Marie Brennan's Blog, page 107

It’s the Somethingth Annual “Guess What I Wrote for Yuletide” Game

I participated in Yuletide again this year. Despite wrist surgery nine days before Christmas, I managed to uphold my minimum of four fics — I just had to make sure I got everything written before the 14th.

Those of you who have perused the 2016 collection, care to guess what I wrote? All are full-length. Two of them were crossovers. The sources spanned books, video games, web series, and songs. One is a nostalgia fandom for many people; two are the epitome of the Yuletide “fandom of one” concept. And if you know the right clues to look for, they are all trivially easy to spot, provided you happen to have actually opened the fics; there’s an extra level of effort I could go to if I wanted to really hide which ones I wrote, but I pretty much never bother with it.

Any guesses?

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

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a note for those who read this blog via LiveJournal

I’ve been seeing concerns about the future of LiveJournal now that its servers are apparently in Russia (and therefore subject to Russian, rather than U.S., law concerning privacy etc). I don’t intend to pre-emptively abandon the LJ iteration of this blog, which is where it began and where the majority of the comments are, but in case I either change my mind or LJ itself goes poof without warning, you may want to bookmark one of these links:

WordPress (now the source for all mirrored versions, and integrated with the rest of my website; can be followed via WP or Feedly/some other RSS reader)

DreamWidth (mirrored from WP)

Goodreads (I can’t remember whether this feeds from LJ or from WP; I may need to change settings around)

If you read this blog on LJ and that stops being an option, you will still be able to find me at one of those sites — and I hope you will! I think the only risk I really face on the LJ front, aside from possible incompetence that causes too many unresolved bugs, is that mine is a paid account and therefore there’s a credit card number involved. So I’ll stick it out until the bitter end, most likely.

Edited to add this from mme_hardy on DW:

Your readers should know about another catch:

LJ no longer allows access to its https site when browsing/posting, which means that any information you send to that site is readable by every other site that cares to eavesdrop. This means that anything you post under friendslock is still being read by any site that chooses to spy on Livejournal communications; you can safely assume that at least one Russian-government entity is.

I just double-checked, and the payment page *is* protected by https, so that at least should be secure.

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

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Dice Tales comes to an end

After nearly fifty installments, the Dice Tales series is finally done. To find out what the future holds, check out the concluding post.

And if you want to go on talking about games and storytelling, consider joining the Dice Tales community on Imzy!

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

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A Trip Down Juvenilia Lane, Vol. 3

My third notebook opens with probably the most sustained example of that conlang I was making up. I won’t translate it, because the text I chose to put there is kind of dumb, but here’s the text itself:

Tíolaic’inn cen

eachtread t’ilith tdeabhíu

ceid tasteal’siad aseo

éis misiuil’siad é conuirtithidh

isin caith’gabhain’siadirh

fara raoneidh cen rannatheidh

Fóire rhiai cosin’siad liate

bronn’iade cenath aithedhé crínnacheidh

élaineí h’isini ómhead h’eseandai

Déarté éis sithé.

So if you were curious what the conlang looked like in action, there you go. It’s . . . well, it doesn’t look so O_O if you know Irish phonology. But if you don’t, well, it has the Irish problem of “holy god what’s with those consonant combinations why are you so in love with the letter H.” (Answer: lenition!)

The next thing in the notebook is . . . an outline? I guess? For that Highlander fanfic. I think I must have been pretending to take notes in class, because that’s the only explanation for the weird formatting. Quite a lot of this notebook is devoted to that story, where it isn’t filled with calculus notes instead, or what I think was an abortive attempt at a college application essay, or translations of the Aeneid, or me writing stuff in Spanish to keep my hand in after I stopped studying it. Judging by the story bits in here, I did not know Japanese history all that well back then — but for an eighteen-year-old in Texas, I clearly knew more than your average swan, which is nice to realize.

In semi-related Highlander content, I also ran a (short-lived) play-by-post game for a seven players, which might have survived longer had I not been ambitious and decided to start off with the origin stories for all of the PCs. This mean I was attempting to run seven simultaneous single-player games set in pre-contact Mesoamerica, medieval England, later medieval Transylvania, Heian Japan, Tudor England, Tokugawa Japan, and the Crimean War. I would consider this a ludicrous challenge now; attempting it back then was sheer hubris.

Three new things appear in this volume. First, we have what I think are some of my earliest attempts at cartography: very messy sketches solely intended to help me figure out spatial relationships, rather than to serve any aesthetic purpose. Second, we’ve got several examples of something I used to do as a writing exercise, which was to take a movie or TV scene I knew really well and write it out as prose. I actually used this same exercise with my students when I taught creative writing, because I think it gives you valuable practice in thinking about which visual or emotional details you want to include and how you’re going to integrate them with the dialogue. Do you give the whole line and then the description? Description and then line? Or do you break up the dialogue with a bit of narration, as a kind of punctuation to control the pace of delivery?

And third, we’ve got the earliest bits I’ve yet uncovered of what at the time were known as “the doppelanger story” and “the outlaw story.” The former, of course, became Warrior (originally titled Doppelganger). The latter came to be known as The Kestori Hawks, a trunked novel that will only ever see the light of day if I decide it has merit as a teaching text — at which point I will put out an ebook of it with annotations about how you can learn valuable lessons on novel-writing by looking at where that book failed. I was apparently putting in a lot of effort at that point to learn how to visualize and describe characters, though, which I had quite forgotten.

So that is Volume Three! Stay tuned for Volume 4 at a later date — I still have a lot of these notebooks left.

