Another special edition: the Memoirs of Lady Trent!

Man, it just be raining news around here this week . . .

Coming soon to a Kickstarter near you: a special edition of the Memoirs of Lady Trent!

If you follow the Kickstarter now, you’ll be alerted when it launches (and it’s worth noting that first, this does not commit you to backing it, and second, more pre-launch followers = better visibility in the Kickstarter algorithms once it goes live).

I should also mention that this is a Kickstarter for the first of two omnibus volumes: this one covers A Natural History of Dragons, The Tropic of Serpents, and Voyage of the Basilisk, while the second one will have In the Labyrinth of Drakes, Within the Sanctuary of Wings, and the short fiction — including “The Incident at Booker’s Club,” a new and previously unpublished story! In addition to that, there’s new cover art, new interior dust jacket art, new interior art, the whole shebang.

Should you be interested in picking this up, you will definitely want to back the first Kickstarter — it’ll be cheaper to get them one at a time rather than waiting for both, and there’s no guarantee of how many copies will be on hand for sale after the campaign ends. Wraithmarked (the publisher) has had it happen before where they run out of Volume 1, due to post-campaign popularity, before Volume 2 is available. But for now, just click that “notify me on launch” button, and we’ll see you when the Kickstarter goes live!

Return of the books read!, March 2025

It’s been a minute since I posted one of these! And by a minute, I mean a literal year.

As I mentioned a while ago, I stopped blogging about what I was reading because everything I was reading was research for a book series (The Sea Beyond) that I couldn’t talk about yet. Then I was able to talk about it, but all my reading was still research, and while I know some of you would be interested in hearing about that, it was draining enough of my brain that writing extra about it, beyond my notes, was really not an appealing prospect.

But! While this post does contain one book from the tail end of that binge, and there are a few others I’ll probably work my way through later (as we get started on the second volume of the duology), for now, I’m actually reading some other stuff.

Fiesta y tragedia: Vivir y morir in la España del Siglo de Oro, Enrique Martínez Ruiz. Last of the research binge, and the fifth book I read in Spanish. This was actually the one I started with, but there are two reasons it took me forever to get through: first, it’s over six hundred pages long in ebook, and second, a Spanish friend has confirmed that this guy’s writing sometimes gets a little impenetrable. As in, I clocked a 127-word sentence, and that might not even be the longest one in here. For someone like me, barely muddling through a second language, daisy-chaining that many clauses together makes following the point of the sentence rather challenging. But there are few enough books on daily life in early modern Spain that beggars could not be choosers, and I got some very useful information out of here even if I had to do a lot of work to get it.

Language of Liars, S.L. Huang. Disclosure: I know the author through the Codex Writer’s Group, and I got sent an advance copy of this for blurbing purposes.

Forthcoming SF novella about linguistics that is, among other things, taking some potshots at nineteenth-century anthropologists (my comment about that was “it’s like shooting fish in a barrel, where the fish deserve it”). The story itself is not for the faint of heart, and I won’t be surprised in the slightest if it winds up on awards lists.

Dragonsong, Anne McCaffrey. Re-read, or rather re-listen, for an upcoming book club. I remember really liking the Harper Hall trilogy; I’m not sure how much of that memory owes itself to later books in the series, and how much is rose-tinted glasses. But man does this one take a while to get started. You’re fully a quarter of the way in before it gets to what I remembered as the plot; everything before that basically consists of detailing just how much Menolly’s life at Half Circle Hold sucks. And then even once the plot gets started, way more time and attention is spent on what other characters are doing than I recalled — in fact, parts of it felt rather like they were more there to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the other Pern books than to really tell a story about Menolly and her fire lizards. It was a quick listen, and doing it in library audiobook meant it was filling time I spent in the car rather than leisure time at home, so I don’t really regret it, but . . . yeah, I was not impressed this time around.

The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett. Also read for that book club. I very much enjoyed Bennett’s Divine Cities trilogy, and I was very interested in the premise of a detective story in a fantasy world, but the basic principles of the setting here are not as much my cup of tea — I’ve never been a fan of the New Weird/body horror/etc. The notion of engraving is cool, and I liked Din reasonably well as a character (Ana a bit less so; you could get a pretty good bender on by drinking every time she grins), but I’m not sure I’m invested enough to continue. I do get the feeling that there is an Inevitable Revelation coming concerning certain things, and I’m curious to know what that is, but I might be at the level of “ask a friend” rather than reading the rest of the series myself.

Filling Your Worlds With Words: A Writer’s Guide to Linguistic Worldbuilding, C.D. Covington. Disclosure: Turning Darkness Into Light is one of the books discussed in here, because back when the author was doing her linguistics column for Tor.com/Reactor, I shamelessly asked her if she’d like to read my novel about translation.

