If you’d like to hear me natter on about not just writing but also role-playing games and what I think of various superhero movies and TV shows, you’re in luck! I sat down recently with Cameron Day of Comics, Clerics, and Controllers to discuss all of those things and more.
The fundraiser I launched last week has raised over six hundred dollars for the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services — $621 to date. Thank you so much to everyone who has participated, whether you bought one book or eight (!). I’m in the process of shipping everything out, which is taking longer than expected due to sheer volume . . . which is excellent news. đ
The fundraiser is still ongoing, in the sense that I see no reason to call a halt to it. You can find the list of stock here, and I’ll update the page to note that I’ll go on taking orders and donations.
The closest I’ve come to making an item of clothing from scratch was when I used an inkle loom to weave a very long strip, then cut the strip into shorter strips and sewed them edge-to-edge to make a piece of fabric, then sewed the fabric into a pouch. (It was for a costume. I couldn’t find any fabric in the colors I wanted.) It was very small, and I didn’t spin the thread myself, and it still gave me a strong appreciation for how much work went into making clothing before industrialization. This week’s New Worlds Patreon post is all about the labor involved, and how that affected the way people interacted with their clothing.
Comment over there!
I used to blog my progress through writing novel drafts, back when it was the Onyx Court books. Fell out of it with the Memoirs, and I’m not sure why. But I was remembering that I used to log three things with each post: the current word count, Authorial Sadism, and the LBR quota, i.e. “love, blood, and rhetoric.” Since Alyc and I announced Sekrit Projekt R&R yesterday, and moreover it is very much an LBR kind of book, I think I’ll take another crack at progress-blogging!
Current word count: ~26000
LBR quota: With our first fight scene and our first dead body (not, as it happens, produced by the fight scene), you would think blood would win out this week. But I think that in hindsight this chapter will be more memorable for love, non-obvious though it is. đ
Authorial sadism: Somebody got what was coming to him, but that’s more just desserts than sadism. I’m going to award this week’s laurel to a different character really regretting their choice of priorities. And also “I can’t sleep” being a line worthy of your creepier class of Doctor Who episodes.
Next week is likely to be a whole lotta rhetoric, as that’s the category I used to put politics into during the Onyx Court days. But also some love, again more visible in hindsight than fore.
Lately I’ve felt like a duck: serenely gliding along the water, but furiously paddling beneath. Lots of things in progress and/or hanging fire; not much I can talk about publicly. But after some discussion with the other party involved in one of those things, I’ve come to the conclusion that I should flip over and show you what my feet are doing. Or something. Pretend I came up with a metaphor that doesn’t involve drowning a duck.
This video is not what I’m doing. It is merely to set the mood:
Now imagine that feeling, in epic fantasy novel form, written as a collaboration with Alyc Helms, aka my best writing buddy for the last eighteen years. When I get stuck with my plot, Alyc is the person I throw the manuscript at wailing “helllllp meeeeeee,” because they think like I do when it comes to story.
And, well. Do that for long enough, and you start thinking, “Why don’t we try to write something together?”
So we’re giving it a shot. We’ve managed to write over 25000 words in less than three weeks, so I’d say we’re off to a good start. It’s got love, blood, and rhetoric, more false-identity hijinks than you can shake a stick at, all the worldbuilding you would expect when two anthropologists decide to write a novel together, and all the character shipping potential you would expect when Alyc gets involved. đ We have made no attempt to sell it anywhere yet because we agreed it would be good to make certain that writing a novel together is a thing we can do before we contractually obligate ourselves to deliver a manuscript.
It is code-named R&R. That does not stand for Rest and Relaxation, but in some ways it might; there’s a certain “wheeeeee!!!” feeling in writing something on spec, because we’re too excited by the story not to give it a go.
Expect more posts and tweets about this as time passes, because there are so many cool things we’re putting in here, I want to be able to talk about some of them. In the meanwhile, wish us luck!
Update, 7/16/18: I will be leaving this fundraiser open for anyone who wishes to pick up a book and donate to RAICES, since there’s no particular reason to call a halt to it. The stock list may get outdated, though, so please do email me to make sure what you want is still available.
I’ve already donated to one of the organizations working to oppose the Trump administration’s cruel imprisonment of refugees and immigrants and to reunite the separated families, but I want to do more. Since I’ve also been thinking that I should cut down on my stock of author copies, that provides me with a way to raise some more money for the cause.
