Marie Brennan's Blog, page 183

The Tropic of Serpents, revealed!

I can't decide whether the people at Tor are mean, or love you very, very much. (Can they be both at once?) You see, The Tropic of Serpents won't be coming out for another eight months . . . but we have cover art now, and they've decided to make it public.



Can I just take a moment to say how pleased I am with myself? Also with Todd Lockwood, of course, who once again has turned in an absolutely gorgeous piece of work, and let's not forget Irene Gallo (the art director at Tor) and everybody else involved in making this happen. But myself, too, because a few months back I was sitting here chewing on concepts and trying to figure out how we could repeat the general look of A Natural History of Dragons without pulling the same anatomical cut-away trick every single time. Then I hit upon the idea of a motion study, and lo: it worked!

You all know what this means, of course. I need an icon! Post your best efforts in the comment thread, and if I pick yours, you can have your choice of either a signed copy of A Natural History of Dragons , or an ARC of the sequel when those become available.

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Books read, June 2013

Did a reasonable amount of reading while I was at TIP -- at least before my brain liquified to the point where I spent most of my evenings watching Doctor Who on my tablet. :-)

The Lightning Thief, Rick Riordan. Made a concerted effort to read some more of the books I thought my students might be familiar with, starting with this one. It was a fun read, and definitely better than the movie. I might try his Egyptian series; I know kurayami_hime really likes that one, and it's ground I've been over fewer times than Greek mythology is.

Feed, M.T. Anderson. SF quasi-dystopia, in that the society it describes sounds absolutely dreadful to me, but isn't actually designed as a "X is forbidden and the government controls Y" kind of setting. I wanted it to do more: the protagonist's interactions with Violet start hinting at a very interesting larger picture, but then it backs away from that in favor of dragging me through the (intentionally) excruciating progress of their relationship. Emotionally intense, but it ended up being too focused on its own navel to really work for me.

The House of the Scorpion, Nancy Farmer. Also an SF dystopia, but not of the standard-issue sort, which makes it much more interesting. Main character is a clone raised for his body parts (to help keep a rich dictator alive), and escapes that horrible place to a neighboring country, which turns out to be horrible in different ways. Enjoyed this one, but genre-wise it's not quite my cup of tea, so I'm not sure if I'll read the sequel or not.

The Tropic of Serpents, Marie Brennan. As usual, my own books don't count. Re-read this preparatory to being sent the copy-edited manuscript, which I'm working through now.

Clockwork Phoenix 4, ed. Mike Allen. Full disclosure: I'm in this one. And it's on sale as of a few days ago. The series continues strongly; there were a couple of stories in here that got too baroque for my taste, but there were also some fantastic pieces. I particularly liked "Happy Hour at the Tooth and Claw," by Shira Lipkin, and "The Old Woman With No Teeth," by Patricia Russo; also, "The History of Soul 2065" by Barbara Krasnoff made me cry. Like, outright cry. It's a good thing the lobby of the dorm was empty at the time, so I didn't have to explain myself.

Subterranean, Fall 2012 Not a novel, but big enough that I'll count it as an anthology. "African Sunrise" by Nnedi Okorafor was interesting, but I felt it wandered and lost focus after the first part. "Game" by Maria Dahvana Headley was very cool, even if I'm not entirely sure what was going on toward the end. :-) "Two-Stone Tom's Big T.O.E." by Brian Lumley was like a throwback to the fifties, and not in a good way: characters who speak half their dialogue with exclamation marks while expositing on the plot, a female character whose narrative function is to shriek in fear and cling to the male character's arm, and an ending so hackneyed, it doesn't even succeed at hipster-ironic hackney-dom. It was a relief to go onto "When the Shadows Are Hungry and Cold," by Kealan Patrick Burke, which was depressing in a kind of nihilistic way, but vastly better than the story before it.

