Marie Brennan's Blog, page 200
September 8, 2012
last reminder
I should have said this before, but don't forget that the Pe 'Sla project is "flexible funding." They'll get the pledged money whether or not they hit their goal, so if you looked at it and thought "I shouldn't bother, since it's not going to happen anyway," then please go back and bother.
September 7, 2012
Priorities
Look. I am glad for
The Gamers: Hands of Fate
. I am glad they met their fundraising goal, and that they also hit the stretch goal that means AEG (the company behind L5R) will be producing a card game based off the one they invented for the film. This is fun and exciting and cool, and I wouldn't have linked to the project before if I didn't want it to succeed.
But.
The Gamers has raised $384,264.
Pe 'Sla: Help Save Lakota Sioux Sacred Land has raised $341,526.
According to the last update, they've managed to get a seat at the negotiation table. That's good, and I'm sure it's due in part to the money they've been able to raise. But I have no idea how much of the land they're going to be able to buy with that money. All of it? I'd be surprised. They wouldn't have set their goal at one million if three hundred grand was enough to do everything they needed.
The Internets are a great place. But they are also a place where people will stump up more money for a movie and a card game than for helping the Sioux Nation regain control of one of their most sacred sites.
I'm not surprised by this, mind you. But I do think it shows some wrong-headed priorities. There's thirty-seven hours left on the Pe 'Sla project; I hope they can bring in more before it's done.
But.
The Gamers has raised $384,264.
Pe 'Sla: Help Save Lakota Sioux Sacred Land has raised $341,526.
According to the last update, they've managed to get a seat at the negotiation table. That's good, and I'm sure it's due in part to the money they've been able to raise. But I have no idea how much of the land they're going to be able to buy with that money. All of it? I'd be surprised. They wouldn't have set their goal at one million if three hundred grand was enough to do everything they needed.
The Internets are a great place. But they are also a place where people will stump up more money for a movie and a card game than for helping the Sioux Nation regain control of one of their most sacred sites.
I'm not surprised by this, mind you. But I do think it shows some wrong-headed priorities. There's thirty-seven hours left on the Pe 'Sla project; I hope they can bring in more before it's done.
Welcome to Welton: Kim (5/11)
“There are three kinds of lies,” Professor Madison said on the first day of class, right after introducing herself and making sure everyone was in the correct lecture hall. “Lies, damned lies, and prophecy.”
My eyebrows rose. That wasn’t the sort of thing you expected to hear out of the woman teaching your intro divination course.
Read the rest at Book View Cafe.
September 6, 2012
what works and what doesn't
As mentioned before, I've been deathmarching through a variety of projects lately. But my brain has hit the stage of "no worky don' wanna YOU CAN'T MAKE ME" this afternoon, so I think a brief break might be in order. First I played a bit of piano, and now I figure I'll talk about how that's going.
1) As mentioned last year, when I spent a few hours dusting off my piano skills, I am slooooow at reading music. I do okay with stuff inside the treble clef, but once you involve ledger lines or (god help me) the bass clef, it gets trickier. And I'm prone to forgetting accidentals. I spend a fair bit of time peering at the music stand, and make more than a few mistakes.
2) My hands have also forgotten a lot. One of the basic skills of piano-playing is knowing how to position your fingers to play a third or a fifth or whatever, how far to shift your arm to move up an octave. I allllllmost remember that stuff, but not well enough ton trust my hands to do it without looking. (When I try, sometimes it works -- and sometimes I miss by just the right interval for it to sound horrible.)
3) And yet, having said all that . . .
. . . sometimes I can just play.
I don't mean the stuff I can just play by reflex. I mean that sometimes I'm peering at the music, going "okay, that's an E-flat and, uh, what is that note --" and then I realize that while I was busy doing that, my hand went ahead and played it. Without me even knowing what I'm doing.
It happens the most often on pieces I used to play. Not the ones I memorized (the ones I can play by reflex -- when I don't totally blank on how they go), but things I played fifteen or twenty years ago. But sometimes it happens with new things, too, the ones that are arrangements of pieces I know. It's because I know how they should sound: either from playing them before, or from listening to them a lot. And some part of my brain goes "this is how you make that sound," without going through the intervening steps of reading the music or figuring out which keys to hit.
When that happens, it's my sense of pitch at the wheel. I know the sounds, and they happen. Given more practice, I think it will return to a more conscious level of control, rather than the weird subconscious instinct it is right now. But at the moment? It's freaky, man. <g>
Anyway, I have a whole pile of sheet music now: a lot of it old, some of it new, not all of it within reach of my skills even when I had 'em. But I intend to keep on trying . . . .
