Marie Brennan's Blog, page 114

Walking my butt off

[This post will include discussion of exercise and weight loss, as an advisory for those who prefer to skip such things.]

Apparently moving house is a great way to lose weight.

I’m not entirely surprised by this. If there’s one thing I believe is true about body weight — well, if there’s one thing I believe is true, it’s that we barely understand the first bloody thing about how it works, and later generations will look back at us with the same kind of horrified disbelief we currently direct at Victorian icepick lobotomies. But if there are two things I believe, the second one is that there’s at least some truth to the idea that you can sometimes make a real change just by moving more.

I don’t mean formalized, focused exercise — though that’s good, too, for a whole bunch of health reasons. I mean being less sedentary: spending more time on your feet, more time walking, more time fidgeting. Because I haven’t been going to the gym lately, or even to the dojo . . . but I’ve been packing and unpacking boxes, shelving books, spending a much higher percentage of my day up and about instead of in a chair or on the couch. My weight’s been dropping slowly and mostly steadily for the last year, since I started trying to do that “ten thousand steps a day” thing, but the only time it went this fast was when I got stomach flu last fall. (And I don’t recommend that method to anybody.)

It still isn’t that dramatic: nobody’s going to look at me and say “wow, you’ve lost weight!” In a year I’ve dropped a little over fifteen pounds, which is a pretty slow rate. On the other hand, it’s sustainable. This isn’t a thing I do for a little while and then stop once I reach my target number; it’s a change to my lifestyle — a permanent one, at least until such time as injury or infirmity puts an end to it. I’ve gone from being the sort of person who defaults to getting into the car to the sort of person who actively wants to walk to the grocery store. I’m standing instead of sitting at my desk as I type this, swaying faintly to the music coming from my speakers; once I move the wall clock that is presently sitting on the other end of my treadmill, I’ll be able to start using that again while I’m at the computer. I’m not running three miles every morning, so my aerobic endurance is still the same crap it’s been for most of my life, but “activity” has become a thing I do all the time, in small, low-level doses, rather than a thing that gets fenced off in regulated blocks that are easy to fail at.

This isn’t the sort of post where I say “and this will work for you, too!” See above re: the one thing I believe; we have no real idea why some approaches work for some people and don’t for others, and there’s a lot of stupidity out there on the topic. But I know that shifting my thinking and my behavior to this mode has been good for me, and not only because it has resulted in weight loss. It’s good for my brain, good for my mood, good for my longevity prospects.

For people like me, whose job is inherently sedentary, that’s pretty damn important.

. . . but I don’t care how good moving house is for weight loss, I ain’t doing it again any time soon. I’ll just have to get my exercise by other means.

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

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And now the set is complete!

The set of cover images, that is:

To complete the set of actual books, you will have to wait a while longer — until April of next year, to be precise. But I’m about to send the manuscript off to be copy-edited, so I promise, I’m working as fast as I can!

My profound thanks to Todd Lockwood for an absolutely stunning artwork. I’ve said it before, but it bears saying again: his art in the Draconomicon was one of the things that inspired this series, and to have his work gracing the covers and pages of this series has been an honor. Tongue only a little bit in cheek, I pity my next cover artist: not only is Todd absolutely fantastic, but he and Irene Gallo (Tor’s art director) have done an absolutely stunning job of putting together the entire look of these covers, with a clean and instantly recognizable design that leaves room for enough variation to keep the volumes from all looking alike. It’s a home run on all fronts, and you can’t expect to get that with every book and every series. I am profoundly grateful to have gotten it even once.

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

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Another Dice Tales batch

As I have been busy with the house move, once again you get a batch of Dice Tales links, my ongoing series over at Book View Cafe.

We’re continuing the discussion of character creation, in three more installments: Finding Flavor, which talks about how the advantages/disadvantages section of the mechanics is my favorite place to generate a character concept; A Matter of Leverage, on how gaming has influenced how I think about setting a character up for a story; and Team Players, where the collaborative aspect of character creation takes center stage.

Comment over there!

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

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Let’s play the Genderswap Game!

Jim Hines has been doing a thing on his blog where he genderswaps character descriptions to look at how women and men get depicted. He did it first with classic SF/F novels, then with more recent titles — including his own.

