“The next day Mr Earbrass is conscious but very little more”

The problem with being in physical therapy is that even when I’ve declared a Day Off From Everything, I still have to do that.

I mean, I could skip it. But since my happiness is better served by recovering as quickly and thoroughly as possible, I’m still going to put myself through my paces. Other than that, however, I intend to spend today having lunch with a friend and reading on the couch and maybe going out to celebrate a bit when my husband gets home from work. Also on the celebratory list: last night I slept without a brace on my ankle, for the first time since the surgery. It was an experiment, to see if it would complain at me when I turned over or whacked it against my other leg — and it did, a little, but not enough to counterbalance the sheer joy of being able to fully relax. I have hopes this will help with the problem where the tendons and muscles that kept cramping while I was in the boot are actually giving me more pain than the bit that got surgeryified.

Who knows. Maybe I’ll work on “The Unquiet Grave” tonight. Because it isn’t work if I decide to do it of my own free will, right? πŸ˜›

A Year in Pictures – Flamingoes of Light

Flamingoes of Light
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This is the last of my shots from the Chinese lantern festival in Dallas, and gives a good sense of what the whole exhibit was like. I took this one very nearly at the end, when I was dead tired (and fighting a cold) — but it was worth the effort to get the reflection in the mottled surface of the lake.

Number sixteen

It’s a short draft, and I already know what needs to be added in, both to fill it out to a better length and to mend a kind of gaping lack in the story. But that is what revision is for.

Right now, at 84,223 words, Chains and Memory is finished.

The #3Things story

Earlier today, I posted the #3Things story to Twitter. Here, in its random glory, is the whole thing:

Buffeted by storm winds, the little lost hummingbird whirled and spun through the air, incapable of even falling. #3Things (1/14)

Her ordeal ended when the winds blew her into a screen of leaves. There she stayed until the storm ended & she fell down. #3Things (2/14)

Where am I? she thought (but did not say — hummingbird tongues are not good for speaking with). #3Things (3/14)

“Why, you are on an aspidochelone.” #3Things (4/14)

The hummingbird looked around to see who had spoken. She saw nothing except a lethal-looking spiky thing on the ground. #3Things (5/14)

“Yes,” I spoke,” the object said. It communicated by means of a revoltingly strong, nauseating odor. #3Things (6/14)

What’s that? the hummingbird wondered. She didn’t know whether hummingbirds could vomit, but she thought she might find out #3Things (7/14)

“I am a durian — the King of Fruits,” the spiky thing said proudly, emitting a wave of raw-sewage smell. #3Things (8/14)

The hummingbird wished desperately for some nectar to clear her palate and wondered what an aspidochelone was. #3Things (9/14)

“It’s a huge creature mistaken for an island because of vegetation,” the durian said. (It had looked this up on Wikipedia.) #3Things (10/14)

“You’ll never return to your eggs or your favorite flower. The aspidochelone is swimming out to sea with us atop its back.” #3Things (11/14)

The hummingbird leapt into the air, desperate to fly home before it was too late, but the durian shot her with its spikes. #3Things (12/14)

These were tipped with sleeping poison, and so the hummingbird fell to the ground once more, dazed and weak. #3Things (13/14)

“I may be the King of Fruits,” the durian said, “but I am a mere servant of this island, and its flowers need pollination.” #3Things (14/14)

***

Many thanks to @lrushlau for the hummingbird, @KarenMemory for the aspidochelone, and @charlesatan for the sentient durian! #3Things

It’s reeeeeeeeeeeeal!

votb-arcs

Those arrived last night, but I didn’t get a chance to share until today. I know these are printed from the text we had after copy-edits before page proofs, so it’s irrelevant that I just sent the proofs back to my editor a few days ago . . . but it feels like magic. Last pass through the text, and poof! Look! It’s a book! πŸ˜€

Stay tuned for me to come up with a clever idea how you can enter to win a copy . . . .

A Year in Pictures – Maleficent’s Hedge

Maleficent's Hedge
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I have another version of this shot that frames that ocean rock partway in a gap between the branches, but I ended up choosing this one because it has much more of the spiky, zig-zag look to the branches. It’s as if someone transplanted part of Maleficent’s hedge from Sleeping Beauty to Point Lobos, California.

name #3Things — get a silly story

Despite not being the world’s best Twitter user, I have managed to reach the milestone of a thousand followers. In celebration, I have decided to play a game!

