Marie Brennan's Blog, page 147

Books read, August 2014

Surgery meant lots of time on the couch. Lots of time on the couch meant lots of reading. (Also lots of photo-editing. And movie-watching. And passing out so I wouldn’t be awake to hate the boot.)

Fly by Night, Frances Hardinge.

Paging Mrissa; Mrissa to the red courtesy phone.

Secondary-world fantasy with revolutionaries! And coffeehouses for the revolutionaries to sit and argue in! And weird religious schisms! It took a while for this one to kick in for me; the beginning was engaging, but there was a moderate stretch where the tone was no longer enough to carry the whole thing, and the plot hadn’t actually founds its feet yet. It eventually picked up, though.

The Apocalypse Codex, Charles Stross.

In which Our Hero and His Bureaucratic Organization tackle an American evangelical preacher who’s actually serving the cause of nameless monstrosities from beyond reality, rather than Jesus Christ. I found myself very much wanting a book about Persephone Hazard and Johnny McTavish. It probably won’t ever happen — among other things, they’re much more conventionally James Bond in tone than the Laundry Files are intended to be — but I liked their dynamic, and they both have intriguing backstories.

The Winner’s Curse, Marie Rutkoski.

Secondary-world YA fantasy, about a sort of Roman-style empire occupying a nearby land, and the efforts of the conquered people to rebel. The two pov characters here are on opposite sides of that schism, and I have no idea whether Rutkoski intends them to get a HEA eventually, but if she does, she’s constructed an impressively large mountain for herself to climb, because wow. Yeah. There are certain kinds of obstacles you can’t just waltz past.

The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus, trans. David Lewis.

I didn’t actually finish this, but I got far enough and spent enough hours reading it that I’m going to count it, okay? This is the saint’s own autobiography, written at the behest of higher-ups in the Church, with digressions into mystical theology, and basically I don’t recommend it unless you’re writing a short story about that kind of thing. Which I was. But now the story has been sold, so I’m done reading this.

Yendi, Steven Brust.

Takes place before Jhereg, and involves, among other things, how Vlad met Cawti. I’m interested in more about the whole backstory that gets touched on here, with the politics that preceded the Interregnum and the characters caught up in that knot of stuff; I’m guessing that’s a plot that will get developed more during later books.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman.

Continuing my effort to read all the other WFA-nominated novels.

This one struck me as remarkably Diana Wynne Jones-ish. She would have written a different book off the idea, I think, but Ursula Monkton and the whole mood surrounding her reminded of Monigan in The Time of the Ghost. I liked the Hempstocks a great deal, and the matter-of-fact approach to their numinous qualities.

Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village, Elizabeth Warnock Fernea.

This kind of thing makes for fascinating reading if you’re me, because it’s written by the wife of an anthropologist, who is not, herself, an anthropologist — which means it includes a lot of tasty ethnographic detail but pretty much none of the more rarified analysis an academic work would get into. The gist is that her husband was conducting fieldwork for his dissertation in a rural Iraqi village in the ’50s, and she went to live with him. For two years. Immediately after their wedding.

Apart from marveling at the fact that their marriage survived that kind of strain right out of the gate, I enjoyed the personalized nature of this book. It also raised a lot of questions, though, that Fernea either didn’t see or didn’t choose to discuss: for example, the friendships she formed with the local women. I have no doubt that she genuinely came to like some of them. But in the other direction? Fundamentally, that friendship was built on a lie, because Fernea reflects in several places how many things about herself she hid or suppressed while in that village, which would have caused the local people to look at her with disapproval, even disgust. There’s a memorable incident where some (male) American friends come to visit, and she’s looking forward to hanging out with them for a relaxing evening . . . until suddenly her Iraqi friends show up at the kitchen door, to “save” her from an evening sitting alone. And she doesn’t — in a sense, can’t — tell them that she doesn’t want them there, that she was planning on sitting with the men, kicking back and having a beer. She doesn’t tell anybody that yes, she and her husband go dancing in public places when they’re at home; she doesn’t even speak up when someone assumes that any woman who does that is clearly a prostitute. So there’s a lot of ethical issues bound up in the whole thing, and it makes for thinky thoughts.

The Land Across, Gene Wolfe.

Another WFA nominee.

