still Abides,” and “Nine Sketches, in Charcoal and Blood.” But the big news here is that they’re going to do some of my novellas, as well! Deeds of Men was already done as an audiobook some years ago, and I don’t hold the rights for The Eternal Knot, but they’ll be recording audio versions of Dancing the Warrior and the two Varekai novellas, Cold-Forged Flame and Lightning in the Blood. I’ll announce those here once they’re done!

The . . . Abvent of Scent?

I had this thought that when I was done going through perfume tests, I would offer up my unwanted samples to the general public, free to a good home.

. . . yeah, “done” has proven to be an ever-receding mirage. Not just because friends keep sending me things (thank you, friends!), but because I’ve now started ordering some random samples myself. At present I have enough to keep me busy through mid-March, and since I know of two people planning to mail me more, we’re probably good until some time in April. And by the time I get there, more may have shown up. Rather than waiting until this mythical “end” to the process, I’m just going to post my current list here, and let people start claiming things if they want.

Most of these are little sample vials; some are 5ml bottles. There are too many for me to want to link to their descriptions individually, but if you go to this tag you can search for specific perfumes, or just browse for things that sound good to you and then check back to see if I’m unloading them. (There’s a very small pile of “I love this!” and a much larger pile of “I would like to try this again” that are not up for grabs — not yet, anyway. Once I try that second pile again, I’m sure some of them will go on offer.) People who have sent me samples will get first dibs on anything here.

List behind the cut!

(more…)

Unfamiliar kinds of physicality

For the last couple of months I’ve been having sessions with a guy who’s sort of part physical trainer of the type you would find at a gym, part physical therapist. My sister’s been working with him for ages; I decided to hop onto the bandwagon because (as some of you know) my ankles have been absolute crap for most of my life, but what I’d seen of how C goes about things made me believe he might be able to do something to improve that.

Which he has in fact done. The process isn’t complete, of course — in some ways it will probably never be complete — but for the first time in years, I’ve started to feel like I can maybe trust my ankles. Getting to that point has involved not the familiar routines I’ve been given by every physical therapist I’ve ever seen, but stuff ranging from getting my arches to move again (which they had more or less stopped doing) to balance exercises aimed at reprogramming the way my eyes and my brain interact.

And also weight training. Which is where things get weird for me.

I’ve done very little of this kind of thing in my life. For a brief time I saw a regular trainer at a gym, and she gave me some upper-body stuff to do, but C’s got me doing deadlifts and bizarre variations on back lunges where I do a one-handed shoulder press with a kettlebell before lunging and then lean over to put the palm of my other hand on the floor and so forth. And what I’ve discovered as I do this is . . . my brain just does not have any baseline for processing what the hell is going on.

Sometimes C will tell me to do something and I am absolute crap at it — until suddenly I’m not. This happened with a small exercise where I was balancing a kettlebell upright in one hand: the first day I tried, I couldn’t keep it in position for even five seconds, and then the next day I was doing fifteen, twenty, twenty-five seconds, no problem. It wasn’t that I’d gotten stronger literally overnight; I think that somewhere between Day One and Day Two, my brain went ohhhh, I see what you’re getting at. But what really gets me is that when I’m doing the strength exercises and my heart rate and breathing go up — y’all, it turns out I have no sense of scale there. Not in the context of that kind of work. Ask me to do karate kata or swim 500 meters and sure, I know how to pace myself. I know how hard I’m working and whether I can maintain that for an extended period of time or not. But put a kettlebell in my hands and suddenly I have no freaking clue whether I need to slow down, whether my heart rate and breathing will continue to spike or whether they’ll stay where they are, how many more reps I’ll be able to do before my muscles give out. I’m probably working slower/easier than I’m actually capable of, because something in my hindbrain is freaking out over these unfamiliar sensations and telling me I need to back off before I ‘splode.

I’ll be interested to see how this changes over time. Presumably, as I get more familiar with the physicality of strength training, I’ll get better at judging where I actually am on the effort scale. I’ll also get stronger — but I think that’s a separate thing. At one point C asked me how hard a particular movement was on a scale of 1 to 10 and I didn’t even know what to tell him. Another time he asked me that question, and I realized that while I didn’t feel like I was exerting myself super hard, I also had this feeling like I was about two reps away from Nope Not Happening Anymore. A weird split between my strength, and the endurance that particular strength had.

It’s a brave new world, yo. One in which I am closer to being able to do a squat than I’ve been in my entire life — so that’s something!

