Marie Brennan's Blog, page 233

Signal Boost: Vera Nazarian

Details are here, but the short form is that Vera Nazarian (of Norilana Books) has lost her multi-year battle to keep her house, and is having to move across the country with her sick mother and four pets.

Norilana is the publisher that puts out the Clockwork Phoenix anthologies, all three of which include stories from yours truly. ("A Mask of Flesh,", "Once a Goddess,", and "The Gospel of Nachash.") I've read all three of them, and think they're quite excellent volumes, quite apart from my personal investment. Norilana has also done a number of other books, including the continuation of the Sword & Sorceress anthology series, a few classic novels, some fantasy, some science fiction -- check out Vera's post for a whole lot more. She could use the business right now, and Norilana's got some great stuff, so if you're inclined to pick up new reading material, head over and take a look.

AROTGOTTVSP,AWBSNSFAPOAPCFTFG

A Review of the Game of Thrones TV Series Premiere, As Written by Someone Not Starting from a Position of A Priori Contempt For the Fantasy Genre

(LJ won't let me have a post title that long.)

I thought it was pretty good. The three of us watching who had read the books thought it was a faithful and effective adaptation of the source material; the fourth member of the audience, who had not read the books, said it succeeded at getting her interested, which is what you want from a premiere. Lots of good casting choices, and because it's a series, it can take the time it needs to build up the characters and the world by methods more gradual than Ye Olde Info-Dumpe.

It being HBO, of course, they were not shy about showing you the nekkid, and things that were faintly disturbing on the page become moreso when you actually see them happening. (In particular, it's hard to miss how problematic the Dothraki are.) But I didn't feel they were gratuitously amping the R-rated stuff up just for the sake of spectacle, which is my usual HBO complaint.

I definitely want to see more. Though we'll probably go the route of recording several eps and then watching them in one go, rather than doling it out an hour each week.



And that, New York Times, is how you do it. You get a reviewer who actually likes the genre to give you an opinion. Not somebody who is convinced of the worthlessness of fantasy before they ever sit down to watch the show. Please remedy this error in the future.

The DWJ Project: The Lives of Christopher Chant

After much hemming and hawing, I decided that I needed to start the re-read with The Lives of Christopher Chant, as it was -- so far as I recall -- the first DWJ book I ever read.

So I think what I'm going to do with this project is post an entry for each book, and put the non-spoilery stuff up top, then hide the spoilery stuff behind a cut. (I'll put in a warning, for those reading this by RSS feed or other methods that might show the whole entry at once.)

Mind you, it's hard to know what to say. I love this book in that unreserved way you can generally only get by forming your attachment in childhood, when things can bypass your brain and go straight to your heart. The easy thing to do is point you at the recommendation I wrote back when I was doing those on a monthly basis -- with two corrections, those being that I spelled Throgmorten's name wrong there (how could I make such a mistake?) and somewhat mis-spoke on what constitutes the unifying thread of the story. It's really more about Christopher's spirit travels than it is about the Chrestomanci business.

If you want an introduction to Diana Wynne Jones' work, I'd say this is a good place to start. It has a lot of her hallmarks: children with more power than they're initially aware of, hard bits the story doesn't flinch away from, choices with consequences. It also sets you up for the rest of the Chrestomanci books, all of which take place later, though half of which (Charmed Life, Witch Week, and the Magicians of Caprona) were written sooner. (When I get to Charmed Life, I'll have more to say about the chronological relationship of those two.) I really love the concept of the Related Worlds, and the notion behind just how nine-lived enchanters come to exist, and I also love the way the story seems to go beyond the boundaries of the frame. Just how did Cosimo Chant and Miranda Argent end up married, anyway? What happens with Fennig and Oneir after Christopher leaves school? What's the tragic tale of Mordecai Roberts and Miss Rosalie, before the book begins? We get hints, but nothing extensive, and if you tell me there's fanfic out there answering those questions, I won't be at all surprised.

But the stuff I really want to say involves specifics, so let's go behind the cut for that.

It's interesting to wonder how many of my own narrative habits can be traced back to this book, or whether I'm just inventing patterns. Names having significance? I know I always get chills when Christopher calls Mordecai Tacroy, after they figure out Gabriel's lives have gone to Series Eleven. Child characters getting to kick ass with their skills? I read this several years before Ender's Game, though that's the book I usually point to as my exemplar of the motif. Male characters being tall and dark-haired? That seems to be my brain's default (see Exhibit A: all the Merrimans when I ran Memento -- one of whom was named Christopher), though I usually try to prod myself away from it. I know "Once a Goddess" had its roots in an anthropological article about Kumari, but it's entirely possible I glommed onto that idea because my brain had been primed for it by the situation with the Living Asheth.

