Marie Brennan's Blog, page 112

Yuletide is a-comin' in

For those who are interested, the annual Yuletide fanfiction exchange is starting up again! If you already know what it’s all about, the nominations post is here. If this is unfamiliar to you, the exchange rules are here, and the more detailed eligibility rules are here. Which may very well be confusing to a newbie, so feel free to ask me questions if there’s something you need clarification on.

Short form: Yuletide is very fun, covers a broad swath of things one would not normally term “fandoms” (ranging from historical periods to works of art to blog posts to commercials), and produces a number of really excellent stories every year. I’ve been doing it since 2010, and it’s sort of a busman’s holiday for me — a chance to tell stories and have it be pure play.

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

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/773122.html. Comment here or there.

Yuletide is a-comin’ in

For those who are interested, the annual Yuletide fanfiction exchange is starting up again! If you already know what it’s all about, the nominations post is here. If this is unfamiliar to you, the exchange rules are here, and the more detailed eligibility rules are here. Which may very well be confusing to a newbie, so feel free to ask me questions if there’s something you need clarification on.

Short form: Yuletide is very fun, covers a broad swath of things one would not normally term “fandoms” (ranging from historical periods to works of art to blog posts to commercials), and produces a number of really excellent stories every year. I’ve been doing it since 2010, and it’s sort of a busman’s holiday for me — a chance to tell stories and have it be pure play.

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

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/773122.html. Comment here or there.

So these just showed up . . .

Five days left!

In celebratory anticipation, I’m going to give away one signed copy to a commenter on this post (across all platforms). There will also be giveaways for Twitter respondents and newsletter subscribers, so if you want to maximize your chances to get your hands on one, keep an eye out there as well! I’m @swan_tower on Twitter, and you can sign up for my newsletter on my website.

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

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/772873.html. Comment here or there.

All the news that’s fit to print

I have survived our housewarming party, and with that in my tail-lights, let me catch up on a few things. And by a few, I mean a lot.

Like my newest Onyx Court story! “To Rise No More” is the tale of Ada Lovelace’s childhood friendship with faeries, and also her ambition to build herself a pair of wings to fly with. No seriously, I didn’t even make that part up. (The wings, not the faeries. But she did also refer to herself as “Babbage’s fairy helper,” so, y’know. Maybe not that part, either.) It went up at Beneath Ceaseless Skies on my birthday, which I found to be excellent timing.

Shifting gears to a different series, the Barnes and Noble blog has just revealed the cover to Lightning in the Blood, which is the upcoming sequel to the still-upcoming-but-will-be-out-next-Tuesday Cold-Forged Flame. As I said on Twitter, I didn’t know until I saw it that one of my life goals was to get a Giant Hunting Cat onto a book cover, but I can check that off my list now!

And while I’m at it, I’ve finally gotten an excerpt from Cold-Forged Flame posted to my site. One week — one week and it will finally be out . . . .

Also, I’ve been busy with the Roundtable Podcast, hosted by Dave Robison and Marie Bilodeau. And I do mean busy, as I’m in not one but two episodes. The first is part of their “Twenty Minutes With” series . . . which, with the introduction and everything else, wound up being more like Fifty Minutes With. But dear god, the introduction alone is worth it: Dave Robison has a habit of describing his guests in epic terms. I have never heard my own life sound so much like a superhero origin story.

So that’s the first episode; the second is part of their “Workshop” series, wherein a writer (or in this case, a writing pair) describe a project they’re working on and then get feedback from the assembled hosts. We dug into an urban fantasy premise for this one, a setting where a new drug is causing people to develop magical powers, and had lots of thinky thoughts on both the way the drug fits into the world and how to write the “psycho ex-girlfriend” trope in a sympathetic and complex manner.

And finally, I’ve got myself a brand-new setup on Imzy. Where by “brand-new,” I mean “there’s basically nothing there yet” — but I figured I should mention, for those who are busy exploring this new site. Then, having done that, I decided to spend my other community-creation slot on putting together one called Dice Tales, which is a spin-off of the blog posts I’ve been doing at Book View Cafe. Speaking of which: the most recent installments there are “Keeping Up with the Joneses,” on power escalation over the course of a campaign; “With Great Power,” on the GM’s ability to screw players over and responsibility to use that wisely; “GNS,” on Ron Edwards’ old Gamism-Narrativism-Simulationism framework; and then a two-parter that consists of “Game Planning I – Arcs, Acts, and Chapters” and “Game Planning II – Sessions and Scenes,” which are pretty much what it says on the tin. But the Imzy community is not just a place to reblog those posts; I’m hoping it will become a great discussion of storytelling in RPGs more broadly. So if you’re on Imzy and you find that kind of thing interesting, come on over!

