Marie Brennan's Blog, page 155
June 19, 2014
A Year in Pictures – (Fake) Rosetta Stone
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One room at the British Museum is still maintained in the museum’s original style. In that room there stands a replica of the Rosetta Stone, this one not behind glass or mobbed by a hundred visitors. Which allowed me to get up close and personal to obtain a much more artistic photo than would ever be possible with the actual stone . . . .
Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.
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June 18, 2014
A Year in Pictures – Ephesian Sculptor
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This fellow was working at the ruins of Ephesus in Turkey. He’s the only re-enactor I remember seeing there, but I wish there had been more; he fit in so well, and I honestly think having people around helps bring historical sites to life (rather literally).
Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.
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June 17, 2014
The Final Countdown
The number currently stands at $4,377*, and given that when I launched this I was moderately terrified I wouldn’t reach the $2000 goal, that’s pretty excellent. 
It’s been exciting to watch the pace pick up, too: there have been more pledges in the last three or four days than any time since the first couple of days. Which is how these things usually go, so it doesn’t come as a surprise — but knowing it’s pretty common doesn’t make it any less exciting.
Anyway, if you want to get in on Chains and Memory, now’s your last chance! All the rewards are still available (though there are only two Tuckerizations left). You’ve got 66 minutes left, as of me hitting “post” . . . .
*I love it when I have to revise that number while drafting a post. ^_^
Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.
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A Year in Pictures – Face on a Wall
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Ordinarily you should frame a photo like this such that the face is looking toward the center of the image, rather than off to the side. In this case I couldn’t: the sculpture was hanging on a wall in a room I wasn’t allowed to enter, and immediately to the left was a window that would have blown out the light levels and made for a bad composition anyway. So I went with what I could get, which is the face looking out of the frame — and I actually kind of like the unsettling effect it produces.
Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.
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June 16, 2014
All Around the Internet
I’ve done a number of interviews and guest posts lately, so here’s a quick link dump:
Five Underused Mythological Creatures at Fantasy Cafe, in which I talk about weird things in bestiaries that show up all too rarely in novels.
Interview at Fantasy’s Ink; they ask me about my favorite characters and what I consider to be the most important element in a book.
Another interview, this one with Mike Underwood, who leverages the fact that we’ve known each other for more than ten years to ask me a lot of fabulous questions about gaming, Driftwood, and what martial arts master I would train with if I could.
“Time, Writing, and Tricks of the Trade”, a guest post at Bookworm Blues where I talk about the challenges of writing a sequel fifteen years after the first book.
“Kick(start)ing Myself into Scrivener”, a post at Book View Cafe on my first-ever attempt to write a novel in a program other than Wordperfect.
And finally, one that isn’t mine, but mentions me and makes for entertaining reading: Science in Fantasy Novels is More Accurate Than in Science Fiction.
Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.
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One day to go . . . .
A bit more than twenty-four hours left on the Chains and Memory Kickstarter. Over the weekend, we went from “might make it to the third stretch goal; might not” to “that’s the third stretch goal sorted; I wonder if we’ll hit the fourth?” Which is, in a word, awesome.
This means that everybody who backs the project will be receiving not two but five rewards: a thank-you in Chains and Memory, “Welcome to Welton” in ebook format, a short story in the Wilders setting, and the soundtracks for both novels. A couple hundred dollars more, and everybody’s copies of Lies and Prophecy will be illustrated to boot!
I’m going to try not to haunt my email today. Your mission, dear readers, should you choose to accept it, is to make that nigh-impossible for me: I still have Kickstarter configured to notify me every time there’s a new pledge, and if they come in at a good clip OH HEY LOOK THERE’S ANOTHER ONE no seriously, I just got another backer while I was typing this — what was I saying? Oh yeah. I would like to be driven to distraction by a steady flow of new pledges. 
Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LJ, Myspace, USEnet, carrier pigeon . . . whatever method you prefer, signal-boosting is a wonderful thing. It’s the last push, and I’m dying to see how far it can go.
Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.
