Marie Brennan's Blog, page 184

'puter troubles, desktop edition

It never rains but it pours.

Remember how my laptop was going kaput a while ago, and I asked for tablet advice? (Thanks for all the responses, btw. I ended up going with a Google Nexus, and I'm quite pleased with it. In fact, that's what I'm writing this post on.)

Well, my desktop has been acting strangely, to the point where I think I should look into getting a new one. The current one is pretty elderly, and I think I'd rather make the switch before it goes completely belly-up.

So now I'm looking for opinions on that end of the spectrum. I'm a Windows user (please don't try to get me to convert), and 90% of the work done on that machine falls into the categories of word processing and internet, so I don't need anything massive. I am running Lightroom these days, though, and I've found that sometimes I can't even play Steam games on the thing because they're too advanced for its graphics card; ergo, I'm likely to aim a bit higher this time than my usual bare-bones build. Current machine is a Dell, as was its predecessor; I've been happy with them, but I haven't been keeping up with the state of the art, and I don't know whether I should be looking at other manufacturers.

Corollary question: Windows 8? kniedzw tells me I will haaaaaaaaaaaate it, because I started computing back in the days of DOS, and object to operating systems that try to keep me from rummaging around in their guts. I'd be interested in feedback from people who have used it at all.

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various bits of news

1) Sure, I'll be kind and put the big one first. I've sold a story to Tor.com! "Mad Maudlin," a novelette based on the folksong variously known as "Bedlam Boys" and "Tom o'Bedlam." It won't be published until late this year or early next, but I'm extremely pleased nonetheless.

2) One straggler from the ANHoD blog tour: an interview with me at LibraryThing, wherein (among other things) I divulge how kniedzw and I approached the most important question one must consider upon moving in together: whether to combine libraries or not.

3) Latest post at BVC is on superstitions.


Edited to add:
4) A Natural History of Dragons is #8 on the Locus bestseller list for May. Go, little book, go!

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What we talk about when we talk about pockets

Originally posted by kylecassidy at What we talk about when we talk about pocketsThis post is about pockets, feminism, design, autonomy and common sense. Please feel free to repost or link to it if you know people who'd benefit from the discussion.

A few weeks ago trillian_stars and I were out somewhere and she asked "Oooh, can I get a cup of coffee?" and I thought "why are you asking me? You don't need permission." But what I discovered was that her clothes had no pockets, so she had no money with her.

Mens clothes have pockets. My swimsuits have pockets. All of them do, and it's not unusual, because, what if you're swimming in the ocean and you find a fist full of pirate booty in the surf? You need somewhere to put it. Men are used to carrying stuff in their pockets, you put money there, you put car keys there. With money and car keys come power and independence. You can buy stuff, you can leave. The idea of some women's clothes not having pockets is baffling, but it's worse than that -- it's patriarchal because it makes the assumption that women will either carry a handbag, or they'll rely on men around them for money and keys and such things. (I noticed this also when Neil & Amanda were figuring out where her stuff had to go because she had no pockets.) Where do women carry tampons? Amanda wondered, In their boyfriend's pockets, Neil concluded.

I then noticed that none of trillian_stars ' running clothes had pockets. Any pockets. Which is (as they always say on "Parking Wars") ridikulus. Who leaves the house with nothing? (It's not a rhetorical question, I actually can't think of anybody).

We fixed some of this by getting this runners wrist wallet from Poutfits on Etsy -- it holds money, ID, keys ... the sort of stuff you'd need. Plus you can wipe your nose on it. It solves the running-wear problem, but not the bigger problem.




Clickenzee to Embiggen!


The bigger problem is that people who design women's fashions are still designing pants and jackets that have no pockets. In fact, this jacket we got last December has ... no pockets. It's not a question of lines or shape, it's a question of autonomy.



