A Year in Pictures – A Friend in Flowers

A Friend in Flowers
Creative Commons License
This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

I don’t often take photos of people, partly because my eye tends more toward the places I’ve traveled to visit, but partly because I’m not as good at capturing them. (My father, for the record, has developed a fair knack for it.) This one, however, turned out delightfully well. That’s a friend of mine looking utterly picturesque in a field of daisies, in the San Francisco Botanical Garden.

The whole way through, I’m narrating this in my head

For the last couple of months, I’ve been trying out the meditation thing — largely through an app called Headspace. I’m not terribly far into it yet, so I can’t give a full review, but the short form is that it’s a secular program developed by a former Buddhist monk that guides you through the basics of meditation. It starts off with a free series called “Take 10,” which is ten days of ten-minute sessions; then if you subscribe, it moves on to “Take 15” (fifteen days of fifteen-minute sessions), followed by “Take 20” (you can guess how that one goes). After that it expands into other stuff — the “Discovery Series” and so on — but I can’t tell you about those because I haven’t started them yet. The program does require you to take everything in order, but I can understand why; fifteen minutes is a non-trivial step up from ten minutes, and likewise twenty from fifteen, so working your way up to it isn’t a bad idea.

Because I’m only a little more than a month into the program, I can’t say much yet as to what it’s done for my mental health. But one thing I can say: it has exposed just how deep-seated my instinct to narrate is.

The largest portion of each session is spent focusing on your breath and letting go of other thoughts — or trying to. My mind, of course, immediately identifies this as prime Thinking About Story time. So I gently take it by the hand and lead it back to my breathing . . . until it wanders off again . . . so back to the breathing we go . . . and after a while it gets the idea, sort of. Whereupon it begins narrating my experience of focusing on my breathing. It isn’t really possible to make a story out of “this time my shoulders rose more than last time, and my exhalation was slower,” but god damn if my brain doesn’t try. And it thinks about what I’m experiencing — difficulties with not thinking included — and starts crafting the blog post in which I will tell you all about it. You have no idea how many times I’ve written this post in my head. (I have a faint hope that actually writing it will head this tendency off at the pass, but it is a faint hope indeed.)

It’s actually kind of hilarious, watching my brain scrabble for a way to narrativize what’s going on. I knew I was the sort of person who will run imaginary conversations in my head, or mentally compose blog posts, or whatever, but I underestimated just how much my thought processes are bound up in telling the story of what I’m thinking about. Turning that off is haaaaaaaaaaaaard. By which I mean, I basically haven’t succeeded yet.

This is not unrelated to my difficulty with the mindfulness thing in general: focusing on my physical experience of something, rather than thinking about other stuff while I do it. I live very much in my head, with all my imaginary friends (i.e. my characters), and if what I’m doing doesn’t demand my attention, I tend to daydream. I can focus when it’s something like karate; that’s detailed and intensive enough that I can sink my thoughts into muscle and bone and breath. But without a focal point like that, not so much.

So I keep practicing. One of these days I’ll get a handle on it . . . right?

Exercise on the road

Apropos of my previous post: any recommendations as to ways for me to get exercise on a trip that will involve a new city almost every single day? I know that if step one is “leave your room and go to the hotel gym,” I won’t manage it. But stuff I can do in my room, without equipment — that might happen. I’ll need to do PT for my ankle regardless, so I’m going to have to set aside time for activity; it should be possible to tack other things on, if people have suggestions.

Tour begins tomorrow!

Quick reminder to folks living in Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Salem, Houston, Salt Lake City, San Diego, or San Franscisco, near enough to such places for this to be relevant: I’m going on tour! With the ever-awesome Mary Robinette Kowal! You can find us in the following places at the following times:

Thursday, May 1, 6:00 p.m.
DePaul University
Chicago, IL

Friday, May 2, 7:00 p.m.
University Bookstore
Seattle, WA

Saturday, May 3, 2:00 p.m.
Powell’s Books at Cedar Hill Crossing
Portland, OR

Sunday, May 4, 3:00 p.m.
Book Bin
Salem, OR

Tuesday, May 6, 6:30 p.m.
Murder by the Book
Houston, TX

Thursday, May 8, 6:00 p.m.
Weller Book Works
Salt Lake City, UT

Saturday, May 10, 2:00 p.m.
Mysterious Galaxy (Part of the Mysterious Galaxy 21st Birthday Bash!)
San Diego, CA

Sunday, May 11, 3:00 p.m.
Borderlands Books
San Francisco, CA

I hope to see some of you there!

A Year in Pictures – Boxer of Quirinal

Boxer of Quirinal
Creative Commons License
This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

I’m fairly certain this is a replica of the Boxer of Quirinal, not the original, but it was still cool to see. I had seen a picture of this statue shortly before making the trip (because I was looking for images of a cestus), so coming across it in the Ashmolean was a pleasant surprise.

several recent books

I am not going to pretend I have any kind of objectivity here. None of these writers are strangers to me; they range from “the woman I’m about to go on tour with” to “the guy whose short stories I was critiquing when he was an undergrad just getting serious about writing.” 🙂 But their books are excellent and I recommend them to you. All three are recently released!

