Marie Brennan's Blog, page 133
January 16, 2015
I've had enough
I actually watched a bunch of things that day, one of which was the first episode of Peaky Blinders . I like Cillian Murphy as an actor, and I'm a sucker for well-detailed historical periods, and the show is solidly written . . .
. . . and I just didn't care.
Because I'm starting to feel like I've had enough. There's a genre of TV right now that somebody on the internet once dubbed "blood, tits, and scowling," and while there is a wide range of splendid material belonging to that type -- for starters, look at just about everything HBO has done in the last decade -- I think I'm hitting my saturation point. There's a cynicism about human nature that tends to be endemic to the genre, and the representation of women is often problematic -- though, in fairness' sake, I should note that Peaky Blinders made a couple of moves with its female characters that I quite appreciated.
At dinner the other night, a friend of mine said he wanted to find a TV show where nobody died, nobody was murdered, nobody did awful criminal things, etc. Ironically, we wound up chatting about two shows that feature people getting murdered as a central plot point -- but in both cases, the entire tone is different. One was Pushing Daisies , which is candy-colored and good-hearted even though the main character brings people back from the dead to solve crimes, and the other was Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries , following an outrageous lady detective in early 20th century Australia. They are both very, very far from blood, tits, and scowling.
I'm starting to crave the change of pace. My taste leans toward drama, so people getting killed is going to be a regular feature of many of the things I watch (and read) -- but I can do without the cynicism, the muted color palette, the parade of morally dubious people doing morally dubious things. Right now I'm enjoying the heck out of Agent Carter , with its cheerful pulp heroics. I need to get hold of The Librarians ; the made-for-TV movies it's based on are the best Indiana Jones films apart from Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade. I want some light, some humour that isn't grim, some fun.
It isn't that the other stuff is bad. I've just had enough of it for now.
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January 14, 2015
icon needed
So!
Needed: one (1) icon made from this book cover
Requirements: no larger than 100x100 pixels
If possible: match well with the previous two icons.
Reward: one (1) Advance Reader Copy of Voyage of the Basilisk
I'll give it a few days for people to send in their pics, and then pick a winner. Happy icon-ing!
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January 13, 2015
Voyage of the Basilisk WILL be coming out
Just a quick heads-up: I’ve gotten several Tweets in the last day telling me that Amazon UK has canceled pre-orders of Voyage of the Basilisk on the grounds that “the book will not be published.” This is, to put it bluntly, not true. I have no idea what’s going on, but if you got that message, a) don’t believe it and b) please do re-order from a retailer that has not gotten its wires so badly crossed.
Now if you’ll pardon me, I need to go investigate this issue.
Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.
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January 12, 2015
An Invocation for Beginnings
There’s a lot of inspirational dreck out there — well, I shouldn’t call it dreck. No doubt it inspires somebody. Generally not me, though, because the sentiment is too saccharine, too happy-fuzzy-warm to have any real impact on me. And yet, things like the demotivators are too cynical: they’re good for a brief laugh, but when you need something to get you going, they probably aren’t going to help. (Unless they do. Brains are weird things, and each one works in a different way.)
Which is why, when I found an inspirational thing that worked on me, I ran out and bought a poster of it. (Mine is green. The color is unfortunate either way: oh well.) The inspirational thing is a video by ze frank, An Invocation for Beginnings:
It works for me because it’s not happy-fuzzy-warm. It’s funny and it’s random and every so often it hits the point right on the nose. If I tried to quote my favorite bits at you, I’d end up quoting half the speech, but I’m especially fond of “Perfectionism may look good in his shiny shoes but he’s a little bit of an asshole and nobody invites him to their pool parties” and the whole part about the pencils. And then the last bit: “And god let me enjoy this. Life isn’t just a sequence of waiting for things to be done.”
Sometimes when I sit down to write, I don’t feel like doing it. I don’t want to be working on that bit of the story, or I don’t want to be working on that story, or I don’t want to be working at all. The Invocation helps me remember to enjoy that night’s work for what it is, to sink myself down into it and have fun. Maybe this isn’t the big thrilling climax to anything . . . but I can still get a cool turn of phrase or add in a detail that wasn’t there before. I’m not just waiting for this book to be done.
Let’s start this shit up.
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scattered thoughts on the next Memoir
I haven’t been posting much about my progress on the fourth Memoir. (Which does have a title now, but as with Voyage of the Basilisk, I’m going to hold off on announcing it until the preceding book is released. I want people’s attention on that one, not the one that won’t be out until 2016.)
It’s a bit hard to talk about this book, because of the weird way publishing timescales work. I read reviews of The Tropic of Serpents and marvel at people who say things like [spoiler] — and then I remember that those people haven’t even read Voyage yet, let alone the one I’m presently writing. Of course the relevance of [spoiler] is not yet clear. Of course [spoiler] hasn’t developed very much yet. I’m not actually pointing at any one thing with those brackets; I could list several to fill in the blanks. I’m almost four-fifths of the way through the series. Everybody else is barely two-fifths done. What the story looks like from my perspective is wildly different from what all the rest of you see.