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A Year in Pictures – Filoli Foxglove
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It’s very easy to take a good photo of a flower: they’re pretty, so pictures of them are pretty. Getting a great photo of a flower is much more difficult. I don’t claim to have succeeded here, but at least this one is not interchangeable with every other flower photo I’ve ever taken, which is more than you can say for some of the others in my library.
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June 13, 2014
A Year in Pictures – Belur Ceiling
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I mentioned before that Indian temples of the Hoysala period are carved within an inch of their lives. The ceilings are not exempted from this attention.
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June 12, 2014
Moving the goalposts
Physical therapists cheat. 
They set the rules of the game, but just when you get to the point where you feel like you’ve got the upper hand, they change the rules out from under you.
Given that my ankle surgery won’t be happening until the end of July, I’m in PT right now to strengthen the joint and make sure the problem doesn’t get worse between now and then. Which means a whole lot of exercises, one of which has escalated in the following manner:
Balance on one foot? Okay, I can do that.
Balance on one foot on a squishy foam pad? . . . okay.
Balance on one foot on a squishy foam pad with your leg behind you to screw with your balance!
Balance on one foot on a squishy foam pad with your leg behind you and a heavy rubber ball in your hands!
Balance on one foot on a squishy foam pad with your leg behind you while waving the heavy rubber ball in various directions!
My PT seriously threatened to make me play catch while balancing on one foot on the squishy foam pad. >_<
I mean, okay, yes. I have gotten stronger. And my balance is vastly better than it was, say, six months ago. But there’s a point at which you think, can’t I just enjoy my accomplishments for a little bit? Do you have to pull the rug out from under me every time I start to get my footing on it?
Yes, they do.
Doesn’t mean I don’t want to give them the stink-eye for it, though.
Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.
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Meet the Rewards: Tuckerization and T-shirts
Combining these two into one because there’s less of a story behind them than the other two.
Tuckerization is the process of either naming a character after a real person or putting that person into the story as a character (those being not quite the same thing). It is, as you might expect, named after a real person.
In my case, what I’m offering is the use of someone’s name for a character. I’m actually not the sort of writer who bases characters on specific people — at least not mostly. There may end up being a cat in Chains and Memory who is both named and modeled after a friend’s cat, for no better reason than because I was thinking a lot about the book when I knew that friend in grad school, and Hitomi wandered randomly into Kim’s life in my imagination. (Cats, man. Not only do they go where they aren’t supposed you, you can’t even confine them to a single world.) I can’t be specific about which characters yet because I need to see what people end up playing a role in Chains and Memory, but there are a lot of Washington, D.C. types as well as wilders who will be passing through the story, so those are the most likely groups. I’ll be working with anybody who chooses Tuckerization to see what role they prefer out of the available options.
As for t-shirts, there are two options, basically one for each book. The Welton University t-shirt is for Lies and Prophecy, and features a six-pointed star, which is one of the frequent shapes given to the Seal of Solomon in Western occultism. The other is the seal of the Bureau for Special Psychic Affairs, a federal organization that features more heavily in Chains and Memory. The three-pointed star indicates the traditional division of the “psychic sciences” into the telepathic disciplines, telekinetic disciplines, and ceremonial magic. The laurel branches indicate the BSPA copying the look of the FBI seal to give themselves an aura of legitimacy, what with being a relatively new bureau and all. And the motto . . . ordinarily it would be in Latin or English, but I’d established that Irish Gaelic was (for reasons of folklore and history) adopted as kind of the banner language of magic after First Manifestation, and so I decided to go with that here, too. It says “power, wisdom, restraint” — and yes, I know srian means “restraint” in the sense of a bridle, but that’s deliberate. These are the people who control wilders. And the book is, after all, called Chains and Memory. If the last word of the motto strikes you as a little ominous, you aren’t wrong.
That’s it for the “special” rewards, i.e. the things that aren’t books or progress reports or what have you. Plus there’s the stuff from the stretch goals, of course. Just a few days to go, and then the rewards can start rolling out!
Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.
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