Marie Brennan's Blog, page 116

A blast from my eleven-year-old past

I somehow managed to miss the fact that they made a Shannara TV series. But it aired on MTV (and will be getting a second season), so I decided to give it a shot.

Watching it is . . . interesting.

More precisely, watching it is like taking a trip in the Wayback Machine to my eleven-year-old brain. These were the first adult fantasy novels I ever read, purloining them off my brother’s bookshelf — my first introduction to high fantasy. I keep thinking of Benedick’s line from Much Ado About Nothing: “Is it not strange that sheep’s guts should hale men’s souls out of their bodies?” Back then, capital letters could hale my soul out of mine. The last descendant of the King of Shannara has to use the Elfstones to help a princess take a seed from the Ellcrys to Safehold, where she’ll immerse it in the Bloodfire and renew the Forbidding that keeps Demons out of the world — yyyyyyyyeah. Nowadays that mostly sounds goofy and artificial to me, but back then, it was awesome.

The TV series doesn’t do a whole lot to restore that power. For me to care about a Destined Hero, I need to care about the characters, and neither the writing nor the acting here is good enough to really compel me. The show also has a certain look to it that I don’t have a good name for, but it’s a lesser version of the same thing that drove me straight out of Reign after a single episode; people look like they’re wearing costumes instead of clothing, and furthermore they look like they’re about to burst into the latest auto-tuned pop hit. One of the reviews I saw gave it a tepid recommendation to those looking for a “teen-friendly Game of Thrones,” and that feels apt. I have trouble telling the two female leads apart, if the camera angle doesn’t show their ears: one’s an elf, one’s a human, but they’re both generically pretty dark-haired young women wearing MTV’s idea of fantasy chic. Their hair is too clean and well-brushed, nobody ever has more than cosmetic smudges of dirt on them, and the entire thing feels like it’s made out of plastic.

Which isn’t to say it’s complete crap. I stopped reading Shannara ages ago, so I had no idea the setting is technically our world, post-magical-apocalypse. That’s an interesting twist on the epic fantasy thing, and sometimes you get the characters riding past the crumbling remnants of modern technology and architecture. I also give them points for having racially diverse elves — and most of the characters we’ve seen so far are elves. On the other hand, no points for Obvious Romani Parallel Is Obvious and Offensive: really, Brooks? We needed a clan of itinerant sexist thieves? The show intermittently entertains me, but it hasn’t yet (as of the first three eps) risen above the status of “thing I can put on on the background while I do other stuff because its plot isn’t complex enough and its performances aren’t compelling enough to really require my attention.”

I don’t much expect it to do so, either. But still: it’s interesting to revisit my eleven-year-old brain, and to muse on what she used to think.

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

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/763159.html. Comment here or there.

Dice Tales at BVC: "Hack 'n Slash" and "Character Death"

Because I was busy setting up my website transfer, I didn’t link to last week’s Dice Tales post at BVC. So this week you get two links: “Hack ‘n Slash,” talking about combat in RPGs, and “Character Death,” exploring when and how player-characters should be at risk. Comment over there!

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

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Explore a Tiny Frontier!

This one is for all the RPG fans out there. Gallant Knight Games are Kickstarting Tiny Frontiers — an authorized SFnal port of the Tiny Dungeons system.

Why do I bring this up? Because I’ll be contributing a micro-setting to Tiny Frontiers — a place and a situation, with a few hooks for plots you could run in it. I’m still in the process of writing that up, but as a teaser, I’ll give you two words: alien. god.

The Kickstarter has five days to go, with several stretch goals of various types: funding goals, social media goals, and so forth. My setting will be included in the core book, regardless of whether those goals are reached, but there are plenty of other goodies to be had! So if this kind of thing sounds fun, do head on over and take a look. It may be tiny, but it’s a giant pile of fun.

Onyx Court 1 and 2 soon to be out as ebooks

I’ve been holding off on a whole lot of news while I waited for the new site to go live; now that it has, you should expect a number of things in quick succession.

Hunt bugs, win a book!

Ladies! Gentlemen! Polite and helpful people of all types!

I need your assistance. Specifically, I need you to hunt bugs and errors on my shiny new website. I will bait you into doing this by offering your pick from my collection of author copies, and I’ll run it sort of like a raffle: for every bug or error you notify me of, you get one “ticket” to win a book. Send in seventeen corrections, get seventeen chances to win. If at least ten different people submit corrections, I’ll pick two winners; if at least twenty people, three winners; and so on. (It doesn’t matter whether you report an error somebody else already sent in; if it was there when you looked at the site, that’s good enough for me. Otherwise I have to do a lot of really annoying bookkeeping.)

Here’s the kinds of corrections I’m looking for:

1) Text errors. Misspellings, grammatical errors, wrong punctuation, etc. I proofread carefully, but there are a lot of pages on my site; odds are quite good that I’ve screwed up here and there.

2) Broken links. I scrubbed out a lot of dead links when I ported stuff over, but I probably missed some. Also, we’ve set up redirects for the old URLs, so when you click on a website-internal link in the middle of text, it should go to the correct new location — but if it doesn’t, I need to know about it.

3) Bad code. This could be anything from images displaying in the wrong place (like over text) to me forgetting to close a tag to munged escape character sequences. If the site displays badly on any particular platform, also let me know that, and I’ll pass it along to my site designer.

You can send these to me by email, via my contact form or in the comments. Please include a link to the page in question, and enough context for me to know where the error is — don’t just say “missing comma” or “broken link,” let me know where in the page that is. It will also help me if you separate the errors in your reply, just so I give you enough raffle tickets!