The plan is simple. I’ve listed the available books below; all of them will be signed unless you specify otherwise. If you want to buy one or more, drop me a line at marie{dot}brennan{at}gmail{dot}com telling me which ones you want, who if anyone you’d like them inscribed to, and where I should send them. After I’ve confirmed that the books you want are still in stock, donate the price of the books to RAICES, Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, an organization in Texas, and send me a copy of your receipt (after deleting or blacking out any personal information you’d prefer me not to see).
Shipping is covered anywhere in the U.S. For shipping internationally, I may ask you to PayPal me a few bucks to help mitigate the cost, because that can add up incredibly fast.
So here’s the list of books. Note that I have numerous foreign-language copies of the first two Memoirs, in a variety of translations; if you would like something to keep your hand in, or know someone who reads that language and might like the book, please do consider picking one up! It’s hard for me to find good homes for them in the normal way of things.
Current fundraiser total: $790
(That last one requires a bit of explanation. I recently bought out my publisher’s remaining stock of the book in order to get the rights to revert so I can republish the series; as a consequence, I have a lot of copies on hand. I’m not even sure how many, but suffice it to say that I have more than I’m going to move via this fundraiser. Though hey, prove me wrong!)
If you have any questions, drop them in the comments or send an email. Let’s raise some funds!
For reasons having to do with a project I’m currently working on, I’ve decided that this month I’m going to discuss clothing! Starting with the basics: what we make it out of, and how we make it.
Discuss over there!
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Like most people who don’t know Lovecraft’s fiction all that well, I associate him pretty much entirely with coastal New England towns. I didn’t know, until I read Ruthanna Emrys’ words about her sequel Deep Roots, that he also wrote about New York City. Of course in typical Lovecraftian fashion he found it utterly horrifying — but for Ruthanna, it’s an opportunity for her Deep One protagonist to rebuild her community.
***
Ruthanna says:
The spark for Deep Roots came years before I wrote it. Years before I read Lovecraft, or imagined Aphraâs first steps into freedom as she left the internment camp, or thought up the details of her familyâs life beneath the Atlantic. That spark struck, and sputtered out, in half a dozen stories before this one: two chapters of a cyberpunk dystopia in high school, scattered post-apocalyptic dreamworlds, a half-written urban fantasy about magical infrastructure failure. And at long last that spark caught, and burned, for the second Innsmouth Legacy book.
Aphraâs insular community of amphibious humansâconsidered monsters by their neighborsâwas destroyed in a government raid when she was twelve. She spent eighteen years imprisoned, watching her friends and neighbors die one by one in the bone-dry air of the desert internment camp, finally released at the end of World War II into a world she barely recognized. In Winter Tide she returned to the ruins of Innsmouth, hoping to recover the esoteric knowledge buried there. In the process she found new family, made fraught alliance with the government that once caged her, and came away determined to rebuild what they destroyed.
And then what?
Aphraâs story is, among other things, a transformation of H.P. Lovecraftâs wildly creative and infamously bigoted horror stories. Winter Tide took place among his imagined Massachusetts coastal towns: Arkham, Kingsport, and of course the remnants of Innsmouth. Lovecraft found such towns scary because they were full of people not descended from rich white Anglo-Saxons, and also old houses. Aphra finds them scary because theyâre full of people who abetted or ignored her familyâs destruction.
But small New England towns werenât the only places that Lovecraft thought terrifying. He spent a few years living in New York Cityâand his stories and letters from that time are full of vile rants against the immigrants living (and horror of horrors, speaking languages other than English) there.
Some of those immigrants were my family. He described them, or people much like them, with the same language he used for his invented monsters.
My parents moved from New York to rural Massachusetts a few years before I was born. But I grew up visiting the city. I learned to find my way around the subway, and keep my balance as the trains juddered beneath the street. To walk in starling synch through the crowded sidewalks. To gravitate to menus describing all the treasure you can carry through Ellis Island, and love foods that couldnât be found anywhere on Cape Cod. And every time we crossed the bridge into Queens, I could feel the cityâs heartbeat, a thrumming, wakeful energy linking me to millions of people jostling to do those same things.
I tried to write that rhythm, and that sensory palette, for years. The smell of the subway and the primal shriek of the train coming in, the echo of tiled foyers in Greenwich Village, the music of all those languages that Lovecraft feared. And it never quite fitâit didnât belong to the cyberpunk assassin or the meditative AI. It belonged, it turned out, to Deep Roots.
