Marie Brennan's Blog, page 257

Best of Talebones now has a cover

No release date yet that I know of, but Patrick Swenson just posted the cover for the Best of Talebones anthology. I'm really looking forward to this one; I have some past issues of the magazine, but only a few, so it'll be nice to have a one-stop shop for the highlights from its whole run.

Freshness and tropes

Once again, I'm building up a raft of tabs in my Firefox bar -- but since I'm still trying to do that "more posts of substance" thing, I don't want to knock them all off with a linkdump. So let me see if I can't get around to discussing these things.

io9 had a good piece recently: Is "avoiding tropes" the same thing as telling fresh stories?

On the one hand, yes, if you define "trope" as "something that's been done before" and "fresh" as "something that hasn't been done before." As Charlie Ja...

Top ideas

This is an interesting post about the "top idea" in your head -- the thing that your thoughts will drift to in the absence of anything else to occupy them.

For me, it's almost always stories, of one kind or another. When I'm mid-novel, it generally ought to be the project at hand; that's how I work through my plot complications and worldbuilding ideas. But it isn't always, because sometimes my brain gets tired of all that heavy lifting, and searches frantically for something else to do. Thi...

::sigh::

I had a prioritized list of things I needed to do today, with three items on it.

Woke up and found something had happened that added another item to that list, which I put in at position #1. Now I've spent the last hour or so working on #3.

So much for prioritized lists.

Forty days, and the good news keeps coming

Booklist's opinion on A Star Shall Fall:

Brennan's historical research is as impeccable as ever, and the twining of the two worlds is the best yet. Fans of the Onyx court novels, and anyone who enjoys historical fantasy, should like A Star Shall Fall.

And also bookblather :

A Star Shall Fall starts fast and goes faster, despite its apparent length. The climax is brilliant. I honestly did not want to put the book down or close it for any reason, and I was sniffly for a good while afterwards. This...

Clockwork Phoenix heads-up

If you're interested in the Clockwork Phoenix 3 anthology, you can read a sample story from it -- "Lineage," by Kenneth Schneyer -- and then enter to win a free copy, all courtesy of Fantasy Book Critic.

Revisiting the Wheel of Time: The Shadow Rising

I misspoke when I called this the Everybody Goes to Rhuidean book: it is, in fact, the Most People Go to Rhuidean, But Elayne and Nynaeve Go to Tanchico and Perrin Goes Home Book. For the first time in the series, the main characters don't all draw back together for a single finale.

Which is kind of key, from a structural point of view. I said in my discussion of The Dragon Reborn that Jordan's decision to not decide on series length was tantamount to taking the brake off the plot; to...

holding out hope

. . . I may, at last, have a title for this book.

I need to think about it. Let it sit in my brain for a bit, think about how its source quote would work for an epigraph, see how it fits with the others in the series. And in the meantime, probably go on searching through other works for possibilities, because I really need to make up my mind before much longer. But it fits all of my requirements, and it would please me to have the title of this last book come from the letters of Ada Lovelac...

Support Antigone Books

If you're in the U.S., you've probably heard about SB1070, Arizona's horrible racial-profiling immigration law. (Short form: cops are supposed to stop and demand papers from anybody they think might be in the country illegally. You know, brown people.)

janni posted recently about We Mean Business, a coalition of Arizona-local stores that are publicly declaring their opposition to the law. Being a writer, she specifically tagged Antigone Books as a store worth supporting; they're part of Ind...

more review happy dance omg wow YAY

Now THIS is how to start your Monday morning: with news of a starred review in PW:

As in 2009's brilliant Midnight Never Come, anthropologist Brennan strikes a resonant balance between history and fantasy in this new tale of the faerie domain beneath 1750s London. Halley's Comet, which houses the exiled Dragon Spirit of Fire who nearly consumed the city in the Great Fire of 1666, is on its way back to Earth. Human lord Galen is in love with faerie queen Lune, bedding the charming sprite...