Marie Brennan's Blog, page 20

Belay my last

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This is just to say

You have added
to the funding
that is in
our Kickstarter

and which
I wasn’t really
expecting
quite so soon

Thank you
we’re almost to goal
$295 away
and so close

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New Worlds: Corvée

The New Worlds Patreon is closing out a labor-focused month with a different angle on the topic: forced labor, of the sort generally grouped under the term “corvée.” Comment over there!

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Poem! In the world!

My first-ever published poem, “Damnatio Memoriae,” came out in Fantasy Magazine at the beginning of this month — but as of today, it’s free to read at that link!

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Kickstarter progress! + other events!

I’ve been so busy promoting the pattern deck Kickstarter up one side of the internet and down the other that I’ve completely forgotten to update about its progress here! We’re at the halfway point of the campaign (it ends on September 5th), and as of me posting this, we’ve made it to 89% of our goal. Which is fabulous, but also I won’t breathe easy until we’re past the 100% line with a bit of cushion to spare. My thanks to everybody who’s been spreading the word about this — and don’t forget, all of our add-ons are available at every tier! So even if the deck itself isn’t of interest, you can back at $1 and still get access to signed books or bookplates, tea samples, personalized readings or horoscopes, art commissions, Tuckerizations, or your very own peacock brocade frock coat!

Meanwhile, we have some other promotional events lined up for the Kickstarter and the release of Labyrinth’s Heart. This upcoming Thursday the 24th, from 4-7 p.m. Central time (5-8 Eastern, 2-6 Pacific, 9-midnight UTC), we’ll be playing Rook & Rose D&D online, courtesy of New Orleans bookstore Tubby & Coo’s! Our special guest player for this event is the wonderful author and editor Fran Wilde, and I have no idea what will happen in the game except guaranteed hijinks.

Alyc and I will also be at DragonCon, though I don’t quite have a finalized schedule yet. If you’re attending and would like anything signed, feel free to catch me after a panel or ping us to arrange a meetup; I know that getting into the dealers’ building can be an incredibly time-consuming process, and we don’t mind signing items in passing to save you hours of waiting in line.

Finally, two pieces of non-Rook & Rose news: first, from now until the 27th, the ebook of A Natural History of Dragons is on sale for only $2.99! And second, looking ahead to October, I’m going to be in conversation with Kate Heartfield to promote our mutual Norse-inspired works, her novel The Valkyrie and my The Waking of Angantyr. That’s organized by Brookline Booksmith, and it’ll be on October 27th at 5 p.m. Pacific (8 Eastern, midnight UTC).

I know there are other things I need to scrape together to post about, but brain am mush, so they will have to wait . . .

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New Worlds: Collective Action

Having looked at the basic ideas of guilds and unions, the New Worlds Patreon now turns its attention to the question of how such groups (and others) can achieve their goals. Short answer: collective action! Longer answer: comment over there . . .

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LABYRINTH’S HEART is in the world!

Nearly six years after Alyc and I said “hey, let’s write the Rook and Rose trilogy together,” the story is complete!

Labyrinth’s Heart is out in the world today, in paperback, ebook, and audiobook. Alyc and I will be celebrating with some carpal tunnel syndrome later on as we conduct an AMA over at r/Fantasy — I’m posting this before I go to bed and Alyc will be setting up the AMA once they wake up, so I don’t have a direct link yet, but you’ll see it there soon enough. My plan is to offer a one-card draw and its interpretation for every person who asks a question, so if you want to see some pattern-reading in action, here’s your chance!

Speaking of pattern, the Kickstarter is 2/3 of the way to goal! And since Alyc and I found a more efficient way of doing the gilding, we’ve decided to offer a third batch of premium decks; it seemed only fair to have a few available on the day the book comes out. So if you were regretting having missed the previous offerings, hie thee to Kickstarter and get one while they last!

(There are a lot of exclamation marks in this post, aren’t there? Six years, yo. It’s a long road to walk from “hey, let’s do this” to the final book being out.)

I should go to bed. But the book! It’s out in the world, for more than just early reviewers! How can I sleep at a time like this?

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WSFA Award finalist!

