Marie Brennan's Blog, page 213

I've been sitting on this for a month

I've worked with Ekaterina Sedia ( squirrel_monkey ) twice before, on "Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics As Employed Against Lycanthropes" (in Running with the Pack) and "Coyotaje" (in Bewere the Night). Now that I have the go-ahead, I'm delighted to say that I have sold her a third story, this one without any shapeshifters in it whatsoever: "False Colours," a novelette in her upcoming anthology of YA Victorian romance, Wilful Impropriety: 13 Tales of Society and Scandal.

You can read more about the anthology here. The table of contents looks pretty awesome:

THE DANCING MASTER by Genevieve Valentine
THE UNLADYLIKE EDUCATION OF AGATHA TREMAIN by Stephanie Burgis
AT WILL by Leanna Renee Hieber
STEEPED IN DEBT TO THE CHIMNEY POTS by Steve Berman
OUTSIDE THE ABSOLUTE by Seth Cadin
RESURRECTION by Tiffany Trent
MRS BEETON'S BOOK OF MAGICKAL MANAGEMENT by Karen Healey
THE GARDEN OF ENGLAND by Sandra McDonald
FALSE COLOURS by Marie Brennan
NUSSBAUM'S GOLDEN FORTUNE by M. K. Hobson
THE COLONEL'S DAUGHTER by Barbara Roden
MERCURY RETROGRADE by Mary Robinette Kowal
THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS by Caroline Stevermer

As for "False Colours"? Well, a select few among you may recall a certain character named Lt. Ravenswood . . . yeah, this is that story. The rest of you will have to wait and read it for yourself -- I wouldn't want to spoil anything!

I'll post a release date when I have one.

my taste in fanfic

I don't read all that much fanfic. My fannish impulses don't express themselves that way; I write individual stories because I come up with specific concepts, not because I have an ongoing engagement with the canon, or am linked into the social community of that fandom. Taken from the other direction, I generally only read things if a friend has recommended them, and a lot of what I read ends up not meaning a whole lot to me, because I lack the context or the interest to receive it properly.

But there are exceptions. There are fanfic stories I not only read, not only love, but remember for years afterward.

And, as I realized a while ago, they all have a common trait.

For a fanfic to really stick with me, it needs to be doing something extra, beyond just being fannish. (There's nothing wrong with being fannish, mind you -- it just isn't what I read for.) Something intellectual, something critical, which can't be done by writing original fiction, because that would lose the closeness entanglement of its commentary, and can't be done by writing straight-up criticism, either, because that would lose . . . something harder to put my finger on. Stories that strike that balance make me absolutely giddy as a reader.

I'd like to share with you a few examples of what I mean, with explanatory notes. (But, uh, be warned -- I guess the stories I like share two common traits. The thing I mentioned above, and the fact that they're EPICALLY LONG. The two rather naturally go hand-in-hand.)


The gist is that Varda and Morgoth have a contest: he will try to destroy Middle-Earth using Mary Sues, and Varda will try to stop them using nothing but logic and common sense. Run with that concept, and what you end up with is not only a fanfic (with lots of really hilarious Silmarillion notes around the edges), but a critical typology of Mary Sues. There's the goth one, and the sparkling-unicorn one, and the anime one, and the Harry Potter crossover one . . . your brain will melt by the end. :-)

"Myriad" (DC Universe/Buffy crossover . . . to start with, before it eats EVERYTHING ELSE), by Vitruvian -- This one starts off with Lois Lane in a bar, ranting at another woman about Superman, and finally bursting out, "When you come right down to it, Superman - no, scratch that, Superman and all of his costumed cronies and stupid enemies - never belonged anywhere but in a comic strip, and I WISH that's where they stayed."

At which point Anyanka, vengeance demon extraordinaire, says, "DONE."

In subsequent chapters, the same thing keeps happening, over and over again . . . and so the fic ends up framing the various canons for Superman over the decades as attempts by the Powers That Be to get Superman's story back on track after Lois Lane repeatedly wishes him out of existence. Naturally, all this mucking about with history attracts the attention of the Doctor . . . and Torchwood . . . and this is the one fic on the list I didn't end up finishing, because I started to run into too many things I either wasn't familiar with, or didn't want spoilers for. It still entertained me mightily, though.

"Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" (Harry Potter, naturally), by Less Wrong -- This is the one that made me realize what it is I look for in a fanfic, because it does it all, in spades.