The Advent of Scent, Week 10

* Yesterday Haze (Imaginary Authors)
Described as “fig, iris, cream, tonka, tree bark, walnut bitters, and orchard dust.” Like a number of their scents, this one hits me as VERY strongly woody — alcoholically so early on, for long enough that I don’t think it’s just the evaporation of the spray; my guess is that’s the “walnut bitters” part. Underwhelming result.

* Moonlight in Chiangmai (Dusita)
Described as “yuzu, jasmine, nutmeg, benzoin, myrrh, patchouli, vetiver, teak.” In the bottle it’s slightly floral, brightened a bit by the yuzu. Wet, it’s kind of green; I think that might be the vetiver? (That’s a note I’m still trying to learn to identify.) As it dries down it gets sort of resinous with a touch of nutmeg and, uh, benzoin is another note I’m still trying to learn to pick out. Interesting enough for me to keep to try again.

* Hollywood Babylon
Described as “glittering Egyptian amber and heliotrope, infused with the sweetness of strawberry and vanilla – dragged into debauch by lusty red musk and a dribble of black cherry.” WOW CHERRY to start, but as it dries . . . I think the only real description I can give this one is “confused.” It’s kind of generically perfume-y with whiffs of fruit.

* Pecan Pie Oud
I couldn’t find a description for this one, but based on my previous experience of oud — by which I presume they mean the perfume component, not the musical instrument, but then again who knows — I was not optimistic. However! It’s got a bit of that cloying note right after I apply it, over a kind of woody/nutty scent, but as it dries it develops more into nutmeg and other spices. At no point did I pick up the sharp, medicinal, chemical note I think was oud in Liquid Gold Is in the Air (which I definitely did not like). I’ll keep this one for now!

* A City on Fire (Imaginary Authors)
Described as “cade oil, spikenard, cardamom, clearwood, dark berries, labdanum, a burnt match.” After applying it I learned that cade is a kind of cypress, which explained why my wrist smelled so much like my hinoki incense. 🙂 Definitely smoky, too. It mellows as it goes, but this is in the same camp for me as BPAL’s Pomegranate and Date Palms — I think I prefer it as a room scent rather than a bodily one? (Though since IA’s perfume samples are all in spray bottles, I could spritz it around as an air freshener, I suppose.)

* Apple Milk (Haus of Gloi)
Described as “apple pulp, hot milk, and cardamom.” Hits that nasal-passage-coating cloying note in the bottle, which I’m going to guess is from whatever they used to create the “milk” note. On, however, it’s mostly apple, eventually bowing to the cardamom. This kept its apple note much longer than many others I’ve tried, but I prefer BPAL’s Honeyed Apple.

* Slow Explosions (Imaginary Authors)
Described as “saffron, rose absolute, leather, apple, benzoin, cashmeran, and Arpora Night Market.” Like Hollywood Babylon, this one just felt confused to me, never quite cohering into something where I could say, “ah, this is the target we were aiming for.” At first it was sort of leathery with some rose and apple maybe; the sort of green and woody note it took on later might have been the cashmeran; I still don’t really get what I’m sniffing for where benzoin is concerned. Not a winner.

* Bull’s Bloood (Imaginary Authors)
Described as “patchouli, rose, costus root, tobacco, black musk, and bull’s blood.” I don’t know whether it’s the fact that IA samples are spray bottles or something to do with how they formulate their perfumes, but wow are they frequently overpowering on me. This one was mostly overpoweringly tobacco — not necessarily in an outright unpleasant way, but it’s not what I want to smell like.

The Advent of Scent, Week 9

Belated post this time, though the perfume-testing continues apace.

* Phantasm
Described as “green tea, lemon verbena, jasmine and neroli.” That sounded very promising, and I picked up the lemon verbena in the bottle, the neroli as it started to dry. But like so many perfumes with floral elements, it wound up just being . . . generically floral. Which is not a category I like.

* Pumpkin Latte
Described as “espresso, pumpkin syrup, smoky vanilla bean, milk, raw sugar, and a dash of cinnamon and nutmeg.” This is quite nice for what it is; it starts out very strongly coffee, with the smoky vanilla coming out in the wet stages; later on the coffee steps back to allow the cinnamon through quite powerfully. But I’m coming to the conclusion that many of the “foody” scents don’t appeal to me: fruit is okay, but other stuff on the edible side of the perfume spectrum is just not what I want to smell like.

