Marie Brennan's Blog, page 146

A Year in Pictures – Maleficent’s Hedge

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I have another version of this shot that frames that ocean rock partway in a gap between the branches, but I ended up choosing this one because it has much more of the spiky, zig-zag look to the branches. It’s as if someone transplanted part of Maleficent’s hedge from Sleeping Beauty to Point Lobos, California.

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name #3Things — get a silly story

Despite not being the world’s best Twitter user, I have managed to reach the milestone of a thousand followers. In celebration, I have decided to play a game!

The rules are simple:

1) You name a person, place, or thing (over on Twitter, if you can — I’m @swan_tower)

2) I choose three things from among those suggestions

3) I write a flash story about those things and post it, in its entirety, on Twitter.

Note that nowhere in here do I say your suggestions must be sensible, nor do I promise a sensible story in return.

Go forth and tweet ridiculous things at me!

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A Year in Pictures – Salt Formations

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After the more standard tour of the Wieliczka Salt Mine, my husband and I opted for an additional tour of the underground museum, which contains random historical artifacts and information on the geology of the area. These salt crystals were in a high case, hanging above everything else; I darkened the background to let them show in all their monochrome glory.

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

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A Year in Pictures – Hanging Coral

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We visited the enormous Churaumi Aquarium while we were in Okinawa. My efforts to photograph the whale sharks met with limited success, but I had better luck with the coral, which was beautifully vivid.

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

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Sale, convention

Apropos of complaining about reading The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus, I’m pleased to say it was not in vain; I have sold “The Damnation of St. Teresa of Ávila” to the anthology Shared Nightmares, edited by Steve Diamond. I’ll post the TOC and so forth once I have it.

Also, if you’re a Bay Area local, I’ll be at Convolution in Burlingame the weekend of September 26th-28th. My tentative schedule is:

Friday 2-4 — You Got Your Science in My Fantasy (M)
Saturday 10-12 — Reading
Saturday 12-2 — Steaming Outside Victorian England
Sunday 12-2 — Social Worldbuilding
Sunday 2-4 — Dice on the Page

That last is a panel I proposed, focusing not on who has adapted an RPG into fiction, but what the craft-oriented challenges of doing so are. Not sure what I’m going pick for the reading. Probably a short story, since I rarely get to do those; I’ll have to see what seems good. Not “The Damnation of St. Teresa of Ávila” — there’s no way I’m inflicting sixteenth-century Catholic mystical theology on people at 10 a.m. on a Saturday.

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A Year in Pictures – Malbork at Sunset

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We basically stayed at Malbork Castle until they kicked us out at closing time. Then we spent a while longer roaming about the grounds, finding shots like this one, with photogenic lens flare.

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indicted on two charges of negligent authorial cruelty

You would think I’d notice when I’m doing something horrible to my characters — but sometimes the penny drops quite late.

The context for this post is the scene I wrote for Chains and Memory last night. There’s a detail I put into Lies and Prophecy that seemed like an interesting twist, an additional layer to an aspect of the world that the characters hadn’t realized was there. When I started planning out this book, I knew I was going to add another component to that detail; the adding happened a few days ago. And then last night, writing a follow-on scene, I finally realized what I’d done to Julian, by tossing in that little detail so many years ago.

I can’t get more specific than that without massively spoiling things, but I can give a different example of what I mean: Nicholas Merriman, an NPC in my game Memento, which is the campaign that ultimately gave rise to the Onyx Court series. Nicholas is nowhere in the novels, so there will be no spoilers for the Onyx Court if I tell you I may have been more cruel to him than any other member of the Merriman family save Francis. (Who did appear in the novels, so if I tell you his role in the game was pretty much the same except it ended a little bit worse, you’ll have some scale for comparison.)

Memento was a Changeling game about a group of faeries reincarnating in mortal hosts over a period of centuries, trying to create the Philosopher’s Stone. They were assisted in this process by a faerie-blooded human family, the Merrimans, who passed down the knowledge of their quest through the generations . . . but lost bits of it along the way, because seven hundred years is a long time to keep that kind of thing alive. Nicholas, living in the modern day, had only the fragments he’d gleaned from his Alzheimer-afflicted grandfather, and almost no connection to the faerie world whatsoever.

Under the mechanics for fae blood in that game, Nicholas was permitted one single “fae gift,” i.e. an ability inherited from his changeling ancestor. It could be a powerful ability, but he could only have one. I chose Parted Mists. In Changeling, the Mists are a metaphysical force that causes human beings to forget about magical things: to come up with “rational” explanations for them or dismiss them as mere fancy or just forget them entirely. Parted Mists allowed Nicholas to actually remember his interactions with the PC changelings, which was pretty necessary to make the plot go; ergo, my decision seemed like simple common sense.

So they meet Nicholas and realize they were doing something important and go through a process that causes them to remember their past lives, which takes up the bulk of the campaign, with them flashing back to previous centuries (and previous Merriman helpers) before finally snapping back to the present day and finishing what they started.

By which point I had realized that I had been horrifically, unthinkingly cruel to Nicholas.

Because he remembered.

Here’s the thing about Changeling: in that setting, there is a magical layer to the world that we can’t generally see. Changelings can see it; children can see it, but lose the ability as they grow up; adults can be temporarily enchanted to see it, but the Mists make them forget after the enchantment fades.

Nicholas did not forget.

After he met the PCs, Nicholas knew that he was living in grey, dreary Kansas. He knew Oz was right there, all around him: a fantastical world filled with color and magic and wonder. He knew the PCs lived in that world, and he’d been permitted to visit it a few times. But every time, the magic ended, and he was back in black-and-white Kansas — remembering precisely what he had lost.

I did not mean to be so cruel to him. But I was, and it took me months to realize I had been.