(Warning: I will not be held responsible for the hours of your life you lose reading this fic. I'm told it's now longer than the first three HP novels put together, and I can believe it.)

It's an AU with one core difference: Petunia Evans married, not Vernon Dursley, but Michael Verres, a professor who raised his adopted son (non-abusively) as a genius of rationality and science. Which makes this a "magic vs. science" story . . . but unlike most such stories, it falls neither into the trap of "science proves that your magic doesn't work!," nor into the trap of "haha, magic doesn't have to obey your silly science." Harry knows magic doesn't work. When he sees undeniable proof that it does, his response is the truly rational one: he concludes that one or more of his starting premises must have been wrong, and sets out to improve his understanding.

Along the way, the fic does a bunch of other things, many of them correctives to things that have always bugged me about the canon. Harry, of course, gets Sorted into Ravenclaw; so does Hermione, while Neville goes to Hufflepuff and Ron (for whom the writer seems to have zero use) goes off to Gryffindor. In other words, all four Houses get used. And Slytherin gets a much more nuanced portrayal, without being utterly revisionist as to its flaws. The same can be said of Draco: he's still a jerk, but he's also eleven, and capable of change (though not easily). There's also commentary on gender, and responsibility, and what happens when you think of yourself as if you were a character in a story, and . . . lots of awesomeness.

Many thousands of words of it, in fact. :-)

"Carpetbaggers" (The Chronicles of Narnia), by cofax7 -- Another novel-length work, this one filling in the gap at the end of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, after the Pevensies have been crowned. It takes a much more realistic angle on the story than Lewis did: Narnia is still a magical, wondrous place that works changes on the people who come to it, but it is also a land that has spent a hundred years in the grip of winter and a ruthless queen. And that has consequences.

This one is interesting for its practical look at nation-building and the basis of sovereign power. Aslan has named the Pevensies kings and queens of Narnia, but that endorsement only gets them so far. They have to earn the respect and acceptance of their new subjects, in a variety of different ways. What makes this one work for me is the way it contrasts with the half-cozy, half-mythic tone of the source; there are plenty of stories about those themes, but by sliding this one into that gap, it reflects interestingly on how such practicality gets turned into smooth-looking history.

"The Chuck Writes Story: An Unauthorized Fandom Biography" (Supernatural), by Lettered -- ALL THE META. This one requires a strong working knowledge of the TV show, and even with that, you may lose track of where the boundaries are between the fic and the source. It imagines that Chuck Shurley, who (in the show) wrote the Supernatural novels about the adventures of Sam and Dean (yes, this is still in the show) under the name "Carver Edlund" (which is a nod to people outside the show), found his way to the Supernatural fanfic communities (which also exist in the show) . . . and started writing his own fic. Starting with scenes cut from the novels, and then writing sequels to his canceled series. Which leads to him interacting with some of the Big Name Fans -- some of whom are characters we saw in the show. And then wank erupts when his true identity is revealed. But all of this is happening concurrently with the events of the show, which means that all kinds of CRAZY META SHIT starts going down.

And the entire fic is written in the style of a fandom-wank history. Complete with links to dummy LJs/DWs created for the purpose of versimilitude. It is freaking brilliant. And it talks about fandom and fanfic and the way we interact with stories, in ways that absolutely could not be done in any other medium.

(Be sure to read the afterwords. One of my favorite touches is in the third one -- the fake fandom_secrets manip. Also, you can read it on AO3, if you prefer, though that loses the visual element that makes it seem like a real fandom-wank history.)
Those aren't all the fics I've ever liked and remembered; they're just five of the most epic examples. I could list Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead among them, because really, it's the same kind of thing. And -- though I shouldn't say this; I really don't have enough spare time -- if you know of any others like them, in fandoms I might be familiar with, feel free to recommend them in the comments.

In the meantime, I hope some of you lose many enjoyable hours reading these. :-)

Reasons I Have Quit Reading Your Novel This Evening

The cover copy of your novel made it sound like the plot was kind of stapled together out of cliches. But a) cover copy can undersell the originality of a story, and b) the cliches you are using are ones I kind of like, so I was willing to go with it -- especially since your setting, being not the Usual Thing, was interesting to me in its own right.