Scenes I love: "EMPTY YOUR POCKETS, CHANT!" The Goddess' portent from Asheth. Christopher lighting his seventh life on fire after giving it to the Dright. Everything involving Throgmorten. Everything with Tacroy after the Castle staff arrest him. I heart Tacroy in general, and his steady, consistent lying as they question him makes me go squish inside.

It's definitely interesting, the hard stuff tucked away inside this story (as is generally the case with DWJ's books). She doesn't linger on it too hard, but it's there, in a way I can't help but think is very carefully calibrated for the youth of its audience: if you're not ready to see it, you can glide right past, but all the important stuff is there once you see it. The butchering of the mermaid tribe, for example -- this time through, I particularly noticed Tacroy pointing out that while he didn't know at the time, he also didn't quit once he found out. I don't think it's just because of the Dright's orders; the more I think about him working at that job for years, the more I find myself pondering what it did to his character. The Living Asheth business is another good example: glancingly horrific as you read it, increasingly so the more you stop and think about it.

The one thing that doesn't come across as appallingly as it might is the business of Christopher dying (six times during the course of the book). There's definitely a bit in the middle there, when he breaks his neck twice in quick succession, where the general effect is pretty flippant. Which is understandable, given that he's got nine lives . . . but to the extent that there's horror in that idea, I have to imagine it for myself. We never get much sense that Christopher is psychologically affected by impalement, massive head trauma, two broken necks, and twice being lit on fire, even when he doesn't know what's going on. To some extent that can probably be credited to the way he keeps dying in the Anywheres, and therefore thinks of it as a dream -- but aside from the bit where he careens all over the hospital shrieking that he's missing cricket practice, he takes it in stride to a surprising degree.
Anyway. I love this book, and I love Christopher; in fact, my disappointment with Conrad's Fate can largely be summed up as "not enough Christopher, dammit." I'll end with a question for those of you who have read the book: how old do you think he is, anyway? A note at the front of the edition I have now says it all takes place at least twenty-five years before Charmed Life, which at least gives me a ballpark range for his age in that book, but I didn't notice any numbers being put on either the time period (turn of the century-ish?) or his age in this novel. I'd guess he's maybe ten or so? But I'm curious to see what other people think.

This month at SF Novelists

I yell at Aaron Sorkin for sounding like a pretentious ass.

Comment over there; no registration required; if you're a first-time commentator give me a bit of time to fish your post out of the queue.

I think I'd prefer a Marlovian film.

It had to happen eventually, I suppose.

SCENE: The inside of swan_tower 's head

SWAN: Let's go look at movie trailers. Anonymous -- what, like the group?

PAGE: <loads>

SWAN: No, it's something set in Elizabethan England! With Derek Jacobi and other cool people! <reads further in synopsis> . . . oh, shit. It's a "Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare's plays" story.

TRAILER: <plays>

SWAN: Old London Bridge! <swoons in a fit of historical geekery>

DIRECTOR: <is Roland Emmerich>

SWAN: grk.

IMDb: This movie's theory is apparently Oxfordian, since Rhys Ifans has top billing, and he's playing Edward de Vere.

SWAN: <sigh> But . . . London Bridge . . . Elizabethan geekery . . . but Roland Emmerich. And Oxfordianism. <more sigh> Well, at least it seems I'm over my knee-jerk "please god no more" reaction to the sixteenth century. And that's something. Whether or not I can bring myself to watch this movie . . . we'll have to see.

Writing Fight Scenes: Maps

[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]

After a delay of much longer duration than expected, I finally have for you a follow-up post on the topic of where to set the combat, which will function as our segue into craft-related aspects of writing fight scenes.

If the layout and contents of the environment are important to the scene -- as they should be -- then you need to have a very clear grasp on their relative positions. It doesn't guarantee you'll communicate that information effectively to the reader, but believe me: if you don't have that clear grasp, your odds of communicating the necessary information go way down.

To that end, I suggest making a map.

It doesn't have to be fancy. Mine, in fact, are hideous. Let me show you, with three examples from Warrior (the novel formerly known as Doppelganger):








The top one is for the scene I mentioned in a previous post, the face-off between Mirage and the four Thornbloods who jump her in the common room of an inn. The letters identify the combatants, in their opening positions; M is Mirage, X are the Thornbloods. The exterior door is in the bottom wall; upper left marks the exit to the kitchen, and upper right marks the staircase. The eight things vaguely resembling rectangles are tables. At this late remove, I can't say for sure, but I think the scribble above the arrow coming off that lower right X represents the wet patch of floor and bucket of soapy water Mirage kicks over later in the fight.