This is a Kickstarter-funded book about many aspects of language and worldbuilding. It starts off with a fairly technical discussion of things like sound production and how those might differ for non-humanoid species, but this is not a book about conlanging; instead she touches on things like how names and speech styles reflect culture, how difficulties of translation can play into your plot, and why universal translators will never work outside of straight-up magic. The formatting for the print edition is not great, but the information is excellent, if you’re interested in this sort of thing.

Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling, Henry Lien. This admits up-front that it’s making sweeping generalizations about “Eastern” and “Western” storytelling, and that it’s deliberately taking the piss out of the latter in an attempt to shake up the brains of readers for whom that’s an unexamined default. It’s a slim book (I read it in an evening) that unpacks the four-part story structure usually referred to in English by its Japanese name, kishōtenketsu, as well as nested and circular storytelling, and also the cultural values that tend to go hand-in-hand with these forms. Lien uses various bits of fairly well-known media to illustrate his points, so it’s not all abstract discussion. Lots of food for thought here!

Hugos 2025!

I went for a hike this afternoon so I wouldn’t just spend the entire middle of the day haunting social media — but as some of you have now seen elseweb, I am once again a finalist for the Hugo Awards!

. . . in the category of Best Poem!

If your reaction to that news is “wait, you’re a finalist for Best Poem?” — no, you didn’t miss a category in previous years. Every Worldcon has the right to pick a Special Award; Seattle chose poetry. It’s possible this might become a regular thing in future years, as happened with Best Series, especially since the Nebulas have instituted that as a new category. But for now, it’s a Special Award.

If your reaction to that news is “wait, you’re a finalist for Best Poem?” — trust me, I was as surprised as you are! I only started writing poetry in 2021, and at the time of this posting, I have a whopping six such publications to my name; my nominated poem (“A War of Words”) was my fourth. So yeah, this is almost as new to me as it is to the Hugos, and I’m still a little croggled.

(And also amused that I have boomeranged from what is generally going to be the longest single category — Best Series — to what is generally going to be the shortest — Best Poem.)

I am in splendid company, and there’s something particularly cool about being part of this unique (or, dare we hope, inaugural?) cohort. I can’t wait to sit down and read all the finalist poems!

“The Poison Gardener”

New story out today, in The Sunday Morning Transport! This one is for subscribers only, but subscribing gets you a story in your inbox every Sunday morning. My contribution this week is “The Poison Gardener”, a vicious little science fantasy piece entirely born out of me thinking poison gardens are cool . . .

In which I take on the old saws of writing advice

Two things make a series, right?

Continuing what I began with The Writer’s Little Book of Naming — in other words, mini ebooks on writing-related topics that I don’t feel are big enough to support a full-size book — today marks the publication of The Writer’s Little Book of Platitudes! This one was sparked by the rants that periodically circulate among writers about how thus-and-such piece of advice is stupid and wrong. Which is true . . . sometimes. This book is me taking on some of the most common soundbites of advice — not the detailed principles, but the short, pithy stuff like “murder your darlings” or “write every day” — to see where it came from, how it can go horribly wrong, what problem it sets out to address, and how to decide whether it’s good advice for you or not.

And, for bonus points, the end of the book has the One True Universal Writing Rule! Guaranteed good for all writers in all situations!

So check it out, and stay tuned for more Writer’s Little Books in the future!

Book read: La Valencia del XVII, Pablo Cisneros

Last year I stopped posting about what I’d been reading because it abruptly became All Research, All the Time for The Sea Beyond, and I couldn’t talk yet about what Alyc and I were working on. Then I could talk about it, but it didn’t make good fodder for the usual “here’s what I’ve been reading” posts, and I didn’t have the time or energy to work through the backlog to do the kinds of individualized book reports I did back in my Onyx Court days.

But this book gets a report, because this is the first time I’ve read an entire book in a language other than English.

Mind you, I wouldn’t give myself full, unadulterated credit. I did rely on Google Lens to check my comprehension of each paragraph after I’d read it, or to assist with sentences I couldn’t quite make sense of. (Some of which I did in fact read correctly the first time, but what they said was so unexpected, I needed verification.) Machine translation also helped a great deal with the quotations of undiluted seventeenth-century Spanish — though after a while I got better at coping with “hazer” and “dexar” and “avía” and “buelta” — and I flat-out needed it for the untranslated Catalan, from which I can pluck out at most fifty percent of the words via cognates.

Still and all, I read this book. On the basis of three years of Spanish classes from ages thirteen to fifteen, a reading comprehension test in graduate school that I passed with an assist from four years of Latin + watching a bunch of familiar movies with their Spanish subtitles running, and a headfirst dive into a Spanish practice app when this series got officially greenlit. I am stupidly proud of myself for doing as well as I did.