You have until the end of the month to send in your feedback; I’ll pick winners once I’m home again in early June. Thank you all in advance for your help!

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

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/762316.html. Comment here or there.

Welcome to Swan Tower 3.0!

If you’ve visited my website in the last twenty-four hours, you may have noticed . . . a few changes.

For the last month or so I’ve been deeply in the throes of a major, major redesign. As in, the entire thing now runs on WordPress — because I finally got convinced that it’s way more powerful and effective than I thought, provided you get somebody to tailor it to your needs (rather than just running with an off-the-shelf install). This beauty is the work of Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios, who has done a number of author sites; I recommend him wholeheartedly. It’s thanks to him that I not only have the usual stuff of blogs and pages and so forth, but a lovely setup that allows me to easily manage all kinds of material for books — buy buttons for different formats, auto-generated links to the rest of the series, cover galleries, “DVD extra”-type pages, and so forth. And photos! A whole gallery setup for photos!

Seriously, this thing is amazing. You guys get to see the pretty front end; me, I’m over here marveling at the dashboard, at how much easier maintenance is going to be in this iteration. So please, go admire it. Say nice things about Jeremiah’s work. There’s a lot to explore.

maybe it's better not to be "a good person"

On the way home from Captain America: Civil War (which is quite good, and should have been titled Avengers: Civil War), we got to talking about the contrast between Arrow and Flash, and the problems I had with the latter. (I say “had” because I gave up on watching it partway into this season.)

It just occurred to me that I think part of my issue with that show is the same thing Slacktivist was talking about here, riffing off this post by Mychal Denzel Smith. Specifically, this bit, quoted from Smith:

When your self-conception is centered on the idea of your own goodness, it prevents you from hearing any critique of your ideology/behavior. Thinking of yourself as “good” allows you to justify harmful words and actions, since anything you do, in your mind, is “good.”

Flash feels like it has defined Barry Allen as A Good Person, and therefore it cannot address anything that might call his goodness into question — like, say, the extrajudicial prison he regularly throws criminals into, keeping them in solitary confinement for indefinite periods of time without benefit of trial or any other such legal process. He is A Good Person, therefore Basement Gitmo is good. By contrast, Arrow has not defined Oliver Queen as A Good Person; instead he’s been presented as a deeply flawed person trying to become good. Corollary: the show offers up frequent critiques of his ideology and behavior, and he changes in response to them. Not always, and not perfectly — one of the points season five has been making is that he still has a lot of problems. But that’s a story the show can tell, because it hasn’t taken its protagonist’s Goodness as a given.

I complained before that telling a story where ethics matter shouldn’t require you to be working in the grimdark mode — that Flash *could* have addressed the difficult question of how to handle superpowered criminals, while still being Arrow‘s perky younger brother. Now I wonder to what extent Smith’s quote points at the source of the problem: they could never tell stories where Barry grappled with ethics and questioned his own morality, because Barry Allen is A Good Person.

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

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Signal-boosting for Judith Tarr

Author Judith Tarr is in dire straits. We’ve got this idiom in English about “losing the farm” — well, she is in actual danger of losing an actual farm. This would not only have dreadful consequences for her, it would leave all of her horses homeless: most of them too old or too untrained to be saleable. Right now she is scrambling to keep them fed for the rest of this month, let alone going forward.

There are a number of ways you can help her out, if you are so inclined.

1) Camp Lipizzan. Her horses are the “airs above ground” breed, the ones renowned for their beautiful high-school dressage movements. This is your chance to ride one, and even try out “horse yoga.”

2) Editing and writing mentorship. Judy’s a World Fantasy Award nominee; she knows her stuff. If you’re a writer, this may be of interest to you.

3) Patreon. She’s posting new fiction there.

4) Sponsor a horse. Full details are there, but you can help feed and water the horses, and get to know them in return.

Also, Judy has asked that people who have read her books post a review on Amazon, as that helps boost the visibility of her work and therefore increase her sales. I particularly recommend Writing Horses to the writers among you: if you’re ever going to have an equine in a story, this will help you do it right.

Many thanks to everyone who lends Judy a hand.

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

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In other exciting news . . . .

Woke up this morning to find out that Sylvie Denis’ translation of A Natural History of Dragons is a finalist for the Prix Imaginales, an award given out at the Imaginales festival in Épinal, France. I’m rubbing shoulders with Sofia Samatar again; as you may recall, her novel A Stranger in Olondria won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel the year ANHoD was nominated, and now Une histoire naturelle des dragons is up against Un étranger en Olondre. Congratulations also to Cat Valente, whose first Fairyland book is listed in the Youth category!

I can’t remember whether I’ve mentioned this here or not, but: I’ll be at Imaginales this year, over what would be Memorial Day weekend in the U.S. and is just the last weekend in May for everybody else. Furthermore, since I’ll be going to all the trouble of crossing the continental U.S. and then the Atlantic Ocean, I’ll also be doing a signing at Forbidden Planet in London on June 2nd. In between those two things, it looks like I’ll have a couple of days to kill in Basel/Basle/Bâle, so if you know of interesting things to do there, do pass them along! It’ll be my very first time in Switzerland.

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

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/760655.html. Comment here or there.

HOLY SHIT

. . . we just bought a house.

Well, properly speaking, we just had an offer accepted for a house. There are still lots of ways this could theoretically fall through (inspections turn up something bad, etc), but . . . we just offered an absurd amount of money for a house, and the seller accepted.

O_O

. . .

O_O O_O O_O

. . . because buying a house when you’re trying to finish novel revisions and write a novella and go on an international trip is a great idea.

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

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/760493.html. Comment here or there.