Marie Brennan's Blog, page 31

In which things start getting warped

My new tablets finally arrived, which means this project can move forward!

For those of y’all who aren’t weavers, though, let’s go over some basics first. There are lots of subtleties and refinements and differences depending on what kind of weaving you’re talking about, but at its core, weaving is about having threads pass over and under each other in order to make fabric.

In the kind of weaving I know how to do, here’s how you do that: first, you put the warp threads on your loom. These are long, each one forming a big loop. The weft thread is wrapped around your shuttle and passed back and forth at right angles to the warp threads. But for this to create fabric, it needs to go over some of the warps and under some of the others. Then, on the next pass, that needs to change — maybe not every thread (this is how more-than-binary patterns happen), but enough to get solid material out of it.

Very primitive looms require you to make that change manually, selecting each thread by hand. An inkle loom, though, achieves this by alternating leashed and unleashed threads. The unleashed ones move up and down freely, while the leashed ones are held in place by pieces called heddles. First you push the unleashed threads down below the leashed and pass the weft through; then you push them up to the top and pass it through again. Rinse and repeat. Looms are, in a basic sense, devices for 1) holding your warp threads while you work and 2) creating that shifting gap between them, which is called the shed.

On a card or tablet loom — like the kind I’m about to start using — it’s a little different. As you’ll see in a moment, all of the threads can move; they’re passed through the holes in the tablets, and by rotating those (collectively called a deck), you change which ones are above or below the shed. I’ll show how that works once I get started weaving . . . but Step One is to warp the loom.

Here’s the advantage of me having had to wait for my new tablets: it gave me time to think. Since I have the sort of brain that pre-games things, I realized that some of the memories I have of warping my inkle loom are not quite going to apply to this style of weaving.

The heddles I use on my inkle loom are just loops of string, hooked onto a peg, passed over the thread, and then hooked again. I can run the warp thread around the loom, pause to wrap a heddle over it if it’s supposed to be leashed, then keep going until I’m done warping that color for the time being, at which point I cut the thread and tie the whole thing off. Or if I’m just putting in, like, one or two threads of another color, I can wrap the one I was using around a peg, add the new color, then unwrap the previous one and keep going. Don’t worry if you don’t quite follow what I mean by that; the relevant point here is that I can just keep pulling thread off the skein for quite a while before cutting it. But on a card loom, the thread has to go through a hole. That’s not really going to work when what I’m holding is an entire skein!

Also, it was my habit in the past to go down first in warping: start at the front peg (you have to start there), run whatever course I’ve chosen along the bottom of the loom, then come over the top before I add the heddle, tie it off, etc. But since I need to pass the loose end of the thread through a hole in the card, and since the cards go at the top of the loom, it makes more sense to reverse my habitual course. That’s fine; it’s just going to feel weird. And then I’ll have to cut each thread off so I get a loose end again, rather than being able to warp continuously.

Which means this is going to be . . . a hassle.

Let’s get started!

One card down, lots of cards to go. As you can see, there are four threads passing through it, one per hole; you may also have noticed the edges of the card are color-coded. That’s because most of these will not have all four threads be identical, and once the cards start rotating, you need a way to keep track of which threads have gone where. Traditionally the holes are lettered A, B, C, D — which these lack — but it’s easier to see what you’ve got if you mark the edges; the ones I inherited from a friend (which do have the letters) had a highlighter run over them for that purpose.

I wasn’t paying close enough attention when I bought the new ones; they are tiny compared to the ones I got from my friend. I have no idea if I’ll wind up regretting that: they’ll probably be easier to turn (especially since they’re laminated), but the shed they create is much smaller. We’ll see.

That’s four cards warped, with the second color now showing up. We’re on our way!

Since I complained above about the inkle-weaving habits that don’t apply here, I should note one that does: I remembered, while waiting for the tablets, that it’s good to check the loom from the side before you finish tying off a thread, to make sure you didn’t accidentally pass over a peg you should have gone under or otherwise screw up the placement. For this enterprise to work, all the warp threads need to be the same length, running along the same path. I already caught one place I’d almost messed up, so that precaution is worth the effort.