“Ruritanian” is the best descriptor for this one, but kind of in the opposite direction I usually mean that: instead of taking place in a setting with no magic (a la Lloyd Alexander’s Westmark books), it takes place in an imaginary Eastern European country, where there definitely is magic. The protagonist decides to go there to write a travel book, and runs afoul of border guards, local bureaucracy, animated severed hands — you know, the usual.

Random observation: Wolfe does an excellent job of depicting what it sounds like when someone isn’t fluent in a language, without resorting to eye dialect. He’s got odd circumlocutions, the definite article where it doesn’t belong, and verb tenses all over the place — in other words, very much the kind of thing that comes out of my mouth when I try to speak Japanese or whatever. It’s a minor thing, but quite pleasing to see it done well.

Teckla, Steven Brust.

I see why the opening note to the omnibus I was reading these things recommends not starting the series with Teckla. This is the one where Vlad Grows a Conscience, or maybe it would be better to say starts being called out on lack of same by the people around him. It goes some way toward mitigating one of the things that bothered me about Jhereg, which was the sort of standard-fantasy attitude toward having an assassin as your main character. It also digs into the politics of Easterners/humans vs. Dragaerans, which I would like to see more of. I wanted to hit both Vlad and Cawti with the Common Sense bat, but they mostly figured out by the end that they were being idiots, so that’s good.

Deathless, Catherynne M. Valente.

I was engaged with this from the beginning, with the lovely fairy-tale rendition of how Marya Morevna’s sisters were married, but really, she had me at the Stalinist house elves. This is a retelling of “The Death of Koschei the Deathless” during revolutionary Russian history, and the komityet of domovoi adapting to and embracing the new communist future was just fabulous. I feel like toward the end of the book it went around a symbolic curve I didn’t quite follow, so the conclusion wasn’t quite as compelling as what had gone before — but it wasn’t bad, and the rest of the book is absolutely worth it.

Voyage of the Basilisk, Marie Brennan. Page proofs don’t count.

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A Year in Pictures – Bird on a Porch

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I made an undignifed spectacle of myself the evening of my mother’s birthday dinner, borrowing my father’s camera and crawling around on the porch with my butt in the air to get this photo of a bird hanging out underneath the railing. Fortunately, both my parents do enough photography that they understood.

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It’s been ten years! Let’s celebrate.

It’s been ten years since my first short story was published. If Amazon is to be believed, Summoned to Destiny, the anthology containing “White Shadow”, came out on September 1st, 2004. Which, as it so happens, is my birthday.

They say it takes ten years to get good at something, don’t they? That’s one of the random metrics, anyway. Ten years from my first published story to a World Fantasy nomination; not bad. Of course, I was writing long before “White Shadow” came out. I got what I consider to be my first mature novel ideas when I was seventeen — ideas that ultimately became Lies and Prophecy and Doppelganger — and ten years later I was writing Midnight Never Come, which I view as one of the benchmarks of me leveling up as an author. I have no idea what I’ll be writing in 2017, since I’ll draft the last of the Memoirs next year, and (probably) The Changing Sea the year after that. But I bet it’ll be fun.

Anyway! Long-time readers of this blog may recall I have a tradition — not observed every year, but going on more years than not for the last decade and more — of a “birthday egotism” post. Back in 2003, I was having kind of a blah time of it on my birthday, and decided to counteract that with a post wherein I listed awesome things about myself, with no disclaimers, caveats, or moderating language allowed. The idea is that, like many people, I am good at downplaying my own achievements, and it’s valuable to have one day where I get to just bask in the happy — especially because I can go back and look at it later, when I need a pick-me-up. So behind the cut you will find a listing of what I’ve done that I’m proud of since 2012 (that being the last time I made a birthday egotism post). It begins with the traditional phrasing:

I’m thirty-four today. What have I got to show for it?

I have a World Fantasy Award nomination, is what.

Seriously, that has to go at the top of the list. It really did blindside me, and I still stop to croggle at it occasionally. A Natural History of Dragons is on a list that says “Best Novel” and includes Neil Gaiman, Gene Wolfe, Richard Bowes, Helene Wecker, and Sofia Samatar. How. freaking. awesome. is. that.

