Marie Brennan's Blog, page 219

for the Yuletide-interested

Fandom nominations have opened. If you haven't been following the admin community, be aware there are some changes: three fandoms, four characters each, and only characters who have been nominated will be eligible for requests or offers. There's a partial list of ineligible fandoms, as well as a post (with spreadsheet) for what people intend to nominate (so people can avoid duplication) and a post for what has been nominated so far (since the official list won't be visible until it's over).

You have until 21:30 EST (edit: on Monday, sorry to have left that bit out) to get your nominations in; signups will open soon after.

Happy Yuletiding!

Thanksgiving Advent, Day Eleven: Naps

If you guessed that today's post is brought to you by what I'm about to do as soon as I post this, you're exactly right.

I haven't talked about it much here, but I've been having issues with fatigue for several months now. I'm getting enough sleep; it just isn't good enough sleep. We're working on a solution to this problem (so no, I'm not looking for suggestions), but until then: naps are what allow me to function.

So if you don't mind, I'm going to go take one now.

<zzzzzzzzzzz>

Thanksgiving Advent, Day Ten: Alternative Pizza Sauces

What? I never said all of the things I'm thankful for were going to be meaningful.

In this case, I am grateful for alternative pizza sauces. I am currently chowing down on a pizza crust that bears cheese, chicken, spinach, and pesto sauce. I could have had creamy garlic instead, and next time I may go for that. Mmmm, garlic.

Why am I thankful for this? Because when I lived in Bloomington, pizza was very nearly the only food you could get delivered.* And my friends and I gamed a lot, or watched movies, and the result was a whole lotta pizza ordering. Much to kniedzw 's sadness (because he could eat pizza every night and be happy), after six years of this, I became so very tired of pizza that I almost never wanted to eat it. Three years on, I'm slowly regenerating my interest -- but that's helped a lot by restaurants that offer me greater variety in my choice of sauces. See, if it's got a non-tomato-based sauce, it's enough Not Like Pizza that I'm more willing to consider it. This, incidentally, makes not just me but my husband happier, and those are both good things.



*Except for Baked! And here I'm going to go on a tangent and talk about something I miss a great deal, and would be thankful for if somebody else would seize upon the WORLD'S BEST IDEA and make it available where I live.

Baked! was a restaurant that would, until about two or three in the morning, bake you custom-ordered cookies and deliver them to your door. Fresh. Hot. And you don't even have to get off the couch. You could choose your dough (sugar, chocolate, oatmeal), your fillings (chocolate chips, raisins, nuts, etc), a frosting if you wanted it. I adored sugar dough with dark chocolate chips, craisins, and walnuts. You had to order at least a dozen cookies total, I think, and the minimum for any given flavor combination was three -- but like that's a hardship.

And yeah, the name was no accident; the business was basically run for stoners, by stoners, and sometimes forty-five minutes after you placed your order you'd get a phone call from a spacey-sounding driver who couldn't find your house and turned out to be on the wrong side of town. But you know, that's a small price to pay for fresh cookie delivery. Why this has not taken over the world, I don't know.

need some suggestions for not!Hebrew and not!Judaism

So one of the things I'm doing with the new series is basing the dominant ~European religion on Judaism, instead of going with the usual default of pseudo-Christianity. Which leads, of course, to me having to make lots of decisions about random worldbuilding details. I'll talk about those more later, probably -- I'm having an interesting time extrapolating both a nineteenth-century form of Temple-based worship, and a widespread state-religion form of rabbinic Judaism -- but one of the most obvious flags on the reader's end is the names of things.

See, in light of the aforementioned extrapolations, I don't want to make the reader think this is supposed to be straight-up Judaism, as it was practiced in the real-world nineteenth century. Because of this, and because the main character comes from a British-equivalent country, I'm mostly using English-language variants on the Hebrew names for things; for example, they have a holiday that corresponds to Purim, but I'm calling it "the Casting of Lots" instead. (Insert lots of thoughts here about how English terms and concepts from Christianity are often unmarked and can therefore be read as "generic," but terms and concepts from other religions are marked and therefore assumed to be referring specifically to the real-world version.)