I got this news on Friday, but had to keep it under wraps until today: my Onyx Court short story “This Living Hand” is a finalist for the WSFA Small Press Award! This is particularly exciting for me since I don’t often achieve this kind of thing with my short fiction; the last was an honorable mention in 2004. “This Living Hand” was published in Sunday Morning Transport in February of 2022, and you can read the beginning of it here, but the story as a whole requires a subscription. SMT’s been publishing some really fantastic stories since its launch, though, and it’s highly worth following!

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New Worlds: Workers Unite

This week the New Worlds Patreon arrives at the reason I asked my patrons if they’d be all right with me delaying our August poll results until September: labor unions, i.e. the groups that are very much in the news right now, striving to protect their members against rapacious corporate interests. We’ll get to strikes and other such actions next week, but for now, comment over there!

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Books read, July 2023

Siren Queen, Nghi Vo. This one is likely of interest to several people I know: Chinese-American history, pre-Code Hollywood, queerness, and fae. Luli Wei is determined to make a career for herself in film, and to do it without falling into certain stereotypical roles — but this is an openly magical version of history where the studio system genuinely does have a supernatural hold on its performers, actors can take long-term damage from the cameras, and “becoming a star” means literally acquiring your very own gleaming spot in the sky, which will persist for as long as people remember and watch your movies.

The supernatural element here, though out in the open, it also largely oblique: at no point does Vo stop and explain it all to you. It actually took me a while to be certain “fae” was even the right word to attach to it, and it’s probably not the whole story anyway (there are references to people making deals with devils at crossroads), but there are enough mentions of the role iron plays, plus a truncated “Tam Lin” in the middle for a secondary character, that it feels more appropriate than any alternative. I mostly liked that obliqueness; it was nice not to have the studio system fall into some kind of clear-cut Seelie/Unseelie structure, not to have the standard parade of familiar types (I think the only creatures that get named directly are “fox girls” in China and a skogsrå from Sweden), etc. There were a few places where I did crave a little more clarity, just so I could properly understand all the dangers of Luli’s world, but those weren’t terribly load-bearing. The ending did not play out in any of the ways I expected, but it played out very well.

On Spec #123 Selling a story to On Spec means you get a one-year subscription! This isn’t the issue I’m in, so I feel free to comment on it. Per my decision last month about anthologies, I didn’t finish reading absolutely everything in here, but I very much liked Kajetan Kwiatkowski’s “Immaculate Deception,” about a jumping spider sent to infiltrate a colony of weaver ants, who finds something very unexpected there — the worldbuilding and the evocation of insect life was very striking. Also enjoyed Lindsey Duncan’s “Not With a Whimper,” a flash piece with a lovely ending — hard to say much without just recounting the whole thing.

Advent, James Treadwell. This was an interesting study in me enjoying things I’m normally less interested in, while being uninterested in things I normally enjoy.

The Publishers Weekly review quoted on the back compares this to Susan Cooper and Alan Garner, and I see where it’s coming from, even if it ended up not working that way for me. Through roughly the first half of the book, this managed to get me really invested in the narrative of Gavin — who has seen odd things his whole life, and has learned not to tell anyone about them, especially not his emotionally abusive father — going out to Cornwall and encountering some people he can actually talk to about those things, just nice, quiet, bonding conversations I found surprisingly engaging. At the same time, the book walks backwards through a series of flashbacks set in the sixteenth century, and despite my love for historical fiction, I honestly found those to be less than welcome interruptions to the rest of the story.

The latter half . . . well, if I’d known this is the start of a series before I hit the last thirty pages, I would have at least had a different frame of reference in which to react to the fact that the secondary characters I enjoyed the most fell out of the story more or less completely, while ones I found less interesting moved to the forefront. (Horace does not deserve what he goes through here, but not gonna lie, it’s hard for me to look forward to more scenes from the kid whose primary emotional flavor is “resentment.”) It was telling to me that my reading pace slowed significantly as I went along, after devouring the first half in fairly short order. I’m guessing that most of the people I liked will return more in the second book, but I probably won’t find out for sure; my interest waned enough by the conclusion that, despite finding the stinger with Jen and Ma’chinu’ch interesting, I don’t think I care enough to pick up the sequel.

(I did like Corbo, though. Yes yes.)

Mummy, Caroline B. Cooney. Caroline B. Cooney is one of those names I recognize from back in my childhood or teenaged years. I don’t actually know if I ever read any of her work back then, though; she might just be one I saw on the shelf often enough that the name stuck in my memory.