Subterranean, Winter 2013 Ditto the above. (I was on a plane, and reading the random ebooks I had on my tablet.) "The Boolean Gate" by Walter Jon Williams was an interesting bit of speculative historical fiction about Samuel Clemens and Nikola Tesla; I quite enjoyed it. "Hard Silver" by Steven R. Boyett appears to be Lone Ranger fanfic, though it never uses the names; it was good, but I wanted a bit more from the ending. "Raptors," by Conrad Williams, was a disappointment to me: too Manic Pixie Dream Vampire Raptor Thingy. (And improvement over Manic Pixie Dream Girl, I'll grant, but still.)
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Deeds of Men, redux

Some of you may recall that years ago, just before In Ashes Lie came out, I released a novella called Deeds of Men, which took place before that novel and after Midnight Never Come . It was originally a promotional freebie, but after a while I took down the free version and put it on sale at Amazon, mostly as a random experiment -- I knew zip about ebooks at the time. Despite that ignorance (which included things like me not bothering to give it a proper cover), it's sold some copies over the years, though not a huge number.

Now that I'm a member of Book View Cafe, I decided to do it over again, this time the right way. It has a spiffy-looking cover, courtesy of Chris Rawlins and Leah Cutter, and some revisions (most of them minor; one correcting a narrative choice I've regretted ever since I released the novella), and this time it got formatted by somebody who knows what he's doing (the inestimable Chris Dolley). That link will take you to the BVC site, where you can buy it in epub and mobi formats, good for most e-reading devices, Kindle included. It's also up on Amazon, and should be live on the B&N and Kobo sites in the next day or so.

A special note about Kindles: if you already bought the novella from Amazon, I think, though I'm not certain, that you should be able to download the new version as an update, without having to pay for it again. I'd love to have that confirmed, so if you're in that camp, please let me know.

For those who are wondering, the story does contain some spoilers for Midnight Never Come, though only of an aftermath-y sort -- it doesn't say what happened, just shows the characters where they are as a result. Otherwise it's only really full of spoilers for early seventeenth-century European politics. :-P

And stay tuned for more news in the next few days, about what I'm doing next with BVC . . . .

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what I did with my June

As you know, Internet Bob, I spent most of June in North Carolina, teaching an intensive creative writing course on science fiction and fantasy. It was a splendid experience: the kids were really engaged, and bonded amazingly well with one another. There's nothing better than teaching for a class where everybody wants to be there and supports one another.

Some people expressed an interest in seeing my syllabus for the course. I'm not going to upload the whole thing -- it's got a lot of extraneous detail -- but I did want to talk about the readings, and the topics we covered in discussion.

With the readings, I made a very calculated decision not to go the route where you assign "classics of the genre." Those classics are decades old, and almost exclusively written by white guys, with a cameo appearance by Le Guin; it was important to me that I show the kids a fresher and more diverse face of the genre. (I also thought at first that I could dodge the problem of getting permissions and paying for coursepack printing if I chose readings that were all readable for free online. This turned out not to be true, owing to the extremely limited availability of computers -- but even so, it made getting the permissions much easier.) The oldest story in the pack was, I think, from 2004. Here's the full list:

"The Grammarian's Five Daughters," by Eleanor Arnason
"The Jaguar House, in Shadow," by Aliette de Bodard
"Where Virtue Lives," by Saladin Ahmed
"On the Acquisition of Phoenix Eggs (Variant)," by Marissa Lingen
"A Song of Sixpence," by Alyc Helms (unrevised draft manuscript)
"The Brides of Heaven," by N.K. Jemisin
"Movement," by Nancy Fulda
"Trickster," by Mari Ness
"Three Little Foxes," by Richard Parks
"The Sun's Kiss," by Yoon Ha Lee
"Love, Cayce," by Marie Brennan

As you can see, it ended up skewing heavily female -- owing in part to the fact that in many cases here I was approaching friends and asking if we could use their stories. (My budget was extremely limited, and I figured friends were less likely to demand a $200 reprint fee. Plus, I know a lot of really amazing writers!) The textbooks for the course were Samuel R. Delany's About Writing and The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, making Richard Parks the only white guy on the entire syllabus. :-P

Regarding topics, I spent the first week on the usual suspects: ideas, grammar and dialogue, setting and worldbuilding, character, point of view, conflict, plot. Week two started off with some basics about research, writing habits, critiquing, and revision, and then we had three days of "here, have every major social issue in condensed form" -- sex, gender, and sexuality; race and ethnicity; economic class and privilege; disability (and super-ability); religion; and violence and its role in stories. Week three had a day devoted to in-class critique and then a grab-bag of practical topics: intellectual property and fanfiction, writing for other genres or other media, and how the publishing industry works.