* Midwinter Eve
Described as “the perfume of sugared plums over a breeze of winter flowers.” This is quite nicely balanced! Early on it’s fruity, but a tart fruity rather than sugary-sweet (despite the description); later on the florals of unknown variety show up, but for once they don’t overpower everything else.

* Samhain
Described as “damp woods, fir needle, and black patchouli with the gentlest touches of warm pumpkin, clove, nutmeg, allspice, green cardamom, sweet red apple and mullein.” I have no idea what mullein is supposed to smell like, and searching did not enlighten me. Possibly it’s the sort of “middle” note I picked up here during the drydown (she said, making vague gestures as if “middle” is anything resembling a meaningful description). Like many of BPAL’s apple scents, that part shows up quite well when this is wet; unlike some of them, it sticks around later. As does the woodiness and the spice. I’d call this one “interestingly autumnal,” and I’m keeping it for now in the “try again later” pile.

* Good
Described as “shimmering celestial musk with vanilla, white honey, acacia, and sugar cane.” Blech. Hella floral, which I guess is coming from the acacia; it even strong-arms the musk into submission, when that’s usually the part that sticks around on me after everything else is gone. (God only knows what “celestial musk” is, though. I’ve now seen celestial, white, black, red, pink, amber, peach, Egyptian, Chinese, bear, skin, body, and blood musks mentioned in various perfume descriptions, and I have no idea if those terms mean anything at all.)

* Golden Priapus
Described as “vanilla and amber with juniper, rosewood and white pine.” I may at last be starting to get a handle on what is meant by “amber” in perfumery, as this starts out with a warm scent that isn’t the usual things like sandalwood or musk. The evergreen elements cut that a bit, which I find quite nice.

* Hay Moon
I cannot possibly replicate in text format the tone of voice in which my sister and I keep saying “haaaaaay mooooon!” to each other. 😛 Described as “hay absolute, tall grasses, dry honey, mallow, cardamom, amber, oat cakes, and wheat.” Based on comparison to a couple of other perfumes, I think I Do Not Like mallow; something in here and a few other mallow-containing scents starts out hideously cloying and . . . all I can think to do is call it “buttery” or “creamy” even that’s not quite what I mean. Now, in this instance that went away as the perfume dried, leaving behind the amber and the cardamom, followed by the vanilla and the honey. But I can get nice scents in that category without first going through the part that makes me almost sick to my stomach.

* Pomegranates and Date Palm
Described as “pomegranate, dates, and cypress infused with ketoret smoke.” Like some others, this does a swap from bottle to wrist: it starts out tartly fruity, with overtones of woody smoke, then becomes sharpy woody with overtones of fruit. It mellows and balances out as it dries, but my ultimate thought was “I want this as an incense, not as a perfume.”

my Boskone schedule

I am going to be at Boskone this weekend! Schedule is below; note that because Boskone is on the East Coast, I am giving all times in EST.

more on ACOUP

I know I’ve recommended A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry here before, but I wanted to remind people of its existence, because it continues to be an excellent source of military history of the sort that looks at how military matters interface with culture and society, with a non-trivial overlap into specifically SF/F matters. Most recently that’s shown up in a four-part series on the Dothraki (as depicted in both the books of A Song of Ice and Fire and the TV series Game of Thrones), looking at Martin’s claim that he based them on the Mongols and the Plains Indians. Spoiler: whoa nelly is that not true. Devereaux isn’t an expert in either of those regions, but he’s done enough of his homework to show how they’re not like each other, and furthermore how in most places the only connection they have to the Dothraki is through the worst of racist stereotypes. You may well have already noticed how offensive the depiction of the Dothraki is, in both the books and the show, but . . . folks, it’s even worse than that. And it’s a salutary lesson in how not to do things, because as Devereaux points out, those stereotypes are still used today to justifice the oppression of real-world ethnic groups.

And speaking of real-world relevance . . . back in October, he posted about the Greek concept of stasis (which means not “everything staying the same,” as we use it now, but rather a recognizable cycle of instability). There are pretty clear parallels between the stasis ancient Greek democracies went through and what the U.S. is doing these days — and, though Devereaux doesn’t say it, I think it applies equally well to the Civil War. He followed that up more recently with a piece on insurrections, showing how strongly what happened at the Capitol on January 6th parallels history. The fact that so much of the invasion there looked stupid doesn’t change the fact that it was a real insurrection; some historical ones looked equally stupid, but they still could have overthrown their governments if they’d succeeded.