I’ve written two novels, six short stories, and a work of nonfiction (Writing Fight Scenes). I’ve sold five short stories, two of them on their first trip out of the gate, one of which was straight-up solicited by the editor — as in, I got an email saying “I’m doing an anthology and would like you to write something for it.” I’ve sold a novelette, which also marks my first success at breaking into Tor.com. I’ve seen three novels, one novella, two novelettes, and four short stories appear in the world — those metrics don’t always line up — plus two podcasts of my work. I’ve sold three novels, when I was little more than one book into my previous three-book contract; that, my chickadees, is what job security looks like for a novelist. My agent has also successfully sold UK rights, audio rights, various foreign rights. I’ve dipped my toes into the wild world of ebook publishing. I’ve run a successful Kickstarter campaign, raising more than 200% of my original goal, for a book I’ve wanted to write for more than ten years now.

I’ve also written twenty-four pieces of fanfic, almost all of them for exchanges, and never gotten less than a very pleased comment from the recipient. There’s a special delight to knowing I made one specific person happy, by writing them the story they wanted to read.

I’ve taught at TIP — Duke University’s Talent Identification Program. This is kind of huge for me, because I was a TIPster for four years in junior high and high school, and it meant I got to give back to the community that gave me so much. I spent three very intensive weeks teaching science fiction and fantasy writing to a group of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, all of whom had listed my course as their first choice out of all the summer-program options. It’s impossible for me to judge exactly what the long-term effect of that will be, but those sixteen kids spent the entire last hour of the course making teary farewell speeches to one another about how phenomenal the experience was; as metrics of success go, that one’s pretty good. (And, not that I can really take credit for this, but I found out two students who met in my SF/F course at IU have gotten married. And they’re still writing!)

I’ve become shodan-ho, a “probationary black belt,” in karate, and a green-and-white belt in kobudo. I’ve traveled to Okinawa for a week-long seminar in karate and kobudo, practicing the art with people from Germany, Spain, and Denmark. I’ve gone to England and France with my husband, introducing him to London, and seeing Oxford, Brighton, and Paris for the first time. I’ve gone to Monterey and Sausalito, and around the San Francisco Bay on a catamaran. I’ve gone to Poland. I used to list the cons I’d been to as part of these posts, the panels I’d participated in, but at this point there are so many I can’t actually remember them all. I do remember, though, that I’ve been on my first book tour (for A Natural History of Dragons) and my first tour with another author (with Mary Robinette Kowal, for The Tropic of Serpents and her Valour and Vanity).

I’ve become a better photographer! My father’s lessons a while back have paid off, and I’ve spent much of the last two years editing my photos in Lightroom, making it through all the digital ones and, as of typing this post, all but 350 or so of the scanned prints. I’ve been doing the Year in Pictures series of posts, which have gotten a lot of good feedback, and I’m even considering entering the county fair photography contest next year.

I’ve started playing piano again, after years away from it. I’ve started swimming again, ditto, and even joined a gym. (I’ve survived a third ankle surgery. That’s an achievement, dammit.) I’ve run a tabletop game in the Dragon Age setting and started another one in Legend of the Five Rings; I’ve become a freelancer for AEG, the company that produces L5R, and have a folder in my account on their forum for the private messages I’ve received thanking me for my contributions to the community there. I’ve made soundtracks, for books and for games alike. I’ve learned things about Africa and Polynesia and the Proto-Indo-European language, all in the name of work.

I’ve probably forgotten stuff. And that’s an achievement in its own way, because it means there has been enough good in the last two years that I can’t even remember it all!

And, because it’s the ten-year anniversary of my first published story, I want to back up and take another tally, this one going all the way back to the beginning of my experiences as a writer. I have a place where I list all the fiction I’ve completed, and I want to see what it adds up to:

Written
four skit scripts
three puzzle game stories
five poems
one short nonfiction book
twenty-seven flash pieces
one hundred and four short stories
six novelettes
three novellas
fifteen novels

That’s everything, or at least as close to everything as my records can get it: published, sold, unsold, trunked, unsubmitted, fanfic, OM skits, the mystery story I wrote when I was nine. It isn’t actually everything, because I’ve probably forgotten stuff, and I know for certain that it doesn’t include any of the fiction I’ve written for RPG characters, which has added up to rather a lot over the years. But it’s the most complete count I have. A more discriminating list:

Published or completed and forthcoming
one short nonfiction book
seventeen flash pieces
thirty-eight short stories
four novelettes
two novellas
ten novels

Not bad. Not bad at all.

Happy my birthday to all of you, and I hope you have a splendid day!

