Marie Brennan's Blog, page 101

the end of an era

Since Livejournal changed their terms of service and the mass exodus began, I haven’t had a single comment on the LJ versions of these posts. Accordingly, I am going to cancel and remove that blog. If you’re still reading via LJ, I suggest you transfer to one of these options:

* the WordPress original (you can subscribe via the widget in the sidebar or checking a tickybox when commenting on a post, or add it to an RSS reader like Feedly)

* the Dreamwidth mirror

I’ll be shutting down the LJ in a few days, so make your changes now!

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

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Spark of Life: Alma Alexander on THE WERE CHRONICLES

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, .

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Alma Alexander, The Were Chronicles

It’s very easy to just follow comfortably in the ruts of a well-trodden road when it comes to telling a story – but every now and then something WILL happen to jolt you out of that and then all of a sudden it’s a bumpier ride but you’re out of the ruts and the view is spectacular out there. That’s largely what happened with the Were Chronicles, because two things collided here – the well trodden road of Were-creatures and their archetypes, and the never-quite-before-explored edge of just how the Were-creatures existed, what made them not-quite-human. And I turned back to my long-ago roots – I hold a MSc degree in Molecular Biology and Microbiology, and all of a sudden I had all this relevant knowledge I could draw on. And the story exploded on me. I suddenly had immensely alive characters who couldn’t wait to tell their stories, in their very distinctive voices, characters who lived and breathed and who were genetically Were-creatures but who were so achingly, vulnerably, totally *human* that they made me wince when bad things had to happen to them. For me, these three books – Random, Wolf and Shifter – are amongst the most vivid, most involving, and by far the most important books I may ever write.

Alma Alexander’s life so far has prepared her very well for her chosen career. She was born in a country which no longer exists on the maps, has lived and worked in seven countries on four continents (and in cyberspace!), has climbed mountains, dived in coral reefs, flown small planes, swum with dolphins, touched two-thousand-year-old tiles in a gate out of Babylon. She is a novelist, anthologist and short story writer who currently shares her life between the Pacific Northwest of the USA (where she lives with her husband and two cats) and the wonderful fantasy worlds of her own imagination. You can find out more about Alma on her website, her Facebook page, on Twitter, or join her on her Patreon page.

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

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Announcing . . . WHAT’S NEXT

Those of you who were at Borderlands on Saturday already heard this; now I reveal it to the rest of the world.

Many people have pleaded for the Memoirs of Lady Trent to continue. I have always responded by saying the series was planned to be five books from the start, that I had a set arc in mind that I wanted to tell, and that having brought that to a close, I am done.

That’s still true.

. . . but it doesn’t preclude other stories in that world.

I don’t have a good working title for this yet, but my next novel will be the story of Isabella’s granddaughter, rapacious private art collectors, black market antiquities smugglers, and the translation of a lost epic from the Draconean civilization. The book will be structured like a mosaic novel, interspersing segments of the epic with the lives of the people translating it, as recorded in diary entries, letters, newspaper articles, and more. So it will once again have the intellectual rigor of Lady Trent’s memoirs (this time aimed in a predominantly linguistic direction), the pulpy adventure of its time period (the antiquities market is a lot more colorful than you might think), and the meta-textual setup that lets the heroine’s voice come through so clearly. Plus, the epic will let me put on my folklorist hat with full panoply of ribbons and bells and run cackling down the streets make good use of my folklore background: my research right now consists of reading or re-reading the Mahabharata, Epic of Gilgamesh, Popol Vuh, and more.

This idea is literally less than two months old. At the Tucson Festival of Books in early March, someone asked me a question about other books set in the world of the Memoirs, and inspiration mugged me out of nowhere. Over the next couple of days it morphed around a bit until it arrived in this form, at which point I pitched it to my editor, saying, “I really think this is what I ought to be doing next.” She agreed, so here we are: setting a personal record for shortest time elapsed from “huh, there’s an idea” to “okay, let’s do this!”