And I’m glad I attempted it! In the grand scheme of things, Cisneros is no Liza Picard; he quotes abundantly from the writings of period travelers and Valencian observers, but he doesn’t seem to have gone digging deeply into other kinds of sources or context that might have fleshed out his description in greater detail. It’s all fine and well to tell me what kinds of development was done around the Palacio Real, but I had to look elsewhere to verify my guess that, in the usual absence of the monarch, that was the residence of the viceroy instead. Cisneros is very obviously writing to an audience of fellow Valencians — there’s a constant evocation of “our city” and “our ancestors” — and his goal is mostly to glorify things about the city that date back to the seventeenth century and to describe things that are no longer there. He does acknowledge some of the less-attractive parts, like the rather dingy houses occupied by non-elites or the truly massive amount of interpersonal violence, but he’s not trying to fully explore daily life back then.

Beggars can’t be choosers, though. There’s an astonishing paucity of books in English about daily life in Golden Age Spain — as in, I’ve found a grand total of two, plus one about sailing with the New World treasure fleets — and even in Spanish, it’s hard to find works that focus on Valencia, which is where a significant part of the story will be set. But for every bit where Cisneros goes into stultifying detail on the Baroque renovations of individual churches (almost all of them late enough to be irrelevant to our series), there’s another bit where he tells me exactly which parts of the river embankment will be under construction when our protagonist arrives there, or how Valencians were required to water the streets in the summer to cool off the city and reduce disease, or what now-vanished traditions represent what they did for fun. (At Carneval, they pelted each other with orange skins filled with such delightful stuffings as bran, fat, and the must left over from wine-making. Apparently injuries were not uncommon: he quotes a poem whose title more or less translates to “From a gentleman to the lady who put his eye out with an orange.”)

So this gave me a decent amount of very useful concrete detail that will help Valencia feel like Valencia, not Generic Early Modern European City. It may have taken me weeks to read its 228 pages, because I could only manage about ten pages a day before my brain shorted out and stopped processing any Spanish at all, but in the long run, it was worth it!

Building Cathedrals

I’ve long thought that the closest thing we have to medieval cathedrals is NASA projects (and those of other scientific space agencies). People work on those in the full awareness that they themselves will often be long gone by the time their mission reaches its destination, returns its data. And yet they do it anyway, devoting themselves to a cause that stretches beyond the everyday horizon of today, tomorrow. Just as the cathedral builders of past ages patiently hewed stone, raised walls, framed roofs, knowing they would not live to hear the psalms sung within the sanctuary they built.

The cathedral of a better United States has been under construction since 1776. Its original blueprint was badly flawed. Sometimes its fabric has crumbled, and what was built had to be built again. Very likely, none of us here today will live to see its true completion.

We must keep building it anyway.

We may hope for a victory in two years, in four — but a victory is not, will not be, the victory. We have to think in the longer term. The Republican Party didn’t get to where it is now overnight; it’s the fruit of decades spent working toward their goals, at every level from school boards and city councils on up. Pushing that back, making a truly progressive society, will be the work of more decades.

So we must celebrate the victories as they come, even when they are small. We may say “there is still more work to be done,” because it will be true, but that must not become a mantra of discouragement. We are building a cathedral, one stone at a time. We may not live to see it completed, but the work itself is still worth doing.

Fit for purpose

There is a simple but deep pleasure in finding the right object for your needs.

I’ve been thinking for a while that I really ought to get rid of a bunch of my jewelry, because I almost never wear it except when out in Performing Author Mode, and then it tends to be a limited set of possibilities. But a few weeks ago I suddenly lost all patience with the assortment of boxes I was storing my jewelry in — especially my earrings, which were crammed eight to a compartment and I could barely pull a pair out without spilling others everywhere. I went online, discovered the stackable jewelry box layers I’d seen before were now all but impossible to get in the types I wanted and matching colors, got annoyed, browsed some more, found another possibility, ordered it.

Something like two days after it arrived, I ordered a second, because YES THANK YOU I had found the correct jewelry box for the purpose.

And guess what? I’m wearing my jewelry again, even when I’m not leaving the house. Because in transplanting everything from its crowded, insufficient quarters to its new home, I kept going “oh, I forgot about that!” and being delighted to see old friends. (Also getting rid of some stuff that I was deeply unexcited to see.) Now, with everything sorted into different layers so each pair of earrings has its own compartment and so do the pendants and the necklaces are no longer crammed onto three hooks and hey have I ever even worn that bracelet, I can actually see what I have. And get to it easily. Sure, I’ve got a spare lid because I had to order two stackable sets to get enough space for everything — you wouldn’t believe it to look at me in daily life, but I own a lot of jewelry — but it’s worth that slight overshot to make this big of an improvement.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go make tea in the Best Mug and then take some more research notes with the Best Fountain Pen. I’ve had a few great instances lately of finding the right object for my needs, and I treasure every one.