The Final Countdown

Just over an hour to go.

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. 😀 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. ^_^

A Year in Pictures – Face on a Wall

Face on a Wall
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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.

All Around the Internet

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.

One day to go . . . .

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. 🙂 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.

A Year in Pictures – Filoli Foxglove

Filoli Foxglove
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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.

Moving the goalposts

Physical therapists cheat. 😛 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.

Meet the Rewards: Tuckerization and T-shirts

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. 😛 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!

Meet the Rewards: Limited Edition Miniscript

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. 🙂

A Year in Pictures – Point Lobos Outcropping

Point Lobos Outcropping
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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.

Meet the Rewards: Tarot Readings

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. 😛

Shield and Crocus

I always love it when my friends’ books come out, because: dude! Book! By a friend of mine! That’s awesome! 😀

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!

A Year in Pictures – Proof Pistol

Proof Pistol
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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.

Countdown to the final week

Eight days left on the Chains and Memory Kickstarter! We’re just $285 from a short story. Less than that, even, if I count the people who have donated via Paypal — which is a thing I should mention here, I suppose. If you cannot or do not wish to contribute via either Amazon or Facebook (and I can totally understand that decision), then I am more than willing to accept donations by other routes, and will include you in the appropriate reward level when I send things out to backers. Ping me here or by email and we can work out the details.

I’ve been working steadily on Chains and Memory for a little while now, so as to be sure I can finish it by October 4th, and it’s proceeding apace. There’s been some two-steps-foward, one-step-back shenanigans as I figure out how to launch the various strands of the plot, but I’m experimenting with Scrivener for this novel, and I think it may assist with tracking that stuff. Regardless, I am definitely on schedule for finishing the draft by the fifteenth anniversary of Lies and Prophecy.

Anyway, we’re headed into the final push. Do spread the word wherever you can, and let’s see if this thing goes to 11!

A Year in Pictures – Undercroft of Ste. Chapelle

Undercroft of Ste-Chapelle
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This is the lower level of Sainte-Chapelle in Paris — the church that’s still (or rather, re-)painted in the style of the medieval period. The effect is really just stunning: the same gothic architecture you see all over western Europe, but picked out in blue and gold and red. As much as I like the plain stone, the original look is really phenomenal to see.

A Year in Pictures – Relaxing on the Cam

Relaxing on the Cam
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One of my rare photos in which not only am I okay with having people in it, that’s the reason I took the shot. 🙂 During my research trip for A Star Shall Fall I went up to Cambridge, and (of course) went punting while I was there. This fellow was sacked out in his punt taking a break, and something about the composition of the long boat and the tall brick wall and the pole and his slouched posture just really pleased me.

Under the Mango Tree

I’m slightly torn about posting this only because of Amazon’s recent bad behavior — if I could point you at a different retailer, I would. But this is a good cause in its own right, and I don’t want people to be reluctant to support it just because of Amazon.

Under the Mango Tree is a collection of folktales from Sierra Leone, assembled by a Peace Corps volunteer in the country. All profits from the book go to the students who wrote it, and to a scholarship fund for their education. Given the economic differences between the U.S. and Sierra Leone, roughly three book sales is enough to pay for a year of education for one child, meaning that every copy sold is rather more than just a drop in the bucket.

I’ve picked up a copy myself; in fact, I installed the Kindle app on my tablet just so I could do so. 😛 I haven’t read it yet, but will certainly report in once that’s done.

A Year in Pictures – Paired Horses

Paired Horses
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I stood for bloody ever at the railing above this sunken area, waiting for a gap in which to photograph this pair without somebody else in the picture. (In fact, I didn’t quite succeed; fortunately, the person who started walking into frame as I took the photo could easily be cropped out.) I loved the foreground/background juxtaposition — even if horse-head sculptures always do make me think of the Mafia . . . .