Dragons had a nice long weekend; how about you?

Two new giveaways popped up over the weekend: one at Short and Sweet, and one at WORD for Teens.

New interview over at Literary Escapism, where I’m asked about writing historical fantasy vs. secondary-world fantasy, and writing British-style stuff when I myself am American.

I also have a post up at Sci-Fi Songs wherein I talk about the soundtrack of the book. (Don’t tell anybody, but I always wish somebody would ask me about the soundtrack. I put so much work into it, and then I’m usually the only person who ever hears it — my music choices are too obscure for me to be able to put it together in a way that can be shared online.)

And, unrelated to dragons, it’s time for my usual post at SF Novelists. This time it’s An Open Letter to the Creators of Sexist Fantasy and Comic Book Art. (Comment over there; no login required.)

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Writing Fight Scenes: Sentence Structure

NOTE: You can now buy the revised and expanded version of this blog series as an ebook, in both epub and mobi formats.

[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]

Step up one level from the nouns and verbs you’re going to be using over and over and overandoverandover again in your fight scenes, and it’s time to consider how you’re going to string them together into sentences.

There are two main schools of thought on this, and I’m going to give you the one I disagree with first.

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Talk to me about tablets, part 2

I made that post the other day in a hurry, hence not going into detail about what I’m looking for and how I’m using my laptop right now. But in a way, that made it more interesting; I got a broad array of answers. Thank you all!

So now comes the detail, and if you have other advice to offer, please do.

First of all, I have a desktop computer, which is where I do 95% of my writing work — maybe more. Also a lot of e-mail, websurfing, listening to music, and most of my game-playing. That’s still working fine.

My laptop mostly gets used in front of the TV, where I deal with e-mail and surf the web while watching TV. Sometimes I write blog posts. It also gets taken along when I travel, and that’s where its deficiency really starts to show: it’s too large, too heavy, too inconvenient. It takes too long to wake up and reacquire a wireless signal, which is partly a function of its slow degeneration from age — but not entirely.

Ergo, I want something that is smaller, lighter, and more responsive, as well as something that can function as a better ebook reader than the tiny screen of my phone. Netbooks are generally too small; I don’t have large hands, but it’s still a bad ergonomic idea for me to try and type a lot on such a small keyboard. I think I’d be better off with a Bluetooth keyboard for a tablet, which will be about the size of the one on my current laptop. An ultrabook is a possibility . . . but I’m not sure I really need something on that scale, for the use I make of it.

On the other hand, I’m not a fan of the restricted environment of an app market, whether Android or iOS, which is a point against tablets. (The Surface would be a compromise on that front, but it has other things against it — price for one, and apparently it’s a nightmare to repair.)

Anyway, I’m likely to go test-drive some prospects soon, as this laptop is having an increasing amount of trouble finding our wireless network and maintaining a connection to it. Without that, it’s nothing more than a very hot brick. So if you have advice to offer, get it in fast, ’cause time is running out!

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Dragon roundup

Before I get to the new links, remember that you, too, can receive a handwritten letter from Lady Trent! That runs through the end of the month.

***

(You thought I was exaggerating when I said I would be EVERYWHERE ON THE INTERNET this month. It ain’t even done yet, folks.)

The Books and Things post, by the way, includes another giveaway. That’s the only new one I’ve found in the last few days, though.

***

Was it really only a week ago that I was in . . . where was I on Friday? San Diego. Wow. And barely more than a week since the book came out! But so far, it seems to be going pretty well.

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Happy Retcon Day

Once upon a time, there was a guy who was interested in a girl. He’d been interested in her for a month or two, and they had recently gone out to dinner on (theoretically) non-romantic grounds, so he was intending to ask her out.

He faced a choice, though. The aforementioned dinner had been on February 12th. Should he ask her out on Valentine’s Day? No, he decided; that would be (his choice of words) “cheesy.” He baked her cookies on the 14th, though, and ultimately asked her out on the 16th.

The two of them dated for many years, and eventually got married. But along the way, a small problem developed.

You see, this guy — sometimes known to the internet as [profile] kniedzw — decided, in direct contradiction of his own reasoning before, to declare Valentine’s Day their anniversary. The girl — sometimes known to the internet as [personal profile] swan_tower — is perfectly happy to celebrate the fourteenth of February as Valentine’s Day and also their Cookie Anniversary (a very important occasion!), but she objects strenuously to this blatant ret-conning of their past.

