Marie Brennan's Blog, page 108

A Trip Down Juvenilia Lane, Vol. 2

My journey through my high school notebooks continues!

I wasn’t organized about filling one notebook completely before starting another, so the chronology here is a vague one. You may recall that volume one included notes from my senior year English class; this one starts with a short-lived attempt to keep a journal while I was in England the summer between my junior or senior years. Obviously there is a great deal of overlap going on.

This notebook contains a great deal more in the way of actual story. It falls primarily into three boxes:

1) Notes and plans from some online RPGs I had completely forgotten ever playing in — largely because (like so many games) they didn’t last for very long.

2) Highlander fanfic about a character of my own creation, a two-thousand-year-old Irish immortal named Eithne. There are surprisingly large chunks of this; most of the fiction in Vol. 1 was just short snippets, a paragraph or two, but this has several bits that run on for two pages or more. I will give my high-school self credit for at least trying to be sensible about why my European immortals were traipsing about Japan during the Tokugawa era; the real answer, of course, is “because Highlander taught us all that Japan Is Kewl,” but I had enough awareness of the history to say my characters got thrown overboard by a ship captain who realized there was something weird about them, and then they were trying to sneak overland to Dejima (and relative safety) without being caught and beheaded.

3) Material from the idea mentioned previously, the one that started off as fanfic but later I tried to file the serial numbers off it. (I’m not mentioning what the original source of the idea was because there’s an outside chance I’ll revive it someday, and I’d prefer not to pre-program people’s expectations of it.)

A few bits of this are fiction, but most of it is notes, and oh, does it ever look like my work. Faced with the realization that I couldn’t do much with the idea unless I de-fanficced it first, my immediate reaction was to worldbuild the shit out of the setting.

Photos over at Dreamstime

I have a favor to ask of y’all!

I recently began posting some of my photography at Dreamstime, one of those stock image sites. I’ve put up a decent-sized batch as my test case — but I suspect their visibility in searches is influenced by how many views each of them already has. Ergo, I’d love it if those of you with a moment to spare could check out my gallery and click through to some (or all!) of the pictures there.

(And if you happen to go “wow, that’s perfect for X purpose of mine!,” they are of course available for licensing!)

Also, don’t forget, my winter black-and-white sets are for sale through my site, in any print medium or size you might want.

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

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/783146.html. Comment here or there.

Dice Tales enters the home stretch

The Dice Tales series is nearly done, but still has a little way to go. The most recent two installments are “A Story in Song” and “Other Relics,” both discussing the kinds of narrative artifacts left behind by this ephemeral mode of storytelling.

Comment over there!

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

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A Trip Down Juvenilia Lane, Vol. 1

I’ve been archiving my papers with the Cushing Library at Texas A&M for several years now, but mostly that’s just meant copy-edited manuscripts and page proofs. I’m reluctant to let go of the boxes in which I keep the papers from each of my novels, because I’m never quite sure when I might need to consult them for some reason; mostly I don’t, but then a random occasion will crop up (e.g. “I need to scan that fight map I drew for Doppelganger so I can include it in Writing Fight Scenes“) and I’ll think, maybe I should hang onto these.

Then it occurred to me that I have about half a shelf of spiral-bound notebooks that I haven’t looked at in . . . more than a decade, certainly. Fifteen years, quite possibly. And those, I decided, are fair game.

But of course I can’t just ship those off to College Station without looking through them first.

Follow me, oh friends, down Juvenilia Lane!

This is like literary archaeology, trying to piece together from clues when the first of these notebooks dates to. Apparently at one point I went through and numbered them, and the early pages contain notes from a class on Native American mythology I took my freshman year of college — or do they? Did I do something else involving Native American mythology? Because that notebook also contains random spates of computer code, and I haven’t taken computer science since my junior year of high school; was I trying to write a program for something writing-related? I seem to recall having done that at one point, though I can’t remember what it was for (and the code itself is not enlightening me). The various snippets of story and notes thereon are no help; I was working on basically the same stuff my freshman year of college as at the end of high school.

Possible clue: I was apparently on a kick wherein I wrote some of those story notes in Spanish or Latin, which were the languages I studied in high school. It isn’t definitive; I might well have been trying to keep my hand in during my freshman year. But more significant is the fact that I don’t have any notes written in Japanese, which is what I studied when I got to college. (I even, god help me, have some bad English-language poetry written in dactylic hexameter. It’s clearly for a story, but the context has long since flown my head.) There are also random bits of Irish Gaelic, but most of those are clearly recognizable as song lyrics: I didn’t take Irish until my sophomore year of college, but prior to that was trying to translate lyrics using a dictionary and no comprehension of Irish grammar whatsoever.

I can watch myself working through the challenges of trying to file the serial numbers off a beloved fanfic idea, which definitely occupied a lot of my time in later high school; it was some time during my freshman year that I shelved it in the hopes that absence would make the heart grow more able to hack it apart as needed. But apparently at one point I decided to set one of the sub-stories from that idea in a Tarot-based world. I have no recollection of this. But it seems it was a thing!

