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Posts Tagged ‘linkage’

On Women and Fighting

wshaffer linked to an interesting column over on McSweeney’s titled Bitchslap: A Column About Women and Fighting. The posts range around quite a bit, from actual combat-related thoughts like A Short and Potentially Hazardous Guide to Sparring Strategy (which might be of interest to the “writing fight scenes” crowd — I promise, I haven’t forgotten about that) to more philosophical things like “On Impact” to pretty good social commentary like “Dressing Up, Looking Down.”

Some of the things she says bother me, because it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that she acknowledges herself to be a woman with a shitty temper, and that her behavior is not necessarily a model you should follow. But it makes for interesting reading regardless.

random linkage

This article is very long, but I found it made for fascinating reading. (Pair with these images to get a sense of what’s going on in the vicinity of Old River Control.) I’ve known for quite a while about the whole “the Mississippi changes its bed” thing, but I didn’t realize that it is very specifically trying to do so right now, and has been for several decades, and furthermore the article gives me a very clear sense of both what the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has done to stop it, and what the costs of those attempts are.

It isn’t cheerful reading; you walk away with a realization that it isn’t just New Orleans, it’s pretty much all human habitation in the Mississippi River Delta that just maybe, from a purely pragmatic standpoint, shouldn’t be there. And I don’t know what we can do to fix that, short of throwing our hands up in the air and saying bye-bye to the region. But it’s very interesting stuff.

link salad is putting Firefox on a diet

Yeah, there were two other writing-related links I forgot to include in the original post (and the follow-up post).

First, The Periodic Table of Storytelling, built from TV Tropes. There’s some entertaining stuff in there.

And second, this post over at 2D Goggles? Yeah. That is so very much what it’s like, sometimes. (Both writing and running an RPG, now that I think of it.) Especially the bit with the tiger. <evil grin>

And then, because it seems a waste of a perfectly good link salad to stop at the writing-related material:

“The Possibilian” — a fascinating article about David Eagleman, a leading researcher on brain function and how we perceive time. His take at the end, on science and religion, is particularly engaging; there’s something to be said for celebrating how much we don’t know, and could potentially learn.

What makes a body obscene? — tooth_and_claw and anybody else who really digs androgyny/playing with gender perception/etc. will dig the image. The story of what happened to the magazine is also particularly interesting.

Poor Jane’s Almanac — a fascinating tale of Benjamin Franklin’s sister, and what it meant to be a woman in the eighteenth century.

Okay, that’s enough for this round. Now hopefully my tab groupings will be a little less absurdly overcrowded.

update on parallelsfic

I went ahead and put in some nominations for , with a specific eye toward variety: one Hong Kong source (The Bride with White Hair, an awesome old-school kung fu fantasy flick), one Korean (The Good, the Bad, the Weird, a crazy 1930s Western), one Indian (the Ramayana, because it’s a more manageable epic than the Mahabharata), and one Japanese (K-20: The Fiend With Twenty Faces, aka the alternate-history Art-Deco-punk superhero movie I keep meaning to make a post about). In general I tried to go with the theme of “crazy fun;” the only reason I nominated the Ramayana instead of Om Shanti Om was that somebody had already beaten me to the latter. 🙂

Anyway, I still don’t know for sure if I’ll be participating; you’re required to offer four sources, and so far — apart from my own nominations — there’s only barely enough things listed that I feel I know well enough to write. But nominating isn’t a commitment to participate, so I figured why not.

Nominations are open until the 25th.

okay, not ALL the links

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.

in which I post ALL the writing links!

Seriously, I’ve got a lot of these piled up.

First: genarti! Congratulations! You have won the “ARC and Desk Delivery Day” giveaway. Email me your address (marie dot brennan at gmail dot com), and I’ll get that on its way to you.

Second, you have a chance to win a complete set of the Onyx Court books by bidding in Brenda Novak’s 2011 Auction, raising money for diabetes research. That runs until the end of the month, so you have about twelve days left to bid. (The prize will ship in summer, when I receive my author copies of With Fate Conspire, or I can arrange to send the first three earlier if desired.) Also, there are lots of other awesome things on offer there, so go browse.

Third, you also have until the end of the month to buy one or more of my stories from AnthologyBuilder, and get a dollar off the cover price. (Fuller details here.)

Fourth, some of you may be interested in , a Yuletide-style fandom exchange for Asian fandoms (e.g. Japanese anime, Bollywood, Hong Kong action flicks, etc). Nominations are open until the 25th, and I’m vaguely tempted to participate; I had fun writing my K-20 story for Yuletide last year. I’m waiting to see how many of the nominated sources I know well enough to write, though, since a lot of the current ones are totally unknown to me.