(She attempted to settle this matter more firmly by proposing to him on the sixteenth of February seven years after they started dating, in the hopes that it would give that date greater historical weight. No dice.)

At this point, of course, she suspects he’s sticking to the point simply because arguing over it has become tradition. But in the meantime, she is celebrating her Cookie Anniversary (nom nom nom), and wishes you all a very happy Retcon Day.

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Talk to me about tablets

My laptop is, after nearly six years of good-to-middling service, tottering along on its last legs. I’m thinking that at this point it makes the most sense for me to pick up a tablet instead of a full laptop, but I don’t really know what to look at.

What’s out there right now, that isn’t an iPad? (I’m considering that too, but A: I’m a PC user and B: my brother worked on the iPad, so if I need proselytizing and/or information, all I have to do is walk down the street.) What do you recommend? What do you recommend I stay away from?

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Writing Fight Scenes: Word Choice

NOTE: You can now buy the revised and expanded version of this blog series as an ebook, in both epub and mobi formats.

[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]

One of these days, I will actually finish this series of posts. 🙂 Today, we come one step closer to that goal!

Fight scenes, oddly enough, have certain technical challenges in common with sex scenes. Namely, both of them are primarily concerned with describing physical movement, and in the course of so doing, they have to refer to certain objects and actions again and again and again and again. And if you try to get too creative in the avoidance of repetition, you very rapidly slide down into the abyss of purple prose.

So how do you get around this?

Giveaways, as far as the eye can see!

Update on the Con or Bust auction: bidding is up to $35 dollars, having just opened on Saturday. Remember that this copy of A Natural History of Dragons is signed by me and by Todd Lockwood, and furthermore that he drew another dragon on the first page! It’s shiiiinyyyyyy . . . .

(I should mention that I’m also auctioning off signed copies of A Star Shall Fall and With Fate Conspire. We now return you to your regularly scheduled ANHoD update.)

Other giveaways: good lord, you can’t throw a rock right now without hitting one. I’m probably missing a few, but so far I know of one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight underway.

Three new bits of content as well. At Bookish, I talk about how I came up with the different dragon types, and at My Bookish Ways I answer various interview questions. Also, over at No More Grumpy Bookseller, I discuss why Victorian-ish fantasy is so popular right now (or at least, why I like it).

Finally, don’t forget that Letters from Lady Trent is underway! I may delay my responses just slightly, to see if I can obtain something Extra Awesome to include in my replies . . . I need to go look into that.

Anyway, there’s a few things to entertain you all, and I promise I’ll be back soon with non-ANHoD-related blogging!

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End of the (tour) line

Just as a reminder, I have one final stop on my tour, this one local to me. If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, I’ll be reading and signing at Borderlands Books starting at 3 p.m. I hope to see some of you there!

Tour updates of various sorts

Where am I? What day is it? Friday? I guess I must be in San Diego, then. Wait, no, haven’t gotten on a plane yet today — I’m still in Portland.

(No really, when I woke up it took me an appallingly long time to figure that out, and also which direction to look in for the door.)

Updates! Giveaways first, since those are shiny: in addition to Jim Hines’ (which is still ongoing), you can try to win a copy from The Bookish Babes (which has an excerpt and a brief Q&A with me as well) or Book Chick City (also with a guest post and an excerpt).

Or, if you’d rather rely on a charitable donation rather than luck of the draw, I have a DOUBLE-SIGNED COPY up as an auction item for Con or Bust, the travel fund for fans and writers of color to attend conventions. What do I mean by “double-signed”? I mean it has my autograph, and it has Todd Lockwood’s — along with a sketch of a dragon Todd drew inside. So that one’s extra-shiny, and the money goes to a good cause.

Guest posts etc not mentioned above:

And finally, not directly related to ANHoD but live right now anyway, another SF Signal Mind Meld, wherein I discuss print and ebooks (luddite that I am) with a bunch of other people.

. . . I think that’s it, at least for now. And if you’ll pardon me, I have to go catch a plane!

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A Natural History of Dragons!

Grrrrrrrrrreetings and salutations, O Internets. Today is a frabjous day for me, as it is the day that A Natural History of Dragons goes on sale in reputable bookshops everywhere!

(The ones who started selling it early are also probably reputable. They just jumped the gun a bit, is all.)

Don’t forget that I will be participating in the Month of Letters Challenge; check that link for details on how to get your own hand-written letter from Lady Trent. You have all month!

