Marie Brennan's Blog, page 131

seeking a hat

Some of you may recall that for my book tour last year, I had a Victorian dress made (in dark red, black, and grey). Well, I need a hat to go with it — and while I could have one made custom, it seems a bit silly to drop that much money on a piece of headgear I will almost never wear.

So: please recommend to me your favorite Victorian-style milliners! My requirements are:

late Victorian in style
designed to perch atop my head, rather than settling down over it (I will have a rather large bun getting in the way of the latter style)
not too expensive — less than $100 would be ideal
either black or grey (I doubt I can match the red without a lot of hassle)

Any suggestions?

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Books read, February 2015

Was still mostly busy with revisions, but I did get some reading in.

Steelheart, Brandon Sanderson. I’ve bounced off several of his works before — something about them just hasn’t clicked with me — but this one was in my World Fantasy bag, and its opening pages drew me in enough that I kept going.

More than anything, Steelheart reminds me of Mike Underwood’s Shield and Crocus. They have a similar “superpowers in a weird dystopian city” vibe going on, though Underwood’s book partakes of the New Weird aesthetic, and Sanderson’s does not. In this case, Epics are the source of the dystopia: they all seem to be sociopaths, and since they started appearing, the world has gone to hell in a handbasket. Steelheart follows the efforts of the Reckoners (a resistance organization) to overthrow the title character, who rules the city of New Cago with <fails her Pun Resistance roll> a steel fist.

Sanderson is either not quite as mean as I am, or else he thought of the same thing and couldn’t find a way out of that particular corner, either. You see, in order to kill Steelheart, the Reckoners have to figure out his weakness. I had a theory for what that weakness might be, and the evidence wholly supported my idea . . . but Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick, it would have made Steelheart almost 100% impossible to kill. The actual answer was still pretty tough, but not quite as bad. Anyway, the book moved at a good clip, and I may pick up the sequel, Firefight.

The Winner’s Crime, Marie Rutkoski. Reviewed here.

Avatar: The Search, vol. 1, Gene Luen Yang.

Avatar: The Search, vol. 2

Avatar: The Search, vol. 3

My husband and I wandered into the local comic book store on the way back from dinner one night, and I noticed there were more Avatar volumes out. Thinking I had finished the first series (I hadn’t, and you’ll be seeing reviews of those in next month’s post), I went ahead and bought the second one.

This series deals with Zuko, Azula, and their long-vanished mother. It’s been a while since I watched the TV series — ye gods, I had forgotten how unstable Azula became at the end. She’s, um. Not much more stable here. It also turns out that the story of their mother is a bit on the convoluted side . . . but I forgive that because the Mother of Faces is an excellent spirit character. Creepy and cool and very, very much not human. (And not secretly Zuko’s mother, which I just realized the juxtaposition there might imply.)

On the whole, I have to say the Avatar comics are a pretty solid example of continuing a story in comics form and doing it well. The plots here have substance, but aren’t the kind of thing that needs a whole TV series to work out. On the screen, they would feel like a letdown after the series finale. On the page, they’re reasonably substantial snacks, and do a nice job of addressing some of the dangling threads without feeling like unnecessary fanfic.

ItLoD, Marie Brennan. My own work doesn’t count. No matter how many hours I spent on it.

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Testing a new setup

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FOGcon schedule

FOGcon is this weekend, and it’ll be a moderately busy one for me:

Friday, March 6th, 3-4:15 p.m.

Tenses for Time Travelers and Other Abominations of Language

Travel to a strange place — learn new words for animals, foods, and activities at your destination and along the way. Travel in a strange conveyance — learn new words for fuels, travelers’ pastimes, and social structures. How do invented words affect the reader’s experience of an invented world? What strange manglings of language feel natural and atmospheric, and what just doesn’t work?

M: Juliette Wade. Marie Brennan, Sarah Huffman, Heather Rose Jones, Zed Lopez

Saturday, March 7th, 10:30-11:45 a.m.

On The Road

The “road novel” is both a mainstream and a genre staple. The interplay between the physical journey and the emotional journey of the characters literalizes metaphor in a sf’nal manner, whether the trope map is mainstream or genre. This panel will be an opportunity to talk about The Road as a narrative structure, as metaphor, as setting, and to share some of our favorite road novels.