Fifth, for the language wonks reading this, “Singular ‘they’ and the many reasons why it’s correct.” I am a big proponent of “they” as a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun, largely because it’s one we’ve been using for that exact purpose for centuries now, and it’s a lot more graceful than “he or she” and similar constructions. Mind you, I do find it unsatisfactory for referring to a specific individual who doesn’t fit into standard gender categories; for whatever reason, in those cases my brain seizes up on the apparent plural meaning of the word. (And it’s politer anyway to use whatever pronoun such a person prefers, though that can be hard to do — and the pragmatist in me does wish we could settle on a single alternative, rather than the motley assortment currently in use.) But for sentences like “everyone took out their books,” or referring to somebody whose gender identification is unknown (frex, somebody you only know online), I like “they.” We’re already using it; I think grammar pedants should accept it.

That’s enough for now, I suppose. There may be other link salad-style posts in the future, though; Firefox’s new tab-grouping setup has really encouraged my tendency to hoard these things. :-/

In which I am Featured

So I just discovered that my biography there is painfully out of date, but I am a Featured Author this month at Anthology Builder.

It’s been a while since I mentioned them here, so for those just tuning in: AB is a sort of iTunes-style service for buying short stories. Their database includes a large (and continually growing) number of stories by a wide variety of authors, both current and classic; what you do is go through and pick out the pieces you want until you have somewhere between 50 and 350 pages, your own custom-designed anthology. AB prints it up for you and mails it off, the authors get a cut of the price, everybody wins.

(At present there is no e-book option, but they’re looking into implementing something along those lines.)

What does it mean that I’m a Featured Author? It means that for the month of May, if you order an anthology with one of my stories in it, you get a dollar off the price. I’ve got twenty-one stories in their database — pretty much all my short fiction from 2008 or earlier, including Deeds of Men — which adds up to enough for a collection of my work, or you can mix one or more of my pieces with stuff by other authors. They have stories by Tobias Buckell, Aliette de Bodard, Marissa Lingen, Ruth Nestvold, Tony Pi, Cat Rambo, Janni Lee Simner, Martha Wells, and a whole lot of others; those are just a few of the names I recognized in a quick scan of the list. So there’s plenty to choose from. I’ve used the service a couple of times myself, and quite like it, so wander over and take a look for yourself.

Happy International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day!

Once again, I celebrate the holiday founded by papersky, International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, wherein writers are invited to share bits of fiction for free online, and thereby prove that this does not cause the sky to fall.

This year I’ve decided to post one of my favorite stories: “Nine Sketches, in Charcoal and Blood.” It’s a favorite because as I was on my way to VeriCon one year these characters wandered into my head and immediately struck up a conversation that hinted at but never said outright all kinds of fascinating things about who they were and how they knew each other and why they had come together again after a long absence. Never have I had such a strong feeling of uncovering a story that was already there, rather than making one up — and hell, I still wonder what some of the things are that they never got around to telling me.

This year, I’d like to make it interactive, too. Leave a comment telling me about free, online fiction you’ve really enjoyed lately, whether a specific story or a particular market or whatever. I read Beneath Ceaseless Skies regularly, but I’d love to gather a bunch of other recommendations, and maybe find some new authors or markets to read. So share the love in the comments, and happy Sant Jodi/Shakespeare’s birthday/Thumb Your Nose at Howard Hendrix Day.

Signal Boost: Vera Nazarian

Details are here, but the short form is that Vera Nazarian (of Norilana Books) has lost her multi-year battle to keep her house, and is having to move across the country with her sick mother and four pets.

Norilana is the publisher that puts out the Clockwork Phoenix anthologies, all three of which include stories from yours truly. (“A Mask of Flesh,”, “Once a Goddess,”, and “The Gospel of Nachash.”) I’ve read all three of them, and think they’re quite excellent volumes, quite apart from my personal investment. Norilana has also done a number of other books, including the continuation of the Sword & Sorceress anthology series, a few classic novels, some fantasy, some science fiction — check out Vera’s post for a whole lot more. She could use the business right now, and Norilana’s got some great stuff, so if you’re inclined to pick up new reading material, head over and take a look.

I think I’d prefer a Marlovian film.

It had to happen eventually, I suppose.

SCENE: The inside of swan_tower‘s head

SWAN: Let’s go look at movie trailers. Anonymous — what, like the group?

PAGE: <loads>

SWAN: No, it’s something set in Elizabethan England! With Derek Jacobi and other cool people! <reads further in synopsis> . . . oh, shit. It’s a “Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare’s plays” story.

TRAILER: <plays>

SWAN: Old London Bridge! <swoons in a fit of historical geekery>

DIRECTOR: <is Roland Emmerich>

SWAN: grk.

IMDb: This movie’s theory is apparently Oxfordian, since Rhys Ifans has top billing, and he’s playing Edward de Vere.

SWAN: <sigh> But . . . London Bridge . . . Elizabethan geekery . . . but Roland Emmerich. And Oxfordianism. <more sigh> Well, at least it seems I’m over my knee-jerk “please god no more” reaction to the sixteenth century. And that’s something. Whether or not I can bring myself to watch this movie . . . we’ll have to see.

borrowed from gollumgollum

This is, hands-down, the weirdest psychology test I’ve ever taken.

