Marie Brennan's Blog, page 229

Sixty days!

I will send everyone off into the weekend, and the month of July, with a nice big chunk of With Fate Conspire, in which we meet Eliza and Dead Rick both.

New material begins here, or you can start back at the prologue if you prefer. Be sure to keep clicking through; I've posted several scenes!

Now also seems a suitable time to mention that Marissa Lingen has beaten Harriet Klausner to the punch, posting the first review of With Fate Conspire. No spoilers, so you can read it without fear!

Results of the icon contest for A Natural History of Dragons will go in a separate post, because you'll be getting a little treat there, too . . . .

On Women and Fighting

wshaffer linked to an interesting column over on McSweeney's titled Bitchslap: A Column About Women and Fighting. The posts range around quite a bit, from actual combat-related thoughts like A Short and Potentially Hazardous Guide to Sparring Strategy (which might be of interest to the "writing fight scenes" crowd -- I promise, I haven't forgotten about that) to more philosophical things like "On Impact" to pretty good social commentary like "Dressing Up, Looking Down."

Some of the things she says bother me, because it's easy to lose sight of the fact that she acknowledges herself to be a woman with a shitty temper, and that her behavior is not necessarily a model you should follow. But it makes for interesting reading regardless.

Listening Through

Does anybody else do this?

I'll be listening to a piece of music, something I've heard plenty of times before -- frequently it's a track from some film score, though other kinds of music can do it, too. Then suddenly, my ears shift focus, in much the same way I imagine those "magic eye" pictures resolve from meaningless noise into meaningful shapes (I actually can't see those worth a damn). I find myself listening through the music to a layer I never noticed before.

I don't know if that makes any sense. It would be easier to explain in person; I would put a piece of music on and wave a hand in the air to illustrate which harmonic line I've switched focus to. (It's always a harmony; the melody is what I'm listening past.) Not infrequently it's something the bass elements are doing, because they more often provide the foundation or embroidery to the melody in the treble -- but sometimes it's a high counterpoint I never really noticed before, or something in the middle registers that was somehow tucked away inside all the other things I'd heard before.

(I sometimes wonder if the way my brain processes music qualifies as synaesthesia. I often conceive of it in spatial or kinetic terms, and I was annoyed when I found out that "texture" didn't mean what I wanted it to, musically speaking. Individual sounds have texture, goddammit, although it isn't the same as the texture I feel with my fingertips. I guess I mean "timbre," but my brain insists that no, if it mean timbre it would say timbre, and what it said was texture.)

In other words, I shift my attention to an instrument or line I hadn't noticed before -- but it really feels like I'm listening through to it. As if the rest of the instrumentation was the reflection on a glass window, and I just now managed to look past that into what lies behind the glass. It just happened to me a moment ago, sparking this post -- "Pageant," from the Cirque du Soleil show Kà, for anybody who's curious; there's a bass counterpoint that suddenly leapt out at me -- and if you can do the trick, Michael Kamen's score for Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves is a lovely, lovely thing to listen to, especially the track "The Abduction and Final Battle at the Gallows." That's the first piece that ever refocused for me, and I still love to close my eyes and follow all the different layers as they come in and out.

But yeah. I'm almost certainly not the only one who does this, but I sometimes wonder, and isn't that what the internets are made for? I'd love to hear how other people experience music in general, whether you process it in terms of other senses or whatever. Tell me I'm not alone in being weird. :-)

The DWJ Project: Deep Secret

I was about to read The Merlin Conspiracy when I remembered that it's technically part of a series, of which this book is first. I have no idea whether it's necessary to take them in order -- I've only read The Merlin Conspiracy once, years ago -- but I figured I might as well.

Deep Secret is the first of two Magid books, which take place in a multiverse setting that isn't the Chrestomanci one (though you could probably find a way to graft them together). The worlds exist in a Mobius loop/infinity symbol configuration, one half of which is "Ayewards" and magically positive, the other half of which is "Naywards" and magically negative. In the middle is the Koryfonic Empire, straddling eleven worlds and going downhill fast. The entire thing is supervised in a fashion by Magids, who serve a collection of entities referred to as the Upper Room, who are sort of godlike, to the extent that their nature is ever made clear.

