Marie Brennan's Blog, page 120

Dice Tales at BVC: Metagaming

This week on the Book View Cafe blog, I talk about metagaming — which is maybe not as bad as people usually think. Comment over there!

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

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Dice Tales at BVC: “Serendipity”

Another week, another Dice Tales post at BVC: “Serendipity”, discussing emergence as a quality of RPG narratives. Comment over there!

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

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Leverage

A while ago somebody started a movement in fandom called The Backup Project. You can put a Backup Project ribbon on your badge, and what it signals is that if somebody finds themselves targeted by harassment or otherwise feeling unsafe at the convention, you will back them up: be their conversational partner to get them away from the dude who won’t shut up, escort them to where they’re going so they don’t have to walk alone, etc.

I never remember to get and wear one of those ribbons, but as this post by Laura Anne Gilman has reminded me to say publicly, I am totally willing to be your backup — or “leverage,” as Seanan McGuire suggested, after the TV show. If you are in that kind of situation, you can walk up to me and ask for leverage. Doesn’t matter if I’m headed somewhere or in the middle of a conversation; once I realize what’s going on, I won’t hold the interruption against you.

I will listen to you.

I will be your safe space.

I will walk you to the nearest security person you feel comfortable with, and stay with you until you’re okay.

I will follow up on what I know.

This kind of thing probably wouldn’t have helped Mark Oshiro, given the nature of the appalling litany of things he and his partner were subjected to at ConQuest 36. But his account of the ways that he was belittled and harassed all weekend long is a very pointed reminder of the crap that goes on far too often at our conventions, and for somebody else? This might be exactly what they need.

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

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transitions, blech

There are certain kinds of transition scenes I detest writing. One of them is the “holy shit, the supernatural is real!” scene common to so much urban fantasy; it was a source of great pleasure to me that I could more or less skip that scene in Midnight Never Come, on the grounds that the reaction of a sixteenth-century gentleman would not so much be “there are faeries under London?” as “there are faeries under London?” (You’ll note that nearly every pov character for the remainder of the Onyx Court series already knew about the fae by the time they showed up in the story. This was not deliberate, in the sense of being a thing I consciously decided to do . . . but I wouldn’t call it an accident, either. The sole exception that leaps to mind is Jack Ellin, and I had more than enough going on in the story to divert him, and me, while that transition happened.) It’s boring to me because the audience already knows the supernatural is real (or at the very least has no reason to be surprised by this fact), and we’ve seen that conversation so many times, making it fresh is really difficult. Your main hope is to undermine it in some fashion, like the time on Buffy when they told Oz vampires and demons were real. “I know it’s a lot to take in –” “Actually, that explains a lot.”

I’m dealing with a similar kind of thing in the fifth Memoir right now. The scene isn’t about the supernatural being real; it’s a different kind of transition, one I don’t really have a name for. And of course I can’t get into specifics, but it’s one of those deals where something very complicated is going on, only the complication is of a type that doesn’t actually make for great narrative. After the initial drama of the moment is over, there’s a lot of explaining that needs to happen, and a lot of very tedious suspicion that can’t be laid to rest with the right words or a single decisive action. Inside the story, the whole thing is going to drag on for days — probably for weeks. Making the reader sit through all of that would be dire, starting with the fact that I would have to write all of that.

It’s at moments like these when I love the retrospective, consciously-framed first person viewpoint of this series. Because I can 100% get away with Isabella saying “what followed was very tedious and dragged on for weeks, because there was nothing I could do that would resolve it with a single decisive action. But X, Y, and Z got settled — not without a great deal of wrangling and suspicion, but settled all the same, and now let’s move on to the next interesting bit.” Any viewpoint can skip over things, but this one gives me greater latitude to summarize what I’m skipping, without making it seem like the elided material is simple to deal with in real life. Isabella can acknowledge all the complications without getting bogged down in them.

I had no idea, when I started writing this series, all the advantages that would come with framing the entire thing as a series of memoirs. It just seemed like a period- and subject-appropriate way to approach the whole thing. But my god . . . it’s probably the best craft decision I’ve made all series long.

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

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Stats for the stat god

Neither Shihan nor his wife were at the dojo tonight, which meant I felt comfortable asking the sensei who teaches on Wednesdays whether he was okay with me keeping my Fitbit on during class. He said that was fine, so for the first time, I have stats for what goes on with my body during practice.