It’s good, chewy stuff. If you like history and looking at both the parallels and differences between cultures, you really ought to be reading that blog.

The Advent of Scent, Week 8

* Drops of Amontillado
I don’t have a description for this one, but that’s fine, because it is clearly GRAPE. Like, high-end grape gummy grape to start with. While it’s drying it gets less cloying — there’s a woody element that comes through, and some whiskey — but I swear it gets grapier again after that. I do not like grape well enough to want to reek of it, even if it’s generally a pleasant reek.

* Dirty
BPAL goes for irony with the name of this one, since its description is “a fresh, crisp white linen scent: perfectly clean, perfectly breezy.” In the bottle it’s green and slightly floral; wet, it takes on a quality I’ve encountered in one or two other scents, where it smells cold to me (and yes, I’m aware “cold” isn’t a smell). I have no idea what gives rise to that! Overall it’s slightly green and very pleasantly fresh. On me it fades fast, though, and even when it’s there, I’m not sure it’s my kind of thing.

* Squirting Cucumber
What an unfortunate name. Described as “wet, grassy greenness;” in the bottle and wet it is very clearly cucumber, and manages to be sweet without being sugary. As it dries, the grassiness comes through. It’s another fresh-smelling scent, and I think I like this one better than Dirty.

* Sanguinem Menstruum
Also an unfortunate name, heh. Described as “the copper tang of blood musk, swept by a cloud of dying bees and red poppies of madness.” It’s almost a buttery musk in the bottle, with maybe a honey note; once applied, that gets sharper and cleaner — maybe that’s the poppies cutting it. Dries down to musk and honey, which for me is a meh result.

* Velvet
Described as “gentle sandalwood warmed by cocoa vanilla and a veil of deep myrrh.” Like Bliss, this one launches itself at you as CHOCOLATE. Later on the sandalwood and myrrh are kind of there in the CHOCOLATE . . . but when all is said and done, I do not wish to smell like chocolate.

* The Red Queen
I purchased this one because the description sounded good: “Deep mahogany and rich, velvety woods lacquered with sweet, black-red cherries and currant.” As with Drops of Amontillado, this starts out extremely juicy and fruity — mostly cherry, maybe a little currant. But then the wood starts to come up, and it balances out really nicely with the two fruits, for a result I really really like!

* Irish Buttercream
Described as “Irish whiskey, granulated sugar, brown sugar, whipped cream, buttercream and coffee.” This is exactly what it bills itself as: starts out smelling like Bailey’s, then develops a coffee note as it dries. I’m on the fence about this one, because I like those scents; I’m just not sure if I like to smell like them.

* A Whiff of Waffle Cone
Described as “vanilla, heavy cream, salted caramel, amyris, orgeat, Saigon cinnamon, ice cream shoppe.” It’s a sugary caramel at first, like you might expect from the name, but then . . . I’m going to assume it’s the amyris I wound up smelling, because when I looked that up online it got described as “balsamic, rich and warming.” And while I’m still not clear on what “balsamic” means in a fragrance, this definitely got rich and warming, with maybe just a hint of vanilla. Much, much later, it started to smell like cream. So, not much like the name, and not really my thing, either.

Novella thoughts

I’m noodling around with an idea that I think will be a novella, and part of that noodling involves thinking about novellas in general.

I don’t have the world’s best grasp on how to pace a story of this size. I’ve written five of them, but two weren’t planned that way — both Deeds of Men and Dancing the Warrior were me saying “well, let’s write this idea and see how many words I end up with” — and really, five isn’t all that many in general. Nor do I think I’m alone in being uncertain about how best to structure such things: a lot of the novellas I’ve read feel like they aren’t paced quite right, going too slow in some places, too fast in others. I speculated to a writer-friend on a forum that it’s because novellas were kind of a dead zone in SF/F for a long time (few good ways to publish them, so very few people writing them), and we can’t look to the novellas of the more distant past for much guidance, because our expectations of storytelling have changed. We’re sort of reinventing the wheel, now with suspension and treads and spinning rims.

Whether I’m right about that or not, the fact remains that novellas feel like terra barely cognita to me. Plus I’m not the kind of writer with much in the way of overt understanding of pacing anyway; what I do, I tend to do on instinct. I know plenty of writers who love making use of beat sheets and the like, which map out what kinds of events should happen when in a novel, but those are deadly to my process. So even if you had a beat sheet for a novella, I wouldn’t get much use out of it.