My next update will come when I start weaving. How long will the rest of the warping take? Who knows! I am out of practice at this stuff; I will have to be much more meticulous to make sure I put the right colors in the right places and also in the right threading direction (because on some cards it will run front-to-back instead of back-to-front)*; and also I’m not young anymore, but warping is still most easily done on the floor, which my back starts to dislike after a while.

*Yyyyyeah, so, I warped two more tablets after scheduling this post and then figured out that I had a flaw in my draft, the fixing of which requires me to thread tablets 4-6 down instead of up. HOWEVER! Before I resigned myself to either cutting twelve threads off the loom or painstakingly untying them and redoing them no matter which method I chose, I realized that I could solve this problem with trivial ease by just flipping the cards around and rotating them a quarter-turn to put the single white thread each one of them contains back where it needs to be. If I were doing anything more complex than the pattern I have in mind, this would be a nightmare, because it messes up that color-coding thing: a quarter turn that will put the red on top for the cards with the correct facing will instead put the green on top for these. But since my plan involves rotating the whole deck together the entire time, with no fancy variations along the way, I can actually survive this. And it’s less annoying than redoing that whole bit.

Pictured: not a good idea. But I can make it work.

Anyway, we’ll find out as we go just how wide of a pattern I can actually warp onto here. The threads all have to stay on the pegs; it’s no good if they start slipping off because they’re too crowded. I can (and probably will) put rubber bands or, better yet, hair elastics on the ends of the pegs to protect against slippage, but still, there’s a limit to how wide a band I can weave. I think I’ll be okay, since I only want my final product to be about an inch wide, but the knots at the front add a lot of local width. I’ll just have to play it by ear.

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New Worlds: Storming the Castle

Yes, the New Worlds Patreon is quoting The Princess Bride this week. (This is very on-brand for me.) We’re talking about siege warfare — comment over there!

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Books read, July-August 2022

I missed reporting on July, didn’t I?

Phoenicians, Glenn E. Markoe. Man, for a book as brief as this one is, it took me a while to get through it. I very nearly decided to skip the opening chapter that’s a potted history of basically the entire Bronze and early Iron Age history of the eastern Mediterranean; it was dry, dry, dry. Things got better once it moved on to discussion of the actual culture, but this was not the most engaging thing I’ve read on the topic.

Raven Strategem, Yoon Ha Lee. Second of the Machineries of Empire series, and a re-read, and also the author is a friend. Sparked many thinky thoughts this time around.

From Unseen Fire, Cass Morris. The author is likewise a friend. Alternate history Roman fantasy; it definitely scratched my Latin nerd itch, especially in the places where it bypassed the obvious aspects of Roman culture in favor of the stuff you only put into your novel if you really know your business. And I award points for not doing the comfortable thing and anachronistically erasing slavery or having the patrician protagonists randomly not own slaves.

Give Way to Night, Cass Morris. Sequel to the above; I picked up From Unseen Fire simply because I was interested, but prioritized reading the sequel right away when I was tapped to interview Cass at ArmadilloCon (where she was the Toastmaster). No regrets! I would have read the third book (which is, for the record, not going to be the conclusion) if it were available right now.

Daily Life in Carthage at the Time of Hannibal, Gilbert Charles-Picard. Hooooo boy. So, the reason I’m reading about this stuff right now is that I have an idea for a story concerning Carthage, which would require me to know something about Carthage. In that respect, this book is very useful to me because it’s from decades ago, and therefore helps me sift what we’ve learned in recent decades out from what we’d learned as of the mid-twentieth century. On the other hand, dear Tanit and Baal Hammon, the racism in here. Charles-Picard is convinced not only that Carthaginian art was absolutely worthless in all respects and that the few good bits were borrowed from Greece and probably made by Greek artisans, he believes the cause of this worthlessness was the Carthaginian religion and the damage it inflicted on the Carthaginian soul. I mean, if I want to write a story set around the mid-twentieth century, I suppose it’s useful for me to know just how bigoted the attitudes toward Carthage might be, but . . . yikes.

Revenant Gun, Yoon Ha Lee. Ditto above, subbing in “third” for “second.”

The Flower Path, Josh Reynolds. Third of the Daidoji Shin L5R novels, this one essentially a bottle episode set within a kabuki theatre. I craved more detail about kabuki theatre, to be honest, but these remain pleasant reads.

