Marie Brennan's Blog, page 159

A Year in Pictures – Twilight Tree

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This is from a recent trip to Point Lobos in Monterey, California. I liked the condition of the light just then — the overcast sky threaded with light, and the remaining sun glittering off the water while the trees and rocks stood in silhouette.

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Okay, so, *that's* going well.

(One thing that isn't going well: my WP installation. I don't know if I'll be able to get it back up before this evening, but for now it's kaput, which means among other things that today's picture post is broken. If you click on the missing image or the link, though, you should be able to see the full-size version on Flickr. In the meanwhile, this is only posting to DW and LJ.)

I'm not sure I have adequate words to express how pleased I am at the progress Chains and Memory has made in its first day. We're coming up on exactly 24 hours since I launched the project, and in that time, it has achieved over 75% of its funding. I think the technical term for that is freaking awesome, yo. Chickens, unhatched, yadda yadda, and we're not actually there yet -- but I think we can agree that's it a rather good start, can't we? </understatement>

It's a good thing that I'm going to Wiscon this year. Tomorrow I will be on planes for many hours, and then I will be surrounded by friends and colleagues and new people to meet, and all together that means I will not be able to haunt my email like a cat at a mousehole for the next few days. (I said on Twitter that I take 2d6 points of SAN loss from Kickstarter emailing me every time somebody backs the project. But hey, if you're going to lose sanity, this is a good way to do it!) If you're going to be at Wiscon yourself, a) do come by and say hello!, and b) my plan is to read from Lies and Prophecy at 2:30 on Saturday.

I promise not to check my email under the table while the rest of my friends read. :-P

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A Year in Pictures – Rose Window of Notre Dame

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I am stupidly proud of how well this shot came out, given the zoom involved and my lack of tripod; I had to brace against something on the far side of the cathedral to get it steady. This is, of course, one of the rose windows of Notre Dame — the north one, I believe — and yes, it is every bit as stunning as I’d been led to hope.

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A Kickstarter for Chains and Memory

Fourteen and a half years ago, I completed the first draft of what at the time I thought was a stand-alone novel: Lies and Prophecy.

Within a year or two, though, I started getting Ideas. Fragments of ideas, anyway — bits and pieces about what would happen to Kim and Julian after the end of that novel. They piled up, and fed back into later drafts of Lies and Prophecy, until here we are more than a decade later, and those ideas have formed a can-can line and are performing choreographed routines in my head.

So I’ve decided to Kickstart them into reality.

My aim, if I meet my funding goal, is to draft the sequel of Chains and Memory this summer, while I’m doing the prep work for the fourth Memoir. In pursuit of that, I am offering a variety of book packages, plus other rewards like behind-the-scenes reports, t-shirts, tarot readings, and even the chance to appear as a character in the novel. Head on over to Kickstarter to check out the full list; it will be running for the next four weeks.

You can also help me immensely by spreading the word! Whether it’s on a blog, or Twitter, or Facebook, or messages stuffed into bottles and dropped into the sea, any and all signal-boosting would be absolutely wonderful. I’ll be posting more information here over the next few weeks, and if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.

You have no idea how excited I am about this.

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

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A Year in Pictures – Savoy Decoration

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If memory serves (which it may not), this is an old decoration from the Savoy. It’s definitely something near the end of the Museum of London galleries, when you’re up to the twentieth century, and it’s from some famous landmark like the Savoy; if I have it wrong, please do let me know. Anyway, I loved the effect of the light from above on the raised carvings.

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A Year in Pictures – Flowering Tree Branch

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I took this picture during my recent tour — the one bit of sightseeing I managed the whole trip. This is a flowering tree off the southwest corner of the Salt Lake City Temple, and I don’t know what kind of tree it is; people on Twitter suggested a weeping cherry, but all the photos I could find of such trees showed straight trunks and branches, rather than the taffy-twisted effect this tree had. Any identification would be much appreciated!

