cui dono lepidum novum libellum

Last week, on a Tuesday when absolutely nothing else was happening at all, I put out a little book — and I do mean little. It’s right there in the title: The Writer’s Little Book of Naming, an 11K-ish headfirst dive into the sociocultural side of naming — particularly for people, but also a bit for places and things. It looks less at the conlang questions of phonetics and such, more at the ways names can reflect culture and, in so doing, help reinforce and deepen other aspects of worldbuilding.

This is actually the first installment of what I intend to be an irregular series, because it occurred to me one day that ebooks make it possible to assemble works on fairly specialized topics of craft — the kinds of topics that can’t really support an entire print volume, and which appeal to a niche market of writers, but dammit, I want to write about them, so here goes. I’ve got about six of these in mind thus far, so I’ll update as they make it out into the world!

(FYI, it is currently available only through Book View Cafe, the publisher.)

what I’ve been up to

Some of you may have noticed that I abruptly stopped book-blogging in April. That’s not because I stopped reading anything; rather, it’s that my reading list suddenly looked like this:

The Spanish Inquisition, Joseph Pérez, trans. Janet Lloyd.
Golden Age Spain, H. Kamen.
Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World, María M. Portuondo.
Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain, Scott K. Taylor.
Spain: The Centre of the World 1519-1682, Robert Goodwin.
Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain, William A. Christian, Jr.
Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II, Geoffrey Parker.

. . . and that’s just a sampler. It would have been a giant red flag that I was Up To Something — but I couldn’t yet talk about what.

Today, that changes! I can fiiiiiiiiiiiinally announce that Alyc Helms and I are hard at work on another M.A. Carrick collaboration, a historical fantasy duology called The Sea Beyond. From the formal announcement:

In an alternate Spanish Golden Age, where the map becomes the territory and mapmakers are the architects of reality, the Council of the Sea Beyond has risen to unrivaled power, exploiting the world’s most precious resources for their own gain.

Determined to discover how cosmographers pin down the islands of the Otherworld, Estevan seeks power with the Council of the Sea Beyond – but he risks the exposure of his own secrets, too. For he is a changeling, a faerie masquerading as a mortal. And for a faerie to enter the mortal world like that, a child must go the other way . . .

The Hungry Girl, the nameless human daughter whose place he took, has grown up opposite her “brother.” Lost among the fae and desperate to find some purpose for her existence, she leaps at the chance to help a group of Spanish explorers in the Sea Beyond . . . only to be horrified at the atrocities they commit.

Soon the unlikely siblings will need to overcome their rivalry — because only together can they bring down Spain’s worlds-spanning empire and save the homes they have come to love.

Though you’d be justified in wondering, this is 100% unconnected to the Onyx Court books: same general time period as Midnight Never Come, yes, and with faeries in, but a completely different version of events — starting with the fact that this is an “open” historical fantasy, where everybody knows and has always known about faerie matters (we’ve been having fun working out some alternate Catholic theology around that), instead of a secret history where the public face of events looks like it did in our world.

So that’s what I’ve been up to this year! I’m not going to backtrack to report on all my reading in the last seven months, but if I have the energy, I may return to a practice from my Onyx Court days, making “book reports” on at least a selection of the titles. We’ll see — right now most of my energy is going to, y’know, the book itself. (And things like finishing up Year Eight of the New Worlds Patreon, and and and.) But it’s public and official at last!

Behold: the Rook and Rose wiki!

This has been in the works for quite some time.

The roots of it go all the way back to when Alyc and I started writing The Mask of Mirrors. We knew there was going to be a lot of worldbuilding information and so forth to keep track of, so my husband very kindly set us up with a privately-hosted wiki we could use for that. And then, well . . . I don’t believe in astrology at all, and also I am such a goddamned Virgo. Which led to me meticulously documenting basically everything.

Having done so, it seemed a pity for all that effort to be locked away where only Alyc could see it.

Behold, the Rook and Rose wiki! We were recently approached by a fan who works at wiki.gg, who helped us export the private mediawiki and set it up over on their site. It has had some art added (check it out in dark mode; the background numinat gets super pretty then), and a fancier front page, and there are all kinds of things we can do now that I didn’t bother with before — like hiding spoilers. (There was no point in hiding those when the only people who could see the wiki were the authors.) Also, thanks to the wiki.gg folks, I now know that the total content of the wiki is a hundred and ninety thousand words, which makes it longer than any novel I’ve written that isn’t part of the Rook and Rose trilogy, and very nearly on par with those.