M: Aaron I. Spielman. Marie Brennan, Charlie Byrd, Elsa

Saturday, March 7th, 1:30-2:45

The Setting Is Another Character

Some stories have such a strong sense of place that the setting comes to life, sometimes becoming as important as any other character. What makes a setting more than scenery? How do settings play a role in our favorite stories?

M: Marie Brennan. Anna Leah Blumstein, Karen Brenchley, Megan E. O’Keefe, Terry Weyna

When I’m not busy with those things, I’ll be around — at other panels, hanging out in the bar, wherever. Feel free to say hi!

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THE WINNER’S CRIME, by Marie Rutkoski

Review copy provided by the publisher.

I read the first book in this series last year, and quite enjoyed it. There’s a dearth of secondary-world YA fantasy out there right now, and I always like a good Ruritanian setting, where there’s interesting worldbuilding but no overt magic. And I very much appreciate a romance where, although it’s a strong element of the plot, it isn’t the driving force; there are things in the world the protagonists care about as much as — possibly more than — each other.

In this case, what they care about is politics. Kestrel is the daughter of a prestigious Valorian general, who grew up in the occupied country of Herran. Arin is a young Herrani man, raised in slavery, and up to his eyeballs in a conspiracy to rebel against Valorian rule. I don’t want to spoil The Winner’s Curse, but I will say the political situation there changes pretty radically at end of the book, in ways that leave both characters in even more precarious positions than they were before — which is saying quite a bit.

This book involves them teetering in those precarious positions. Kestrel is definitely the worse off for most of the book; she’s stuck in a Valorian snake pit, politically speaking, with very few resources she can rely on. As somebody who likes a tasty bit of intrigue, I quite enjoyed that. I think I would have liked to see Arin grappling more with his own responsibilities, but I recognize that under the circumstances, that would have meant running him and Kestrel in separate plot strands, without the two of them interacting much at all. The necessity of keeping the leads something like together means that Arin has less traction initially; his big difficulties don’t come until later, when his plot goes off separately from Kestrel. As such, his part of the story doesn’t carry quite the same weight as hers does.

Unsurprisingly, this feels very much like a middle volume. Matters changed drastically at the end of the last book; at the end of this one, it’s more that you can see the buckets of fecal matter lined up in front of the fan, ready to be flung in the third and last volume. But it doesn’t feel predictable: I know something will blow up, and I can see certain aspects of how, but I don’t know what the ultimate fallout will be.

This is because Rutkoski has done a good job so far of creating problems with no easy solutions. Even if you could kick Valoria out of Herran and be sure they would never retaliate or come back . . . Herran’s in a mess, and will take generations to fully rebuild. And that only fixes Herran, not the rest of the continent that Valoria is trying to conquer. Overthrow the empire? Maybe — but how are you going to manage that? And what kind of terrible hardships will that create for the ordinary Valorian citizens, who are not to blame for the imperialistic tendencies of their leaders?

Nowhere is this ambiguity more clear than in Kestrel and Arin’s relationship. Fundamentally, they have both done things the other would — and should — disapprove of. They’ve had to make political choices in situations where there’s no good choice, just “what will cause the fewest people to die?” When they have failures to communicate, I tolerate it much better than usual, because storming off without listening to somebody’s explanation is more understandable when the thing they’re trying to explain is why they caused a massive famine. I’m still left with the questions I had at the end of the first book, which are: does Rutkoski intend the two of them to live happily ever after? And if so, how the hell are they going to manage that?

It does feel a bit weaker to me than the first book, I think because there’s a stretch of it where Arin has very little to do. Had his interactions with Kestrel been tightened up, and the extra space used to develop another sub-plot for him, the book as a whole would have hit more strongly than it did. As it stands, though, it’s still enjoyable, and much more ethically complex than YA usually gets credit for. I’m very much looking forward to the third volume.

The Winner’s Crime is on sale as of <checks watch> yesterday. (I should have posted this sooner, but got hammered down by a sudden cold.) Many thanks to the publisher for providing the review copy.

