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Posts Tagged ‘help me o internets’

The LiveJournal Guide to Southern India

So, I don’t think I’ve gotten around to mentioning that next month, kniedzw and I are skipping off to India — specifically, Bangalore. His company is sending him there for two weeks of work, so we’ve bought me a ticket and extended his trip an extra week and a half, and will be running around sightseeing for a while.

Our timing coincides very fortuitously with Diwali, so we’ll be hanging around Bangalore for the festival. After that and a bit of local sightseeing, though, we’re interested in spending roughly five days Somewhere Else. Ergo I throw this open to you, O Internets: if you know southern India at all, where do you recommend we go? Mumbai? Goa? We like places of historical interest, temples, that kind of thing, but we’re skipping the big-name things in the north like the Taj Mahal because we’d rather see a tiny fraction of one region than an even tinier fraction of the whole country.

This is the first trip to India for both of us, so any and all advice is appreciated.

inquring minds don’t want to find out first-hand

Dear LiveJournals,

Have you ever been punched in the face? I mean, really punched in the face, not just your brother smacking you one when you were five?

What was it like?

I kind of need to know the subjective experience of realio trulio being decked (or otherwise struck — I suppose a car dashboard or the like would also do) so I can describe it properly, and while I will taste gin for this book, I will not court concussion for it.

Thanks,
Your Friendly Neighborhood Novelist

got it!!!

Okay, so I didn’t take anyone’s suggestion. But I’m going to award the prize to kizmet_42, whose nomination of “The Green Lion” for its alchemical resonance led me to my choice:

The Crow’s Head.

Which is a) alchemical, b) pub-like, c) suitable to the Onyx Court, and d) a reference to the supposed burial of Bran the Blessed’s head in London.

kizmet_42, send your address to marie dot brennan at gmail dot com, and I’ll send you your prize.

name a faerie pub!

This one especially goes out to all the Brits, who are more familiar than your average American with the verbal genre known as the Pub Name.

There is a tavern of sorts in the Onyx Hall. I need a good name for it. Right now it’s the White Stag because of the folkloric connections, but really, that’s far too clean and ordinary-sounding. (It was going to be the Ash and Thorn, but that’s been co-opted for something else.) So: suggest to me suitable faerie pub names. If I end up picking yours, I’ll send you a signed copy of In Ashes Lie.

what the hell did we spend our time learning?

Watched Charlie Wilson’s War last night.

Got furious, again, over the state of history education in this country.

Maybe somewhere in the U.S., there are schools that do a decent job teaching history. God knows I didn’t go to one of them, and neither did anybody I’ve ever talked to about this. We never seemed to make it past the Civil War; even in junior high, when U.S. history was split over two years, the first one ending with the Civil War and Reconstruction, we still didn’t get through the twentieth century. Why? Because we started the second year by recapping . . . the Civil War and Reconstruction. And then got bogged down reading All Quiet on the Western Front. I know nothing about the Korean War. (Except that I think technically I’m supposed to call it the Korean Conflict.) What I know about Vietnam, I got from movies. Ditto WWII, mostly. And when it comes to things like Afghanistan (the subject of Charlie Wilson’s War) or our involvement in Iran, there are whole oceans of historical incident I’m ignorant of.

Historical incident that is very goddamned relevant right now. How many people in the U.S. — especially those under the age of 30 — understand the ways in which our problems in Afghanistan are of our own creation? We wanted to stop the Soviets, so we poured weapons and support into the hands of the Afghans, and then wandered off as soon as the commies went away. What’s worse than rampant interventionism? Half-assed interventionism. But thank God we’ve learned our les — oh, wait.

You can’t learn from history if you never learned it in the first place, people.