So if there’s anything you ever wanted to know about the world, our characters, the plot, or anything else, go check it out! It contains mentions of deleted bits, details of the setting that never made it into the story — all kinds of stuff. There’s only one specific tidbit of information we removed before making this public, as it’s a reveal we might want to deploy if we write some future work in this setting. (It is, however, an aspect of the world that a reader could potentially deduce, so have fun guessing what that might be.) Other than that, if you read this, you will know basically everything we know about the world and this story!

Three poems make a pattern!

My third published poem is out today and free to read online: “To the Angels Alone,” in Augur Magazine. It’s kinda sorta a stealth Onyx Court poem? I wrote it for an anonymous contest in a writers’ group, so that precluded writing anything that would have directly linked it to the series, plus I don’t know if I would have done that in the first place — within the confined space of a poem, it might feel a little shoehorned in. But it’s about faeries and Mary, Queen of Scots, so it’s definitely in conversation with that series!

Possibly of Use: Special COVID Edition

Last week, after four and a half years of successfully dodging it, my husband and I got hit by the covid bullet. Not too badly, and Paxlovid helped to reduce our symptoms more rapidly (at the cost of, yes, a very unpleasant metal taste that came and went for five days), but it nevertheless wiped us out pretty hard. A week after first testing positive, I still don’t quiiiiiiite have a negative test result, and I am still sleeping far more than I used to.

This experience prompted me to experiment with two things that — per the mission statement of these posts — could possibly be of use to others. Big asterisk this time, which is that I’m about to pass on Internet Medical Advice, and we all know what that’s worth . . . but hey, this at least one comes with PubMed citations? It’s also stuff that in most cases will, at worst, do you no harm, which puts ahead of some of the other Internet Medical Advice out there.

The straightforward one first: melatonin. A friend linked me to this study, which says that in addition to helping address the sleep disruption caused by covid, it may — more studies are needed — actually do something against the virus itself, up to and including making vaccination more effective. Since I got absolutely shitty sleep the first two nights I was sick, I figured that if all it did was help me sleep better, I was already ahead, and if it did more than that, bonus! It made a massive difference in my ability to rest, which is good for healing all on its own. (I did, however, have to check for potential interactions with the small mountain of other medications I was taking. The only real flags were that it + dextromethorphan, aka cough suppressant, might make me extra drowsy — oh no, don’t throw me in that briar patch — and that ritonavir, one of the components of Paxlovid, might make the melatonin less effective.)

The slightly less straightforward one comes from this blog post, which collects sources in support of a certain antihistamine protocol. The short form is that combining two classes of antihistamine — one found in most OTC anti-allergy medications, and one found in most OTC acid controllers — may improve your chances of full recovery and reduce the risk of long covid, improve the symptoms of long covid, and (weaker evidence here) even lower your chances of catching covid in the first place. There’s more explanation there if you’re interested, along with the specifics of the protocol.

Take all this with a grain of salt, of course (provided there are no negative interactions between salt and any other medications you might be on). IANA doctor of any stripe, your own personal medical situation might include factors that make one or both of these a bad idea, and all of them need more study. But in my case, there was no compelling reason not to try them. Whether they helped against the virus itself, I don’t know — but at least I got some better sleep out of it.

Stories and a sale!

Two stories of mine have come out recently, one while I was out of town, the other not long after I got back:

“In the Paradise of the Pure Land” is a little piece of folkloric flash, inspired by my yōkai research for L5R novels. But you won’t find well-known things like kitsune or tanuki here; instead it’s a tale about a very special karyōbinga . . .

And then at the opposite end of the short story length spectrum, we have the not-quite-novelette “Any Rose My Mother Raised, Any Lane My Father Knows.” I won’t say what exactly it’s based on, but I suspect some of you will tumble to it pretty darn fast.

As for the sale, I am delighted to say that I have sold a poem to Strange Horizons! It took many fewer attempts than with short fiction, even accounting for the fact that SH lets you submit up to six poems at a time. “A War of Words” is likely to be out fairly soon, September or maybe October; I can’t wait.