1) As mentioned last year, when I spent a few hours dusting off my piano skills, I am slooooow at reading music. I do okay with stuff inside the treble clef, but once you involve ledger lines or (god help me) the bass clef, it gets trickier. And I'm prone to forgetting accidentals. I spend a fair bit of time peering at the music stand, and make more than a few mistakes.
2) My hands have also forgotten a lot. One of the basic skills of piano-playing is knowing how to position your fingers to play a third or a fifth or whatever, how far to shift your arm to move up an octave. I allllllmost remember that stuff, but not well enough ton trust my hands to do it without looking. (When I try, sometimes it works -- and sometimes I miss by just the right interval for it to sound horrible.)
3) And yet, having said all that . . .
. . . sometimes I can just play.
I don't mean the stuff I can just play by reflex. I mean that sometimes I'm peering at the music, going "okay, that's an E-flat and, uh, what is that note --" and then I realize that while I was busy doing that, my hand went ahead and played it. Without me even knowing what I'm doing.
It happens the most often on pieces I used to play. Not the ones I memorized (the ones I can play by reflex -- when I don't totally blank on how they go), but things I played fifteen or twenty years ago. But sometimes it happens with new things, too, the ones that are arrangements of pieces I know. It's because I know how they should sound: either from playing them before, or from listening to them a lot. And some part of my brain goes "this is how you make that sound," without going through the intervening steps of reading the music or figuring out which keys to hit.
When that happens, it's my sense of pitch at the wheel. I know the sounds, and they happen. Given more practice, I think it will return to a more conscious level of control, rather than the weird subconscious instinct it is right now. But at the moment? It's freaky, man. <g>
Anyway, I have a whole pile of sheet music now: a lot of it old, some of it new, not all of it within reach of my skills even when I had 'em. But I intend to keep on trying . . . .
Welcome to Welton: Robert (4/11)
The chaotic arrangement of boxes— “arrangement” was too kind a word for it, really—made pacing damnably hard. Every time Robert went to shift them into a more useful formation, though, he was halted by doubts. It made no sense to pile them along the wall next to the window; what if they ended up putting a desk there? It all depended on the furniture. And that depended on how this suite was to be divided.
He’d been waiting since yesterday, which didn’t help. All the freshmen were moved in, and the upperclassmen—those not helping with the process—would arrive tomorrow; everyone other than Robert himself was at orientation or supper. They’d timed it well, he had to allow: the grand arrival would occur when no one was looking.
Read the rest at Book View Cafe.
. . . I promise there will be more content soon. It just has to wait for me to stop deathmarching through my current projects. (I wrote four thousand words yesterday, and need to do at least two thousand more today.)
September 5, 2012
Welcome to Welton: Kim (3/11)
I shouldn’t have felt grateful that a work crisis forced my mother to fly home a day early. Not only was that bad news, but I’d been glad of her help as I settled in. Apart from that one interrupted conversation, she’d refrained from saying anything about CM, and got along well with Liesel.
But in the end, I was still a college freshman, and ready to get out from under the parental wing.
Liesel and I headed off to orientation, which someone with a sense of the dramatic had decided to hold at the campus monument. As memorials to First Manifestation went, it was tasteful: a circular plaza of dark green marble, edged with three grey arches for the three branches of the psychic sciences. No lists of the dead, or of cities burned; just the seals of the countries that had signed onto the Cairo Accords after the chaos died down. It should have been bakingly hot, but a pleasant breeze blew steadily -- so steadily that I wondered if it had magical help.
Read the rest at Book View Cafe
September 4, 2012
Books Read, August 2012
I utterly forgot to keep track of my reading in August. Some combination of travel and psychotic deadlines, I guess, but mostly just brain failure. What follows below is the stuff I can recall emember finishing; I want to say there was more, but if there was, I don't remember it.
Team Human, Justine Larbalestier and Sarah Rees Brennan. YA urban fantasy, with the tag line "Friends don't let friends date vampires." It's actually less anti-vampire than that sentence would have you believe, though, which kind of disappointed me; I was in the mood for a book about how no, vampires aren't just a different kind of human, and no, dating them is never going to be a good idea. It's still a fun read, but it wasn't quite what I was looking for.
1861: The Civil War Awakening, Adam Goodheart. This is, in some ways, a Civil War book for people who aren't very interested in the Civil War. Because it isn't about the battles and so on, which is what you probably think of first if you say "I'm not very interested in the Civil War." It is, instead, a social history of the attitudes in the lead-up to and early days of the war, and how certain ideas (like secession and abolition) moved from being nearly unthinkable to being inevitable. You may, from time to time, find yourself wanting to punch various historical figures in the face, but that's their fault, not Goodheart's. I found it highly readable.
