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When we were at Point Lobos, I found this carcass of an alien tentacle monster mass of kelp washed up on the beach. It was kind of fascinatingly weird-looking, all sprawled out like that.
I got interrupted in my re-watch of Supernatural, and then I was traveling, and then I had that whole Kickstarter thing to run and also the copy-edits showed up for Voyage of the Basilisk, so, yeah. The good news is, this isn’t a blog series I’m attempting to do on any kind of organized schedule, which means if I fall off the wagon for three months, hey. π
So! “Salvation” and “Devil’s Trap.” Aka the end of season 1, aka not at all what I think they were priming the audience to expect.
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Had I been a little more organized, you would have gotten Dramatic Chopin Is Dramatic on his birthday (which Wikipedia tells me was either February 22nd or March 1st). I didn’t think of that until we were halfway through the year, though, so he’s showing up in June. I just loved the lighting on this one, and the shadow he’s casting on the wall.
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Because it was formerly a royal palace, the Louvre an incredibly splendid building, quite apart from all the artwork displayed in it. This is the ceiling of the “Apollo Gallery,” painted and gilded and carved to within an inch of its life, with representations of the zodiac signs along its edges.
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One room at the British Museum is still maintained in the museum’s original style. In that room there stands a replica of the Rosetta Stone, this one not behind glass or mobbed by a hundred visitors. Which allowed me to get up close and personal to obtain a much more artistic photo than would ever be possible with the actual stone . . . .
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This fellow was working at the ruins of Ephesus in Turkey. He’s the only re-enactor I remember seeing there, but I wish there had been more; he fit in so well, and I honestly think having people around helps bring historical sites to life (rather literally).
The number currently stands at $4,377*, and given that when I launched this I was moderately terrified I wouldn’t reach the $2000 goal, that’s pretty excellent. π It’s been exciting to watch the pace pick up, too: there have been more pledges in the last three or four days than any time since the first couple of days. Which is how these things usually go, so it doesn’t come as a surprise — but knowing it’s pretty common doesn’t make it any less exciting.
Anyway, if you want to get in on Chains and Memory, now’s your last chance! All the rewards are still available (though there are only two Tuckerizations left). You’ve got 66 minutes left, as of me hitting “post” . . . .
*I love it when I have to revise that number while drafting a post. ^_^
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Ordinarily you should frame a photo like this such that the face is looking toward the center of the image, rather than off to the side. In this case I couldn’t: the sculpture was hanging on a wall in a room I wasn’t allowed to enter, and immediately to the left was a window that would have blown out the light levels and made for a bad composition anyway. So I went with what I could get, which is the face looking out of the frame — and I actually kind of like the unsettling effect it produces.
I’ve done a number of interviews and guest posts lately, so here’s a quick link dump:
Five Underused Mythological Creatures at Fantasy Cafe, in which I talk about weird things in bestiaries that show up all too rarely in novels.
Interview at Fantasy’s Ink; they ask me about my favorite characters and what I consider to be the most important element in a book.
Another interview, this one with Mike Underwood, who leverages the fact that we’ve known each other for more than ten years to ask me a lot of fabulous questions about gaming, Driftwood, and what martial arts master I would train with if I could.
“Time, Writing, and Tricks of the Trade”, a guest post at Bookworm Blues where I talk about the challenges of writing a sequel fifteen years after the first book.
“Kick(start)ing Myself into Scrivener”, a post at Book View Cafe on my first-ever attempt to write a novel in a program other than Wordperfect.
And finally, one that isn’t mine, but mentions me and makes for entertaining reading: Science in Fantasy Novels is More Accurate Than in Science Fiction.
A bit more than twenty-four hours left on the Chains and Memory Kickstarter. Over the weekend, we went from “might make it to the third stretch goal; might not” to “that’s the third stretch goal sorted; I wonder if we’ll hit the fourth?” Which is, in a word, awesome.
This means that everybody who backs the project will be receiving not two but five rewards: a thank-you in Chains and Memory, “Welcome to Welton” in ebook format, a short story in the Wilders setting, and the soundtracks for both novels. A couple hundred dollars more, and everybody’s copies of Lies and Prophecy will be illustrated to boot!
I’m going to try not to haunt my email today. Your mission, dear readers, should you choose to accept it, is to make that nigh-impossible for me: I still have Kickstarter configured to notify me every time there’s a new pledge, and if they come in at a good clip OH HEY LOOK THERE’S ANOTHER ONE no seriously, I just got another backer while I was typing this — what was I saying? Oh yeah. I would like to be driven to distraction by a steady flow of new pledges. π Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LJ, Myspace, USEnet, carrier pigeon . . . whatever method you prefer, signal-boosting is a wonderful thing. It’s the last push, and I’m dying to see how far it can go.