Hexarchate Stories, Yoon Ha Lee. Ditto above, subbing in “short story collection.”

Good Neighbors, Stephanie Burgis. I actually read this in a previous month, but I can’t remember which; opening my Nook app reminded me I’d read it and never posted about it. This is a fix-up of several shorter pieces of fiction, getting longer with each piece; it’s a fairly light-hearted romance about a necromancer and a mad inventor who are definitely not considered good neighbors by the local villagers. Quick, sweet, and entertaining.

Morien, trans. Jessie Weston. Heard about this one from Marissa Lingen, and heeeee, she was right. Do you need a thirteenth-century Dutch chivalric tale about a Moorish knight who becomes best friends with Lancelot and Gawain and saves Gawain’s life and and and this could totally pass for fanfic were it not for the archaic prose? (Hell, let’s be real; there are Yuletiders who would totally mimic this style for fun.) It does come with the caveat that the text keeps reminding you this guy is black, like, really, black all over if you can believe it, but not his teeth, those aren’t black; as Marissa said, it was clearly written by someone who had once seen a Black person for an audience that probably hadn’t. As we are not thirteenth-century Dutch people, this reads very oddly. But Morien is awesome, and this is crying out for somebody’s modern retelling.

Lion City, Ng Yi-Sheng. I was on a panel with the author at the last WorldCon and picked up his collection on the strength of that. There’s a whole mix in here of SF and fantasy, focused on Singapore, with several stories that particularly stood out for me (an one that may have sparked a story or poem idea).

Heaven Official’s Blessing, Vol. 2, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. I’m beginning to suspect that the fan translations used for this series were not really edited before being typeset, as there are numerous instances here of the language being not quite right (“jaded” does not mean the same thing as “jade”). Which is a pity, because that keeps distracting me from the story, which is what I’m actually here for. I’m enjoying it, but I may still pause to let more of the volumes come out, because the amount of story in each one is relatively small.

A Thousand Li: The Second Expedition, Tao Wong. You know, I’ve commented on previous books that I’m not super impressed with the prose or characterization of this series, and I’m reading it mostly for the tour of cultivation novel tropes. I would not have predicted that the philosophy which starts cropping up in this volume would actually engage me! Not that it has profound answers to the human condition, but it raises interesting questions, and I really enjoyed that.

The Troubadour’s Tale, Ann Swinfen. Fifth and penultimate book of the Oxford Medieval Mysteries, once again sans murder. I realized with this volume that the author is deliberately doing a seasonal round; the whole series takes place over the course of a year. Here we are in winter, with much of the “what was life in medieval England really like” attention devoted to the challenges of traveling and staying warm as the Little Ice Age began.

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell. This wound up being much deeper of a book than I expected. It’s not “social media bad, boo;” instead it’s about things like community and environmentalism, and how the commodification and fragmentation of our attention damages our ability to take effective political action. I enjoyed it a lot.

In the Shadow of the Gods: The Emperor in World History, Dominic Lieven. A rather hefty tome of world history — well, mostly Eurasian history — that looks at different imperial systems and how they handled things like succession and the centralization of power. The interesting takeaway here is that there’s rarely if ever a “best” answer; any approach is going to come with downsides. (On the other hand, there are definitely some bad answers.) Since some of the regimes and time periods covered here are ones I knew basically nothing about, it also served to orient me in those contexts!

Singapore Children’s Favorite Stories, Diane Taylor, ill. L. K. Tay-Audouard. A very brief book, and part of what appears to be a sizable Asia-focused series. It was pleasing all out of proportion to recognize some of the tales in here as the ones that inspired short stories in Ng Yi-Sheng’s Lion City.

Six of Crows, Leigh Bardugo. I avoided reading this for quite some time because Alyc and I were still writing the Rook and Rose trilogy. Amusingly, Alyc and I decided, quite independently of one another, to read it at the same time! I don’t quite buy the characters’ stated ages, but if you ignore that, this was a lot of fun. And yes, I can see why people keep making comparisons between Vargo and Kaz Brekker.

Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, Jane Alison, narr. Bernadette Dunne. This was, I will admit, a bad book to experience in audio. The narration was good and Alison’s writing is engaging, but the lack of clarity over when I was hearing an excerpt, and the inability to backtrack to look at that text, did not do me any favors. Still, some thought-provoking stuff in here, even if what I think of as “spiral” narrative structure appears to be completely different from what Alison thinks of.

