in which the author is quite chuffed

A number of you probably know about this by now, but: NPR has included A Natural History of Dragons in their Best of Year . . . Venn diagaram . . . Oort cloud . . . not-actually-a-list . . . thingy.

Basically, although it looks like a list, what they’ve done is go the tag route. That’s the “science fiction and fantasy” tag, but if you click on ANHoD there, you’ll find it’s also tagged “love stories,” “for history lovers,” and “it’s all geek to me.” (You can also read Annalee Newitz’ recommendation.) Anyway, this is pretty awesome — like, “it has apparently had a measurable effect on sales” levels of awesome.

Plus there’s also this: A Natural History of Dragons was picked as one of the top 15 books of the year by Slate.com’s book editor Dan Kois. Put that together with the Goodreads semifinalist thing, and the fact that there are still new reviews coming in at a steady pace, and, well, see the title of the post. Quite chuffed. Quite, quite chuffed. It’s good encouragement to have as I tackle the dreaded Middle of the Book for #3.

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two copies left

In the course of contacting people who had bid in the Philippines disaster relief auction, I realized that most of the mad rush had been for the ARCs of The Tropic of Serpents (surprise!), with only some going toward A Natural History of Dragons. There are two copies of that left; the asking price is $10, but thus far people have been paying $20 and up. It’s a good cause, so I have no compunctions about using peer pressure to encourage you to donate more than the baseline. ^_^ (Really, I should have had the good sense to list them at $20 to start with. I just plugged in my usual “I’m looking to get rid of some of this stock” prices without thinking it through.)

So yes: two copies left. Signed and personalized, if you wish! And good causes. So go forth and bid.

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Hear ye, hear ye! . . . Again!

Seven and a half years with my books being only ink on the page or pixels on the screen, and now I have two audiobooks landing atop one another. πŸ˜€

Remember me mentioning that giant deal Book View Cafe signed with Audible? Well, now you can listen to Lies and Prophecy, too! Different narrator than A Natural History of Dragons (and by the way, I’ve listened to the sample for that one now, and it’s fabulous), and it’s likely that my other project will get yet a different reader — especially since the pov in that one is male.

Did I mention that I have a third project with them? No? Well, you’ll just have to wait and see what that one is. πŸ™‚

I do, by the way, still have plans for a print edition of Lies and Prophecy. I’m dependent on the assistance of others for that, though, so it will have to wait for a moment when somebody can spare the time and energy to help. In the meanwhile, the ebook isn’t going away. πŸ™‚

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Hear ye, hear ye . . . .

A Natural History of Dragons is now an audiobook.

Actually, it’s been an audiobook since Friday, but I was busy running around doing other things and didn’t manage to post about it right away. And then it was the weekend, so I waited. Mondays need fun things to liven them up, don’t you think?

I haven’t yet heard the thing myself, but I did correspond with the narrator beforehand, and based on that I expect she did an excellent job. She asked all the kinds of questions you’re supposed to hope your narrator asks, like how to pronounce things and whether you have any models in mind for what the voices should be like and so on. (In fact, her pronunciation of the names is probably better than mine, since my instructions included a lot of things like “this is how I say it, but it’s supposed to sound like French and I’m terrible at that so ignore me if I’ve got it wrong.”)

So if you’ve been waiting for the chance to listen to the book — those of you with driving commutes or gym workouts or such — now you can!

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Things I did not know (before tonight)

You know how I said that A Natural History of Dragons was in the semifinal round for the Goodreads Choice Awards?

Apparently it wasn’t in the first round. It was, instead, one of the top five write-in candidates during the first round, and thus got added for the semifinal.

That? Is really cool. I don’t know how the write-in votes stacked up against the ones cast for first-round nominees, but the fact that people remembered it well enough to vote for it off their own bat is very flattering.

I think voting ends tomorrow, so if you want to cast your vote, you still can.

In other news, I was trying to make a paper shell for my inflatable globe so that I could finally work out where all the continents are in Isabella’s world, when it occurred to me that what I really needed was a spherical whiteboard. So there’s a white beachball that should be arriving here in the next few days, and I’ll be putting the water-soluble markers we bought for drawing on the D&D battle map to an exciting new use. πŸ™‚

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FandomAid fundraiser for the Philippines

The death toll and destruction in the Philippines have been nothing short of horrific. The LJ community FandomAid has put together a fundraiser — not an auction but just a “Buy It Now” sale. Since my time is limited, I’m offering stuff that already exists, to whit, books.

