Marie Brennan's Blog, page 21

May we see the Face and not the Mask . . .

The Rook & Rose pattern deck Kickstarter is live!

Kickstarter doesn’t let you schedule a campaign to launch at a set time — you have to set it off manually — so last night I did that right before I went to bed, and then deliberately left both my phone and my laptop downstairs in the den, as far away from the bedroom as they could get, so I wouldn’t be tempted to just take a peek when I woke up in the middle of the night. This turned out to be a very good decision . . . and it meant that I woke up to the news that we were already about thirty percent funded! It’s slowed down since then, of course, and I’ve had to impose a rule on myself that I have to do something useful (like writing this blog post, or tidying something around the house) before I’m allowed to refresh the page and see if we’ve acquired another backer, but we’re now up to nearly forty percent, which is an excellent start.

In addition to the deck itself, we’re offering a variety of other rewards, like signed books from the trilogy (or bookplates if you already own them/don’t want to pay for shipping a book overseas), samples of our series-themed tea blends, your very own numinatrian horoscope, custom art, Tuckerization in one of my stories, and a frock coat sewn to your measurements in your choice of two gorgeous peacock brocades. For the truly splurgy (or groups of friends pooling their money), we’ll run you a one-shot RPG in the Rook & Rose setting for up to five players! The add-ons can be selected even if you only back at the $1 level, so if the deck isn’t of interest to you but other things are, you can always back minimally and then add on what you like.

And whether you back or not, signal-boosting is HUGELY appreciated! Right after social media cracks up like a frozen river in spring is uhhhh not a great time to be trying to make a project like this happen, so every bit of word of mouth is enormously helpful. We’ve got posts on Mastodon and The Service Formerly Known as Twitter, if you want to boost those, or just mention the deck anywhere you know of people who might find it appealing!

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Kickstarter Artist Preview #3: H. Emiko Ogasawara

With the Kickstarter launching tomorrow, I bring you the last of our artists!

H. Emiko Ogasawara works in a dizzying variety of media: woodblock prints, pop-up books, ceramics, and more. I’ve known her for a few years — I think we met at the San Jose Worldcon in 2018 — and not only is she a great artist, but she has the kind of mind that digs deep into the context of the art; on the Discord server for our readers, she at one point asked about what type of paper-making is practiced in Vraszan, given that we talk about them having printing presses. Y’all know me; you know I love thinking through my worldbuilding in depth. Emiko managed to catch me flat-footed: I had not given so much as a moment’s thought to that question. But it absolutely delighted me that she asked!

We say in the story that pattern decks can either be hand-painted (for the fancy ones) or woodblock-printed (for those without so much money). Obviously we’re going more of a hand-painted style for the fronts of the cards, but for the backs, I really loved Emiko’s eye for design and attention to technology. In fact, she’s cut actual printing blocks for her backing! We’re not going to actually use them to print all the decks, of course — that would be wildly unfeasible — but she’s gone to work with carving tools and several stages of lino blocks to give the image that authentic look, which is above and beyond the call of duty.

As for her work in general, you can check out her website to see her range! For visual art, I was particularly charmed by this fellow:

And with that, you have met all of our artists! Tomorrow, we kick this Kickstarter into gear!

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New Worlds: One Guild to Rule Them All

Thanks to the flexibility of my patrons — who allowed me to swap in a timely replacement for the winner of the topic poll for August — this month the New Worlds Patreon is looking at some labor-related economic topics. We’re starting off with guilds — comment over there!

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Kickstarter Artist Preview: A.C. Esguerra

Time for a peek at the second of our artists! As Avery Liell-Kok will be doing the Face and Mask cards in the upcoming pattern deck, the wonderful A.C. Esguerra will be doing the bulk of the deck itself: all the “unaspected” cards in each thread, plus the seven clan cards.

A.C. has a gorgeous style that meshes beautifully with Avery’s watercolors. When they sent in their portfolio, my eye was immediately caught by this image:

The vivid colors, the dreamlike feel without sacrificing crisp detail — it felt absolutely perfect for our deck. You can check out more of A.C.’s work on their website and see the range of styles they practice, but this is absolutely the angle we fell in love with for the project.

One more artist to come!

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New Worlds: Internal Security

A month that started off with foreign diplomacy winds up spying on citizens at home, as the New Worlds Patreon takes a look at internal security. As usual, comment over there!

