At this point, Swan Tower should be navigable again. This is not the same thing as pretty; there are various bits of formatting that need to be adjusted for the new layout, plus bad decisions of mine that were invisible in the old look but become glaringly, appallingly obvious (not to mention ugly) now that the background color has changed. It will take me some time to deal with those. But at least you can get at stuff again.
I could use a spot of help from somebody who knows their way around Perl. The task at hand is to write a reliable script that can do a multi-line replacement across multiple files in multiple subdirectories — to take X (longish) chunk of text and swap Y chunk into its place.
If you’ve got the skills to do that, and the free time to do it in the next day or so, please drop me an email at marie -dot- brennan -at- gmail -dot- com.
Since this blog is hosted separately from my website, the number of people this will directly affect is probably small, but:
Swan Tower (the website, not the journal) is about to get a major face-lift. As in, probably today. Please disregard the dust, hammering noises, and falling support beams that may occur during the process. I’ll post again here when it’s safe to venture back inside.
Twenty days and counting; the last piece of the excerpt has gone up. (Beginning is here.)
Over on the LJ, the discussion of Midnight and Ashes continues with a new question, regarding time and point of view in the novels. The first question, about the connection between the mortal and faerie worlds, is still open; you don’t need to be a con attendee or even an LJ user to jump in.
And speaking of things you don’t have to be a con attendee to do, there are four days left to submit a recipe for the drink contest. There’s been some by e-mail already, and I’m looking forward to trying these things out!
Booklist‘s opinion on A Star Shall Fall:
Brennan’s historical research is as impeccable as ever, and the twining of the two worlds is the best yet. Fans of the Onyx court novels, and anyone who enjoys historical fantasy, should like A Star Shall Fall.
And also bookblather:
A Star Shall Fall starts fast and goes faster, despite its apparent length. The climax is brilliant. I honestly did not want to put the book down or close it for any reason, and I was sniffly for a good while afterwards. This is one spectacular book; Brennan is firing on all authorial cylinders. I finished it and wanted to start it all over again, just to have some more time with the characters.
Forty days until the book comes out, and that means it’s time for another excerpt! You’ve already met Irrith and Galen St. Clair; now it’s time for them to meet each other. Or, if you missed the earlier excerpts, you can start at the beginning.
Also, don’t forget the contests for the launch party. Even if you aren’t attending Sirens, you can still enter a drink recipe and win a bound copy of Deeds of Men. You have until August 15th!
arielstarshadow, a while ago — where “a while” is “about six months” — you mentioned you’d be interested in seeing my playlists for the Onyx Court books, the stuff I had on shuffle while writing, that the soundtracks got built out of. Well, since I recently found myself with occasion to mail those playlists to someone, I figured I might as well go ahead and put them up on my website. The Midnight playlists are here, and the Ashes playlists are here.
They’re just .txt files, and moderately illegible; when iTunes exports a playlist, it includes all the file information, and it was already enough work just cleaning out the chaff so you could see what the titles, composers, and albums were. I didn’t feel like doing even more work to make it pretty. Also, most of it is film scores. But if that’s the kind of thing you’re interested in — especially the dark-and-atmospheric end of film scores — you can scan through and see what I’ve been listening to.
This is the extra bit I alluded to yesterday, when I posted my research book list: I finally have a version of the cover that I’m allowed to post. (There may be minor tweaks before it hits the shelves, but they’re along the lines of fiddling with the text, rather than image changes.)
In honor of that, I’ve started putting the page for the book into proper order. Enjoy!
Also: since my image-manipulation skills end at being able to crop and shrink pictures. I will be grateful to anyone who can make a nifty icon out of this, so future book posts can use that rather than the comet image I’ve been employing.
Very brief update, as I’m on the road and need to get moving: the history geeks among you may appreciate my research bibliography for A Star Shall Fall.
I may have another thing to add to that later today or tomorrow, but for now, I must run.
That header sounds painful, now that I think about it.
Anyway, if you would prefer to listen to a story about Driftwood rather than read it, you can now download the audio from BCS. (Which also has a new Aliette de Bodard story this week, one of her Aztec pieces. I haven’t read it yet, but I am very much looking forward to it.)
I’ve also put up an extra tidbit for the Driftwood fans: “Smiling at the End of the World.” It’s a piece of flash fiction from Last’s point of view, but since Driftwood flash doesn’t stand on its own very well, I’ve chosen to just post it to my site as a freebie. Enjoy!
I posted a new excerpt from A Star Shall Fall (beginning of the whole is here).
