Marie Brennan's Blog, page 105

Two kinds of research

I’m starting to think there are two kinds of research — or rather, a spectrum with two ends. Quite possibly it’s a more multi-directional spectrum than that, but there are two ends that seem particularly applicable to my life.

The first kind is reading for facts. This is the type of research I did all the time for the Onyx Court books: I’m writing about a specific thing, and so I need to know stuff about it. What route did Elizabeth I’s coronation procession take? Where were the imprisoned members of Parliament held after Pride’s Purge? When did somebody calculate the moment of perihelion for Halley’s Comet in 1759? What actions were taken by Fenian terrorists in the later Victorian period? This extends to more general questions; a lot of my reading was to fill in broad topics along the lines of “what was life like in this period,” not because there was a specific detail I knew I needed, but because I needed a large mass of specific details to draw from in shaping my plot and laying out my scenes. And often one of those elements would suggest a new dimension to the story, so then I’m off down a new fact-reading rabbit hole; rinse and repeat until my deadline starts breathing down my neck and I have to quit adding to the pile.

The other kind of research is one I used to do all the time — but I didn’t really think of it as “research” back then. It was just, y’know, my life. I took an odd assortment of classes and read an odd assortment of books, and they all poured material into my head, and out of that came stories. This is reading for fodder, and I’m finally back to doing it, because I have several projects in the hopper that are all secondary-world, as opposed to urban fantasy (the Wilders series) or historical fantasy (Onyx Court) or what I think of as world-and-a-half (Memoirs of Lady Trent, halfway between historical and invented). It isn’t that I won’t wind up using specific details out of what I read; the difference is that in the end, I’m not actually writing about those things. Lately I’ve been reading a book on Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, Everyday Things in Premodern Japan, the Mahabharata, a book on the Sumerians, a bunch of Wikipedia articles on ancient Greek philosophy and society because I finished Jo Walton’s The Just City. Am I planning on writing anything set in Georgian England, Tokugawa Japan, ancient India, ancient Sumer, or ancient Greece? Not necessarily. But it’s all going into the mental compost heap, to intermix and break down and become fertile soil for ideas.

Some subconscious part of myself feels like I’m skiving off of work reading these things, because it’s been trained by nine books of historical or quasi-historical fiction to think the only real research is the kind done for facts. I need to do this, though, or else the worlds I invent will stay firmly in the box of “modified analogues,” places that can easily be mapped to single real-world origins. I need to throw a bunch of different things into my head at once, so that I come up with a society where there’s a deified emperor (a bit Roman, a bit Egyptian) and a caste system (a bit Indian) with a meritocratic way of changing your caste (a bit Chinese) and a clockpunky tech level (a bit Italian Renaissance) and so forth, without it being straightforwardly any of those things. If they wind up having an architecture a little bit like Tokugawa Japan or a schooling system like ancient Sumer, it will be because that happened to click into place, not because I had to use one of those societies for inspiration.

As I said at the beginning, these aren’t clearly divided types. “What was life like in this period” is closer to being a fodder-type question than “how rapidly did the plague take hold in 1665,” because it’s designed to help me come up with ideas for that specific period. And you’ll see the Mayan calendrical system with a minor fictional paint job showing up in Lightning in the Blood because years ago I read about it for fun and wound up incorporating it into a story more or less wholesale, complete with fiddly little details about Year-Bearers. But it helps me to remember that fodder-type reading is a form of research, and one that’s very necessary for my job.

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

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A Trip Down Juvenilia Lane, Vol. 7

If you need proof that my numbering for these notebooks is more what you might call guidelines than actual rules, look no further than this volume.

Our last installment was largely devoted to the spring of my junior year, with a brief retro-foray into my sophomore spring in the last few pages (where I was pondering which field school to attend and writing part of Doppelganger). This notebook, which theoretically follows in in sequence, opens with me as a sophomore again, dwells for a while on my actual time at Cas Hen, skips off my junior year like a rock off a pond, and then lands firmly in my senior year for a good half the notebook before wrapping up in the final pages with me settling into Bloomington the summer between college and grad school — except that the back has the nigh-obligatory couple random pages of text from Doppelganger (seriously, how many notebooks did I spread that across?) and page after page of Japanese vocabulary practice, which could date to any point between my freshman year of college and my third year of grad school.