Rupert Venables, the most junior Magid, is having to deal with two problems at once. First, he has to find a replacement for a more senior Magid who just died (though Stan hangs around as a disembodied voice to help him out). Second, as junior Magid he's in charge of the Koryfonic Empire, even though he lives on Earth, and the Empire is having some rather serious problems. His efforts to pick a replacement keep being interrupted as he gets dragged away from Earth to deal with problems on Koryfon -- but, as the laws of narrative efficiency would lead you to expect, it turns out those two problems aren't as unrelated as they seem.

Much of the pleasure of this book comes from its setting. You see, Rupert decides to simplify his Magid search by pulling all his candidates together in one place. The requirements of a magical node, the balancing of fatelines, and a mundane excuse to lure the people there mean that everybody winds up at a science fiction convention in Wantchester. And so the book is filled with lovingly-observed details about con culture: all the weirdness and friendliness and administrative drama that such events bring. (I seem to recall hearing once that the hotel -- where, thanks to magical disturbances, one can make endless right-angle turns without ever coming back around to the elevator -- was inspired by an actual hotel used by some con in Britain, probably one DWJ had been to. All I can say is, we've got one of those here in the States, too.)

I also quite like both Rupert and Maree Mallory, the other major protagonist in the story. Rupert takes a while to warm up -- the first few pages aren't as immediately engaging as in most of DWJ's books -- but Maree has a strong narrative voice. And this is a more adult book than most of hers; I think Rupert is twenty-six and Maree is twenty, and certainly there's more in the way of swearing, sexual overtones, and explicit violence than I recall in the others. (Certainly it's on the long side, compared to most.) All in all, I quite like it.

But I do have a couple of quibbles, plus some more spoilery things I like, which will go behind the cut.

First, I have to say the entire scheme with Janine and Gram White and Timos IX's crazy paranoia and all the rest of it is kind of baroque and complicated. There was a point, re-reading this book, where I wanted to sit down and draw out a family tree to keep track of who was related to whom and how. But I can kind of cruise past that and not worry about it too much.

I have more difficulty with the structure of the book. It isn't that it's unclear; it's just awkward. We have three first-person narrators: Rupert, Maree, and (at the very end) Nick. Because all three of their accounts are explicitly framed as being written after the fact, the narrative keeps jumping around in time, mostly in the form of Maree's sections back-tracking to fill in gaps or give new context to events we've already seen. I would have liked for those to interchange more smoothly. And then once Maree is stripped, she no longer works as a narrator; she's halfway out of it, and then even once she's restored she has no chance to sit down at her computer (which is contaminated anyway), so we lose her point of view. And using Nick to describe the Babylon segment means that comes at the end of the novel, well after it took place. That allows the story to end on a more mystic note, I suppose, than if it ended with Koryfos straightening matters out, but it loses a lot of the tension because we already know how things turned out. I think I would have preferred the book to drop the explicit framing and just give a less-defined first person narration, that could shift around as needed.

But I honestly do love the Babylon stuff. The use of the rhyme here hit a button for me that hadn't been pressed since Howl's Moving Castle; it takes something real-world and inscribes an extra layer of meaning onto it, with a whole lot of cool tension alongside. The challenge of opening and maintaining the road long enough for them to go and come back is very effective, I think. I only wish the details of what happened along the way had been woven in there, cutting away probably on Maree saying she wanted her Dad cured, and then jumping to Rupert seeing Nick stumble back out.
Okay, I mean it this time. The Merlin Conspiracy is next.

The DWJ Project: Eight Days of Luke

This book is the reason I can never quite believe that Loki is evil.

See, it was my very first introduction to Norse mythology. I'd long adored D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths , but had not yet encountered its northern counterpart. (I think the edition of this novel I read back then had an afterword explaining who the gods were, or all the reveals at the end would have flown totally over my head.) Thanks to Diana Wynne Jones, I'm subconsciously convinced Loki's a sweetie who never really meant to hurt anybody.