With the second map, I got fancier; I blame the fact that I wrote the related scene right after getting back from an archaeological field school, and I had topography on the brain. This is a chase scene, where Mirage et al. get ambushed by a group of Cousins, and all those little cuneiform marks are me telling myself in which direction the slopes are angled when the horses go charging off the road. I think the bit in the upper right corner is me doing a cross-sectional view of that bend in the road. Not a fight, per se, but as physical action it has many of the same practical requirements.

The third map is the house in which Miryo is imprisoned, and I created it to plan Mirage's assault. Again, we have a cross-sectional view, this time so I can keep track of where Mirage is climbing; then there are two floor plans, with an M for Miryo and C's for a pair of Cousins.

As you can see, these are purely utilitarian. They primarily exist to mark boundaries and obstacles -- walls, slopes, large pieces of furniture -- and keep them from accidentally wandering off to the other side of the combat space because you got turned around as to which way your character was headed. The less specific you are about the movement of a fight, the less necessary a map tends to be; if your scene is primarily about the viewpoint character's psychological reaction to violence, you may not need to remember whether the staircase was to the right or the left as she came in the door. But the more you bring spatial details into play, the more it helps to keep a record of them.

These particular maps are remarkably light in arrows; I thought I remembered the first one having a lot more. (Possibly there was another version, not in my box o' papers from that book.) If a fight moves widely around the combat space or has multiple participants, I will frequently scribble arrows all over the page, to keep track of where everybody is -- it's really helpful to do the map itself in pen, and the arrows in pencil, so you can erase them at will. Thanks to my stage combat background, sometimes I'll designate the sides as downstage, stage left, etc, and then jot down shorthand notes to myself about the action in the fight: "M runs DS, knocks #3's blade wide SR, steps in, breaks elbow." Whatever. The point is to do something that will help me keep track of positions and movement, so I can visualize it well enough to then relay the necessary info to the reader. Otherwise, I'll come back to read the scene the next day and have no idea how it looked in my head. And if I can't re-create that, the odds of the reader doing so are pretty small.
All right, there's that hurdle done with. Hopefully I'll finish the rest of the posts in a more timely fashion. From here on out, it'll be more specifics of craft rather than broad considerations, though we'll definitely be referring back to those as we go.

more Scion tidbits

I'm a bit proud of this idea from the game I'm running, so I wanted to share. It will make the most sense to those who already know the cosmological setup for White Wolf's Scion system, but for everybody else, I can quote the nutshell description I gave when I posted about my concept for the game:

The underlying enemies in this scenario are the Titans, the parents of the gods themselves. They're truly impersonal, elemental powers: the "body" of the Greater Titan of Fire, for example, is more or less equivalent to the D&D Elemental Plane of Fire. However, Greater Titans can manifest more concretely as avatars, which are god-like beings reflecting a particular aspect of their concept. Prometheus, for example, is an avatar of the Greater Titan of Fire; so is Kagu-tsuchi, but they embody different things. The Titans aren't precisely evil, but they're not friendly to the world, and their influence usually isn't a good thing.

Got that? So, it mentions in the books that some of the Titans were never bound. Hundun because it's the Greater Titan of Chaos and can't be bound; Logos because the Greater Titan of the Word struck a deal with the gods. Etc.

I was trying to decide what to do with the Mississippi River, cosmologically speaking. I failed to turn up any useful info on how tribes along its length viewed the river -- no deity names or anything -- and I knew "Old Man River" was a relatively late concept, but at the same time it seemed necessary and appropriate to have some kind of unifying entity for use in the game.

What I settled on was this: that Iteru, the Great River, is a Greater Titan, and it, like Logos, struck a deal with the gods way back in Ye Old Mythic Times. Part of its body now serves as the Godrealm for the Pesedjet, the Egyptian gods. (In the game books, Iteru is the name of that realm, and it's also the Egyptian name for the Nile.) Major rivers around the world are avatars of Iteru, and they individually formed contracts with the gods of early civilizations along their banks: the Tigris and the Euphrates in Mesopotamia, the Ganges in India, the Yellow River in China, etc. Old Man River is just a recent (from the viewpoint of game-time) name for the Titan avatar that is the Mississippi River, which hasn't had a contract with any society since the decline of the Mississippian culture exemplified by Cahokia. But since this game is in part about the attempted land- and people-grab of a whole bunch of pantheons, you can bet they're all courting Old Man River's favor . . . .