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Less Is More

I just sent the first draft off to my editor; that makes the fourth Memoir a Real Thing now, ’cause other people are going to be reading it.

Doing the final polishes before kicking it out the door, I came upon one scene where I felt like I needed to amp up the emotional force a bit. So I went to the middle of the scene, stuck in a few line breaks, and started typing a new paragraph that would take what was going on and foreground it a bit more overtly. I wrote a sentence . . . started another one . . . deleted it . . . wrote a second sentence . . . started a third . . . deleted that and the second sentence . . . and after a lot of fiddling, I had a new paragraph, which I joined up to the following text. I looked it over, polished it a bit, tweaked some words — and then deleted the whole paragraph.

Because I was trying to play the wrong game.

These aren’t the sorts of books in which the narrator lays out her emotional state for the reader to marinate in. Those lines I had so much trouble writing? They were too overt. They were modern in style, rather than the buttoned-up Victorian tone I’ve been aiming for this whole time. I don’t pretend this will work for every reader, but: as far as I’m concerned, that scene has more impact, or at least more the kind of impact I’m going for, when I keep it simple. Less is more.

This is on my mind right now because my husband and I just finished watching Agent Carter, and we’re also nearing the end of the first season of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. I realized tonight that I’m starting to crave passionate, operatic, heart-on-sleeve declarations of love, because both of those shows feature a lot of very proper characters having All the Feels but never talking about it openly. I said before that I ship Peggy Carter and Edmund Jarvis in a totally platonic way, and I stand by that — but it doesn’t mean I wasn’t flailing during one of the last scenes of this last episode, with the two of them being so very Britishly reserved at one another. And my god, if Jack Robinson and Phryne Fisher don’t kiss by the end of this season, I might throw things at the TV. (A real kiss, I mean. Not a “no I only did that to keep the murderer from noticing you I swear that’s all it was” kiss.)

My reaction means the writers are doing their jobs correctly, of course. And this is the thing romance and horror have in common: they both carry more impact if they tease you for a while first, hinting at stuff and building it slowly before finally delivering the emotional payoff. If you rush the process, it doesn’t work as well. But if you play the tension right, if you see only hints of the monster or the occasional Meaningful Gaze between the characters . . . then you don’t need an enormous payoff to get a lot of energy out of it. One kiss can work as well as — or better than — the characters falling into bed; one brief shot of the monster’s face can horrify you more than seeing the entire thing.

When it’s done well, I adore this sort of thing. Too steady of a diet, though, and I start feeling like I need some characters with a bit less self-control. But tell me: what are your favorite “oh my god this tiny thing was so incredibly meaningful” emotional payoffs in a story, or your favorite “and then we pulled out all of the stops and fired up the jet engines and went so far over the top we couldn’t even see it with binoculars” moments?

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Every Frame a Painting

This is a fascinating series of videos.

The video blogger, Tony Zhou, digs into the art of the director and the cinematographer to talk about how they achieve their effects. For somebody like me, who is a dyed-in-the-wool narrative geek but doesn’t know the first thing about the craft of film, it’s like catnip: a chance to understand how one tells stories with images rather than words.

Mind you, I can’t quite follow everything he says. There are times where he’ll try to draw out a particular point, but its effect is subtle enough or he doesn’t unpack the idea enough or I don’t have enough basic grounding in film craft that I end up shrugging and thinking “okay, if you say so.” But many of them are just great, like “What Is Bayhem?”, wherein he dissects the work of Michael Bay. It isn’t about saying “oh, he’s such a genius” — he isn’t. Zhou’s thesis is that Bay imprinted on a couple of visual tricks and then BEATS THEM TO DEATH in every movie he makes. But it’s possible to identify what those tricks are, and to see he got them from or where other people try to copy him without understanding what he’s actually doing. It’s possible to put your finger on why you don’t like Michael Bay’s films (if indeed you do not like them) . . . because the man uses the same visual tricks without much regard for the material he’s using them on. It’s the equivalent of playing a piece of music all at one volume: there’s no dynamics, no contrast, just EVERYTHING IS EPIC ALL THE TIME. Even when the story itself is not actually being very epic at that moment.