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A Year in Pictures – London Wall

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For my birthday, I give you: one of my two favorite spots in London. (The other is the front steps of St. Paul’s, right by my hostel; I ate many a dinner sitting there and watching the sun set down Ludgate Hill.) The garden you see here belongs to the Salters’ Company, but on the far side there’s a little fragment of park beneath this, one of the largest remaining fragments of the Roman and medieval London Wall. You can see its patchwork nature and the toll taken by the passing centuries, but it’s a nice little relic of the City’s past.

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I haven’t done a meme in a while

You can tell a lot about a person from their music. Hit shuffle on your iPod, MP3 Player, etc. and put the first 10 songs! One rule, no skipping!

(I’m leaving out the part where I’m supposed to tag ten more people to do this.)

I guess I’ll go with the playlist I’ve been slowly assembling for Chains and Memory. This isn’t the soundtrack; it’s just the music I’ll be going through when I pick stuff for the soundtrack. As such, it skews toward techno, rock, and more modern-sounding scores (whereas the playlists for the Memoirs, to choose a contrasting example, avoid those exact things).

1. “The Magic Wedding,” Cirque du Soleil, CRISS ANGEL Believe

2. “The X-Jet,” Michael Kamen, X-Men

3. “Mater Gloria,” Lesiem, Mystic Spirit Voices

4. “. . . He’s been arrested for espionage,” Harry Gregson-Williams, Spy Game

5. “Written in the Stars,” Ramin Djawadi, Clash of the Titans

6. “CWN Annwn,” Glenn Danzig, Black Aria

7. “Amnesia,” Dead Can Dance, Anastasis

8. “No More Sorrow,” Linkin Park, Minutes to Midnight

9. “Creeping Death,” Apocalyptica, Plays Metallica by Four Cellos

10. “There’s Only Me (Instrumental)”, Rob Dougan, Furious Angels

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A Year in Pictures – Ceiling Vortex

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I have a Thing for ceilings.

You haven’t seen too many images of them in this series because a lot of them don’t come out very well, or when you get down to it the ceiling in question is simply not that interesting to anybody who doesn’t have a fixation. But this ceiling? HOLY MOTHER OF GOD. It is possibly the most awesome ceiling I have ever seen. It belongs to a small pavilion in Fukushu-en, a Chinese-styled garden in Okinawa, and it is just . . . phenomenal.

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A Year in Pictures – Island and Tree

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I believe this was the last photo I took on our recent trip to Hawaii, a split second before my camera’s battery died. Memory tells me there’s some local folklore about that tiny island (which lies off the coast of Oahu); it does not oblige me by recalling what the folklore was. I did like the framing of this shot, though.

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A Year in Pictures – Pediment in Pieces

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The Roman museum in Bath had a really cool way of presenting the fragments of this pediment: not only did they hang them up on the wall in their original configuration, but they had a light fading in and out to show you what the rest of it looked like. I stood there FOREVER to get a shot that was steady, timed right, and devoid of other people’s heads wandering through . . . .

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A Year in Pictures – Blue Mosque

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The Blue Mosque — or more properly, the Sultan Ahmed Mosque — in Istanbul is a remarkable sight. I really wish I’d had more time to actually appreciate the sight of it; sadly, we were with a tour group that pretty much had to rush through everything (in part because of a woman who seemed to have overlooked the fact that the tour involved, y’know, walking, and complained and dragged her feet the whole way through).

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Oh there was joy in Wapping when the news flew through the land

As of a few hours ago, I am officially Free of the Boot.

The boot is dead; long live th — wait, no, it can die in a fire.

I’ve graduated to a mere brace: a complex arrangement of laces and straps and velcro designed to make sure I don’t re-injure myself while I get my strength and mobility back. I suspect, though I can’t be sure, that I’m already off to a better start than I was last time, owing to all the PT I did beforehand. Stepping on my unbooted left foot is still mildly scary (and my heel hurts like crazy, it’s so tight), but it doesn’t feel as pathetically weak as I think the right one did post-boot.

Either way, I’m not going to waste any time. My first PT appointment is tomorrow morning! At this point I could probably do the relevant exercises in my sleep, but it’s good to have someone helping me pace myself, plus they have nice things like the electical stimulation machine that will speed my recovery along.

In the meanwhile, I’ll be over here curling my toes and rubbing my heel and generally rejoicing in the fact that I am free, free, FREE.

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