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Kickstarter Artist Preview: Avery Liell-Kok

In the lead-up to the launch our pattern deck Kickstarter, I want to give you all a glimpse of the art style to expect — starting with Avery Liell-Kok’s work!

I’m cheating a bit here because it lets me show off the painting Avery did as a gift for me. She asked for one of my favorite photos out of my own work, with no context; when I got to a certain point and then stalled out on trying to choose, she selected this one:

Her style lately is based on blind contours, drawing multiple times from a reference without looking at the page, and then watercolors over the line drawing. From my photo, she produced this:

My poor scan does not do justice to the details, believe me. And for a deck based in a setting with dream-related magic, the overlapping shapes and vibrant colors are perfect. Avery will be doing the Face and Mask cards for the deck, the ones representing Vraszenian deities — starting with The Mask of Mirrors, which you will see very soon!

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New Worlds: Spies Like Them

Diplomacy and espionage: they go together like peanut butter and the knife you use to spread it over bread. The New Worlds Patreon is taking a look at intelligence work — your comments over here will hopefully not self-destruct any time soon.

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Only brief rest for the wicked

The problem with vacation is how much you have to hustle beforehand to get matters squared away, and then when you come back there’s a new pile of things you have to dig out from under.

But hey, at least the pile of things in this case includes author copies of several things! On Spec #124 is out now (and will be available at NASfic, for those of you who are going), with my Greek mythological story “Your Body, My Prison, My Forge.” ZNB Presents: Year One has been out for a little bit, but now I have my copy; you can find various buy links for that on the story page for “Crafting Chimera.” And the Department of No Really Your Book Is Real sent me my copies of Labyrinth’s Heart! So those at least are some bright spots in a sea of emails to be answered and revisions to be completed.

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New Worlds: Diplomatic Emissaries

For diplomacy to have a chance, you need the right person to be conducting it. The New Worlds Patreon takes a look at the diplomats themselves — comment over there!

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Possibly of Use: Miso (and friends)

This might be the start of an irregular blog series about stuff I have found helpful, which I’m mentioning it in case it’s of use to someone else. Feel free to ignore; I recognize that any time somebody on the internet says “I improved/fixed X problem by doing Y,” there’s kind of a whiff of proselytization that can turn people off. I know not every solution will work for everybody. But on the other hand, hey, maybe it helps somebody. That would be nice.

Cutting for (non-icky) discussion of digestive health.

For quite a while now, I’ve had fairly frequent digestive problems. Nothing severe, but happening often enough that I knew I should probably talk to a doctor about it. Which I kind of dreaded doing, because I suspected the doctor would say I had IBS or something — and just so we’re perfectly clear, yes, I’m well aware that “I don’t want this diagnosis” is a stupid reason to avoid going to the doctor.

Meanwhile, I keep reading news articles about the research being done on the gut biome, which increasingly makes me feel like we are in fact just the meat cars our intestinal bacteria ride around in. They’re being implicated in more and more facets of our health — not just digestion but psychological things like anxiety. Hell, if you suffer a head injury, that damages your gut biome. What the hell? How do these meat cars even work!

Then one day I think: well, I am an affluent American, which means good statistical odds that I am not going to win any contests for Best Intestinal Flora. I’ve been taking a probiotic for years, to what benefit I’m not sure, but they also say it’s good to eat certain kinds of food that foster the right sort of microbiota. Most of the foods on that list are fermented, and I don’t like most fermented foods . . . but I do like miso.

So hey, let’s experiment. I am too lazy to make full-bore miso soup with wakame and green onions and little tofu cubes, but I bought a container of fresh miso and some dashi stock, and I started having a cup of miso broth in the mornings.

Within a week, something like 80% of my problems were gone.

I feel like a frickin’ clickbait article saying that: This one simple trick doctors don’t want you to know! Except they do want you to know, and also, this legitimately seems to work for me. I wouldn’t go the miso route if I had to worry about my sodium levels — I’ve dialed back to three times a week anyway, just in case — but there are other foods that get recommended, like sauerkraut and gimchi.

So here ya go: possibly of use to some of you. Certainly easier to arrange than a fecal transplant, which is just a horrifying phrase anyway. Tried in moderation, it’s unlikely to hurt, and certainly anybody who’s had to take an antibiotic recently could probably benefit from restoring some of what that nuked.

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