Marie Brennan's Blog, page 234

some Friday fun

I almost used a writing icon for this, then realized it really ought to be the Roman d20.

For your Friday delectation, issue #22 of the Intergalactic Medicine Show has gone live, containing my story "Love, Cayce."

Dear Mom and Dad,

The good news is, nobody's dead anymore.

Yeah, this would be one of the goofier stories I've ever written. Letters to home from what amounts to the kid of some D&D adventurers, giving her parents a series of heart attacks as they find out what their wayward offpsring has been up to.

I've got to say, props to Dean Spencer, who appears to have done the art: this story got slotted into the issue's lineup on very short notice, which means he must have put together that painting on even shorter notice, and yet it matches the story quite precisely. Once you orient yourself -- the dragon is up and the elf is down -- that becomes the scene where Shariel is falling off a thousand-foot cliff, pursued by a dragon, and casting the spell I wasn't allowed to call "Feather Fall" because it would have been a copyright violation. :-) Nice work!

The rest of the TOC includes stories from Aliette de Bodard, Tony Pi, Brad Torgersen, George Lippert, and David Lubar, along with other goodies. Aliette's story in particular got some gorgeous art. Check it out!

desk query

(Yeah, I'm posty today. It happens.)

I'd like to hear from anybody out there who uses a standing desk, either of the static or adjustable (i.e. sit/stand) type. My present desk is fine, but it probably won't survive another move, so I'm thinking of making a new one my "investment in career" purchase for this new book deal. And there seems to be a growing amount of interest in the notion of standing desks -- claims for their health benefits ranging from the simply logical to the possible snake oil -- so I'm kind of tempted to get one of these, or something similar. If nothing else, it seems pretty well-proven that one of the best ergonomic things you can do is not stay in the same position forever (regardless of how good that position is), so the option to adjust is appealing.

But I've never tried to use a standing desk, beyond brief encounters with computer terminals in libraries, so I don't know if I would like it. Any anecdata on the topic would be appreciated.

borrowed from gollumgollum

This is, hands-down, the weirdest psychology test I've ever taken.

Seriously, half the questions had me going "AAAAAAAGHHHH whut?" They make no sense. And it's all the harder because the instructions tell you not to tie the shapes to "any narrative or storyline," which is like telling me to breathe without using my lungs. But I persevered, wondering sometimes if I was picking answers utterly at random, and then . . . .

Verbally and mentally fluid, you are refreshing and illuminating to those around you. This is occasionally somewhat discounted by the obvious pleasure that you take in exercising your mental acuity. Although generally peaceful you can often take a verbally aggressive tact in relations with the world, which can often be misunderstood by those around you. Innovative in the extreme, you can often think yourself right out of the correct answer to a given problem. Many times you are referred to as your own worst enemy. You tire very quickly of routine and so make poor clerks or administrative help. You also have no respect for authority and little patience for those you regard as inferior, most especially those in charge. Experimentation is your watchword and can occasionally lead to experience for its own sake and shallow decadence. Your thought can sometimes be scattered and disconnected.

. . . which, um, yeah. I wouldn't agree on all counts (I'm not so much about experimentation), but it's close enough to be unnerving. Makes me feel like the test was a bit of flashy misdirection while somebody picked my psychological pocket.

(Especially since I just added, then deleted, a [sic] after "tact" in that diagnosis. It should be "tack." Grumble mutter </pedant>.)

Anyway, if you feel like melting your brain, the test only takes a couple of minutes -- and that's if, like me, you have to wrestle with the tendency to go "well maybe that big triangle is a ship and then the little one is about to ram no dammit I'm not suppposed to make up stories." It probably goes faster without that.

huh . . . upgrades

So you know how sometimes Amazon gets a wrong piece of information into its book database? The wrong format, or release date, or cover copy, or whatever.

That didn't happen here.

With Fate Conspire really is going to be a hardcover.

