Marie Brennan's Blog, page 115
June 9, 2016
The Perfidious Ankle: A Play in Three Acts
Dramatis Personae
YOUR HUMBLE BLOGGER, our heroine
YOUR HUMBLE BLOGGER’S RIGHT ANKLE, our villain
YOUR HUMBLE BLOGGER’S RIGHT KNEE, our tragic figure
Assorted other characters including a HUSBAND, a NURSE, a BOX OF PAPERS, a STAIRCASE, and GRAVITY.
Act One
YOUR HUMBLE BLOGGER is in the process of loading her car for the purposes of moving house. She is carrying a BOX OF PAPERS down a STAIRCASE. Six steps she navigates without difficulty, but on the seventh and final step, YOUR HUMBLE BLOGGER’S RIGHT ANKLE declines to perform its assigned duty, pitching YOUR HUMBLE BLOGGER headfirst onto the landing.
GRAVITY, which has been present in the scene since the beginning, takes center stage.
The BOX OF PAPERS is the first to receive the impact. (YOUR HUMBLE BLOGGER is still holding onto this BOX; she will, when she has leisure afterward, take a moment to be grateful that she is wearing braces on both wrists already.) By some miracle and mercy of Providence, the ANKLE does not take any of the weight GRAVITY has sent careening downward; it survives this entire drama with no perceptible damage, which is most unusual for our heroine’s life. The remaining weight falls upon YOUR HUMBLE BLOGGER’S RIGHT KNEE.
After a moment of shaken relief that she was not at the top of the staircase when she was so cruelly betray’d by her ANKLE, our heroine picks herself up and completes her task, carrying the BOX OF PAPERS to the car.
Act Two
On her way back from the car, YOUR HUMBLE BLOGGER notes that the right knee of her jeans is stained with blood. Grumbling in annoyance at the small split in the fabric, she goes upstairs. Here she grouses to her HUSBAND about the treachery of the ANKLE, then washes out the larger split in her RIGHT KNEE, which so nobly sacrificed itself for her. She places antiseptic ointment and a bandage upon it, puts her stained jeans to soak, and goes about her business.
Four hours later, it comes to her attention that the wound is continuing to bleed — not copiously, but enough to draw attention. She concludes it would be wise to change the bandage and renew the antiseptic. In the process of doing so, however, she notes that the skin around the wound does not move in the fashion she expected; its behavior implies greater depth to the split than she had originally estimated.
With trepidation, she asks her HUSBAND whether he concurs. He does. She, in a state of great vexation, gathers her belongings and goes to the hospital.
Act Three
We shall not try the reader’s patience, nor their fortitude, by recounting every detail that transpires at the hospital. Suffice it to say that a friendly NURSE cares for the valiant RIGHT KNEE, straightening the edges of the wound and putting in seven stitches (the split is not so large, but as YOUR HUMBLE BLOGGER scars easily, she takes extra care in closing it). She contemplates putting our heroine in a joint-immobilizing support, but ultimately settles for an ace bandage and instructions for YOUR HUMBLE BLOGGER to remain off the leg as much as possible for a while, because standing, let alone walking/going up and down stairs/lifting heavy boxes would put strain upon the stitches. And so, suitably chastened, YOUR HUMBLE BLOGGER goes home.
Postscript
So that’s where things stand. This . . . puts an annoying spike in the process of moving, as getting to the car (or even moving around within either the source or destination residences) requires navigating stairs — which I can do, but toddler-style, step-together step-together. I am deeply annoyed at my ankle for deciding to stop ankling, and simultaneously relieved it didn’t happen at a higher elevation. My wrists are fine; my ankle’s fine; it’s just my knee, which has a little red smile, now sewn shut.
This is not how I wanted to spend my Thursday afternoon.
Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/765709.html. Comment here or there.
June 8, 2016
A message to my fellow progressives
With Clinton sewing up the Democratic nomination, I understand that a great many people are feeling disappointed by the results of primary season, and discouraged by the prospect of the upcoming general election. You don’t want to vote for the racist, sexist egomaniac, but you don’t like the idea of voting for Clinton, either: she’s too corporatist, too much of a hawk, too much or too little of whatever you’re most focused on. And so you’re thinking that come November, maybe you’ll write in Bernie’s name or vote Green or just not show up to vote at all. As a protest against the corruption, the two-party system, the rightward swing of our country.
To those people, I say this: look at the rest of the ballot.