***

There are going to be a lot of sightings of me around the Internet for the next month and more, as I undertake a blog tour for this book. Rather than spamming you with links every time an interview or guest post goes live, I’m going to collate them into round-ups. As of today, we have the following:

A giveaway at Jim Hines’ blog. He provided an excellent blurb for A Natural History of Dragons, so Tor sent him four finished copies of the book, of which he is giving away three. But wait, there’s more! He has signed the back of the book, under his blurb, and I am sending him stickers so they can be autographed by me, too. In fact, it’s possible that Daniel Fox (the blurber beneath him in that photo) will also be contributing. If you can snag one of these, and then track down Melanie Rawn and Todd Lockwood, you’ll have the most thoroughly signed copy of this novel in existence! To get a copy, head on over to Jim’s blog and write your own blurb for the fake book Mary’s Angels (previously featured in his Aicardi Foundation fundraiser).

“Why Do Dragons Look Like That?” A PW Tip Sheet, wherein you can see some of the interior sketches from the book, and read my thoughts on why I chose those parts of the story to be illustrated.

“An Interview with Lady Trent, Dragon Naturalist” From the Tor/Forge newsletter, an in-character interview of Lady Trent, by a muckraking journalist of her own world. 🙂

“The Pop Quiz at the End of the Universe” An entirely silly interview with me, featuring seventeenth-century profanity!

Blog Critics interview — and finally, a more serious and thorough interview, where I talk about academia and female protagonists.

***

Finally, a quick reminder that tomorrow I embark on my book tour. If you’re in Seattle, Portland, San Diego, or San Francisco, please do stop by and say hi!

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Books read, January 2013

The list of books I started reading and gave up on (permanently) is longer than the list of books I finished. <sigh> It was one of those months.

At least I’ve learned to give up on things, though. Once upon a time I felt like I had to finish every book I started, and that would have made this month substantially more boring. (We will ignore how many of these I kept reading after the point where I should have stopped, in the hopes that they would get better.)

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The Month of Letters returns!

As you may recall, last year I particpated in Mary Robinette Kowal’s Month of Letters challenge, inviting people to write letters to the characters from the Onyx Court series. I sent replies on old-fashioned paper, handwritten with a dip pen, sealed with wax, and generally had a blast.

This year, your correspondent will be Isabella, protagonist of A Natural History of Dragons. The book isn’t out quite yet, of course — next Tuesday!!! — but you’ll still have most of February in which to meet Isabella via fiction and then write to her via post.

Send your letters to:

Marie Brennan
P.O. Box 6802
San Mateo, CA 94403

IMPORTANT: Address the outside envelope to me, not to Isabella. Otherwise your letter may get bounced by the post office as being for a recipient not at that address. ALSO IMPORTANT: Include your return address! Otherwise I can’t write back.

Now if you’ll pardon me, I have to go practice my cursive again. It’s gotten rusty since last year . . . .

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Tour schedule for next week

I also posted this to my site, but here it is for more noticeable access:

Wednesday, February 6, Seattle, WA

Thursday, February 7, Portland, OR

  • 7 PM — reading and signing at Beaverton Powell’s

Friday, February 8, San Diego, CA

Sunday, February 10, San Francisco, CA

And then April 20-21, I’ll be at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. As for my convention plans for the rest of the year, I need to sort those out . . . .

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CP4 TOC

I still have to revise the book, of course — or I should say, finish revising; I’ve been working on that as I go along — but I have enough brain and breathing room now to catch up on a few things that slipped through the cracks while I was busy.

First up! I sold a story! To Mike Allen! For Clockwork Phoenix 4! (Maintaining my streak: Tanith Lee and I are the only ones with a story in every CP anthology to date.) You may remember this as a Kickstarter project a while ago; well, the project was a success, and now the anthology is underway. The finished TOC consists of:

  • Yves Meynard, “Our Lady of the Thylacines”
  • Ian McHugh, “The Canal Barge Magician’s Number Nine
  • Nicole Kornher-Stace, “On the Leitmotif of the Trickster Constellation in Northern Hemispheric Star Charts, Post-Apocalypse”
  • Richard Parks, “Beach Bum and the Drowned Girl”
  • Gemma Files, “Trap-Weed”
  • Yukimi Ogawa, “Icicle”
  • A.C. Wise, “Lesser Creek: A Love Story, A Ghost Story”
  • Marie Brennan, “What Still Abides”
  • Alisa Alering, “The Wanderer King”
  • Tanith Lee, “A Little of the Night”
  • Cat Rambo, “I Come from the Dark Universe”
  • Shira Lipkin, “Happy Hour at the Tooth and Claw”
  • Corinne Duyvis, “Lilo Is”
  • Kenneth Schneyer, “Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer”
  • Camille Alexa, “Three Times”
  • Benjanun Sriduangkaew, “The Bees Her Heart, the Hive Her Belly”
  • Patricia Russo, “The Old Woman with No Teeth”
  • Barbara Krasnoff, “The History of Soul 2065″

Mike Allen has more to say about it here. My story, “What Still Abides”, is the one I was complaining about before, saying that it was trying to kill me; well, it failed, and then it sold, so at least I got something for my suffering. 🙂

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comic books for young children?

Question on behalf of friends:

They are looking for comic books suitable for their five-year-old daughter to read. She reads at the level of an eight- or nine-year-old, in terms of vocabulary and comprehension; however, she does not have the emotional or psychological development of a kid that age. In particular, she has recently started to grok what death means, and is deeply upset by it; ergo stories that involve death are (at present) Right Out. (Even in a therapeutic, coming-to-terms-with-it way. The parents are handling the issue, but for now they don’t want to give her stories that will trigger a meltdown.) Ergo, they’re looking for lighthearted things with content suitable for a five-year-old, even if the language is more sophisticated than that.

Suggestions? My own knowledge of comic books is pretty narrow, and in terms of age suitability doesn’t go any younger than, oh, Elfquest. They want comic books because although their daughter’s reading comprehension is great, she’s much more interested in stories that have pictures than those without. And, y’know. The parents are geeks, too, and it’s never too early to indoctrinate your child!

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Recent offerings from Book View Cafe

book not done book not done book not done <pant pant pant>

But I’m surfacing long enough to post something I’ve had sitting around for weeks, which is the list of recent offerings from BVC. Before I get into the full list, I want to call out this one particularly:

Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars, edited by Nisi Shawl

Eleven original stories by recipients of the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship (2007 through 2012), plus a reprint of “Speech Sounds” by the scholarship’s namesake, Octavia E. Butler. This anthology also includes a brief memoir of Butler by her Clarion classmate Vonda N. McIntyre and an introduction by Nalo Hopkinson.

Every year, the Carl Brandon Society, whose goal is to increase diversity in the field of science fiction, presents scholarships to two students of color accepted to the prestigious Clarion and Clarion West writers’ workshops. The scholarships, named in honor of the brilliant African-American writer Octavia Butler, pay workshop tuition and housing fees for the recipients. Since 2007, they have made it possible for eleven students to attend the workshops.

Give a little, get a free ebook.

If you contribute a mere $8.01 to the scholarship fund, you can download Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars, an ebook anthology of science fiction and fantasy stories by these students — the voices of the new generation of writers of color in speculative fiction.

This special ebook is available only until June 22, 2013, Octavia’s birthday. She would have been sixty-six this year.

Octavia taught at Clarion and Clarion West, and provided enormous support there — and elsewhere — to other writers of color. Through these scholarships, she continues to do so.

Help continue Octavia’s work.

Other new books, from Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Pati Nagle, Gregory Frost, and David D. Levine

Something more like a book

After yet more whinging and moaning and telling myself I earned a break with yesterday’s work, I made myself put my butt in the chair and start typing . . . and two thousand words later, I have hit the mighty 80K mark, which is the point at which this starts to feel like a Real Book to me.

Of course, this isn’t the Onyx Court: I’m aiming for 90K total, rather than the nearly 160K that With Fate Conspire ended up clocking. So that particular boundary lies quite close to the Finished Book line right now. I still have various things that need fixing — in fact, I’ve been revising as I go for a while, settling the characters who kept changing their names, putting guns on mantelpieces after I realized I needed to fire them somewhere in the 70K stretch, etc — but I’m going to arrive at the end of this month with a passably decent draft, I think.

And that, my friends, is victory.

Edited to add — bonus (spoiler-redacted) quote, to celebrate my achievement, and the fact that two finished copies of A Natural History of Dragons showed up today:

This is how I marched out of [place] toward [place] with what, at first glance, might understandably be mistaken for a small invading army.

Fortunately, the confusion was resolved before anyone fired upon us.

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