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It’s very easy to take a good photo of a flower: they’re pretty, so pictures of them are pretty. Getting a great photo of a flower is much more difficult. I don’t claim to have succeeded here, but at least this one is not interchangeable with every other flower photo I’ve ever taken, which is more than you can say for some of the others in my library.
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I mentioned before that Indian temples of the Hoysala period are carved within an inch of their lives. The ceilings are not exempted from this attention.
Physical therapists cheat. π They set the rules of the game, but just when you get to the point where you feel like you’ve got the upper hand, they change the rules out from under you.
Given that my ankle surgery won’t be happening until the end of July, I’m in PT right now to strengthen the joint and make sure the problem doesn’t get worse between now and then. Which means a whole lot of exercises, one of which has escalated in the following manner:
Balance on one foot? Okay, I can do that.
Balance on one foot on a squishy foam pad? . . . okay.
Balance on one foot on a squishy foam pad with your leg behind you to screw with your balance!
Balance on one foot on a squishy foam pad with your leg behind you and a heavy rubber ball in your hands!
Balance on one foot on a squishy foam pad with your leg behind you while waving the heavy rubber ball in various directions!
My PT seriously threatened to make me play catch while balancing on one foot on the squishy foam pad. >_<
I mean, okay, yes. I have gotten stronger. And my balance is vastly better than it was, say, six months ago. But there’s a point at which you think, can’t I just enjoy my accomplishments for a little bit? Do you have to pull the rug out from under me every time I start to get my footing on it?
Yes, they do.
Doesn’t mean I don’t want to give them the stink-eye for it, though.
Combining these two into one because there’s less of a story behind them than the other two.
Tuckerization is the process of either naming a character after a real person or putting that person into the story as a character (those being not quite the same thing). It is, as you might expect, named after a real person.
In my case, what I’m offering is the use of someone’s name for a character. I’m actually not the sort of writer who bases characters on specific people — at least not mostly. There may end up being a cat in Chains and Memory who is both named and modeled after a friend’s cat, for no better reason than because I was thinking a lot about the book when I knew that friend in grad school, and Hitomi wandered randomly into Kim’s life in my imagination. (Cats, man. Not only do they go where they aren’t supposed you, you can’t even confine them to a single world.) I can’t be specific about which characters yet because I need to see what people end up playing a role in Chains and Memory, but there are a lot of Washington, D.C. types as well as wilders who will be passing through the story, so those are the most likely groups. I’ll be working with anybody who chooses Tuckerization to see what role they prefer out of the available options.
As for t-shirts, there are two options, basically one for each book. The Welton University t-shirt is for Lies and Prophecy, and features a six-pointed star, which is one of the frequent shapes given to the Seal of Solomon in Western occultism. The other is the seal of the Bureau for Special Psychic Affairs, a federal organization that features more heavily in Chains and Memory. The three-pointed star indicates the traditional division of the “psychic sciences” into the telepathic disciplines, telekinetic disciplines, and ceremonial magic. The laurel branches indicate the BSPA copying the look of the FBI seal to give themselves an aura of legitimacy, what with being a relatively new bureau and all. π And the motto . . . ordinarily it would be in Latin or English, but I’d established that Irish Gaelic was (for reasons of folklore and history) adopted as kind of the banner language of magic after First Manifestation, and so I decided to go with that here, too. It says “power, wisdom, restraint” — and yes, I know srian means “restraint” in the sense of a bridle, but that’s deliberate. These are the people who control wilders. And the book is, after all, called Chains and Memory. If the last word of the motto strikes you as a little ominous, you aren’t wrong.
That’s it for the “special” rewards, i.e. the things that aren’t books or progress reports or what have you. Plus there’s the stuff from the stretch goals, of course. Just a few days to go, and then the rewards can start rolling out!
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The rest of the building this used to be attached to is gone now, but the old Town Hall Tower still stands in the central square of Kraków. The patchwork effect of the repairs on its sides is inadvertent, I think, but it lends the place a certain aged charm.
Of all the rewards I’m offering on the Chains and Memory Kickstarter, I think this one is the most special to me.
Changeling: The Dreaming has a concept it calls “dross”: objects invested with so much emotional significance that they actually contain energy of the sort changelings use to power their magic. They literally embody somebody’s dreams. Sometimes a piece of dross is famous or valuable — e.g. Babe Ruth’s bat — but they can just as easily be personal, like your beloved teddy bear from childhood.