Offer #1: signed ARCs of A Natural History of Dragons

Offer #2: signed ARCs of The Tropic of Serpents

There are five copies of each on offer (because that’s all I have left of ANHoD, and about all I can spare of TToS). The ARCs have full-color covers and all the interior illustrations, but not the maps; inscriptions can be personalized on request. The price is $10 in the US, $15 overseas, and the books will go on a first come, first served basis. You just make a donation to one of the approved charities — there’s a list here.

If you want to donate more, please do. They need it.

And if those offers don’t float your boat, browse the post for more. There’s eleven pages of comments already, and more to come, I’m sure.

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An open letter to dog owners

This post has been brought to you by the behavior of a very large dog at the post office today.

***

Dear Dog Owners of America:

Please train your dogs.

To those of you who actually do, I say, thank you! I appreciate your effort, and your dogs are probably lovely creatures. Unfortunately, you are in the minority, and the other dog-owners and their pets are making you look bad.

It used to be that whenever the Great Pet Debate came up — dogs vs. cats — I found myself wondering, why don’t I like dogs more? After all, the qualities ascribed to them sound great. I liked Platonic Dogs very well, but Actual Dogs much less, and I didn’t know why.

Then I realized that was because the majority of the Actual Dogs I meet are badly behaved.

They bark. They bite. They chew on stuff. They jump on anything and anyone they can get near. No, their “enthusiasm” is not adorable. In small dogs, it’s annoying; in large dogs, it can be outright dangerous. You know what’s adorable? A dog who knows how to express his enthusiasm in a socially acceptable fashion. Which is to say, a dog who is trained.

And no, a dog who brings the ball back when you’re playing fetch and sits (sometimes) on command is not “trained.” If you have to drag your dog down off the counter of the post office, your dog is badly trained and badly behaved. If he barks for a minute straight every time the doorbell rings, he is badly trained and badly behaved. If you have to bribe him with treats to get peace and quiet during dinner, he is badly trained and badly behaved. If he draws blood through my clothing because he tried to jump on me and his claws went raking down my thigh, he is badly trained and badly behaved.

A well-trained dog is one who knows how to behave like a civilized member of society.

I have met far too few of them in my life.

So please. For the love of god. Train your dog. Teach him when it is and is not okay to bark. Teach him to show enthusiasm with tail-wagging and jumping in place, not on people. Do not reward his bad behavior by giving him commands and then, when he ignores them, rewarding him with whatever it was he wanted. You owe it to your dog to be consistent, to give him a framework within which he can operate and be happy. And the rest of us would appreciate it very much.

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catching up on the (fiction-related) news

It’s taken me about a week to regenerate much brain, with most of what I could spare going to working on the next of the Memoirs. But I have some now, and so you get a news batch!

First of all, A Natural History of Dragons is in the semifinal round for Best Fantasy of 2013 over on Goodreads. I’m not saying you should go vote for it or anything. I’m just, y’know, mentioning.

you should totally go vote for it

Next up, Book View Café has a fun new anthology out: Mad Science Café. This debuted while I was out of the country, so I’m a bit behind the curve in announcing it, but it’s pretty much what the title would lead you to expect, i.e. lots of stories about Science Gone Wrong (Or Very, Very Right). It reprints my story “Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics As Employed Against Lycanthropes,” aka the Werewolf Fake Academic Paper story, so if you missed it when it first came out in Ekaterina Sedia’s Running with the Pack, here’s your chance!

I’m also in another anthology! Apex Magazine has put out The Book of Apex: Volume 4, which collects fifteen issues’ worth of the magazine, including my own “Waiting for Beauty.” That one’s available in print as well as electronic formats.

Speaking of anthologies (no, we’re not done yet), there’s an excerpt from “Centuries of Kings” up at Bookworm Blues. Because I was out of the country when that went up, the Kickstarter linked is over and done with (after successfully raising its target and more). But still, you can get a taster of the story, which will be in Neverland’s Library.

And finally, not about me: Mike Allen ([profile] time_shark), editor, poet, and fiction writer, has a novel out! The Black Fire Concerto, about which people have said many good things. It has a blurb from Tanith Lee! “A prize for the multitude of fans who relish strong Grand Guignol with their sword and sorcery.” Mike is, of course, the fellow who has brought you all four Clockwork Phoenix anthologies, not to mention Mythic Delirium and other such projects. If you dig horror, you should definitely check this out.

