Marie Brennan's Blog, page 46

The Advent of Scent, Week 19

* The Apothecary
Described as “tea leaf with three mosses, green grass, a medley of herbal notes, and a drop of ginger and fig.” I keep wanting to like scents in the “green” category more than I do, simply because it’s my favorite color (and yes, I’m aware that the color and the smell are not actually related). This one was only temporarily green, though; it goes from “lemony ginger tea” through the green phase to being just too floral for me — not sure which element that was coming from.

* Gingerbread Wolfman
Described as “gingerbread, honey, molasses, pulverized chestnut, powdered sugar, nutmeg, and hazelnut.” Ugh, no — this mostly came through as molasses, and the more time passed, the more burnt the molasses smelled. It would have been okay but not amazing without the burnt note; with it, I wanted to get away from my own arm.

* Last Tavern at Town Gate
Described as “vivid red musk streaked with sleet, hearthsmoke, a glimmer of lemon rind and yellow amber, and oak-aged whiskey.” This was very complex! I had a hard time teasing the notes apart, except for the usual pattern of the musk dominating after a while. It’s interesting, but it wasn’t for me.

* Kitsune-tsuki
Described as “Asian plum, orchid, daffodil, jasmine and white musk.” Starts off plum and daffodil, maybe with some jasmine later on. It’s floral, but surprisingly not off-putting?

* Event Horizon
Described as “black opium, labdanum, opoponax, black orchid, and benzoin.” It reminded me a little of Darkness, in that my sister again said that I was clearly going to the opera; I think that’s the opium note. It’s heavy, a little sweet, a little floral; later on she called it “very very fancy bubblegum,” which I think might be the opoponax? It’s interesting enough to try again later!

* Maiden
Described as “white tea, carnation and damask rose.” Somehow this manages to smell almost lemony in the bottle, turning into tea + rose as it dries. The scent is fairly steady, and I kind of like it?

* Paladin (RPG Series)
Described as “white musk, sweet frankincense, bourbon vanilla, white leather, and shining armor.” Like Gingerbread Wolfman, this got more ugh over time. It’s generic cologne at first, and then I think basically leather frankincense later; I did not like it. (I’m starting to think leather notes will just be not for me overall.)

* Blood Rose
Described as “voluptuous red rose bursting with lascivious red wine and sultry dragon’s blood resin.” I’m not positive if I’ve encountered dragon’s blood before; people on the BPAL forum theorized that it was in Wolf’s Heart (the one that smelled like laundry detergent on me) and Sanguinem Menstruum, but the official descriptions don’t say for sure. So I can’t tell whether the sweet aspect here is coming from that, or from the red wine. But it sheds the oddly sugary effect it has early on to become quite pleasant; this and Maiden are two rose scents I actually kind of like, at least enough to hold onto them and compare again later.

. . . and in looking up Blood Rose, I discovered BPAL has a perfume called Black Rose, which of course I have to try. I’ve ordered a sample!

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MAPS TO NOWHERE now in print!

One of my projects for 2021 is to start working my way through my backlist of BVC titles and get the majority* of them into print editions. That project starts now, with Maps to Nowhere!

It’s a slim little paperback, about the size of a novella, and you can get it now from Barnes and Noble, Book Depository, Bookshop.org (which, btw, has become one of my favorite places to order from — it’s the latest development in supporting independent bookstores), or Amazon US or UK. (Full disclosure: I get a commission from sales through the Amazon US link. Which is nice, but did I mention I really like Bookshop.org?)

The others will follow in due course — with the asterisk up above being that some titles (Never After, Monstrous Beauty) are too short for print editions, while others In London’s Shadow, The Doppelganger Omnibus) are too long. But the rest are Goldilocks-approved, and over the next year or so, I hope to roll them all out!

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New Worlds: The Pace of Change

It being a fifth Friday, the New Worlds Patreon has a theory post for you! This week we’re looking at change over time, and the extent to which we may mis-perceive how fast and/or inevitable that is. Comment over there!

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The Advent of Scent, Week 18

* Bengal
Described as “skin musk with honey, peppers, clove, cinnamon bark and ginger.” This is a perfectly pleasant spice-based scent, mostly dominated by the cinnamon — I only ever got the clove at the outset, and a slight astringent hint from the ginger. Nothing wrong with it, but not enough a standout for me to feel it needs keeping.