As you can tell from that list, it was intense. Six hours of instruction a day, plus a seventh hour of evening study, in which they read or worked on their stories. And bear in mind that a number of my students had never even written a complete short story before! At least when you go to something like Clarion, you have some sense of what you're in for and what you're capable of. But as I told the parents in the final conferences, part of the point of TIP is to ask these kids to do more that they're capable of -- because that's the way to find out just how far they can go. I'm ridiculously proud of the work they did and the amount their writing grew over those three weeks.

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two in one month?

I'm on my way home from North Carolina, but the timing of my ride to the airport meant I had five hours to kill here.

I was almost very lazy. There's free wifi here, and I was tempted to just watch Doctor Who on my tablet. But the wifi is slow -- slow enough that Netflix would play about five seconds of video, then stop to re-buffer. And so I thought, okay, it's a message from the gods, and they're saying: stop being so lazy!

Two hours later, I have a finished draft of the Penelope story, which I think was inspired by a passing comment in Diana Wynne Jones' Reflections. It doesn't have a title yet, but I wrote the entirety of it during this trip. Combine that with the 5K or so I wrote on "The Rose" during my first two weeks here, plus bits and pieces on some other things, and I'm reasonably pleased with myself: that's two short stories in one month! I haven't done that in ages. And during a month where I had very little spare energy or brain, to boot.

Now I think it's time to find some food. I only have an hour or so layover in Chicago, so assuming I'll have time to get dinner there strikes me as a very foolish move.

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this is how I spend my Saturday night

I'm still in North Carolina, and extremely busy (teaching six hours a day: not easy!), but today I had only a half day, and what do I do with my time off?

I finish the punk Tam Lin retelling, is what I do. Provisional title is "The Rose," and it's 7400 words long, of which 3K+ got written today. It's entirely possible this thing will be a novelette by the time I'm done revising. But it makes kind of a good companion to "Mad Maudlin," which is of similar length, and if I'm lucky, maybe I can sell it to the same place. ;-)

Now I'm wondering if this Penelope idea my brain is noodling around with could possibly get knocked off before I'm done here. That would be nice.

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Books read, May 2013

Okay, I lied about not posting for a while, because I remembered I hadn't yet put up a books-read entry for last month.


The Book of Earth. L5R gaming book (the first of several you'll see here). I actually read about half of this late last year when it came out, but only finished it recently. The line continues to be pretty solid quality; I think this one is more solid than The Book of Air was (no pun intended).

Imperial Histories. Another L5R I read half of a while ago, and only finished just now. I figured I should take care of that before . . .

Imperial Histories 2. So this is the first L5R book I freelanced for, with the "Togashi Dynasty" chapter. It came out in May, and I still get warm little glows looking at it. Better still, I already know of one person who's intending to use my chapter for a campaign, so I can pretty much call this one a win.

Oh, you want to know about the rest of the book? Well, it's a lot like the first Imperial Histories, which is a good thing. I have come to realize that I'm much more interested in the chapters that describe something other than a war; things like the Clan War (in the first book) and the Destroyer War (in this one) may be important as historical events, but I wouldn't want to base a campaign around them. I vastly prefer the chapters where there's a socio-political conflict simmering along, with less in the way of armies.

Harbinger of the Storm, Aliette de Bodard. Second of aliettedb 's historical Aztec murder mystery fantasy thingies. This book does a thing I love love love, which is to take the sort of magical thing that real-world cultures believed in and make it entirely real. When the Revered Speaker dies, there is a genuine danger that the star-demons will come down and eat the entire freaking world if the priests don't do their jobs right. This threat shows up in chapter one and is chilling. As for the ending . . . yikes. I espy problems for the third book, hoo boy.

The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, Samuel Delany. Prepping for the TIP course. There is one chapter in here I didn't get at all (and haven't assigned), but much interesting stuff, too. The descriptive parts of "Midcentury" alone are great reading.

The Writers' Workshop of Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Michael Knost. I thought about using this for my course, but it didn't come out in time, and now that I've read it, eh -- I'm just as glad I didn't. This purports to be more of a 200-level discussion of writing, and some of the essays rise to that level, but others don't, and I personally found the interviews to be not all that useful.