This method currently falls down in two particular places: the name for the ~Hebrew language, and the name for the religion itself. My current placeholder for the former is "Ivrit," which is, yes, the name of Hebrew in Hebrew. (Presuming Wikipedia hasn't lied to me.) I cannot keep this, unless I want it to be an in-joke for the Hebrew readers in my audience. The current placeholder for the latter is "[Judaism]," because the one time I referred to the religion as a whole I was tired and just wanted to get the night's writing done instead of bogging down on naming. I cannot keep this, period.

Suggestions for either one? I can't read the Hebrew alphabet well enough to do my usual thing, which is to look up semi-random words and then fiddle with them until I get something I like. The language could be based on the real Hebrew word for "speech" or something in that vein, following the common tendency in some parts of the world for a tribe's name to simply mean "the People." The religion . . . I dunno. A currently-unsold book idea of mine has already laid claim to the word "Messianism," which I kind of feel works better for ~Christianity anyway, given the different attitude toward the whole Messiah thing. I need something that can be used to refer to both the Temple-based form of the religion and the rabbinic offshoot (which in this setting occupies the role of the Protestant Reformation, in terms of dividing up ~Europe along religious lines.) Not sure what would work for that.

Any ideas?

Thanksgiving Advent, Day Nine: My Dojo

Just got back from two classes in a row at my dojo, one in kobudo (weapons) and the other karate. From when I walk out my front door to when I get home, that's pretty much three straight hours in which I don't sit at my computer, barely moving, alone with the imaginary people on the screen and in my head.

This is a really, really good thing.

It's exercise, which sedentary types like writers have to be very careful to get. The exercise actually starts with walking out the door; our dojo is close enough that I generally hoof it there and back. Takes a little longer, but it gets me out into the fresh air, and gives me some good contemplation time. Then there's stretching, and the mild cardio of doing kumite (sparring) and kata.

It's also social time, which is likewise very important when you write full-time (or have another solitary-making job). A couple of years ago, when I was working on A Star Shall Fall, I went through a stretch where, to meet my deadline, I needed to write about 1500 or 2000 words each day, and revise 5000 of what I'd already written. This coincided with the dojo being closed for two weeks while the black belts and sensei decamped to Okinawa for the World Karate Championships. While it was good from a freeing-up-time standpoint, ask kniedzw what it was like, living with me for the duration. I went crazy. Workworkwork all the time + no real outlets = bad news.

Our dojo is a really cool place, too -- very welcoming, very laid-back while also being committed to excellence. Shihan, the owner, is ninth dan in Shorin-ryu (our karate style) and eighth dan in Yamanni-ryu (our kobudo style); he regularly travels the world to do guest seminars in foreign countries. He's that good. One of the other sensei recently made sixth dan. My sister-in-law, the lowest-ranked sensei in the lot, is third. The excellence is there for you to learn from, without being one of those scary-competitive places like the Evil Dojo in the Karate Kid movie. <g> Working there wakes up all the old gears in my head, left over from my ballet years, where I think on a fine-grained scale about what my body is doing. It's a very good change of pace from how I normally spend my time. (Even if sometimes I'm thinking about how to apply what I'm doing in a story. Shutupdon'tjudgeme.)

When I moved here, I didn't really want to study karate; there were other styles that appealed to me more. This place was convenient, though, and I knew people there, and I liked the atmosphere. When it comes to actually going to class and enjoying it, those things matter more than the details of the style. I'm very thankful that I had someplace this good so easily available to me.

Every Part of Your Life Is Real

You know how sometimes you find yourself losing patience for something, entirely without warning? Yeah. I've lost patience with the phrase "real life."

It's an extension of the gripe I had when I was in graduate school, about people referring to academia as "the ivory tower" -- as if a job there somehow not a (hmm, this sounds familiar) a real job. Trust me, universities have just as much in the way of politics and bureaucracy and such things as any other workplace. People in them do work, get paid money . . . just like people do in a corporation or store.

Lately I've seen writers talking about how "real life" has distracted them from writing. I'm not just talking about hobbyists (though my point would stand even if I were); I'm talking about professionals, for whom writing is, if not their sole job, at least one they file taxes for. Why is that part of their lives somehow less valid than the rest of it? I hear people saying the same thing when they talk about things in contrast with their hobbies. What exactly is real life, anyway?