And while I’m tidying up my browser, I might as well make this a linkdump post and add in two other things:
Cat Valente on the power of the suit — which I note mostly because, as I was saying to a friend recently, I have essentially no fashion registers between “jeans and t-shirt” and “formal wear.” I’ve sort of acquired a degree of business casual, left over from the year when I was teaching my own (non-archaeology-related*) classes, which you can see in action at ICFA and other warm-weather cons, but most of the time I default to a higher degree of slobbiness. But I really enjoy dressing up, i.e. actual fancy wear. It’s just the middle registers I don’t have much use for.
The Pleasures of Imagination — what struck me in this was a bit near the end, where the author said,
I have argued that our emotions are partially insensitive to the contrast between real versus imaginary, but it is not as if we don’t care—real events are typically more moving than their fictional counterparts. This is in part because real events can affect us in the real world, and in part because we tend to ruminate about the implications of real-world acts. When the movie is finished or the show is canceled, the characters are over and done with. It would be odd to worry about how Hamlet’s friends are coping with his death because these friends don’t exist; to think about them would involve creating a novel fiction.
And I immediately thought, “hello, fanfiction.” Because the aftermath of trauma is one of several fertile areas out of which derivative works can sprout.
This has been your not-at-all-regularly-scheduled schizophrenic link post.
*My theory was that when you’re assistant-teaching intro to archaeology, you’ll actually get more cred by showing up in jeans and a flannel shirt than a skirt and heels.
The other writing-related bit of news I promised is another excerpt from A Star Shall Fall. This one introduces Mr. Galen St. Clair, first of the novel’s two protagonists — with a bonus cameo appearance by a Famous Historical Figure. (Who, like Newton, and indeed most of the FHFs that show up in this book, is not so good with the social graces. I guess that’s what happens when your book concerns itself with scientific history.)
If you missed the earlier excerpts, the beginning is here. Enjoy!
Here’s the visual version, showing the recent expansion of information not only to your friends, but to your networks, to all of Facebook, and to the entire Internet.
The good news is, Facebook won’t be doing much more to undermine your privacy — because they’ve already decided to show just about everything to just about everybody.
The graphic is a representation of the information from this EFF article. Wired has more generalized discussion of the issues with Facebook, and Business Insider gives 10 Reasons to Delete Your Facebook Account. If you decide to do that, though, read this, because Facebook uses just about every trick short of outright lying to prevent you from actually deleting your account.
I’ve never given Facebook much private information; the furthest I went was to list my schools and graduation years, my marital status, and a few interests, none of which are particular secrets. But Facebook, unlike (say) LJ, allows for — sorry, let’s update our terms, is actively taking steps to facilitate — organized mining of that data. This bothers me on three fronts.
First, I can control what data I post about myself, but I can’t control what data my friends post about me. And while this is true of the Internet in general, on Facebook, any photo tagged with my name is automatically and unambiguously connected to me, in a way that I cannot avoid. Also, changes have made it such that I’m not just sharing that info with friends, and with Facebook-the-company, but with everybody who develops an application for them. Do I trust all of those people?
Second, this is a cynical violation of the principles on which Facebook was founded. After years of saying your information would be private, visible only to friends (thus encouraging you to submit a lot of it — after all, isn’t the point of the service to share news with your friends?), now the founder is claiming that our society’s privacy standards have changed and he’s just keeping up with the times. We all totally want to live our lives in public on the Internet, right?
Third — most offensively — this is opt-out, not opt-in. Facebook did not ask me, “would you like to share these pieces of information by connecting them to these public pages?” It said, “You’re now going to share all of this! Or you can pick individually.” And then I had to manually deselect every single item, because I didn’t get a “no, thanks” option. Given the way Facebook has implemented changes, I have no certainty at all that I’ve successfully kept myself out of that loop, because they bury the “stay private” options as deeply as they can — when they even provide them. Sometimes the only way to stay clear is to completely delete information about yourself: you can no longer have private “likes.” You either have them, and they’re auto-linked to public pages, or you leave them blank. So much for sharing private info with friends. To use the service now is to use it for all the Internet to see.
Which is faintly annoying when it’s just a matter of me listing, oh, music as a hobby. But what if you’ve listed “gay marriage rights”? Or “abortion rights”? Or something else politically sensitive? Now your activism is visible to your boss (who maybe voted Yes on 8), and to people who maybe like harassing activists like you.
There are more details in the articles I’ve linked, but those are enough for me. The value I get from Facebook is marginal: yeah, I’ve connected to old friends from high school, etc, but we’ve done nothing more than connect; I haven’t struck up conversations with them. The signal-to-noise ratio of my news feed is so abysmal I don’t even bother reading it most of the time. I hate the layout of the service, and as for the applications, they’re time-wasters I really, really don’t need.
And I don’t feel like continuing to patronize a service that behaves this badly, even if the actual damage to me is likewise marginal.