Clickenzee to Embiggen


So I'm asking my friends who design women's clothes to consider putting pockets in them, they can be small, they can be out of the way, they can be inside the garment, but space enough to put ID, and cash and bus tokens. And maybe a phone. (And if you can design a surreptitious tampon stash, I'm sure Neil & Amanda & a lot of other people would appreciate it as well.)





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Books read, April 2013

Happy May Day!

I really, really want to list as one of the books I read this month, "the first third of Quicksilver." Because really. I read and read and read, and and it was an entire book's worth of reading. It just wasn't the entirety of that book. Not by a long chalk. Stephenson, you are engaging, but also a very wordy bastard.

Moving Pictures, Terry Pratchett. Probably the weakest Discworld book for me since the first two. Mostly because the central conceit felt shoehorned in -- a fact which was lampshaded by having it be an intrusion from some kind of outside, quasi-Lovecraftian realm. Having Holy Wood be somewhere outside Ankh-Morpork, having the characters wander off there with no real understanding of why they're going . . . on the one hand, I see why those things fit the concept, but on the other hand, it meant I was constantly aware of the artificiality of the whole thing, in a way that kept it from being as engaging and as funny.

But Reaper Man is next, which I'm looking forward to. (Also looking for, since I know we own it, but the actual book appears to have gone walkabout.)

Without a Summer, Mary Robinette Kowal. Oy, does Jane make some bad decisions in this one. Plausible ones, but that didn't stop me from going "auuuuuuuuuuuugh" at her a lot. There are two really strong things going on here: first, the politics, which revolve around the fact that 1816 is the year when, courtesy of Tambora's eruptions, the northern hemisphere faced a freakishly cold summer. In this book that gets blamed on the "coldmongers" -- people who use glamour to chill things -- even though there's no logical way the coldmongers could be at fault. Society needs a scapegoat, and that makes a good one. But the coldmongers push back because they, like many groups in that time period, labor under appalling conditions (using glamour for cold is extremely dangerous), and you can probably see where this is headed, at least in general terms.

The second really strong thing is the politics of family, most specifically Vincent's. Which, um. Wow. We finally get to see more of them, and what we see is pretty appalling, in ways that take his backstory from "romantic trope" to "fully-grounded realistic thing." This book is way too girly for the general public to call it "gritty," but between Vincent's family and the coldmonger issue, I think it deserves the word.

Behemoth, Scott Westerfeld. Picked this up at the L.A. Times Festival of Books, and finished it before I went to bed. A quick, entertaining read, and one that recontextualizes some interesting bits of Ottoman history I didn't know before. (My ignorance of twentieth-century history: let me show you it.) I am, of course, itching for Alek to find out Deryn's secret, and of course that doesn't happen this book, because we're not close enough to the end of the story yet. But the road to that point is fun, too.

A Dance with Dragons, George R. R. Martin. Speaking of things long enough to count as several other books. Discussed here, with major spoilers. Short form is that I was seriously disappointed, and am hoping the TV show rewrites some of how it goes.

Dragon Age: The Calling, David Gaider. This was a bad one to try and finish right after A Dance with Dragons, because I was seriously crankyfaced and then hey look slogging through another book I'm not really enjoying, why am I doing this to myself. In this particular case, my reason (as before) was research for the Dragon Age game kniedzw and I am running, but it turned out to offer very little in the way of information I didn't already have, and some of what it did offer, I'm chucking. (Darkspawn share a consciousness? Really? So that if you kill one, all the others will know where you are and come running? That is a howling contradiction of the way the games work -- they use proximity triggers, so if you're careful enough, you can kill some of the darkspawn in a room while the others just stand there and watch. A petty example, but I didn't really get much out of this book that was more significant.) As for the story itself -- eh. Possibly I would have enjoyed this a lot when I was thirteen and chowing down on Forgotten Realms novels, but I skimmed two entire chapters in here that were "the characters fight the darkspawn" followed by "the characters fight a dragon." Combat, yawn, can we move along.