A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, narr. Cassandra Campbell. This, on the other hand, was gorgeous in audiobook. I loved Campbell’s narration, which is both crisp and warm. The book itself is a classic of the conservation movement, and I can see why. It first goes month by month through the year, with Leopold talking about what happens in his natural environment and what activities he engages in as someone who lives close to that environment; at the end it discusses the importance of that approach, of a “land ethic” that sees the soil, water, plants, and animals of an area as part of its community, worthy of protection and care. Really, the only glaring flaw in here can be chalked up to it being written in 1949: a lot of what Leopold says is exactly the mindset advocated by indigenous environmental activists, but Native Americans are almost completely absent from even passing mention here. The points are good ones nonetheless, and it’s interesting to see where we have or haven’t achieved the kinds of changes Leopold hoped would occur.

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New Worlds: Raiding for Fun and Profit

Once again my loyal Topic Builders of the New Worlds Patreon have voted: for September, we’re turning back toward war! Specifically, the idea of there being different kinds of battles that aim to accomplish different purposes, with raiding first up on the list. Comment over there!

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New Worlds: Slavery-Adjacent

The New Worlds Patreon discussion of slavery wound up spreading across two months rather than the original plan of one, but it concludes at last with institutions that bear some resemblance to aspects of slavery. Comment over there!

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In which the foolish project gets started

Okay, we’re making a thing!

. . . how do we do that?

Step one is to figure out what I want this strap to look like. As I said before, card-weaving can do much more complex patterns than inkle-weaving — but it’s still limited by what you warp onto the loom, so you need to plan ahead. And there’s an extra twist (pun not intended, but very apropos), in that if your pattern doesn’t involve rotating the cards backwards as well as forwards, over time you’ll twist your unwoven warp threads into little ropes. Because I want to keep my first project simple, I went digging through different patterns both in my book and online, and settled on one that’s the tablet version of the “chain” pattern from inkle weaving — same idea, but (because of how card-weaving works) less tightly compressed.

This required me to generate a warping draft. Doing this for inkle-weaving is easy; you have only two kinds of thread (leashed and unleashed), so putting those on separate lines and using different letters to represent the different colors, a single chain pattern looks like this:

With a card loom, though, you need to plan four threads for each card. Furthermore, it matters whether the threads are warped “up” or “down” — that refers to the direction in which they pass through the card. I wound up making a spreadsheet with cells deliberately shaped to be taller than they are wide (to represent how the threads will look as they’re woven) and color-coded to imply the colors of the threads, and produced this draft:

The letters on the left tell me which hole in the card gets which thread, and the little v’s and carets tell me whether to warp up or down. To weave this, I will first rotate the cards forward four turns, then backward four turns, so I don’t wind up with twisted warps making life difficult at the end of the project. The nice thing about the spreadsheet is, I can copy-paste to make an expanded version that gives me a sense of what the final product will (hopefully) look like:

Now, there’s a key piece of guesswork going on here, which is the question of width. How wide your fabric is depends both on the number of threads and the thickness of those threads. Back in my inkle-weaving days, I was decent at eyeballing this . . . but that was a looooong time ago, and also I have zero experience with how this whole four-threads-per-card thing is going to work, with them twisting around each other and all.

Is this a reasonable number of cards for the project? I have no idea. The thread I bought is very fine, so I’ll definitely need more than with some of my projects of yore. But I am straight-up guessing with the draft you see there.

The good news is, I have some leeway to experiment. I don’t want to put a very short warp on the loom and just test-drive with a piece I’ll have to throw away (though it would probably be smart of me to do so), but I suspect my loom isn’t large enough for me to weave all the material I need in one go anyway. (Your material inevitably gets shorter as you weave it, because what were formerly straight warp threads are now going over and under the weft.) So I can weave this, and if it’s too skinny or too broad, I can use it for the “equatorial” straps that go sideways around the box. Then round 2 can be adjusted, and I’ll weave the big loop that will be the one I’m holding in my hand.

But this has introduced one wrinkle to the process. When I originally made my draft, it was narrower — an alternation of three-and-two on the chain, instead of five-and-four. I widened it upon receiving the thread and realizing how slender it was. Alas, I do not own enough cards for the wider draft; I have had to order more from Etsy. I’m waiting on those to arrive . . . and then the warping can begin!

