Marie Brennan's Blog, page 100

Photography for sale

If you’d like to order a photograph for someone on your holiday list (or for yourself! that’s okay, too!), my galleries are here! Aaaaaand, I have finally gotten off my duff and finished editing my pictures from the Okinawa trip this summer, so there are three new galleries: one for the trip as a whole, and then specific ones for the former royal estate of Shikina-en and one for Gyokusendo Cave.

Depending on where I order the print from, I can get it done on pretty much any medium you like: paper, glass, canvas, wood, aluminum, acrylic, etc. Sizes are flexible, too. If you’re interested, drop me a line!

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Signed books for the holidays

Just a quick reminder: if you’d like to get one of my books signed for the holidays, Borderlands Books can help you out. Get in touch with them, place an order, and then they’ll let me know and I’ll go up there to take care of it.

But act fast! It’s a hike for me to visit the store, so it might take a week or so for me to arrange a time when I can swing by.

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Light in the darkness

I’m a solar-powered creature and don’t much like the darkness of winter, but I love the symbolism of this season: the rekindling of light in the darkness. It is, in a sense, our yearly miracle, and the fact that it’s caused by the elliptical orbit of the earth around the sun doesn’t make it any less magical to me.

We are now one year into my monthly series of tikkun olam posts. (Linked to the DW mirror because that’s where the most responses have been happening.) The darkness, as always, seems like it will go on forever. But if we’re to turn the corner and head back toward a brighter world, it won’t happen automatically; it takes effort, and the more of us who try, the faster it will go.

Tikkun olam: repairing the world. Volunteering, donating, performing acts of kindness. Whatever you have done in the last month to make the world a better place, whatever you have planned for upcoming days, share it here. You don’t have to apologize for not doing more or deprecate what you’ve done. Sometimes we’ve got more in us; sometimes we’ve got less. But anything is greater than nothing, and so anything, however small, is worth counting.

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New Worlds: Lineage

Over on the New Worlds Patreon, my theme for December is going to be kinship — the anthropological term for “family,” and a favorite subject in the field. We start with lineage, including a discussion of how people often misunderstand what matrilineality means. Comment over there!

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New Worlds: Dining Customs

The last November post for the New Worlds Patreon covers dining customs! How do you eat? When? Where? And with whom? All interesting questions to consider . . .

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Books read, uh, most of 2017?

Okay, so the last time I posted about what I’d been reading was in February, at which time I noted that I’d fallen out of the habit of book-blogging and wanted to get back into it. Welp, clearly I fell right back out again.

My log for 2017 is not complete, I know — I failed to log things in my file as well as write about them here. And it will be even less complete as I exclude various things like my own work (re-read for editing purposes), things I’ve read for review or critique, things I’ve blogged about already, and the pile of folkloric epics I’ve been reading for research (the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Mahabharata, the Popol Vuh, the Kalevala, the Táin Bó Cuailnge, and a very abbreviated rendition of Journey to the West). But it’s still a decent pile, so let’s get started.

Lace and Blade, ed. Deborah J. Ross. Read as a kind of research, because I was going to be submitting a story to the fourth installment in this anthology series. This is “romantic fantasy” in the Zorro/Scarlet Pimpernel/swashbuckling-and-intrigue sense of romance; there is also love, but not always. I still remain a less-than-ideal audience for anthologies, because my preference is to sink into a longer story, but I enjoyed several of the pieces in here.

Red Seas Under Red Skies, Scott Lynch. Didn’t hang together as well as its predecessor, alas. The con Locke and Jean were running wound up basically being an afterthought, while the parts of the story that took place at sea didn’t feel integrated with the rest. It was still fun, but fun kind of in segments, rather than forming a powerful whole.

Coyote Still Going: Native American Legends and Contemporary Stories, Ty Nolan. Collection by a Native American storyteller. It interleaves the legends themselves with anecdotes about situations in which he’s told those stories, reflections on the people and communities he tells them to, and even some recipes, which I think is a really interesting approach.

The Republic of Thieves, Scott Lynch. Better-constructed than the second book in the series, and we finally — at long last — get to meet Sabetha. For a story in which we mostly see her through Locke’s pov, she was fairly successful in escaping the trap she’d been caught in before, which was being defined as the Object of Desire for Locke. She very clearly has her own desires and opinions about things, even when Locke himself is too caught up in his feelings to notice, and her own goals that she’s pursuing by her own means. (I can’t help but contrast her with Denna from The Name of the Wind.)

