Marie Brennan's Blog, page 156

A Year in Pictures – Krakow Town Hall Tower

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The rest of the building this used to be attached to is gone now, but the old Town Hall Tower still stands in the central square of Kraków. The patchwork effect of the repairs on its sides is inadvertent, I think, but it lends the place a certain aged charm.

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Meet the Rewards: Limited Edition Miniscript

Of all the rewards I’m offering on the Chains and Memory Kickstarter, I think this one is the most special to me.

Changeling: The Dreaming has a concept it calls “dross”: objects invested with so much emotional significance that they actually contain energy of the sort changelings use to power their magic. They literally embody somebody’s dreams. Sometimes a piece of dross is famous or valuable — e.g. Babe Ruth’s bat — but they can just as easily be personal, like your beloved teddy bear from childhood.

That miniscript? Is dross. Back in the fall of 1999, when I had finished the first draft of the novel eventually known as Lies and Prophecy, I knew I needed to edit it. Since I was going on a weekend trip to a football game with the Harvard Band, the bus ride seemed like a good time to read through the book and mark it up — but for that, it needed to be portable. And, well, I hadn’t told anybody other than my then-boyfriend (now husband) that I’d finished a novel, and I didn’t want anybody saying “wow, that’s a giant stack of paper you’ve got there; what did you do, write a novel?” So I invented the miniscript: eight-point font, half-inch margins, single-spaced, full justification, print on both sides of the page, and voila, you’ve got a book on forty pieces of paper.

Which is still, to this day, the way I do my first round of edits. (You can tell me that is a bloody stupid way to print out a manuscript for editing. I will agree with you. And then I will go on printing miniscripts, because that is How I Do Things.)

The miniscript of Lies and Prophecy is quite literally the first time the first draft of the first novel I ever completed existed in print. Its creation is pretty much the moment that Marie Brennan, Fantasy Author stopped being a thing I wanted to be when I grew up, and became what I actually was.

It’s also a record of just how much the book changed over the years — and how much it didn’t. The first draft was flabby as all get-out, and I’ve added all kinds of new layers since then (the Yan Path stuff), fiddled around with secondary characters (Grayson used to be white; Liesel’s friends went through about eight different names apiece), cut out bits of worldbuilding that didn’t really contribute anything to the story. But it’s still the tale of Kim and Julian and the attack on Samhain and it ends pretty much the same way. If somebody ever writes an academic work on Marie Brennan, Fantasy Author, this miniscript will be a goldmine for their attempts to trace my growth as a writer.

And if you want a copy of your very own, you can have one.

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A Year in Pictures – Point Lobos Outcropping

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Point Lobos in Monterey has a tendency to look autumnal regardless of time of year, because of a rust-colored lichen that grows over many things along the coast. The golden stone also looks particularly good in the late afternoon, when the angles of the rock are thrown into high relief.

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Meet the Rewards: Tarot Readings

I meant to post these a while ago, rather than in the last week of the Kickstarter — but hey, better late than never, right? So over the next few days, I’ll be making a few posts to talk about the non-book rewards available for Chains and Memory, and why I chose them.

First up are the tarot readings by my friend Emily Dare. I included these because Kim is a divination major at Welton, and tarot is her preferred tool, so it’s something that’s both very fitting for the story and also kind of unusual. And I asked Emily to participate because pretty much any time* Kim sits down with a tarot deck in this series, that’s Emily’s handiwork you’re seeing: I tell her what I want the reading to convey, and she reverse-engineers that to say what cards Kim should get, what layout she would likely use, etc. For Kim’s big reading in the early part of Lies and Prophecy, that ended up adding quite a lot of depth to the scene, because of Emily’s suggestions for how to complicate the process. And that’s exactly why I look for outside help: I could sit there with the itty-bitty Rider-Waite booklet and try to make something up, but I wouldn’t get the nuances and the neat little details that make it seem more real.

(Which is pretty much a true statement of any instance where I recruit help on a particular topic for a story. It’s always good to ask the people with the hands-on experience; they know the things you wouldn’t even think to ask.)

So that’s it for the first of the special rewards. I’ll be back later to talk about the miniscript, Tuckerization, and the t-shirts. Stay tuned!

*The exception being the Tower scene in Lies and Prophecy. I made up that particular reading all on my own.

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Shield and Crocus

I always love it when my friends’ books come out, because: dude! Book! By a friend of mine! That’s awesome!

But it gains extra awesomeness points when it’s a book like Mike Underwood’s Shield and Crocus, because I’ve been with this one very nearly from its earliest days: I read what I think was the first draft, years ago, back when Mike was saying “what happens if I take this Clarion story of mine and try to make it a bit biggOH HOLY GOD IT’S GROWN TENTACLES AND IT’S TRYING TO EEEEEEEEEAT MEEEEEEEEEEEE,” and I’ve offered various bits of feedback and assistance since then. I’m bouncing-in-my-seat happy that it’s made the journey from his brain to the shelves. My blurb for it compared it to Perdido Street Station and David Edison’s The Waking Engine, because it has that kind of setting, sort of New Weird-ish (but less heavy on the grotesquerie than some). If that sounds like your cup of tea, you should check it out.

Because today, my friends, it is out in the world. There’s a preview on Tor.com, or you can buy it from Powells or Books-a-Million or IndieBound or Barnes and Noble, as well as Amazon (whose imprint 47North are the publishers). You can also get it in audio form.

Congratulations and happy bookday to Mike!

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A Year in Pictures – Proof Pistol

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I can’t remember the details for certain, but the Royal Armouries exhibit in the Tower of London has a small collection of weapons that I think were designated “proof” pieces: official examples of standard armaments produced by various craftsmen. This is the grip of a proof pistol, with the red seals marking it as such.

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Countdown to the final week

Eight days left on the Chains and Memory Kickstarter! We’re just $285 from a short story. Less than that, even, if I count the people who have donated via Paypal — which is a thing I should mention here, I suppose. If you cannot or do not wish to contribute via either Amazon or Facebook (and I can totally understand that decision), then I am more than willing to accept donations by other routes, and will include you in the appropriate reward level when I send things out to backers. Ping me here or by email and we can work out the details.

I’ve been working steadily on Chains and Memory for a little while now, so as to be sure I can finish it by October 4th, and it’s proceeding apace. There’s been some two-steps-foward, one-step-back shenanigans as I figure out how to launch the various strands of the plot, but I’m experimenting with Scrivener for this novel, and I think it may assist with tracking that stuff. Regardless, I am definitely on schedule for finishing the draft by the fifteenth anniversary of Lies and Prophecy.

Anyway, we’re headed into the final push. Do spread the word wherever you can, and let’s see if this thing goes to 11!

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A Year in Pictures – Undercroft of Ste. Chapelle

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This is the lower level of Sainte-Chapelle in Paris — the church that’s still (or rather, re-)painted in the style of the medieval period. The effect is really just stunning: the same gothic architecture you see all over western Europe, but picked out in blue and gold and red. As much as I like the plain stone, the original look is really phenomenal to see.

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A Year in Pictures – Relaxing on the Cam

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One of my rare photos in which not only am I okay with having people in it, that’s the reason I took the shot. During my research trip for A Star Shall Fall I went up to Cambridge, and (of course) went punting while I was there. This fellow was sacked out in his punt taking a break, and something about the composition of the long boat and the tall brick wall and the pole and his slouched posture just really pleased me.

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A Year in Pictures – Half Dome

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The famous Half Dome Rock in Yosemite. It’s one of those natural features that is just so bloody photogenic, you have to work really hard to not have it come out looking awesome.

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