Unfortunately, you have not managed to transcend these cliches. I skipped ahead to see if you would, once the story actually got moving; instead I discovered that it takes a regrettably long time for the story to get moving. Furthermore, you seem to lack the courage of your convictions where the setting is concerned: the names are a random mix, some appropriate to the culture, others not, with no apparent pattern or reason for this blend, and the first fifty pages are littered with small details that contradict the rest of the picture. (Example: the presence of a food that is not only non-traditional to that culture, but traditionally considered disgusting.) While I do not demand 100% fidelity to a real-world culture in a secondary-world fantasy, I cannot find any compelling aesthetic rationale to explain why you diverged from it; the result therefore feels watered down, rather than interestingly varied.

It's a pity. I was quite hoping to enjoy your novel. Alas, it is simply not doing enough to hold my interest, but instead far too much to push me away.

I haven't tried this in years

Trotting out the old Elizabeth icon for the occasion:



I had the wrong setting on my camera, so it's unfortunately blurry, but you get the idea. I am so. doomed. I haven't tried to write in cursive, except for that thing I laughably call my signature, for years.

Admittedly, my writing got better when I realized that a tiny notebook is a very bad choice for hand support and such. Practicing on better surfaces, and relaxing into it a bit, the result looks less awkward. Of course, if I relax into it, I'm prone to turning my n's into m's and my m's into some alien thing with far too many little humps . . . which is only the most common of my errors. There are others, too. The letters I send may have more than a few things crossed out and corrected. (Which is part of the whole handwritten letter thing, right? Not everybody bothered to send perfect copy. I guess it all depends on which character I'm writing as. Dead Rick probably doesn't worry much about errors. Delphia, however . . . .)

All right, you convinced me.

There has been enough interest expressed in the Month of Letters/Letters from the Onyx Court thing that I have decided to go ahead and do it. Full details are here.

Send me letters! (Or rather, send them to my characters!) I've rented out a P.O. Box for the duration; I hope to make extensive use of it.

Letters from the Onyx Court

I'm tempted to follow in the shoes of Mary Robinette Kowal and participate in the Month of Letters . . . or rather, have my characters participate.

But I don't want to advertise my home address to all the world, so I'd need to get a P.O. box. And that means I need to take the temperature of the Internet first, to see if there's any interest. Would you like to receive a letter from the Onyx Court? If so, drop a comment here, on Twitter (swan_tower), or via e-mail (marie[dot]brennan[at]gmail[dot]com) to let me know.

I figure all characters from that series (including the short fiction) are fair game, though be warned that some are better correspondents than others. :-) If I do this, I'll probably ask that you put a date on your own letter, so that I'll know when the character should be responding; after all, Lune would write a very different response in 1588 than she would in 1757. (Mortal characters contacted before their births or after their deaths are not likely to respond at all.)

I even, like Mary, have quill pens with which to respond -- though it may become a tossup between authenticity of writing implement and legibility of the handwriting . . . .

The DWJ Project: Enchanted Glass

When Andrew Hope's grandfather dies, he leaves Andrew in charge of his magical field-of-care -- with very little instruction as to what to do with it. And when a boy named Aidan Cain shows up on Andrew's doorstep, looking for safety from the inhuman things chasing him, the two of them have to work together to sort out just what is happening in the village of Melstone.

This is one of Jones' newest books, surpassed only by Earwig and the Witch, which is one of the only things of hers I haven't read at all. It's a splendid example of two of the things Jones did beautifully well, which are vivid characterization coupled with a dry wit. The opening pages, which describe Andrew trying to cope with the housekeeper and gardener for Melstone House, are just hilarious: slightly larger-than-life (quite literally, in the case of the vegetables Mr. Stock keeps dumping in the kitchen as punishment), but still grounded in something very real. And both of the protagonists, Andrew and Aidan, are the kind of sensible people I have always loved in her books. (It makes me wonder, in fact, how much of my preference for sensible characters stems from reading her work. Not all of it -- Cimorene from Dealing with Dragons deserves some credit, too -- but I suspect quite a bit.) First reading this book when I was thirty instead of thirteen means those characters will never occupy the deep place in my heart some of her others have, but I have very little to quibble with, where they're concerned.

My quibbles have to do with the world, which hints at all kinds of fascinating things, but never goes into enough detail to satisfy me. For an explanation of that, follow me behind the cut.