The rules are simple:

1) You name a person, place, or thing (over on Twitter, if you can — I’m @swan_tower)

2) I choose three things from among those suggestions

3) I write a flash story about those things and post it, in its entirety, on Twitter.

Note that nowhere in here do I say your suggestions must be sensible, nor do I promise a sensible story in return. πŸ™‚

Go forth and tweet ridiculous things at me!

A Year in Pictures – Salt Formations

Salt Formations
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After the more standard tour of the Wieliczka Salt Mine, my husband and I opted for an additional tour of the underground museum, which contains random historical artifacts and information on the geology of the area. These salt crystals were in a high case, hanging above everything else; I darkened the background to let them show in all their monochrome glory.

Sale, convention

Apropos of complaining about reading The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus, I’m pleased to say it was not in vain; I have sold “The Damnation of St. Teresa of Ávila” to the anthology Shared Nightmares, edited by Steve Diamond. I’ll post the TOC and so forth once I have it.

Also, if you’re a Bay Area local, I’ll be at Convolution in Burlingame the weekend of September 26th-28th. My tentative schedule is:

  • Friday 2-4 — You Got Your Science in My Fantasy (M)
  • Saturday 10-12 — Reading
  • Saturday 12-2 — Steaming Outside Victorian England
  • Sunday 12-2 — Social Worldbuilding
  • Sunday 2-4 — Dice on the Page

That last is a panel I proposed, focusing not on who has adapted an RPG into fiction, but what the craft-oriented challenges of doing so are. Not sure what I’m going pick for the reading. Probably a short story, since I rarely get to do those; I’ll have to see what seems good. Not “The Damnation of St. Teresa of Ávila” — there’s no way I’m inflicting sixteenth-century Catholic mystical theology on people at 10 a.m. on a Saturday. πŸ˜›

indicted on two charges of negligent authorial cruelty

You would think I’d notice when I’m doing something horrible to my characters — but sometimes the penny drops quite late.

The context for this post is the scene I wrote for Chains and Memory last night. There’s a detail I put into Lies and Prophecy that seemed like an interesting twist, an additional layer to an aspect of the world that the characters hadn’t realized was there. When I started planning out this book, I knew I was going to add another component to that detail; the adding happened a few days ago. And then last night, writing a follow-on scene, I finally realized what I’d done to Julian, by tossing in that little detail so many years ago.

I can’t get more specific than that without massively spoiling things, but I can give a different example of what I mean: Nicholas Merriman, an NPC in my game Memento, which is the campaign that ultimately gave rise to the Onyx Court series. Nicholas is nowhere in the novels, so there will be no spoilers for the Onyx Court if I tell you I may have been more cruel to him than any other member of the Merriman family save Francis. (Who did appear in the novels, so if I tell you his role in the game was pretty much the same except it ended a little bit worse, you’ll have some scale for comparison.)

Memento was a Changeling game about a group of faeries reincarnating in mortal hosts over a period of centuries, trying to create the Philosopher’s Stone. They were assisted in this process by a faerie-blooded human family, the Merrimans, who passed down the knowledge of their quest through the generations . . . but lost bits of it along the way, because seven hundred years is a long time to keep that kind of thing alive. Nicholas, living in the modern day, had only the fragments he’d gleaned from his Alzheimer-afflicted grandfather, and almost no connection to the faerie world whatsoever.

Under the mechanics for fae blood in that game, Nicholas was permitted one single “fae gift,” i.e. an ability inherited from his changeling ancestor. It could be a powerful ability, but he could only have one. I chose Parted Mists. In Changeling, the Mists are a metaphysical force that causes human beings to forget about magical things: to come up with “rational” explanations for them or dismiss them as mere fancy or just forget them entirely. Parted Mists allowed Nicholas to actually remember his interactions with the PC changelings, which was pretty necessary to make the plot go; ergo, my decision seemed like simple common sense.

So they meet Nicholas and realize they were doing something important and go through a process that causes them to remember their past lives, which takes up the bulk of the campaign, with them flashing back to previous centuries (and previous Merriman helpers) before finally snapping back to the present day and finishing what they started.

By which point I had realized that I had been horrifically, unthinkingly cruel to Nicholas.

Because he remembered.

Here’s the thing about Changeling: in that setting, there is a magical layer to the world that we can’t generally see. Changelings can see it; children can see it, but lose the ability as they grow up; adults can be temporarily enchanted to see it, but the Mists make them forget after the enchantment fades.

Nicholas did not forget.