Also, I don't remember who told me that reading these books would make more sense out of what Loghain does in Origins, but dear that person: nope. I still think he's a jerk and a flaming idiot.

Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium,, Judith Herrin. Read for a book club. To the extent that this was a study of eighth- and ninth-century Byzantine politics and specifically the role of imperial women in same, I enjoyed it. My knowledge of Constantinople pretty much ends with the fall of the western empire, so this was largely new to me, and okay now I see why "Byzantine politics" is a proverbial phrase for a) complicated and b) cutthroat. (Blinding your own son to keep him from taking power. Cutting an emperor down, in church, while he's singing the Christmas liturgy. Making your best friend marry your mistress so you can go on sleeping with her. Etc.)

The other half of the book was less engaging. Herrin's argument -- in what is clearly a "here is my original contribution to historical research" kind of way -- is that Empress Euphrosyne formed kind of a bridge beween the two iconophile heroines, Irene and Theodora, who both helped reverse the temporary Byzantine policy of destroying icons. (The logic there was that Islamic forces eschewed figurative art, and were kicking the asses of the Byzantines, ergo getting rid of icons would clearly make Byzantium more successful in war.) In pursuit of this thesis, though, Herrin does a great deal of speculation in the vein of "we don't have any proof that Euphrosyne did this, but she could have." Also, long explanations of building projects in Constantinople are not as interesting as emperors getting shivved by soldiers disguised as choirboys. But the stuff around that was cool.

Reflections: On the Magic of Writing, Diana Wynne Jones, ed. Charlie Butler. Discussed elsewhere.
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The DWJ Project: Reflections

A belated entry to this series, on account of it not being out yet when I finished my re-read of all of Diana Wynne Jones' books.

Reflections: On the Magic of Writing is a collection of various essays and lectures she gave, on various subjects related to writing (her own and that of others). A couple of these I had read before; "The Origins of Changeover" was the foreword to the edition I read, and I tracked down scans of "The Heroic Ideal: A Personal Odyssey" after seeing it referenced by rushthatspeaks . (Very glad to now have a proper reprint, as the essay does wonders for my ability to understand certain parts of Fire and Hemlock.) Most of this, though, was new.

It makes for interesting reading, though certainly a few details get repetitive -- these pieces span decades, and there are certain things, particularly biographical incidents, that she brought up more than once. The two things that fascinated me most were her knowledge of pre-modern English literature (much of which I haven't personally read), and her comments on her own books. The former made me feel in places like I was reading pameladean 's Tam Lin, because it threatened to leave me with a reading list of rather obscure works. The latter . . . I don't know. Sometimes it strips the magic away to know how the magic got made, but I think that here it just turns into a different sort of magic for me, because I can think about her books as a writer as well as a fan. When she talks about similarities between her characters, I nod at some and blink at others, and wonder if she didn't see the similarities elsewhere, or simply didn't bring them up. (Upon reflection, I see what she means about the commonality of Torquil and Tacroy, and also, after much more reflection, Thomas Lynn and the Goon. But what about Tacroy and Thomas, and also Howl? Or for that matter, Mark and Herrel, who are a straight-up deployment of her habit of "splitting" a character type and using different facets?)

I wish we had more of that stuff. I would love to know what sparked the ideas for all of her books, because Diana Wynne Jones wrote books that are nothing like mine, and knowing where they came from helps me understand the result. I also, quite selfishly, want to read all the unrevised first drafts and unfinished beginnings she had stuffed into drawers, because I crave more, and I'm (probably) never going to get it. I know it wouldn't be the same, and it very well might not be good, but I crave it anyway. This book made me sad all over again that Diana Wynne Jones is dead, and that I never had the chance to meet her. I would have liked to thank her in person, and having read this book, I feel certain she would have understood.

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story!

It took me substantially longer than expected (the last scene was an absolute bear to write), but I just finished "To Rise No More."

