A Year in Pictures – July Column, Bastille

July Column
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Our last evening in Paris, we went to visit a friend who lives outside the city center, and ended up strolling with him down toward the Place de la Bastille (former site of the Bastille fortress). The castle’s long gone, but there’s a column commemorating the “July Monarchy,” and the clouds made the early sunset light absolutely glorious.

A Year in Pictures – Hippodrome Obelisk

Hippodrome Obelisk
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This obelisk is Egyptian (as you can presumably tell from the hieroglyphics), but it stands in the Hippodrome of Istanbul. I had very little time for photos there, unfortunately, because our tour included a couple of women who had apparently missed the part where it said there would be walking, and moved at a snail’s pace while complaining the whole time. But I got what I could, and this is one of the results.

Achievement Unlocked: World Fantasy Nominee

So I’d been having a less than stellar day, mostly on account of the fact that I’m leaving for Okinawa next week and don’t feel remotely ready and this fact is making me stressed. I was out getting take-out and running Okinawa-related errands this evening when I checked my phone and saw that hey, Mike mentioned me in a TwHOLY CRAP I’VE BEEN NOMINATED FOR A WORLD FANTASY AWARD.

You guys.

I am on a shortlist with Neil Gaiman, Gene Wolfe, Sofia Samatar, Helene Wecker, and Richard Bowes.

I . . . have still not wrapped my brain around this fact.

For crying out loud, it’s the World Fantasy Award. It’s one of the biggest awards in SF/F, alongside the Hugo and the Nebula — and if I’m being honest, it’s the one I have lusted after the most since I started publishing. The Hugos and the Nebulas cover speculative fiction as a whole, but the World Fantasy Award is for fantasy, and although stories of mine have been published as horror, fantasy is fundamentally My Genre. To see A Natural History of Dragons on the list of nominees is nothing short of gobsmacking. Like, I’m half-afraid to hit “publish” on this post because what if I’ve imagined the whole thing? (The couple dozen congratulatory tweets and emails and such argue otherwise, but y’know, paranoia knoweth few boundaries.)

I was already planning to go to World Fantasy this fall; now I guess I should plan on going to the banquet, too? And get something interesting to wear to it. Not that I expect to win — and that isn’t just modesty talking; it’s my admiration for my fellow nominees. But hey, let the record show I have promised my husband that, should I win, he has my permission to get me drunk. Which is a thing that hasn’t happened in the nearly thirty-four years of my life, so the promise is a non-trivial thing.

And what will I do between now and the con? I will write another book. Because being an author is like enlightmentment: Before nomination, chop wood, write book. After nomination, chop wood, write book. I don’t have any wood or an axe, so I guess I need to focus on the writing.

Congratulations to Todd Lockwood

His cover for A Natural History of Dragons is one of the finalists for the Chesley Award, in the category of “Best Cover Illustration — Hardback Book.”

I feel a bit proprietary about this, of course, because the book in question is mine. Furthermore, I had input with Tor about the cover design; I had suggested a skeletal diagram of a dragon, while my editor was thinking of more of a life drawing, and the two concepts got hybridized to produce the final cover. But the cover itself is Todd’s work, and the nomination is richly deserved. Fingers crossed for him to win!

A Year in Pictures – Fireworks over Lake Biwa

Fireworks over Lake Biwa
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The fireworks display at Lake Biwa in Kyoto during Obon was astounding. It utterly dwarfed any such display I’ve personally seen in the U.S. For the most part it did not photograph very well — I would have needed to set my camera on a tripod and have it take lots of rapid-sequence shots to have much hope of catching things at the right moment — but this one came out pretty well. (The shadow impinging on the left is a tree; the spot of light lower down is someone’s cell phone. I don’t know how many thousands of people were there, but judging by the crush in the train on the way out, it felt like the entire population of Kyoto.)

Supernatural Re-Watch: “In My Time of Dying” and season premieres

I never thought about it until I sat down and rewatched the episode for this project . . . but this is a really weird episode to open your season with.

Think about it. What do you want a season premiere to do? It should be a good entry point for people who are new to the show, since this is pretty much your best chance to pick up fresh viewers. That means it needs to give a good sense of the flavor of the show, while also not relying too heavily on stuff those hypothetical new viewers don’t know.

From that standpoint, this episode fails resoundingly — in fascinating ways.

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A Year in Pictures – Roman Forum

Roman Forum
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You have to understand: I am a dyed-in-the-wool Latin geek. Not the most knowledgeable one, not by a long stretch, but I did NJCL competitions in high school, up to the national level in Certamen. The origins of my Latin geekery lie even further back, courtesy of an Odyssey of the Mind project in fifth grade where the problem we chose was “Pompeii.” So for me, going to Italy was like a pilgrimage, and the Roman Forum was my shrine. To actually walk on the Via Sacra and see the remnants of all those old monuments . . . it was a dream come true.

Books read, June 2014

This was a terrible, terrible month for reading books. I’m in one of those pits where you start reading things and then quit on them, but too many of them are things I get a hundred or two hundred pages into before I decide to stop. Or else I’m reading things I’m not done with yet, like the autobiography of St. Teresa of Ávila, which I picked up for research; it’s kind of a slog. (And also a study in religion as Stockholm syndrome. Every time she goes on about how God makes her suffer so that she may better know the depths of His love . . . yeah.)

