Marie Brennan's Blog, page 160

A Year in Pictures – Halebidu Frieze

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Indian temples are very frustrating things to photograph, because the decoration on them isn’t done in discrete blocks: it’s an ongoing mass of things, friezes like this one banding the exterior, sculptures rubbing shoulders with elaborately carved columns — basically no square foot left plain. I suspect this frieze depicts military glory, since there appears to be someone crouching beneath the hooves of that horse, but as you can see the top edge has rather been damaged.

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Tour report, and one day to go!

Design Your Own Dragon ends tomorrow night! Get your entry in while the getting is good . . . .

Me, I’m home from tour. The fact that I am exceedingly glad to be back has more to do with the wear and tear of shifting from hotel to airport to cab to store than to do with the tour events themselves, which were splendid. Mary Robinette Kowal and I drew some pretty good crowds together, and it turns out we make for compatible traveling companions — which was by no means a guarantee! We’d met a couple of times before, at conventions and such, and of course our books make a good pairing with each other . . . but that didn’t necessarily mean we’d get along on the road. Despite Mary having her own hashtag for travel woes, I quite liked traveling with her. It turns out we see eye-to-eye on a number of fronts, ranging from fiction to how early we should get to the airport, and that’s valuable when you’re spending a week and a half together and suffering the aforementioned wear and tear.

Plus! There were costumes! And dragon bones!

I foolishly did not get anyone to take photos on my own phone, so rather than stealing other people’s pictures, I will link you to them. This report at A Truant Disposition shows the whole thing pretty well, from my dress and Mary’s to our respective song-and-dance bit (a mini puppet show on her part, a mini naturalist lecture on mine). Geeky Library has some more, and I quite like this photo from @ghostwritingcow on Twitter. The “dragon bones” are the thing I alluded to before the tour: Mary suggested I obtain replica dinosaur fossils from Skulls Unlimited, and use them as dragon substitutes. For the curious, the skull and the smaller claw are from a velociraptor, while the tooth is from a T-Rex and the larger claw is from a megaraptor. (The tiny skull, which I don’t think got photographed, is actually supposed to be a “dragon skull;” Mary picked it up at a natural history museum in Utah.)

Touring is a lot more fun in company, I have to say. Not only does it jazz up the event itself, by giving you somebody to riff off of, it does a lot to mitigate the “oh god I’m in another airport” drudgery of the travel itself. So props to Tor for putting us together, and I hope for a chance to do something like this again in the future.

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A Year in Pictures – Polish Church Interior

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I don’t actually know the name of this church, which is a pity. It’s somewhere in Zakopane, or at least that general region; we weren’t able to go in, so this photo is taken through a window in the door. The woodworking is absolutely gorgeous, and I love the warmth it creates.

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A Year in Pictures – Sainte-Chapelle Relief

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I rather suspect this relief decoration is new, because it is not nearly weathered enough to have been there for more than maybe a hundred years or so. But I imagine it’s intended to be the type of carving that might have adorned the place in the past; given how much care they’re taking with restoring the building, it may even be a direct reproduction. It was next to the entrance, and I thought it was quite cool; then I walked inside and discovered it was only a tiny, greyscale taste of the glory within.

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Four more days to Design Your Own Dragon

We’re headed into the final stretch for Design Your Own Dragon, and I just wanted to clarify something one interested party asked about a few days ago:

You do get to keep the rights to your entry.

Which is to say, if I pick your dragon as a winner, I will have the non-exclusive right to use the concept (with modifications, if necessary) in the Memoirs of Lady Trent, in prose and/or visual form — but you retain all other rights. If you want to write own stories or make your own art about your dragon concept, you are entirely free to do so. You are not signing over your idea to me wholesale.

This was a question for at least one interested party, which means it may very well be a question for others as well. So if that was giving you any hesitation in entering, hopefully this clears things up in an acceptable fashion.

You’ve got until 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on May 15th. I’ve got a lot of fun entries already, but there’s always room for more!

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A Year in Pictures – Netsuke

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The Victoria and Albert Museum has a splendid collection of Japanese netsuke: little carved figures used to secure boxes or other such things to the obi. I have a number of shots of them, but this one is my favorite, because of the way he towers over the others.

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A Year in Pictures – River Bones

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Apparently you can take the archaeologist out of the field, but you can’t take the field out of the archaeologist. While wandering down to the short of the Thames near Tower Bridge, I discovered several bones amidst the gravel: a vertebra or two, bits of some long bones I couldn’t ID. I have no idea what they were from, though (because I am the sort of person I am) it did cross my mind that they were of vaguely the right size to be human. Anyway, although I rarely “stage” my shots, in this case I piled the bones up in an artistic manner and took this photo. Like you do.

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One more week for dragons! Also, an interview/giveaway.

Interview first: I’m over at Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing, talking about a whole host of stuff, ranging from The Tropic of Serpents to my essay on epic story structure to making up slang to about a dozen other things. Check out the link for a giveaway, too — either a copy of The Tropic of Serpents or a set of both books.

As for the contest, this is your one-week reminder; the deadline is coming up on May 15th. If you’d like to see your own dragon concept show up in the Memoirs of Lady Trent — not to mention read Voyage of the Basilisk before it comes out! — check out the guidelines and send in your entry!

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A Year in Pictures – Torii Detail

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I posted a shot of Fushimi Inari before, showing one of the galleries of torii arches. This is a detail shot from another arch further on — a fairly recent addition, judging by the glossiness of the paint. You can see the ends of another behind it, giving you another sense of just how closely packed they can get.

If memory serves, by the way, this shot is also the one that inspired this post while I was in Japan. Being able to control your camera is nice.

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eheheheh

I guess the work I did filing off the footnotes was worth it: “Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics As Employed Against Lycanthropes” is going to be recorded for Pseudopod.

In other news, the tour is going splendidly. I will have a fuller report next Monday or thereabouts, after I’m home.

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