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

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/772704.html. Comment here or there.

Real and unreal names

Rambling thoughts, as I try to name a character.

Lots of fantasy and science fiction feature made-up names. Some of them look more made-up than others — but there are ways and ways of looking made-up, aren’t there? When The Tropic of Serpents came out, I recall reading a review where the person complained about having difficulty with the made-up fantasy names in that book . . . in a way that strongly suggested they had no trouble with Dagmira, Vystrana, Drustanev, or any of the other equally invented names from the first book. But of course those are all recognizably European in style, while names like Ankumata n Rumeme Gbori are meant to look African instead. I don’t recall anymore what Smithsonian article I was reading at the time, therefore can’t look up the place name I came across in it, but it was something from a Pacific Northwestern Native American language, and it looked like the kind of thing beginning fantasy writers get told to avoid at all costs: a mash of “unpronounceable” consonants and apostrophes. But it isn’t unpronounceable, of course; it only looks that way to your average Anglophone reader, who isn’t used to dealing with phonemes in that configuration. Result: a name of that sort often looks fake and made-up, even when it isn’t.

And then there’s the other direction — what I’ve mentally dubbed Babar names. CVCVC, consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel-consonant. There are a LOT of these in fantasy, because apparently when an Anglophone brain is fumbling for letters and trying to arrange them into a name, this is the pattern it’s most likely to default to? Or else strong influence from somebody in the genre, but I don’t know who; Tolkien was not very prone to Babar names at all. (Rohan, sure, but you can’t say it was a dominant pattern with him. He was too much of a linguist for that.) These can be perfectly real too, of course, in a variety of different languages. But they’ve started to look fake to me in fantasy novels simply because I’ve seen so many of them. There are so many other ways to put phonemes together! This character I’m trying to name, he was originally Khimos and now he’s Ilan and I’m not happy with either of those in part because they’re just one step away from a Babar name, CCVCVC and VCVC. There’s someone else in that story whose name comes from the same language and she’s Vranatzin Iskovri. That looks like a real name to me. It has internal logic, even if I’m the only one who knows what it is. And yeah, it’s more difficult to pronounce, but if I only stay within the zone of what’s familiar and easy to an Anglophone reader, I’m ignoring a whole swath of possibility. I just wrote a series where people have names like Iljish and Yeyuama and Heali’i and Nour and Thu Phim Lat. I intend to keep that kind of variety going.

I just need this guy to cooperate. You’re important to this story, dude; you need a name I’m going to be happy with, something that will look real to me. Aadet took forever and a day to accept a name, but even he had one by the time I got to him in the story. You? I’ve got a complete first draft and I still don’t like yours. C’mon. We can do better than this.

Originally published at . You can comment here or .

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Birthday Egotism

It looks like I didn’t do a birthday egotism post last year.

For those of you new to this blog (and by new, I mean you’ve been here for less than two years), this is a sporadic tradition of mine for the last decade plus, wherein I step back and reflect on the awesome things I’ve done in the last year (or two or however many it’s been since I did the last post of this kind). It started one year when I was feeling down on my birthday; I decided to counteract that by making myself list my achievements, with no disclaimers, caveats, or modesty allowed. It turns out this is a useful thing to do every so often, and so I shall ask again the traditional question:

I’m thirty-six. What do I have to show for it?

Well, for starters, I BOUGHT A HOUSE.

We bought a house; my husband and my sister share in the credit here, both from the financial and labor standpoints. But I went out to find a house and I found this one and then we bought it and it makes me so happy. On Saturday we’re having a housewarming party. Because it’s OUR HOUSE.

Recommend poetry to me?

So here’s the thing: I read very little (basically no) poetry. When I find a thing I like, I really like it . . . but the rest of it more or less bounces off my skull without leaving a mark. Result is that I don’t read much poetry, because the odds of me finding one of those things that will embed itself in my brain instead of poinging off my cranium are too low to make it worth the effort.

But! I have an internet at my disposal!

So those of you who are lovers of poetry: please recommend things to me that you think I would like. To assist in narrowing down that field, here are things I know I like in poetry:

* Narrative, because brain likey story.

* Aural devices, such as meter, rhyme, alliteration, and so forth. (With exceedingly rare exceptions, I bounce hardest of all off free verse.)