Plus there were copy-edits. Result: the title of this post only barely deserves the plural.

Skull City, Lucius Shepard. Novella, and technically a re-read, but given that I first read it when I was twelve and remembered nothing beyond the quote we put on our TIP shirt, it might as well have been new to me. 😛 Re-read this because Shepard passed away recently, and the Locus roundtable discussion made me realize I had encountered his work once upon a time. If this is representative of Shepard’s writing, then he was a deeply weird writer, but also one with some very thoughtful things to say.

Also: I’m tempted to make a project of re-reading all the TIP stories. I still have ’em; it might make for a fun experience, seeing what I make of them now.

Also also: holy mother of god I can’t believe Roger got away with giving this story to twelve-year-olds. Even if I didn’t know what “fellatio” meant back then, there’s plenty more that’s clear enough. O_O

Shadowboxer, Tricia Sullivan. Read for blurbing purposes.

You all know me. You know what genres I like. So when I tell you that I probably would have read and enjoyed this book if it had no fantasy content whatsoever and was just about a teenaged Dominican girl trying to make it in the world of MMA, you should extrapolate accordingly.

Voyage of the Basilisk, Marie Brennan. Copy-edits don’t count.

Building a Better World

Some of you may have seen this excellent set of posts on the blog Generation Anthropocene, using details from George R.R. Martin’s novels to try and build a geological history of Westeros and Essos. It’s a fantabulous bit of geekery, marrying serious scientific know-how to one of the big challenges of writing speculative fiction, that task we refer to as “worldbuilding.”

I read those posts, grinned at the geekery — and then paused.

And clicked around a bit.

And sent an email.

A couple of months later, I am the proud owner of a tectonic map of Lady Trent’s world, along with extensive notes on the geology and climate of her planet. Mike Osborne and Miles Traer of Generation Anthropocene were kind enough to read through the first two Memoirs and take my description of the places that show up in #3, then help me work out the underpinnings of that world in greater detail than I had already. I’m pleased to say that my efforts on the climate front pretty much held up to their scrutiny; I don’t have any howling errors there. Figuring out the tectonics, though, gave me information I need for future maps, and provided a number of new considerations I’ll definitely be trying to work into the last two books.

I want to thank these guys publicly, because they have done yeoman work on my behalf. If this kind of nerdiness is your catnip, you should definitely check out the Generation Anthropocene site.

A Year in Pictures – Column Capital

Column Capital
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I shouldn’t actually have this photograph. It’s from one of the museum-y bits at Westminster Abbey, and I didn’t realize until after I’d taken the shot that photography wasn’t permitted in there. I’m glad I have it, though, because the under-lighting on the figures is so wonderfully sinister.

A Year in Pictures – Arms and Armor

Arms and Armor
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My fondness for the implements of war is showing through. 🙂 These were on display in the Artus Court of Gdańsk, and something about the simplicity of it just appealed to me. I think it’s partly that you tend to see this kind of stuff formally laid out in a display case, whereas this looks more casual.

A Year in Pictures – Dishware Dragon

Dishware Dragon
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The Chinese Lantern Festival in Dallas also featured this lovely dragon, which (as you can see) is not made as a lantern, but rather consists of plates, spoons, and other such items wired together. It was a nightmare to photograph, because the head was swinging from side to side, and at low light levels the exposure time was not short. But as the copy-edited manuscript for Voyage of the Basilisk has just gone back to my editor, it seemed an appropriate time to post this image!

A Year in Pictures – Armored Border

Armored Border
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This is one of my favorite detail shots from the “Line of Kings” exhibit in the White Tower. I don’t remember which Henry this armor belonged to; I only know it was a Henry because of the HR decoration on the border. Taking a photo of the whole shebang, full suit of armor atop a similarly armored horse, turned out utterly terrible — too many lights, too much glare from the intervening glass, too many people wandering through — but one of the things photography has taught me is, sometimes it’s the little bits that make the best shots.

the real work begins

The hard part isn’t running a Kickstarter campaign. The hard part is dealing with all the work after your campaign succeeds. 😛

Good news is, I’m being organized. I’ve made a spreadsheet for all the backers, noting which items go to whom, so that (hopefully) it will be easy to track what’s been taken care of and what still needs doing. It would be easier if I could take care of everything in one go, but of course that won’t work; a lot of rewards involve Chains and Memory in either print or ebook format, and I can’t send that out until after I, y’know, write the book. (And revise it and copy-edit it and proof it and so on.)

But the ball will get rolling pretty soon. I’m just waiting on a half-dozen remaining surveys, at which point I can start sending out the rewards that are ready to go. After those, I’ll deal with the stuff that involves actual production (t-shirts, miniscript photocopies, etc) and/or coordination with the backers (tarot readings, tuckerizations). And then so on from there. This is going to be an item on my to-do list for a while, I can tell.

Such, my friends, are the laments of success. 🙂