It’s an interesting enough exercise that I decided to go through my own books and see what happens when I genderswap the descriptions. Results are below. I skipped over the Doppelganger books because quite frankly, describing people has never been a thing I do a lot of, and back then I did basically none of it, so this starts with Midnight Never Come.

***

Elizabeth->Eliot, young:

The young man who sat on the floor by the fire, knees drawn up to his chin, was pale with winter and recent illness. The blanket over his shoulders was too thin keep him warm, but he seemed not to notice; his dark eyes were fixed on the dancing flames, morbidly entranced, as if imagining their touch.

Nothing gendered about this, except that it conveys character and situation more than appearance, which is (sadly) still a thing men get more often than women.

Eliot, decades later, as viewed by Michael->Michelle Deven:

She had seen him from afar, of course, at the Accession Day tilts and other grand occasions: a radiant, glittering figure, with beautiful auburn hair and perfect white skin. Up close, the artifice showed. Cosmetics could not entirely cover the smallpox scars, and the fine bones of his face pressed against his aging flesh. But his dark-eyed gaze made up for it; where beauty failed, charisma would more than suffice.

Invidiana->Invidianus, meeting Eliot; I’ve changed the clothing to masculine period style:

Tall, he was, taller than Eliot himself, and more slender. He wore a sleek black doublet, close-fitting through the body but flaring outward into trunk hose and a high standing collar that gave his presence weight. Jewels glimmered with dark color here and there, touching the fabric with elegance. [..] Slender as a breath, he should have been skeletal, grotesque, but far from it; his face and body bore the stamp of unearthly perfection, a flawless symmetry and grace that unnerved as much as it entranced. [..] The faerie was a sight to send grown men to their knees, and Eliot was only twenty-one.

These passages are interesting to me because of the period. Back in the Renaissance, impressing people with your clothing was not nearly as feminine-coded of a thing as it is now, so talking about Eliot and Invidianus in that way doesn’t sound that odd; and where the focus is on beauty, it’s beauty-as-power in a way that also doesn’t read (at least to me) as specifically feminine. Overall, the impression I was trying to give here is one of presence and strength, and it mostly just comes across as a little more conventional when the characters are men.

Tiresias->Tiresia; the “he” here refers to Invidianus:

No footfalls disturb the hush as the woman — not nearly so young as she appears — passes down the corridor, floating as if she walks on the shadows that surround her. […] Her clothes are rich, thick velvet and shining satin, black and silver against pale skin that has not seen sunlight for decades. Her dark hair hangs loose, not disciplined into curls, and her face is smooth. As he prefers it to be.

I couldn’t really convey more of what that last line means without quoting way too much text, but the whole “this is how Invidianus prefers her to look” thing is skeevy here, and was meant to be skeevy in the original. But they don’t read quite the same, because “her appearance is tailored to a man’s wishes” and “his appearance is tailored to a woman’s wishes” just don’t carry the same weight for the audience. (Also, the “smooth face” bit reads weirdly here, because a woman doesn’t generally need to shave her chin.)

Michelle Deven, meeting Eliot:

She had prepared for this audience with more than customary care for appearances. The seamstress had assured her the popinjay satin of her gown complemented the blue of her eyes, and the sleeves were slashed with insets of white silk. Her dark hair, carefully styled, had not a strand out of place, and she wore every jewel she owned that did not clash with the rest. Yet in this company, her appearance was little more than serviceable, and sidelong glances weighed her down to the last ounce. But those gazes would hardly matter if she did not impress the man in front of her.

Utterly conventional, in its swapped form. One of the things I liked about writing this period was the fact that “you need to peacock yourself up” thing applied equally to men, and that it was a woman Deven had to please, in a less creepy way than with Tiresia.

Lanval — I decided to go with an Arthurian name swap for Lune — disguising himself as a human:

The rippling, night-sky sapphire of his doublet steadied and became plainer blue broadcloth. The gems that decorated it vanished, and the neckline closed up, ending in a modest ruff, with a cap to cover his hair. More difficult was Lanval’s own body; he had to focus carefully, weathering his skin, turning his hair from silver to a dull blonde, and his shining eyes to a cheerful blue. Fae who were good at this knew attention to detail was what mattered. Leave nothing unchanged, and add those few touches — a mole here, smallpox scars there — that would speak convincingly of ordinary humanity.

Doesn’t seem much different in tone to me, except that I left the neckline comment in there, which doesn’t quite apply to period styles.