I was surprised at how few “steps” it recorded, to be honest. Sure, we spend the first twenty minutes or so on various warmups and stretches, most of which won’t register on the Fitbit. But it only recorded 1500 for the whole hour, which is equivalent to about fifteen minutes of normal walking at my usual pace. I thought the various punches and blocks would add up to more. The real interest, though, is in the heartrate tracking: I can see where we finished the warmup and started doing basics, and I can see what happened when I ran seven kata back-to-back in preparation for my upcoming test, which is a thing I’ve been doing at every practice for about a month. Turns out that I do indeed spend most of the class in the zones generally classed as “cardio” or “peak,” and topped out the scale at 185 at one point during that block of kata. (It would be amusing to see which kata work me the hardest, but since I was only allowing myself five breaths’ pause between them, there’s no hope of differentiating one from the next via the stats.) 185 is what the American Heart Association considers the usual “maximum” for my age, so I feel safe in saying that I’m working pretty damn hard when I do that kind of set. :-P

I wish Fitbit had a way for me to save that data and label it “karate,” so that I can add it to my stats for the day any time I go to the dojo. But I also wish they made them waterproof enough to wear while swimming, and that they could make the actual unit thinner; I can’t get everything I want.

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

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Dice Tales at BVC – No Takebacks

My newest Dice Tales post is up at Book View Cafe: No Takebacks, in which I talk about the way that RPGs don’t really allow for revision, and what that does to the story. Comment over there!

I’ll also mention that since the BVC WordPress configuration doesn’t display the series name, I’ve switched to using a tag to sort all the Dice Tales posts. So if you’re looking for one easy way to pull them all up, now you have it!

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

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Burnination for fun and profit

So on Twitter the other day, in a fit of frustration, I posted this:

I should not buy a $70 prop and light it on fire just because the internet is not giving me the cover image I want. >_<

— Marie Brennan (@swan_tower) February 6, 2016

Which of course promptly led to a bunch of people saying that no, I totally should do that. After the third or fourth of those, I issued this challenge:

ALL RIGHT INTERNET if you want me lighting things on fire for work, somebody mail me a gold, medievalish crown you don’t need back intact.

— Marie Brennan (@swan_tower) February 6, 2016

Until someone steps up to that plate, I am not going to destroy things just for your entertainment. :-P

— Marie Brennan (@swan_tower) February 6, 2016

…but if somebody DOES mail me a suitable crown, I will blog/tweet the burnination for the entertainment of all. <g>

— Marie Brennan (@swan_tower) February 6, 2016

And, well. I think I’m actually serious about this. If you have a crown you don’t want back (or don’t mind getting back charred and possibly warped), get in touch with me. The following requirements apply:

1) It needs to be metal, as nothing else will last long enough in the fire to be of use. (Doesn’t have to be gold, though.)

2) Should look at least vaguely royal/medieval — no bridal tiaras here.

3) Has to be full-size.

If you have something that fits that bill, send a picture of it to marie {dot} brennan {at} gmail {dot} com. As promised, if I get what I need, I will take blog/tweet the whole process, with color commentary. But I need it soon, so be prepared to act quickly if you offer up your crown!

And thanks in advance to anybody who might be able to help.

FORGOT TO ADD: If you do provide me with a crown, I’ll send you your choice of the audiobook of A Natural History of Dragons on CD, a UK trade paperback of Midnight Never Come, or an ARC of In the Labyrinth of Drakes.

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

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New Dice Tales post at BVC

My blogging series at Book View Cafe continues with Dice Tales: What happens in a game? Comment there!

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

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Books read, uh, recently

Over the last few months I seriously fell off the horse when it came to keeping track of my reading. So this covers December and January, but only the things I can recall reading — which isn’t very much.

The Grace of Kings, Ken Liu. I know this one ate quite a lot of December, because BRICK.

I . . . really, really wanted to like it. Epic fantasy, drawing on Chinese epic tradition! Sign me up. I was totally there for the worldbuilding and the character archetypes and the nature of the plot. And, courtesy of comments I’d seen elsewhere on the internet, I was prepared for (though not pleased by) the fact that the first half of the book has virtually no women playing significant roles, because I knew that there would be more showing up in the remaining pages. As indeed there are! But anybody without that advance warning would be justified in thinking that the only women in the story would be helpful wives, distant goddesses, or deeply problematic seductresses, so I can’t really say the second half justifies the first.