I had a plot epiphany the other night that is so freaking perfect, I honestly can’t believe it took me this long to come up with it. Like, how was this not part of the pitch I sent to Tor back in 2011? How was I such an idiot that I did not see this needed to be part of the story until just now? I really have no idea. Seriously, you all are going to read this book and assume I’ve been planning [x] from the start. I will smile mysteriously and try to pretend that’s true, so you don’t all know how blind I really was.
On Twitter the other night I joked that sometimes when I’m writing these books, I think about what the sensible thing to do would be . . . and then I have Isabella do the opposite. It’s funny because it’s true, to an extent. The key is mood: back when I was drafting A Natural History of Dragons, I had to keep prodding myself not to fall into Onyx Court mode. Forget subtle political maneuvering; this series needs crazy shit, yo. So the bit of plot I’m presently wrapping up right now had a moment where Isabella could have gone the cautious and sensible route, informing somebody of a suspected problem and mobilizing various resources to deal with it. But that would have created a story where she sits on her hands and then gets a report from other people that the issue has been dealt with. That? is not pulp adventure. So instead I came up with a reason for her not to tell that person what was going on — a solid enough reason, I hope, to at least pass muster for the genre — and then there were hijinks involving her tailing Person A who is tailing Person B and at the end of it all there’s an abortive brawl. Much better.
I’m also going at this in weird order. I was floundering around in the middle of the book, with Isabella out in the field doing one stage of her research — but I didn’t really know how long I should spend on that bit, and I wasn’t sure where the whole thing was going anyway (this was pre-epiphany), until finally I decided I should skip ahead and write the bit referenced in the above paragraph, since at least I knew what I was doing with that. I think I’m going to keep on from there, writing some — who knows; maybe all — of the last third of the book; then, once I have a chunk of that in place, I’ll be able to back up and know what ought to go in the middle, to set up the end. This is weird for me, y’all. I don’t write this way, out of order. Except that maybe right now I do.
Hey: whatever gets the book done.
Speaking of which, I’m about at the . . . halfwayish point sorta but not really? I have about half of the word-count, but since a chunk of that is from way later in the book, I’m not mentally at the halfway point of the story. More like the two-thirds point, possibly a bit later. But it’s starting to look like a book rather than a short story that got way out of control. And in another few days I’ll get to write the emotional resolution to one of the conflicts, which will make it a lot easier to go back and figure out the rise and fall of the stuff leading up to that. (I hope. Remember, I’m new to this method.)
Darling du jour:
“There’s a bit of difference between swimming in shark-infested water because you’re trying to retrieve something from the bottom, and staying in just because you’re already there and haven’t been eaten yet.”
“We are still trying to retrieve something from the bottom. All that has changed is whether anybody on shore cares whether we — oh, hang the metaphor.”
Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.
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January 9, 2015
What I Published in 2014
It’s that time of year, when authors round up what they did in the previous year for your consideration in awards.
Novel-wise, I had The Tropic of Serpents, the second of the Memoirs of Lady Trent. It made NPR’s “best of” list, in three different categories: Science Fiction Fantasy, Science and Society, and It’s All Geek to Me. The third book in the series is coming out in March — which is irrelevant to awards for 2014, but may be of interest to you all in other respects. 
Short fiction, I had four pieces:
“Mad Maudlin on Tor.com (read it online)
“Centuries of Kings” in Neverland’s Library, ed. Rebecca Lovatt and Roger Bellini
“Daughter of Necessity on Tor.com (read it online)
“The Damnation of St. Teresa of Avila” in Shared Nightmares, ed. Steve Diamond
The latter three are short stories, while the first one is a novelette, as such things get counted.
I also published Monstrous Beauty, but that’s a reprint collection of previously published work, so it isn’t eligible for anything that I’m aware of.
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January 5, 2015
Books read, December 2014
December was light on non-research reading, but I did get a few things in:
Stranger, Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith. This novel is famous for being the “gay YA” book, but it’s easy for that to overshadow the fact that it is also a story. One set in a post-apocalyptic California, generations after something mutated half the wildlife and knocked humanity on its butt, technologically speaking. I appreciate the fact that this is not a Mad Max crapsack post-apocalypse: it isn’t cozy, limited resources are an everpresent fact of people’s lives, and there’s a lot of tension between the Changed and the Normals . . . but the town of Las Anclas is generally cooperative and functional, in ways that seem realistic. The story itself danced on the edge of having too many pov characters for my taste — every time a narrative shifts perspective, I get kicked partway out and have to re-engage; hello, George R.R. Martin — but ultimately things dovetailed well enough to keep me hooked. The sequel will be out soon; I’ll post when that happens.