It's kind of awesome to get that news right after I posted about the celebration of my five-year anniversary of Realio Trulio Being a Novelist. :-) And it prodded me to stop waffling over the lovely, lovely icons you guys made for me and finally pick one, with victory going at last to airo25 . (This was a hard decision, y'all. So props to everybody else who made me an icon, too.) airo25 , e-mail me your address at marie [dot] brennan [at] gmail [dot] com, and I'll make a note to send you an ARC of Fate when they come in.

My first hardcover. Maybe I can use that to stave off the tedium of the page proofs, which arrived yesterday. :-) Whee!!!!!

Not a third book, but it will have to do.

Five years ago this month, my first novel was published, under its original title of Doppelganger .

In celebration of that anniversary, I dusted off -- by which I mean "rewrote from the ground up" -- an old novella related to that series, and sold it to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. The first part of Dancing the Warrior just went live, and the second part will be going up in two weeks, with the next issue.

But wait! There's more!

You can enter to win a signed set of both doppelganger novels (the new edition, wherein they are known as Warrior and Witch). I'll be giving away two sets, one for each half of the story. All you have to do is comment on the story thread, telling me what your Hunter name would be. Full rules are here; the important bit is that you do need to be a registered forum user, so that we can properly identify entrants. But registration is quick and easy.

Five years. Jeebus. Where did they go?

Natural History research

So, I mentioned before that I have a new series.

It will surprise nobody who's been around for the Onyx Court books that I intend to do a bit of research. :-)

NOT AS MUCH AS BEFORE. (Thank god.) But there are some things I want to read about, to get some good material for compost into my head, so this is the first of a couple of posts asking for recommendations.

The first topic up is, of course, the discipline of natural history. Can anybody recommend a good biography of Darwin, something that focuses on the fieldwork end of things? His education, the voyage of the Beagle, that kind of thing; I'm less concerned with what happened after he published his theories. Or books on other natural historians, or the development of the field. I've got a few things to read already, but knowing the internets, it's entirely possible that somebody reading this post has a random love for the topic of nineteenth-century natural history, and knows exactly what I ought to be reading to understand it. If that's you -- or if it isn't, but you know a couple of things you'd recommend -- speak up in the comments.

If you're not familiar with this topic at all, stay tuned; there will be other requests to come.

Subscriptions!

An Archive of Our Own has, after much anticipation, reached a point where they can implement subscriptions. This means that AO3 users can set their accounts up to be notified when a writer they like posts a new story. (I have no idea if I'm likely to post anything before next Yuletide, but the nice thing about subscriptions is it's no big deal if I don't; you just won't get notifications. I'm [image error] russian_blue , if you care.)

I'll have to see how this particular implementation of the idea works out in practice, but man, I still want something like it for pro fiction. Obviously it's harder in some ways to implement -- the AO3 is a single database; a short story subscription manager would have to scrape updates from a bunch of different online magazines -- but if there was a central service I could use to be alerted when short story authors I like publish something new, something along the lines of an RSS reader, I would sign up so fast my keyboard would be smoking.

But I wouldn't know where to begin in coding something like that. So I sit here and make begging eyes, and hope that if I mention it enough times, the idea will spread until it lands in the brain of somebody who can do it.

Motherhood and Bujold

I mentioned in my last booklog update that I had thoughts about Ekaterin, which needed to be off in a separate post. This is that post; it contains spoilers for the Vorkosigan series, so I'm putting the actual content behind a cut.

The short form is, Bujold clearly cares about writing stories where family and children are something that happen to the characters, and where motherhood is treated as worth writing about. Except that I don't feel like she really succeeds in that mission -- a statement which I think I can only make sense of by following my thoughts through their process of formation.

It started with Drou. I really liked her as a character, and the dynamic between her and Kou -- them living in a society where men are ideally warriors and women are not, but he's physically disabled and she's an Amazon. It made me happy when zunger reassured me there would be "plenty more" of those two later on in the series, because I wanted more exploration of the lack of choices Drou had, and maybe her daughters getting to have more choices.

