Marie Brennan's Blog, page 205

more tarot coolness

I've been meaning to post this one for a while: another friend of mine is also doing a tarot-oriented Kickstarter Project, for a "sequel" of sorts to the traditional deck. I have to say, I find the approach of this one rather shiny:

The Major Arcana of the Tarot proper are often understood as the way-stations of a "Fool's Journey" towards self-knowledge and self-mastery. The Major Arcana of the New Tarot are meant to encapsulate a second and more outward-focused leg of that journey, in which the newly enlightened Fool steps out into the world to explore and to make his dreams a reality.

I especially like the new suits and their meaning. It's a fascinating act of symbol-creation, that really makes the ears of my inner folklorist perk up.

The project is over halfway to its goal, but still has some distance to go, with eleven days left. Head on over and take a look. As with the Urban Tarot, you can lend your visage to a card, or pick from a variety of other rewards. Help get this one over the line!

MIA, and a call for corrections

I've been very absent from here lately due to busy-ness and illness; KublaCon was last weekend, and kniedzw and I ran our one-shot LARP, which went very well I think, but now I have Con Crud and that isn't much fun. Especially since I have work I need to do.

But! I am breaking radio silence to say that I've gotten the page proofs for the mass-market edition of A Star Shall Fall. This is my chance to correct any errors that made it through me, my editor, me again, my copy-editor, me again, my proofreader, and me yet again in the trade paperback edition -- and believe me, there are some. I know of two instances of a duplicated word ("an an" in both cases), and one place where the line "Galen's mouth gone dry" is missing the word "had," and the arithmetic error on page 171. If you've spotted any others, please let me know!

Brief Hebrew question, again

I need a Hebrew word/root for "trick" or "lie."

(Ultimate goal: to end up with some "Zedekiah"-style invented name that tells those in the know that the bearer is actually a liar.)

Two reminders

1) The first of teleidoplex 's costume auctions are ending soon -- like, in about six hours. (Others have a bit longer to run.) Take a look, bid while you can, help her go to Clarion West!

2) I'm reading at SF in SF tomorrow night, with Ysabeau Wilce and Erin Hoffman. Hope to see some of you there!

This month at SF Novelists

I missed posting last month, for which I am kicking myself. (I also missed last December. Other than those two occasions, I have posted every single month since August of 2007. Whoa.)

But I'm back this month, with a new bit of musing on "The Effect She Can Have." Usual drill: comment there, not here, no registration required, but have patience if you're a first-time commenter and your words get delayed in the moderation queue.

inadvertent internet bankruptcy

>_<

I just closed Firefox with the intent of rebooting it, because I'd opened some things that were making it laggy.

When I relaunched the program, it did not restore my tabs. Nor did it let me have the "Restore Previous Session" option. Nor did it list anything under "Recently Closed Tabs."

They're just gone.

Well, um, I guess that's one way to clear out my browser? I've managed to remember some of what I had open, but not all of it -- not by a long shot. Like, less than 50%. Some of the things I know I had open, I can't recreate well enough to pull them up in an address bar. The rest, I don't even remember what they were. Which I guess you could argue means they weren't that important to me . . . but that isn't actually true, since some of them were things I had open for reference purposes, and it annoys the snot out of me to have them vanish.

Grar.

Costume sale! For a good cause!

My friend teleidoplex has won herself a place in Clarion West, which is totally awesome.

But Clarion, regardless of direction, is kind of expensive -- and that is not so awesome.

But! You can be awesome and help!

In addition to being a writer of much talent, teleidoplex is a veteran costumer. (In fact, she's one of the people that infected me with the costuming bug when I started LARPing.) And she's created an eBay store to sell off some of her hoard of outfits, wigs, shoes, and more, with proceeds going toward paying her way to Clarion. Some of the stuff is very costume-y; other stuff is perfectly legitimate street clothing. I heartily encourage you all (at least, all of you with a use for women's clothing) to browse through it and see if there's anything you might be interested in.

And if you don't want stuff, but do want to help her out, there's a donation button on her website, where you can chip in directly.

two short story sales

And one of them is to a new (for me) market! Apex Magazine has picked up "Waiting for Beauty" (another one of my twisted fairy-tale retellings), and Beneath Ceaseless Skies has bought "The Ascent of Unreason" -- a new Driftwood story!

No pub dates yet for either of those, but I'll let you know when they go live.

Malevolence

(The following post talks about The Avengers on its way to the actual point, but does not give spoilers.)

Interestingly, one of the moments that has stayed with me the most strongly from The Avengers is the speech Loki flings at Black Widow.

He has other Villain Speeches in the movie, of course. But this one stands out for its sheer, unbridled malevolence. He doesn't say those things out of megalomania or fraternal resentment or any other such understandable motivation; he says them because, quite simply, he wants to hurt her.

I've said before that I tend to write antagonists more often than villains. That is, I write characters who think they're doing the right (or at least the necessary) thing, who happen to be wrong about that. There are exceptions, of course; Nadrett doesn't give a damn what's right, only what he can get away with. But I have a harder time writing that sort of thing.

Which means -- of course -- that I want to study how it's done. So this is a Recommend Stuff to Me kind of post: what books/movies/TV shows/etc have those moments of pure malevolence, where the character is just trying to hurt somebody? Off the top of my head, there's Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles ("Stop sidling, my swan. I am going to hurt you, but I am not going to kill you, just yet. You are going to provide me with a deal of merriment still."), some of Angelus' moments in Buffy, and pretty much everything the main villains do in Tokyo Babylon and X, but I'm having trouble thinking of more. (Actually, that's a lie. I can think of plenty of sadistic villains. It's just that most of them are sadistic in a shallow, uninteresting way, and I want ones that really manage to get the knife between the ribs.)

Where have you seen this done well?


Edited to add: Please to be avoiding spoilers as much as possible. This discussion will necessarily involve a degree of revelation, but if you can use phrases like "the main villain" instead of the name (where the villain is not obvious from the start), etc, that would be much appreciated.

The Avengers

I'm not usually much of a shipper (in the fanfic sense) . . . but I want ALL THE HAWKEYE/BLACK WIDOW FIC NOW.

Ahem. Apart from me loving those two and wanting them to get their own movie, I thought The Avengers was quite excellent. Once I have it on DVD, I may well sit down and try to pick apart just how the writers managed to balance their script. Superhero movies have foundered before on the "too many heroes/villains" problem, but this one did a remarkable job of giving each character a meaningful role, without letting the pacing bog down in side tangents. It's helped, of course, by the fact that they're operating off a whole slew of individual movies -- but that doesn't account for all of it, because you can do that and still have a terrible team-up (just look to comic books for proof). This one handled things very deftly, I thought, and I'd love to dig into how.

And now, I crash. Because I survived my first kobudo seminar today (though I'm not sure my feet did), and have earned my rest. :-)