Of course Aphra would go to New York. It was only logical: she wants to find her remaining relatives on land, and you can find ten of anything there. But New York also accentuated her internal conflicts. Aphra grew up in a small community of people who shared a culture and a faith and a set of assumptions rarely found outside their wallsâand she thrived there. But whatever she does, she canât rebuild that. Even if she finds a townâs worth of people with Deep One ancestry, they wonât have grown up there. They wonât take the same things for granted. The family sheâs making for herself now includes people from many cultures, many faiths, many sets of assumptions. So New York, with all that cosmopolitan community that I love and Lovecraft hated, is both the opposite of what she finds comfortable, and the epitome of the new kind of life that intrigues and terrifies her.
So thatâs the sparkâthat rhythm Iâve felt since childhood and can imagine in my sleep, finally finding its place in a late â40s New York full of Deep Ones and aliens andâtruly terrifyingâordinary humans.
***
From the cover copy:
Ruthanna Emrysâ Innsmouth Legacy, which began with Winter Tide and continues with Deep Roots, confronts H. P. Lovecraftâs Cthulhu mythos head-on, boldly upturning his fear of the unknown with a heartwarming story of found family, acceptance, and perseverance in the face of human cruelty and the cosmic apathy of the universe. Emrys brings together a family of outsiders, bridging the gaps between the many people marginalized by the homogenizing pressure of 1940s America.
Aphra Marsh, descendant of the People of the Water, has survived Deep One internment camps and made a grudging peace with the government that destroyed her home and exterminated her people on land. Deep Roots continues Aphraâs journey to rebuild her life and family on land, as she tracks down long-lost relatives. She must repopulate Innsmouth or risk seeing it torn down by greedy developers, but as she searches she discovers that people have been going missing. She will have to unravel the mystery, or risk seeing her way of life slip away.
RUTHANNA EMRYS lives in a mysterious manor house on the outskirts of Washington, DC, with her wife and their large, strange family. Her stories have appeared in a number of venues, including Strange Horizons, Analog, and Tor.com. She is the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, which began with Winter Tide. She makes homemade vanilla, obsesses about game design, gives unsolicited advice, and occasionally attempts to save the world.
For a while there I completely stopped not only posting about what I was reading, but keeping track of what it was in the first place. So here, have what I’ve read in the last two months + what I can remember from before that.
Nine Hundred Grandmothers, R. A. Lafferty. Collection of short stories. Lafferty is one of those names I’ve heard a bunch but never read; I picked up this book at a used bookstore ages ago, and finally took it off the shelf when I joined a challenge on Habitica for reading more short fiction. As with any such collection, it was very hit or miss; Lafferty has a certain type of character he writes in multiple stories who just leaves me cold. On the other hand, “In Our Block” (with alien creatures doing a terrible job of pretending to be human) made me laugh out loud, and “Land of the Great Horses” managed to dodge making me cringe over its depiction of the Romani — in part because of how the story ends.
One of the earliest funding goals of the New Worlds Patreon was a fifth essay in the months that have five Fridays. (The baseline premise of the Patreon is four posts a month, but the calendar does not always agree.) Rather than having these all continue on with the same kind of culture-focused topics, I decided to devote them to “theory” — by which I mean both discussions of concepts that underlie certain social structures (like liminality), and discussion of how one goes about putting these kinds of things into stories.
This week’s post, on “gratuitous worldbuilding,” is one of the latter. It’s an ode to the details that don’t matter: the little setting touches that are there just because they would be, and because they make the story more flavorful. Comment over there!
And if you enjoy the New World series, remember, this is all brought to you by my Patreon backers. You can join their ranks here!
The first season of Born to the Blade concludes today, with the release of Michael R. Underwood’s finale episode, “All the Nations of the Sky”!
And if that isn’t enough to catch your attention, Serial Box is running an epic sale through the end of this month. You can get the ENTIRE season for the price of a single episode — just $1.99. All you have to do is go here and enter the coupon code SUMMER18.
Or if you already have Born to the Blade, may I recommend A Most Dangerous Woman, by fellow BVC author Brenda Clough? It’s a sequel to Wilkie Collins’ smash nineteenth-century hit The Woman in White, full of the grime and glamour of the Victorian period, with a dashing heroine who deserved a better ending than Collins gave her.
Or try out one of their other offerings! Either way, you have through June 30th to get in on this action.
On Saturday, I plan to attend a Families Belong Together protest. You can find your nearest one here.
If you are at all capable of attending, please do.
Because make no mistake: we in the United States are currently under the aegis of a white supremacist government. Not one that is merely bigoted (“merely”), not one that’s politically incorrect. A government that is morally incorrect. A government that thinks it’s being generous when it says, fine, we’ll keep the children with the parents when we incarcerate brown people for taking the Statue of Liberty at her word.
White supremacist. There is no more accurate label.