Five Red Herrings, Dorothy Sayers. It's been a while since I started my Sayers read, so I can't be sure whether I'm right in saying this one feels weaker. It's all the trains, really: my eyes started glazing over. I imagine there are some mystery readers for whom that kind of timetable puzzle is fascinating, but I am not one of them. Plus quite a lot of this seems to be about other people investigating the murder, with relatively little seen of Lord Peter Wimsey. And then there's Sayers' decision to phonetically represent Scottish accents/dialect . . . oy. I got a whole stack of Sayers at a nifty used bookstore in Menlo Park, though, so hopefully the next one will be better.
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livin' la vida monastica

I'm in North Carolina now, for the TIP course I mentioned before. Ahhhh, dorm life: I'm living in a cinderblock box that normally houses two undergrads, and boy, do I pity them. This is not what you would call a spacious room.

It's funny to watch myself fall back into a mode I've lived in before, which I tend to think of as "monk-like." With so few possessions, I become very organized about putting them all away in their places. (You would think that's a more necessary trait when you have lots of stuff, and you would be right. But I'm better about it when my life is spartan.) I'll have a very organized schedule, too, including a much earlier bedtime than is my wont. This is how I lived on digs, and much like how I live when I travel, too. It's a stripped-down existence, with my attention almost entirely focused on what I'm here to do.

Of course, since what I'm here to do is "teach creative writing," there's a certain overlap with my normal life. On the way out here, for no apparent reason, one of the short stories I thought I would never actually write stepped up and spat out nearly four hundred words. "Fate, Hope, Friendship, Foe," the seedlet that for the last nine years has consisted of a set of signs I saw while driving from Dallas up to Bloomington, and the fact that I had a life-sized statue of Atropos in my backseat at the time. Will it turn into a complete story? Who knows. And I have a new idea, too. I don't know if preparing to teach creative writing flipped a switch in my brain, or if this is the same switch that's been flipped since early this year, when I found myself itching to write half a dozen short stories instead of the novel I needed to finish.

Anyway, blogging will likely be scarce around here for a while, as I am going to be very busy. But if there's any cool news to report, I'll be sure to let you all know.

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Neverland's Library

As I mentioned a while ago, my short story "Centuries of Kings" is going to be in the charity anthology Neverland's Library , whose sales will benefit the literacy charity First Book.

Before it can do that, though, the anthology has to be funded. You can find them over at Indiegogo -- note that this is a "flexible funding" campaign, which means all pledges will be honored, even if the project doesn't make its goal. You can also see updates over there, with shiny things like the cover art (which is really, really lovely). If you scroll down the project page, you can also find a list of the contributing authors -- the ones accepted so far, that is, as submissions are still open.

So click around, and if you like what you see, lend them (us) your support. You get good stories and a good cause out of it. :-)

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Where I'll be next month

By that title, I don't just mean "I'll be going to X place during June" -- I mean I'll be in X place for essentially the entirety of June.

Some of you may be familiar with Duke TIP. (Others of you may know the very similar CTY instead.) This is a program I participated in as a kid; when I was twelve, I went to Davidson for three weeks to read and talk about science fiction short stories. The next year it was marine biology in Galveston; then it was tropical ecology in Costa Rica; then geology and a bit of archaeology in New Mexico. TIP is probably the single coolest thing I got to do during my adolescence.

And now I'm going back, this time on the other side of things. I'm heading off to North Carolina in early June to teach a creative writing course, focused on SF/F/H. It will be ridiculously intense: class runs for two three-hour blocks every day, M-F, and another block on Saturday morning. That's thirty-three hours of instruction per week, for three weeks straight. It's "Clarion for twelve-year-olds."

I'm not only allowed, I'm expected to make this the most awesome and challenging three weeks those kids have ever seen. We're talking about seventh- and eighth-graders who have scored a 570 or better on the verbal portions of the SAT. Want to know what I'm giving them for a "how to write" textbook? Delany. I'll be lecturing a bit, but there will be much more in the way of discussion, and they'll be doing writing exercises until their brains fall out. My challenge will be to figure out how to pace things such that they get enough variety to keep the brain-falling-out stage from happening too soon.

I won't be blogging the process as I go, because I don't think that would be appropriate. But I'll probably have thoughts about it after the fact, and I'll certainly share my syllabus/readings/etc. In the meantime, if I'm less chatty online than usual during June, you'll know why.

It's because my brain will be on the floor, along with those of my students. :-)

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