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, E.L. Konigsburg. One of several childhood favorites I picked up at a used bookstore. This one was slightly less cool than I remembered; the parts that involved hiding out in the museum were a smaller portion of the book than I remembered, and Claudia was a little more abrasive. But even when she was being abrasive, the book wasn't setting her up as a snotty know-it-all who needs to be taken down a peg, which is what this character type usually gets, so I appreciated that. And, y'know, the idea of running away to hide out in a museum is still really cool. :-)
The Egypt Game, Zilpha Keatley Snyder. When I was a kid, books didn't divide very cleanly into "fantasy/not fantasy" in my head -- largely because of my tendency to read magic into things that didn't actually have any. This was faintly true of the Konigsburg above, and far more so of this book. It still feels magical to me, even now, with the kids and their game, nevermind that there's nothing actually supernatural in it. There is, however, startling diversity: the story takes place in southern California, and actually feels like it, with lots of non-white characters. I'd put it up there with The Westing Game for childhood books that turn out to have merits I never recognized at the time.
Team Human, Justine Larbalestier and Sarah Rees Brennan. YA urban fantasy, with the tag line "Friends don't let friends date vampires." It's actually less anti-vampire than that sentence would have you believe, though, which kind of disappointed me; I was in the mood for a book about how no, vampires aren't just a different kind of human, and no, dating them is never going to be a good idea. It's still a fun read, but it wasn't quite what I was looking for.
1861: The Civil War Awakening, Adam Goodheart. This is, in some ways, a Civil War book for people who aren't very interested in the Civil War. Because it isn't about the battles and so on, which is what you probably think of first if you say "I'm not very interested in the Civil War." It is, instead, a social history of the attitudes in the lead-up to and early days of the war, and how certain ideas (like secession and abolition) moved from being nearly unthinkable to being inevitable. You may, from time to time, find yourself wanting to punch various historical figures in the face, but that's their fault, not Goodheart's. I found it highly readable.
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, E.L. Konigsburg. One of several childhood favorites I picked up at a used bookstore. This one was slightly less cool than I remembered; the parts that involved hiding out in the museum were a smaller portion of the book than I remembered, and Claudia was a little more abrasive. But even when she was being abrasive, the book wasn't setting her up as a snotty know-it-all who needs to be taken down a peg, which is what this character type usually gets, so I appreciated that. And, y'know, the idea of running away to hide out in a museum is still really cool. :-)
The Egypt Game, Zilpha Keatley Snyder. When I was a kid, books didn't divide very cleanly into "fantasy/not fantasy" in my head -- largely because of my tendency to read magic into things that didn't actually have any. This was faintly true of the Konigsburg above, and far more so of this book. It still feels magical to me, even now, with the kids and their game, nevermind that there's nothing actually supernatural in it. There is, however, startling diversity: the story takes place in southern California, and actually feels like it, with lots of non-white characters. I'd put it up there with The Westing Game for childhood books that turn out to have merits I never recognized at the time.
Welcome to Welton: Liesel
The dark-haired girl leaning against the window sill straightened in a rush. “Yeah, this is 509. You must be Liesel.”
“And you’re Kimberly.”
“Kim.” She stuck her hand out toward Liesel, with easy confidence. Liesel guessed she spent a lot of time around adults. Her grip was firm, but not a challenge. “This is my mother, Dr. Argant.”
Read the rest at Book View Cafe
September 3, 2012
Welcome to Welton
“So,” I said, “how different does it look?”
My mother surveyed the campus of Welton University and smiled. “This is my cue to say it seems smaller than I remember—but the truth is, it’s much bigger. It used to be all open field over there, behind Cavendish. We had epic snowball wars after second-quarter midterms.”
Her happy reminiscence made me shudder, thinking of the frozen doom that awaited me in a few months. My mother saw it and shook her head. “You’re the one who decided to go to college in Minnesota, Kimberly. It could have been Georgia Psi instead.”
Read the rest at Book View Cafe
* * * * *
There will be one of these coming each weekday for the next little while. (And, confidential to the handful of people for whom those names are familiar: yes. This is exactly what you think it is.)
September 1, 2012
Birthday Egotism, 2012 Edition
I have a tradition, dating back to 2003, of . . . well, rampant egotism on my birthday.
It's an antidote to feelings of blah-ness (which were plaguing me on that day in 2003, and have been known to do so since). I make a post where I am only allowed to brag about the cool things I've done lately: no qualifications, no disclaimers, no undercutting myself. The last two years, for various reasons, I haven't done the post in the usual manner (I've done other kinds of egotism-related things instead), so this time around, we're gonna rack up three years' worth of achievements.
I'm thirty-two today. What do I have to show for it?