And the Republican Party is openly, unabashedly, even proudly the party of white supremacy. #NotAllRepublicans? It doesn’t matter anymore. Right now, support for the Republican Party is support for its white supremacist agenda. It doesn’t matter if you try to asterisk that part and say you opt out; they don’t give a shit. They’re still getting what they want out of that transaction. If you can honestly say the same, then either you support white supremacy, or you’re willing to accept it in order to get what you do want. And there’s not nearly as much daylight between those two things as you might like to believe.
This isn’t hyperbole. Various countries have gone down this path before; it is the path of genocide. The fact that we haven’t gotten that far yet doesn’t mean we aren’t headed in that direction. And we aren’t even at the top of the path — we passed that quite a while ago. When you throw due process out the window, when you start incarcerating people wholesale, when you start tearing children away from parents and inflicting lifelong trauma on them, you’re halfway to the bottom.
We have to turn around. Not at the midterm elections; now. March in the streets. Call your officials. Is there a “Trump hotel” near you? Picket it. And then get ready for those midterms, because we need to democracy so fucking hard at these people that there’s no way they can steal the election without resorting to corruption so blatant even our usual apathetic electorate won’t stand for it.
The blogger Slacktivist pointed out the other day that Abraham Lincoln talked of the United States as being a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” We are the people. We are the government. Jess Sessions’ twisted quoting of Biblical scripture gets it wrong; he thinks we the people owe our unquestioning obedience to our elected officials. It’s the other way around. They serve us. They serve at our sufferance.
And we will not suffer this. Enough people have suffered already.
With the topic du week being taboos, you would be justified in expecting something salacious out of today’s New Worlds Patreon essay. But the danger here is more metaphysical than moral — read and see for yourself!
I’ve been trying for days to figure out a way to say something about the United States’ new policy of tearing families apart, imprisoning children, telling the parents their kids are being taken away “to have a bath,” dosing them with antipsychotics to ensure compliance.
I can’t. The sick horror I feel won’t go into words. This is the best I can do, and it falls short.
I know this is not the first such atrocity my country has committed. From slavery to Native American genocide to Japanese internment camps, we’ve done shit like this before, and worse. But that doesn’t make this one any less gutting.
At least there’s outrage. We aren’t yet so numb to unspeakable cruelty that people are taking this lying down. But — some people are. CNN quoted a guy saying “Quit trying to make us feel teary-eyed for the children. Yes, I love children a great deal, but to me, it’s up to the parents to do things rightfully and legally.” Empathy is dead in that man. Whoever he is, he has the shape of a human being, but inside he’s hollow.
We can’t become like him. We cannot let the human soul of this country — a soul we have been trying, slowly, painfully, to build for nearly two hundred and fifty years — be scraped out and cast away. We have to stop this, and then take steps to prevent it from happening again.
It couldn’t happen here?
It is happening. Right now.
We have to make it stop.
There are a lot of TV shows I try and just sort of drift away from, because they aren’t doing enough to hold my attention. The latest in this series is Black Lightning, which surprised me, because there are a number of things I like about its characters and its story. But in the end, its dialogue doesn’t have much of a particular element for which I can find no better term than “zing.”
Thanks, brain. “Zing.” That’s a real helpful way of describing it. >_<
Zing is not the same thing as witty banter — though many shows have mistaken the one for the other, and fill their scripts with dialogue that’s absolutely leaden in its attempt to be light. You can have zing in a deadly serious conversation (as Game of Thrones has proved). It’s a cousin, I think, of Mark Twain’s comment about the difference between the right word and the almost-right word being the difference between lightning and a lightning bug: it’s the lightning lines, the ones that leap off the page or the screen, the ones that don’t just get you from Narrative Point A to Narrative Point B but make the journey between them memorable. You see it in The Lion in Winter, which along with Twelve Angry Men made me wonder if this is a quality especially possessed by older stage plays — I haven’t seen enough older stage plays to be sure. At its apex, it’s the feeling that no line has been wasted or allowed to do the bare minimum of work. Think of The Princess Bride, and how many lines from that movie are quotable. It isn’t just because the lines themselves are good; it’s because there’s almost no flab in the script, every word simultaneously developing character and furthering the plot while also being entertaining.
Zing gets my attention, in a TV show or a movie or a book. Without it, my attention wanders a bit; I scrape a general sense of the story out of the mass of words used to tell it, but don’t engage on a moment-to-moment level. With it, I lose track of the world around me because I don’t want to miss anything in the tale. Zing makes me decide, before I’m two scenes into the first episode of a show, that I’ll give the second one a shot. Zing is what makes me plow through thousands of pages of Neal Stephenson making an utter hash of his plot, because he can describe a room above a tavern on the seventeenth-century London Bridge in such riveting terms that I wind up reading it out loud twice, once to my husband and once to my sister.
