So I’m watching the last Harry Potter movie — don’t worry; no spoilers — and at one point there’s a shot which completely distracts me from the movie. This has happened before with the films.
But as I leaned over and said to my husband a moment later: this time I was distracted by contemplating dragon anatomy, and not by trying to ID the slice of London flying by in the background.
Ladies and gentlemen, the new series has clearly moved in and set up house.
Abseiling/rappelling without mechanical aid (i.e. by wrapping the rope around your body): I’m guessing there is a high likelihood of bruises around your ribs or waist? Especially if you aren’t experienced?
Any other tidbits of information on that sort of thing are equally appreciated. Rope burns on the hands? Etc.
(Yes, I just sent Isabella over a cliff. It’s not the meanest thing I’ve done to her — but that will surprise no one.)
So, after a very difficult decision (in which I had to convince myself that buying extra icon space on LJ would only lead go overload in the long run), I have settled on not one but two winners for the A Natural History of Dragons icon contest. First, scottakennedy, for something wonderfully period (though I may ask you to switch the text just as soon as I make up my mind what I want!), and second, pathseeker42 for hitting a target she didn’t even know she was aiming at. From the book:
When I was seven, I found a sparkling lying dead on a bench at the edge of the woods which formed the back boundary of our garden, that the groundskeeper had not yet cleared away. With much excitement, I brought it for my mother to see, but by the time I reached her it had mostly collapsed into ash in my hands. Mama exclaimed in distaste and sent me to wash.
Our cook, a tall and gangly woman who nonetheless produced the most amazing soups and souffles (thus putting the lie to the notion that one cannot trust a slender cook) was the one who showed me the secret of preserving sparklings after death. She kept one on her dresser-top, which she brought out for me to see when I arrived in her kitchen, much cast down from the loss of the sparkling and from my mother’s chastisement. “However did you keep it?” I asked her, wiping away my tears. “Mine fell all to pieces.”
“Vinegar,” she said, and that one word set me upon the path that led to where I stand today.
If found soon enough after death, a sparkling (as many of the readers of this volume no doubt know) may be preserved by embalming it in vinegar. I sailed forth into our gardens in determined search, a jar of vinegar crammed into one of my dress pockets so the skirt hung all askew. The first one I found lost its right wing in the process of preservation, but before the week was out I had an intact specimen: a sparkling an inch and a half in length, his scales a deep emerald in color. With the boundless ingenuity of a child, I named him Greenie, and he sits on a shelf in my study to this day, tiny wings outspread.
Compare that to this:
Yeah, you see why I had to take both.
So congrats to you two! E-mail me your mailing addresses (send them to marie {dot} brennan {at} gmail {dot} com) and I’ll get ARCs of Fate on their way toward you shortly.
It is now seventy days until the release of With Fate Conspire, and that means it’s time for more goodies.
Ten days ago, it was the first excerpt; now it’s my research bibliography. (Not the most thrilling thing in the world, I know, but chock full o’ Victorian-period material, if you need that kind of thing.)
Also, because I’ve been too swamped to do anything more with this until now, I’ll go ahead and say the contest mentioned last time is still open. I need an icon for A Natural History of Dragons — something, y’know, natural historian-y and dragon-y — and if yours wins, I’ll send you an arc of Fate.
Save me from my lack of Photoshop skills, Obi-Wan Internetobi; you’re my only hope!
I’ve been so occupied with other things that I completely missed my usual “one hundred days until publication” landmark. Also ninety days. Eighty is tomorrow, but that’s the weekend, so let’s go with eighty-one days, and give you your first excerpt from With Fate Conspire!
“You were unable to stop them.”
In other news, I made it to forty thousand words on A Natural History of Dragons last night. I need an icon for that series, so let’s do a combined event here: post an icon (or even just an image) in the comments that you think would be appropriate for the adventures of my !nineteenth-century lady naturalist, and the winner will get an ARC of With Fate Conspire.
And I’ll try to keep on track better from now on. <guilty look>
Despite my efforts last night, I missed not one but two of the links I meant to post.
First, a bit belated, the usual link to my monthly SF Novelists post. This time, it’s Worldbuilding, from the ground up, as I talk about the interesting challenges I’m encountering as I work on A Natural History of Dragons. (Comment over there, not here; you don’t need to register, but there will be a slight delay while I fish the comments of newcomers out of the moderation queue.)
Second, Sideshow Freaks has a background post on how I came to write “Love, Cayce” (aka the “letters from a D&D adventurer’s kid” story).
. . . I think that’s it. But just you wait, I’m sure I’ll trip over more I forgot as soon as I turn around.
Ever since I moved to my current residence, I’ve had a map of London on the wall behind my desk: Restoration-era, Georgian, Victorian.
I’ve taken the last of those down now, and the blank space is staring at me. It’s a wide horizontal gap, too big to be filled by any of the pictures I have around. I don’t know what to do with it.
A map of the world A Natural History of Dragons takes place in, perhaps. But I don’t have such a map yet; I’m still trying to figure out the geography of that world.
What the heck do I do with this wall?
