Marie Brennan's Blog, page 247

concerning radio silence

I turned in a novel, and then my sister left for Japan, and then I had a house-guest, and now I'm heading off for Sirens. So the lack of posting is likely to continue for a few days yet; I may post updates during the con, but in all likelihood you'll get the story after the fact. (Among other things, I have a keynote address to finish writing, a reading to practice that requires a certain stunt, and a workshop to plan out. So that will have me busy in my off moments.)

I am nervous and very excited. This is my first time as a Guest of Honor; I can only hope I do justice to the role.

I finally finished Avatar.

After much hiatus-ing along the way, I've finally seen the entirety of Avatar: The Last Airbender. (TV series, natch -- not the Shyamalan film. Though I laughed and laughed at how the episode "The Ember Island Players" seemed to presage the movie's awfulness.)

I very much enjoyed the show: the characters, and most especially the world it takes place in, which has all kinds of nifty little details squirreled away in the corners. Apparently Nickelodeon is planning a new twelve-episode series to air next year -- set seventy-five years later, focusing on Korra, a Water Tribe girl who's the new Avatar -- and I am very much looking forward to that.

It was interesting, though, watching a show which fundamentally was written for a kid audience. I read a decent amount of YA, but this was aimed at a demographic aged 6-11 (according to Wikipedia), and they play in a whole different ballpark. I could feel the difference: the show still grapped with interesting and sometimes difficult ideas, but the way it did so was . . . simpler.

Which feels like a criticism, maybe even a dismissal, and that's the part I find interesting. I can't find any words to describe what I'm thinking of that don't sound like pejoratives. It's simpler. The answers come more easily. They aren't explored in as much depth.

But that isn't a bad thing. How many adults got hooked on that series? I'm nowhere near the only one. Just because we weren't the intended audience didn't mean we couldn't enjoy it. If it didn't reach quite the same depths of grief and heights of joy as, say, Dorothy Dunnett, that's okay; I was shouting at the TV screen anyway, which is a good sign that I cared. The story may have been simpler, but it wasn't lesser.

So I'm left wondering, what makes that trick happen? What's the secret technique that makes a nice, simple story for children (Avatar, Harry Potter) into something hordes of adults enjoy? Was it the characterization? Again, that didn't have the depth I might expect from an adult show -- but it was compelling; I giggled and cheered and wailed at the characters not to do the stupid thing I knew they were about to do. Was it the world? Maybe we were all just starving for a full-blown setting that wasn't the usual familiar medieval Eurofantasy. I'd be curious to hear from people who loved the show: what was it that drew you to it?

(Be spoiler-free, if you can.)

::falls over::

Draft of With Fate Conspire is off to the editor. I have formally decided I don't have to look at it again until after Sirens is over, which means I'm on vacation (from this book, at least) until October 11th.

I go fall down now.

oh holy god at LAST.

Through random bloody chance and the favor of the gods of procrastination, the Victorian book, my assembled ladies and gentlemen, HAS A TITLE.

Can I get a drumroll?

<rolllllllllllllll>

With Fate Conspire.

Unless you are my husband or moonandserpent , you do not know -- and do not want to know -- how much Victorian literature I read through in search of something I could use. This one was lovely but had the verb at the front (and therefore looked out of place with the rest of the series); this one had the verb at the end but the quote it came from only fit the book if I tilted my head at a particular angle and squinted; this one was gorgeous but didn't fit no matter how hard I squinted; this one was out of period; this one fit the pattern but wasn't a great title. (Children, learn from me: nevereverever constrain yourself to this kind of highly patterned titling scheme.) I kept on plowing through poet after poet after architecture writer after novelist, trying to find something.

And then I sat down yesterday to read Tim Powers for procrastination, and I found my title.

The funniest part is, the epigraph he used came from a source I'd already gone through, and gotten nothing from. I mentioned some random bloody chance, right? The edition Powers quotes is earlier than the one I'd read, and has a different phrasing. "With Him conspire" is not a line I would have used. But Powers used an earlier edition, and I stared at the epigraph thinking, could I . . .?