So now you know. And now I need to go read the world’s collection of epics to gather material.

Remember the three tenets

I have a back-burner project about a group of people involved in a really big movement. The project needs a lot more development, but I know their three tenets:

You can’t do it all by yourself. We have to do it together.
You can’t do it all at once. We have to do it bit by bit.
Just because something is small, doesn’t make it not worth doing.

Welcome to this month’s tikkun olam open thread. Share with us all the things you’ve done to repair the world. If you’ve helped out with a cause or an individual person, if you’ve donated money or goods, if you’ve improved your own life in a way that will rebound on others, or if you’re planning on doing those things in the upcoming weeks, please tell us about it.

And remember tenet #3 above. Even small deeds are worth doing, and worth sharing.

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

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Broadening My Horizons

If you’re in the Bay Area, don’t forget: I’m reading at Borderlands Books tomorrow, at 3 p.m.! (On Independent Bookstore Day, no less.) And I will have some very special news to announce . . .

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I think one of the things I’ve enjoyed most about writing the Memoirs of Lady Trent is the way it gave me a reason to shore up some of the gaps in my knowledge.

Take African history for example. If all you had to go on was my high school education, you’d think that it consisted of human evolution, Egypt, and the slave trade, with nothing in between. (Nothing after, either, but that wasn’t a regional bias; my history classes bogged down on the Civil War and Reconstruction, so that the twentieth century is as the void to me.) I had the vague osmotic sense that there had been a place called Songhay, and that was it.

I could have fixed that at any time. But I’m much more likely to pursue reading about a topic when I have an immediate use for it — something beyond “man, I really ought to know more about X.” It’s pretty well-documented that we learn things better in context, rather than in isolation, and a writing project gives me context. A globe-trotting protagonist was therefore ideal, because she dragged my thoughts in all kinds of new directions, laying the foundation for future exploration. (Solaike in the upcoming Lightning in the Blood draws a lot of its social structure from Dahomey; that probably wouldn’t have happened without The Tropic of Serpents first.)

Islam is another good example. In college I took classes on early Christianity (which also means you wind up learning a decent bit about Judaism) and Hinduism, and some of my Japanese history classes touched on Buddhism and to a lesser extent Shinto, but Islam? Terra incognita for me. Sending my characters to Akhia was the kick in the pants that I needed to read up on it, to make myself conversant with at least the basics. I could have read a Wikipedia article to learn the difference between Sunni and Shiite, but it was easier to retain details when I had a reason to devote dedicated work time to the question. I wouldn’t call myself deeply well-informed on Islam now, but at least I’m not flat ignorant anymore.

Thanks to this series, I know more about Polynesia and how you can locate a flyspeck of land in a thousand miles of empty sea. I know some of the dynamics behind and resulting from Tibetan polyandry. And as I said on the Tor/Forge blog, I’ve learned piles about different kinds of climates and how people live in them.

This is one of my favorite aspects of my job. It’s constantly giving me reasons to learn new things, and I feel richer as a result.

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

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The Accidental Mr. Thomas Wilker

I’ve got a post up at Tor.com about what it feels like to say goodbye to Isabella, and there’s an interview with me at Goldilox. Continuing on from yesterday’s post (and this time basically sans spoilers), there’s someone else I’d like to talk about . . .

***

Tom Wilker is the best accidental character I’ve had in a while. Maybe ever.

What do I mean by “accidental”? I mean that I did not, at the outset, plan for him at all. I don’t think he was even in the first thirty thousand words I wrote, before I set the book aside for a few years; I think I added him in when I came back to the story, because I realized Lord Hilford would of course have some kind of assistant or protégé along for the Vystrani expedition. Jacob was too new of an acquaintance to occupy that role; therefore I invented Mr. Thomas Wilker.