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Being green

Apropos of my earlier post — really, what I need are more environmentally friendly ways of doing the developmental stages. I had some very productive thinking time while showering, and more while driving to and from the city, but I can’t just do those things on a whim to make my brain work!

I genuinely think that my job got harder when I switched over to writing full-time, but not for the reasons that usually get cited: when I was in college, when I was in grad school, I spent a fair bit of my life walking to and from class. That was excellent thinking time. But these days . . . yes, I realize I could just go for walks. It isn’t the same, though? Walking just for the sake of walking feels like it’s me trying to hide the fact that I have scheduled this period for Thinking About the Book, which isn’t effective. It works better when I’m walking for some other purpose. Like errands — but a combination of pandemic + foot problems means I haven’t even done as much of that lately.

Maybe I should take up gardening.

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No really, it’s work

In all seriousness, one of the trickiest things about writing as a line of work is the part that doesn’t look recognizably like work.

I’m currently in progress on a background project, and I’ve had to accept that as much as I would like to be charging ahead and putting words down on the page, doing that right now stands a high chance of producing material I’ll just have to cut later. I need to think. I need to figure out plot beats that will be lively as opposed to merely getting the job done. I need to make sure I intend to stick with my current idea about how magic works in this setting, because I’ve already tweaked it once, and you know what’s not fun? Invalidating a chunk of narrative because things don’t work that way anymore.

This is necessary work — but it is also work that does not lend itself to metrics. It is the opposite of effective for me to set a timer and say, okay, for the next hour I am going to Think About the Book. Nor can I really set a goal where by the end of the week I need to have a clear sense of a particular character and how they’ll get involved with the plot. Trying to set that kind of goal is a really, really good way to make my brain freeze up and produce nothing at all.

And even when the ideation does happen . . . at what point am I allowed to kick back and say, okay, done for the day? I can set a baseline for drafting: for me it’s usually a minimum number of words, but for other people it’s a certain amount of time at the keyboard. Either way, when you hit your goal, you’re done. (If you want to or have to be. There are days when I hit that goal and keep going just because I’m on a roll; yesterday was one of those days.) Thinking, though . . . how do I decide that I’ve made enough intangible progress, and now it’s okay for me to slack off and watch TV? And even if the answer is that I should do more work, how do I do that when the best way for me to think is to be doing something else? Only certain kinds of something else count; TV isn’t a great one. Neither is reading or playing a game. Showering’s great, but we’re in a drought here, so I can’t just take three a day and see what happens.

I dunno. I’ve been doing this stuff for years and I still dunno. I have a good plot bit, though — something that will introduce a bit of action and set up some complications for my protagonist. I still don’t know much about one of the characters involved in it, which is bad because they’re supposed to be moderately important to this story . . . so I guess I have more thinking to do. Eventually.

Maybe tomorrow, when I’m in the car.

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Return to Rokugan!

I have a whole pile of projects right now that I am either not permitted to discuss (as in, there’s an NDA and everything) or superstitious about discussing until they reach a firmer milestone. In one particular instance, this means I have not only drafted an entire novel but sent it to my editor, gotten comments in return, and sent back the revised manuscript, all without being able to say a word about what I was working on.

But as of today’s official announcement, that FINALLY changes!

The Game of 100 Candles is, as the title suggests, a sequel to The Night Parade of 100 Demons. It takes Ryōtora and Sekken to Phoenix Clan lands, and from the rural wilds of the mountains to the heart of a powerful provincial court — where more supernatural matters are afoot . . .

This will be out in February of next year!

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It’s the final countdown . . .

As of me posting this, the Uncanny Magazine Year 9 Kickstarter has six hours to go. They’ve achieved all their listed stretch goals, but I want to note that the last priority in every Uncanny fundraiser is “pay the people who run the magazine.” Lynne Thomas and Michael Damien Thomas pay their staff before they pay themselves . . . but they’ve built Uncanny up to be one of the most admired publications in the field, and they deserve a reward, too. Not only that, but their daughter has had some serious medical expenses recently — so if you can back the Kickstarter, signal-boost it elsewhere, or both, please doe!

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