Anyway, this is what happens when I let Archaeologist Brain out to play with Folklorist Brain. I come up with ways to mythologize and then translate into RPG terms the frequent pattern of early civilizations forming on the banks of rivers.

Next task: figure out what I'm doing with 1876 New Orleans.

The Diana Wynne Jones Project

Okay, folks. So I mentioned a while ago that I think I'm going to re-read the complete works of Diana Wynne Jones.

How should I go about doing this?

She wrote multiple different series, and a whole lot of stand-alone books. Should I read them in chronological order of publication? That would, in some cases, break up series by rather large amounts. Read all the series first, then tackle the stand-alones, in chronological order or not? Go at it any which way, grabbing whatever tickles my fancy? I'm really not sure how best to approach it. The one thing I'm sure of is that I'll start with either Fire and Hemlock (beause it made me a writer) or The Lives of Christopher Chant (because it was the first one I read), but recommendations for what to do after that would be welcome.



For the first time, it occurs to me to wonder if my subconscious had The Lives of Christopher Chant in mind when it came up with the title for "The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe."

more short story!

Pretty much everything I've sold lately is coming out this month. Dancing the Warrior , "Love, Cayce," and now "Coyotaje," in Ekaterina Sedia's new anthology Bewere the Night . The TOC includes people like Cherie Priest, Holly Black, Elizabeth Hand, Genevieve Valentine, Marissa Lingen . . . I could keep going, but you can see the whole list for yourself. I don't have my author copy yet, so I haven't read it, but I'm pretty excited about this one.

Also, don't forget about the giveaway for Dancing the Warrior. All you have to do is let me know what your Hunter name would be, and you'll be entered to win a signed pair of the doppelganger novels.

And now, back to the page proof mines.

A Special Report

I've been told I have to repost this from kniedzw 's journal. Apparently the logic is is "so your readers will know how crazy you are," but you guys already know that, right? Right. So we don't need evidence, and we can just move on.

. . . <sigh> No. I know teleidoplex . She'll come after me if I don't follow through. Very well, then, I give you a bit of domestic silliness.

***

Date: Fri, 8 Apr 2011 19:37:27 -0400 (EDT)
From: swan_tower
To: kniedzw
Subject:
The following is an analysis of the t-shirt wearing habits of Kyle N., as based on laundry data collected since the beginning of calendar year 2011. It covers 19 loads of laundry, and includes all t-shirt content during that period except one load of laundry from mid-February (omitted because it was washed and folded by the subject himself, offering the commission's investigator no chance to record the relevant data).

During the period under study, there were 91 distinct t-shirt wearing events, as documented by the number of shirts that appeared in the laundry basket. However, those events were distributed across only 30 individual shirts, most of them seeing wear multiple times. The distribution is as follows:

7 shirts were worn once
6 shirts were worn twice
4 shirts were worn three times
8 shirts were worn four times
4 shirts were worn five times
1 shirt was worn eight times

A full list of these shirts may be found in Appendix A of the report.

The mean number of wearings for a given shirt was 3.03. The median was 3.5. The mode was 4. A census of the dresser drawer reveals that the subject possesses 98 t-shirts in three drawers; 68 of these were not worn at all during the period under study, which amounts to 69% of the total.

Breaking the total shirt collection down by color, we find the following categories:

white [1] -- 28 shirts
black [2] -- 27 shirts
blue -- 18 shirts
grey [2] -- 10 shirts
red -- 6 shirts
green -- 3 shirts
brown -- 3 shirts
cream [1] -- 1 shirt
orange -- 1 shirt
multicolored -- 1 shirt

[1] A large number of the white shirts were sufficiently discolored as to make it difficult to separate them from shirts which are cream-colored. For the purposes of this study, the only shirt counted as "cream" is the alphabet shirt, a recent purchase whose color is not in doubt.
[2] Similarly, many of the black shirts have faded to a sufficient degree that they may arguably be called grey. Two borderline cases were placed into the latter category; otherwise the investigator gave semi-black shirts the benefit of the doubt.

White shirts returned the most extreme statistics: they comprise the largest category in the drawers, but only one was worn during the period of the study, on a single occasion. White shirts therefore comprise 3.3% of t-shirts worn, and 1.1% of t-shirt wearing events; furthermore, only 3.6% of the white t-shirt collection saw use during this period.