But the other day I realized that I do have one useful framework for thinking about this. I need to ask myself: is what I’m writing more like a short story, or more like a novel?

With a novel, I usually have a couple of set points I vaguely map out ahead of time, pegging them to what feels like the right moment in the story — most often either the 1/3 and 2/3 marks, or 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4. The Night Parade of 100 Demons is a thirds novel; The Mask of Mirrors is a quarters novel. Sometimes I can tell you why; In Ashes Lie is done in quarters because the Great Fire of London burned for four days, and I knew I wanted to interleave two timelines (the fire and what led up to it), so that meant breaking the preceding history into four chunks. Sometimes I have no idea. Any novel I break into an odd number of segments often winds up with a midpoint marker as well; that’s true of both Night Parade and Midnight Never Come (which is in five parts because I wanted to echo the five-act structure of a Shakespearean play). I don’t push too hard for them to wind up exactly on their marks, but since I have a general sense of how long I want the book to be, I use the set points to gauge how much complication and side plot should develop on the way to the next milestone.

That is not at all how I approach a short story. With those, it’s never a matter of me wanting to place narrative turning-points at certain percentages of the way through the total. My short stories are usually built as a sequence of scenes: whether they get scene breaks between them or not, I know we need X to set things up, Y to develop them, and Z to conclude them. For highly variable quantities of X, Y, and Z, of course, and sometimes the structure is non-linear or whatever — but it doesn’t change the essential point that I know what needs to happen, and the quantity of words needed to do that properly determines how long the story is. Which nearly the opposite of the novels, where I’ve got a ballpark target for length and a few key fragments of what’s going to happen, with the bricks being filled in as I feel my way through the story.

(Obligatory disclaimer: writing it out this way makes it all sound much tidier than it is in reality. For example, tons of my short stories start out with me having no idea where I’m going with my shiny new idea. Then they sit around until I’ve figured out enough of the remainder to write the rest. Sometimes this takes years.)

So where do novellas fit into this? As soon as I asked myself “should I approach them like a short story or like a novel,” the answer was obvious. They’re ickle novels, not gigantor short fiction. I’m not going to be able to see the full sequence of scenes ahead of time, no matter how long I let it sit. Which means the thing to do is to find myself a couple of fixed points and then decide where they should go. This feels like a thirds story to me: at roughly the one-third mark, the protagonist will succeed in getting E and G out of the situation they’re in, and then at the two-thirds mark they’ll . . . either get to where she promised to take them (only to find more complications there), if I decide that’s the way the story is headed, or they’ll abandon that goal and do something else. I don’t know which, but I don’t have to. It’s enough for me to say, okay, something like 8-12K of “getting them out of their situation” plot, then another 8-12K of “difficulties and developments along the complete lack of road” plot. Writing the latter will tell me what’s going to happen at the two-thirds mark — or if it doesn’t, then I’ll let it sit for a while. (That happens sometimes with novels, too. A Natural History of Dragons stalled out one-third done for several years.)

I can’t swear this is going to produce good results, because I haven’t tried it yet. But it feels right, y’know? It feels like an approach that will help me thread the Goldilocks needle of too much or too little plot for the space available. I know when the narrative is going to change its trajectory, so now it’s just a matter of feeling my way through the smaller conflicts and alterations before then.

I will report back!

THE NIGHT PARADE OF 100 DEMONS is out . . . yesterday!

Yeesh! Having two novels out in two weeks is not good for my brain: yesterday I was running around announcing the publication of The Night Parade of 100 Demons everywhere but, apparently, here.

cover art for The Night Parade of 100 Demons by Marie Brennan

But the good news is, it is still out today! And for quite some time to come, but of course if you’re interested in it, I suggest buying it soon. (Er, if you’re in North America or reading it in ebook. Due to covid messing with distribution, the paperback won’t be available via UK channels until April 15th.) This is, as the cover shows, a Legend of the Five Rings novel, but if you’re not familiar with the game, don’t let that put you off: the novels Aconyte is publishing are very much designed to be read by anybody. If you would be interested in a book from me that’s set in Japanese history and chock full of folkloric creatures, characters protecting their secrets, an investigation into some mysterious disturbances, and a queer romance, then this will be up your alley; just swap in “country based on historical Japan” and you’re good to go.