Seriously, half the questions had me going “AAAAAAAGHHHH whut?” They make no sense. And it’s all the harder because the instructions tell you not to tie the shapes to “any narrative or storyline,” which is like telling me to breathe without using my lungs. But I persevered, wondering sometimes if I was picking answers utterly at random, and then . . . .

Verbally and mentally fluid, you are refreshing and illuminating to those around you. This is occasionally somewhat discounted by the obvious pleasure that you take in exercising your mental acuity. Although generally peaceful you can often take a verbally aggressive tact in relations with the world, which can often be misunderstood by those around you. Innovative in the extreme, you can often think yourself right out of the correct answer to a given problem. Many times you are referred to as your own worst enemy. You tire very quickly of routine and so make poor clerks or administrative help. You also have no respect for authority and little patience for those you regard as inferior, most especially those in charge. Experimentation is your watchword and can occasionally lead to experience for its own sake and shallow decadence. Your thought can sometimes be scattered and disconnected.

. . . which, um, yeah. I wouldn’t agree on all counts (I’m not so much about experimentation), but it’s close enough to be unnerving. Makes me feel like the test was a bit of flashy misdirection while somebody picked my psychological pocket.

(Especially since I just added, then deleted, a [sic] after “tact” in that diagnosis. It should be “tack.” Grumble mutter </pedant>.)

Anyway, if you feel like melting your brain, the test only takes a couple of minutes — and that’s if, like me, you have to wrestle with the tendency to go “well maybe that big triangle is a ship and then the little one is about to ram no dammit I’m not suppposed to make up stories.” It probably goes faster without that.

a few Japan-related things

We’re in the final day over at , and bidding on my short story offer is up to $100. If you want a story written to your prompt from Japanese history or folklore, now is your chance.

Also, my friend unforth is doing a 1000 Cranes Project over on her craft blog. There’s a link there for one of the cranes being auctioned on , but with 999 cranes to go after that, there’s plenty of room for all.

And finally, this is kind of an awesome story about heroism during the tsunami. The post is written in a tongue-in-cheek manner, but with all due admiration for the courage and resourcefulness of Hideaki Akaiwa.

help_japan is underway

Bidding has begun on my short story offer. I forgot to mention before that I will probably try to sell the story, and money from that sale will go to Doctors Without Borders, so whoever wins this auction will get a double return on their buck.

(If you missed the original explanation of the auction, it’s here.)

The situation at Fukushima has me really, really worried. My fingers are crossed so tight they hurt, that the efforts to cool the reactions there will succeed.

This is what preparedness looks like.

A really good post laying out the basics of Japan’s response to the earthquake and tsunami.

The thing we need to bear in mind (other than the fact that Japan is a very long country, and most parts of it are hundreds of miles from the epicenter) is that there is no place in the world better-prepared for seismic trouble than Japan. Read through that post. Read about the checklists. Read about the architecture and the failsafes and the emergency warning systems. This is still a tragedy and a disaster, and no amount of human planning can completely mitigate that; ultimately, the planet is stronger than we are. But this would be a much larger tragedy and disaster if they hadn’t been ready for it. (Even the situation at the Fukushima reactors isn’t as bad as it could have been, though I can’t confirm if the writer of that post is right about the scale of leakage there. I hope he is.)

Remember this, the next time some politician in your locality or nation proposes cutting funding for emergency preparedness, be it earthquake, tornado, hurricane, volcano, blizzard, or whatever. It’s an easy cut to make in the short term, when you’re trying to make a political point about “fiscal responsibility.” But I put that inside sarcasm quotes because what you’re really doing is gambling that nothing bad is really going to happen, and sooner or later, you lose that bet. Japan knows better than to gamble on that; they’re home to some absurdly high percentage of the world’s earthquakes. But other countries — like the U.S. — aren’t so sensible, and places like New Orleans pay the bill.

I want to be more like Japan. I live in California, and I want to believe my state is equally ready for when the Hayward Fault blows. But I don’t think we are.

doing my part, what little I can

There is, as you might expect, another LJ charity auction underway, at . There are many things on offer there, but this one is mine: a short story to a prompt of the winner’s choosing, drawn from Japanese history or folklore.

I’ve set the minimum bid at $50 because unlike the Onyx Court auctions of the past, this time I’m guaranteeing a fully-written short story. Having never offered something like this, I don’t know if that’s too high and I’ve just scared you all off, or it’s too low and you’re going to jack the price way up in bidding. (Since this is for charity, I hope it’s the latter.) Instructions for bidding (or offering) are here, and the auction will run until Saturday the 26th.

Categories of offer: art and artistry, audio work, interesting stuff, food, graphics, words. Go forth and bid, for a good cause.

a visual resource

The next post in the “writing fight scenes” series has been delayed by the necessity of scanning in a few things for illustrative purposes, but in the meantime, have a video:

It’s a nice demonstration of the tactics that prevail between a rapier and a longsword, as well as a few other technical matters that we’ll get to in future posts. In fact, I may well refer back to this as an example later on.