Legend, Marie Lu. First in a dystopian YA series, with a privileged young woman hunting down a young male rebel. Romance ensues, naturally, because it’s a dystopian YA series.

New Worlds: Kitchens

Have you ever given much thought to your kitchen, and how you would keep yourself fed without one?

Whether the answer is yes or no, come along to the latest New Worlds Patreon post and read all about kitchens!

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Spark of Life: Juliet McKenna on THE SHADOW HISTORIES OF THE RIVER KINGDOMS

Spark of Life is a chance for authors to talk about a key moment when the story came to life: a character did something unexpected, the world acquired new depth, or the plot took a perfect but unforeseen turn. For more details, go here.

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Juliet McKenna, The Shadow Histories of the River Kingdoms

This Must Be Kept A Secret

After four series and fifteen novels, I’m familiar with that electrifying moment when a story comes alive, when the interaction of people, places and plot generates an internal momentum to drive the narrative, often in unexpected directions. It can be a wild ride. It’s always exhilarating.

My experience with the stories in The Shadow Histories of the River Kingdom was very different. This new fantasy world started with one short story for an anthology called “Imaginary Friends”. What if a lonely child’s imaginary companion proved to be a threat? not a consolation? What would make this significant? It would be, if that child was important. So I devised the tale of Princess Kemeti discovering that her imaginary friend can step out of the Unreal World. Worse, he threatens to break free of her control. That’s some challenge for a nine year old.

So far, so good, for a single story. Then I realised something about the magical environment I’d just created, where dreams, longing and other emotions can call something or someone into existence in a parallel world. The possibilities were limitless, and if those creations could cross over into day-to- day reality, so was the potential for confusion and for dangerous situations. More stories floated through my own imagination. But that wasn’t the ‘spark of life’ moment.

That came when I realised this magic would have to be kept a secret. Except, how could that possibly be done? If someone’s dreams of a unicorn could send one trotting down a street? Unicorns get noticed. Apparently inexplicable things get noticed by the authorities, religious, political, whoever. Once those in power worked out what was happening, they’d see that same limitless potential for chaos that I had. Then they would go one step further. They’d realise the uses they could make of such magic, as well as the ways their enemies could abuse it. What would this mean for the River Kingdom which I’d sketched into the background of Kemeti’s story?

More than that, something so powerful would have to be kept a secret. But how do you keep something so unpredictable hidden? By watching and waiting and concealing every manifestation as quickly as possible. By assessing anyone and everyone who proves to have this uncanny magical talent. By enlisting those powerful enough to be of use, whatever their character or their background might be. When the stakes are so high, that’s going to be an offer these people would be very unwise to refuse. But that’s okay if we’re the good guys, right? The ends can justify the means…

That’s it. That’s the spark. This tension, this challenge, the inherent instability, which will drive more stories, novellas and novels set in this world.

Juliet E McKenna is a British fantasy author living in the Cotswolds, UK. Loving history, myth and other worlds since she first learned to read, she has written fifteen epic fantasy novels, from The Thief’s Gamble which began The Tales of Einarinn in 1999, to Defiant Peaks concluding The Hadrumal Crisis trilogy. In between novels, she writes diverse shorter fiction, ranging from stories for themed anthologies such as Alien Artifacts and Fight Like A Girl through to forays in dark fantasy and steampunk with Challoner, Murray and Balfour: Monster Hunters at Law.

Currently exploring new opportunities in digital publishing, she’s re-issued her backlist as ebooks in association with Wizard’s Tower Press as well as bringing out original fiction. Most recently, Shadow Histories of the River Kingdom offers readers a wholly new and different fantasy world to explore. Learn more about all of this at www.julietemckenna.com and find her on Twitter @JulietEMcKenna

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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Spark of Life: Aliette de Bodard on THE HOUSE OF BINDING THORNS

Aliette de Bodard’s latest book, The House of Binding Thorns, is the second book in the Dominion of the Fallen series, which began with The House of Shattered Wings. What’s the point at which the book came to life for her?

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I really dithered about where to start The House of Binding Thorns.