And SEMI-RELATED — I will be appearing on The Story Hour tonight! My plan is to read “As Tight as Any Knot,” the Rook and Rose short story I had out in Beneath Ceaseless Skies last month.

Books read, January 2021

Transgressions of Power, Juliette Wade. Second in the Broken Trust series, and not that I expect anybody to notice this, but the first book (Mazes of Power) has not appeared in my logs. There’s a story there, heh.

Juliette is a friend, and the only reason I hadn’t read Mazes of Power immediately after acquiring it last year was that I had zero cope for a dystopian story like this one in 2020. But then I was asked to blurb the second book, so I thought, self, let’s just go ahead and read them both. Except I started running out of time, and I didn’t want to let that hurdle mean I let Juliette down, so . . . I just dove in and started reading Transgressions. Which I do not generally recommend! The setting is beautifully complex, and if you skip the introduction as I did, you will be madly dog-paddling in an attempt to stay afloat! But as I said to Juliet, the fact that the story sucked me right in even though I had no idea who any of these people were and was busy doing the aforementioned dog-paddling is a testament to how good it is. The plot is a slow build, but boy is it satisfying when it lands (and I have never seen the signing of a bureaucratic form look as heroic as it does in this book). The caste-structured society of this world has some impressively creepy aspects — the people who serve as bodyguards are always referred to as a possession of their masters, e.g. “Nekantor’s Dexelin” or “my Dexelin” — and also some very cool cultural differences in the various layers.

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, Christopher Paolini. Paolini is, of course, the guy known for the Inheritance Cycle, beginning with Eragon. This? Is a very different type of book, being interstellar science fiction that starts out wearing its homage to Alien on its sleeve, then takes that opening in entirely new directions. Directions I liked quite a lot, once I got past the body horror of the beginning (a horror which includes being a woman dealing with a doctor who refuses to listen to anything you have to say or respect your bodily autonomy — that got me so much harder than the alien stuff because it happens all the time). I read it in ebook, so I can’t quite measure how massive of a brick the book is, but let’s just say it’s huge and that didn’t stop me from hoovering it up in the space of a few days. It’s also a stand-alone volume, though with a setting that’s open to telling lots of other stories.

Tangleroot Palace, Marjorie Liu. Read for blurbing purposes (this has been a lot of my reading lately, you might notice). A small short story collection from Tachyon, ranging through fairy tales to superheroes to a post-apocalyptic setting, often with queer content. I saw the twist coming a mile off in the title story, but not in a way that wrecked its appeal; I think most kinds of story can survive that, as long as they’re well-written.

Wench, Maxine Kaplan. MG or YA book (I’m not quite sure of its categorization), read for review. Full reaction here; short form is that I found it disappointing. Its tone never quite settled, and the most interesting bits got tossed in at the end, when there was no time left to develop them.

Witherward, Hannah Mathewson. Also read for blurbing purposes. The obvious comparison here is to V.E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic series, with an alternate London existing alongside the real (Victorian-era) one. That London, the Witherward, is divided up among factions of magical people all existing in a peace so tenuous it barely deserves the name. The main character, Ilsa, has been living in Victorian London using her magic to get by, without realizing she’s originally from the Witherward; when she gets pulled across the boundary, she finds herself eyeball-deep in the politics there, with a great many people around her having secrets and conflicting agendas.

The Four Profound Weaves, R.B. Lemberg. Another Tachyon publication, but one that came out a while ago. This is either a novella or a short novel (not sure which) set in Lemberg’s Birdverse. It is intensely queer — both protagonists are trans, one from a culture where it’s entirely normal to use magic to adjust your body to fit your identity, one from a culture where that is not the case — and it’s very poetically written. There’s a lot of suffering here, a lot of loving people who maybe don’t love you back the way they should, because they’re afraid of change (a recurrent theme) or focused on the wrong things, but ultimately it’s a hopeful story, not a bleak one.

Three Twins at the Crater School, Chaz Brenchley. Also read for blurbing purposes! Chaz is also a friend, and he’s been writing the Crater School stories through his Patreon for a while now, but they’re going to be coming out from Wizard’s Tower, hence looking for blurbs. I have never read the Chalet School series this is openly inspired by (classic British girls’ boarding school stories); what I know of that genre comes via the descriptions of the Lowood House novels Millie reads in The Lives of Christopher Chant. I am given to understand they do not usually take place on Mars? 🙂 This is a delightful little book, and very unlike most of what I read these days. Although there are a couple of plots centering on the new arrivals to the school, they aren’t the kind of plots that drive the whole book. Nor are there any real villains apart from some offstage parents — no cruel teachers that make the students’ lives a misery. Mostly you’re spending time with the girls of the Crater School as they deal with each other and their prefects and the teachers and the weird aliens in the lake, and then every so often there’s a problem with the Russian spies up on Phobos or whatever. If you need a story where generally people are good-hearted despite their flaws, where strictness from authority is happening for understandable reasons even if the recipient doesn’t appreciate that fact, where somebody can invoke the importance of upholding the image of “a Crater School girl” and that’s a meaningful force on the characters, this is a very good place to find that.

