“Can one use a dragon to light a candle on Shabbat” and other important questions from Lady Trent’s world

My husband, to me: “You probably want to see this.” <sets his laptop down in front of me>

Me: <reads the best tumblr conversation I’ve seen possibly ever in my life>

Seriously — “Can I use my pet dragon to light candles on Shabbat?” is an actual debate religious leaders would have to have in Isabella’s world. Because they have dragons, and a sizable percentage of Anthiope is Segulist (i.e. Jewish), so that scenario is a thing that could actually happen. Probably has. And now I’m regretting that I’m not conversant enough with Judaism to write a short story that is entirely about Segulist magisters arguing over something like using a pet dragon to light a candle on I don’t think I ever came up with a replacement term for Shabbat (it would run from sunset on Eromer to sunset on Cromer, i.e. Friday-Saturday, but there ought to be another word for it). I had enough trouble writing “The Gospel of Nachash”; this would be harder, especially since I don’t think I can ethically yoink the things people said in that Tumblr thread for my own commercial purposes, and figuring out how to turn it all into a workable story would require me to go beyond what’s there into the wilds of stuff I don’t even know enough about to ask the right questions.

<wanders away from half-finished blog post for a while, thinking>

<comes back>

Okay, screw it. We’re doing this thing.

And I do mean “we,” because I am actively soliciting ideas from people who know Judaism better than I do, that you’re willing to let me use to write a Lady Trent story about religious debates concerning the proper role of dragons in pious Segulist life. I have no idea what form this is going to take; right now in my head it reads like a “Dear Abby” column, with some magister who is here for all your dragon-related religious queries, but it would be hard to give that enough shape to pass for a short story rather than just a novelty piece. Really, I can’t plan the story itself until I know what material it’s going to be built around, because that will probably suggest to me a context for why and how and of whom the questions are being asked.

So toss me some suggestions, people. Other than using a dragon to light a candle on Shabbat (probably a sparkling or a Puian fire-lizard; I don’t recommend desert drakes for the purpose), what other questions might come up? I know enough about kosher laws to be pretty sure dragon meat does not qualify, assuming you would even want to eat it, which you probably would not. After that, I don’t know what would be interesting to consider. Any thoughts?

Eyvind Earle (and Jumanji)

This weekend I went to an exhibit of art at the Walt Disney Family Museum up in the Presidio, on the art of Evyind Earle — a man most of you have probably never heard of (I hadn’t), but who did the backgrounds for the 1959 Sleeping Beauty. I had no idea what I would think of the rest of his art, but I figured, hey: if nothing else, I’ll get to see some of his work from that movie, which I knew was lovely.

The rest of his art is gorgeous.

He worked in a number of different media, ranging from black-and-white scratchboards to oils. As with so much physical art, reproductions don’t do it justice; the tiny images on that website don’t even do it a tiny fraction of a shred of a shadow of justice. His oils and serigraphs often use very intense color, coupled with a strong chiaroscuro effect, and he had a fascinating knack for combining clean, geometric shapes with fine detailing that makes some of the images almost seem to glitter in person. One of the signboards had a quote from when he was working on Sleeping Beauty that really summed up both his approach and why it appeals to me so immensely:

“I wanted stylized, simplified Gothic. Straight, tall, perpendicular lines like Gothic cathedrals . . . I used one-point perspective. I rearranged the bushes and trees in geometrical patterns. I made a medieval tapestry out of the surface wherever possible. All my foregrounds were tapestry designs of decorative weeds and flowers and grasses. And since it is obvious that the Gothic style and detail evolved from the Arabic influence acquired during the Crusades, I found it perfectly permissible to use all the wonderful patterns and details found in Persian miniatures. And since Persian miniatures had a lot in common with Chinese and Japanese art, I felt it was OK for me to inject quite a bit of Japanese art, especially in the close-up of leaves and overhanging branches.”

