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Posts Tagged ‘a natural history of dragons’

a snippet for your weekend delectation

Mostly I don’t post quotes from works in progress because I have trouble picking good ones that aren’t also full of spoilers. But this, the final paragraph of tonight’s work, entertains me:

Of course, there was the minor problem of the Green Hell being one of the deadliest regions on earth. But my interest was, that evening, still academic; my purpose in coming to Bayembe was to study the dragons of their arid plains. Moulish swamp-wyrms were a minor note — in much the same way that a fisherman’s lure is a minor note in the world of a fish.

Isabella: still fun to write.

not so much five things as everything on hand

1) The Red Cross book sale raised $250 (I added a bit to make a nice round number). Thank you to everyone who a) supported the cause and b) took some of these books off my hands!

2) Speaking of books, I just got the news that the Science Fiction Book Club has acquired A Natural History of Dragons as an Editor’s Pick. Given that they did the entire Onyx Court series as well, this makes me very happy.

3) Speaking of other things related to my job, both Sirens and 4th Street Fantasy are open for registration. I haven’t yet settled my con schedule for next year, but there are good odds of me being at both of these — and whether I am or not, I highly recommend them both to all of you.

4) Speaking of things related to other people’s jobs as writers, Patricia Burroughs is running a costume contest between now and December 4th. This is your chance to play dress-up and win an ebook and a gift certificate. I know some of you are costumer types, so check it out!

5) Speaking of, um, okay, I’m having trouble inventing segues . . . speaking of other people’s jobs as creative people (in this case, art), Robert Scott (he of the Urban Tarot Deck) now has an online store, selling prints not only of various Urban Tarot cards, but other work he’s done. So much pretty stuff . . . .

6) Speaking of things totally unrelated to everything above, I encourage you all to check out Rolling Jubilee. This post does a good job of articulating why I support the project, as does this one. Short form: it’s a way to short-circuit one of the systems that perpetuates and feeds the growing inequality in the United States. And I’m kind of in favor of that.

7) Giving on up on segues, this video is nifty.

8) . . . and that’s all I’ve got for now.

no kitchen sinks, though

Since I just put Chekhov’s hang glider into this story, I thought I would share with you guys some of the items scribbled down in my notebook, on the page designated for Cool Things What I Intend to Put Into the Second Dragons Book:

  • talking drums
  • griots
  • witchcraft
  • blacksmiths
  • leeches
  • malaria
  • poisons/hallucinogens
  • waterfall island
  • guard dragons
  • masks
  • iron/gold/salt/ivory
  • booby traps

And some other things that would be too spoilery to share.

Mind you, Isabella is looking over my metaphorical shoulder and objecting strongly to my classification of malaria as a “cool thing” (she’s no happier about the prospect of me replacing it with yellow fever), but narratively speaking, it qualifies. 🙂 (Confidential to kurayami_hime: at least it’s not the plague!)

I’m still working on stringing all this stuff together into a book, rather than a collection of things I think are neat, but hey. There are worse ways to build a novel than throwing awesome bits of setting at the page. (It’s more or less how I built several of the Onyx Court books, and that seems to have worked out okay.)

Books read, October 2012

Way late, but that’s because I came home with a cold and then, just as I was recovering from it, contracted a different one! Yay! Wait, not yay. Anti-yay.

Saba: Under the Hyena’s Foot, Jane Kurtz. This was a startlingly political book. It’s part of the Girls of Many Lands series, which is the “rest of the world” companion to the American Girl thing, i.e. the dolls you may have seen. It takes place in Ethiopia in 1846, and features kidnappings, assassinations, and palace coups — in other words, a lot more in the way of political intrigue than I would have expected out of an “intermediate fiction” doll tie-in book. They’re all written by different authors, so the quality is undoubtedly all over the place, but I note that Laurance Yep wrote a Chinese book for the series (Spring Pearl: The Last Flower) and Chitra Banerjee Divarakuni wrote an Indian one (Neela: Victory Song), so I’m inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and say they’re worth checking out.