I don't think there's a single answer. People use the phrase in a lot of different ways, for a lot of different reasons. Work is real life and hobbies aren't, because work isn't fun, and we all know (thank you, Puritans) that fun things are of the devil. If work is fun, it becomes not-real. Trouble is real. The things you can't get away from are real. But all the rest of it . . . that doesn't count. You have to deprecate it, apologize for devoting energy and attention to it, because it's a diversion and therefore fake.

I say, screw that. Every part of your life is real. Even the optional parts, and the ones you enjoy. I'm not saying there isn't any such thing as prioritization; obviously some things demand or deserve more investment from you. But that doesn't make them more real -- just more important. Let's say what we actually mean, and not something else, that makes people feel like the things they care about are for some reason invalid.

My job and my hobbies, almost everything I do, involves imaginary people and events. But that doesn't make my life not real.

Award nomination!

I was supposed to sit on this a while longer, but somebody apparently jumped the gun, so now I'm allowed to tell.

Romantic Times (which covers a great many things besides romance) is holding its Reviewers' Choice Awards, and With Fate Conspire has been nominated! In, er, the "Epic Fantasy" category, which is not what I would have expected -- but hey, I'm in good company:

THE WISE MAN'S FEAR Patrick Rothfuss, DAW, (March 2011)
WITH FATE CONSPIRE Marie Brennan, TOR, (September 2011)
THE COLD COMMANDS Richard K. Morgan, DEL REY, (October 2011)
THE KINGDOM OF GODS N.K. Jemisin, ORBIT, (November 2011)
STANDS A SHADOW Col Buchanan, TOR, (November 2011)

I won't know the results until April. In the meantime, congrats to my fellow nominees, and to all the other nominated authors.

Thanksgiving Advent, Day Eight: Netflix Streaming

Yeah. I know. I'm lazy. But it's true; I'm thankful for Netflix Streaming, and other services that allow me to enjoy movies and TV from the comfort and sloth of my home. :-)

Not only because they enable me to act like a total slug, but because they make it me more willing to give a shot to various things I wouldn't have tried if I had to make an effort to seek them out. And, as a corollary, they make it easier to give up on stuff that isn't any good. If I've rented something, or waited for the disc to be sent to me, I'm more likely to feel as if I should stick it out for the whole thing, even if it isn't really holding my interest. If it's streaming, though, I feel very few compunctions about quitting after fifteen minutes. And that frees up more time for me to try the stuff I mentioned at the beginning of the paragraph!

(Mind you, it also means I'm apt to let such things suck away more of my time in general. But there's a price for everything, I suppose . . . .)

Thanksgiving Advent, Day Seven: Days Off

Yeah, so I missed yesterday. I spent my time hanging out with friends, and playing a video game, and giving myself a day off from everything -- which wasn't intended to include these posts, but hey, I can always get around that by being meta, right?

Anyway, days off are definitely a thing to be thankful for. I tend toward self-flagellation when I'm not doing as much as I think I should, but you know, you need downtime in order to make the most of your productive hours. And it's good to have a day of rest. So I'm grateful for Sundays -- or Saturdays, or whatever day of the week you take as your vacation (even if it's not actually every week). We need that time off.

Thanksgiving Advent, Day Five: That Bakery at the Farmers' Market

It's the Brioche Bakery, and they show up at our local farmers' market every Saturday morning. Why am I grateful for them? Partly for their tasty, tasty baked goods (om nom apple cinnamon muffin, or their scones -- oh, their scones), which have become the standard Saturday-morning breakfast for me and kniedzw , but also for a less direct reason.

See, their baked goods are so tasty that kniedzw and I will actually go to the effort of obtaining them, nearly every Saturday morning. Not only does this get us out of bed and out of the house, it gets us to the farmers' market. Tasty baked goods in hand, we wander up and down the aisles, where we pick up more things: fresh-squeezed orange juice (also so very tasty), fruit to snack on during the week, specialty ravioli (like ham and cranberry and smoked gouda -- it's fabulous), and other sundry foodstuffs. At Christmas time we get a wee lil' tree. All of which are good things, but I can't say with any certainty that we would actually have the motivation to go and get them if it weren't for the bakery.

So thank you, Brioche Bakery, for your muffins and scones, and also your cheesy garlic bread, and your cookies, and your loaves of other bread that tastes really good with that spreadable quark cheese the stall about halfway down sells, which reminds me, I really ought to buy some quark next week.

Yeah. :-)