Mashing all those influences together explains the balance of simplicity and detail that runs through so much of his work, not just the material for Sleeping Beauty (which I liked, but wound up being eclipsed by his independent work, at least for me). We liked it so much that when we’d gone through the whole gallery, we went back to a few of the rooms just to look at our favorite paintings again — and then I went straight to the shop and dropped fifty dollars on an art book of his ouevre, because I wanted to be able to look at it again. I would have bought prints if they’d been selling any, apart from a couple of framed images priced at a thousand bucks apiece. I wish his estate was selling anything in the price range of normal mortals, but they don’t appear to be. (The guy at the museum shop admitted it was their mistake not to sell the concept art of Prince Philip facing off against Maleficent in sizes larger than schoolchild: how did they not realize that was a thing adults would throw money at???)

And then we had lunch followed by an exhibit at the De Young on Teotihuacan followed by Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle followed by dinner. It was a busy day. Jumanji was even better than I hoped it would be, and I have to give massive kudos to the big-name actors for channeling the mannerisms of their young counterparts; Jack Black in particular committed 110% to playing a self-absorbed teenage girl in the body of, well, Jack Black. Karen Gillan did an American accent well enough that I didn’t even think until after the movie about the fact that she’s not American, and I cannot imagine anyone other than the Rock in the lead role, because the number of actors who can pull off both the over-the-top machismo of a video game character named Dr. Smolder Bravestone and the neurotic twitchiness of a weedy teenaged nerd is fairly small. I recommend it to anybody who could use a few hours of laughing their ass off right now.

Yuletide 2017

Yuletide!

This year I asked for and received a fic for the Mummy movie series (the ones with Rachel Weisz and Brendan Fraser, not the more recent thing with Tom Cruise). I got “Alicanto,” by someone who chose to remain anonymous even after reveals, which introduces Evy and Rick to the idea of the Chinchorro mummies of South America.

My assignment was to write for the movie Clue. I produced “But here’s what happened . . . later”, set ten years later, with the various guests of Hill House receiving new letters inviting them to dinner — and that’s about all I can say without spoilers!

I also wrote three treats, as is my wont. “Found-hope” is a follow-up to the TV series of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell; I think it also works for the novel, but it’s been long enough since I read it that I can’t swear to the continuity. “Eleven Echoes” is a look through the life of Tacroy from The Lives of Christopher Chant (with major spoilers for same). And “In Fair Verona, Where We Lay to Rest” is again a follow-up, this time for Romeo and Juliet, where the living are still haunted — quite literally — by the ghosts of those who died.

I’ve had relatively little time and brain to read the collection myself after the first day or two, so if you have things to recommend to my attention, please do link them here!

Books read, late November and December 2017

Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett. Continuing my desultory wander through the Discworld books. This one was about fairy tales, which entertained my folkloric brain, and about the nature of stories, which I inevitably eat up with a spoon. I’m not sure the attempt to work in voodoo-style magic was entirely successful, but I do appreciate that it was there.

Vassa in the Night, Sarah Porter. So, you can generally separate urban fantasies into closed (only a few people know about the magic stuff) and open (everybody knows about the magic stuff). This book . . . laughs in the face of that separation. It is a world where people don’t admit to the existence of magic, but also don’t bat an eye at the fact that there’s a store called BY’s that dances on chicken legs and kneels down for you to enter when you sing their advertising jingle and if you’re caught shoplifting, the proprietor will decapitate you and stick your head on a spike in the parking lot. They may complain about the fact that the city’s health inspectors don’t do anything about the rotting heads, but they never question the underlying premise. Which makes for a very weird narrative dynamic — but not an unsuccessful one, if you can go along with it. So: a retelling of Vasilisa the Beautiful with a very damaged protagonist and a lot of family issues to sort out. Recommended if you like that kind of thing.

Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Largest Museum, Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino. Nonfiction about the Getty Museum and its history of buying black market antiquities (which makes it clear that the Getty is FAR from the only museum with this problem; it’s just one of the few to face prosecution as a result.) In many ways the content was intensely frustrating, because it’s this whole sequence of “well, you’re an improvement on your predecessor, but AUGH could you stop it already with your own problems.” The second guy in charge of acquisitions at least wasn’t committing blatant tax fraud? But he bought wholesale into the narrative that museums weren’t feeding the black market, they were nobly rescuing artifacts that would otherwise vanish into private collections. And then his successor, Marion True, showed a remarkable ability to talk out of both sides of her mouth on the matter, simultaneously championing better practices while also turning a deliberate blind eye to all the things she was warning against. I really don’t know what to make of her, because she genuinely did lead the charge to improve things at a time when everybody else was still talking out of only one side of their mouth (the one excusing it all), but at the same time, ye gods, the hypocrisy. She’s the one person who basically refused to talk to the book’s authors, which contributes to the ambiguity of “what the hell were you thinking?”

Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer, Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer. A collection of texts related to Inanna, including her descent into the underworld, the death of Dumuzi, etc. Interestingly, it includes not only the scholarly translation and notes on same, but more speculative and personal theorizing on the meaning of the texts. This sometimes wanders close to the edge of New Age territory, but not, I think, in a way that leaves the evidence behind.

Redeemer, C.E. Murphy. I may make a blog post about urban fantasies and their settings with this and The Coroner’s Lunch as my exemplar texts, because if you asked me, do you want to read a novel about an organization of demon hunters and the young woman with an inborn gift for defeating demons, I’d yawn. Doesn’t matter how interesting your approach to the cosmology of demons and their slaying is; I’ve just read too much of that for it to hold much interest anymore. But when you take that story and set it directly after WWII, where your protagonist is literally named Rosie and worked in a factory riveting airplanes together, and she’s worried about losing her job and the independence it gave her because all the men are coming home and reclaiming the workplace, and the love triangle happens because she hasn’t seen her boyfriend in three years and they’ve both been massively changed by their wartime experiences and the other guy in the triangle is grappling with the fact that he was sent home early after trashing his leg for life . . . now I’m interested. Because now you’re showing me something new, something I haven’t read or watched a dozen times before.

The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria, Carlos Hernandez. Short story collection. I received it as a Christmas present and finished it about two days later, which is a good sign. These stories mostly feature Cuban-American protagonists and freely mix science-fictional ideas with more magical realist material. I found it helpful to keep Google Translate open on my tablet while I read, not because you have to know what all the Spanish means, but because I liked to add that context where my own remembered vocabulary fell short. My favorite story was probably “More Than Pigs and Rosaries Can Give,” about a man going back to Cuba in an attempt to find and speak to the ghost of his mother, who died heroically during the Cuban Revolution, except that I feel like the story cut out early, going for the funny ending line rather than closure. Fair warning, though: these stories feature quite a lot of dead mothers, and also one story that, while hilariously funny (it literally made me laugh out loud more than once), can be read in a kind of disturbing dubious-consent light.

The Night Orchid: Conan Doyle in Toulouse, Jean-Claude Dunyach, trans. various. I’ve been meaning to read this for ages, ever since I met Jean-Claude Dunyach at Imaginales in France (he’s the one who provided me with ebooks of this and another collection). Although his afterword says that he writes science fiction because he thinks the world is a wonderful place, many of these stories are pretty bleak: there’s a lot of stuff about memory and its loss, alienation of both the psychological and literally “aliens from outer space” sort, and hackers or AIs who have thoroughly lost comprehension of the world of the flesh. The most cheerful story is probably the title piece, which is a very nineteenth-century tale featuring Arthur Conan Doyle’s character Professor Challenger and a beast that likes opera.

These last two titles in my year’s reading made me realize: I do much better with single-author collections than I do with anthologies. There’s generally (though not always) more of a unified feel to them, which tells me that despite what I might think, I apparently respond more to authorial voice than to subject matter when it comes to keeping my attention focused on a single book.