Needs revision, of course, but right now, that doesn't matter. What matters is that I've managed to write a short story! And not even one that was spoken for before I wrote it. The last seven things I wrote sold on their first trip out the door, because they were either solicited by editors or very nearly so, i.e. I knew that if I wrote them, then so-and-so was extremely likely to buy the result. Which isn't a bad position to be in, of course -- but it's less good when you have to use that as a motivation to actually get the thing done. This one, I wrote because I wanted to.

Hopefully somebody will buy the result. :-)

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It's a novel! Also a pasta sauce!

Okay, this is really nifty. The blog Paper/Plates bills itself as "exploring the world through food and literature" . . . and someone there just posted a review of A Natural History of Dragons, followed by a recipe for a vegan alfredo sauce inspired by the book. (On the grounds that Isabella's lifestyle does not fit her culture's expectations.)

I think fanworks in general are cool, but I never thought anybody would make a pasta sauce for one of my books!

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Weather forecast: rain. LOTS of it.

Back in 2010, I decided that (as with the Wheel of Time before it), I was done reading A Song of Ice and Fire until the series was finished. I hadn't read any of the books since A Feast for Crows came out in 2005, and knew I would need to re-read to refresh my memory whenever A Dance with Dragons finally emerged -- and then would have to re-read again some years after that, when we got book six, etc. Better to just stop and wait, however long that took. I sold my copies of the first four (to free up shelf space) and washed my hands of it.

About a month later, Martin announced the Really No We Mean It publication date for Dance, but that was okay: I was at peace with my decision. It came out in 2011, and I didn't read it, and I went on not reading it.

But in discussing the show with friends, I've grown tired of dodging spoilers (sometimes unsuccessfully). So I kind of wanted to read the book, just to fix that problem. On the other hand, it had now been more than seven years since I read the books, and I knew that without a refresher, I wouldn't find Dance as satisfying as I otherwise might. And yet, I didn't want to take the time to re-read that much stuff. On the other other hand, teleidoplex told me I wouldn't find it satisfying whether I re-read or not.

Reader, she was right.

I am putting this behind a cut because a) it's long and b) if your personal parade is a happy one, I don't want to rain all over it. Because I was not impressed with this book. No, that falls short: there are things in here that decrease my enjoyment of previous books. If reading about that is going to make you sad, then click away now.

Let me say this up front: I do not think this is as bad as Crossroads of Twilight , the absolute nadir of the Wheel of Time. Unfortunately, I do think it's worse than, say, The Path of Daggers -- which I consider to be the second-worst book of that series.

Just to give you a sense of scale.

Also up front: Martin faced a very large problem here. As I understand it, he had originally planned to jump ahead five years, to give Dany's dragons and some of the human characters time to grow up. The more he thought about it, though, the less feasible that seemed, so he decided to write a bridging book, which then turned into two, Feast and Dance. Makes sense, in a way . . . but it creates its own problem.

These books cannot contain any of the awesome, game-changing events we've been waiting for. Those events are already earmarked for a later point in the story. Dany returning to Westeros? Not gonna happen yet. The Others mounting a big attack and either being thrown back or overrunning the Wall? Nope. Bran busting out in his full skinchanger/greenseer glory? Later, my friends. Which means, inevitably, that this is two books of delay on the things we really want to see. Two books of smaller stuff. Some of it is undoubtedly the stuff Martin always meant to have happen in the downtime, which he felt needed to be shown rather than summarized; some of it, one suspects, is new material invented to flesh out that period into book-worthy form. But alas, another word for that latter is "makework." I wholeheartedly believe that Martin really tried to come up with interesting things to have happen, but ultimately, very little of it feels like it matters -- and I suspect that very little of it does.