The glass, of course, is the major part of it. Where the hell did it come from? What does it connect to? Why is it there? The only identification we get for the power behind the glass is when the oak tree uproots itself and steps in at the Fete -- which, given how elegantly Jones handles such matters in other books, leaves me feeling like the hidden layer here is much too thoroughly hidden. I wanted more. I feel like it should be the thread that ties together Oberon and Melstone, making their juxtaposition more than just random happenstance; it could be random, but it would be more compelling to me if it weren't, and so that hint and then lack leaves me a touch frustrated.

I'm likewise frustrated by the note Oberon sends Andrew at the end. I can't quite decide if I'm supposed to take seriously the claim that Aidan isn't his son. If I am, it strikes me as a) too pat and b) an undercutting of the tension that drove Aidan's half of the book. If I'm not, then I'm fairly convinced the comment about the resemblance between Aidan and Andrew is actually meant as an indication of Andrew's parentage being other than he believes -- but then that feels like a giant dangling thread, that again makes me want more.

The slightly under-developed feel here and there makes the ending a bit underwhelming. Andrew drawing on the power of his field-of-care through the glass would mean more to me if I knew what the source of that power really was, and where the glass had come from. As it stands, it feels a bit like arbor ex machina; a tree comes to save him, and I don't know why. And the confrontation with Oberon and the others would feel more important if Aidan's role weren't retroactively made ambiguous (or possibly a mistake).

The one other thread I'm a little dissatisfied by is the deal with counterparts. Okay, they're all connected with fairies; that part I get. I'm not sure why, though. And more importantly, I'm not sure what it means when the fairies withdraw. It seems clear that the exceptional talents which pop up in Melstone are a result of that leakage; does its removal mean the talents go away? Or just that no new talents will crop up in the same way? Either option bugs me a little: the special people are special because of something outside themselves, and without that something, ordinariness reigns. (That's kind of how it feels, anyway, which may partly be an artifact of my own personal red buttons as a reader.)

(I'll tell you, though: the first time I read this book, I expected 90% of the village to be changelings. It's because of the name Stock: that's one of the terms for the thing left behind in the cradle when the fairies take a child away.)

It's easier to talk in these posts about the things that don't quite work for me, rather than the things that do, which makes it sound like I'm much more negative on them than I really am. I do like Enchanted Glass, though; as far as I'm concerned, it's one of her most successful later books, up there with The Pinhoe Egg and Year of the Griffin. Andrew reminds me of Derk and (as I said in describing Derk) Erg, but I find him the most sympathetic of the three -- a combination of me being most inclined to understand a desire to retreat into writing a book, and him not trying quite so hard to retreat as Derk does. His way of doing magic also tickles me pink, starting with when he gets his car out of the ditch. I find the characters in general to be fabulous; the various Stocks, and Tarquin, and Stashe, and so on. I just wish the worldbuilding felt fully baked, because I bet it would have been delicious.

Er, that metaphor may have gone a bit too far, there. I think I need something to eat. :-)
The Game is up next (which, like this book, I first read in January 2011), and I may or may not finish off Unexpected Magic before the month's end. Then I get to read the rest of my second tier of favorites: Archer's Goon, Power of Three, and A Tale of Time City. I'm looking forward to them!

Where I spent the last five days

My parents need to have fortieth anniversaries more often. ^_^

I suppose I should tell you . . . .

I'm in Hawaii. ^_^

I couldn't mention it before, because it would have spoiled the surprise for my mother, but my father arranged to ship me, kniedzw , my brother, and my brother's wife out to Hawaii for a long weekend to celebrate my parents' fortieth wedding anniversary with them. As I type this, I can pause to look out over my balcony to the lagoon down below, where yesterday I swam and basked in the sun; just past it is the sea, where in a few hours I'll be going whale-watching.

(Yeah, I might be gloating just a bit.)

Quite apart from the beautiful surroundings, it's great to be able to hang out with my family like this. The last pure vacation the four of us took together was also in Hawaii, nineteen years ago; the last vacation-with-another-purpose was a year or two later, when my brother was looking at colleges, and we took it as an excuse to go sightseeing in California. We see each other on the holidays, but it's lovely to have this kind of time, where nobody has to cook or run errands or do any of the other things that can make the holidays stressful.

And, y'know, the surroundings don't hurt. :-) Especially in light of the fact that the Bay Area is currently receiving a lot of desperately-needed, but not terribly fun to walk around in, rain.

So huzzah for my parents and forty years of happy marriage. May they continue happy for many more years to come.

swan_tower @ 2012-01-18T10:16:00