Like I said. Guidelines, not actual rules.

Anyway, this bounces back and forth between NPC stats for the Japan-based Vampire game I never ran on the recto side of pages with Irish verb conjugations on the verso before getting to quite an assortment of writing stuff. The notes for Sunlight and Storm must be very early; I hadn’t named any of the characters yet, just referring to them as “the protagonist” and “flighty” and “Mrs. Dull.” (Who actually isn’t dull, but that’s how the protagonist first sees her.) Then, after a page of semi-outline for Doppelganger and a page of me conjugating laudare for no reason I can recall, I’m at Cas Hen!

I think my field school notes started when we were in Ireland for the middle two weeks of six, because the earliest stuff is about graveyards, and we spent a lot of our time in Ireland taking rubbings of old headstones and so forth. That and survey work: if I need to remind myself on the differences between resistivity, magnetic susceptibility, and magnetometry, now I can. Also phosphorous testing, which I’m pretty sure is how we snapped the handle on the auger before somebody got around to admitting we had totally the wrong kind of auger for the job and that’s why it never worked for beans even when it was intact.

Random line, reigning in solitary glory on the back of a page, I think said by one of my friends at the field school: “The reincarnation of Jack the Ripper is the son of Zeus.” No, I have no idea what we were talking about to wind up with a line like that. I don’t think it was meant seriously.

Some of this is actually kind of interesting, and I can only assume I got it from someone at Cas Hen, given its placement in the notebook. I have a page describing the tools a blacksmith uses: not just the obvious things like hammer and anvil, but also bosh, mandrel, swage block, drifts, sets, fullers, hardies, and the difference between cold chisels and hot chisels. Also the parts of an anvil, and the detail that the block it sits on is usually elm? And then another page of the different heats you bring a metal to (warm, black, dull red, bright red, bright yellow, light welding, full welding) and the techniques you use on it (drawing out, upsetting, bending, hot cutting, punching and drifting, welding, hardening, tempering, annealing, normalizing, case hardening). The next page talks about the right build for a workhorse versus a warhorse vs a horse for endurance riding; for all I know, I got that from one of my field school friends, who knew a lot about horses. I don’t think it’s really worth photocopying these before I send the notebook off, because I could get that info in much greater detail from a book if I ever need it for some reason, but it’s still quite nifty.

Then piles of notes for my final paper, about how the site of Cas Hen gets presented to the public through signboards, reconstructions, pamphlets, and shop displays. Unlike most of my classmates, I actually have the paper itself, too, because I went to the trouble of hauling my laptop to the back end of nowhere and running it off the electricity in the finds tent. I had to write my final draft by hand, which was annoying, but at least I was able to compose the paper digitally. I’ve preferred to write on a computer ever since I was nine.

Back to writing! There was a thing I was doing freshman year, that must have continued for longer than I recalled, where I was writing folktales and bits of pseudo-history as worldbuilding for the Nine Lands. I have one of them in here, about an incident in the political history of Tir Diamh. (In verifying that, I also discovered that what I thought was me trying to write poetry for poetry’s sake was actually an attempt at the satire that gets mentioned in one of the other bits of Diamhair history. It seems I used June Tabor’s “Aqaba” as my source for its melody and scansion.) Did that plant the seeds for something that shows up near the end of the notebook? I have there something of an outline for the early part of a novel I still haven’t written; whether I will or not, who knows. Then more Doppelganger bits, including the earliest evidence I’ve yet come across of what eventually became Dancing the Warrior, eleven years later.

Junior year is represented by me trying to work out floor plans for our dorm suite and about four pages of class notes for three different classes, before the next page declares HIEROGLYPHICS! in very large excited letters. Which means it’s now my senior spring, when I took a class on Egyptology. But wherever the first half of that semester is, it isn’t here, because the hieroglyphic bits are followed by my first trip to Japan, during spring break: thoughts on which places I might visit (I hit rather a lot of them, though didn’t make it to Sanjuusangendou, Arashiyama, or Fushimi Inari until a later trip), an attempt at a daily journal that died four days in. (Half in Japanese, half in English, of course.)