After he met the PCs, Nicholas knew that he was living in grey, dreary Kansas. He knew Oz was right there, all around him: a fantastical world filled with color and magic and wonder. He knew the PCs lived in that world, and he’d been permitted to visit it a few times. But every time, the magic ended, and he was back in black-and-white Kansas — remembering precisely what he had lost.

I did not mean to be so cruel to him. But I was, and it took me months to realize I had been.

And that’s more or less what I’ve done to Julian. Not the same flavor of cruelty, but the same failure to notice until an embarrassingly long time later. The good news is, I have noticed, and that means I can make story out of it; that’s what I was doing last night. Not only that, but in writing up the problem, I realized it had a whole second layer to it, so that he’s asking Kim the question she hears, and also a second question she won’t hear until it’s almost too late.

If I’m lucky, readers will hit this part of the story and think “oh, wow, that’s a really awesome thing Marie Brennan set up there.” They won’t realize how much of it was an accident, that I only just caught at the last second. πŸ™‚

A Year in Pictures – Pompeii Baths

Pompeii Baths
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This is one of the surviving fragments of decoration in the Forum Baths at Pompeii. It gives you a remarkable sense of how beautiful the place must have been before the eruption — the sort of glimpse into the past that never. happens. on archaeological sites.

Not unless a volcano helps out, anyway.

The Incompetence of Samsung’s Customer Support

A few weeks ago I noticed that my Nexus 10 tablet wasn’t charging properly. I poked around online and found a number for Samsung’s customer support, so I called them up.

The lady I spoke to was very nice. We ran into confusion, though, because when I looked in the settings where my model number ought to be, all it said was “Nexus 10.” Apparently there was supposed to be something else. She gave me a ticket number and said I should call back in a few days, at which point her supervisor would have made the arrangements to put me manually into the system, which would allow them to send me a shipping label to get the tablet repaired.

Seemed good to me, so I thanked her, hung up, and waited.

When I called back, my first call got dropped. On a second try, the guy I talked to seemed to have no awareness of this having happened, despite the ticket number. He asked for my model number, and when I told him it only said “Nexus 10,” he said somebody would call me back in one to two days, after his supervisor made the arrangements to put me manually into the system, which would allow them to send me a shipping label to get the tablet repaired.

It took something more like three or four days, but I did get a call back from a woman saying there was some confusion about the lack of model number, but that she suspected the problem was that my tablet is wi-fi only, and they’re the department for tablets that are registered with a carrier for cellular service. She asked me to call her back and gave her a number.

Let me say for the record that up until this point, I feel like the service I’d received was less than ideal, but basically par for the course with this kind of thing.

That’s about to change.

Today (having been busy for several days, plus the holiday weekend seemed like a bad time to follow up), I call the number I’ve been given. It has a menu. Press 1 for mobile devices, tablets, etc. Okay. Press 3 for tablets. Okay. Press 1 for wi-fi only tablets. Progress, right? I seem to have had the wrong department before, but now I’ll get the right one. I press 1, 3, 1, and get a customer service rep to talk to.

“Can I have your phone number? First and last name? Verify your email address? Thank you. How can I help you today?”

I explain that I have a wi-fi only Nexus 10 tablet that isn’t charging properly, and I’m trying to send it in for repair.

“I’m sorry, but I’m not able to do anything about that here. I’ll have to transfer you to another department.”

. . . not sure why the people under the wi-fi tablet option can’t help me with my wi-fi tablet, but okay. But note: in the eight or so times I called this number and went through this process, I’m fairly certain that I did not get transferred to the same department each time. I’m not positive, since I didn’t take notes, but I’m pretty sure.

And here’s where things get terrible. No matter where I get transferred to, I’m in the wrong place — and it’s blatantly obvious that half the reps aren’t even listening to what I say, because when they ask what I’m calling for, I say it’s a wi-fi only Nexus 10 tablet . . . and then a little while later they are surprised to discover my tablet is wi-fi only, or a Nexus, and they’re going to have to transfer me to somebody who can help with that. One call, I get transferred four times, and I know for a fact that at least two of those transfers were to the wi-fi department. Meaning the wi-fi department sent me somewhere else (I think it was the Nexus department), and then somebody else sent me back. The rep doing the sending back apologizes and says something vague about them having trouble with their phone system. This must be true, because that call gets dropped while I’m waiting to talk to the wi-fi department again — and that is not the only time I get dropped, because I’m not calling Samsung eight times in one afternoon just for shits and giggles. I get dropped once while the initial rep is going through her opening spiel. I get dropped when I’m on hold. I get dropped when somebody picks me up from hold and asks what department I’m trying to reach. At no point can anybody give me the number of the department I’m supposed to be talking to, because apparently they don’t actually have the numbers; they only have a phone system they can use to transfer me.