Year Two

We made it through 2017. Now begins 2018.

Things have been harder for me lately. This is the point at which it really starts to hit home that this isn’t a short-term challenge; it goes on and on and on. Taking tikkun olam in its proper sense, repairing the world is a task that goes on more or less forever, because there are always ways to make things better. But the amount of repair it needs right now is huge, and many of our victories amount to maintaining the status quo, rather than letting it get worse.

But 2018 does offer a chance to turn things in at least a little bit of a new direction, via the midterm elections in the U.S. If I have one resolution this year, it is to make sure the Republican Party reaps what it has sowed. They’ve been given their head, and they’ve used it to screw the American middle class, benefit the wealthy, strip protections from the environment, lash out at Latinos and Muslims and women, hand the Internet over to corporations, try repeatedly to gut health insurance, and generally piss on everything I care about. They’ve made it clear that they don’t really give two shits about democracy or the will of the people.

So it’s time for us to speak all the louder.

If you are not registered to vote, then register. If you are registered, make sure that’s still valid. And then vote. Same goes for anyobody living in another country, because your politics matter, too. Don’t listen to the voices that tell you that you don’t matter. You do.

You can change the world. One bit at a time.

The election is in November, but the work begins now. Share here anything you’ve done to repair the world: donations, volunteer work, good deeds, changes in your own life to be a better citizen and friend and neighbor. No effort is too small to be worth mentioning. We’ll need every straw if we’re going to break this camel’s back.

I need a cool two-syllable word

Okay, here’s a random one for y’all.

I’m trying to name something for a story. It needs to be named with an English word, and for reasons of rhythm, that word has to be two syllables, with the accent on the first syllable. The thing in question is mystical, but don’t feel obliged to go for obviously mystical-sounding words; in fact, it’s probably better if I stay away from that (so no “shadow” or “dragon” or what have you). But it should be something that sounds cool — no “sofa” or “laundry” here. 😛

Bonus points if it has the same form as both a noun and a verb, but that’s icing on the cake.

Suggestions?

my publications in 2017

A fairly busy year for me, all things considered. And a reminder that I need to go through my bibliography page and clean up all the things that still say “forthcoming” when they’re already out.

Novels

Novellas

Short stories

Collections

Nonfiction

Gaming fiction

the eighth annual Yuletide Guessing Game

As has been my wont, I participated in the Yuletide fanfic exchange this year, and has been my habit, I wrote four fics for it — my assignment, and three treats. If any of you currently reading your way through the archive would care to guess at my offerings, I will give you the following clues:

  • I wrote for one book, one movie, one TV show, and one play.
  • Only one of those is a fandom I have written in before.
  • My assignment is in the 4000-5000 word range.
  • For some inexplicable reason, all three of my treats came in between 1600 and 1700 words.

Any guesses?

The Light Side and the Dark Side of the Force

Let’s talk about Star Wars and The Force.

Episode III, Revenge of the Sith, forever changed the way I think about the Force — in a fashion I’m still not convinced that George Lucas intended. You see, I walked out of the movie theatre convinced that this whole “light side” and “dark side” business is just Jedi propaganda. There are two sides . . . but they aren’t innately moral. There is simply the path of attachment, which gets called the dark side, and the path of detachment, which gets called the light side. And both of them can lead to good or to evil.

What persauded me of this? It’s been long enough since Episode III came out that I probably don’t need to put the answer behind a cut-tag, but just in case — and because I’m headed toward The Last Jedi spoilers, and because I’m about to get wordy again — I might as well.

(more…)

On Star Wars, Sacrifice, and Darkness

So I saw The Last Jedi, and I liked it. I have to agree with Scalzi that it’s a good thing we got Rogue One before this: not because there’s a direct narrative connection between them, but because that film established precedent both for Star Wars movies that don’t quite have the Joseph Campbell feel, and for Star Wars movies that are dark without being grimdark.