I mean, what do any of our characters accomplish in here? Tyrion's biggest achievement in the entire story is discovering Aegon. Which isn't much of an achievement, given that Aegon then goes and publicly declares himself in Westeros; it only matters because presumably Tyrion will tell Dany, whenever the two of them meet up. The rest of his chapters are about him eating, angsting, fucking women or thinking about fucking them, wandering through half the world getting infodumps about the places he passes through, being humiliated with stereotypical dwarf follies, and failing to actually meet Dany. As for Daenerys herself, she eats a bowl of stupid this book (to borrow a phrase from teleidoplex ): she lusts after Daario, waffles about her political problems until they grow even worse, and apocalyptically fails to deal with the issue of her dragons. Jon does better for a while . . . then grabs a double helping of Dany's idiocy cornflakes and sparks a coup. Bran gets, what, three chapters?, in which he starts to learn something useful, but doesn't learn it fast enough to actually do anything useful with it. Arya reminds us she exists, then kills a guy. Theon serves to show us that Ramsay Bolton is the most over-the-top caricature of evil in the entire series, and to get entangled with a byplot that doesn't even feel necessary. Asha is our pov on Stannis, ditto with the byplot. Areo Hotah's entire chapter could have been cut. So could Quentyn Martell's -- I am so glad we wasted all that time watching him wander around only to see him get roasted for his stupidity. Cersei almost has a Crowning Moment of Not Really Awesome But Pretty Good Given Her Circumstances . . . but nope, she breaks before the end, and then we get to reflect on her pathetic-ness. Jaime reminds us he exists, then vanishes with Brienne. Barristan pulls off a coup; I guess that's pretty good. Victarion randomly joins the "everybody is now going to go help Dany!" brigade, but doesn't actually get there and help her.

Going into this book, I expected that it (in combination with Feast) would bridge that five-year gap and leave the various pieces in their starting configuration for the second half of the series. That is patently not the case, because even when Martin had a chance to do something relatively big here, he postponed it. Tyrion does not meet Dany. Victarion does not arrive with his fleet. Jaime does not do anything with Brienne. Stannis and Bolton maybe have their battle, but if they do we don't get to see it, and maybe Bolton was just lying with that letter in the first place. Boom tomorrow; never boom today.

And instead of boom, we get . . . what? A guided tour of the sewers, both literally and metaphorically. I joked to friends that if I had live-blogged this book like I did A Memory of Light, it would have contained entries like "New drinking game. Take a shot whenever Martin describes someone pissing. Take two shots if he remembers to specify that the guy shakes the last drops off." That was in the early parts of the book; later I would have gladly gone back to all the people pissing if it meant we could stop with all the shitting. Yes, okay, there's an outbreak of dysentery or whatever; I got that pretty quickly, and did not need repeated descriptions. Then we have Stannis' Donner Party hijinks near Winterfell, and an entire chapter devoted to nothing more than "Ramsay Bolton is a terrible horrible no-good very bad person here come revel in Theon's suffering isn't it nifty."

You know what we don't see? We don't see Dany imprisoning her dragons. That gets ignored for about three-quarters of the chapter after it takes place, then gets summarized in flashback narration -- even though it should be a fucking important scene. We don't see Tyrion, Penny, and Jorah taken prisoner by slavers, either. In fact, we don't see a lot of the turning points in this story; we just wander through the in-between stuff, while Martin falls victim of the stereotypical vice of the epic fantasy writer, the Interminable Journey (With Bonus Infodumps). We learn a lot about the history and culture of Pentos and Andoral and Volantis and Yunkai and Astapor and Meereen and even a random little grudge-match somewhere in the riverlands of Westeros, and all this stuff fills up words without giving the characters a chance to do anything of substance.