I want the history textbook I never got. I want a single-volume overview of United States history, 1900-1999, that will tell me the basics about the Korean War Conflict and Vietnam, about Afghanistan and Iran and Iran-Contra and the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, about all those things that were kind of important to U.S. policy and foreign relations that might be tripping us up today, and most especially about the ones I’ve never even heard of and so can’t list here. Bonus points if it has colorful pictures and informative sidebars and maybe a brief quiz at the end of each chapter, because when it comes to this stuff, I’m about at a junior-high level of comprehension.

I don’t even know if that book exists. If it does, I don’t have time to read it anyway, because the downside of writing the Onyx Court series is that most of my nonfiction reading is about Britain. But I can always buy it and hold onto it until the next time I hear about some war I never even knew we fought, and then maybe I’ll drop everything for a few days and learn about my own country.

sprechen Sie (Neuhoch)deutsch?

1) How different is modern German from the language circa the eighteenth century? It looks to me like they were speaking New High German, which is apparently more or less the same as Standard German nowadays, but my own facility with the language ends with one proverb and one alarming speech about having a grenade (don’t ask), so it’s all Greek German to me. My guess would be that it differs in much the same way as eighteenth-century English does, i.e. more in phrasing and word choice than anything else, but I’d like to know for sure.

2) Once I’ve sorted that out, I will need someone to do small amounts (i.e. a few sentences) of translation work for me, either into the modern language or into New High German, if that’s noticeably different. If you have fluency with either of these, or know someone who does, please drop me a line.

(You would be justified in asking why I should contemplate translating into an archaic dialect of German when I haven’t been writing these novels in equally period English. The answer is, because I can. Assuming I can find a translator, of course.)

a question for speakers of Mandarin

I have a couple of different stories in the pipeline that take place in semi-Chinese societies — specifically, societies where I’ve decided to base the language on Mandarin, at least as far as the phonology of names is concerned. (i.e. I’m neither using actual Mandarin in the story, nor conlanging beyond deciding what to call characters and towns.) IANASpeaker of Mandarin, so my question for those who are is: how likely are you to be distracted by possible meanings for the names I’ve made up?

To put it differently: if I invent German-looking names for a story, I can (and do) check in a dictionary to make sure I haven’t named a character “Elbow” or something like that. And it’s relatively easy to avoid actual words, just by changing a few letters. With the semi-Japanese names in the doppelganger books, on the other hand, I kind of let it go, because any random pair of mora I threw together were likely to mean something in Japanese — tsue is a walking stick, for example, and katsu, depending on the kanji, means “to win,” “thirst,” “yet,” “living,” “cutlet” (when written in katakana) and something you yell at Zen practitioners when they screw up. (Or so my favorite dictionary tells me.) So the Cousin names and honorifics in particular were likely to mean something whether I wanted them to or not.

Mandarin’s more opaque to me, since I don’t speak more than about five words of it, and those very badly. I’m familiar with the function of tones in it, so I suspect it’s likely any random syllable I stick in a name is likely to mean one or more things, possibly incongruous ones. Hence asking the fluent speakers: how badly would that distract you, in a story written in English? Is it something you could just sort of breeze by (provided I don’t accidentally hit upon something flagrantly obscene), or is your brain likely to play the homophone game, coming up with variant translations of the character’s name?

a capella recs

My parents linked me to this cover of Toto’s “Africa” by a Slovenian a capella group (whose great performance is especially marked by its simulated thunderstorm at the beginning), and it made me realize:

I really like good a capella.

And, in parallel with my taste in instrumental music, what I especially like is neither the melody nor the beat, but the stuff in the middle: the harmony, the changing chords in the background, all that good substance. I never really paid attention to that layer of “Africa” before now, but something about hearing it rendered in human voices made it really appeal to me. So help me, o internets: can you recommend good a capella albums that do a lot of that kind of thing? (Not covers of Toto songs; strong and interesting harmonies.)

web help needed

I need the assistance of someone who can code a web-form type thing for me — basically, something which will ask people for their e-mail addresses, give them the a chance to opt in to a few things, and then send them along to a different URL when all of that’s done.