I think this is what some people, when teaching the craft of writing, describe as “voice.” I’ve been known to rant about how I find that term completely unhelpful . . . but, well, here I am talking about “zing,” because my alternative is to wave my hands around in the air and make inarticulate noises. That thing. Over there. Do you see?
These days I’m reaching for it more in my own work, especially in one of the things I’m noodling around with right now. A character is hiding in a palace full of baroque decorations and complaining about the discomfort. There’s something jabbing into my back. No. There’s a carving jabbing into my back. No. There’s a gilded carving grinding into my kidney. Better. There’s a gilded figure of the South Wind imprinting itself on my left kidney. Better still.
Doing that for every sentence is exhausting. I have no idea how Stephenson keeps it up, especially while writing books that could double as foundation stones. But I suspect that, like many things in writing, after you’ve pushed at it for a while some parts of it just settle in as habit. I hope so, anyway, because I’m going to keep trying.
It’s Friday, which means it’s time for a New Worlds Patreon post! This time we’re discussing superstitions: what they mean, why you don’t see them more often in fiction, and how to go about including them.
I’ll note, by the way, that if you’re not a patron then you’re missing out on some of the content. Every patron at the $1 level and above receives a photo each week — one that’s themed to that week’s post, if I can manage it, though some topics make that easier than others — along with a brief discussion of it and how it relates to worldbuilding. Today, for example, I sent out a photo of a gargoyle and talked about the architectural and apotropaic roles they play (and why it’s so interesting to find them on the Natural History Museum in London). Patrons at higher levels get free ebooks, the ability to request post topics, bonus essays, and even the chance to get private feedback from me. So if you’ve been enjoying the series, consider becoming a backer! Or recommend it to friends — that also helps!
I put this up last month, but since I was busy traveling, I didn’t have a chance to mention it publicly until now.
Swan Tower now has a privacy policy page. It’s modifed from WordPress’ boilerplate suggestions, so it’s a little clunky, but the short form it this: I gather almost no data about visitors to my site, use only data which is necessary for the purpose (e.g. email address if you sign up for the mailing list, IP address etc for comments), and will delete your data if you ask. It may take me a little while to do the latter, depending on the scale of the request and whether I’m on a trip or something at the time, but I will do my best to respect any such wishes as promptly as I can.
On a less site-specific note, it’s been interesting to watch the privacy updates roll out across the web. Turns out to be a fantastic way to find out what I’m subscribed to that I had utterly forgotten about — which has led to a lot of unsubscribes, as you might imagine. And I have taken great pleasure in telling certain sites that no, they may not do XYZ with my data. So on the whole, I’m glad that GDPR has pushed the web in general and U.S. companies in particular toward being more careful with such things, even if there was a mild panic as everyone realized the deadline for compliance was coming up fast.
It’s been twenty years since I read A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe, but it came to mind again when writing this week’s post for the New Worlds Patreon. Numbers have meaning; numbers are magic, for both good and for ill.
Comment over there!
Just inhaled the first season of The New Legends of Monkey on Netflix, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.
It’s loosely based on Journey to the West, insofar as it has the recognizable characters of Tripitaka, Monkey, Pigsy, and Sandy, and characters heading vaguely west in search of some kind of important written thing — and that’s about where it ends. The setting makes no attempt to be Ancient China; it’s best described as “vaguely post-demon-apocalyptic wherever.” The show was filmed in Australia, and about half the characters have distinct Australian accents. The main actress (because Tripitaka is female here) is of Tongan ancestry; Monkey’s actor is of Thai ancestry. The cast overall is mixed enough that I’m pretty sure the show’s creators had no pre-set notions of what ethnicities they wanted in which roles, and just cast whomever appealed to them.
If so, it was a good decision. The central characters are mostly great (the exception being the villains, who are a little weak) — I particularly adore Sandy, likewise female, who strikes the note of being a little off-kilter without obxiously “look at how crazy I am!” The setting is 500 years after the gods disappeared; demons rule the earth now, and humanity’s only hope is to find and free Monkey, and then get him to show them where he hid the seven sacred scrolls. But the way Monkey is remembered may not be exactly what he’s like in reality . . .
The show is ten episodes, each less than half an hour. You can watch the whole thing in a long evening — I know because that’s what we did. It’s fun and good-hearted, and I hope they do more!