. . . waitasecond. I’ve got half a page here of text from . Half a page of text so old, Liesel is still called Lisa.

(Despite that, some of the sentences are unchanged from this notebook scribble to the finished product.)

IT’S A HIGH SCHOOL NOTEBOOK. I have found the smoking gun, and it comes in the form of my Beowulf notes. My senior year English teacher permitted us to annotate our copies of Beowulf with any information we thought might be useful to us on the test; I have a whole two page here where I was collating line citations for references to fighting, gift-giving, loyalty, Christian/pagan blending, the heroic ideal of excellence, and more. (I inherited three annotated copies of the text from my brother and other previous students to get me started; I still own my copy, and it is the most thoroughly annotated thing I think that teacher ever saw.)

Still don’t know why I was writing computer code in it, though. The early pages might be from my junior year (did we do a Native American mythology section in Theory of Knowledge? We must have), but there’s code in the middle of my Chaucer notes, which is definitely senior year.

And with one and a half lines that might have been me trying to conlang for one of my stories (it’s a cryptic description of the perfect passive participle, and then I didn’t get around to detailing the present participle), we finish out the first of my notebooks. Thank you all for accompanying me down Memory Lane. Stay tuned for further installments, probably, as I wade into notebooks from later in my pre-career!

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

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Kicking at the darkness until it bleeds light

The title of this month’s tikkun olam post comes from something Marissa Lingen once said years ago, about the symbolism of the darkest time of the year (and the making of difficult but lovely cookies in that season). Seems apropos.

As promised, I’m posting an open thread on the first day of each month where people can talk about the things they’re doing to repair the world. Any good deed you have done recently, any charitable donation or volunteering of your time, any change you’ve made in your life so that you will be a better citizen of your society, please share it here. Anything you are intending to do in the coming months, tell us about it.

Nothing is too small. Don’t hold back on mentioning something because you’re embarrassed to mention something so trivial. We need every bit of light.

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

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Dice Tales nears its end

Last week’s Dice Tales post and this week’s: “The Magic of Wikis,” on the ability of a private wiki to serve as a record and organizing tool for a game, and “A Story in Song,” on game soundtracks.

Comment over there!

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

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It’s Black-and-White Friday!

No power on the ‘verse could compel me out into the Hunger Games maelstrom of Black Friday shopping, but the nice thing about the internet is that I can set this particular thing up from the comfort of my laptop.

Looking for East Asian actor recs

I’m trying to get a more solid image of a character in my mind, which is not a thing I’m very good at; it goes better when I have a casting to look at and then verbalize. But I’ve had to cast a bunch of East Asian male characters lately (mostly for my L5R game), and my brain keeps going back to the same well of possibilities, which is starting to run a little dry. And so I turn to you, the internets, and ask: please share with me names and pictures of East Asian actors or other public figures you especially like! Looking for somebody roughly in their twenties or thirties, i.e. not babyfaced but still fairly young. No particular guidelines as to facial type or personality; I really don’t know what I want this guy to look like, which is why I need brainstorming fodder.

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

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Available now: IN LONDON’S SHADOW, an Onyx Court omnibus

It’s out!

For centuries a faerie court has lain hidden beneath London: a place of shadows and intrigue, where the city’s immortal inhabitants can watch and manipulate the mortals above. Through two royal dynasties, through rebellions and plots, through war and plague and fire, the Onyx Court endures.

Now the court’s first two centuries are collected in a single book. This omnibus contains the novels Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie, as well as the novella Deeds of Men, the novelette “And Blow Them at the Moon,” and the short story “Two Pretenders.”

You can buy this from fine e-tailers all over the internet, chief among them Book View Cafe, but also Amazon US or UK, Barnes and Noble/Nook, Google Play, iTunes, Kobo, or (for the Canadians among you) Indigo.

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

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Now available for pre-order: IN LONDON’S SHADOW

For centuries a faerie court has lain hidden beneath London: a place of shadows and intrigue, where the city’s immortal inhabitants can watch and manipulate the mortals above. Through two royal dynasties, through rebellions and plots, through war and plague and fire, the Onyx Court endures.

Now the court’s first two centuries are collected in a single book. This omnibus contains the novels Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie, as well as the novella Deeds of Men, the novelette “And Blow Them at the Moon,” and the short story “Two Pretenders.”

This is my latest (or rather, next) project with Book View Cafe: an omnibus of the first half of the Onyx Court series, short fiction as well as long. It will be out next Tuesday, at which point you’ll be able to obtain it from BVC or Barnes and Noble; right now you can pre-order it from Amazon (or Amazon UK), Google Play, iTunes, or Kobo.

And I have to be smug for just a moment . . . because that cover image? That’s a photo I took, when I was in Switzerland earlier this year. So hey, this particular hobby has a practical side!

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

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