The purpose of this post is to unpack that last bit. Which I’ll mostly do behind a cut-tag, to avoid spoiling those who haven’t seen the film yet (and also because dear lord, self, wordy much?), but out here I’ll say that what I mean by “dark without being grimdark” is that there’s never a sense of cynicism about the whole thing. Trust is not folly; honor is not a lie; it is possible to win and not always regret it afterwards. What The Last Jedi does is acknowledge that war has a cost, and you can’t have a Rebellion or a Resistance without risking, and often suffering, real loss.

Ah, you say, but didn’t The Empire Strikes Back establish precedent for dark Star Wars movies, long before Rogue One came along?

Yes and no. Let’s go behind the cut-tag.

(more…)

New Worlds: Third Cousin Twice Removed + some news about Patreon

The most recent Patreon post is “Third Cousin Twice Removed”, about kinship terminology and which categories we differentiate or don’t.

For those who haven’t heard, Patreon is planning to institute some changes in how they handle the processing fees for pledges. Unfortunately, their plan for doing this involves charging the fees to patrons — which is especially bad for people who have made a lot of small pledges, since (for example) each $1 pledge will actually cost $1.38. Patreon creators are pretty united in saying this is a bad idea, since it’s already causing people to reduce their pledges or cancel them entirely; if you want to speak out against it, there’s a petition you can sign, or you can send a comment to Patreon directly via Zendesk (note that you’ll need to register at the end of the process for your message to go through). I encourage you to do this; the messages I’ve gotten from Patreon indicate that public pressure may already be having an effect, so let’s keep it up.

The world’s most scattershot progress

I haven’t said much here about my work on the current novel — the one that’s a followup to the Memoirs — in part because it is so unlike the process of writing any other novel so far, I’m too busy figuring out what I’m doing to spare much attention for reporting in.

But hey, it’s useful to talk about what happens when you write a Totally Different Kind of Book. So here goes.

(more…)

Photography for sale

If you’d like to order a photograph for someone on your holiday list (or for yourself! that’s okay, too!), my galleries are here! Aaaaaand, I have finally gotten off my duff and finished editing my pictures from the Okinawa trip this summer, so there are three new galleries: one for the trip as a whole, and then specific ones for the former royal estate of Shikina-en and one for Gyokusendo Cave.

Depending on where I order the print from, I can get it done on pretty much any medium you like: paper, glass, canvas, wood, aluminum, acrylic, etc. Sizes are flexible, too. If you’re interested, drop me a line!

Signed books for the holidays

Just a quick reminder: if you’d like to get one of my books signed for the holidays, Borderlands Books can help you out. Get in touch with them, place an order, and then they’ll let me know and I’ll go up there to take care of it.

But act fast! It’s a hike for me to visit the store, so it might take a week or so for me to arrange a time when I can swing by.

Light in the darkness

I’m a solar-powered creature and don’t much like the darkness of winter, but I love the symbolism of this season: the rekindling of light in the darkness. It is, in a sense, our yearly miracle, and the fact that it’s caused by the elliptical orbit of the earth around the sun doesn’t make it any less magical to me.

We are now one year into my monthly series of tikkun olam posts. (Linked to the DW mirror because that’s where the most responses have been happening.) The darkness, as always, seems like it will go on forever. But if we’re to turn the corner and head back toward a brighter world, it won’t happen automatically; it takes effort, and the more of us who try, the faster it will go.

Tikkun olam: repairing the world. Volunteering, donating, performing acts of kindness. Whatever you have done in the last month to make the world a better place, whatever you have planned for upcoming days, share it here. You don’t have to apologize for not doing more or deprecate what you’ve done. Sometimes we’ve got more in us; sometimes we’ve got less. But anything is greater than nothing, and so anything, however small, is worth counting.

New Worlds: Lineage

Over on the New Worlds Patreon, my theme for December is going to be kinship — the anthropological term for “family,” and a favorite subject in the field. We start with lineage, including a discussion of how people often misunderstand what matrilineality means. Comment over there!