Marie Brennan's Blog, page 102

Upcoming events for WITHIN THE SANCTUARY OF WINGS

I meant to post this yesterday but didn’t have the time, so now it’s six days to the release of Within the Sanctuary of Wings instead of a whole week!

As in past years, I will be doing several bookstore events and conventions to promote the release of the book. If you’re in the vicinity of any of these places, I hope to see you there!

Saturday, April 29, Borderlands Books, San Franscisco, CA

3 p.m. — reading, Q&A, and signing

Monday, May 8, Poisoned Pen, Phoenix, AZ

7 p.m. — reading, Q&A, and signing

Tuesday, May 9, Mysterious Galaxy, San Diego, CA

7:30 p.m. — reading, Q&A, and signing

Friday, May 26 – Monday, May 29, BayCon, San Mateo, CA

details TBD

Friday, June 30 – Sunday, July 2, Denver Comic Con, Denver, CO

details TBD

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

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Yes, it’s hard. Put on your grown-up pants and do it anyway.

Background, for those who don’t follow the SF/F convention scene:

A few years back, Jim Frenkel was banned from Wiscon and lost his job at Tor following complaints of persistent harassment against a number of women. More recently, Odyssey Con decided to install him as their Guest Liaison. When their Guest of Honor, Monica Valentinelli, told them that Frenkel had harassed her in the past and she felt neither comfortable nor safe interacting with him, they blew off her complaint; when she withdrew from the convention, they posted her private emails on their Facebook page without her permission, characterized her behavior as trying to “dictate” who could and could not attend the convention, assured everybody that Frenkel and another named problem are great guys, and swore that they’re totally a safe space and will handle these problems appropriately if and when they arise.

They’ve since taken down the emails and their initial statement, so Damage Control Mode is a go. But it’s too little, too late: it is already abundantly clear that they are not dedicated to dealing with harassment in a professional manner. They don’t understand privacy, safety, or basic common decency.

But there are plenty of other people dissecting the daisy-chain of failures here. I want to talk about something slightly different.

I have, in a non-convention context, dealt with a problem like this. I am on the board of an organization that received complaints of harassing behavior and assault by a member — someone I have known for years. I was not part of the group tasked to investigate the complaints, but I was one of the people who had to decide what to do after we received that group’s findings. I’m the one who wrote the email announcing our decision to the membership at large, hand-carving every word in an attempt to minimize the risk of misunderstanding or unintended implication.

It’s hard. No matter what you do, you’re going to upset somebody — and that includes doing nothing. You have to wade into the muck of information you’d rather not hear, examine your reaction to each and every piece of that information, weigh potential responses and their repercussions, and then figure out how to translate all of that into statements and actions. Then, once you’ve done that, you get to deal with the fallout. From start to finish, the whole process sucks.

Too bad. Put on your grown-up pants and do it anyway.

And if you can’t — if your reaction to a complaint is going to be to assume it’s no big deal, to let your gut guide you instead of looking at the evidence, to stick your fingers in your ears and go “la la la” in the hopes that the problem will go away and trouble you no more — then don’t put yourself in a position where you’re going to have to deal with these things. Because the days when you could just skate along and know the woman (it’s almost always a woman) will slink quietly back into her corner? Those are over. These days, if you do this bad a job of handling a known problem, you can and will be pilloried for it. And you will deserve that pillorying, because resources and guidelines for how to do better are readily available, and it was your decision not to pay attention to them.

Creating a “fun, safe, welcoming, event where fans of all kinds can come together and enjoy themselves” takes work. So do the work. Words alone are not enough.

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

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Two weeks to the release of WITHIN THE SANCTUARY OF WINGS

Are you impatient? I know I am. <g>

In preparation for the book’s release, I’ve spiffed up its page on my site. The opening chapter excerpt is now posted there (if you didn’t read it already on Tor.com), and there’s a page that will collect all the blog posts I make about the book, etc. And, for something entirely fresh, I’ve also posted the soundtrack — though that comes with the usual warning that, while I have done my best to minimize spoilers in the track titles, they do still provide some clues, however tiney, about the novel’s plot. For them as likes that kind of thing, go and see what you can divine? For them as prefers to come at the book entirely unspoiled, you may want to hold off on looking at that page, just in case.

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

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New Worlds talks phonology

Month two of the New Worlds Patreon kicks off with a look behind the scenes at my super-easy approach to making languages look real. Comment over there!

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

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The Future of (me on) Livejournal

If you’re intending to bail from LJ due to the changes in the terms of service but want to go on reading my blog, your options are:

1) my website

2) its DW mirror

When it comes to commenting, my personal preference is for the original home, i.e. my website. That’s the place I control, and the home of my blog in the eyes of anyone who googles my name; it would honestly be nice to have more of the discussion happening over there. I recommend Feedly as a service for all your blog-following needs, mine or anyone else’s; all you have to do is click “add content” and paste in a URL to follow a WP blog, DW, LJ, whatever you like. (There are more bells and whistles, but that’s the core of it.) On the other hand, I know many of you like the LJ/DW style interface and would prefer to stick with that, so rest assured, I’ll continue to read and respond to comments on the mirrored posts.