It's also the last of my top tier of favorites, which means I did a book recommendation for it yonks ago; read that for a plot summary.

This was her fourth book published (third fantasy), and as fjm said in the comments to Witch's Business, it's the first one to really feel like a DWJ novel. Not just because of the neglected kid protagonist, but because the fantasy isn't random; it's a meaningful layer to the story, and not entirely shiny. Luke may not be a villain, but he isn't quite what you'd call good, either. He's far too pleased with his own cleverness and power, and not inclined to think about the cost to others unless somebody reminds him.

I'm thinking particularly of the fire while David's out shopping with Astrid, and the quiet, intense way that Luke goes about it. There's a sinister edge to the scene that strikes me as very DWJ; it's there but not in your face, which is a balance she was very good at striking.

With the knowledge of Norse mythology I have now, though, I do have to wonder a bit at her characterization of Loki. Luke claims the death of Baldr was supposed to be a fun trick, that he didn't know it would kill the guy. Okay . . . but what about the bit where Loki masqueraded as Thokk and refused to weep for Baldr? Was that a fun trick, too? And he claims he gave himself up to be imprisoned, which I'm willing to accept on the partisan grounds that they never would have caught him if he hadn't let them -- but that isn't exactly the way the myth goes.

On this re-read -- with a semester of Old Norse, a thesis on Viking weapons, and about fifteen sagas under my belt, not to mention both Eddas -- I noticed a lot of things that had never really registered on me before. Place-names: not just Wednesday Hill and Thunderly Hill, but Ashbury (Yggdrasil is an ash-tree) and Lockend (the actual location of the house, and Luke talks about David having "unlocked" his prison). The Rainbow pub outside the ordinary Wallsey, and the rainbow light along the bridge at the other Wallsey. The cameo appearance by Nidhogg. My mental image of this Thor still owes too much to the Mr. Lynn type, though; he's described as tall, but there's nothing about his build, so I see him as way too lanky for who he's supposed to be. I also find myself frowning a little at Chew now, who isn't remotely like the conception of Tyr I've formed in the interim. (And why exactly does Mrs. Fry have it in so vehemently for Luke? Is it because of how he trash-talked her in the Lokasenna? He trash-talked everybody then. More likely it's because of Baldr's death, even though the pairing of the Frys suggests she's Freyja more than Frigg.)

I do love the valkyrie chauffeurs, though. And Sigurd and Brynhild -- I think of them by their Norse names, now, even though the book leans toward the Germanic. They really stuck with me, even when I didn't know their story; one of my unpublished novels (a Viking revenge epic) has a scene in it which owes a fairly direct debt to the image of Brynhild sleeping in the fire. The notion that she would want to give the finger to Odin and all his kin is pretty plausible, I'd say, after what happened to her.
As usual, comments are welcome on previous posts, and feel free to request books you'd rather hear me talk about sooner rather than later. (The Merlin Conspiracy is up next for that reason.)

parallelsfic now open

For those who were interested, parallelsfic is now open for signups, and will be until Sunday night.

Green Lantern: actually doesn't suck

The money I paid to see Green Lantern would have been well-spent just for the character of Carol Ferris, who is probably the best female character I've seen in a superhero movie in quite a while.

The rest of the movie is, contrary to what I'd been led to expect, not terrible. Yes, the central idea is goofy (glowing space cops who use the green energy of willpower!), and yes, the "good guys" make one monumentally stupid decision partway through the movie, and there are smaller details in the story and script I would have tweaked. But Hal Jordan, the main character, is not nearly the "dur, I'm a man-child who can't take anything seriously" disaster the first trailer seemed determined to advertise him as, and the central theme is better than some I've seen lately.