Lanval, again in human disguise, as seen by Michelle Deven:

Frost glittered on the ground and the bare branches of trees like ten thousand minuscule diamonds, forming a brilliant setting for the gem that was Andrew Montrose. With his hood fallen back, his unbound hair shone palest gold in the sun, and his wide eyes, a changeable grey, would not have looked out of place on the King of Winter that featured prominently in last night’s masque. He was not the greatest beauty at court, but that mattered little to her.

Okay, here the weight of it shifts more noticeably with the gender-swap: this was the first introduction of Lune’s alter ego, whom Deven was in love with, so I was playing up some of the male gaze thing, which here becomes female gaze.

Lanval, not disguised, as seen by Michelle Deven:

Hair — silver. Doublet — black feathers, trembling with him. And his face, imperfectly warded by his hands, refined into otherworldly beauty, high-boned and strange, with silver eyes wide in horror and fear.

Making this a male faerie instead of a female one automatically makes me see him as more of an anime bishounen, as that’s one of the few genres where this type of male beauty is a norm.

Moving on now to In Ashes Lie . . . if there’s any place in there where I wrote a concentrated description of either Antony or Jack, I can’t easily find it, which is interesting all on its own.

Eochu->Eocha Airt, as seen by Lanval:

The three who entered stood out vividly from the courtiers filling the chamber. Where the fae of his realm mostly followed the fashions of the human court, with such alterations as they saw fit, the Irish dressed in barbaric style. The warriors heeling the ambassador from Temair wore vivid blue cloaks clasped at one shoulder, but their breasts were bare beneath, with bronze cuffs around their weapon arms. Eocha Airt herself wore a splendid robe decked with feathers and small, glittering medallions, and bore a golden branch in her hand. […] Her strawberry hair, long as a man’s but straight, fell over one eye as she straightened from her bow. She might be an ollamh, the highest rank of poet, but the Irish expected their poets to be warriors, too. The scowl was fierce.

Bare breasts definitely read differently from bare chests! I gave up on altering “long as a woman’s” to something that fit the period, though, because it would have changed the body language. I like the ferocity here.

Lanval, as seen by Antony->Antonia Ware:

Lanval stood by his chair of estate, with the alert, arrested posture of a deer. The elaborate curls of his silver hair still trembled against his cheek, for he had turned his head sharply just before the usher’s cry. They outshone the cloth-of-silver of his coat, and made the lutestring silk of his doublet and cloak a richer midnight by comparison. Sapphires winked in his circlet, each one worth a lord’s ransom. Their eyes met; then Antonia blinked, breaking the spell. A faerie king was a powerful sight, however often one saw it. And she had been some time away.

For me it’s really the body language here that reads oddly when Lune is gender-swapped to male.

Wayland Smith, as seen by Lanval:

The voice came from behind him, a deep, friendly growl. For such an enormous woman, Wayland moved far too silently. The Queen of the Vale did not look obviously fae; at first glance, she seemed nothing more than a brawny blacksmith, with muscles cording her arms and straining her plain leather tunic across her chest. But Lanval offered her a respectful greeting, never forgetting he owed this royal cousin his present sanctuary.

We don’t see a lot of brawny female blacksmiths, do we? I should do more of this kind of thing.

Nicneven:

Nicneven could never have passed for an Onyx Courtier. His face — neither handsome nor unhandsome — had a wildness to it that made Irrith look tame, from the sweep of his cheekbones to the high wings of his brows. The garb he wore would not have seemed out of place in Scotland these thousand years or more, a kilt of intense woad-blue and leather shoes cross-gartered on his legs. But for all his rustic dress, he carried himself with the presence of a King.

Over on Jim’s blog, there was some discussion of the different values conveyed by “beautiful” vs. “handsome” depending on which gender they’re applied to. I haven’t altered that wording at all in these excerpts: where I described a woman as beautiful, I kept it as a beautiful man, and Nicneven here was always described in terms of handsomeness. I just changed pronouns and turned a kirtle into a kilt.

Let’s take a look at A Star Shall Fall . . . .

Galen, in his first scene:

She stepped free carefully, ducking her head to avoid knocking her hat askew. A footwoman stood at the ready; Galena gave her name, and tried not to fidget as the servant departed. Waiting here, while the chair dripped onto the patterned marble, made her feel terribly self-conscious, as if she were a tradeswoman come to beg a favor, rather than an invited guest. Fortunately, the footwoman returned promptly and bowed. “You are very welcome, ma’am. If I may?”