I could. I can. My editor has given it the thumbs-up. On this, my last day of revising before I send the draft off to him for comment, my quest has ended. The Novel Formerly Known As The Victorian Book is now With Fate Conspire.

my six-year-old self had no idea

. . . wait, the Heaviside Layer is a real thing?

I thought it was just something made up for the musical Cats.

(This epiphany has been brought to you by Tim Powers' novel Declare, and the details on wireless telegraphy therein.)

thoughts on steampunk

If you're interested in steampunk, Nader Elhefnawy has a well-thought-out article on it up on the SFWA site.

I particularly like the way he acknowledges the role of nostalgia without automatically dismissing nostalgia as something that must always be inherently bad. Yes, the steampunk vision of the past conveniently overlooks the less-attractive parts of the period, but the flip side of that coin is that it valorizes the attractive, selecting out qualities we may be losing/have lost in this day and age and trying to resurrect them. Plus, Elhefnawy puts the current era in context with the past in a way I found very eye-opening, characterizing this as the post-apocalypse of the Victorians, with WWI as the apocalypse.

Interesting stuff. I recommend reading it.

For level 30, I took the Flying feat

By the way, this is what I did for my thirtieth birthday:



It's called "indoor skydiving," and it is FABULOUS.

My understanding is that the setup was invented to help skydivers train. You can also do it for fun, though. A giant fan beneath the wire trampoline blows enough wind upward to lift a person who's perpendicular to the flow, simulating the effect of free-fall. The trainer is there to catch and adjust you; it can be hard to stabilize if you've never done it before, so you sink down or drift into the wall. Once you get the hang of it, they may spin you, or (in the case of our guy) latch onto you at shoulder and hip, put themselves into free-fall, and then take you zooming up into the shaft above, dropping down until you almost hit the trampoline, zooming up again, down again, maybe spinning as you go . . . .

OMG.

SO. MUCH. FUN.

You may be put off when you find out what your money gets you. My husband bought a group package for me and some friends/family; we each were allotted two one-minute flights. Doesn't sound like much -- but trust me, that's a lot of free-fall. One of our group fell sick and didn't come, so I got his extra time, making for two two-minute flights, and holy god by the end my pecs were tired. It's like lying on your back, holding a heavy weight juuuuuuust above your chest, for one (or two) minutes at a stretch. (Since I, for some ballet-related totally inexplicable reason, found it more natural to bend at the hip rather than the knee - as seen in this photo -- I also ended up with sore glutes. I'm pretty sure I would have just traded those for sore quads instead, though, had I made the effort to drag my knees down.) By the time my second two minutes were up, I was more than ready to be done.

If you have any desire to fly, you should absolutely try this out. Especially if, like me, you've had enough ankle-and-knee problems that leaping out of a plane (or rather, landing after such a leap) is just asking for trouble. It will make you giddy with joy.

holy *shit*.

It's boggling enough that for the first time since I started writing the Onyx Court series, there are photographs from (nearly) the period in which I'm writing.

Every so often, one of them hits me like a punch to the gut:



YOU USED TO BE ABLE TO SEE ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL.

I knew this, of course. There are all kinds of references, and even paintings, to how the churches of the City used to soar over everything around them, rather than being lost in the cracks. But holy shit. Not just the dome, n...

after-action report

The reading went swimmingly. Quite a good number of people in attendance, and the stories went over well. For the curious, my final choices were:

1) "The Wives of Paris" -- even if nobody had voted for it, I might have read this one, just because I've been looking forward to doing so for ages. As it also got a goodly number of votes in the poll, my desire had some justification to back it up.

2) "A Heretic by Degrees" -- lots of votes for the various Driftwood options. I didn't get the new ...

Clearing the Slate: usernames

Continuing my effort to clear out my Firefox tabs and my brain, let's talk about usernames.

yuki_onna posted about this a little while ago, and I have to say I'm on her side. But first, let's talk about the original poster's argument.

I feel like pretty much everything he says can be turned around from a positive into a negative. True, on Facebook you don't have the problem of signing up only to find your customary username has already been taken. Instead you have the problem of signing up w...