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

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Radio semi-silence for a while

I’ll be having surgery on my wrist tomorrow, which means I won’t be typing large quantities for a little while — not sure how long. I’ve got a couple of posts scheduled already, but apart from that, I may be scarce around here until I’m able to use that hand again.

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

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Dice Tales goes full academic

This week’s Dice Tales post sees me dusting off some of my academic work, to discuss the ways in which RPGs are like rituals.

Also, I’m trying to make use of the Dice Tales community on Imzy, with a post there about how to make combat feel more integrated with the rest of the action, instead of it coming across as a mini-game that stops the flow of everything else. If you’re on Imzy and you find that an interesting topic, stop by and add your thoughts — or put up a post of your own! The Imzy community is for anybody who wants to discuss RPGs and narrative, not just for me.

Comment over there!

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

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Solidarity as medicine

Today I went to the “Hour of Prayer and Solidarity” at a local mosque, which they organized in the wake of receiving a piece of hate mail. I estimate that around 300 people showed up, which is bloody good turnout for a cold Sunday afternoon and a place that’s basically inaccessible without a car. They had leaders from a bunch of other faith communities (Methodist, Catholic, Sikh, Jain, Jewish — those are the ones I recall), some local legislators, and the mayor. There were some speeches and a lot of clapping.

In addition to the good it does for the people targeted by hate mail to see us all standing out there in the parking lot to support them, it did me good to go. Because in the end, Tweets don’t carry as much impact as much as the physical presence of people around me, going to effort greater than clicking “retweet” to stand against that kind of prejudice. It is, in a way, a kind of medicine, strengthening my heart against the poison that’s seeping out of the cracks right now.

I’ve been thinking a fair bit about religion lately. I was raised in the Methodist church, largely for reasons of convenience rather than tradition (neither of my parents was raised Methodist); I went through confirmation, but none of it ever meant very much to me on a personal level. But lately — especially as I listen to Christmas music for the season — I find myself thinking a lot about myself as a Christian. I feel this odd desire to claim that label for myself right now, not because I’ve experienced a sudden upwelling of doctrine-specific faith, but because I want to stand in contrast to all the Christians who have let themselves forget the importance of love, tolerance, charity, and forgiveness. I want to be in solidarity with the Christians who haven’t forgotten those things, to help keep them from being drowned out by the others. I want to stand in a cold parking lot for an hour and say wa-alaikum-salaam back at the guy who just wished peace upon me as a member of not just a geographical community, but a religious one — at least in the social/cultural sense of “religious.”

I’m not sure where this impulse will go. I doubt I’m going to start attending church again — though you never know. I just know that that feeling of community is important right now, that feeling of solidarity. I need those reminders that the hateful are not the only ones out there, and the rest of us have voices, too.

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

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my work in 2016

Man, 2016. It’s been such a . . . thing . . . that when I sat down to write this post, I thought, “should I bother? I mean, I didn’t have much out in 2016.”

Uh. This was actually one of my busier years, in terms of publications. But the first half of this year might as well be the Neolithic, it feels so long ago. Thank god I have a website to remind me what I’ve done! Courtesy of my own bibliography page, I give you the list of the things I published that came out this calendar year:

Novels</p>
Chains and Memory
In the Labyrinth of Drakes

Novella</p>
Cold-Forged Flame

Short stories</p>
“The Mirror-City” (in Clockwork Phoenix 5)
“From the Editorial Page of the Falchester Weekly Review“ (at Tor.com)
“To Rise No More” (in Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

So that’s two novels, a novella, and three short stories, not counting the three backlist ebooks I put out (Midnight Never Come, In Ashes Lie, and the omnibus In London’s Shadow). All in all, I’d call that a pretty good pile.

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

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cooking chicken

A question for the culinary types.

I recently made a meal (chicken vesuvio, though not quite the version described there) that turned out pretty well, except the texture of the chicken breasts was less than ideal. The outer portion was great, but the core was kind of tough, and I’m wondering what the reason for that is.

The recipe calls for the breasts to be lightly browned and then put into the pan with potatoes, broth, and cooking wine and simmered for about 12-18 minutes. My impression is that the browning part went great (which is why the exterior of the meat was in good shape), but the simmering is where things went wrong. Could it be that the meat simmered too fast, or reached too hot a temperature? I’m supposed to get it up to 160 degrees; after 12 minutes it had already shot past that. My stove tends to run hot, so I feel like maybe it would turn out better if I reduced the heat (it calls for medium-low, so I could go to low) and let it cook a bit more slowly. But I don’t actually know the dynamics of how these things work, so I could use either confirmation of my theory, or an explanation of what’s more likely to have been the problem.

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

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How do we improve the news?

One of the issues I keep chewing on is the fundamental weakness of journalism today. A combination of factors ranging from the ability of fake news to spread via social media to the economic pressures that encourage our formal outlets to pursue sensationalism and fence-sitting have made it such that misinformation rules the day right now.

I want to work on fixing that, but I don’t know how.

I’ve seen people say “we need to subscribe to paid outlets so they can afford to do proper investigative journalism.” Is that the answer? I’m not sure. I have no guarantee that’s what they’ll spend my subscription dollars on, and no certainty that even if they do, it will have a noticeable effect. So I put it to you all: what’s the best place to apply leverage to improve the state of journalism today? Is it a newspaper subscription? Some organization? Does anybody out there have a real, practical solution to this problem — or at least a convincing argument for one — and if so, where?

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

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