This isn’t really description as such, but I included it because Galen is depicted as being anxious and uncertain — which are traits much more commonly attached to women, not men.

Irrith, as seen by Galena in their first meeting:

Galena’s own muddy prints were obliterated by an enormous smear as the dripping and filthy figure shifted, slipped, and landed unceremoniously on their backside. “Blood and Bone!” the figure swore, and the voice was far too low to be female. […] That he was a faerie, she could be certain; the delicacy of his hand — if not his speech — made anything else unlikely. But she could discern little more; he seemed to have rolled in the mud for sport, though some of it had subsequently been washed off by the rain. His hair, skin, and clothes were one indeterminate shade of brown, in which his eyes made a startling contrast. They held a hundred shades of green, shifting and dancing as no human irises would.

Again, this becomes more conventional when gender-swapped. Women rarely show up in the text covered in mud. The delicacy still reads a bit oddly, though, like all the faerie men in the story are meant to be coded as gay.

Recommend a vegetable to me!

I’m not much of a cook, but I’m trying to change that. Which means that as time goes on, there may be more of these “help me figure out how to alter this recipe” questions.

The recipe in this instance is involves some advice about how best to arrange a pan of chicken pieces and vegetables to ensure optimal cooking in the oven. Dark meat + carrots and potatoes on the outer edge of the pan, white meat and brussels sprouts on the inside, because otherwise the white meat will dry out and the sprouts will get a little charred.

All well and good, except I loathe brussels sprouts. (They have a weird aftertaste for me that I find very unpleasant. This is possibly related to being a supertaster, though I don’t know for sure; all I know is, most other people don’t seem to notice any aftertaste.) So what can you recommend to me that would profitably occupy the center position in the pan? It needs to be less robust than carrots and potatoes, while harmonizing well with them.

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

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The Great Swan Tower Moving Day Sale, Redux and Cont’d

Many thanks to everyone who has picked up items from the Great Swan Tower Moving Day Sale! It has been a great benefit to me, cleaning out the various boxes I keep my author copies in

In the course of packing up, I found a stash of the US trade paperbacks of Voyage of the Basilisk squirreled away in a corner. (I’d been wondering where they’d gone.) So here’s an updated list of what’s available. Same drill applies: all you have to do is email me or leave a message here calling dibs on something and giving me your mailing address; I’ll respond to let you know whether it’s still available, and we’ll arrange payment. Shipping is included for orders within the U.S. Inscriptions on request.

In Ashes Lie , UK trade paperback
A Natural History of Dragons , US trade paperback — 2 copies (already inscribed to the wrong person; I’ll strike that out and sign them to you), $10
The Tropic of Serpents , US trade paperback — 1 copy, $12
Voyage of the Basilisk , US trade paperback — 5 copies, $12
Voyage of the Basilisk , US hardcover — 3 copies, $20
In the Labyrinth of Drakes , US ARC (no illustrations) — 1 copy, $8
In the Labyrinth of Drakes , UK trade paperback — 2 copies, $12
In the Labyrinth of Drakes , US hardcover — 8 copies, $20

You have one more week to order anything that strikes your fancy!

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

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Fun things to listen to

A whole bunch of audio links have piled up in my inbox lately, so here — have things to listen to!

I’ve raved before about how awesome a narrator I have for the Memoir audiobooks. But if you haven’t checked them out, and need to hear just how fabulous Kate Reading is, here’s an excerpt from In the Labyrinth of Drakes. It’s spoiler-free, so if you haven’t caught up with the story yet, don’t worry about hearing anything you shouldn’t.

If you’d like to hear me reading from Cold-Forged Flame, the Varekai novella coming out this September, here’s a recording from SF in SF. My reading starts around 36:30, after M. Thomas Gammarino, and then there’s a Q&A after.

While I was in San Diego for Mysterious Galaxy’s birthday bash, I recorded with the Geekitude podcast, which is posted here. My segment starts at the hour and twenty-two minute mark, and we discuss a host of things, ranging from what it’s like to wrap up the Memoirs, to hitting your thirties and not being made of rubber anymore, to RPGs and my experiences with them.