* Generally a darker mood; not sure why, but poems about how happy somebody is tend to draw less of my attention.

* Allusions to things I know about, be it mythology or pop culture or what have you.

I would also be interested in seeing the poetically-minded among you ramble on about why you like poetry: how you read it, what you think about when you consider a poem, etc. Theoretically we had a “poetry appreciation” segment in my high school English classes, but, well. High school.

I’ll put specific examples of what I like behind the cut, for space reasons.

I like “The Raven,” because it’s very aural; I like “Of the Awful Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles, Together with Some Account of the Participation of the Pugs and the Poms, and the Intervention of the Great Rumpus Cat” for the same reason, though that one’s pretty goofy. I appreciate a good classical Japanese haiku or tanka (uh, in translation; I don’t read well enough for the original), though I usually need footnotes to explain to me all the nuances — haiku and tanka are just about the only semi-decent poetry I’ve ever written, for which I blame credit the L5R game I’m running. To pick something more modern, I like Steven Eng’s “Storybooks and Treasure Maps.” I like Neil Gaiman’s “Instructions,” but mostly because I have a recording of him reading it; that doesn’t really register on me as poetry so much as a piece of interesting flash fiction.

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calmed — see here it is —

I hold it towards you.

I encountered this verse of Keats’ in Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, and it put shivers down my spine that have never gone away.

“And this is the word of Mary,

The word of the world’s desire:

‘No more of comfort shall ye get,

Save that the sky grows darker yet

And the sea rises higher.'”

That’s from G.K. Chesterton’s Ballad of the White Horse, and again, it hits the “shivers down the spine” note for me — especially if I quoted the whole bit leading up to it, but I’m trying not to type up too much stuff here.

I should note that I’m leaving out Shakespeare’s blank verse, partly because Shakespeare, duh, and partly because the context of a play means I don’t relate to that stuff primarily as poetry.

(I’m also leaving out all Latin poetry because a lot of that relies on being able to tie your word order into knots.)

And if you’ve read this far — basically, the reason I’m posting this is because I’m still thinking thinky thoughts about description in prose, and I suspect my ability on that front might be improved by a greater poetic sensibility. Which I am unlikely to develop spontaneously, so I’m hoping that more extensive exposure to poetry will help me along . . . but to do that as anything other than a pointless chore, I need to find more poetry I like.

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

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/772050.html. Comment here or there.

Panel suggestions, free to a good home

After the brouhaha over WFC’s panels the other week, I took to Twitter to brainstorm ideas for panels that would make World Fantasy more up-to-date with the current genre. Wound up with quite a few I’d like to see at some con, a selection of which are below.

Additionally, I propose a guideline for all panel programming: if you’re discussing a topic or subgenre and your panel is not explicitly about either a historical period in the genre or its most recent works, then it may be good to have your panel description reference one foundational work, one classic, and one recent title. So, for example, if you were going to talk about vampires in fiction, you could name-drop Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight. If you cannot think of an example from within the last twenty years, then get Twitter or Facebook to help you out. Otherwise you wind up calling Interview “recent” and looking pretty ignorant . . . .

Anyway, panel ideas! Feel free to suggest more in comments.

* Serialized Publication — Both self-publishing and projects like Serial Box have revived this approach to storytelling. How does it differ from its Victorian or pulp-era counterparts (and from modern serialization on TV), and what are the benefits it offers to the writer and the reader?

* Living Memory as History — Fantasy is stereotyped as being mired in a medieval past, but historical fantasy has started to mine the twentieth century for settings. What’s the appeal of setting a novel not in the present, but within living memory, and what perils does that hold?

* Works in Translation — English-language authors often derive a portion of their income stream from translations of their works into other languages, but the flow in the other direction is much smaller. Let’s highlight recent successes of translation into English, and discuss what the barriers are that keep the numbers from rising higher.

* DVD Extras — Author websites and social media provide many opportunities for writers to “add on” to their works, providing additional details or explanation or behind-the-scenes glimpses of how a book came to be. Do these add to the experience, or does knowing too much take away from the magic?

* Trigger Warnings — Fiction, by its nature, often includes content that might be distressing to a given reader. There’s a trend on the internet to note when a post might contain references to triggering content such as sexual assault or child harm, and fanfiction has a long-standing practice of tagging stories to give a preview of what’s inside. How might professional writers do the same — and what, if anything, is the aesthetic cost of doing so?