Unspoken, Sarah Rees Brennan. YA update of the old “gothic” genre. I was mildly distracted by the part-Japanese protagonist being named “Kami” (though there’s an explanation for it in the story), and early on I felt like the peppiness of the narrator’s voice was at odds with the gothic mood. But the peppiness settled down as the story went on, and the explanation for the name came along, and I ended up quite enjoying this one. The premise — and this comes out early enough that I don’t think it’s a spoiler — is that Kami has always had an “imaginary friend” in her head, a guy named Jared that she talks to all the time. And then Jared shows up. Because he’s a real person. And one of the things I liked best about the book was how this was not a Wonderful Thing, but a shocking development neither of them can quite cope with, because they’re not what each other expected and yet they know each other really well and it’s really traumatic to lose something that was both a deep source of comfort and a constant risk of being thought genuinely delusional by those around you.

Fair warning, though: the book, while it does resolve the central mystery, leaves a whole mess of things dangling for future plot development. So if you are looking for a nice tidy satisfying package of a book, this is not it.

Wieliczka: Historic Salt Mine, Janusz Podlecki. Very short book, mostly consisting of photographs. A souvenir of this place, which I will be reporting on soon if I ever get around to blogging about the Poland trip.

The Jews in the Time of Jesus: An Introduction, Stephen M. Wylen. A discussion of what first-century Judaism was like, and its relationship both to modern Judaism and modern Christianity. I’ve studied the early Church before, and that entailed a bit of talking about Judaism, but this was kind of the other side of that picture. It’s not wholly focused on the first century and its aftermath, though: in order to make that part make sense, it starts with a very concise little potted history of Judaism in general, which I also needed and was grateful for. (Things like “the Babylonian Exile” are more than just phrases to me now.)

Writing-wise, I kind of wanted to smack the author. He has a tendency to write in short, declarative sentences. The sentences I’m using here are examples. This gets tedious after a while. Also, there’s a very didactic tone in places, like where he patiently takes you by the hand and explains that the “pious Jewish” interpretation of X and the “pious Christian” interpretation of X are not the same as the “secular historical” interpretation of X, and I’m like, no shit, Sherlock. Occasionally I feels he fails as a historian, too, like when he says “The Pharisees were much more important when [the Mishnah and the New Testament] were being written than they were in the time of Jesus and the Temple” (okay) and then later says “The attention [the Pharisees] receive in [the New Testament] tells us that they really were important in the time of Jesus.” Um. I think your editor missed something there, sir.

Despite those nitpicks, however, overall I found the book quite useful.

This was the month of Not Finishing Books, either because I quit on them or because I only needed to read pieces or because I hadn’t finished them yet. (November has already featured the completion of two books I started in October.)

And now I convince myself not to go fall asleep again.

five things are all the post my brain can manage right now

1) As a reminder, the book sale will be running until next Thursday morning. I should mention that my goal is to downsize my stock until it actually fits once more in the official Box of Author Copies. And, um. We’re not there yet. <gives stacks of books the side-eye>

2) Pati Nagle is donating $2 per sale from her book Dead Man’s Hand to the Food Bank of South Jersey for the remainder of this month.

3) On a different charitable front, the Strange Horizons fund drive is in its last few days. All donors get entered into a draw for these prizes, which include a full-color ARC of A Natural History of Dragons.

4) Speaking of ANHoD, mrissa has a lovely advance review of it up on her blog. (I think this is perhaps slightly less of a tailored-for-mrissas book than A Star Shall Fall was, but apparently not by much.) Also, a review of Lies and Prophecy, which I’ve been meaning to link to for a while.

5) Finally, I’m blogging at BVC again today, on what makes a folktale. Go there to guess what makes some fantasy seem fairy-tale-like, even when it isn’t actually retelling a fairy tale.

disaster relief book sale fundraiser

I’m going to take care of two problems here today:

1) I would like to raise funds for the American Red Cross in the wake of Hurricane Sandy,

2) I have way too many author copies around the house, that I’d like to get rid of.

So we’re having a book sale here at Swan Tower. Comment on this post, or e-mail me at marie{dot}brennan{at}gmail{dot}com, and I will sell you the following books at the following prices, including autographs and (if you request it) personalization to you or another person of your choice.