I also loved the video on “Edgar Wright: How to Do Visual Comedy”. It hammered home for me some of the reasons why I find Wright’s movies to be a lot of fun, while a lot of other cinematic comedy bores me stiff. I’ve said before that the issue is one of content, and that’s true: I don’t find humiliation funny, I’m annoyed rather than amused by people acting so stupidly I’m not sure how they can even walk and talk at the same time, gross-out humour is just NO, and I’m very hit-or-miss with physical comedy. I like wittiness, and wittiness tends to be in short supply these days, at least in American comedy films. But it turns out there’s more to it than that. Zhou points out that so many movies have limited themselves to only one channel of humour, which is people standing around talking: they don’t use lighting or well-timed sound effects or matching scene transitions or soundtrack synchronization or things entering and leaving the frame in unexpected ways. (It was interesting, watching Galavant after seeing that video; I found myself noting the places where it employed a broader array of tools.) Using all those channels means you can vary your approach, make your point in different ways depending on the context.

Other particularly good ones: “Jackie Chan: How to Do Action Comedy.” “David Fincher: And the Other Way Is Wrong.” “A Brief Look at Texting and the Internet in Film.” All of them are interesting to watch, but I found those five the most comprehensible and eye-opening. If you have any interest in that sort of thing, they’re well worth taking a look at.

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excerpt; letters

If you want to whet your appetite for next month, Tor.com has posted an excerpt from Voyage of the Basilisk.

It seems a good excuse to remind you all that you have until the end of this month to send a letter to Isabella and get one in return. (Those of you who have sent one already will be getting replies soon: my progress on those has been slowed by the necessity of finishing and revising the draft of the fourth book.) I have to say, I’ve been touched by the number of personal elements people are incorporating into their missives; it’s wonderful to know that this story speaks so deeply to their own lives, in one way or another. I hope my replies will do that justice.

And now, back to the revision mines!

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Three shows that have pleased me lately

I mentioned a while ago that I was tired of grim ‘n gritty TV shows, things full of cynicism and decidedly lacking in color. In contrast, I’d like to recommend three TV shows that are bright! and energetic! and feature almost no death whatsoever!

Bonus, of a sort: all of these shows are short-run, with the longest having only ten episodes. So if you’re looking for something you can marathon for weeks, these will not fit the bill — but if you want something that isn’t a huge time commitment, they’re perfect.

***

#1 — The Librarians.

This show. THIS SHOW.

It is a totally worthy successor to the movies, while still being its own thing. Basic premise of the setting, for those who don’t know: there is a Library, which contains all kinds of weird magical shit and miles upon miles of information about same. There is also a Librarian, who is selected from among the geekiest trivia magnets in the world to chase down and deal with magical problems in the world. (Played by Noah Wyle.) In the show, events conspire to bring together three candidates who were invited to apply for the Librarian’s job (back when Noah Wyle got hired) but didn’t show up for one reason or another, along with a Guardian who is supposed to protect the Librarian — except that the current guy has done without a Guardian for ten years and doesn’t see why he needs one now. Stuff happens, things go crazy, and the Guardian gets assigned to babysit the Librarian candidates on various missions while Noah Wyle’s character runs off to deal with something else.

Things that are awesome: well, for starters, the Guardian is a woman (played by Rebecca Romijn), a counterterrorism expert who suffers throughout the first season from a constant case of “this magic stuff is making my sanity melt down.” One of the Librarian candidates is also a woman; another is an Asian guy. (Could have done with more characters of color elsewhere, I will admit.) And the candidates’ personalities make me wonder if the writers thought up the character types, matched them to the castings, and then rotated the set one click. The math nerd isn’t the Asian guy; it’s the girl. The art history major isn’t the girl; it’s Christian Kane from Leverage. The smart-mouthed thief isn’t Christian Kane; it’s the Asian guy. And their dynamics together are a lot of fun.