* Everybody Writes It, Nobody Reads It — Certain genres appear to be more popular with writers than with readers. Or is that just received wisdom? Agents and editors say nobody wants a portal fantasy, and yet many authors want to write them; the same might be true of pulp. Why the disjunct?

* Resurrecting Books — It used to be that your backlist, once out of print, might never be seen again. Self-publishing offers the chance to give these books new life — but what should an author do when these works aren’t up to their current standards of craft, content, or more? Is it better to revise them before republishing, or should they stand as the historical artifacts they are?

* Examining Empire — Good-bye, faceless minions of the Dark Lord; hello, realistic examinations of empire and colonialism. Recent works such as Kameron Hurley’s The Mirror Empire, Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings, and Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant have delved into the ways that empires acquire and maintain power. Let’s discuss the angles they take, and what this tells us about the world today.

* Alternatives to Violence — The default assumption in the genre is that the stakes are high only if a lot of lives are at risk, and the most exciting victory a character can achieve is to win a climactic fight. But there are books that present alternatives, either by solving problems through non-violent means, or by basing the conflict on some other axis entirely. How do writers create excitement and tension without resorting to violence?

* It’s Not About You — Popular authors may find a fandom springing up around their works. How do they strike a balance when it comes to interacting with those fans? Authors have been cautioned for years that it’s dangerous to acknowledge fanfiction and other fanworks, but is that really true? And what’s an author to do when the fans say they aren’t welcome in their own fandom?

* Grimdark Women — When we hear the word “grimdark,” most or all of the authors who come to mind are men, and the stories they tell are often criticized for sexism and misogyny. Who are the women writing in this corner of epic fantasy, and do they receive that label on their works? Are the female characters in their stories handled differently from those in the works of men?

* Poverty in Fantasy — Many fantasy protagonists grow up poor, but in most cases it seems to be cosmetic poverty: the rural farmboy and the girl from the streets never seem to be malnourished or wondering where they’ll sleep tonight. What books feature protagonists who are realistically poor? What are the difficulties in writing about someone who lacks the free time and disposable income to engage in the usual activities of a protagonist?

* Bring Your Own Dragon — Our modern world is mobile like never before, but a lot of urban fantasy still features protagonists who are ethnically and culturally homogenous with their homes. Who’s writing about immigrant protagonists? How can an author navigate the mesh of different folkloric traditions, the dynamics of multiple cosmologies being real?

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

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World Fantasy 2016

Unless something changes in the next month or so, I will not be attending World Fantasy this year. Here’s some other people giving the background on why:

Sarah Pinsker on the issues with the program

Fox Meadows

Jim Hines

File 770 roundup

And then Darrell Schweitzer doubled down.

World Fantasy has had a number of issues over the years, but this turned out to be the straw that broke my back. As I said in my email to the concom, Schweitzer trumpets the fact that there are “smart and friendly people” at WFC; well, as a smart person, I decline to engage with a program that shows such profound ignorance of the last forty years, and as a friendly person, I decline to support the behavior of someone who doesn’t care how many people he’s alienating. He appears to believe that “PC ignorami” and “outrage junkies” are driving people away from the convention — so the only course of action I can in good conscience follow is to provide a data point in the other direction.

WFC is one of my favorite conventions, but that has more to do with the number of friends I can see there than with the convention itself. If they could update themselves to show any awareness of the genre’s development during my lifetime? That would be excellent. But so long as they’re presenting a program whose genre awareness ends at 1980, and so long as the man in charge of it thinks that women, PoCs, and anybody under the age of fifty is beneath his notice? I decline to join them.

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

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Today’s media thought

I’ve been watching Elementary, and I figured out why I subconsciously keep expecting Sherlock to relapse: because his drug addiction registers on Writer Brain as Chekhov’s gun, and therefore I expect it to go off eventually. But at this point (halfway through season three), I suspect that’s the point the writers want to make. An addiction is Chekhov’s gun . . . and you have to live the rest of your life with it sitting on the mantel, begging to be fired. Whether this is a suitable analogy for addiction or not, I can’t say — I have fortunately never struggled with that myself — but I’m pretty sure that’s the thematic point they’re aiming for. Which I do find interesting.

(What do I think of Elementary as a whole? I think I would like it better if it weren’t a Sherlock Holmes adaptation, because I often find it disappointing in that regard. Their Moriarty is fabulous, but sadly underused, and their Mycroft was not just a resounding disappointment but an active detriment to the story as a whole. But where it’s doing more of its own thing, I think it’s decent. Not hugely compelling for the most part, but acceptable background entertainment.)

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

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