Not the rest of the presidential ballot. The rest of the ballot. Governor. Senator. Representative. State legislators. Heck, go past those down into the real nitty-gritty: mayors, city councilmembers, school board, local measures, whatever your particular voting district lets you register an opinion on.
That is where your protest can mean something.
At that level of the ballot, you can damn well bet that every single vote can make a difference. Maybe your state is guaranteed to go blue or red in the electoral college, but your town? That’s easier to swing. And if you swing the town in the direction you want, it gets easier to swing the county, and the state, and the nation.
Sure, it’s a pain in the neck to pay attention to all of those races. Lots of them don’t even have official party affiliations, so you can’t just look for the right letter; you have to spend some time googling endorsements and policy statements. Voting responsibly at the local level requires preparation. But not much: even just an hour online the night before the election can give you a decent sense of the lay of the land. And then you’ve made the area around you just a little bit more like the world you want to live in.
Because for fuck’s sake, if we sit around expecting to make change happen once every four years, it’s never going to happen. We need change at the local level. We need city governments that prioritize making our lives better on a daily basis. We need ordinances that protect people’s health and safety. We need fields in which to grow new candidates, creating the governors and senators and presidents of the next few decades. So find the people you want, find the fire-breathing socialist radical of your dreams or the economic visionary with the ideas that can save us all that’s running for county commissioner, and vote for them. (Hell, maybe even sign up for their campaigns. But I haven’t gotten that far myself, so I’m trying to just preach what I practice, here.)
Then, when you’ve done that, take a look at the top of the ballot again.
Ask yourself: of the options there, which has the best chance of supporting all those downticket people in their work?
(And remember, this is not the Hugos. We can’t vote No Award, can’t say we’d rather have no president at all than one of the candidates on offer. We’ll have a president. And it’s going to be one of two people.)
When you vote, it’s not about you or your preferred candidate. It’s about the rest of the country, its government and its citizens, the extent to which they’re going to work together or against each other. It’s about the Supreme Court justices that candidate will nominate, who will decide the cases that will improve or wreck lives. It’s about those lives they’ll improve or wreck, all the people who can’t afford to say “well, maybe four years of Trump would be the wake-up call this country needs” — because they’re already awake, and they’re the eggs that would get broken for your self-righteous omelette.
You say you want a revolution? Vote for one — down at the bottom of the ballot, the roots that tree needs in order to grow.
(Personally, I’m fine with Clinton, and am happy to vote for her in November. If you feel differently, I won’t argue with you; but I’m not particularly interested in dissecting her character, voting record, or other qualities in the comments.)
Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/765564.html. Comment here or there.
Update on the Great Swan Tower Moving Day Sale
For some reason the updates I had made to the Great Swan Tower Moving Day Sale page had vanished, but I’ve reinstated them. The list of books there should be fully up to date with what’s still available.
Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/765319.html. Comment here or there.
June 6, 2016
The Great Swan Tower Moving Day Sale
So, this just happened:
Got the keys Friday, an hour after my return from Europe. Whee! ^_^
And now, of course, we come to the next bit, which is relocating from our current abode to our shiny new one. As many of you know, moving house is a daunting task. I’m sure you’ve all been sitting around thinking, “How can I help Marie out in this most tiring of times?”
I’m so glad you asked!
The answer is the Great Swan Tower Moving Day Sale. I have a pile of author copies of my books; every one you buy is a book I don’t have to move to the new house. (Plus, given the O_O expense of house-buying, every bit of income right now is exceedingly welcome.) 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. Here’s the list of what’s available, kept updated as promptly as I can manage:
Midnight Never Come , UK trade paperback — 2 copies, $12
In Ashes Lie , UK trade paperback — 6 copies, $12
A Natural History of Dragons , US trade paperback — 2 copies (already inscribed to the wrong person), $10
A Natural History of Dragons , 9-CD audio set — 1 copy, $40
Un histoire naturelle des dragons , French trade paperback — 2 copies, $12
The Tropic of Serpents , US trade paperback — 3 copies, $12
Voyage of the Basilisk , UK trade paperback — 1 copy, $12
Voyage of the Basilisk , US hardcover — 6 copies, $20
In the Labyrinth of Drakes , US ARC (no illustrations) — 1 copy, $8
In the Labyrinth of Drakes , UK trade paperback — 9 copies, $12
In the Labyrinth of Drakes , US hardcover — 17 copies, $20
All books will be signed to the person of your choice. Prices include domestic shipping; for international shipping, there will be a small addition. And of course purchases of any of my books in any format from other outlets are also good.