. . . but sorry, zunger , I have to disagree with your assessment. There isn't "plenty more" of them; there's hardly any, except in A Civil Campaign, where their role is pretty much restricted to concerns about their daughters' marriages. We're told Drou is still athletic, and later on it's clear she taught her daughters to defend themselves, but nobody has picked up her baton and run onward with it. Drou's societal role basically goes from "bodyguard to the Emperor of Barrayar" to "mother," and it disappoints me.

Then there's Cordelia. Who is awesome, and the heroine of two novels . . . but her story ends with Miles' birth. After that, she's a side character in his story. She does some cool things (handling Mark; smacking Kou and Drou upside the head), but she doesn't get point of view, and isn't a protagonist anymore.

Which wouldn't have bugged me, except for what happened with Ekaterin. When we first see that woman, she's a pov character; in fact, Komarr starts with her, before we even get to Miles, and I seem to recall the book ends with her, too. The only other character to be given that kind of prominence is Mark, in Mirror Dance. She doesn't take much of Miles' shit, and she has a Crowning Moment of Awesome with the gravitic thingy, all of which made me quite like her as a character. And it pleased me that she went on being interesting in A Civil Campaign, with another CMoA at the end.

. . . but then there was Diplomatic Immunity. In which she doesn't get pov, and doesn't have much effect on the story, except for Miles to worry about her safety and getting her home in time to decant the kids.

. . . and then there was Cryoburn, in which we get one kid-laden message from home, and that's it.

It's hard not to walk away from that feeling like motherhood means the end of your story. (Heck, even Elena takes a step backward out of the story when she marries Baz, and a bigger one when they retire to have children.) I know this is the Miles Vorkosigan series, not Ekaterin's or Cordelia's or anybody else's, but some characters have gotten co-equal protagonist status with Miles. Once I've invested in those people as semi-independent actors in the plot, watching them get relegated to the sidelines is disappointing. I can accept it better with Mark; after all, his mission in life is to have a life away from his brother. But Ekaterin, I feel, should be there: at Miles' side, doing narratively interesting stuff like she did before. God knows she has the security clearance for it, and Bujold, I think, knows that there's valuable intel to be gathered through social channels. It could have worked very well in Diplomatic Immunity, and the failure to take that opportunity really weakened that book. Cryoburn's more intense lack of Ekaterin makes it look even worse.

Mind you, it's possible to make the argument that fatherhood means the end of your story nearly as much. Aral fades into the background even more than Cordelia does, and Kou ends up next to Drou on the sidelines. Baz leaves with Elena. But there are counter-arguments in all of those cases: Aral and Baz were never as prominent in the story as their eventual wives, so had less distance to fall. None of the men had protagonist status like Cordelia or Ekaterin. And of course, Miles doesn't stop being interesting when he has kids -- because it's his series, and if Bujold stops telling stories about him, then the party's over.

It's just enough of a problem to annoy me. I really, really hope that whatever Vorkosigan book comes next reverses the trend, and puts Ekaterin back into the story in some interesting fashion. Otherwise this disappointment is going to stay with me, and I'd really prefer if it didn't.

Books read, March 2011

No, the shortness of this isn't some April Fool's joke. I was playing Dragon Age II this month.


The Path of Daggers, Robert Jordan. Analytical re-read, discussed here.

Memory, Lois McMaster Bujold. In which Bujold finally managed to sink a knife between my ribs and twist. (Which is a good thing. I am a sucker for putting characters through hell.) That scene between Miles and Illyan was painful to read, in the best possible way. And I can't say I'm sorry to see the series make its pivot into the latter half; the Naismith space-adventure thing was fun, but Mirror Dance was the only book out of that set that really hit my buttons. Then again, fairness requires me to note that the first half of the series is also mostly the early half, so my impressions have as much to do with Bujold's skill as the content of the books. Anyway, all of this is to say that Memory is my favorite of the lot, and will probably remain so.