And Carol Ferris. She is smart, and competent, and not terribly interested in Hal's bullshit (though she's interested in him sans bullshit), and she does actual useful things. Not the best actress in the world, and there's one thirty-second scene where I would have rewritten all of her dialogue, but it was the only sour note; the rest of what they did with her, I liked a great deal. Spoiler cut:

It started with the argument after the plane crashed, when Carol said she didn't have to choose between being a pilot and a businesswoman. The earlier argument between them had danced close to the line of "strident perfectionist woman chides man-child for his stupidity," but this was Carol standing up for her own life, rather than being obsessed with Hal's. Then two things at the party: first, her interpreting Hal's compliment as being about the plane rather than her dress, and second -- the moment where I really started liking her -- when she called for emergency aid even before the helicopter crashed. Actual clear thinking in a crisis, holy shit. Instead of standing there and screaming.

Then, oh my god. The balcony scene. "I've known you since I was a kid! Did you think I wouldn't recognize you because I can't see your cheekbones?" I had already leaned over to kniedzw and made my usual sarcastic comment about a tiny fig-leaf of a mask "hiding" somebody's identity, so I burst into delighted cackles when she saw right through it.

And finally, the confrontation with Hector. I kind of wish the "why don't we swap and let her choose?" idea had gone through, though I see why it didn't; at least the line nodded toward her agency, rather than leaving her as bait in the air. Once she was on the ground, she actually got to do something useful, with the missiles and then retrieving the ring. She was not left to play Damsel In Distress all through the final confrontation. Thank god.

What would I have changed? The dialogue on the roof right after that, when she inexplicably fell into "but you're going to die!!!" right after being the one to tell him he needs to be couragous. (Maybe it was her cunning plan to amp up that whole "overcoming fear" thing?) It was cheesy and out of place. But there was enough success with her character that I can get past it.
So yeah. It is not the best superhero movie I've seen in the last five years, but it was entertaining, and far better than some of the dreck they've been putting out lately.

BCS "Best Of" Poll

Beneath Ceaseless Skies is planning a Year Two anthology, which will include my Driftwood story "Remembering Light." They're currently running a poll to pick one more story for the lineup; head on over to the forums to vote for your top five favorites, and put them into the runoff.

70 days and counting . . . . .

It is now seventy days until the release of With Fate Conspire , and that means it's time for more goodies.

Ten days ago, it was the first excerpt; now it's my research bibliography. (Not the most thrilling thing in the world, I know, but chock full o' Victorian-period material, if you need that kind of thing.)

Also, because I've been too swamped to do anything more with this until now, I'll go ahead and say the contest mentioned last time is still open. I need an icon for A Natural History of Dragons -- something, y'know, natural historian-y and dragon-y -- and if yours wins, I'll send you an arc of Fate.

Save me from my lack of Photoshop skills, Obi-Wan Internetobi; you're my only hope!

lessons from the stolen bike

No, I don't have my bike back. I don't expect I ever will; if it shows up one day, it will be by a coincidence of police work and sheer random chance, and I'll probably donate the thing to some charity. But I have a new bike now, which means that I've had a fresh reminder of how some asshole came in and stole the old one, but at least I don't have to be pissed off every time I think of an errand to run and then remember I have no way to run it.

I want to talk about what I learned from this. But it's not going to be a list of "I should have done X, Y, or Z," because you know what? Fuck that noise. It smacks of "it's my fault my bike got stolen," because all the precautions I took were not enough precautions, or the right precautions. Or maybe I shouldn't have owned a piece of easily stealable transport in the first place. Frankly, that kind of logic can bite me.

What I want to talk about is the stuff others may not know, the stuff that made my investigating officer call me "the perfect victim." Not in the sense of being somebody crime was bound to happen to, but rather the kind of person a cop hopes to deal with, and rarely does.

In other words, if crime happens to you, then here are some things you might want to bear in mind.

So the order of events was this.

I came downstairs to our parking garage and noticed somebody had tried to pry the metal grating off the pedestrian gate. (I say "tried" because they had made a hole, but I did not, at the time, think it was large enough for them to reach through and turn the knob. I was wrong.) We've had trouble before, usually due to the car gate malfunctioning and not closing all the way, so I frowned at that and went on in. I got remarkably close to where I keep my bike before I noticed that, um, no, the bike was not there: just two pieces of chain on the ground.