. . . did I mention that A Natural History of Dragons is up for a vote? ^_^

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minor to major

Hey, people who know more about music theory than I do:

How does one go about shifting a piece of music from a minor key to a major one? (Assume, for the purposes of this discussion, that I’m just looking to transpose a simple melodic line. No chords or anything to worry about.)

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things I have been enjoying since I got back

1) Not wearing the jacket I’ve been wearing every day for nearly a month.

2) Not wearing the shoes I’ve been wearing every day for nearly a month.

3) Not wearing shoes at all for much of the day, if I do not choose to.

4) Sleeping in my own bed.

5) Sleeeeeeeeeeeeping.

6) Going to the dojo and the gym. (There’s some discomfort associated with this one, because I basically didn’t stretch for a month and also walking = full exercise, but it’s still good.)

7) Seeing Thor: The Dark World, to which I said “Needz moar Loki.” My husband claims they actually filmed extra Loki scenes after the fact.

8) Seeing how my pictures from the trip turned out. (There are still too many of them.)

9) Working on the third Memoir. I sorted out some fun plot points on the trip, so now I get to make them happen.

10) Seriously, though. NO. SHOES.

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last of the photos

The last seven of these are new.

No photos from Brighton, alas. Partly because I was busy at the con, but more because it rained a fair bit while I was there, and when it wasn’t raining, the wind was trying to fling me into traffic. No, really: at one point a guy waiting at the intersection with me was leaning back into the wind at about a fifteen-degree angle, just letting it hold him up. It was kind of ridiculous. Since the weather also meant my glasses were constantly being coated in a thin layer of salt and grit, I decided not to expose my camera to such trials.

It might also have something to do with me being all OMG NO MORE PHOTOS, though. During this trip, I took nearly 3500 shots in total. A first pass of culling has dragged that number down to about 2400, which (by comparison) looks much more reasonable, but — jeebus. If we exclude the major outliers, i.e. the days where I took less than forty pictures, I averaged almost 230 per day. When we went to Highgate Cemetery, I took 350 in two and a half hours.

Which is by way of saying that, while I’ll definitely post more pictures later, it’s going to take a while for me to go through them all and do the necessary editing, labeling, etc. Don’t look for that to happen any time soon, I’m afraid. I had been all proud of myself and the work I’d done on my pre-existing catalogue of photos. All I had left to go through were my honeymoon and Poland, and I was thinking I could see the light at the end of the tunnel . . . but it turns out to have been the oncoming train of this trip. πŸ˜›

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five more photos

Added an additional five shots to the photoset so far. Still one per day, but not caught up to the present yet; I’ve fallen behind in dealing with my photos (surprise!), so there are three days I haven’t even gone through yet in search of good shots.

These are, for the record, totally unedited. I’ve tried to pick ones that look good already, but just think how much better they’ll look once they’ve gone through Lightroom!

In other news, I have discovered how many days is too many to be continually on my feet sightseeing. If I ever plan a trip this long again, I need to build in more downtime — or rather, find some way to silence the little voice that insists I should be out seeing stuff, being as how I went to all the effort of getting here.

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Yuletide signups are open!

One last post before I leave on my trip. (Okay, that might be a lie. I have no idea if something else will prod me into posting in the next twenty hours or so. But this is the last one I intend to make.)

Yuletide signups are open. If you already know and love Yuletide, go forth and have fun!

If you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about, keep reading.

(more…)

ARCs are here!

Look what showed up on my doorstep today!

As you can see, this ARC is decidedly more ARC-y looking, which is to say, more like a promotional thing than a copy of the book that just happens to be more cheaply printed. That wall o’ text on the cover is pull-quotes from a bunch of reviews for the first book, with the actual cover art squeezed into the corner there. But the text is the real deal (minus a few tweaks made during page proofs), and the interior art is in place, though the maps aren’t. So: on its way to being a Real Book!

I realized, dreadfully late, that I never did announce the results from the icon contest I did ages ago. [personal profile] obaona, as you may have seen from the icon on this post: you’re the winner! You can have a signed copy of either A Natural History of Dragons, or one of these pretty, pretty ARCs. Just e-mail me (marie {dot} brennan {at} gmail {dot} com) and let me know where to send it.

I will, of course, be looking for excuses to send more of these things to good homes. That will have to wait until after my trip, though. In the meanwhile, you’ll have to content yourself with the picture. ^_^

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