I’m composing this post while I’m on hold — but not for the wi-fi department, or the Nexus department. I’m on hold waiting to tell Samsung that they have the shittiest customer service I have ever had the misfortune of dealing with. I’ve been waiting to tell them this for forty minutes now, and nobody has picked up.

Basically, Samsung doesn’t give a fuck. I can’t take my device to someplace local to get it repaired, because it’s a tablet; apparently the only way I can get it fixed is to mail it to the manufacturer and wait for them to send it back. But I can’t even do that, because they can’t be bothered to meet the bare minimum standards of actually helping their customers.

I broke off writing this post because after forty-five minutes on hold, I finally got a competent customer service rep who neither attempted to transfer me nor dropped my call. She gave me a new ticket number and her extension, so that if I have to call back, I can (theoretically) get hold of her again and not be sent around the merry-go-round for the millionth time. I’m still waiting — yet again — for someone to set up whatever’s necessary to deal with the lack of model number, but I supplied my proof of purchase, so maybe this time it’ll work? We’ll see.

Not gonna lie, though. I’m not holding my breath.

A Year in Pictures – The High Pavilion

The High Pavilion
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The Chinese-styled garden of Fukushu-en in Okinawa is really impressive to wander through, and my favorite part was this: a small pavilion perched atop a rocky hill, overlooking a waterfall that pours into the lake below. You can wander around inside the hill, too, through a little cave scraped out to let you see the waterfall from within.

Books read, August 2014

Surgery meant lots of time on the couch. Lots of time on the couch meant lots of reading. (Also lots of photo-editing. And movie-watching. And passing out so I wouldn’t be awake to hate the boot.)

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A Year in Pictures – Bird on a Porch

Bird on a Porch
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I made an undignifed spectacle of myself the evening of my mother’s birthday dinner, borrowing my father’s camera and crawling around on the porch with my butt in the air to get this photo of a bird hanging out underneath the railing. Fortunately, both my parents do enough photography that they understood. πŸ™‚

It’s been ten years! Let’s celebrate.

It’s been ten years since my first short story was published. If Amazon is to be believed, Summoned to Destiny, the anthology containing “White Shadow”, came out on September 1st, 2004. Which, as it so happens, is my birthday.

They say it takes ten years to get good at something, don’t they? That’s one of the random metrics, anyway. Ten years from my first published story to a World Fantasy nomination; not bad. πŸ˜› Of course, I was writing long before “White Shadow” came out. I got what I consider to be my first mature novel ideas when I was seventeen — ideas that ultimately became Lies and Prophecy and Doppelganger — and ten years later I was writing Midnight Never Come, which I view as one of the benchmarks of me leveling up as an author. I have no idea what I’ll be writing in 2017, since I’ll draft the last of the Memoirs next year, and (probably) The Changing Sea the year after that. But I bet it’ll be fun. πŸ™‚

Anyway! Long-time readers of this blog may recall I have a tradition — not observed every year, but going on more years than not for the last decade and more — of a “birthday egotism” post. Back in 2003, I was having kind of a blah time of it on my birthday, and decided to counteract that with a post wherein I listed awesome things about myself, with no disclaimers, caveats, or moderating language allowed. The idea is that, like many people, I am good at downplaying my own achievements, and it’s valuable to have one day where I get to just bask in the happy — especially because I can go back and look at it later, when I need a pick-me-up. So behind the cut you will find a listing of what I’ve done that I’m proud of since 2012 (that being the last time I made a birthday egotism post). It begins with the traditional phrasing:

I’m thirty-four today. What have I got to show for it?

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A Year in Pictures – London Wall

London Wall
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For my birthday, I give you: one of my two favorite spots in London. (The other is the front steps of St. Paul’s, right by my hostel; I ate many a dinner sitting there and watching the sun set down Ludgate Hill.) The garden you see here belongs to the Salters’ Company, but on the far side there’s a little fragment of park beneath this, one of the largest remaining fragments of the Roman and medieval London Wall. You can see its patchwork nature and the toll taken by the passing centuries, but it’s a nice little relic of the City’s past.