But of course if he was going to be a part of the expedition, then he needed to have an identity beyond “Lord Hilford’s assistant.” I’m pretty sure the idea for his background came from The Dragon Seekers — which sounds like a stereotypical fantasy novel but is instead a nonfiction book about Victorian paleontologists. Specifically, I was inspired by Mary Anning, who achieved remarkable things despite having two strikes against her socially: her gender (female) and her class (working). I already had the gender angle covered with Isabella, but I realized it would be potentially fruitful to include someone from a lower-class background — someone who faced challenges that were similar but not identical to hers.

And so Lord Hilford’s assistant, a character of convenience, became a person. But even then, he was supposed to be a person of limited significance: a source of friction in the first book, but after that . . .

Well, after that. It made all the sense in the world that he and Isabella should work together in Eriga during the second book, because Lord Hilford was funding their expedition. I had the vague thought he might be around in the third book, but I knew Lord Trent was on his way; I figured that by book four, I would have phased Tom out.

Hahahahah NO. In hindsight, that plan died during the witchcraft ceremony in The Tropic of Serpents. There was no way I could put the two of them through that kind of bonding experience and then write Tom out of the story. (He became Tom to me, too, as a consequence of that scene.) I don’t think I quite realized what I’d done until I was partway through Voyage of the Basilisk, but yeah . . . at that point he was in it for the long haul.

And I am so, so glad of it. Friendships between men and women — platonic friendships, where neither has any romantic interest in the other — are among my favorite narrative tropes. Nor am I the only one to feel that way, judging by the number of reviews, reader emails, and in-person comments I’ve gotten that rave over how wonderful it is that they don’t ever hook up. Tom and Isabella have each other’s backs without question, and I think it would be fair to say they love each other, in the way of true friends; but they are not in love.

All that, from the pragmatic thought that Lord Hilford ought to have an assistant.

(Poor Tom. In the history books of his world, he’s probably remembered as “Lady Trent’s assistant.” It’s the fate of many female scientists to have their own work and discoveries downplayed, relegating them to secondary roles in the stories of their much more famous male counterparts; in this tale he is playing the female part. Even though Lady Trent herself would ferociously defend his contributions.)

There are narrative decisions that change a story so profoundly, you can’t really envision what it would have been like had you decided differently. There’s one of those in Warrior; it’s the moment when Satomi says, “Wrong.” I have no idea what the climax of that novel would have looked like had my subconscious not spoken up in the middle of that scene. And I have no idea what the Memoirs of Lady Trent would look like without Tom at Isabella’s side.

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

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Concerning “Lord Trent”

More than six years ago, in January of 2011, I sent my agent the pitch for the Memoirs of Lady Trent. It consisted of thirty thousand words from the first book and a document approximately three thousand words long describing the setting and the plots of the various novels. Because I am crap at outlining, while those latter synopses bear some resemblance to the final story, it’s very obvious in hindsight that I was just waving my hands in an attempt to make it look like I knew where was going . . . and nowhere is that clearer than in the figure of “Lord Trent,” i.e. Isabella’s husband.

Here there be spoilers. (Up through In the Labyrinth of Drakes, though I’d say the only really bad spoiler is for A Natural History of Dragons. If you haven’t yet read Within the Sanctuary of Wings, you’re in the clear.)

Jacob’s death was always going to happen. I knew when I pitched the series that he would die at the end of the first book. I had a reader ask me once why I had “fridged” him — and while that term is usually applied to female characters, I’ll admit it has some applicability here. My answer to that reader was threefold: first, in the Victorian British society I used as a model for Scirland, wealthy women often had more freedom as widows than they did as either wives or spinsters. I wanted to explore that, which meant Isabella had to be married and then lose her husband. Second, there’s the pragmatic consideration that without reliable birth control, a married woman is liable to be pregnant on a fairly regular basis, which would greatly restrict Isabella’s ability to be a field researcher. I could have given her fertility problems (and you’ll note she does have a miscarriage in the first book), but I didn’t want that to be a recurrent thing; having her be widowed gave me a way to deal with that issue in a plausible fashion.

