Marie Brennan's Blog, page 150

A Year in Pictures – Locks on the Bridge

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The bridges over the Seine have become a site for the “love padlock,” put there by couples who then throw the key into the river. This particular bridge is almost completely covered in them, and some enterprising soul came along and did a bit of graffiti across the locks themselves — making for a nice juxtaposition of medieval and modern.

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A Year in Pictures – Rosebud

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Not to be confused with a sled.

The roses were not yet properly in bloom at Filoli — we were there in tulip season — but this one rosebud had caught a bit of water in its opening petal, which made for a nice little detail shot.

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A Year in Pictures – Vesuvius Through the Temple

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This isn’t the most visually striking photo I’ve ever taken, but I count it among my five-star shots anyway. The mountain you see in the distance is http://journal.swantower.com/Vesuvius, and the foreground is the ruins of the Temple of Apollo in Pompeii. I’ve had a minor obsession with Pompeii since I was ten, so the chance to go there in person was really the opportunity of a lifetime.

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Back on the horse

Got started again on Chains and Memory last night. I wasn’t sure I’d recovered enough brain yet (between jet lag and the anaesthesia, I’ve been half-zombified for days; I spent most of Saturday alternating half-hour naps with an hour or so of wakefulness), but I decided to put my butt in the chair and see what happened. What happened was 1K of words, so I got to pat myself on the back for that and declare that I am officially Back to Work.

Of course, one day of writing does not actually Back to Work make. It’s a nice start, though, and it was actually rather pleasant to feel like I’m starting to recover. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have another 1K to crank out . . .

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A Year in Pictures – Crouching Gargoyle

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My trip to England and France last fall was the Trip of Gargoyles. (I’m only sad that the towers of Notre Dame were closed by a strike while we were in Paris, robbing me of a chance to photograph the gargoyles there.) This one is on the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford, and seems to have something very important to say . . . .

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Books Read, July 2014

Most of these were read on the Okinawa trip.

Jhereg, Steven Brust. I had tried to read this once before, several years ago; did better this time. There’s a noticeable resemblance in the tone of this and Nine Princes in Amber, so I wonder if it’s a thing of the time period — a kind of modern edge to dialogue and narration in a setting that is mostly or entirely secondary-world. I find it somewhat jarring, but not enough so to put me off reading more.

The Duchess War, Courtney Milan. I’ve heard enough about Milan to want to give her books a try, and started with this one on recommendation. It was enjoyable, though not quite as engaging to me as Bourne’s series; I especially liked the way things went with the hero’s mother, including her in-character acknowledgment that she was in a position to play the role of Lady Catherine de Bourgh in their particular story. (It so often seems that characters in historical novels live in worlds where the literature of their periods doesn’t exist.) Also, points for the obstacles between the romantic pair feeling real, rather than contrived: Minnie’s agoraphobia felt overdramatic, but Robert genuinely screws up dealing with her concerns, and has to make up for it later.

Goliath, Scott Westerfeld. Last book of the Leviathan trilogy, an alternate WWI with bioengineering and dieselpunk. I wanted to smack Alek for his whole “destiny” thing, and the perspicacious lorises came verrrry close to being Plot Help Ex Machina, but in general this was a fun conclusion, where the characters had to make some actual choices with actual costs. My main real complaint is that Goliath was too much of a macguffin.

Dust Devil on a Quiet Street, Richard Bowes. When I found out I was up for a Best Novel WFA, I decided I should read the other nominees, and started with this one. As I suspected, it was not really my cup of tea: a semi-fictionalized autobiography, and a story of the sort where most of the fantastical content is on that border where maybe it’s real or maybe it’s symbolic or maybe the characters are just imagining things. I have never been a fan of that mode, and am not likely ever to be. But if you are a fan, your mileage may well differ.

Dragon Age: Asunder, David Gaider. Either Gaider got a ghostwriter to help him out, or he learned MASSIVE amounts from writing The Stolen Throne and The Calling. I picked this one up solely because I know the stuff that happens in it is going to be highly relevant to the third DA game (one of the characters from here will be a companion in Inquisition), and expected to do as I did with the first two, mostly skimming through it for content without really engaging. But from the very first page, this one is obviously different, and better. Worlds better. I won’t say Asunder is brilliant, but I actually enjoyed reading it. I wouldn’t recommend it if you don’t already know and care about the DA setting — among other things, it suffers from the setting’s perennial problem, which is a failure to really balance the mage/templar conflict — but if you’re a fan of the games, it isn’t a bad read.

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A Year in Pictures – Shrine Above the Waves

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Since I have set a new speed record for editing photos from a trip, it seems appropriate to start this week off with an image from my recent week in Okinawa. Naminoue-gu is quite literally the “Shrine Above the Waves” — perched on a cliff overlooking one of the beaches in Naha. As dramatic settings for a religious structure go, this may be the best one I’ve ever seen.

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Okinawa!

This is less coherent than I wanted it to be; I blame the narcotics.