May 24, 2016
IN ASHES LIE now available in ebook!
Following on last week’s release of Midnight Never Come, this week we have In Ashes Lie out from Book View Cafe and various other retailers. So if you’re looking to complete your Onyx Court ebook collection, now you can!
. . . and that’s from me for a while. I’m leaving on a jet plane, for Imaginales and Forbidden Planet.
Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/764874.html. Comment here or there.
May 23, 2016
Dice Tales at BVC: “Preserving Agency” + The Once and Future Podcast!
Two links for you today!
The first is my latest Dice Tales post at Book View Cafe, on the topic of “Preserving Agency”. How do you handle social manipulation (or outright mind control) without taking agency away from the player?
And, as a bonus for this Monday, I’m on The Once and Future Podcast talking about a whole slew of things, from the Memoirs of Lady Trent to gaming to anthropology and more. Enjoy!
Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/764666.html. Comment here or there.
May 22, 2016
New photos!
At long last, I’ve finished going through my photos from our European trip last year. There are new galleries up: Adriatic Coast, Barcelona, La Sagrada Familia, Montserrat, Florence, and Venice, plus my pictures from Rome separated out, and additions to the Italy and Other galleries.
Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.
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May 20, 2016
May I call to your attention . . . .
First of all, my friend Mike Underwood’s Genrenauts Kickstarter campaign is already nearly funded, because I’ve been crazy busy in the last week and a half (house-buying drama; turned out okay, thank god), but you’ve still got eighteen days left to back it. This is the “Season One” collection of Genrenauts, comprising six novellas (two already published, four to come), plus a bunch of extras. If you’re not familiar with the series, it involves a group of highly-trained agents parachuting into alternate realities governed by the laws of different genres, seeking to right imbalances that threaten the stability of our own world. Basically, catnip for anybody who likes thinking about and playing around with the tropes of narrative — which of course is why Mike started writing them, and why you all should read them!
Second, I’ve put up two items for auction via Con or Bust, a nonprofit that helps fans of color attend conventions they wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford. The first is a signed hardcover of In the Labyrinth of Drakes, and the second is a 9-CD edition of the audiobook for A Natural History of Dragons, narrated by the amazing Kate Reading. It’s for a good cause, so please, bid high!
Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/763992.html. Comment here or there.
May 19, 2016
Celebrating issue #200 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies
It’s the two hundredth issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies this week. I’ve published seven stories with them — more than I have with any other venue; possibly twice as many, now that I think about it — and I want to take a moment to talk about what BCS means to me.
Years ago, I remember reading guidelines for a new magazine which announced proudly that they, unlike all those other magazines out there, wanted fiction that broke the boundaries of genre. In fact, I remember reading those guidelines more than once — because for a while there, it seemed like every new magazine wanted genre-breaking material: call it interstitial, call it slipstream, bring on your magical realism and your experimental formats and so forth, just so long as it isn’t quite fantasy.
But as Marissa Lingen once said, while she’s a fan of interstitial fiction, she’s also quite fond of stitial fiction: the center from which all those other things branch out. I’m right there with her on that. If you want to know what I most reliably enjoy, it’s stories which carry me away into a world that isn’t like ours, a three-dimensional, full-color secondary reality. The kind of thing I’ve sometimes called “cultural fantasy,” because part of what it’s doing is exploring different ways of life: different government, religion, family structure, history, physical environment, style of dress, domestic architecture, the food the characters eat.
And that’s why I was so delighted when Beneath Ceaseless Skies launched. It is the one magazine I’ve ever found that reliably publishes the type of thing I like, week in and week out. Even when a given story doesn’t work for me (because no magazine bats 100%), it is almost invariably the kind of story I enjoy. And I’m delighted to see it still going strong, two hundred issues later.
They’re running a subscription drive to mark this anniversary. Check out the mega-sized issue #200, and if you like what you see, you know what to do!
Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/763716.html. Comment here or there.
May 18, 2016
MIDNIGHT NEVER COME out now in ebook!
You know you’ve had too busy of a day when you forget to announce a book coming out. >_>
In fairness to me and my brain, this is backlist, not a new title. But if you want to own Midnight Never Come in pixel form, it is now available from a variety of retailers! And remember, In Ashes Lie will follow next week. I’ll try to remember to announce that one in a more timely fashion.