But those were really just ancillary effects. The biggest reason I did it was that we have countless stories about meeting someone and falling in love and living happily ever after with your One True Love. We have vastly fewer stories, especially in fantasy, about meeting someone and getting married and growing attached to them but then losing them and grieving and recovering and eventually finding someone else. Stories where it isn’t One True Love for your whole life and then if they die that’s it, game over.

So from the start, there was always going to be a Lord Trent: Isabella’s second husband, met and wed years after Jacob’s death. I knew he would be an archaeologist, because that would give me a way to do more with the whole “ancient ruins” business. I knew he would show up in the third book and they would be married by the fifth, because Isabella needed to have at least one book on her own, and then I wanted their relationship to build over time.

But I didn’t know who he was.

In the synopsis he was William Sinclair, a Scirling aristocrat. Even in January of 2011, I knew that was a lie. Or rather, a placeholder: William Sinclair is a bland nonentity in the synopsis because he was just a character-shaped cardboard cutout occupying the space reserved for the real Lord Trent. From an early point, I knew that I wanted the actual Lord Trent to be something other than an ~English nobleman straight from Romance Casting Central; it was just a toss-up whether he would be ~European and physically disabled in some fashion, or from some other part of the world. (He could have been both foreign and disabled, of course, but at the time they felt like separate character concepts in my mind.)

And so we wound up with Suhail. I went with an Akhian character largely because the fourth book, where their relationship would solidify into marriage, was going to take place in Akhia; it seemed more fruitful to have a Lord Trent with ties to that location than one wandering in from outside. Only later did I really think about the political implications of having a ~Muslim Arab figure so largely in the story (marrying a ~Jewish woman, no less). If I had it to do all over again, I would make the exact same choice, just with a different weighting of my reasons. As it stands, I regret nothing.

Despite that change, the space Suhail occupies isn’t shaped much differently from that of the cardboard cutout. He shows up in the third book and is married by the fifth. He’s an archaeologist with an interest in the ancient Draconean civilization. Like William Sinclair, he’s the son of an influential family that doesn’t really approve of his work, which is why Isabella doesn’t discover his connections until the fourth book. The difference is, he’s three-dimensional. He’s a character, rather than a post-it note labeled Romantic Partner #2 Goes Here.

. . . and he isn’t Lord Trent. Not directly, anyway.

This is the one thing that startled me when I looked back at that document from 2011. For reasons surpassing my understanding, when I first pitched the series, William Sinclair was the son of the Earl of Trent, so that when he eventually ascended to his father’s title, his wife — Isabella — became Lady Trent. I had clean forgotten that, because for as long as I can remember, I was fixed on the notion that Isabella would not marry into her title, but would achieve it on her own instead. The shift probably happened when I decided on an Akhian husband, since then it would take quite a lot of narrative gymnastics to justify him having or inheriting a Scirling peerage. But the new idea — Isabella being created Lady Trent in her own right, so that her husband would become Lord Trent by dint of his marriage to her — colonized my mind so thoroughly that I forgot it had ever been otherwise.

I’m glad the series I wound up writing bears only a passing resemblance to what I pitched. I like this Lord Trent much better . . . and this Lady Trent, too.

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

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WITHIN THE SANCTUARY OF WINGS is out now!

At long last, the series is complete.

This story has been living in my head for . . . about a decade, I think. I know I wrote the first third of A Natural History of Dragons in 2007 or thereabouts, before stalling out on the plot and setting it aside. I came back to it in late 2010, sold it in 2011, the first book came out in 2013, and now, my friends, the end of the story is in your hands. (Or will be, as soon as you run out and buy it.)

I’m going to be launching a new blog series, along the lines of John Scalzi’s THE BIG IDEA or Mary Robinette Kowal’s MY FAVORITE BIT, called SPARK OF LIFE: a place for authors to talk about those moments where the story seems to take on a life of its own, with a character doing something unexpected or the world unfolding a bit of depth you didn’t plan for. For me that mostly tends to happen in the depths of the tale, when I’ve built up enough momentum and detail for such things to spring forth. But in the case of this series, it happened less than a page in, because the spark of life?