Machinehood, S.B. Divya. Outside my usual reading, being near-future SF focused on AI and body modification and so forth, but Divya is a friend from the Codex Writers’ Group, and I’m making a significant effort to focus on new and upcoming releases right now (this one’s hitting the shelves March 2nd) due to concerns about books being lost in the pandemic chaos. And like Paolini’s book, this made for a diverting change of pace! It is definitely hella dystopian, with weak AI and bots having supplanted enough of the human workforce that the latter subsists on a lot of meaningless crappy gig jobs, constantly scrabbling for enough work to stay afloat — and downing all manner of pills to help them do those jobs, which in some cases has some pretty bad effects — though the most dystopian part of it for me might have been the sort of influencer/up-vote side of things, where even being a bodyguard is a performance art for the ubiquitous cameras, and at one point a woman about to have sex with her partner thinks about how they didn’t put on makeup or dress up for foreplay and so they won’t get a lot of tips. But what I really liked here is that most chapters begin with a quote from the manifesto of the Machinehood, the group attacking everybody . . . and that manifesto makes a lot of good points. Divya does a very good job of counterpoising their ideology against their actions, so that it doesn’t sort into a clear-cut situation of “these people are bad, the end.”

Books read, December 2020

I am behind again! But at least I’m posting about December before January is over.

Kingdom of Copper, S.A. Chakraborty. Second of the Daevabad trilogy. I’m enjoying these well enough, but there was a moment in here that made me realize what’s generally lacking: a sense of humor. It’s got a scene where some characters wind up shoved together with all the awful conflicts between them coming out with teeth bared, and then in the middle of that one of them says they need to get out of there before somebody realizes they’re plotting conspiracy in a janitorial closet, and I thought, yes. I want more of that. It doesn’t negate the pain they’re all feeling and inflicting; in fact, that kind of thing usually makes the dramatic stuff hit harder for me. When it’s nothing but tension and bleakness and bad things happening without anybody managing to find a note of levity, I just don’t engage as deeply.

RWBY: Fairy Tales of Remnant, E.C. Myers, illus. Violet Tobacco. I know nothing about RWBY, but I saw this mentioned and the folklorist in me was intrigued. It’s a pretty little book, and the material in it ranges across a couple of folkloric genres, some more successfully than others; it can actually be very hard to write realistic folklore, because that stuff just doesn’t operate like modern fiction. (It’s entirely possible that “realistic folklore” is neither the target Myers was trying to hit, nor a desirable target to aim for in the first place.) It didn’t quite scratch that itch for me, though, and since I know nothing about RWBY, I’m not inclined to hold onto this.

These Violent Delights, Chloe Gong. This reminds me of Angel of the Crows in one specific respect: I think I would have liked it even better if it had let go of its source material and just focused on the original stuff it was doing. In this case the source material is Romeo and Juliet, but only very distantly; Roma Montagov and Juliette Cai met years ago, had a relationship and fell out and now consider themselves bitter enemies, and so their names and Benedikt and Marshall Seo and Rosalind Lang and Juliette having a nurse who died years ago were mostly just distractions in a story about a weird monster and a war between Chinese and Russian gangs in 1920s Shanghai. The one place where it felt like the Shakespeare plot really played a role, I got pulled out of the story by thinking “ah, here we have a piece of actual Shakespeare plot!” Without that . . . I liked the historical setting, the complex politics of a city being carved up by various European interests and the rise of Chinese Communism and the ambiguous role of gangs, and I cared a lot more about that than I did about the minor Shakespearean elements. I could have done with more meaningful progress on the plot, which involves a strange magical effect causing people to tear their own throats out, as that felt like it was treading water for long stretches of the book. And Juliette was a little too persistently angry at everybody around her and determined to prove she was hard and heartless; more dynamics there would have been welcome. So overall, a mixed bag.