* Not a Perfume (Juliette Has a Gun)
The name of this one refers to the fact that it’s just straight-up cetalox, which is one of the forms of synthetic ambergris out there. So, uh, if you want to know what ambergris smells like, here you go? I haven’t been a huge fan of it in blends, and I certainly don’t like it enough to want that to be the only thing I smell like.

* Gentlewoman (Juliette Has a Gun)
Described as “neroli, bergamot, coumarin, almond, orange blossom, musks, ambroxan” (that last being another synthetic ambergris). This one goes into the not-sweet orange family until the ambroxan takes over. Interestingly, although my sister has not generally been a fan of ambergris, she turned out to like this one.

* Decisions, Decisions (Imaginary Authors)
Described as “tuberose, sarsaparilla, geranium, labdanum, jasmine sambac, raspberry, and sweet suspense.” With this, I have reached the end of their catalogue! I have literally tried every perfume Imaginary Authors makes (barring any which were discontinued before I started this project; some of the ones I’ve tried have since vanished from their website, so that’s a possibility). I think this was dominated by the labdanum — that’s a note I hadn’t really learned to recognize before trying this, but there was something sort of bitter and sort of warm, in a way that reminded me of chocolate without actually being that. Maybe the raspberry came through a little, too? But I’m not sure that wasn’t my brain grasping at straws, trying to figure out how to label what was actually the labdanum.

(I’ve managed to induce a remarkably vivid scent flashback in myself just writing this one up.)

* Marshmallow Snow
Described as “soft poofs of chilled marshmallow,” which honestly isn’t very helpful. In the bottle it’s evergreen, which somebody on the BPAL forums opined was probably spruce, and something almost . . . fruity? The fruity note persists for a bit as just a ghost of sweetness in the evergreen, and then some baking spices arrive to join the party, with the spruce or whatever it is staying around to keep this from becoming too cloying. I don’t know yet whether I like this or Thieves’ Rosin better, but either way it’s a very good scent for the Christmas season!

* S.C. 59 (Phlur)
Described as “mint, lemon zest, orange flower, and amber.” Unfortunately, this one wound up unpleasantly floral, though it started out very promisingly as mint and lemon. Might be fine for them as likes floral, but that ain’t me.

* In Dubiis Libertas
Described as “golden amber, smoked vanilla, benzoin, and blue cypress.” In the bottle and wet, this had a hint of something sharper that cut the vanilla and amber — possibly the cypress, but benzoin is one of those notes I don’t really grok yet — but alas, it lost that and just became vanilla and amber. Like Bengal, this is perfectly pleasant, but at this point in my sampling that isn’t enough to make me say it’s a keeper.

* Hanami (Phlur)
Described as “fig, bergamot, hazelnut, white florals, sandalwood, vetiver, and musk.” Another that’s fine but forgettable. Floral citrus at the outset, picking up an earthier note for a bit that was too faint for me to be sure whether it was the fig or the hazelnut, and then it predictably settled down into the warmth of sandalwood and musk.

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New Worlds: Bodyguards

The April tour of the New Worlds Patreon through interpersonal violence wraps up with protection from same, in the form of bodyguards. Comment over there!

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JordanCon!

Late in 2019, I got an email inviting me to be the Author Guest of Honor at JordanCon in April 2021.

. . . yyyyyeah, obviously that didn’t go as planned.

But! JordanCon will be happening this year, and it will even be an in-person event, the weekend of July 16th-18th. Now, I imagine several of you are thinking that’s on the early side to be doing this kind of thing, and you’re not wrong — so it’s important to state up front that the con staff are taking stringent precautions around this. I don’t just mean requiring masks at all times (though that, too): they’re requiring proof of full vaccination no less than two weeks before the con (with medical exemptions handled on a case-by-case basis), along with daily temperature checks at the event. They’ve reduced capacity and won’t be having features like the con suite, room parties, or other things that involve people unmasking and/or being shoved into very close proximity with each other.

It’s still going to be fun. We’re looking into ways to do things like stream panels to other rooms and hold outdoor activities; it’s my intent to come up with as many creative things to do that are compatible with social distancing as possible. If you’re able to come, I hope to see you there! And even if you aren’t, note that JordanCon is holding a fundraiser — like many, many organizations right now, they’ve taken a financial hit due to not holding their 2020 event, so they’re working to make sure the con will be able to continue in the future.