Attack the Geek, by Michael R. Underwood — a side installment in the Geekomancy series (Geekomancy, Celebromancy, the upcoming Hexomancy). This series is basically “what if you could get superpowers through your knowledge of pop culture?” And don’t tell me you never wished you could do that. 😀

(Bonus installment: there’s an excerpt from Shield and Crocus up on Tor.com; that’s Mike’s new series, which will be starting up in June.)

Valour and Vanity, by Mary Robinette Kowal — fourth in the Glamourist Histories (Shades of Milk and Honey, Glamour in Glass, Without a Summer). I haven’t read this one yet because it just came out today, but you damn bet I’m going to, and not just because we’re touring together. This series is Austen-ish with magic, and they’ve only gotten richer as they go along. Plus: GONDOLA CHASES. How can you not want to read a book that has a gondola chase in it?

Steles of the Sky, by Elizabeth Bear — last in the Eternal Sky trilogy (Range of Ghosts, Shattered Pillars), though there will be new stories in that world after this, or so I hear. Central Asian-inspired epic fantasy, with some truly awesome worldbuilding elements and also a giant tiger-woman. (My love for Hrahima, let me show you it.) I was belated in reading the second book, so I haven’t picked this one up yet, but as above: you damn bet I’m going to. In fact, it may be coming with me on the trip.

A Year in Pictures – Kerala Houseboat

Kerala Houseboat
Creative Commons License
This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

One of the most splendidly relaxing things we did during our India trip was visit the “backwaters” of Kerala — a series of waterways plied by houseboats, like the one you see in this photo. There’s a bedroom in the “house” with a kitchen at the back, and dinner was partly made from fish and shrimp pulled out of the water less than an hour before they went in the pan. I love being on the water, and while I prefer the sea, there’s a lot to be said for a quiet bit of floating around.

she’s a changeling; they get reborn all the time

I have no idea when and how I will do it, but I suspect that one of these years, Ree is going to find her way into some piece of fiction I write.

She was my Changeling character in a long-running LARP, and over the course of five years of playing her, I worked up a fascinatingly complex framework for the metaphysics of her personality. She was a changeling: a faerie in a human body, which meant that psychology and metaphysics and narrative were essentially three sides of the same coin (and hey, it’s the Dreaming; why can’t a coin have three sides?). I don’t know why she came to mind tonight, but she did, and I found myself re-reading the transcript of a scene I once ran via e-mail. Jadael hosting people at his manor for some kind of party — I don’t remember why — and Ree in the middle of her cyclical Court change, which meant she was Unseelie and overwhelmed by fatalism and taking it out on everybody around her. So Jadael, being the perfect host, took her to a building out back and let her beat the ever-living shit out of him in a fight . . . because that was clearly what she needed. Which was both true, and not. It probably wasn’t good for her. But it made her feel better, because she had more anger than she knew what to do with, and whaling on Jadael with her fists let her inflict the fatalism on him, too, and make him bleed into the bargain. And there’s the whole layer that got added in by the Mesoamerican faerie stuff I had invented — stuff which got reworked into “A Mask of Flesh” and several other stories from that setting I haven’t finished and sold yet — Ree formally thanking Jadael at the end for giving her blood, which meant more than he realized, because of the concept of a debt of blood and what it signified to her. She was a diamond that had been shattered, and ultimately I got her out of the pit of her Court change and her fatalism by way of a metaphor, Ree understanding that you don’t fix a diamond by gluing it back together, you recognize that what you have — what you are — is coal, and you make a new diamond through unspeakable pressure over a long period of time.

I don’t think you can tell that story with a human being. Whatever I do with it would have to be higher-fantasy than that, because you need somebody whose soul is a story, somebody who exists through and for the telling of stories, who can re-tell her own story to fix what got destroyed so long ago. Somebody whose psychological problems are metaphysical and metaphorical at their root, tied up in diamonds and blood and fire and ice. Parts of it will go away, I’m sure: the two jaguars and her totemic tie to them, which is straight out of the Mesoamerican stuff and will wind up in the Xochitlicacan stories if it winds up anywhere. The specific framework of the Changeling cosmos, with Seelie and Unseelie and Ree as an eshu. Many of the characters she interacted with. But something about the core is still there in my mind, simmering away, and like blood, it will out.

Someday. Somehow. I’ll let you know when it does.

Extra time to Design Your Own Dragon!

It occurred to us (i.e. myself and my Tor publicist) that it would be nice to give people in the cities I’ll be visiting on my book tour a chance to participate in the Design Your Own Dragon contest. Ergo, the new deadline is:

11:59 EASTERN TIME ON MAY 15TH

All current entries are still included, of course. But if you were worried about the impending deadline, now you have another two weeks or so to polish your creations. Full details for the contest are here, if you need a refresher.

Now, back to prepping for the tour!

A Year in Pictures – Barbican Model

Barbican Model
Creative Commons License
This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The old/tourist part of Kraków has a lot of these things: little bronze models of the famous attractions, with plaques telling you something about the site. They’re really handy, especially when (as is the case with this model) they show you what the place looked like back in the day. The moat around the Barbican is gone now, except in this pint-sized version.