“Since I work on stories instead of taking notes anyway, I might as well use a story notebook.” Is that what this is? And here I thought it was a nonsensical hodgepodge of random crap. But while I may have been ignoring the professor in my Aegean Bronze Age archaeology class, I do wind up having actual Egyptology notes soon after that. Interspersed with bits from my push to write a bunch of short stories before I graduated, so I could send them in to what was then the Isaac Asimov Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing; it’s now the Dell Magazines Award for same, and it was my first monetary success with my writing. Of the six stories I wrote in those two months, “Calling into Silence,” “The Twa Corbies,” and “A Thousand Souls” wound up being published; the other three are currently trunked. But trying to brainstorm story ideas from folklore gave me my first notion of writing a short story based on “Tom O’Bedlam,” so while I can’t really say that I had the idea for “Mad Maudlin” in college, I did have the ancestor of the idea for it.

Unexpected treasure: notes from the Shadowrun game a friend of mine ran. It was, for a long time, the only campaign I played in that actually reached a conclusion — because it was planned from the start to be something like six sessions. People who know Shadowrun are invited to beat their heads into their desks when they hear that our party consisted of three physical adepts and a shaman. <g> Our GM was kind and tailored the game so we didn’t need a decker or a rigger or, y’know, any of the things that are normally core to a Shadowrun campaign. (One of our phys ads practiced . . . aikido? Some martial art that meant he had a penalty if he initiated violence. He was also built like a tank, so we generally stuck him in front as our meat shield, let the bad guys attack him, and then went to town once he started fighting back.) But really, our weird-ass party composition fit the plot, which turned out to be a modern-day sequel to the old wuxia film The Bride with White Hair. Sadly, the notes here cut off before the end of the campaign. I hope they turn out to be in another notebook, because I remember the conclusion wound up being very bittersweet: we had to decide which of several factions (the Bride, her lover, some triad group, I forget who else) to give the magic flower to, and waffled back and forth so much, more people died than might otherwise have done. My comment afterward was “I think my character feels like they made a wrong decision . . . but she can’t tell which one it was.”

The last thing in here, before the logistical notes from me moving to Indiana for grad school, the Doppelganger bit, and the Japanese vocabulary, is from what I dubbed Old Project C a while ago. I’d laid it aside round about my freshman year, maybe sophomore; years later I picked it up again, in the hopes that the intervening time would have given me enough distance to be able to really reconceive it as I needed to. The answer was both yes and no: I was able to make major changes, but not to turn it into something successful. I got far enough, though, that I started trying to write new fiction in the setting, plots wholly unrelated to my previous attempts. And this one is especially noteworthy because it’s pretty much the only thing I wrote that entire summer: I was working for a contract archaeology lab, getting up way earlier than I was accustomed to, which meant I also had to go to bed way earlier than I was accustomed to.

This killed my creativity.

I knew I was a night owl, but I didn’t know how much. I won’t say that I’m incapable of writing in the daytime, but my most productive hours are after 10 p.m. Always have been. And the shifted schedule, combined with a mind-destroyingly tedious job, meant I got no writing done — except for the one night I decided to say “screw it” and stay up later than I should. I wrote a short story that night, the story I apparently started here in this notebook. So it’s a reminder that yeah, my work schedule is a choice . . . but not a random one.

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Elfquest Re-Read, Fire and Flight: A Maiden’s Place

(This is part of my Elfquest re-read. There will be spoilers.)

I mentioned in my last post the cultural exchange between the Wolfriders and the Sun Folk, two very different societies. One of the differences between them comes to the forefront when the earthquake sends the zwoots stampeding toward the Sun Village, and the Wolfriders head out to try and turn the herd away. Leetah is shocked to see Dewshine going with them, saying “But it is not a maiden’s place to –” She can’t even muster a justification for that incomplete thought, and Dewshine shrugs it off with a laugh, because she sees no reason she shouldn’t ride in the hunt.

I didn’t notice, until this re-read, that the first half of Fire and Flight doesn’t back up Dewshine’s attitude nearly as much as I assumed. At the time of the holt’s burning, there are seventeen Wolfriders: nine men, five women, and three children (two male and one female). The raiding party that rescues Redlance consists of Cutter, Skywise, Treestump, Strongbow, One-Eye, Scouter, and Pike — all the men of the tribe save Woodlock and Redlance himself. The same group goes to face down the human leader, and the raid on Sorrow’s End adds Woodlock, who otherwise sticks to his usual role of the peaceful stay-at-home dad. (Redlance, another pacifist at heart, stays behind because he’s badly injured.) None of the women participate. It isn’t until you get the story of Madcoil that you see the women riding out: Fox-Fur, Brownberry, and Joyleaf are all with the hunt, and the group that finally takes out Madcoil includes Clearbrook, Nightfall, and Dewshine.