Rogue Spy, Joanna Bourne. Fifth in the series of Napoleonic spy romances I started inhaling last March. The timeline of these books turns out to be more convoluted than I realized: I’m pretty sure the bullet wound Hawker’s recovering from in this book is the one Justine put in him partway through The Black Hawk is the one Annique dug out of him in The Spymaster’s Lady. Since The Black Hawk itself went back and forth in time, the impact of this story is slightly defused; there’s a pretty awful revelation in that book which sets up the main conflict for this one, but the “present moment” timeline there takes place after this novel, so you know things work out just fine for the hero. Which you would pretty much guess anyway, since it’s a romance novel and they tend not to end on a sad note . . . but guessing and knowing are still different things.
Anyway, this book is still enjoyable. Bourne puts a twist on her usual formula by having her hero and heroine technically be on the same side of the Britain/France divide — but under such conditions as to make both of their loyalties rather complicated. And there’s still the underlying virtue of this series, which is that it’s about people who respect and admire each other’s competence at espionage as part of their True Love, and makes True Love the key to solving external problems, rather than treating those problems as a side dish to the main (romantic) course.
Mortal Clay, Stone Heart: And Other Stories of Black and White , Eugie Foster. Another short story collection, this one based around the conceit of stories which involve black-and-white things (e.g. skunks, black swans and white swans, etc). I had bounced off one of these when Podcastle ran it, but it turned out to work better for me on the page. Enjoyable overall, though nothing in here really got me in the gut.
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January 1, 2015
Yuletide after-action report
I wrote four stories this year — not anywhere near a record, but the fourth Memoir has been leaving me with very few spare processing cycles.
My assignment was “Crushed Upon the Shore” for the manga Tokyo Babylon. It takes place between that and the anime/manga X/1999, and involves Subaru investigating a case that turns out to have some, uh, personal resonance. WARNING: it is not a nice story. It involves dead children and other less-than-lovely things. Because let’s face it, Seishirou is not a good person, and Subaru’s feelings toward him are more than a little messed up.
Next I took on a pinch hit, which in terms of readership has been my big success of this Yuletide: “Eldest” for the Disney film Sleeping Beauty. The request was for Maleficent backstory that is different from what you get in the Jolie movie. This is the one I think has a dead giveaway in it; I had to name some other fairy women, and after exhausting the obvious two (Titania, Mab) my brain went straight to Nicneven. Who most people have never heard of — but she plays rather a large role in the main conflict of In Ashes Lie.
The remaining two were treats. One, “It’s Betty from Apartment 2204″, was sparked by the recip making an offhand comment wondering what Dana’s neighbors make of all the snarling and such going on in her apartment in Ghostbusters. The other, “The Only Way to Be Sure”, is a brief look at what Rita Vrataski did during and after Verdun in The Edge of Tomorrow. (There are quite a lot of fics for that movie this year, most of them on the theme of “Rita Vrataski is a badass and I heart her.” This is a sentiment I could easily get behind.)
If there are fics you especially enjoyed this year, please link in the comments! I haven’t had a lot of time to read, so recommendations are extremely useful.
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A Year in Pictures – St. Paul’s at Sunset
This work by http://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
This is almost certainly the best photo of St. Paul’s Cathedral I’ve ever taken, and it’s mostly because of luck: I was coming home from research during the Midnight Never Come trip, and the sky had cleared just enough in the west to let the sunset light through. But the air behind the dome was still filled with clouds, and this brilliant contrast was the result.
It seems a fitting note to end this series on. I missed a single day in the Year in Pictures project — November 10th, because I failed to schedule something ahead of time for the day I’d be traveling back from World Fantasy — so you get one extra today to make up for it. I’m proud of myself for missing only one (though frustrated that I didn’t have a perfect record); this turned out to be, well, precisely as big of an undertaking as I expected it to be. I’m glad I did it, though: several of you have commented repeatedly to let me know you enjoyed certain pictures, which reassured me that I would not be the only person interested in a public series of my photos.
Stats in the end: 260 five-star pictures posted, 172 not posted. (Not counting my shots from New York and DC, which haven’t been edited yet on account of Lightroom needing to update for my new camera model.) That latter number is . . . ye gods. A goodly way toward being able to do a second round of this, though boy howdy no I am not doing that any time soon. Maybe in a few years, when I’ve traveled to other places and gotten more fresh material — many of the 172 unposted are very similar to ones I did post. Though really, travel isn’t as necessary as it used to be: one effect of getting more serious about my photography is that I see more opportunities for it right in my own back yard. Even so, there’s nothing like visiting a foreign country to give me an itchy shutter finger. ^_^
I hope you all enjoyed this, and many thanks to everyone who commented along the way!
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December 31, 2014
A Year in Pictures – Shrine Lights
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To close out the year, another light in the darkness: this time, it’s lanterns at Yasaka Jinja in Kyoto.
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