That miniscript? Is dross. Back in the fall of 1999, when I had finished the first draft of the novel eventually known as Lies and Prophecy, I knew I needed to edit it. Since I was going on a weekend trip to a football game with the Harvard Band, the bus ride seemed like a good time to read through the book and mark it up — but for that, it needed to be portable. And, well, I hadn’t told anybody other than my then-boyfriend (now husband) that I’d finished a novel, and I didn’t want anybody saying “wow, that’s a giant stack of paper you’ve got there; what did you do, write a novel?” So I invented the miniscript: eight-point font, half-inch margins, single-spaced, full justification, print on both sides of the page, and voila, you’ve got a book on forty pieces of paper.
Which is still, to this day, the way I do my first round of edits. (You can tell me that is a bloody stupid way to print out a manuscript for editing. I will agree with you. And then I will go on printing miniscripts, because that is How I Do Things.)
The miniscript of Lies and Prophecy is quite literally the first time the first draft of the first novel I ever completed existed in print. Its creation is pretty much the moment that Marie Brennan, Fantasy Author stopped being a thing I wanted to be when I grew up, and became what I actually was.
It’s also a record of just how much the book changed over the years — and how much it didn’t. The first draft was flabby as all get-out, and I’ve added all kinds of new layers since then (the Yan Path stuff), fiddled around with secondary characters (Grayson used to be white; Liesel’s friends went through about eight different names apiece), cut out bits of worldbuilding that didn’t really contribute anything to the story. But it’s still the tale of Kim and Julian and the attack on Samhain and it ends pretty much the same way. If somebody ever writes an academic work on Marie Brennan, Fantasy Author, this miniscript will be a goldmine for their attempts to trace my growth as a writer.
And if you want a copy of your very own, you can have one. π
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Point Lobos in Monterey has a tendency to look autumnal regardless of time of year, because of a rust-colored lichen that grows over many things along the coast. The golden stone also looks particularly good in the late afternoon, when the angles of the rock are thrown into high relief.
I meant to post these a while ago, rather than in the last week of the Kickstarter — but hey, better late than never, right? So over the next few days, I’ll be making a few posts to talk about the non-book rewards available for Chains and Memory, and why I chose them.
First up are the tarot readings by my friend Emily Dare. I included these because Kim is a divination major at Welton, and tarot is her preferred tool, so it’s something that’s both very fitting for the story and also kind of unusual. And I asked Emily to participate because pretty much any time* Kim sits down with a tarot deck in this series, that’s Emily’s handiwork you’re seeing: I tell her what I want the reading to convey, and she reverse-engineers that to say what cards Kim should get, what layout she would likely use, etc. For Kim’s big reading in the early part of Lies and Prophecy, that ended up adding quite a lot of depth to the scene, because of Emily’s suggestions for how to complicate the process. And that’s exactly why I look for outside help: I could sit there with the itty-bitty Rider-Waite booklet and try to make something up, but I wouldn’t get the nuances and the neat little details that make it seem more real.
(Which is pretty much a true statement of any instance where I recruit help on a particular topic for a story. It’s always good to ask the people with the hands-on experience; they know the things you wouldn’t even think to ask.)
So that’s it for the first of the special rewards. I’ll be back later to talk about the miniscript, Tuckerization, and the t-shirts. Stay tuned!
*The exception being the Tower scene in Lies and Prophecy. I made up that particular reading all on my own. π
I always love it when my friends’ books come out, because: dude! Book! By a friend of mine! That’s awesome! π
But it gains extra awesomeness points when it’s a book like Mike Underwood’s Shield and Crocus, because I’ve been with this one very nearly from its earliest days: I read what I think was the first draft, years ago, back when Mike was saying “what happens if I take this Clarion story of mine and try to make it a bit biggOH HOLY GOD IT’S GROWN TENTACLES AND IT’S TRYING TO EEEEEEEEEAT MEEEEEEEEEEEE,” and I’ve offered various bits of feedback and assistance since then. I’m bouncing-in-my-seat happy that it’s made the journey from his brain to the shelves. My blurb for it compared it to Perdido Street Station and David Edison’s The Waking Engine, because it has that kind of setting, sort of New Weird-ish (but less heavy on the grotesquerie than some). If that sounds like your cup of tea, you should check it out.
Because today, my friends, it is out in the world. There’s a preview on Tor.com, or you can buy it from Powells or Books-a-Million or IndieBound or Barnes and Noble, as well as Amazon (whose imprint 47North are the publishers). You can also get it in audio form.
Congratulations and happy bookday to Mike!
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I can’t remember the details for certain, but the Royal Armouries exhibit in the Tower of London has a small collection of weapons that I think were designated “proof” pieces: official examples of standard armaments produced by various craftsmen. This is the grip of a proof pistol, with the red seals marking it as such.