Now, I could actually see an in-story reason for this. The Wolfriders have a serious birthrate problem (about which more in a future post); the six who died in Madcoil’s attack left only four children behind. The tribe after that has only five women of reproductive age, and one juvenile girl. It would actually make sense if they were in a more defensive posture, protecting the women so the tribe as a whole won’t die out. But nobody ever says anything about that, which makes me wonder: did the Pinis change their minds a couple of issues in and decide to give the female Wolfriders a more active role than they originally planned? Or did it simply take them a while to get past their defaults like they meant to? It isn’t just that the women don’t take part in the various war parties. They also get very few lines early on — though to be fair, neither do most of the men — and when the fire starts, Scouter cries to One-eye that “Mother needs us! And I must save Dewshine!” The overall impression is one of much more conventional (i.e. passive) femininity.

But that’s just the first few issues. I actually love the women of this series; there are so many of them, and they’re very different from one another. Nightfall is not Dewshine is not Savah is not Leetah is not Winnowwill is not Kahvi. It takes time for that to develop — in this first volume, Nightfall and Dewshine are the only female Wolfriders to get much page time — but they’re all distinct personalities, with different qualities and flaws. It’s an excellent illustration of how avoiding the Smurfette problem also helps you dodge other pitfalls of writing female characters: when there isn’t just one, she doesn’t wind up being a statement on Women As a Whole. Leetah’s sheltered and peaceful ways are what she is like, not a reflection of her entire gender. Nightfall is fiercer than her lifemate, but that doesn’t mean all female elves have to be Amazons. Rainsong is happy to sit at home trying to solve the birthrate issue single-handedly — or rather double-handedly, because gentle Woodlock is right there with her. If anything, Leetah’s comment to Dewshine feels like 1978 intruding on the story: nobody in the Sun Village is the type to ride into the face of a stampede, except for Rayek. Gender might be a factor, but to me it seems secondary to general Sun Folk attitudes about such behavior.

Which honestly makes a fair bit of sense, for the type of society this depicts. The archaeology post will come later, but hunter-gatherer societies tend to be fairly egalitarian, and while I’m not as familiar with horticulturalists (small-scale farming, of the type we see the Sun Folk doing), I know you don’t usually get major social stratification and specialization until you develop much larger-scale societies than any of the elf tribes have.

I also want to note that I very much appreciate the way the story handles the trial of hand, head, and heart — or rather, the implications of it. Both Rayek and Cutter make the mistake of thinking that winning the contest means winning Leetah. But as she points out to both of them, the purpose of it is to settle their rivalry with each other — not her actual choice. She has a chance to choose before it begins, and can’t; after that, what the victor receives is the right to talk to her without the other one interfering. In Leetah’s own words, she is not “some trinket to be handed out as a prize.” That’s a point many stories miss, even today.

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A Trip Down Juvenilia Lane, Vol. 6

I pity the hypothetical poor bastard who ever tries to go through these notebooks to write some book or paper on me. The fifth page of this notebook features the following gem: “Tá mé réasúnta ard agus measartha tanaí. Caithfidh mé a ? láidir. I should email [name]; he can probably help.” Four pages after that, we get “家へかえりたい” — the start of a whole block of Japanese text. I think by this point in my life I had stopped randomly writing things in Spanish, but I can’t swear to it, nor that there won’t be some Old Norse later on. The actual content of this stuff is rarely meaningful; the Japanese says “I want to go home” and goes on to whine about how I can’t write in kanji anymore and I’m tired, while the Irish, from what I can piece together with the help of a dictionary, is an evaluation of my height and weight and physical strength (why I was writing that I don’t know, other than as a way of not forgetting the language). But a casual glance at the text doesn’t tell you whether it’s pointless filler or not, written down because I was bored in class. Some of it might be load-bearing. The only way for that hypothetical researcher to know is to translate the Irish and the Japanese and the Spanish and maybe the Old Norse, along with the Welsh song lyrics and Latin poetry and other crap I scribbled out because I was trying not to fall asleep.