And that’s more or less what I’ve done to Julian. Not the same flavor of cruelty, but the same failure to notice until an embarrassingly long time later. The good news is, I have noticed, and that means I can make story out of it; that’s what I was doing last night. Not only that, but in writing up the problem, I realized it had a whole second layer to it, so that he’s asking Kim the question she hears, and also a second question she won’t hear until it’s almost too late.

If I’m lucky, readers will hit this part of the story and think “oh, wow, that’s a really awesome thing Marie Brennan set up there.” They won’t realize how much of it was an accident, that I only just caught at the last second.

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

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A Year in Pictures – Pompeii Baths

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This is one of the surviving fragments of decoration in the Forum Baths at Pompeii. It gives you a remarkable sense of how beautiful the place must have been before the eruption — the sort of glimpse into the past that never. happens. on archaeological sites.

Not unless a volcano helps out, anyway.

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The Incompetence of Samsung’s Customer Support

A few weeks ago I noticed that my Nexus 10 tablet wasn’t charging properly. I poked around online and found a number for Samsung’s customer support, so I called them up.

The lady I spoke to was very nice. We ran into confusion, though, because when I looked in the settings where my model number ought to be, all it said was “Nexus 10.” Apparently there was supposed to be something else. She gave me a ticket number and said I should call back in a few days, at which point her supervisor would have made the arrangements to put me manually into the system, which would allow them to send me a shipping label to get the tablet repaired.

Seemed good to me, so I thanked her, hung up, and waited.

When I called back, my first call got dropped. On a second try, the guy I talked to seemed to have no awareness of this having happened, despite the ticket number. He asked for my model number, and when I told him it only said “Nexus 10,” he said somebody would call me back in one to two days, after his supervisor made the arrangements to put me manually into the system, which would allow them to send me a shipping label to get the tablet repaired.

It took something more like three or four days, but I did get a call back from a woman saying there was some confusion about the lack of model number, but that she suspected the problem was that my tablet is wi-fi only, and they’re the department for tablets that are registered with a carrier for cellular service. She asked me to call her back and gave her a number.

Let me say for the record that up until this point, I feel like the service I’d received was less than ideal, but basically par for the course with this kind of thing.

That’s about to change.

Today (having been busy for several days, plus the holiday weekend seemed like a bad time to follow up), I call the number I’ve been given. It has a menu. Press 1 for mobile devices, tablets, etc. Okay. Press 3 for tablets. Okay. Press 1 for wi-fi only tablets. Progress, right? I seem to have had the wrong department before, but now I’ll get the right one. I press 1, 3, 1, and get a customer service rep to talk to.

“Can I have your phone number? First and last name? Verify your email address? Thank you. How can I help you today?”

I explain that I have a wi-fi only Nexus 10 tablet that isn’t charging properly, and I’m trying to send it in for repair.

“I’m sorry, but I’m not able to do anything about that here. I’ll have to transfer you to another department.”

. . . not sure why the people under the wi-fi tablet option can’t help me with my wi-fi tablet, but okay. But note: in the eight or so times I called this number and went through this process, I’m fairly certain that I did not get transferred to the same department each time. I’m not positive, since I didn’t take notes, but I’m pretty sure.

And here’s where things get terrible. No matter where I get transferred to, I’m in the wrong place — and it’s blatantly obvious that half the reps aren’t even listening to what I say, because when they ask what I’m calling for, I say it’s a wi-fi only Nexus 10 tablet . . . and then a little while later they are surprised to discover my tablet is wi-fi only, or a Nexus, and they’re going to have to transfer me to somebody who can help with that. One call, I get transferred four times, and I know for a fact that at least two of those transfers were to the wi-fi department. Meaning the wi-fi department sent me somewhere else (I think it was the Nexus department), and then somebody else sent me back. The rep doing the sending back apologizes and says something vague about them having trouble with their phone system. This must be true, because that call gets dropped while I’m waiting to talk to the wi-fi department again — and that is not the only time I get dropped, because I’m not calling Samsung eight times in one afternoon just for shits and giggles. I get dropped once while the initial rep is going through her opening spiel. I get dropped when I’m on hold. I get dropped when somebody picks me up from hold and asks what department I’m trying to reach. At no point can anybody give me the number of the department I’m supposed to be talking to, because apparently they don’t actually have the numbers; they only have a phone system they can use to transfer me.

I’m composing this post while I’m on hold — but not for the wi-fi department, or the Nexus department. I’m on hold waiting to tell Samsung that they have the shittiest customer service I have ever had the misfortune of dealing with. I’ve been waiting to tell them this for forty minutes now, and nobody has picked up.

Basically, Samsung doesn’t give a fuck. I can’t take my device to someplace local to get it repaired, because it’s a tablet; apparently the only way I can get it fixed is to mail it to the manufacturer and wait for them to send it back. But I can’t even do that, because they can’t be bothered to meet the bare minimum standards of actually helping their customers.

I broke off writing this post because after forty-five minutes on hold, I finally got a competent customer service rep who neither attempted to transfer me nor dropped my call. She gave me a new ticket number and her extension, so that if I have to call back, I can (theoretically) get hold of her again and not be sent around the merry-go-round for the millionth time. I’m still waiting — yet again — for someone to set up whatever’s necessary to deal with the lack of model number, but I supplied my proof of purchase, so maybe this time it’ll work? We’ll see.

Not gonna lie, though. I’m not holding my breath.

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A Year in Pictures – The High Pavilion

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The Chinese-styled garden of Fukushu-en in Okinawa is really impressive to wander through, and my favorite part was this: a small pavilion perched atop a rocky hill, overlooking a waterfall that pours into the lake below. You can wander around inside the hill, too, through a little cave scraped out to let you see the waterfall from within.

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