Here’s a brief video interview I did with ActuSF during Imaginales. The questions are entirely in French — my interpreter, Hélène Bury, was translating them for me, but too quietly for the camera to pick up — but I answer in English, before Hélène translates it for the camera.

I don’t have a fifth thing. Curse the internet for establishing that five things make a post! We’ll have to be satisfied with 80% of a post instead.

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

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the actions of the few

I do not blame the many for the actions of the one.

Therefore I do not blame all Americans just because Omar Mateen was an American.

I do not blame the many for the actions of the one.

Therefore I do not blame all Christians just because Dylann Roof is a Christian.

I do not blame the many for the actions of the one.

Therefore I do not blame all men just because Adam Lanza was a man.

It’s a damn good thing I don’t blame the many for the actions of the one, because if I did, I would be blaming white men a hundred times over. But if I can see that my husband and my father and my brother are not to blame for the actions of the white men who commit the majority of hate crimes, then I can see that Muslims (who, globally, are the overwhelming majority of terrorism’s victims) are not to blame for the actions of a few Muslim murderers.

I blame the murderers.

And I blame, here in America, the lawmakers who put on Very Serious Faces every time a mass shooting happens and offer their thoughts and prayers to the injured and the bereaved, but do nothing to change the fact that U.S. homicide rates are seven times higher than those in comparable nations, driven by a gun homicide rate that is more than twenty-five times higher.

Do not comment here to tell me that the majority of gun owners are law-abiding; that does nothing to prevent the accidental deaths. Do not tell me we need to arm more people to kill the bad guys when they show up, because this isn’t the fucking Wild West and we can damned well resort to law before counter-murder. Do not immediately leap to the extreme conclusion and equate “we need gun control” with “we’re going to take away every single gun.”

I want a change in our gun culture, that makes it more responsible owners with locked cases and less cowboys waving their pieces around to feel strong. I want the ban on assault rifles renewed. I want getting your gun license in Texas to require more in the way of training and certification than becoming a fucking manicurist, rather than the other way around.

I want us to agree that the level of gun violence we have in this country is unacceptable, and then actually do something about it.

And until we do, I am damn well going to blame my government for letting the bloodshed continue.

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

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Catching up on Dice Tales

Traveling and moving house and so forth have kept me so busy, I’ve neglected to link to my recent Dice Tales posts. (Fortunately I had the foresight and organization to get them written and scheduled well ahead of time, which is why the posts themselves have continued unabated.)

So now you get a threefer! The first post, Coping with Failure, talks about what happens when the dice say “nope, not happening,” and how you keep that from derailing the story/turn it into a narratively positive thing. So You Want to Be a . . . begins our discussion of character creation, and Decisions, Decisions goes through the choices you have to make when creating a PC for a game.

As usual, comment over there!

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

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Why is this funny?

Mary Robinette Kowal recently had nasal surgery to correct a medical problem. Being who she is (a writer, and therefore professionally interested in just about everything under the sun), she’s been posting pictures of her recovery.

She also posted this.

Here’s the thing. Remember when I fell down the stairs? (It was just three days ago; surely you haven’t forgotten.) Afterward, several friends of ours made similar jokes, about my husband pushing me down the stairs.

Why is it that, any time we hear about or see a woman injured, our minds go immediately to domestic abuse?

And why is it funny?

As Mary says, part (maybe all) of the humor comes from the absurdity of the idea: my husband would never push me down the stairs; her husband would never hit her. Anybody who knows us knows this. But at the same time . . . is it really that absurd? How many instances are there of women being abused by their husbands, when all the friends and neighbors would never dream of him doing such a thing?

It isn’t funny, because it isn’t absurd. Not nearly as much as it should be. It’s reality for far too many women. And making jokes about it — that normalizes the idea. Used to be that you got cartoons about drunk driving, the bartender pouring his customer into his car when he’s had a few too many and waving him off homeward with a cheery grin. Because that was normal. You don’t see those cartoons anymore, do you? We don’t think it’s normal to drive when you’re sauced, and we don’t think it’s funny.

We need the same to be true of domestic abuse.

By all means, joke about me falling down the stairs. Remind me that I can’t fly. Say that however much I don’t want to carry boxes, I should stop at hurling them to the bottom, and not hurl myself with them. That’s fine by me; humor is a good way to deal with a really annoying and painful situation.

But don’t joke about my husband pushing me, or Mary’s husband hitting her.

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

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