Dear god. A later page has me trying to write out the first line of the Aeneid . . . in katakana. アルマ　ウイルムクエ　カノ。

My brain has always been a weird place.

Anyway, this notebook. It mostly continues straight on from the previous one, as in I’m still taking notes from my junior year Japanese history and witchcraft classes. (Also my ethnography class, but either it bored me stiff or it was the kind of class that was more about discussion than absorbing information. Possibly both; I could tell you better if I remember which professor taught it. Anyway, my “notes,” such as they are, largely consist of details about paper due dates and complaining about my fellow students.) Reading through it took me a while, because I was pretty gung ho about writing as much as I could of my notes in Japanese; I got a lot of hiragana practice the last couple of days, and had a few rounds of “what do those kanji mean? Bakufu, maybe? <goes to dictionary> Okay, yes. Then the bit right before it probably means Kamakura, because I know that’s the next historical period after Heian.”

From a writing perspective, it means this volume isn’t very interesting, as the vast majority of it is class notes, and the bits that sparked story ideas are pretty scarce. But I’ve got a page or so of noodling about the Nine Lands, scattered notes on The Kestori Hawks, and the occasional nugget of idea, marked to hold onto for later. My paper for that ethnography class was written on the local SCA fencing practice, which is further evidence of how my interest in that subject developed. Toward the end I started working on my junior thesis, which wound up being about weapons in Viking Age Scandinavia; apart from more proof of “hey, I like sharp things,” that thesis led directly to a short story and an as-yet-unpublished novel based on same. (I read Hervarar saga and was wildly disappointed by how it squandered the narrative potential of the poem “The Waking of Angantyr,” which was included in my Old Norse textbook. So I decided to write my own version.) And I think this one page full of random words was me scribbling down names I liked while working for Anthropological Literature as an indexer, because the second page of that also features the note “Kumari” by Allen, Journal of the Indian Anthropological Society, 32:3 207-221 pp. I knew “Once a Goddess” was inspired by an article I read while indexing; now I have the exact citation. Thanks, Professor Allen!

The most interesting bit, however, comes at the back of the notebook — which clearly got used before the rest of it did, because the material there dates to my sophomore year, before everything else. I’ve got contact info for several archaeological sites, which must have been field schools, because the last thing on that page says “Cas Hen’s a possibility.” That would be Castell Henllys, the field school I attended the summer after my sophomore year, which is noteworthy for two things in particular. The first is that I wrote a good chunk of Doppelganger while sitting in my pup tent with my laptop balanced on my air mattress — including the pivotal scene where Miryo comes face-to-face with the Primes after her encounter with Mirage, which will forever stick my memory because my subconscious threw a spanner into the works that night, that wound up making the entire story much richer. And the second noteworthy thing is that Cas Hen is where I met Alyc Helms, who seventeen years on is still a good friend and my closest writing buddy. As I said when recommending her to my former editor after he set up shop as an agent, every time I hit a wall mid-draft, Alyc is the person I fling my manuscript at, wailing piteously for her to hellllllp meeeeeeee. So, uh, I’m glad I decided not to go work on Low Briker Farm or Silchester Roman Town or the Billown Neolithic Landscape Project, because I could have written Doppelganger there, too, but I wouldn’t have met Alyc.

Oh, and there is Spanish in this notebook, though it’s limited to me scrawling CALLATE! (shut up!) when one of my classmates wouldn’t stop talking, and some song lyrics when I got really bored. So, par for the course.

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Elfquest Re-Read, Fire and Flight: Wolfriders vs. Sun Folk

(This is part of my Elfquest re-read. There will be spoilers.)

Fire and Flight, the first volume of the series, could stand on its own just fine. It’s the story of how a tribe of elves called the Wolfriders were driven from their home and found a new one; it’s also a romance story for the protagonist, the Wolfrider chieftain Cutter. Both of those things find resolution here, so while the seeds of the ongoing story are present, you get a complete tale right out of the gate.

When it comes to interesting things to say about this volume, the first one that leaps out at me is race. Looking at it with my current perspective, the story doesn’t open very well on that front. We get a brief flashback about how the ancestors of the elves came to the World of Two Moons and met with disaster, and . . . well. Tall, thin, pale Tolkien elves get bashed over the head by brutish humans who are a lot darker-skinned. There’s a whole lot of interesting stuff going on with that backstory that will have to wait for a later post, but the visuals you get in those first few pages aren’t great. In the present moment, thousands of years later, the humans look more anatomically modern (I’m going to do a whole post about the archaeological perspective on this series), but they’re still fairly brown and primitive, and the elves are still pale and pretty.