The book is a Gothic dark fantasy set in a decadent Paris set in the wake of a magical war: I knew pretty early on that it was going to be "opium war with dragons" and that it was going to involve politics, backstabbing and magical intrigues around an arranged marriage, but while I hammered out the basics of the plot pretty quickly, I couldn't get the entire thing to gel. It sounded fantastic on paper, but I tried and discarded several beginnings that didn't work.

One of the main characters, Madeleine, is a drug addict (to the opium analogue in this universe, a drug distilled from the ground bones of Fallen angels). I knew that her first chapter was going to involve her being forcibly weaned off the drug in unpleasant ways (since the magical faction she belongs to, House Hawthorn, is headed by a sadist and completely ruthless). But every attempt I made at opening in media res fell flat.

And then I realised I was having a twofold problem: the first was that opening on a character being tortured felt too over the top for me personally. The second was that opening in media res is a very tricky thing. It's too early for the reader to care about the characters that horrible things are happening to, so the writer needs to both get the reader to care and to keep everything else going at the same time, which is a lot of very hard juggling.

The usual fix to this is to open earlier, get the reader time to get attached to the characters, and then have things go pear-shaped. I realised that I could actually open later, after the weaning from the drug had already happened, and only allude to it in flashbacks. This solved both of my problems in one go. I could make the reader attached to a character recovering from trauma, and I also could leave the description of said trauma mostly to the reader's imagination– which I've always found to be more effective than graphic descriptions of violence.

I sat down, and wrote:

In the House of Hawthorn, all the days blurred and merged into one another, like teardrops sliding down a pane of glass. Madeleine couldn’t tell when she’d last slept, when she’d last eaten—though everything tasted of ashes and grit, as if the debris from the streets had been mixed with the fine food served on porcelain plates—couldn’t tell when she had last woken, tossing and turning and screaming, reaching for a safety that wasn’t there anymore.

And just like that, the character (and the book) came alive for me.

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Aliette de Bodard writes speculative fiction: her short stories have garnered her two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award and two British Science Fiction Association Awards. She is the author of the Dominion of the Fallen series, set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, which comprises The House of Shattered Wings (2015 British Science Fiction Association Award, Locus Award finalist), and its standalone sequel The House of Binding Thorns (Ace, Gollancz). She lives in Paris. Visit her website or Twitter for more information.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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This should haunt them until the end of time.

Last night my temper snapped. I pulled up the website for every single congressional representative from Texas who voted for the atrocity they call a healthcare bill and tweeted at them — I would have emailed, but none of the ones I tried accept emails from non-constituents — telling them that they are unfit to hold public office.

Why Texas? Because I was born and raised there, and still feel ties even though as of last September I’ve lived there less than half my life. It seemed like a good place to start with my rage. I originally meant to keep going, but after tweeting at twenty-four of the two hundred seventeen Republicans who greenlit a bill that might as well be labeled We Don’t Care If You Die, I was too sick at heart to continue.

When I say they are unfit to hold public office, I mean it. They should not be voted out; they should resign before the next election even rolls around. But since I doubt most of them have enough shame left to do the right thing and step down, it’s on the people of this country to make it happen at the next opportunity. Those two hundred seventeen people have completely lost sight of what it is to be an elected official. The ideas of representing their constituents, of serving the public good, of laboring to make our imperfect union a little more perfect? That’s long gone. Some of them have admitted they didn’t even read the bill before they voted in favor of it. The rest apparently read it and were okay with the monstrous cruelty it represents. Because it isn’t about governance anymore; it’s just a great big game of sportsball, and they wanted their side to score some points. They wanted to pass something. Anything. Didn’t even really matter what it was, so long as they could be seen achieving something, marking the world as their own by pissing all over it.

Never let them forget this. Some votes don’t really matter; this one did, even if the bill dies in the Senate as it deserves. This was evil. This is a bill that, if passed, would kill countless Americans, that would make us all sicker and weaker and more vulnerable. And they didn’t care. They cheered it on, because it’s their team, and that’s all that matters anymore.

The list of names is here. I thank the 193 Democrats who voted against it, and the 20 Republicans who appear to still have a conscience or a sense of duty.

The rest of them?

Tie this millstone around their necks, and make them carry it for the rest of their lives. It’s the least they deserve.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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