I went to Okinawa! As many of you know. The main purpose was a karate and kobudo (weapons) seminar; there was also time built in for sightseeing, which is relevant because Shihan’s planning to do another seminar in three years, but that one is intended to be all training, all the time. It is also possibly intended for a different time of year, because yare yare, the heat and humidity. I said I was going to be training in an un-airconditioned budokan; this turned out to be mostly not true, as Shihan got them to turn on the A/C for most of our scheduled training. But we also had one unscheduled afternoon block — about which more later — with nothing but a couple of very inadequate fans, so I got to experience something more like the full misery for at least a couple of hours. More than enough to be grateful it wasn’t the entire time, I can tell you that! (Though even with A/C, it was quite warm. Japan, unlike my home state of Texas, does not feel obliged to chill every indoor space to 55 degrees Fahrenheit.)

The prefectural budokan is an odd place: concrete walls studded with random bits of stained glass, highly functional but with lovely hardwood floors in most places, and then the exterior looks a bit like a stylized samurai helm. Our first day we shared the place with a swarm of children there for a tournament; we also saw a number of kendo groups come and go. It clearly gets plenty of use, and has three separate training halls as well as a weight room and a konbini and so forth. As for the training, it was both very intense and not. Each block was two hours long, usually without a break, and sometimes I was doing things like learning kusanku that drove me into the ground. But periodically Shihan would stop everybody to expound upon some point of technique or history, so you did at least get breathers. I suspect the experience was a bit more valuable for the people from Germany and Denmark and Spain and so on; people from our dojo get advice from Shihan on a regular basis, and are taught by people who are still being trained by him directly. The other RBKD dojo are a bit further removed, and so get that kind of guidance much more rarely. But it was very nifty to see them all, and to realize we truly are part of an international organization for the promotion of shorin-ryu karate.

Where sightseeing is concerned . . . I realized a while ago that I kept saying I was going to Okinawa, not to Japan. The difference matters. Those islands were only added to Japan in the relatively recent past, and culturally speaking, they have a lot of influences from Taiwan and China that make them distinct from the home islands (not to mention, of course, the indigenous Ryukyuan culture). We went to Shuri-jou, to Naminoue-guu, to Fukushuu-en, to the Churaumi Aquarium to see the whale sharks. We went to a small island called Kourijima, and that wound up not really working at all: I don’t know what happened, but we had nowhere near enough space for everybody who came. Shihan told us monks sleep on only one tatami mat; well, the American contingent had fourteen people in an eight-mat room, with no futon or even pillows. (Half the group ended up sleeping on the wooden porch; one of them got bit badly enough that he ended up going to the hospital to have the water blisters lanced.) So Kourijima got cut a day short, which is why we were back in Naha for an extra afternoon of training. But we were there long enough to have “beach training,” which Shihan ought to have called “ocean training” instead: he literally marched us into the water and made us do kata there. (It turns out that you can do the upper-body half of naifanchi shodan quite well while treading water.)

As instructed by my sister, I ate spam fried rice. I ate chanpuru (though not with goya). I ate Okinawan soba; I could not have avoided it if I tried, because it got served as a side dish with practically every meal I ordered. We got to see traditional Okinawan dancing at the welcome dinner; Shihan’s wife Tomoko-sensei is to Okinawan dancing what he is to karate, basically, though health issues mean she doesn’t practice regularly anymore. We bought CDs of traditional Okinawan music and also heard the same group sing “Let It Go” in Japanese. All in all, an excellent trip . . . except for the Kourijima part.

And oh yes, there are pictures. Expect to see many of those in the days to come.

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A Year in Pictures – Vincennes at Dusk

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I previously posted a smaller shot from this same day, but I’m equally fond of its wider cousin, especially since I caught the French flag partly extended.

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The Rocky Road to Recovery

So that twitch I mentioned yesterday? It recurred this morning, badly enough to catapult me straight out of sleep into grabbing my leg and yelping. Which worried me enough that I called the doctor and he had me come in for a quick examination at the end of their lunch hour.

Turns out all is well; I have been reassured that this is neither a result of something going wrong, nor likely to be a cause of it. The surgeon’s assistant theorizes that they aggravated some of the nerves in that area during the operation, which is why I’m in more pain generally than I was last time, and hurting even more when I twitch. The surgeon himself also mentioned that there’s been a new development in this procedure since I had it done on my right ankle: a teeny-tiny anchor he drilled into the bone to help secure the ligament. Which goes a long way toward explaining why the aftermath of this particular surgery is feeling more like my first one (when I was nine and they drilled into the bone) than my second (when I was twenty-nine and they didn’t).

Upshot is that I have a prescription for a muscle relaxant to take at night, and I’m no longer expecting to go off the Vicodin and onto Advil in the next day or two, like I did last time. In theory I was hoping to get back to work tomorrow, but we’ll see how much of my brain survives the barrage of drugs that “may make you drowsy” (read: will put me down for the count). Oh yeah, and I’m still getting over the jet lag. My plan of sleeping these issues off simultaneously is still going according to plan, at least.

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