But. If you continue on past that, things get a lot better.

For starters, I love the fact that our Tolkien elves have become short and (relatively) stocky and eat raw meat and ride wolves and howl at the moon. The Wolfriders are not their ancestors, and they’ve become a lot more primitive themselves, struggling to survive in a harsh world. The only reason they have metal weapons is because they trade with the trolls underground — who, though not depicted in anything resembling a flattering light (they’re green and lumpy and not remotely admirable), clearly have much more advanced technology than either the elves or the humans.

Where it really gets interesting, though, is when the Wolfriders cross the desert after the burning of the holt and find themselves at Sorrow’s End. In 1978 — the same year that Gary Gygax introduced the drow, those black-skinned concatenations of every evil outsider characteristic you can think of — Wendy and Richard Pini gave us the Sun Folk, a settlement of civilized, brown-skinned farmer elves. Compared to them, the Wolfriders are straight-up barbarians. Made cynical and suspicious by their recent woes, the Wolfriders literally charge down into the village and raid the place, even to the point of carrying off Leetah (a direct reversal of the “brown animalistic barbarians will carry off the white womenfolk” trope). Is it subtle and nuanced? No, not really. But for 1978, it was pretty remarkable. And Elfquest still remains the only example I can think of where not only are there brown elves, but they’re depicted as more civilized than their white cousins. Everything else either maintains the color quo (the Forgotten Realms now has non-evil brown-skinned wild elves, but they’re barbaric compared to pale sun or moon elves), or just kind of flings around skin color at random (the Shannara TV series, which made no attempt at setting up any rationale for elven ethnicity).

True, the Sun Folk are depicted as weak in certain ways, and “weakness” is one of the standard Orientalist tropes for the Other. Rayek is basically the only hunter among them, and even he uses his hypnotic powers to stun his prey rather than chasing it down on wolfback like Cutter’s people. Part of the cultural exchange that ensues features the Wolfriders encouraging the Sun Folk to be more proactive and aggressive. But it is an exchange; the Sun Folk teach things in turn, like history or the planting of crops and weaving of cloth. And, y’know, the not being an asshole. (More on that when I get to the post about Recognition.) The Sun Folk’s pacifism and passivity are circumstantial, the consequence of living in a sheltered place with almost no threats, not anything inherent to them. Ultimately you get some Wolfriders settling down in the Sun Village because the culture there is more their speed, and some Sun Folk going off with the Wolfriders because the quiet life doesn’t suit them. Both ways are okay. Both sides can benefit from the other. So while there are criticisms you can make, it is (sadly) still progressive enough to be noteworthy, even today.

If there are other good examples of racial diversity among elves out there, please do let me know.

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Introducing the Elfquest Re-Read

Growing up, I never read that many comic books. I associated the medium with superhero stories, which didn’t much interest me; later on, when I knew there were lots of other kinds of stories out there, I still found myself bouncing off them for various reasons (didn’t like the art style, found the stories too thin to engage me, etc). These days there are some comic book series I love, but even now they’re few in number.

And then there’s Elfquest.

A friend of mine handed me the first graphic novel when I was about twelve, and I fell hard. She went out of town right after loaning me the third volume; I just about went mad waiting for her to come home and give me the fourth. I discovered there was an Elfquest roleplaying game, and I got my local bookstore to order it in. Had I ever played an RPG? Nope. Never got around to playing that one, either. But it was an Elfquest-related thing, so I had to have it.

I’ve decided, in the tradition of my Wheel of Time and Diana Wynne Jones Project, to re-read the series and blog as I go. I don’t have a terribly organized plan for this; I think I want to approach it more via topics than making one post per volume, but I’ll tackle those topics in narrative order, revisiting some of them as they become relevant again. Right now my intent is to stick only to the first eight graphic novels (up through the end of Kings of the Broken Wheel); nothing after that worked as well for me as the early stuff did. But possibly I’ll change my mind, especially as I’m still working my way through The Final Quest, and may want to revisit some of the middle volumes to remind myself of what’s going on there. If you want to read along, all the stuff I’m definitely going to post about is available for free on their website.