Note that the prices are a bit higher than they might otherwise be, to ensure that packaging and shipping doesn’t take too big a bite out of the Red Cross donation total. (I will send books overseas, too, but since this is for charity, I will probably ask you to kick in a few bucks extra to cover the increased cost of shipping.)

    $10

  • A Star Shall Fall, mass market paperback (17 copies, was 19)
  • Warrior, mass market paperback (2 copies)
  • Witch, mass market paperback (1 copy)

Please spread the word wherever you think people would be interested. I’ll try to keep this list updated in a timely manner, so that you’ll know how many books are left of each type. ETA: Total raised thus far = $245

The sale will run for one week (so, through next Thursday morning, the 8th of November).

we can’t all be the goddamned Batman

There’s a moment in The Dark Knight Rises — don’t worry; no spoilers — where Bruce Wayne gets from one part of the world to the other, in a very short span of time, without access to his usual resources.

How does he manage that? As kniedzw said when I brought this up to him, “He’s the goddamned Batman, that’s how.”

And you know, I’m fine with that as an answer. It fits the genre, and the place that scene occupies in the story; nobody wants to pause there for an extended dissertation on the logistics of international travel. Or even a short one, really. If it isn’t an interesting and relevant part of the story, we should skip over it and get to the parts that are.

. . . I talk a good talk there, but the truth is that I have a damn hard time doing this in my own work. Skipping over routine things, sure. I don’t do a blow-by-blow of every last action my characters take. But when something less than 100% routine happens, I have a hard time saying “my character is the goddamned Batman” and moving on. If I’d been writing The Dark Knight Rises, I would have had to figure out — for my own edification, if nobody else’s — just how Bruce Wayne got from A to B under those circumstances. And, if it were a novel, probably looked for a place to toss in a line of narration or dialogue nodding in the direction of whatever explanation I worked out. Because however willing I am to grant other people’s stories the benefit of the doubt in these cases, I have a hard time believing anybody else will do the same for me.

Obviously there are places where the benefit of the doubt falls down. If the thing being glossed over is too outrageous, I can’t bridge that gap, and the stumble distracts me from the story. Or if you make too frequent a habit of doing it, I begin to feel like you’re lazy, dodging all the hard stuff because you only want to have fun (and your fun gets flimsier as a result). Or if you’re trying to be all realistic and crunchy about how things get done, and then you handwave past something major, I suspect you did that because you couldn’t find a way to get it done, and your only answer was to cheat. I also think it’s easier for movies to get away with this trick than novels. They move at their own pace, rather than the reader’s, leaving less time for spotting holes; they also aren’t expected to go into as much detail, lest their run time be nine hours. And some genres accommodate this trick better than others.

But we do it in novels, too, whether the extent is lesser or greater. Dorothy Dunnett spends all of a couple of sentences on telling us how half a dozen guys made their way across sixteenth-century Europe to Russia. Those sentences nod to them having a lot of trouble doing it, but it’s only a nod, with no explanation; we are invited to understand that they are each the goddamned Batman, and that’s how they managed it.

Sometimes it’s a benefit for me to work through those things, to answer all the logistical questions for myself, if not for the reader. Sometimes, though . . . it’s easy to get hung up on this, to stall forward progress because I have to nail down every last detail in my head. And sometimes I catch myself subsequently putting those details into the story, because if I don’t show my math I don’t trust that the reader will trust me.

It isn’t just a plot issue; sometimes it’s a worldbuilding one, too. For Isabella’s memoirs, I’m working through a myriad of details on climate, geology, and other such details of the natural world, because my hindbrain is convinced that I can’t be allowed to gloss over a single thing there. We aren’t talking Tolkien’s suspiciously rectangular mountain ranges here, either: I mean that if I don’t set up the elevation and surrounding topography of the swamps of Mouleen precisely right for the amount of rainfall they receive, everybody will notice.

And the truth is, only some readers will. The climatologists among you. If they’re paying close attention. And maybe not even then, since it isn’t like I’m providing information on the exact latitude of Mouleen, or the direction of ocean currents along its shore. (Though believe you me, my brain would try to work the ocean currents out, if I didn’t keep it on a leash.)