Any takers?

Brit-picking needed

Actually, it’s not so much Brit-picking as a British copy-edit. Any chance I could get a volunteer to read over a lengthy document (~35 pages, single-spaced; aka 20K words) with an eye toward correcting it to British spelling and usage? Genuine copy-editing experience preferred, but in the absence of that, I’ll be more than happy to work with an enthusiastic hobbyist.

I’ll find something to reward you with. Probably an early copy of In Ashes Lie, if I can wheedle one out of Orbit UK. Or I’ll just mail one of my US copies, when I get them.

Drop me an e-mail (mention any relevant credentials) if you’re interested. Marie dot brennan at gmail dot com. Turnaround time on this would need to be about a week.

four hundred people have friended this journal; maybe one of you will know

Is there anyone reading this LJ who has a good familiarity with Middle Eastern history and/or folklore? I don’t mean the ancient past (I got that covered), but rather from the beginning of the Islamic period forward. I am pig-ignorant of that subject, and could use a brain to pick in finding suitable readings for a particular purpose.

If that happens to be an area and time you’re familiar with, please e-mail me off-journal — marie (dot) brennan (at) gmail (dot) com.

Edited to add: Putting the history part in more specific terms, I need good books to read on the later Ottoman Empire. My knowledge of it pretty much ends at the name, alas.

terminology question

Is there a standard term in fantasy (or for that matter, science fiction) for secondary worlds that are distinctly based on a specific primary-world culture? I mean things like the Not-Japan of Lian Hearn’s Tales of the Otori, etc — settings where the author has lifted an entire culture en masse, rather than just taking elements of it. Is there a word for that?

I need a hobby.

No, really.

I say this now because today kniedzw and I will be hosting our annual Outrageous Clothing Mockery Oscars party, and that means a lot of time spent sitting and watching the TV. And when I do that — or anything else that engages my eyes and brain, but not my hands (i.e. books are exempt) — I find myself very restless, needing to do something with my hands. If I’m table-top gaming, I keep rearranging my dice, not out of superstition but a need to occupy my hands. If I’m watching TV . . . let’s just say I know over a dozen varieties of solitaire, but after a while that gets boring.

I need a hobby.

The problem is, the obvious hobby — knitting — is not really useful here, because kniedzw already has our knitting needs (such as they are) covered. We have all the scarves we need, and aren’t in desperate need of hats or gloves or sweaters or suchlike. I could knit things for my cousins’ kids, maybe, but that moves it from the category of “random thing to do while watching TV” to “obligatory thing I must finish by X time because someone’s waiting for it/will outgrow it otherwise.” I don’t want to take on any more obligations. I want this to be something where if I don’t finish it for six months it’s no big deal. Crocheting is too similar to knitting, and we already have sufficient afghans in the house. Embroidery? It’s a possibility — especially if I learn more than the three stitches I presently know — but I’m not sure what I would make. We’ve already got embroidered dish towels, courtesy of my mother, and I don’t have any costume pieces in foreseeable need of it. (I think I was embroidering during the Oscars a couple of years ago, for the Changeling game.) Ditto inkle weaving, though I’d like to make use of the looms currently sitting around uselessly. I could learn to card weave, as I’ve been meaning to do for years, but at least in the short term it’s likely to occupy too much of my attention to be suitable for this situation. Maybe once I know the basics, it would work. And cross-stitching is once again covered by my mother. The only patterns I like are much too complicated for me to attempt, so I leave them to her.

Other possibilities? Maybe even ones that don’t involve textiles? (No, I don’t know why I default to thinking of Things Involving Thread.)

More icon love needed

I still haven’t gotten around to figuring out how to do text-on-images in a pretty (i.e. more than basic) fashion, so can anyone take the cover in the last post and make me a proper Ashes icon? Something in the vein of the MNC icon, seen here. The font used is AquilineTwo, which you can get for free online.