Fans of Driftwood, rejoice: I finally got around to writing and revising and submitting a third story, which are usually the prerequisite steps to selling anything. Which is to say, Beneath Ceaseless Skies has bought “Remembering Light.”
That’s three, which means Driftwood officially gets its own category in my site organization. I hope to have quite a few more than that in the long run, though.
I found something new to post, that didn’t require much jinking to make it web-ready: “But Who Shall Lead the Dance?”
This originally came out in Talebones, whose fourteen-year run came to an end last fall, much to my sadness. Patrick Swenson published three of my stories in total: this, “The Twa Corbies,” and “The Snow-White Heart,” which was in their final issue. (You can still buy back issues here.)
. . . you know, posting this has reminded me of something I forgot. Namely, that this story tried to turn into a ballad as I was writing it. You can see that in the style — this was the first real stylistic experiment I ever tried writing — the rhythm of the “But who shall lead the dance?” suggested the end of a ballad stanza to me, and everything else followed from there.
Maybe I’ll revisit that, and actually try to write it as lyrics, just for fun. No doubt I’ll fall on my nose; poetry and related forms are not something I’m good at. But hey, it’ll be good exercise. And the silly thing’s halfway there already.
The process of website improvement has started. So far, the only change is that I’ve moved the entire site down a level: everything that was swantower.com/marie/* can now be reached at swantower.com/*. Soon — possibly later today — kniedzw will be helping me set up a redirect so that anybody who’s bookmarked a specific page will get bumped along to the new location. After that, the actual revamping will begin.
If you notice anything broken on the site, drop me a line at marie [dot] brennan [at] gmail [dot] com, and I’ll fix it as soon as I can.
Okay, I finally got off my butt and finished sorting through my hundred and hundreds of pictures from India to cull them down to the 100MB I could upload in a month — only to discover that I’d hit the limit for publicly-available pictures (200), and if I wanted the oldest ones (the Midnight Never Come research set) to be visible, I’d have to either delete some of what I just posted, or upgrade my account. So I upgraded, and now I don’t have to worry about that 100MB limit.
Oh well. It’s probably better for your sanity and mine that I restricted my choices that sharply; otherwise this could be the Photoset That Never Ends. Instead it’s a selection of the better results. I hope you enjoy.
Since setting up a photo gallery on my own site is one of the things I intend to do with the redesign, please take a moment if you haven’t already and give me your thoughts on what the new look should be.
Poll time; please take a moment to answer this, as the more responses I get, the better.
I’m preparing to do a fairly substantial redesign on my website, including (among other things) a visual facelift. I always meant to make it more colorful, but never did decide where I was going graphically — which, as it turns out, is the subject of this poll. I know I want to change the color scheme and provide some kind of image at the top and/or side(s), but I frankly have no idea what that should be. So I’ve put together this handy poll, to see what ideas you all have, and whether those nudge me out of my current waffling and into a useful direction. Check as many boxes as you like; if you like several but prioritize one choice over the others, say so in comments.
Feel free to get as detailed as you like in the comments. (And if you’re coming here from outside LJ, you don’t need an account to comment, though it will help if you sign some kind of name.) This is a mass brainstorming session, basically, so let’s bounce ideas around until something comes out.
Is there any convenient way to do a mass-redirect on various URLs? Basically, I want to simplify the directory structure of my site, such that everything which used to be swantower.com/marie/X becomes swantower.com/X. But people may have bookmarked particular links, and I’d like them to be automatically redirected when they try the old URL. What I don’t know is whether there’s any simple method for achieving this. Help?
I haven’t yet gone through my site and scrubbed the Amazon Associates links from my book recommendation pages, but I’ve done the pages for my own novels. Which made me realize how lazy I’d been with those; I was pretty much just linking Amazon. I’ve replaced that with a much more comprehensive set: Powell’s, IndieBound, Barnes and Noble, Borders, Fictionwise (for ebooks), Chapters (for Canada), and Waterstone’s (for the UK).
Having done that, I now put it to you, my loyal LJ readers: are there other stores I should include? I can’t list every store on the planet, of course, but if there are other major online retailers — especially for Canada and the UK — let me know what I’ve missed.
Adding in some new titles last night, it occurred to me that oh yeah, I have something on my website that could be useful as a racial-diversity resource. Of course, I’ve read only a fraction of the books listed there, so I can’t say they’re all worth reading; some of them may in fact be head-‘splodingly bad. But if you’ve got a hankering for fantasy novels that acknowledge the existence of a world outside of the usual feudal-Celtic-Norse triangle, well, there’s a starting point.
(A perenially incomplete one. E-mail me, or comment here, with others I should include: author, title, and which category they belong in.)
