Marie Brennan's Blog, page 258

The authors is always the last to know.

. . . oh.

Huh.

Apparently one of the things this book is about? Is identity.

You'd think I would have noticed it sooner, what with the stuff with Eliza and the stuff with Dead Rick and now that I think about it the stuff with Cyma -- come on, Hodge, jump on the bandwagon; you know you want to -- hell, even Owen has identity stuff going on. But no, I had to get nearly 70K into the book before I saw the obvious, and even then I only did because I was grumbling to myself about how many times I've...

Memes that AREN'T so good

So this meme goes around, where you plug in a sample of text and it tells you who you write like.

I give it four selections from the prologue of Midnight Never Come and get four different results, ranging from Dan Brown to James Fenimore Cooper. I roll my eyes at the uselessness of the meme and move on.

Then nojojojo links to this post, which points out that <sigh> yet again it's the same old carnival of white guys, with a tiny number of white women (and Jewish men) tossed in for "variety." S...

Memes I wouldn't object to

Now this? Is a meme I could actually get behind.



The Old Spice commercials are some of the only ads I've seen in . . . years, maybe, that genuinely entertain me, and not just on the first viewing. Of all the things that could turn into meme seeds, this is a lot better than most.

apologies I only sort of mean

Dear Dead Rick,

I'm sorry I'm a horrible person.

Tomorrow morning kurayami_hime will read this and say, "You're not sorry at all," and she'll kind of be right -- but I have to say it anyway. Because one of your levers is more like a giant knife sticking out of your heart, and sometimes I just have to give it a good twist.

Sorry.

If it's any comfort, I suspect you have some RIGHTEOUS FURY OF REVENGE scenes coming up later in the book. It's got that feel in my head, even if I don't know the speci...

ID'ing the pattern

I've gotten a number of reviews of both Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie that say some variant on, "this takes a while to get going, but once it does, it's pretty awesome." (Or sometimes, "this takes forever to get going, and I gave up.") I fully expect that as more reviews come in for A Star Shall Fall, I'll get a few that say the same thing.

And I've finally figured out how to characterize it in my head: these books are arrangements of dominoes.

That is to say, the opening stages of eac...

The reviews begin!

Okay, so they actually began with Stephanie Burgis' ARC giveaway last month. (Her verdict: "I loved Book One in Brennan's Onyx Court series (Midnight Never Come, which was really fun), and I admired Book Two (In Ashes Lie) for how ambitious it was, but A Star Shall Fall is my favorite of Marie Brennan's novels so far.") Now we can add to that a review from David Forbes:

A Star Shall Fall is a a marvelous, magical novel that evocatively brings to life 18th Century London through interesting...

This month at SF Novelists

I tackle the trope of the "honorary male."

Comment over there; no account needed.

Heh.

It just occurred to me that this particular plotline amounts to industrial espionage.

Well, it's the Industrial Age; it fits. It just makes an odd little mirror to the Walsingham-style intrigue of Midnight Never Come.

Okay, brain; a few more paragraphs of revision on this scene, and then we can go to bed.

Launch party for A Star Shall Fall!

On August 31st, A Star Shall Fall comes out.

On October 7-10, I will be at the Sirens Conference in Vail.

I have therefore decided to have my first (slightly belated) proper launch party for a book, at the conference. It will take place on Saturday the ninth, in the hour leading up to the costume ball. There will probably be giveaways of the book at that party, but there are also two chances to win special prizes.

WHETHER YOU ARE ATTENDING THE CON OR NOT -- we're holding a contest to design a ...

Latin rusty; please help

I totally have to surrender my Latin geek card in shame, but attempting to figure out this phrase is stalling my forward progress in the scene, so I'm just going to toss it out to the LJ mind and get on with what Dead Rick is doing.

How would you say "Two worlds joined as one" in Latin?