I need to understand these people . . . .

Before I get to this question, I should clarify one thing: unless I specify otherwise, when I post here for research help, I’m not asking people just to provide me with relevant-looking titles. That would be lazy of me in the extreme, since I’m usually capable of finding relevant-looking titles on my own, and I don’t want to be lazy. What I can’t do on my own is tell which ones are worth my time. So — not to thumb my nose at recommendations in general, because I do appreciate them, but what I’m really looking for are books you’ve read, or know someone who’s read, or otherwise have heard good things about. Some way to cull the list of all possible sources down to a smaller list of pre-vetted works. (And — the flip side — please do tell me if you know of any utter crap I should stay far, far away from.)

With that in mind: alchemy.

I really want to be able to use alchemy in fiction. I do not yet understand it well enough to do so. I need, not just old-school sources deliberately written to be as obscure as possible so that they won’t share your secrets with the uninitiated, but more modern secondary works that can help me unlock those old-school things, since otherwise I tend to skip off the top of them. But there’s a lot of vaporous New Age crap about alchemy out there, so if you know of any worthwhile books in a more scholarly/historical vein, please pass along titles. I’m already planning on giving Eliade a shot, and I’ve gamed Amazon into making a lot of recommendations, but it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.

for the psych folks

yhlee got me thinking about this one by linking to Harry Harlow — if I needed to read up on the social and emotional development of children, what names should I be looking for?

Specifically, the story situation I’m working with involves children raised from birth in what amounts to an orphanage: professional caretakers (well-meaning ones, not Dickensian sadists), but no parents as such, and the children have to depend on each other for affection. I’d like to know what effects that would generally have on their behavior, and also what kinds of practices the Powers That Be might institute to keep the kids from growing up too warped. (Would it help if they slept in dormitory arrangements, at least until a certain age? Etc.)

I’ll be asking my psych-major husband, too, but until he gets home from work, you guys are it. 🙂

Edited to add: I’ve read enough to come across Bowlby and Ainsworth, but I’m a) looking for more recent models and b) trying to work out the behavior of an adult character raised in such a situation; the specific behavior of toddlers is of less interest to me.

a star in the sky

Can anybody tell me what planet I’ve been seeing in the sky lately? I keep noticing it in the vicinity of the moon, in the western part of the sky, and it’s quite bright. Is that Venus, or something else?

now that “Chrysalis” is out of my way

I’m trying (again) for the one-story-a-month thing, which means I’m gearing up for February. This one is going to be a bigger project, and involves at least one piece of directed research. So:

Can anyone recommend to me a good biography of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham? I’m particularly interested in the last five years or so of his life; I could care less what he got up to in childhood.

(Oddly, this is completely unrelated to me reading The Three Musketeers. THAT book, I picked up because I’m trying to figure out what “The Three Hackbutters” should be about, other than its title.)

for something completely different

O internets, I could also use someone who can spot-check me on matters of London vocabulary — specifically, the insults that would be used by a pre-adolescent girl who’s spent a fair bit of time on the streets. (E.g.: does “crackhead” sound too American?) Also derogatory terms for a police officer: what other than “copper” and “pig”?

I ask because “The Last Wendy” is being copyedited right now, and this is my last chance to catch any glaring regionalisms. I’m not looking for full-bore cockney rhyming slang here, but I don’t want the words to sound out of place.

graphical help needed

Sadly, while I can get around in Paint, there are a great many things that program can’t do. And I still have not figured out the first blessed thing about working in the GIMP, which may be a great open-source alternative to Photoshop, but is about the least user-friendly program I have ever seen, at least where new users are concerned. And I don’t own Photoshop.

So. I need assistance from someone who is good at placing text on an image. The aforementioned text needs to follow the contours of certain features on the image, which is what I can’t manage on my own. It shouldn’t be a huge amount of work — maybe thirteen words all told. And it needs to be done quickly. Any volunteers?