The statistics for black shirts are potentially complicated by the subject's ownership of two identical black Strange Horizons shirts, which cannot be distinguished by any practical means. However, the commission found that the two were regularly found in conjunction, both appearing in the laundry basket during any given period, so this analysis assumes an equal distribution of wearing across the two.

Counting the identical pair as two separate items, 12 black shirts saw use during this period, which is 44.4% of the total black shirt collection. They made up 40% of t-shirts worn, and 42.9% of t-shirt wearing events.

Taking colored shirts as a single grouping, 16 saw wear, comprising 37.2% of the total colored-shirt collection; they constituted 53% of t-shirts worn, and 47.3% of t-shirt wearing events. Breaking them down into individual categories, the numbers are thus:

blue: 6 worn; 33.3% of blue shirt collection; 20% of shirts worn; 30% of wearing events
grey: 4 worn; 40% of grey shirt collection; 13.3% of shirts worn; 8.8% of wearing events
red: 2 worn; 33.3% of red shirt collection; 6.7% of shirts worn; 6.6% of wearing events
brown: 2 worn; 66.6% of brown shirt collection; 6.7% of shirts worn; 9.9% of wearing events
green: 2 worn; 66.6% of green shirt collection; 6.7% of shirts worn; 4.4% of wearing events
cream: 1 worn; 100% of cream shirt collection; 3.3% of shirts worn; 4.4% of wearing events

It should be noted that the most popular shirt in the subject's collection is blue: the Oshiro dojo shirt, which saw eight distinct uses during this period.

The data strongly supports an "accessibility" model of t-shirt selection: the specimens worn most often are those in the top layer or two of a drawer. T-shirts placed deeper in the drawer are only worn when those from superposed layers are in the laundry basket, making laundry frequency the biggest determinant of t-shirt-wearing diversity. This is a self-reinforcing cycle, as the shirts which have been worn will be returned to the top of a drawer, where they are almost certain to be chosen again before long. Two factors disrupted this pattern: first, the purchase of new shirts during the study introduced "false variety," broadening the number of distinct items worn without involving a larger percentage of the existing collection. Second, in late March or early April the subject folded a stack of black shirts, but left them on top of the dresser rather than placing them in a drawer. This caused two previously unworn shirts and one that had seen only a single incident of use to be introduced into the rotation. Otherwise, the only factor likely to produce much "churn" seems to be the delay of laundry, which is undesirable for other reasons.

The commission firmly recommends a substantial reduction in the t-shirt population. The white shirts, in particular, make up almost an entire drawer which sees only the most negligible use. Based on the evidence, the subject could get by with only thirty t-shirts; however, the commission recognizes the undesirability of such a large reduction in the eyes of the subject. It therefore recommends fifty to sixty t-shirts, the number having been chosen on the following basis: such a collection will fit into two dresser drawers (freeing one up for other kinds of clothing and thereby simplifying the broader clothing-storage situation in the bedroom), while still leaving room for new acquisitions, thus forestalling the need for further cuts in the near future.

The criteria by which the selection is to be made are left up to the discretion of the subject; however, the commission will make bold to offer the following suggestions. Based on the subject's personality, it seems most advisable to concentrate t-shirt retention in the following areas:

1) Shirts with significant personal meaning (e.g. Boston Red Sox World Series)
2) Shirts with humor and/or conversational value (e.g. those acquired from Woot)

Reductions might be focused on other categories:

1) Shirts which have seen significant wear and tear (e.g. holes, fraying collars, etc)
2) Shirts with generic personal meaning (e.g. random conference swag)
3) Duplicate shirts

The actual approach to reduction, however, is left up to the discretion of the subject. The commission welcomes discussion of the topic, and hopes that the assembled data proves useful.


APPENDIX -- Wearing incidents by individual shirt

black shirts:
Bubba Ho-Tep -- 3
Jim's Big Ego -- 3
Penguin -- 4
EFF -- 4
Strange Horizons (2) -- 10
LISA -- 5
Watchmen -- 4
Tori Amos -- 2
Pi -- 2
Dublin -- 1
Freedom -- 1


colored shirts:
-blue-
Respect -- 1
ICFA -- 4
Akamai -- 2
dojo -- 8
Jaws -- 3
Terminus -- 2

-grey-
raven -- 1
Delorean -- 4
future -- 2
Batman -- 1

-red-
Mesoamericans -- 4
Communist Party --2

-brown-
huckleberry -- 5
Usenix -- 4

-cream-
alphabet -- 4


white shirts:
dojo -- 1
Two disclaimers: first, I never took a statistics class, and second, I take no responsibility for any negative consequences that may arise from others applying similar methodology to their own spouses. Use at your own risk.