That was Isabella.

Countless reviews have talked about how the narrator is one of the strongest features of the story. I’m here to tell you that, like Athena from the head of Zeus, she sprang out more or less fully-formed. The foreword got added a bit later, so it was in those opening paragraphs of Chapter One, where Isabella talks about finding a sparkling in the garden and it falling to dust in her hands, that she came to instant and vivid life. Part of the reason that initial crack stalled out in 2007 — or rather, the reason it got so far before stalling — was because I was having so much fun just following along in her wake, exploring her world and listening to her talk. The narrative voice has consistently been one of the greatest joys of writing this series. I have an upcoming article where I talk about how sad it is for me to be done with the story, because it feels like a good friend has moved away and I won’t get to see her regularly anymore. That’s how much she’s lived in my head, these past years.

Stay tuned on future Tuesdays for a glimpse at how other authors’ stories came to life. And stay tuned in upcoming days for some more behind-the-scenes stuff about my own characters!

***

In the meanwhile, the book is out, and so are the reviews. Here’s a spoiler-free one from BiblioSanctum, and two reviews on one page at Fantasy Literature; here is a SPOILER-TASTIC one at Tor.com. (Do NOT click unless you’ve read the book or are fine with having the big discovery of the entire series laid out in full. I’m serious.) (And while I’m at it, the same goes for that Gizmodo article that shows all the interior art for the book, because spoilers can come in visual form, too. Love ya, Gizmodo, but oof. Tor.com warned; you didn’t.)

Back in the land of no spoilers, you can read about my absolute favorite bit of Within the Sanctuary of Wings on Mary Robinette Kowal’s blog. It’s . . . a wee bit topical, these days. And I’m on the Functional Nerds podcast, talking about all kinds of things that aren’t this book, because they like to give authors a chance to branch out and natter on about roleplaying games and things like that.

And finally, I’m currently running a giveaway on Twitter. Name your favorite female scientist in any field (there, or in comments here), and get a chance to win a signed book of your choice from my stash of author copies. It’s already a stiff competition; we’ve had dozens of women named. (If you were wondering why my Twitter stream has turned into a sea of retweeted names, that’s why.) You have until tomorrow!

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

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One day left! (For two things!)

Tomorrow, y’all. Tomorrow, Within the Sanctuary of Wings will be available from all reputable vendors of books! If you’ve been waiting for the series to be complete before you pick it up, now is your chance to start! If you know someone who has been waiting for the series to be complete before they pick it up, now is your chance to tell them to start!

My upcoming tour schedule is here, with a new item added: a May 11th signing at University Bookstore in Seattle, where I will be joined by the inestimable Todd Lockwood.

Also, don’t forget that the illustrated edition of Lies and Prophecy is currently 30% off at Kobo. Just enter “APR30” as a coupon code at checkout to get the discount. The sale ends today!

Finally, I’ve contributed a number of items to this year’s Con or Bust auction. There are three lots:

signed copies of Voyage of the Basilisk, In the Labyrinth of Drakes, and Within the Sanctuary of Wings
signed copies of Cold-Forged Flame and Lightning in the Blood
signed copies of all four UK editions of Midnight Never Come, In Ashes Lie, A Star Shall Fall, and With Fate Conspire

Bidding is open now, and will continue until May 7th. It’s a great organization and a great cause, so go forth and bid!

. . . see you all tomorrow!

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

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Things what are on sale now!

Since you still have four days to wait until Within the Sanctuary of Wings is released, now is a splendid time to try out the Wilders series, if you haven’t already. The illustrated edition of the first book, Lies and Prophecy, is currently 30% off at Kobo; enter the promo code APR30 at checkout to get the discount. That ends April 24th, so get it while the getting is good!

And speaking of things available only for a limited time, I’ve put up a gallery for the photos currently being exhibited at Borderlands Cafe in San Francisco. If any of them look like something you’d want on your own wall, drop me a line!

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