Marie Brennan's Blog, page 255

The White House Photographer

So apparently it's been standard practice since Kennedy's day to pick one official White House photographer, who then hires a flock of other photographers, and the minions shoot various public events but the head guy is the one allowed to wander around behind the scenes, snapping pics while the President is in meetings or on the phone.

According to this Daily Kos diary, Pete Souza is the current White House photographer, and previously held the post during Reagan's second term. What's differe...

Git yer discussion on!

Over on the sirenscon community, they're doing GoH book discussions leading up to the conference in October. In an excellent bit of timing, this is month my books are up to bat: Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie are on the table, and the first questions have been asked.

I don't think you need an LJ account to comment over there (though it would probably be helpful to put some name on your posts). And I doubt they'd object to input from non-Sirens attendees -- not everybody can make it to ...

Star reminders

For those who don't check LJ over the weekend, I posted the soundtrack for A Star Shall Fall, along with a partial mix on iTunes.

Also, don't forget the drink contest for the launch party at Sirens in October. You don't have to be a conference attendee to submit a recipe; that prize is open to anybody, and the prize is a signed copy of Deeds of Men .

90K!

After a few days' break, I'm back on the horse. And how; in addition to 1,142 words to kick off Part Three, I backtracked to add a couple of necessary scenes to Part One. 1,874 to cover one, and 942 to start the other, for a total of 3,958 today.

Why so much? Because I wanted to hit 90K, dammit. So I did.

The additions are important. For something so central to this book, the Underground really hadn't appeared onstage properly, so one of the additions is basically Cyma Rides the Train; the...

Interview with the Resurrectionist

Tell me if you think these words belong together: "Victorian," "supernatural," "grave-robber," and "comedy."

If the answer is "yes," go rent I Sell the Dead. Arthur Blake (Dominic Monaghan) is a resurrectionist about to be executed for his crimes; Francis Duffy (Ron Perlman) is a priest who comes to interview him before his head gets chopped off. Blake tells the story of how, as a wee lad, he got into the body-snatching trade -- and then how he and his mentor discovered the real money was in...

Music time!

For those interested in the interrelation of music and books, today's countdown-to-book-release goodie for A Star Shall Fall is the soundtrack.

Usual caveat: if you stare at those new track titles long enough, you may be able to guess some of what's going to happen in the plot (though I do make an effort to avoid outright spoilers).

You should be able to hear samples from some of the tracks in the iTunes store. Enjoy!

Yay Driftwood!

Finished another Driftwood story. Wrote most of this one on the Bahamas cruise, because it wasn't really work work, it was fun work. (Especially since the goal of this one is to have a Driftwood story that isn't depressing.)

Current title is "Stone and Sky," but I hope to find something more interesting before it gets sent out to magazines. It needs to sit for a bit and get critiqued first, though, so the title fairy has some time to show up.

(Right now, my subconscious wants to call it "Two...

Mechanical difficulties

I haven't run a lot of games. (In fact, I've run precisely two: Memento and the ongoing Once Upon a Time in the West, plus one almost completely rules-free LARP session.) In the case of Memento, going into that game, I had a large amount of familiarity with the LARP mechanics for Changeling (i.e. what sorts of things their powers did, though there were occasional points of massive discrepancy between the two sets of rules), and a similarly large amount of familiarity with basic World of Dar...

sale!

One of the odd perks of my sleep schedule (going to bed circa 2 or 3 a.m. West Coast time, waking up circa 10 or 11 a.m.) is that most U.S.-based people have started their business day before I get up. And that means a disproportionate number of the e-mails I get saying "I'd like to buy your story!" are in my inbox by the time I shuffle into my office, starting my day with a smile.

Which is by way of saying that Pseudopod will be doing an audio reprint of "The Snow-White Heart," which origina...

What happens when I do Fun Work

It's hard to say how many words I wrote today, since some of it involved replacing a bit of scene I'd written before, but it's definitely north of 5K.

This is what happens when I let myself work on something other than What I Should Be Working On. (Even if the something else is, technically, also something I should be working on. It ain't the novel currently under deadline, which is all that really matters.)

Tomorrow, we see if we can't polish off that nearly-finished short story, and get som...