I have completed three novels (A Star Shall Fall, With Fate Conspire, and A Natural History of Dragons), six short stories, three novelettes, and one novella. I've sold three novels (A Natural History of Dragons and two sequels), eleven short stories, two novelettes, and a novella, and the audio rights for seven stories -- not to mention a chapter for a Legend of the Five Rings RPG book!
Speaking of gaming, I ran my second tabletop game ("Once Upon a Time in the West," a nineteenth-century Scion game) and carried it all the way through to completion, making me two for two on that front. With
kniedzw
, I ran a one-shot Changeling game at a local convention, for about thirty-five people. I started playing in an ongoing LARP and two tabletop games, plus a one-shot LARP along the way. I've made soundtracks (including covers) for the Scion game, my LARP character, and the novels. I've made costumes of various kinds.
I attended . . . you know, I'm not going to be able to count all the conventions. A dozen or so? Including my first stint as a Guest of Honor, at Sirens. I've traveled to India, Japan, and Hawaii. I improved my photography skills, learning how to control aperture and depth of field, with some very satisfying results to show for it.
I got Honorable Mentions in two Year's Best anthologies, and saw one of my novels listed among the best fiction of the year, by Kirkus Reviews. I got my publisher to not only contract Todd Lockwood for my cover art, but to do interior art for the book! I added even more to the metric crap-ton I know about English history, expanded my knowledge of Japanese folklore, and started remedying my ignorance of African history and cultures. I kept studying karate, advancing seven belts (from orange with a black stripe to the second stage of brown), and started studying kobudo, aka weapons, advancing six belts (from white to blue with a black stripe). I bought a piano and started playing again.
I started writing fanfiction for fun, and have written seventeen stories -- one of which became a breakaway hits of Yuletide last year. I joined the Book View Cafe, and you'll see the results of that soon.
I did something related to my career that I can't talk about publicly. It wasn't fun, but it was important, and getting through it counts as an achievement.
It's a list worth being proud of.
So, to borrow
mrissa
's phrase again, happy my birthday to you. I'm going to a cool museum exhibit today with friends, and then dinner, and then hanging out. Please, in honor of this momentous day, take at least a few moments to do something that makes you happy. :-)
It's an antidote to feelings of blah-ness (which were plaguing me on that day in 2003, and have been known to do so since). I make a post where I am only allowed to brag about the cool things I've done lately: no qualifications, no disclaimers, no undercutting myself. The last two years, for various reasons, I haven't done the post in the usual manner (I've done other kinds of egotism-related things instead), so this time around, we're gonna rack up three years' worth of achievements.
I'm thirty-two today. What do I have to show for it?
I have completed three novels (A Star Shall Fall, With Fate Conspire, and A Natural History of Dragons), six short stories, three novelettes, and one novella. I've sold three novels (A Natural History of Dragons and two sequels), eleven short stories, two novelettes, and a novella, and the audio rights for seven stories -- not to mention a chapter for a Legend of the Five Rings RPG book!
Speaking of gaming, I ran my second tabletop game ("Once Upon a Time in the West," a nineteenth-century Scion game) and carried it all the way through to completion, making me two for two on that front. With
kniedzw
, I ran a one-shot Changeling game at a local convention, for about thirty-five people. I started playing in an ongoing LARP and two tabletop games, plus a one-shot LARP along the way. I've made soundtracks (including covers) for the Scion game, my LARP character, and the novels. I've made costumes of various kinds.I attended . . . you know, I'm not going to be able to count all the conventions. A dozen or so? Including my first stint as a Guest of Honor, at Sirens. I've traveled to India, Japan, and Hawaii. I improved my photography skills, learning how to control aperture and depth of field, with some very satisfying results to show for it.
I got Honorable Mentions in two Year's Best anthologies, and saw one of my novels listed among the best fiction of the year, by Kirkus Reviews. I got my publisher to not only contract Todd Lockwood for my cover art, but to do interior art for the book! I added even more to the metric crap-ton I know about English history, expanded my knowledge of Japanese folklore, and started remedying my ignorance of African history and cultures. I kept studying karate, advancing seven belts (from orange with a black stripe to the second stage of brown), and started studying kobudo, aka weapons, advancing six belts (from white to blue with a black stripe). I bought a piano and started playing again.
I started writing fanfiction for fun, and have written seventeen stories -- one of which became a breakaway hits of Yuletide last year. I joined the Book View Cafe, and you'll see the results of that soon.
I did something related to my career that I can't talk about publicly. It wasn't fun, but it was important, and getting through it counts as an achievement.
It's a list worth being proud of.
So, to borrow
mrissa
's phrase again, happy my birthday to you. I'm going to a cool museum exhibit today with friends, and then dinner, and then hanging out. Please, in honor of this momentous day, take at least a few moments to do something that makes you happy. :-)