. . . I’ll even fix my damn theme so the text around the comment box is readable instead of accidentally being white-on-white. Like I’ve meant to do for, um, years.

I am not at present intending to drop the cross-posting to LJ, but it sounds like many of you will be shifting to DW or elsewhere, so the comment threads are likely to get a lot quieter. For my own part, I suspect I’m going to be reading everything through Feedly from now on, regardless of where it’s hosted.

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

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three weeks to the release of WITHIN THE SANCTUARY OF WINGS

In preparation for Within the Sanctuary of Wings coming out on the 25th, the Kindle edition of A Natural History of Dragons is on sale for 99 cents right now through Amazon UK.

Also, the first of several blog posts has just gone live: “Beyond the Concrete Jungle,” in which I talk about setting my story in a variety of non-generic-temperate environments (and my near-total ignorance of nature). Should be of particular interest to New Worlds readers!

Finally, last call for icons! An ARC of the book could be yours . . .

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

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Help me find a song?

I’m trying to pick a song to serve as the “soundtrack” to a certain aspect of one of the games I’m in, and I’m coming up empty. So I turn to you, o internets, for recommendations!

The thing I’m trying to set to music is a situation where two character who both have a crap-ton of secrets (including false identities) are going through kind of a fencing match/cat-and-mouse game of figuring each other out and maybe developing something resembling trust. In a perfect world, the song for this would be a male/female duet, but that’s icing on the cake if I can get it; mostly I just need a song that fits the concept. Or, if I can’t get suitable lyrics, something instrumental that is both lush and a little playful. (With a library of over 17000 songs, you’d think I would be able to find something that fits. But nothing has clicked: the closest I’ve come is “Qué Viyéra,” which still isn’t quite right.)

Any suggestions?

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

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slow and steady wins the race

(If you prefer to avoid discussions of weight and fitness, skip this post.)

According to the scale at my gym, I’ve lost 21 lbs since I decided that the slow, decade-long upward creep of my weight was not a good thing, and probably shouldn’t continue unchecked.

It’s taken me twenty-one months to achieve that result — nearly two years. This is not the kind of progress that will get anybody’s attention if you advertise it on TV. On the other hand, it’s sustainable. Not constant; Christmas always reverses the trend a bit, and so does Girl Scout cookie season. But my goal here was to change my life in ways that would allow me to still enjoy the things I like, instead of having to cut them out entirely. Because you know what? Short of me developing a sudden and deathly allergy to chocolate, there is no world in which I’m swearing off Thin Mints for life. Any plan for my body predicated on such a ban is doomed to fail.

Which is why nothing I’ve done in the last two years could be called a “diet.” We’ve got growing mountains of evidence that such an approach is often unsuccessful, or even counter-productive, and I know I couldn’t make it stick even if I wanted to. The closest I come is telling myself that I only get to eat two Tagalongs a day, not half a box in a sitting. (I still eat the whole box. I just take my time.) And as I’ve gotten more willing to cook, I’m finding tasty recipes that are also healthier — but when asked what comfort food I wanted after my wrist surgery, it was grilled cheese sandwiches, yo. I’m not completely denying myself the things I like.

What I have done is walk.

Lots and lots of walking. “Buy a Fitbit and make a daily goal on Habitica for ten thousand steps a day” walking. “Hmmm, it’s 11:30 and five more minutes will get me to fourteen thousand for today” walking. “Run those errands on foot if it isn’t raining” walking. “Put a treadmill under my desk and walk on it while I’m dealing with email and reading random things online” walking. There are some pretty unfortunate correlations between sitting on your butt all day and decreased life expectancy; spending more of my time in motion is a goal in its own right, quite apart from the effect it’s had on my weight. I also do karate, and I was doing some weight-lifting before the wrist problems made me swear off that for a bit, but mostly? I walk. Miles every day, but it doesn’t have to be all at once to have an effect. And while walking/running as a dedicated activity works for some people, I’m more likely to get it done if it’s integrated with other things I’m doing — hence the errands and the email and all the rest.

Like I said. Sustainable. It means my results are slower, but nearly two years on, they’re still going. And that makes me quite happy.

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

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Answering the urgent question

“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is: ‘What are you doing for others?'” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

Another month begins; another tikkun olam post.

It may sound odd, but the above quote makes me think of something two friends of mine once said at the beginning of a LARP they were running. They pointed out that if you come into a game with your main goal being to have fun, then there’s one person working to make sure you enjoy yourself. But if everybody comes into game with their main goal being to help other players have fun, then you have a whole bunch of people workign to make sure you enjoy yourself. So it is with the world: if you only try to help yourself, that’s one person. If we all try to help each other . . . yeah.

Share that help with the world. Volunteer work, donations in money or kind, acts of kindness, anything you’ve done to repair the world. No act too small. Repeated and ongoing acts welcome. Any good is good.

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

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New Worlds: Measuring Time

It’s the fifth Friday of the month and I only promised four New Worlds essays per, but since the first post was mostly just an introduction, you get five this month. For future months, I’ve added a funding goal to cover those months where there ought to be five. In the meanwhile — and on the topic of weeks and months — let’s talk about measuring time!

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

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