And then. Y’all. This was a silly bit of fluff full of nerdy trivia goodness, and then every so often it would punch me in the feels. There’s an ongoing thing involving terminal illness, which the show handles with a surprising amount of nuance for a story that is essentially comedic in its tone. Magic does not wave a wand and make the illness go away. Sometimes it is debilitating to the sick character; sometimes it is not. The fact of the illness affects how that character acts, and how other people act toward that character, in good ways and bad. Heck — there are ways in which the illness even provides a benefit sometimes . . . but the story never loses sight of the fact that the character is still sick, that no amount of side benefit can make this a good thing. Given that the show has been renewed for a second season, I won’t be surprised if eventually there is a solution; the alternatives are a) the character dies (which would be saaaaaaaaaaad and not really how this show rolls) or b) the character mysteriously cruises on forever without that whole “terminal illness” thing ever reaching its conclusion. But in the meanwhile, it’s frankly done a better job with that side plot than a bunch of dramas out there. That isn’t the only thing that punched me in the feels, but it was one of the big ones.

So, in summary: nerdy trivia goodness, magic, plots that are lolarious “no seriously whut” kind of fun, surprisingly good coherence overall, entertaining characters, yay.

***

#2 — Agent Carter.

If they do not keep going with this show, I will cut someone.

Basic premise, for those who don’t know: Peggy Carter from Captain America joins the Strategic Scientific Reserve after WWII and, despite being a full agent, gets treated mostly like a secretary. When a bunch of Howard Stark’s inventions get stolen and he gets accused of selling them on the black market, she agrees to work in secret and try to clear his name.

Shorter version: come watch Peggy Carter punch sexism in the face! With bonus weird science!

Seriously, this strikes a beautiful balance for me of addressing the sexism of the time without depicting it in such pervasive detail that I want to slit my wrists. (I can’t watch Mad Men at ALL.) This is in large part because its genre is pulp adventure, and Peggy is a two-fisted action hero who handles both chauvinistic colleagues and molecular nitramine bombs with equal panache. Furthermore, the show doesn’t fall into the trap of making her only “a woman in a man’s world”: her workplace is entirely male (apart from the “telephone operators” downstairs who open the secret door to the real office), but she has a social life outside of work, and that’s made a relevant part of the story rather than a bolted-on addition. She has a roommate, a friend, women who live in her building who help her or get in her way or just exist in ways that tell you their lives don’t revolve 100% around Peggy Carter. Heck, she even talks to one of those telephone operators on several occasions, despite that being a bit part. (It doesn’t address racism at all, though, so if you’re looking for that, you won’t find it here.)

Her relationships with men are good, too. Can I say that I ship her and Jarvis so much in the most non-sexual way ever? I would be massively disappointed if the show ever had them hook up, but the good thing is I don’t think they’re going to. Jarvis is awesome as the buttoned-down butler who will occasionally try to hit people but isn’t very good at it and is absolutely devoted to his wife. I love the fact that he respects the hell out of Peggy, and also the fact that his respect doesn’t prevent them from having problems of other sorts. I’m amused by Howard Stark, cruising in and out of the show being an outrageous ass but occasionally slipping up and showing real substance. If I’m rooting for Peggy to hook up with anybody, it’s Sousa, the phsyically disabled SSR agent who sees Peggy a lot more clearly than most of their colleagues, largely because they don’t see him in much the same way they don’t see Peggy — but again, that clarity doesn’t make him perfect, and he isn’t always the ally Peggy might want him to be. Heck, even Thompson is growing on me, the golden boy who isn’t quite as perfect as he appears.

I like the fact that the characters on this show are generally smart. Not just in the “we know facts” way, but in their reasoning and actions (allowing for a certain amount of pulp adventure ridiculousness). Peggy’s colleagues are not buffoons; she only stays ahead of them by working fast and having access to some information they don’t possess. There’s only one point on the show where I’ve felt like somebody made a choice that was inexplicably short-sighted, and that’s in last week’s ep — jury’s still out as to whether the follow-up in the next one will mitigate that for me. (I won’t get to watch that until my husband comes back from his work trip, sob weep alas.) I may wail “no you idiot!” at the screen, but it’s generally for good in-story reason, not for gratuitous stupidity.

WANT MOAR. There had better be more than eight episodes of this show when it’s all over.