This will certainly be a unique GoH gig for me (at least, I hope it remains unique). But I’m looking forward to it!

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New Worlds, Year Four!

I failed to schedule this for the publication date — but that’s all right; the book did not go off sale in the last twenty-four hours.

New Worlds, Year Four is out now! It’s a little croggling to realize my Patreon really and truly has been running for over four years without pause. But I’m quite proud of the body of work represented in the collections so far, and I’m still going strong on the topic of worldbuilding. You can get the ebook now from Book View Cafe (the publisher and host of the essays in their initial run), Amazon (note that I get a commission through that link, though I encourage you to buy from something other than the Bezos Behemoth if you can), Barnes & Noble, Google Play, iTunes, Kobo, Indigo for the Canadians among you, and Amazon UK for the Brits. The print edition will follow in June, if you prefer to have it in dead tree edition.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to polish up this week’s essay . . .

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The Advent of Scent, Week 17

Some adventures this time with a new-to-me perfumer!

* Liquid Illusion (Juliette Has a Gun)
Described as “heliotropin, tuberose absolute, iris absolute, tonka bean, and cetalox” (which the internet tells me is synthetic ambergris). I can smell the almond at the outset, but it’s kind of earthy/salty in a way that I think might be the cetalox (and possibly the iris, depending on whether that’s supposed to be the flower or the root), but it rapidly goes to a slightly soapy tonka/cetalox blend. Do not like.

* Rose Cross
Described as “purest rose with sacred frankincense.” At first it’s exactly as billed. Then it PUNCHES YOU IN THE FACE WITH ROSE. Eventually that dials back to a more faded rose, and it isn’t terrible, but I do not like that note enough to want this.

* Mari Lwyd
Described as “Welsh cakes and ale with a smattering of dried lavender.” In the bottle it had that cloying, sort of buttery note I’ve encountered before, which fortunately didn’t last. Unfortunately, it pretty much just went to cake after that, which I think might partly have been built from musk. I never picked up anything ale or lavender. Meh.

* Invisible Gingerbread Man/Gingerbread Invisible Man
(BPAL appears indecisive about which is the correct name.) Described as “champagne-soaked gingerbread, candied ginger, lemon, and white sugar.” I got the ginger and lemon initially, but I also got soap, and it just got soapier the longer things went on. Blech.

* Oatmeal and Apple Spice Cookies
What it says, plus “brown sugar, nutmeg, and walnuts.” This also had a hint of that cloying note in the bottle, but that went away on application in favor of being very, very apple. The spice comes through later, but I never really got the oatmeal or walnut, and overall it’s just meh.

* Oil Fiction (Juliette Has a Gun)
Described as “tuberose, saffron, and amber.” It amuses me that my reaction to some things is “this smells like perfume” — there’s just sort of a generic, kind of floral effect to some blends. This one wasn’t bad as floral things go, and the amber comes through a bit later, but it’s still not for me.

* Wheatstacks, Snow Effect, Morning
(This is one of the BPAL scents named after a painting, in this case one by Monet, hence the odd name.) Described as “hay, white peach, opalescent musk, orris root, pink carnation, osmanthus, and rooibos.” This once again featured that effect I can only describe as cold — no idea what does that — along with peach. The carnation showed up for a while in the early drydown, and then eventually became peach fading into musk. Not bad, but not interesting, either.

* Bon Vivant
Oh HELL no. This is described as “an effervescent blend of crystalline champagne notes and sweet strawberry,” but there was nothing effervescent about it, and very little strawberry; I smelled like flat champagne. And this one had significant throw, too, so I kept getting gusts of flat champagne coming off my wrist, to an extent that was borderline nauseating.

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New Worlds: Hostages and Ransoms

Would you beggar your kingdom to buy your king back? This week on the New Worlds Patreon, we take a look at hostages and ransoms. Comment over there!

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A Trip Down Juvenilia Lane, Vol. not-10

Take . . . three?