So why did I pick this book up now, well after the point at which I’m its target audience? Because Rachel Manija Brown posted about it a little while ago, and basically had me at “heist with questions about the ethical treatment of ancient human remains.” The protagonist here is a smart, well-behaved girl who has dreamed basically all her life of Doing Crime, and gets the chance when the plan for a senior prank leads a few of her fellow students to suggest they steal the mummy from a local museum. But Emlyn has a number of reservations about the whole plan, starting with her feeling that her fellow thieves are not planning the heist nearly well enough, and taking a sharp turn when Emlyn gets her hands on the mummy and immediately starts to think about what it means for her to be hauling around the fragile remains of, y’know, an actual human being.

The book is a short one, and ambiguously fantastical: Emlyn has visions of the Egyptian past that might just be her imagination, but are presented vividly enough that they carry a whiff of magic.. In places it feels ever so slightly peculiar — the references to technology make me wonder if Cooney originally drafted this earlier than its publication date of 2000, because they come across as slightly off for the time. That doesn’t really damage the book itself, though, which winds up hinging on that question of what’s the ethical thing to do with this mummy. I blew through this in less than a day while on vacation, and have no regrets about my reading choices.

Flower and Thorn, Rati Mehotra. Disclosure: I know the author through the Codex Writers’ Group, and uh may have emailed her out of nowhere to bat my eyelashes and ask for an ARC of this book.

This is an alternate history where a certain region of India, the Rann, is renowned for producing several types of magical flower. The protagonist, Irinya, is a flower-hunter, and largely happy making her excursions into the salt desert after the precious blooms there, but when an incredibly rare flower is found — one with the potential to turn the tide of the colonial war against the Portuguese — she gets hauled out of that life to wrestle with much larger-scale politics.

As alternate histories goes, this one struck me as different from most. Although at least one historical character is mentioned in passing here (the Portuguese adventurer Francisco de Almeida) — possibly more, but my knowledge of Indian history is too thin to say for sure — it’s much less concerned with specific people or specific events than a specific *place*. The Rann is a real place, with (as far as I can tell) more or less the ecology and resulting human culture that existed in the real world at that time, and it gets evoked quite vividly here, in ways I really enjoyed. (Minus, of course, the magical flower part.) I also liked the handling of the different villains, who have a welcome degree of depth and evoked sympathy from me at different points in time. Even for the guy whose priorities are in the wrong place, I can at least see why he’s taking that approach, even if it’s short-sighted.

Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, Jorge Luis Borges, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. A couple of the books I read recently (How Fiction Works and Maps of the Imagination) mentioned Borges, which reminded me that I’ve never actually ready any of his fiction. Since we have had a collection of his work on our shelf for years, this was easily remedied . . . though I’m not sure if the approach I took was a great idea, a terrible idea, or both at once. For Reasons, there was a day when I needed to stay up until about 5 a.m. — bear in mind that I normally go to bed at 3 a.m., so this isn’t as heinous as it sounds — and so, having finished the book I was reading at the time (not Flower and Thorn; I started reading the Borges back in June and just didn’t finish until July), I picked this one up and started reading. At about 2 a.m.

It took me a while to get through the whole collection because this definitely isn’t the kind of fiction one binges — at least not for values of “one” that are “me,” though the experience of some of you may differ. I’d classify most of it as interesting rather than moving; Borges’ self-admitted tendency to kind of write the Cliff Notes of his ideas rather than fleshing them out in full meant they often felt quite distancing. (One of the few exceptions was “The Secret Miracle,” which is bleak as hell but really got me in a good way.) And, well, it was round about “The Library of Babel” where I consciously noticed just how thoroughly absent women are from most of his fiction: the narrator mentions having been born in the library, but speaks only of men living there, so apparently in the world of Borges’ imagination, women aren’t even needed for reproduction. (There is one story here with a female protagonist, “Emma Zunz,” but that’s it for not just this collection but his work as a whole, according to Wikipedia.) Still and all: the ideas are often interesting, and heck yeah I can see how he’s influenced certain fantasy writers. I mean, he’s managed to influence me, in that I realized after reading this that I could take the concept for a novel trilogy I will almost certainly never write and condense its key elements down to a short story in the form of a character’s testimony. So if nothing else, I got that out of this experiment!