A Year in Pictures – Rhodes Dolphins

Rhodes Dolphins
Creative Commons License
This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

By the time I went on my honeymoon, I was starting to get better at photographic composition. This one especially pleased me, with the dolphins in the foreground, the crumbling walls in the background, and the intense blue of the harbor at Rhodes to contrast with the sculpture and the sky.

Design Your Own Dragon: final week!

Just a reminder that the Design Your Own Dragon contest will be ending in a little more than a week, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on April 30th. This is your chance not only to win an ARC of Voyage of the Basilisk (once we have some on hand), but to have your very own creation included in the Memoirs of Lady Trent. I may choose up to three winners, depending partly on how many entries I get — so in a sense, the more of you that enter, the better your chances are!

(Okay, really I’m just selfish. I’ve enjoyed the heck out of reading the entries thus far, and am eager to see what else people come up with.)

E-mail your submissions to dragons.of.trent {at} gmail.com. You’ve got about one week left!

A Year in Pictures – Notre Dame Tympanum

Notre Dame Tympanum
Creative Commons License
This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

This is another one I dropped a filter on, in this case because doing so made the sculptural details more distinct. It’s one of the tympana over the entrances to Notre Dame, and reminds me oddly of the temples we visited India, which is the only other place I’ve ever seen that density and intricacy of carving over a large surface. (Though if this had been an Indian temple instead of a French cathedral, the whole building would have been carved like that.)

post roundup

Things I’ve been saying in different places ’round the interwebz . . . .

“Seeing the Invisible” — this month’s post at SFNovelists is a review of Invisible, the ebook collection Jim Hines put together of guest posts and additional essays on the topic of representation. Proceeds from sales go to charity.

“The Gospel of Combat” — an excerpt from Writing Fight Scenes, which will be familiar to long-time readers of this blog. You can comment there for a chance to get a free copy of the ebook, though!

Interview at My Bookish Ways — in which I talk about a variety of things.

“The Dreaded Label ‘Mary Sue'” — guest post at Far Beyond Reality, talking about female characters who don’t apologize for their awesomeness.

A Year in Pictures – Tulips at Filoli

Tulips at Filoli
Creative Commons License
This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

My mother came to town for a visit recently. Before her arrival, I sent an e-mail to her and my brother (and my husband and my sister-in-law) suggesting that perhaps we might visit Filoli . . . and sheepishly admitting I might have a photographic motive for being interested. Much to my amusement, my mother responded that she had been thinking the exact same thing! (My father: not the only photographer/pusher in the family.) Unlike my sole previous visit, this time I was there early enough in spring to catch the tulips before their glory days had ended.

Seven Souls in Skull Castle

Tonight I saw a movie which is probably the most refrackulous thing I’ve watched in ages.

Its Japanese title is Dokuro-jo no shichinin, and it’s actually a recording of a stage production, deliberately intended (so the blurb for it said) to be a blend of cinema with live performance. That much is comprehensible.

But the plot, you guys. The plot.

It just —

These characters —

I — I have no way to describe it that wouldn’t be full of spoilers. Which you probably don’t care about because the number of you who will ever see it is minuscule. But I can’t tell you why Tayu’s crew of prostitutes are so awesome. Or who exactly that one dude turned out to be (though I can say that I turned to my sister about ten minutes prior to that reveal and said “if he turns out to be X, I am going to laugh my ass off.” Of course he was X.) I just —

Okay, look, here’s an example. The story takes place in 1590, eight years after the death of Oda Nobunaga. There’s this guy who’s set up shop in Skull Castle in the Kantou region, calling himself Tenmao, the Demon King of the Sixth Heaven. (This story: it is SUBTLE, yo.) It turns out that he, along with several of the other characters, used to be one of Nobunaga’s retainers, and hasn’t really gotten over his lord’s death. I believe the technical term for his state of mind would be, hmmm, how do they put it, oh yeah — bugfuck crazy. So one of his former comrades-in-arms goes to Skull Castle, and something like the following conversation ensues:

TENMAO: See this mask on my helmet? It was made from the skull of our dead lord!
FORMER COMRADE IN ARMS: That’s a little crazy, dude.
TENMAO: That’s funny, coming from you. I happen to know those beads you wear are made from our dead lord’s bones!
FCIA: . . . okay, that’s true. <caresses bone necklace>
TENMAO: And this drink in my cup is made from our dead lord’s blood!

Whereupon he drains the cup, kisses his former comrad-in-arms, and spits the blood into his mouth, which turns out to be drugged, so FCIA also goes what you might call bugfuck crazy.

It is kabuki on crack and cranked up to eleventy-one. It also dodges the Smurfette trap (three of the seven heroes facing down Tenmao are women), swings wildly between broad comedy and rather grim drama, features some kind of amazing stage fighting, and has a character who basically figures out how to turn the fact that he can’t make up his mind which side he’s on into his superpower.

I am so buying this the instant it’s available on DVD. And then I am going to inflict it on everybody around me.