This post will serve as the index for the whole blog series, so I’ll update it as I go with links to the individual posts as I make them. Look for the first of those soon!

Fire and Flight: Wolfriders vs. Sun Folk

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A Trip Down Juvenilia Lane, Vol. 5

Years ago I numbered these notebooks so I would know roughly what order they went in, but it’s more what you might call guidelines than actual rules. This one, #5, starts out with my junior year of high school — I can tell because there are three pages from a project I was working on for Theory of Knowledge — but then it jumps straight to my sophomore year of college. And I can tell that because I was finally taking actual notes in class.

In fact, the bulk of this notebook is dedicated to class notes, stretching across three semesters. But even if there were nothing story-related in it — which isn’t the case — I would still consider it fair game for archiving, because of what it shows about my development as a writer. The classes recorded here are Ancient Celtic Society, my Irish Gaelic language course, The Christian Revolution (on the early formation of the church), Shakespeare’s Later Plays, the history of folklore theory, Japanese history, and witchcraft. (Yes, I took a course on witchcraft. My textbooks for that had the most interesting titles.) This is characteristic of my education: I ricocheted all over the globe, filling my brain with bits and pieces of material from a dozen different cultures.

I hadn’t realized it began this early, but here we get the first scattered appearances of the mark I mentioned before, the thing I would put in the margins of my notes to let me know when I’d gone haring off the path of class material and into ideas for my stories. It’s a little MB, for Marie Brennan, and it makes obvious what otherwise would require inference: the fact that my classes were directly fueling my fiction. It’s possible that one of my other notebooks will even record the moment at which a folklore seminar gave me the idea for “Calling into Silence,” the first piece of fiction I ever had monetary success with. I’ve said before that I didn’t choose my majors (archaeology and folklore & mythology) with an eye toward what would be useful to me as a fantasy writer, but I don’t think I could have chosen better for that purpose if I tried. Here is the proof of it, with my college education dumping truckloads of fertilizer and seeds directly into my brain.

Story-wise, there are a bunch of things in here, starting with Old Project C (that can be the code name for the originally-fanfic-based-but-later-original thing I may revive someday in vastly altered form) and bouncing around through Doppelganger, The Kestori Hawks (my third and wildly unsuccessful novel, now trunked), the Nine Lands short stories, and Sunlight and Storm (my fourth novel, which may get revived from the trunk someday). I can see the moment where I started noodling around with the name that wound up becoming Shikari. There are some scene-bits for what would probably be the pivot point of a series I have not yet written, more than fifteen years later. There are diagrams and choreography for the plays I worked on, during the four years that I was basically the only stage combat person at Harvard with anything resembling training — early stratigraphy for Writing Fight Scenes.

There are also a few habits that are still with me now. The first is my tendency to randomly start writing in cursive, in a never-ending and perpetually doomed attempt to regain the ability to make it look good. Sketches periodically fill the margins; I’m not much of a visual artist, at least not outside of photography, but that hasn’t stopped me from trying. And every so often — more, when there’s a good reason — I’ll write bits of my notes in Japanese, again in an attempt to keep up my skill. Mostly what it means in practice is that I remember how to write dates, and my hiragana comprehension has stayed good, because I can spell out things I don’t remember/never knew the kanji for, and kanji (at least the way I write them) are often too slow for note-taking purposes. This was useful in the part of the notebook where I was studying Japanese history, because I could and did write about how しょとく promoted Buddhism in やまと during the 六の century, but a few scattered habits stayed with me overall; I suspect later notebooks will show me writing 人 for “person” or “people,” because that’s one of the few cases where the kanji is genuinely faster to write.

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

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/789758.html. Comment here or there.

Taking part

My dojo’s New Year’s party was today*, conflicting with the Women’s March up in San Francisco. So instead I went to the Answer Coalition protest last night.

(*Japanese New Year’s parties happen in the new year. I’m told that as long as you get it done before the end of, oh, February, it still counts.)