The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild, Craig Childs. Nonfiction about the writer’s personal experiences with encountering different animals — one chapter per animal. He says in the introduction that his ideal is for people to pick the book up and read a chapter at random here and there, but that if you must read straight through, then he hopes you’ll at least take breaks along the way, sipping rather than gulping. Sir, I wound up reading your book in small chunks because I had to calm my heart rate; the Carnivora section in particular (but also some later chapters) had me wondering how the hell you survived to write this book. Like, oh, the chapter where you were playing your usual trick on your friend by stalking him through the brush and you were about three seconds away from charging forward to leap on him in a surprise attack when you heard him calling from somewhere else and realized that for the last several minutes you’d been stalking a jaguar instead. O_O

Childs writes very vividly, though. He’s excellent at evoking not just the animals, but the physical experience of being in the wild environments where they’re found and the psychological experience of coming into close contact with them. There’s some very poetic writing in here, which I valued because this book is part of my ongoing quest to improve my ability to write about nature. (My real goal is less “make good sentences” than “get to a point where acquiring the content for said sentences doesn’t involve half an hour of research first,” but that may be a pipe dream.) I highly recommend it to anybody for whom nature writing and animals and so forth appeals.

Oh, and I ended up writing a poem based on a detail Chlids mentions in here, so this is another fruitful piece of reading for this month!

To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, Moniquill Blackgoose. YA fantasy from a Seaconke Wampanoag author, set in an alternate nineteenth-century North America. The alternate history here fascinated me, because of the linguistic game Blackgoose plays: early references to things like “anglereckoning” and “erelore” made me realize this seems to be, essentially, a world where the Roman Empire never became dominant in Europe, and so the colonization of the eastern seaboard was heavily Germanic in nature, and possibly stemmed from the Norse excursions acquiring more of a permanent foothold than they did in our history. Ergo, instead of geometry you have anglereckoning, and instead of history you have erelore. (Though there are a few places where Latinate names remain, e.g. “Saturday” and “January.” As much as I would have loved to see those changed, too, I’m sympathetic to the fact that the more you change basic details out from under the reader, the harder it will be for them to find their way in the story.)

As for the story itself, it concerns a Masquisit girl who winds up bonding with a newly-hatched Nampeshiwe, an indigenous type of dragon that hasn’t been seen in colonized territory for a very long time. Since the laws of the colonizers require all such dragons and their riders to be trained at official dragon academies, Anequs has to go off to boarding school — despite the fact that many people don’t want any “nacky” (indigenous) dragon-riders at all.

I liked this book, but I wanted it to dig in deeper on some of the emotional beats. Anequs’ culture shock, for example, mostly registered on me as being an intellectual thing: she doesn’t understand or disagrees with many aspects of Anglish life, but I never really got that visceral feeling of being in an alien place, where all your familiar touchstones are gone and people are all too ready to sneer at you for anything you do that doesn’t fit the accepted mold. Some of the peak bits here flew by very fast — as in, the climax was about two pages? So it didn’t get its claws as deeply into me as I would have hoped, but I’m still interested in reading the rest of the series.

Maria, Maria: & Other Stories, Marytza K. Rubio. Short story collection that I grabbed in ebook from the library when the other novel I’d brought with me on vacation turned out to be not quite to my taste. I’m not entirely sure this collection was quite to my taste, either, but short stories turned out to be the right speed for that stretch of time, where I could dip in and out more easily than with a novel.

These stories skew distinctly literary and in some places experimental. Some of the latter worked surprisingly well for me; in this camp I’d count “Art Show,” a story which is presented basically as the plaques accompanying an exhibit of artwork — complete with actual images (several of the stories in here have some form of illustration). I was less enthused by “Paint by Numbers,” which gives you a numbered diagram and then a sentence or so for each region of the image, emphasizing a color word in the text. They do overall add up to a narrative, but because the text is so terse, it didn’t win me over. The tone is often pretty bleak, too; several bits have a whiff of post-climate-apocalypse to them — or more than a whiff — which is not a mode I’m a great audience for.

Still and all: I may not have loved this, but I enjoyed it enough that I was always willing to try the next story, even if I hadn’t enjoyed the previous. Those with a better fondness than I have for literary-toned short stories and experimental formats might really like it.

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