But the real problem for me was the style. It read a lot like an old epic — too much so. I fundamentally did not care about any of the characters, because the text never let me get close enough to any of them to form an emotional attachment. The style is incredibly distant, telling instead of showing, often spending more time narrating to you what is happening than letting you experience it. Let me give an example — it’ll be a spoiler, but (for reasons I’ll explain in a moment) not much of one. If you’d prefer to avoid it, though, just skip the next paragraph.

So there’s a plot thread involving one of the few early female characters, who has been blackmailed by an enemy general into working for him. We don’t see her arrive in the lands of the rebels — that part I’m okay with, since it isn’t as important as what she does when she gets there. Once established among the rebels, she manipulates two men into falling in love with her: an uncle and a nephew, who have been inseparable for the nephew’s entire life. (These are major characters in the book; the nephew is essentially co-protagonist with another guy.) Once both of them are besotted with her, she plays off their jealousy, using it to create a rift between them, until they become wholly estranged and the uncle sends the nephew away at a critical moment when he needed to be present. Then she murders the uncle and commits suicide.

From beginning to end, this entire thing takes about sixteen pages.

Fully a quarter of which is spent on that last sentence, actually; the rest gets crammed into twelve pages, where it shares space with other things going on in the plot. We the readers are told that both of these guys have fallen in love with her. We’re told that they’re jealous. We get little snippets of actual interaction, a few paragraphs here and there, which present us with emotion (love! jealousy! anger!) the narrative hasn’t actually earned. I don’t consider this to be a spoiler because I don’t feel like there’s an experience to spoil; it feels more like me giving away the ending to a historical account of the Duke of Buckingham’s assassination. I majored in folklore; I’ve read a great many epics from different parts of the world, and can deal with that kind of arm’s-length approach. It is not, however, what I’m looking for in a novel. The sweeping scope of The Grace of Kings is impressive, but it only fits into one book because so many of the elements of modern fiction have been squeezed out. The result is that I found myself pronouncing the Eight Fatal Words: “I don’t care what happens to these people.” I finished the book, but have no motivation to pick up the sequel. Which is a pity, because I was so excited for the first one.

Daughter of Mystery, Heather Rose Jones. I don’t remember where I heard of this one; it’s an ebook that’s been sitting on my tablet for ages. Normally when I call something “Ruritanian fantasy,” what I mean is that it’s set in a secondary world, but has no magic (e.g. Lloyd Alexander’s Westmark books). In this case, however, I mean that it’s set in the fictional European country of Alpennia, but has magic. I suspect that Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint and The Privilege of the Sword are among its literary ancestors, as one of the two protagonists, Barbara, is a woman trained as an armin (bodyguard) and duelist for an eccentric Baron. The other heroine, Margerit, unexpectedly inherits the Baron’s estate upon his demise — including Barbara, who was his property. The plot is moderately complex, involving the question of why he named his goddaughter his heir and why he failed to free Barbara as he promised (and why he owned her and trained her in the first place), running alongside a strand wherein Margerit begins to study the “mysteries” (sacred magic) and investigate why they no longer work the way they should. Overall it came together in a reasonably satisfying way, and Jones has a pleasingly solid grasp of the social politics of a nineteenth-century-type world: Margerit can’t just go “la, who cares” and blow off her obligations without consequence, however much she may want to. Plus, lesbian romance, which I know would be a selling point for many of my blog readers. :-)

Phoenix, Stephen Brust. Still working my way slowly through these. I liked Vlad’s interactions with the Empress: they struck a nice balance between the formal ceremony that accompanies such a role, and showing the Empress as a human being (well, for the contested values of “human” that apply in this setting). I’m also pleased, though not surprised, to see Brust follow through on what he began in an earlier book, with Vlad questioning his role in the Jhereg and his chosen livelihood of murdering people for money. I have no idea whether that was planned from the start, or whether Brust got a couple of books in, looked at his assassin hero, and reconsidered how good of an idea that really was, but either way it’s nice to watch the change percolate through the narrative. Where it goes in the long run . . . well, that will be interesting to see. “Phoenix stone” felt like a bit of handwavium to me, but I’d love to see more exploration of what pre-Empire sorcery was like, and how the Interregnum changed the way sorcery worked.

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

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The Month of Letters has begun! Get a letter from Lady Trent!

What with yesterday’s World Fantasy kerfuffle, I forgot to post a reminder that the Month of Letters has begun! If you’d like to receive a letter from Lady Trent, instructions for how to do so are here. (Or, y’know — I’ll answer letters addressed to me, too.) I’ll reply to anything postmarked within the month of February, so get your pens going!

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

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