***

#3 — Galavant.

I didn’t actually expect to like this show, but my husband talked me into watching it.

Basic premise: Ye Olde Mediaeval Europe. In the opening song (yes, it’s a musical), Galavant’s beloved Madalena is stolen away from him by the evil King Richard. When Galavant charges into the castle to win her back, though, Madalena tells him she rather likes the notion of being queen. Galavant gets thrown out; jump to one year later, and he’s a pathetic drunk in a tavern who gets hired by the Princess Isabella to rescue her parents and save her kingdom from King Richard, who has taken over.

This is the most straight-up comedic one of the lot, which is why I didn’t expect to like it. But its humour relies more on witty social commentary than grossness or slapstick or oh my god how have you people not perished of your own stupidity, which are the things that usually put me off comedies. (My favorite line so far is probably the one that comes after Gareth, the cockney-accented bodyguard of King Richard, attempts to tell a joke that consists mostly of bleeped-out profanity. Richard stares at him and then says, “Good lord, Gareth. Do you kiss my ring with that mouth?”) The sidekicks are competent — often more so than the lead, but without the lead being so useless that I wish the show would just jettison him and talk about the other, more interesting people. The song lyrics are often clever; if the melodies aren’t the most amazing in the world, well, you try running a show with several musical numbers every week and see how well you do.

I haven’t seen to the end of this one yet. Since there are only eight episodes and each one is half an hour minus commercial time, though, you can sprint through the whole thing in under three hours — less time than some movies would take.

***

There are other shows I enjoy, too, but these share the qualities of being colorful and packed with energy and I think the cumulative death toll of all three might be less than half a dozen. I know at least one will be getting a second season; I’d be delighted if all three did.

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Books read, January 2015

This is belated on account of Own Book Eating Brain. This is also rather short on account of Own Book Eating Brain. And possibly shorter still on account of Own Book Eating Brain and Making Me Forget to Record Things. What I’m trying to say is, I didn’t read much in January (apart from some research stuff I’m not listing here), and I don’t remember half of what I read, so I’m having to recreate this post facto.

The King of Rabbits and Moon Lake, Eugie Foster. Last of Foster’s short story collections that I picked up after she passed away. Many of the things in here are folktale-ish, but not all; there’s one story (“The Adventures of Manny the Mailmobile”) about a robot, that doesn’t quite fit in tonally with the rest, and the others show a broader range in both tone and cultural source than Returning My Sister’s Face did. Since the folktale-ish stories are what I like best of Foster’s work, I was less pleased with this one than the other, but it still had some material I quite enjoyed.

The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss. I talked about the gender aspect here, but didn’t really say much about the book itself. I’m not sure how to say this without it coming across as a condemnation, which I do not intend, but: dear god Kvothe is the Mary Suest Mary Sue to ever Mary Sue. From now on, every time somebody complains about a female protagonist being an unrealistic Mary Sue, I want to hand them a copy of this novel with a post-it note on the cover saying “Your argument is invalid.” There is nothing wrong with occasionally wanting to enjoy a story about a hypercompetent super-genius; the wrongness or rightness of it should not change based on gender.

. . . I just went back to the gender thing, didn’t I. Um. I like Rothfuss’ world; the stuff with sygaldry and sympathy and naming is intriguing, and I am a sucker for that kind of thing. So ranting aside, I did enjoy this. (I wouldn’t have finished reading it if I didn’t.) Ranting once more calculated into the equation, though, I’m not sure whether I’ll read the second book or not.

Unbound, Jim Hines. Third of the Magic Ex Libris series, and ye GODS do not start here, because this is the culmination of a bunch of stuff from the first two books, Libriomancer and Codex Born. I do recommend it, though, if you like the kind of series that first presents you with an idea and then starts looking at it from different angles and breaking it and gluing it back together in new ways. Also, Hines deserves cookies for the single most awesome cipher concept I think I have ever seen. Watching Isaac work his way through that thing made me really wish I could see the text itself, just to appreciate the beauty of its design.

. . . that’s all I can remember, anyway. That may be all there was. Not a lot of spare brain in January, is what I’m saying.

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