I have to do some of this for the series because it’s about a scientist, and that means I need to be able to talk about the science without the whole thing falling down. But it is also supposed to be an adventure. The adventure tone is not served by me anxiously showing my math on every last detail of plot and setting. And yet I still struggle to believe that I can get away with anything, even as I let other people do it all the time.

I’d be interested in examples of authors you think have done this badly or well. What factors determine how willing you are to leap over those gaps?

Purty pictures!

Now that everybody’s had time to send me icons . . . alessandriana, you’re the winner! Many, many thanks, and as you can see, I’m already using it. If you send your mailing address to me (marie {dot} brennan [at] gmail {dot} com), I’ll get the ARC on its way to you.

Of course, those of you who have gotten ARCs have only gotten the story. (And a not-fully-revised version of the story, at that — though at this point I’ve totally lost track of what I changed after they got printed.) You don’t have the lovely, lovely cover, and you don’t have what showed up in my inbox today:

The interior art.

See, back when I was developing this pitch, my agent suggested that I make Isabella an artist. Life drawing was — and still is — an important skill for natural historians. The idea clicked, and then I had a pie-in-the-sky hope: could I convince my publisher to include sketches in the book? Sketches of Isabella’s own work?

Tor agreed, and so not only is Todd Lockwood doing the cover, he’s producing ten rougher, black-and-white drawings that will be scattered throughout the novel. It is perfect. They aren’t all done yet — a few are still in the “preliminary sketch” stage — but the ones I’ve seen are utterly fabulous. And it will add so much to the book, being able to have the artwork in there, supporting the idea that Isabella is drawing everything she sees in Vystrana.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to sneak any previews of that to you guys before the book comes out. But I wanted to let you know that my beautiful, beautiful cover is not the only Lockwood art this book will have; the purtiness continues inside. I can’t wait to see the finished product.

what I’ve been sitting on for months now

It got an official, shiny reveal on Tor.com today. Several people there have already mentioned the D&D Draconomicon, and that’s no accident: Todd Lockwood’s line drawings in that book were one of the elements that inspired this series in the first place. So when I found out he was going to be doing the art for MY book . . . .

You can imagine my reaction. ^_^

And, the usual drill: I need an icon! And I have no Photoshop skills! If you make me an LJ icon out of that cover, and post it in the comments, I will pick one and send the winner my final ARC of A Natural History of Dragons. (Final for now; I’m sure I’ll have more later.) The book itself won’t be out until February of next year, so you’d be getting quite a jump on everybody else.

Now if you’ll pardon me, I need to go off and make little eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee noises to myself for a while longer.

a meme, because why not

Via alecaustin and mrissa:

1. Go to page 77 (or 7th) of your current ms
2. Go to line 7
3. Copy down the next 7 lines – sentences or paragraphs – and post them as they’re written. No cheating.

I chose page 7 because page 77 happened to fall on a chapter break, and didn’t have enough lines on it to suffice. Appropriately, the incident being related happened when the character was seven years old. From A Natural History of Dragons:

My curiosity soon drove me to an act which I blush to think upon today, not for the act itself (as I have done similar things many times since then, if in a more meticulous and scholarly fashion), but for the surreptitious and naive manner in which I carried it out.

In my wanderings one day, I found a dove which had fallen dead under a hedgerow. I immediately remembered what the cook had said, that all birds had wishbones. She had not named doves in her list, but doves were birds, were they not? Perhaps I might learn what they were for, as I could not learn when I watched the footman carve up a goose at the dinner table.

I took the dove’s body and hid it behind the hayrick next to the barn, then stole inside and pinched a penknife from Andrew, the brother immediately senior to me, without him knowing. Once outside again, I settled down to my study of the dove.

. . . Isabella’s sentences are on the long side. But I’d call that pretty representative of her story. (And yes, she is about to engage in amateur dissection.)

ANHoD Giveaway: the winner!

My high-tech not-quite-randomization system (which excludes certain people, like those who are already getting an advance look at the book via other means, or my mother) has picked a winner for the first ARC: Janet, from Goodreads!