I don’t think I’ve ever really been to that kind of event before. I can’t recall anything like it, anyway. It was grey and raining and rather cold when I arrived at UN Plaza, but I worked my way slowly to the front-ish part of the crowd and listened to people give speeches, including one delivered in both Spanish and English. Every so often the sky decided to drool on us for a bit; people were good about opening their umbrellas safely above head height, and indiscriminately sheltering not only themselves but whoever happened to be standing nearby. I couldn’t help but see a metaphor in that. Out of an abundance of caution I’d taken a Sharpie to my arm and written out an emergency contact, drug allergies, and the fact that my ophthalmologist had dilated my eyes a couple of hours earlier (so any hypothetical EMT would know why my pupils were blown), but it wasn’t at all necessary; everything was good, all the energy channeled in the right directions.

I hadn’t looked very closely at the details of the protest. Answer Coalition, okay, 5-7 p.m. in UN Plaza. I missed the part where it said there was going to be a march. When they said we were heading to the Castro (nearly two miles away), I thought about returning to BART and calling it an evening. But hey, it won’t hurt to go at least a little way, right?

Next thing I know, I’m in the Castro.

I thought about splitting after a few blocks. But there was a cadre of six or seven people who had brought side-slung marching drums, a guy with a snare, somebody with a cowbell, and one brave guy with a trumpet (I’ve played brass in cold weather before; it sucks). Everything is better with drums. There’s a reason armies use them, and it isn’t just to keep everybody in step. I went along with those people for a while, enjoying the beat, but eventually outpaced them and caught up with another group that was doing lots of chants: anti-Trump things, “Black Lives Matter/Native Lives Matter/Trans Lives Matter,” socialist worker chants, chants in Spanish. Somewhere in there I noticed that our progress down the westbound lanes of Market was being facilitated by cops, and I started thanking them as I passed. One of them grinned and said that if he hadn’t been on duty, he probably would have been there anyway. Another said it was easy with a group like ours. Cars headed eastbound on Market, or waiting at the cross-streets, honked in support as we went by. And then I could see the giant rainbow flag up ahead, and, well, who could quit before reaching it?

Only we weren’t done there. We hung a left down Castro Street itself, then hooked back east on 18th. Where was our stopping point? I began to form a suspicion that we didn’t really have one. I asked one of the cops, and he just shrugged: he didn’t know, either. I checked my phone and discovered that if I got ahead of the march, I could hit Borderlands before it closed; we were headed that direction, but not fast enough. So I peeled off at last, stopped by to sign some things and stuff a pastry in my face, got back on the nearest bit of BART, and went home utterly exhausted.

But very, very glad I went. I wish I could have joined the Women’s March today, but that one was good, too. And today I get to see the pictures, which made me just a touch verklempt. I knew there were marches in a lot of major U.S. cities, but I had no idea there would be marches in so many not major cities, too. And in other countries. And on other continents. (I wondered out loud if that’s every woman in Antarctica right now, and possibly every human in Antarctica. Turns out that the staff of McMurdo Station is much larger than that, plus there are other stations down there, so no — but still. Every. Single. Continent.)

Donald Trump has insulted and threatened well over half the population of this country. (Women alone make up 50.8%. Add in all the black, Latino, Muslim, Jewish, queer, or otherwise targeted men, not to mention all the men who don’t see those groups as the enemy, and who knows what the number really is.) We have mobilized, in our hundreds of thousands, to show what we think of that.

It’s a beginning. Now let’s keep going.

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

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/789266.html. Comment here or there.

I Do Not Accept

Yes, by the laws of this country Donald Trump is legitimately our president.

By any measure other than the letter of the law, I do not accept him.

He did not receive a majority of the votes, and is not supported by a majority of the American people. He benefited from some unknown quantity of illegal foreign interference. He is supposed to defend the Constitution of the United States; he has shown repeatedly that he has no understanding of that document, much less concern for what it says. He has demonstrated a degree of cronyism and corruption unprecedented in my lifetime, before he even took office. He makes the United States less safe. He represents everything that is worst about this country, from bigotry to crass materialism, and none of what is best.

I do not accept him as my leader in any sense other than that forced upon me by law. And I will work by any legal means available to oppose the damage he is going to inflict on my nation.

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

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/789093.html. Comment here or there.

Anybody have an old ARC of COLD-FORGED FLAME?

I have a tradition of keeping one copy of every version of my books: paperback, hardcover, audio, translation, etc. And that includes ARCs . . . but I never got one of Cold-Forged Flame (an oversight on my part). If you happen to have one of those lying around that you’d be willing to sell me, please let me know! My collection is incomplete.