A longer list than March’s, but the post will be shorter, because the DWJ books have all been discussed elsewhere already.
(And while it may be a longer list, I’m not sure it amounts to more pages read. March included a Wheel of Time book, and a bunch of Bujold; April is lots of DWJ and two graphic novels. I won’t be surprised if this turns out to be more like my usual level, as opposed to January and February, where I was mainlining books like a woman who hadn’t read much fiction in, well, ages.)
So, I mentioned before that I have a new series.
It will surprise nobody who’s been around for the Onyx Court books that I intend to do a bit of research. 🙂
NOT AS MUCH AS BEFORE. (Thank god.) But there are some things I want to read about, to get some good material for compost into my head, so this is the first of a couple of posts asking for recommendations.
The first topic up is, of course, the discipline of natural history. Can anybody recommend a good biography of Darwin, something that focuses on the fieldwork end of things? His education, the voyage of the Beagle, that kind of thing; I’m less concerned with what happened after he published his theories. Or books on other natural historians, or the development of the field. I’ve got a few things to read already, but knowing the internets, it’s entirely possible that somebody reading this post has a random love for the topic of nineteenth-century natural history, and knows exactly what I ought to be reading to understand it. If that’s you — or if it isn’t, but you know a couple of things you’d recommend — speak up in the comments.
If you’re not familiar with this topic at all, stay tuned; there will be other requests to come.
. . . or those who didn’t hear me announce it there:
I have a new book deal.
Three books for certain; the series may run as long as five; title of either the first book or the entire series — haven’t decided yet which one — is A Natural History of Dragons. They are the memoirs of Isabella Trent, Scirland’s foremost lady adventurer and dragon naturalist, and cover her illustrious career traveling the world to study dragons (and getting into large amounts of trouble along the way).
As you might guess from the “Scirland” bit, this is a secondary-world fantasy, albeit one based on the real-world nineteenth century. Hallelujah, I get to make stuff up. There will still be research, of course — there is always research — but it will be of a more compost-y sort; I’ll read stuff, get the flavor in my head, and then make up something in an appropriate vein. You have no idea how much I’m looking forward to that part.
I came up with the idea for this series just before the first round of Novel in 90, several years ago, and it should tell you something that I wrote about thirty thousand words of it in a rather short space of time, before stalling out on account of not having figured out my metaplot. In the interim, I’ve made progress on that problem, and am very eager to get back to the story. The narrative voice is just a delight to play with. In celebration of the deal, here’s an excerpt, from the foreword to the first volume of Isabella’s memoirs:
Not a day goes by that the post does not bring me at least one letter from a young person (or sometimes one not so young) who wishes to follow in my footsteps and become a dragon naturalist. Nowadays, of course, the field is quite respectable, with university courses and intellectual societies putting out fat volumes titled Proceedings of some meeting or other. Those interested in respectable things, however, attend my lectures. The ones who write to me invariably want to hear about my adventures: my escape from captivity in the swamps of Mouleen, or my role in the great Battle of Keonga, or (most frequently) my flight to the inhospitable heights of the Mrtyahaima peaks, the only place on earth where the secrets of the ancient world could be unlocked.
Even the most dedicated of letter-writers could not hope to answer all these queries personally. I have therefore accepted the offer from Messrs. Carrigdon & Rudge to publish a series of memoirs, chronicling the more interesting portions of my life. By and large these shall focus on those expeditions which led to the discovery for which I have become so famous, but there shall also be occasional digressions into matters more entertaining, personal, or even (yes) salacious. One benefit of being an old woman now, and moreover one who has been called a “national treasure,” is that there are very few who can tell me what I may and may not write.
Beyond this point, therefore, lie foetid swamps, society gossip, disfiguring diseases, familial conflicts, hostile foreigners, and a plenitude of mud. You, dear reader, continue on at your own risk. It is not for the faint of heart — no more so than the study of dragons itself. But such study offers rewards beyond compare: to stand in a dragon’s presence, even for the briefest of moments — even at the risk of one’s life — is a delight that, once experienced, can never be forgotten. If my humble words convey even a fraction of that wonder, I will rest content.
Expect much babbling over the next few months about Darwin and Stanley and Isabella Bird, who actually wasn’t the source of my protagonist’s name, but it’s a nice coincidence nonetheless.
I didn’t freeze, and we appear to have a functioning furnace again, though it’s striving mightily to drag this old heap up from its freezing temperatures to something livable while it’s barely above zero outside. Learned many interesting lessons about survival in the cold without central heating, and also used up a lot of my candles and lamp oil.
But that’s neither here nor there. I want to ramble on about parallels and differences between two different projects of mine. One, Sunlight and Storm, is a fantasy western that was the fourth novel I wrote, back when I was in college. Its first draft sucked rancid goat cheese; its second draft is better, but I still want to rewrite it substantially before it ever goes public, and that will probably not be any time soon. The other is a series I’m contemplating for the future, which would essentially be about scientific expeditions going to study dragons. They share the common characteristics of being in settings that look a lot like our nineteenth century, and they both have female main characters, hence the desire to ramble on about colonialism and feminism.