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Nine Princes Nowhere to Be Found

I am croggled to discover that Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber is apparently not available as an ebook (not commercially, anyway — my library seems to only have it in electronic format). Furthermore, if I wish to purchase the dead tree edition new, my only option seems to be buying an enormous honkin’ omnibus of all ten main novels.

I would welcome evidence that I am wrong about this, likely on account of searching when it is nearly 3 a.m. here and I need sleep. But if it is indeed as it appears: what the heck? Why has the rights-holder not made the book more widely available? This is not some obscure novel nobody’s ever heard of except academics and three Yuletide fans; it’s a reasonably well-known classic. I want to give the rights-holder money, whoever they are. But they are making it annoying to do so. I don’t want a giant omnibus; I want the instant gratification of an ebook, which I can take with me to Wiscon, and then if I like the first one I’ll probably buy it and the rest in paper. I do not want to carry a brick on the plane.

Grrr. Argh.

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hilarity

My most recent gem of WordPress spam:

Write more, thats all I have to say. Literally, it seems

as though you relied on the video to make your point. You obviously know what

youre talking about, why throw away your intelligence on just posting videos to your site when you could be giving us something informative to read?

Indeed. My problem is that I don’t write enough — I’m just throwing my intelligence away.

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A Year in Pictures – Limpets

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One of the effects from me becoming more interested in photography is, I’ve begun to appreciate details. Point Lobos is a very pretty area in Monterey, and I took many scene-sized pictures there . . . but I also found myself pausing to shoot things like this little line of limpets, clinging to a rock on the shore. A few years ago, I suspect I never would have even noticed them, much less taken this picture.

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speaking of Ree . . . .

Possibly the easiest way for me to encapsulate the character I talked about in a previous post is by linking you to this song.

It’s an amazing remix all on its own. I love the way it builds, wave-like: it keeps climbing and then receding, stepping back to a quieter level when you expect it to bust out in full Linkin Park screamo yelling. But more than that, it fit beautifully with Ree at the pivotal moment of her story, the brink of her metamorphosis from the broken, lost thing she had been for eons back to her original self. “I’ve felt this way before” . . . she’d been shattered, and had tried to piece herself back together — thought she had succeeded — but then during the course of the game she was shattered again, falling back to square one, so far from her goal it was almost impossible for her to believe that she was actually closer to it than ever. “Against my will I stand beside my own reflection” . . . she sold half her soul to someone else, not realizing that was what she was doing, and she had to reclaim it. “Without a sense of confidence, I’m convinced that there’s just too much pressure to take” . . . the problem with her Seelie side was that it had too much confidence, without the fatalism of her Unseelie half to temper it, which is how she got broken again, and then the symbolism of the diamond and pressure over time pretty much guaranteed I had to use this song. This was Ree at her lowest point, one step away from victory, and the tension that builds throughout this evokes those days perfectly in my mind. There’s more to it than one song, but I can point to the song and say, this. This is why I can’t forget her story.

When I make soundtracks for characters, or for games I run, or for novels, many of the songs are filler. They go in because I want the whole story in music, and so I pick the best matches I can; in the really good soundtracks, even the filler is pretty solid. But this? This is why I go to the effort. For the one or two or five songs that are the story, the ones that become so linked with the narrative that they end up feeding back into it, and it can be eight years later and hearing them still brings the story to life in my head. This is Galen walking into the chamber below the Monument. This is Dead Rick getting his memories back. Here’s the entire second half of Doppelganger, according to my half-dozing brain when I was in the middle of writing the book; I can quite literally map segments of the novel to the various stages in the music, because my subconscious had decided this was the outline it was writing to. (Much like what happened here, though that was on a smaller scale.)

It’s no accident that I also love film scores. Pairing music with story — turning music into story — is one of my favorite things. Since I’m not a composer, I have to settle for the mix-tape approach. Sometimes it works out very, very well.

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