And maybe this is a random thing, but . . . what is with Martin avoiding people's names in the chapter titles? It feels symptomatic of the problem somehow. Okay, for Arya and Theon it makes sense, given that part of what's going on with them is the loss of their original identities (though that doesn't explain why Theon is "Reek" for two or three chapters, then "The Prince of Winterfell," then "The Ghost of Winterfell," before finally being "Theon" again). But what possible excuse is there for titling Quentyn Martell's chapters "The Merchant's Man," "The Windblown," and "The Dragontamer"? Or for Asha, "The Wayward Bride" and "The King's Prize"? Or how about Ser Barristan Selmy being "The Queensguard," "The Discarded Knight," and "The Kingbreaker"? (One of those goes several paragraphs without identifying whose thoughts we're hearing, which is simply bad writing.) I considered that Martin might be trying to avoid spoilers for the people who flip through the books, but . . . I don't see how it's a spoiler to just title those chapters Quentyn, Asha, and Barristan. He's been doing this on a regular basis since Feast, and it feels like this coy, artificial attempt to inject some kind of mystery into the tale. Like he's worried that if he uses Quentyn's name, readers will say "Quentyn? Who? I don't know this guy. Why should I care about him?"

If so, that's kind of a clue.

Can we take a moment to talk about Aegon? Becaues for the love of little fishes, whut. Surprise Targaryen heir! I find myself really hoping he gets squished like a bug, because right now, he's Mr. Gary Stu. He's got as good of a claim as Daenerys', plus all the skills and education and so on that she so patently lacks. Minus the dragons, true, but since Dany's reaction to those was "let me lock them up and not think about them because that'll solve things I'm sure," Aegon kind of comes out ahead. But where the hell did he come from? Varys knew about him all this time? Sure hasn't been acting like it; the assassination of Pycelle and Kevan Lannister at the end of the book felt massively out of character for the Varys I've been seeing before. This was not foreshadowed enough, or possibly at all. Yes, it's been clear for some time now that Dany would need two other people with Targaryen blood to ride the dragons, and everybody's assuming Jon will turn out to be one of them. But that's okay, because Jon has his own thing that he's doing, his own brand of cool he can bring to the table. Aegon does not have his own thing; he's basically just stealing Dany's. Couple that with her being a walking disaster this book, and it's massively off-putting.

Which, sadly, is my reaction to most of the story. It actively decreases my fondness for various characters. Tyrion lost a giant whack of sympathy when he killed Shae; this book does nothing to fix that. I kind of don't care about him anymore. I'm annoyed with Dany, I'm annoyed with Jon. The list of characters whose chapters I was looking forward to got shorter and shorter as the book went along. And perhaps most damning: I cannot think of single moment in here that I want to go back and re-read. There is no scene of a character being really awesome in a way that will linger in my memory and make me grin when I think about it. There's just piss and shit and cannibalism and people being flayed and stupidity and bad decisions and the payoff never coming.

Watching the show made me kind of want to re-read the books. Reading A Dance with Dragons made me less interested in watching the show. However much I enjoy what it's doing right now, I know it's headed into this pit. And I find myself actually hoping the show's writers will rewrite things to be better.
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last day for NPT signups

If you're intending to participate in the Not Primetime fic exchange, you have about twenty-two hours left. FAQ is here, if you need a rundown.

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two (three) good causes

The Indiegogo campaign for Neverland's Library has started up. You may recall me mentioning this before; it's the anthology to which I sold "Centuries of Kings."

If you contribute, you're actually helping two things happen: first, the anthology itself, which includes such authors as Mark Lawrence, William Meikle, R.S. Belcher, Jeffrey J. Mariotte and Marcy Rockwell, Peter Rawlik, Jeff Salyards, Kenny Soward, and Tad Williams. (Plus others -- the TOC isn't entirely filled yet. Submissions remain open until June 20th, and I especially encourage women to submit, as I'd like to see a more balanced final TOC.)

Second, your donation is helping to support the literacy charity First Book, since 50% of the profits from the anthology will be going directly to them. First Book is a good organization, so I'm in favor of a project that both helps them out and produces a cool book.

Also, the Public Domain Review is running a small fundraising campaign, which is almost over; there are six days to go, and they're 96.39% of the way to their goal as of me posting this entry. It isn't a Kickstarter/Indiegogo-type thing, with all the reward levels, but if you donate $40 or more you do get a tote bag.

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