I am still chewing on title thoughts, so feel free to go on suggesting things. In related news, Jim Hines’ fundraiser for rape crisis centers has raised more than $2500, which means another ARC of ANHoD and a copy of With Fate Conspire have both been added to the pool of prizes. If you chip in over there, you’ll have a chance at both of them, and also a host of other awesome things. (I should also note that donations to RAINN will be matched, so you get double money for your dollar, there.)

And now I shall ponder what to do with the remaining copies . . . .

ANHOD giveaway, Urban Tarot, and Jim Hines’ fundraiser

My thanks to everyone who sent me a title suggestion for the second book of Isabella’s memoirs! I received comments here, on Twitter, on Goodreads, by e-mail . . . the whole gamut. Give me a little while to sort through them, and then I’ll announce a winner.

Speaking of winners, Jim Hines’ fundraiser for rape crisis centers is less than $200 away from hitting the benchmark that tosses a signed copy of With Fate Conspire and a signed ARC of A Natural History of Dragons into the prize pot. There are new rewards, too, at levels up to $4000, and some of them are very shiny.

And finally, we’re in the last days of the Urban Tarot Project. $375 dollars more there will mean embroidered bags for everyone receiving the deck! And there are still signed copies of With Fate Conspire available there, too, so if you want one of those (along with all the other parts of the reward package), you have 71 hours left in which to get it.

Excelsior!

Fundraising for rape crisis center

The ever-awesome Jim Hines running a fundraiser this month for rape crisis centers. For every benchmark hit, he’ll be giving away one of a whole slew of books, which you can see at that link. And if the fundraising gets up to $2500 (which I devoutly hope it will!), then I’ll be tossing in two things to sweeten the pot: a signed copy of With Fate Conspire, and a signed ARC of A Natural History of Dragons.

(This is separate from the title-suggestion giveaway for the first ARC. Two chances to win!)

Head on over to his post for details, including how to donate. It’s an excellent cause, and I hope it raises enough money that he has to find more prizes to give away!

A Natural History of Dragons: Giveaway the First

Just laid this out piecemeal on Twitter; here it is in less truncated form.

I’m chewing over potential titles for the second book of Isabella’s memoirs. I want it to sound Victorian and travelogue-ish, and/or to potentially echo something having to do with sub-Saharan Africa (which is the region I’m taking as my model for this installment). My tongue-in-cheek placeholder is “Mrs. Camherst, I Presume,” but that’s not great as a title, hence looking for a replacement.

Right now I’m charmed by a pattern that showed up in Victorian travel-writing, exemplified by “Along the River Limpopo, With Gun and Camera.” The whole thing is unwieldy, but maybe a “With X and Y” phrase? If I can find suitable nouns to plug into it. (And if I can shut up the part of my brain that says I already have one published book whose title begins with With.) Or, y’know, something else.

Anyway, all that rambling is just to give you an idea of the flavor I’m looking for. The actual point of this post is to say that for the next week, I am opening the floor to title suggestions. In between now and noon PST on Monday, e-mail me, leave comments here, or post to Twitter with the hashtag #ANHODgiveaway. I can’t promise I’ll take any of the suggestions as a permanent winner, but I will pick someone as a contest winner, and send them one of these advance copies of A Natural History of Dragons.

If you don’t have any suggestions, don’t worry! I have four ARCs to give away, which means there will be three other opportunities to snag one. In the meanwhile, let the suggesting begin!

BOOKSES BOOKSES BOOKSES MY PRECIOUS

Eeeeee! Much earlier than I expected, a packet of advance reader copies for A Natural History of Dragons has shown up on my doorstep.

. . . wow, y’all. This thing looks tiny next to With Fate Conspire. Which it is; that monstrosity was nearly 157,000 words in the end, and this one is a svelte 93,000. But it’s a little startling.

I should think up a contest to give some of these away, but first I need to spend a little while beaming at them and gloating. ^_^ (I promise only to pet the one I’m keeping for myself, though. Otherwise it might get a little weird.)

Bookses!

A Natural History of Dragons is off

To my editor, that is, and thence to the copy-editor.

