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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this is why the first rule is, put your butt in the chair and start typing

For a night when I really didn’t want to start working and whinged and moaned about it and tried to convince myself I could get away with a night off (I really, really can’t), those 3500 words sure fell out of my head awfully easy.

Especially given that my aim was only to write 2000 words tonight.

I could take the night off tomorrow, if I wanted. But I need to remember this part is fun, and also that getting the book done sooner rather than later is a good thing.

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Worldbuilders

As in previous years, Patrick Rothfuss is running Worldbuilders, a charity auction/lottery to raise money for Heifer International.

He’s been adding prizes in batches, and mine just went live. By donating, your name will go into the lottery, with a chance to win not only copies of Warrior and Witch, but a signed ARC of A Natural History of Dragons. Plus there’s, like, a bazillion other awesome prizes — you can check out the site for more.

Go forth! Donate!

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Current and upcoming ANHoD stuff

First off, SF Signal is currently doing a Book Cover Smackdown!, Dragon Edition. Head over there to see the four covers A Natural History of Dragons is competing against, and vote for your favorite. (Hint, hint . . . not that I’m biased or anything.)

This and the reviews that have started popping up are the leading edge of the flood. ANHoD comes out February 5th, and starting then, I am going to be ALL OVER THE INTERNET. I’m not kidding; this blog tour we’ve got planned is srs bsns. I’ve done what I can to make sure I’m not horribly repeating myself, though, so at least you won’t be seeing the same guest post in seventeen places.

But wait! There’s more!

I am going to be traveling the weekend after the book’s release, doing signings in Seattle (2/6), Portland (2/7), San Diego (2/8), and San Francisco (2/10). I’ll post pretty soon with the details of those events, i.e. times and locations. If you’re local to any of the four, please do stop by!

And, last but not least, I will be repeating the Month of Letters experiment from last year, this time with Isabella as your correpondant. So in February, you can write to her and receive a handwritten, wax-sealed letter in return. (I’d better start practicing my cursive again . . .)

Oh yeah, and I’m finishing the second book right now and will be revising it some time in the middle of all that stuff. Because I am not a sensible person. Whee!

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How to Fix iTunes

Several people were interested in this, so I figured a new post was better than replying in several places.

I believe what I did was this:

1) Click on the little dark/light rectangle in the top left — the one with a down arrow next to it, that does nothing to tell you what it’s for. (Design failure #1: I’m clicking semi-randomly on things to find out what they are.)

2) In that menu, tell it to show me the menu bar.

3) Now I have a “File/Edit/View/etc” bar. Thank god. But there’s something else I have to do before that can become useful.

4) Click over to Songs in that top ribbon — not the menu bar I just brought in.

5) This allows me to deal with the “Column Browser” sub-menu under “View,” which was inactive when I was still on the default Artist tab. I think it defaulted to showing me the column browser (which is what I wanted), but if not, you can turn it on here.

6) Now you have your genres/artists/albums listings up above, with the songs below, like it used to be (at least for me). But where the hell are my playlists and such, that used to be on the left???

7) Again under “View,” click “Show Sidebar.”

8) If you want, you can also click “Show Status Bar,” which gives you back the bottom edge of the window, where it lists stats.

That got me back all the navigational tools I was accustomed to using. I basically will never click on that top ribbon again, the one with “Songs/Artists/Albums/etc,” as any tab other than “Songs” is Ye Newe Terrible View.

Also, the “shuffle” button now operates more like on an iPod: it’s up by the top of a playlist name, and you click on it to start the music playing in a shuffled fashion. If, once it’s started, you want to turn off shuffling, that’s in the window where it shows time, etc.

Hopefully that’s useful to people.

Dear Apple

I understand wanting to make improvements to your program. But when I install a new version of iTunes and it defaults to a different layout that is HORRIBLE and NOTHING LIKE WHAT I HAD BEFORE, and I have to hunt around to 1) find what to click on to get a toolbar and 2) experiment in that toolbar to get back the navigational framework I had before? That is not an improvement. That is me staring in horror at what you’ve inflicted on me and praying to high heaven I can get it back to what it used to be. (Which I could. Thank god.)

Don’t do that to me again.

a fundraiser for Jay Lake

For those of you not aware, Jay Lake — author, blogger, and all-round excellent guy — was diagnosed with cancer back in 2008, and at every step of the way, the dice have turned up snake eyes for him. Now he’s approaching a dead end in treatment, where there won’t be anything new for his doctors to try, that hasn’t already failed.

There is, however, the possibility of whole genome sequencing, which would potentially allow them to tailor his chemo regimen to his cancer much more specifically. This is, of course expensive — but in the time it’s taken me to put up this post, the campaign to raise the money has passed the $20K goal already. Given the financial burdens on Jay (despite good employment and good insurance), overshooting isn’t a bad thing. So consider sparing a few bucks, if you can.

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A Memory of Light Liveblog, Part 2

Today I continue reading A Memory of Light, and subjecting you all to my stream-of-consciousness reactions as I go. (Where by “all” I mean “those of you who click on the cut tag,” which is probably not a lot, since at this point 95% of my audience probably falls into two groups: those who don’t care, and those who do care but haven’t read the book yet themselves and don’t want spoilers.)

First part is here, for those few who care and have read the book/don’t mind spoilers.

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to whet your appetite some more

It’s probably mean of me to tease you guys with tidbits from the second book when the first one isn’t even out yet . . . but I have to share. Tonight’s writing featured a location based on this:

Yeah.

(I saw that image back in November, I think, and instantaneously chucked out something I had half-planned for the novel, because CLEARLY I needed to use this instead. And writing these scenes? Is awesome.)

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