Back in 2016 and 2017, I began reading through my old notebooks from high school, college, and graduate school, unearthing what bits of story I was working on when, pinpointing the moment at which certain things began, and so forth, all preparatory to sending those notebooks off to be archived. Then I dropped the ball until 2019 and picked it back up again — for a single post, after which I dropped the ball again until now. But dammit, I will persevere! (Because I want these notebooks to stop cluttering up my office, heh.)

So, onward into the tenth volume!

Forewarned is forearmed: this time I checked the back of the notebook, and sure enough, I did the same thing of taking notes for different classes from both ends. So I can keep an eye out, as I go through, for where the order of the pages starts going in reverse.

This is another grad school notebook, but I’d have to go diving into my transcripts to figure out whether I’m still in the first year or moving on to the second — I don’t as clearly associate certain courses with certain years as I did in college. Or possibly the evidence of my game notes will make it clear: I do have a pretty clear sense of what happened in which “season” of the Changeling LARP, so I might be able to peg it based on that.

Many of the notes early on in here are from the first course I took with Henry Glassie — a course whose name and ostensible topic I don’t even remember, because it was more or less a class on How to Be a Folklorist. Some history, some theory, some practical technique (there are notes in here about photography, ranging from “if you take a few photos you’ll support your argument; if you take lots, you’ll counteract your bias” to “don’t trust the light meter”), a whole lot of stuff that doesn’t fall into any of those categories. It’s mostly not directly relevant to any of my writing, except insofar as I can feel Glassie’s patience, humor, and humanity breathing off the page, even in this condensed form. He really was the best teacher I had in grad school, or possibly ever — a wonderful, soft-spoken man who could do a two-hour slide lecture on a random topic like Turkish carpet weaving and I would be awake and paying attention the whole way through. His first fieldwork was with storytellers in Northern Ireland, and he either learned a lot from them or was already their peer. And there’s so much great stuff in here about how to relate to the people you’re working with in a respectful manner, things like giving them the manuscript of your book to read over and comment on, and making sure you publish some form of your work in their country, maybe in an edition tailored to a more general audience. I’ll still probably send this notebook to Cushing, but man, if I ever wind up writing a novel about an ethnographic fieldworker, I’m going to go park myself in one of their reading rooms for a week or so to make use of my own papers.

Which doesn’t mean there aren’t still lines of me practicing kanji in between notes on what Glassie said, or random spates of Welsh song lyrics. But it reminds me that doing that wasn’t always a sign of boredom; I’ve always needed something to occupy my hands, even when I’m listening closely. Rote writing of random crap is sometimes that thing. In fact, I don’t think it was during this course — I was too new to grad school to do anything this bold — but I think when I took another course from him later, on the writing of ethnographies, I told him outright that if he saw me doodling in the margins of my notebook, he shouldn’t take it as a sign of inattention. And he understood completely.

Anyway, thanks to Glassie’s skill as a lecturer and discussion leader, we’re twenty pages into the notebook before any significant quantity of story material appears — an outline for the first chapter of the Viking revenge novel. In fact, that’s the only substantive thing I wrote down in thirty-six pages. There are smaller bits throughout, vague not-quite-story ideas; one notion for an incident in TIR, the novel I never wrote; one random typological thing about swords for no reason I can recall; a few higher-level thoughts about writing and the eventual direction of my studies — but mostly my thoughts seem to have been on the class. (It’s a shame I never wrote that Proppian analysis of The Princess Bride.) I actually wrote “Last lecture . . . ” in my notes — that’s how much I enjoyed his course.

After that I move into notes for my fieldwork course, where you can see my focus of study shifting very directly to role-playing games, as I was in a really good position to do research on that topic. But I think I was also noodling around with the idea I had at one point to do . . . some kind of project? Maybe a masters’ project, except I’m not sure why I was looking at doing something like that when I was pursuing a Ph.D.; I remember there being some reason, but it’s gone now . . . anyway, a collection of short stories about Sahasrara, one of the Nine Lands, with accompanying commentary about the worldbuilding. That’s the only reason I can think of why I was speculating randomly about different animals and how to match them with each other in oppositional pairs but also connect them to different parts of the environment, as it doesn’t carry the marginal sign I generally used for writing-related stuff, but it has bugger-all to do with the class notes around it. Then again, I may have fallen out of the habit of using that sign, since a page later I’m back to conlanging and it isn’t marked.