While I wait for the CEM to be dropped on me, I get to poke at short stories, and start noodling around with the second book of the series. I need to get its title nailed down . . . .

Anthropological Warning Signs and How to Spot Them

I’m engaged in research mode right now for the second book of Isabella’s memoirs. But this isn’t the focused, targeted research of the Onyx Court series, where I know my time and place and am looking for details; I’m trying to decide what time(s) and place(s) I’m going to be drawing from to begin with. Since the general sphere of this second book is going to be “sub-Saharan Africa,” that means doing a fair bit of 101-level familiarization, before I decide where to dig down further.

One of the books I just read had me rolling my eyes at certain obvious flaws, and I figured that when I write up my “books read” post in a few weeks, I’d dismiss it with a flippant sentence that would make teleidoplex and albionidaho laugh, and move on with my life. But then it occurred to me that the flaws I see as obvious actually may not be. I spent ten years in anthropology and related disciplines; I’m familiar with the ways in which anthropological writing can go wrong. Not everybody else is. And it might be useful for me to talk to more than just the anthropologists in my audience.

So here, with an illustrative example, is how to look critically at the genre. This isn’t in-depth technical stuff, where you need to know the region or the theory to spot where it’s going wrong; this is just critical thinking, of a mildly specialized sort. But the flaws are a type that can slip under the radar, if you’re not accustomed to them.

(more…)

more fun with Hebrew

What are the Hebrew words for “chosen” (or “elect” or anything else in that vein) and “temple” (as in Temple, comma, the)?

Any linguistic neepery concerning the triliteral roots for those words is welcome.

need some suggestions for not!Hebrew and not!Judaism

So one of the things I’m doing with the new series is basing the dominant ~European religion on Judaism, instead of going with the usual default of pseudo-Christianity. Which leads, of course, to me having to make lots of decisions about random worldbuilding details. I’ll talk about those more later, probably — I’m having an interesting time extrapolating both a nineteenth-century form of Temple-based worship, and a widespread state-religion form of rabbinic Judaism — but one of the most obvious flags on the reader’s end is the names of things.

See, in light of the aforementioned extrapolations, I don’t want to make the reader think this is supposed to be straight-up Judaism, as it was practiced in the real-world nineteenth century. Because of this, and because the main character comes from a British-equivalent country, I’m mostly using English-language variants on the Hebrew names for things; for example, they have a holiday that corresponds to Purim, but I’m calling it “the Casting of Lots” instead. (Insert lots of thoughts here about how English terms and concepts from Christianity are often unmarked and can therefore be read as “generic,” but terms and concepts from other religions are marked and therefore assumed to be referring specifically to the real-world version.)

This method currently falls down in two particular places: the name for the ~Hebrew language, and the name for the religion itself. My current placeholder for the former is “Ivrit,” which is, yes, the name of Hebrew in Hebrew. (Presuming Wikipedia hasn’t lied to me.) I cannot keep this, unless I want it to be an in-joke for the Hebrew readers in my audience. The current placeholder for the latter is “[Judaism],” because the one time I referred to the religion as a whole I was tired and just wanted to get the night’s writing done instead of bogging down on naming. I cannot keep this, period.

Suggestions for either one? I can’t read the Hebrew alphabet well enough to do my usual thing, which is to look up semi-random words and then fiddle with them until I get something I like. The language could be based on the real Hebrew word for “speech” or something in that vein, following the common tendency in some parts of the world for a tribe’s name to simply mean “the People.” The religion . . . I dunno. A currently-unsold book idea of mine has already laid claim to the word “Messianism,” which I kind of feel works better for ~Christianity anyway, given the different attitude toward the whole Messiah thing. I need something that can be used to refer to both the Temple-based form of the religion and the rabbinic offshoot (which in this setting occupies the role of the Protestant Reformation, in terms of dividing up ~Europe along religious lines.) Not sure what would work for that.

Any ideas?

And then there were thirteen.

I generally count a night’s work as belonging to preceding day, even though the clock says otherwise, but in this case I wanted to be sure I finished before we technically passed over into August.

A Natural History of Dragons is done, at 86,174 words.

(God, I love writing a shorter novel for once.)