As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride, by Cary Elwes (with Joe Layden). This was a Christmas present that’s been on my list for years, and having finally received it, I found myself apprehensive to open it. This movie was so formative for me and I love it so much, any “behind the scenes” account risked poking my heart in some very vulnerable spots. But the book is an utter delight, y’all. For starters, the people involved genuinely loved what they were doing and got along amazingly well: although the bulk of this is written from Elwes’ perspective (who knows how much of it is his words, vs. being ghostwritten by Layden), there are sidebars from a bunch of other people, and they consistently praise each other and talk about what a great experience filming this movie was. Not that nothing ever went wrong — Wallace Shawn was so convinced that Rob Reiner regretted casting him and was about to fire him that he apparently fretted himself into hives, and Elwes is 100% frank about how he was a twenty-three-year-old idiot who broke his toe goofing around on set and nearly screwed over the entire production — but the love truly shines through. And my household can attest that various bits had me cracking up throughout.

The Light of the Midnight Stars, Rena Rossner. Sent to me for blurbing purposes. Gorgeous and melancholy historical fantasy about three Jewish sisters in fourteenth-century Eastern Europe, blending some historical personages with folktales. This is not a cheerful story in any respect, but it’s beautifully written and notably queer, both of which I know are aspects that would be of interest to several people who read my blog.

The Advent of Scent, Week 7

I have now tried over fifty perfumes (because these “weeks” are eight days long, for silly reasons). That’s . . . kind of boggling? And I’m nowhere near done yet! People keep offering me more samples, hah.

* Beeswax & Sweetgrass (Haus of Gloi)
Described as “the golden glow of beeswax mingled with dry sweetgrass.” It . . . basically just smells like honey on me, with maybe some underlying musk at the end. It’s not bad, but it’s also pretty simplistic.

* Burial
Described as “deep, brooding forest scents, including juniper and patchouli. The scent of upturned cemetery loam mingling with floral offerings to the dead.” In the bottle, it is VERY sharply juniper, taking on a bit of an herbal tone when applied. As it dries, the “floral offerings” emerge as a distinct rose — but I like how the evergreen helps to restrain that note. It achieves a nice balance; I’m just not sure it’s a me balance.

* Pink Grapefruit and Egyptian Musk (Haus of Gloi)
Described as “pink grapefruit, green tea, bergamot, and Egyptian musk.” Surprisingly (and counter to how it normally seems to behave), the musk only comes through faintly at the end; mostly this has a nice fresh green scent from the tea and maybe the bergamot.

* Winter Divinity (Haus of Gloi)
PEPPERMINT. HI, THIS HAS PEPPERMINT IN IT. CAN YOU TELL THERE IS PEPPERMINT? Eventually vanilla comes out to play. It made me smell like Christmas candy. I may hold onto this until next Christmas, and then if I decide I don’t really want to wear it in that season (it would have to beat out BPAL’s Thieves’ Rosin), I’ll unload it.

[Here endeth the batch of samples Yoon sent me. The next bunch are a combination of some from a different friend, a couple I bought, and random freebies BPAL included with my order.]

* In Omnibus Caritas
This is one I bought, because I liked the sound of it. Described as “honey and mallow flower, sugar cane, white sandalwood, orris, and vanilla bean.” Started out buttery, which fortunately it lost over time, but on me it’s just kind of uninterestingly warm and sweet.

* Kabuki
Described as “cherry, red musk, and star anise.” I . . . really don’t understand this one, because at no point did I smell cherry or red musk (even though musk more often takes over anything it’s in). And I guess star anise in perfume doesn’t smell like licorice the way I assumed it would, because I don’t get that, either. It’s sharp and medicinal, almost like cleaning fluid, though not unpleasant. Not for me, though.

* The Arrival at the Sabbath and Homage to the Devil
Described as “bourbon vanilla, benzoin, caramel, Mysore sandalwood, aged black patchouli, carnation, and iris florentina.” This one was hard for me to parse, because I’m still not sure several of its element smell like (benzoin in particular). People on the BPAL forum described it as a very foody scent, but it wasn’t at all like that; I’m not even sure how to describe what it was like.

* Fae
Described as “white musk, bergamot, heliotrope, peach and oakmoss.” So today I learned what heliotrope smells like! In the bottle it came across as, like, really high-end artisanal bubblegum; then it turned into marzipan. Sadly, though, the musk did what it usually does, retaining only maybe a faint trace of peach.