In fact, yes: a little while later I have notes on Blood and Flowers, which was the working title for that project. I still don’t remember why I was doing it — maybe the folklore department required such a thing? — and it never did happen, but that’s definitely what those bits were for.

I’m sort of amused by the section where apparently we were discussing academic publication. I’ve got a laundry list of questions clearly shaped by my experience with fiction publishing, which is wildly different from how it works in academia. I think my professor was a little croggled by my approach to the subject.

This time around it’s easier for me to spot where the direction of note-taking switches from front-to-back to back-to-front. Why can I tell? Because I was apparently so colossally bored in one class that I started just writing out song lyrics — in English, for once — formatted as if they were my notes, and written in cursive to make it harder for anyone to tell what I was really doing. It’s one thing for me to do a few lines here and there, but this goes on for pages. Not sure which course that was, since on that day I appear not to have written down a single bloody thing that had to do with class. This happens several times, actually, which suggests I had one course that was really tedious. I could dig through my file cabinet and probably figure out which one, but . . . I don’t actually care enough to do that? Which kind of sums it up.

Anyway, flipping to the back of the notebook and moving forward: huh, for once in my life I took detailed notes on my reading. Possibly that was for a class where I was supposed to type up a primer for my fellow students on that particular book; it’s the only reason I can think of why I would have been so thorough on something that wasn’t for a paper I was writing. But that soon gives way to brainstorming “charms,” by which I seem to have meant small folkloric stories that would be told to prevent the rusting of iron, each one relating to why it rusts in the first place and how someone can counteract that reason now. These are actually kind of cool! And I don’t think I have them typed up anywhere, so I will definitely fix that before I send this notebook away.

OH MY GOD I think some of these notes are from the course that had That Guy in it. The That Guy-iest That Guy I ever encountered in all my years of school. You know That Guy. The one who won’t. shut. up. In this case, the one who once talked for ten minutes straight and twice steamrolled right over the professor when Bauman tried to shut him down. How am I sure these are from that course? Because I wrote down “Good god. Someone has told {That Guy} to listen to others.”

I had honestly forgotten how much random conlanging I did during this time, most of it for the Nine Lands. There’s a lot of work on scripts — trying to come up with something like radicals for one language; an abjad arranged into blocks sort of like Hangeul for another — plus ongoing efforts toward declensions (complete with vowel gradation!) for a third language, one I don’t have a script for, but I know I was going to make it be essentially based on ogham. I started working on the grammar for yet another one of that setting’s languages, this time using German phonology and Irish grammar — which meant I had to make up something to take the place of lenition. Why did I inflict this on myself? Mother of god, I even tried to work out the historical evolution that produced two related languages from one ancestral language. I also made up army banners for yet another country in that setting, and there are three pages of longhand fiction for TIR that I probably didn’t write during class. I really had the Nine Lands on the brain, likely because I was marinating in so much anthropology that it automatically flowed into the largest worldbuilding project I had available. But why most of it is linguistic, I don’t know — I wasn’t studying any languages at the time. There’s pages of this stuff, though.

But I was working on other things, too. There’s a draft of the pitch letter for another novel I might dust off someday, and — locating this firmly in my first year of grad school, not a later one — a list of the stories I had sent to the Asimov contest, meaning that we’re in December of 2002, since I heard back that I’d won in early 2003. (I may have dated most of my class notes, but only with the month and day, not the year.) Plus there are enough scattered notes on the Viking revenge epic to make it clear I was still preparing to write it and noodling around with the early bits; I finished that draft in the summer of 2003. Also periodic lists of which short stories I was working on, and a half-finished attempt to rework “But Who Shall Lead the Dance?” as a folksong, since it has the rhythm of one anyway — it looks like I did that even before I wrote the story itself. There’s relatively little game material, though, apart from one spate of Ree-related stuff and me listing the costuming and makeup I would need to play the first incarnation of the White Swan character.

This notebook actually has quite a bit of stuff I want to make sure I’ve recorded elsewhere before I send it along to Cushing. The short story ideas jotted down in it may not look like all that much, but I’ve had plenty of other ancient, dusty, not very rich concepts unexpectedly flower into a thing, so I’m operating on the principle of “keep everything, just in case.”

Now, let’s see if I can get through the rest of the notebooks in anything like a timely fashion!

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