Komarr, Lois McMaster Bujold. It's funny, how much I could predict just based on the fact that Ekaterin had pov in this book. Fortunately, I quite liked her -- more than I ever really liked Quinn or Taura or Elena or Rowan or the rest. They weren't bad characters, but I never invested in their happiness in the right way for this. I also liked the more political plot, and the running semi-joke about Miles' ImpSec habits. All in all, very enjoyable.

A Civil Campaign, Lois McMaster Bujold. In which EVERYBODY gets point of view! As I've been telling people since I read it, this is the sort of thing you can write when you're ten books into an ongoing series with a widely beloved cast of characters; in fact, it sort of requires you to be ten books etc. The dinner party. The dinner party. Trainwrecks of that sort can only happen when there's a deep foundation of history between the characters, history that wasn't set up just to make this one event happen, but gets dragooned into making everything explode. And I really liked, as in Memory, forcing Miles to admit and deal with his mistakes, rather than taking the easy way out like so many narratives do.

Winterfair Gifts, Lois McMaster Bujold. In which . . . Roic gets point of view? Okay. I don't know if it's Bujold or me that makes me not really care about most of the attractions between her characters, but laying that aside, this reminded me of "The Zeppo" from Buffy: off to the side here there's GIANT PLOT that could fill an entire novel, but mostly we're just going to wave at it while telling another story. I think the effect worked well in this case, and Roic went from "uh, who?" to a character I like.

Falling Free, Lois McMaster Bujold. After having read this much of the series, my completionist streak would not let me skip this one, even though I knew it wouldn't involve any of the characters I knew. It was fine, but forgettable.

Diplomatic Immunity, Lois McMaster Bujold. So, I won't go into this in detail because I think it needs a separate post, but it bugs me that Ekaterin wasn't a pov character. I think that's a missed opportunity on Bujold's part: it would have added depth to the plot, as well as continuing to treat Ekaterin like a protagonist. As it was, she felt sidelined. On the whole I found the book okay, though; I just wish the unpacking of the ba's plot hadn't been treated like a footnote at the end. (Which is a place where Ekaterin pov could have helped: she didn't spend the end of the plot out of commission.)

Cryoburn, Lois McMaster Bujold. As books to end on (in the sense that there are no more right now, and I'll probably have to wait a while for the next), this one . . . wasn't good. Kibou-daini didn't have the setting complexity of Cetaganda or even Quaddiespace; it was just that one central thing (cryonics) with a few Japanese details hung on the frame. The plot was diffuse -- one thread having to do with Komarr, another local to Kibou-daini -- and neither managed to be very compelling to me. Expanding to Roic's and Jin's points of view didn't bring a concomitant growth in complexity, especially since I wanted more about the characters I already knew. And aside from the very, very end, not much of this felt like it had consequence for the series. I would probably be more forgiving if this wasn't the last impression I'll get for some time, but it made a weak note to end on.

So, I have managed, in three months flat, to read all of the Vorkosiverse stuff, except maybe some short stories floating around the ether. Verdict: fun to the degree that I will almost certainly read the next book when it comes out, but not so much that I expect I'll go back and re-read any of it (except maybe Memory). Bujold is very good at not letting her characters weasel out of the bad implications of their actions, and I do appreciate that. I also feel like I've learned a lot about writing this type of series, where composition order and internal chronology do not line up. At some point I'll probably give The Curse of Chalion a try, but first I should probably take a break and read other authors. After all, there are all these shiny books clamoring for my attention . . . .

Apparently this is Amazon's day to post Surprise Cover Art.

Hey, look! I seem to have finalized cover art!

Y'all know what that means: it's time for another "please make me an icon, because I suck at image manipulation" contest. Something featuring a crop or resizing or whatever of that cover, plus the title, like ceosanna did for A Star Shall Fall . Winner will get an ARC of the book when I have one, or a copy of Star, according to their choice.

Eeee! I can haz cover!