I swore. Very loudly. (This part is not strictly useful, but it will probably happen anyway.)

I stormed out a different gate, because the first thought in my head was to call management and tell them to fix the broken gate, and by the way my bike got stolen. I don't have their number saved in my phone, so I had to go to the mailboxes and pick up a maintenance form. While I was doing that, I called kniedzw and asked him to come pick me up, because the reason I'd gone down there in the first place was to bike to a doctor's appointment. Then I called maintenance and left a message, and then called the emergency pager for good measure, because it was the Thursday before Memorial Day weekend and if they didn't get on that repair right away, we'd go for days with a busted gate.

Then I went back into my apartment and threw my bike helmet down and swore some more, and posted to LJ. (Yeah. Welcome to the twenty-first century, where that seems like an important thing to do.)

Having posted, it occurred to me that hey, this was a crime. You know who deals with that? Not management. The police.

I knew, even when I called, that it probably wouldn't accomplish much in the long run. But that's no reason not to try. So I looked up the main number, called, and said something along the lines of "uh, I don't know how to go about doing this, 'cause it's never happened to me before, but I'd like to report that my bike was stolen." I explained that the thief had broken into locked property to get at the bike and cut through the chain, and the man on the phone said they would send an officer by.

Since logic was now catching up with me, I then called kniedzw back and said that uh, that appointment? Yeah, I was canceling it. (Which I proceeded to do. If the receptionist had tried to charge me a cancellation fee, I think I would have reached through the phone and torn her face off. But I explained that my transportation had been stolen, and she expressed her sympathies.)

How long was it going to take the cop to arrive? No idea, but it occurred to me that I couldn't really remember the make and model of my bike -- did I have the receipt anywhere? Why yes, I did, in an easily-findable place, so I pulled that out and found it had not only the make, model, and price, but the details for several bike accessories I'd bought at the same time . . . and the serial number.

Then, because I couldn't sit still, I grabbed my digital camera and went back down to photograph the busted door and cut chain.

Fortunately, the cop arrived soon after, or I don't know what I would have found to occupy myself. Post a Craiglist ad looking for a bloodhound, maybe. She noted down the information from my receipt (praising me for still having it and being able to produce it on demand), took her own photos, and questioned me about timing. I was ultimately able to narrow the theft down to a four-and-a-half-hour window, which impressed her: I knew the bike had been there when I returned at about 5:30 a.m. from driving a friend to the airport, and confirmed with kniedzw that the pedestrian gate hadn't been crowbarred open when he left for work at about 11 a.m., and I'd discovered the theft at 3:30 p.m. I was able to tell her the arrangements for the garage, i.e. who had access and how, the allocation of parking spaces, previous troubles in the area, etc. I hadn't even touched the chain, which is when she praised my behavior; apparently most people's instinct is to grab the thing, throw it around, etc (probably while swearing). Because of that, she was able to try lifting prints off it, though she had no success.

(More proof that I am a writer: when she did that, I asked if I could observe and ask questions. By then I was calm enough that "I'd better remember this for posterity" had kicked in.)

I asked the cop what my odds were of getting the bike back, and she shook her head. Pretty much as I expected. But the police will do their best. And when she was gone, or maybe before she came -- can't remember which -- I set kniedzw to work inquiring into what our renters' insurance would do to cover the loss. It's about all I could do, that and post signs warning my fellow residents to make sure they hadn't lost anything. (The cop and I walked around the garage and saw no other signs of theft, but couldn't be sure.)
When my parents' house was burgled several years ago, my father was able to produce receipts for pretty much everything they took -- even items that had been bought in 1977. Me, I'm not that good. But what I learned is this: keep receipts for the expensive things, at least. Make sure you can find them on short notice. Try to pay attention to the world around you, inasmuch as it's possible to teach yourself to be that kind of person, so that you can answer questions when they come. TOUCH NOTHING. Document everything.

And let yourself swear.