Marie Brennan's Blog, page 48

New Worlds: Poetry

In a show of appropriate timing (since I had to write several tanka and haiku for my short story “Speak to the Moon,” which came out this month), the New Worlds Patreon has moved on to the topic of poetry! Comment over there.

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The Advent of Scent, Week 13

* New Orleans
Described as “sweet honeysuckle and jasmine with a hint of lemon and spice.” The hint is very slight; I never get the spice at all, and the lemon is only fleetingly there while this is wet — not even really discernible as lemon so much as a touch of lightness (that doesn’t show up when my sister tries this one). It’s one of the better florals I’ve tried, though, nice and mild, with a faint honeyed note that comes through toward the end. Holding onto it for now.

* Manhattan
Described as “sheer amber, black leather, white mint, lemon peel, white tea, grapefruit, kush, teakwood and orchid.” I definitely smell a sweet leather in the bottle, along with the citrus, but (as is so often the case) the floral elements end up dominating. Not gratingly so, but enough that this is just a meh for me. (And yes, “meh” has become an actual rating in my system, indicating that it’s a three on my five-point scale.)

* Arcana
Described as “frankincense, rosemary, lavender, neroli, and verbena.” Starts out as rosemary and citrus, becomes resinous and herbal, and winds up as a mellowed frankincense that could almost pass for sandalwood. Not bad, but not me, so: meh.

* Bergamotto di Calabria (Perris Monte Carlo)
Described as “bergamot, petitgrain, timur pepper, pink pepper, orange flower, neroli, orange blossom, jasmine, iris, sandalwood, vetiver, and musk.” In the bottle, a generic “perfume” smell with an orange-y tinge. On me, it’s basically a citrus floral air freshener: inoffensive but also completely forgettable.

(Here endeth the Kurayami-Hime Citrus Collection. Now begin the samples that cgbookcat1 very kindly mailed to me!)

* Nephilim
Described as “holy frankincense and hyssop in union with earthy fig, defiled by black patchouli and vetiver, with a chaotic infusion of lavender, cardamom, tamarind, rosemary, oakmoss and cypress.” Oh BPAL, I’ve missed your more outrageous descriptions. I suspect what I smell when I first apply this is the hyssop, maybe tag-teaming with the rosemary; it’s something very green and sharp. Over time the fig comes through, and I wind up with that and the cardamom. In the long run I’ll probably decide it’s not for me, but I’ll try it again.

* Penitence
Described as “a blend of pure, pious frankincense and graceful myrrh.” This is the first time I’ve had a perfume go full circle! In the bottle it’s kind of a heavy, sweet spice, but as soon as I apply it the tone goes much lighter and sharper, almost medicinal. Then it takes on a green and resinous edge, before mellowing to . . . a kind of heavy, sweet spice, pretty much identical to its bottle scent. Another that’s probably not for me, but I’m holding onto it because it will be useful for comparisons against more complex blends with frankincense and myrrh.

* Fighter
Described as “leather, musk, blood, and steel.” Well, it delivers, I’ll say that for it? Been a while since my reaction to a scent was “ugh, NO,” but I don’t really want to smell like metallic leather.

* Miskatonic University
Described as “Irish coffee, dusty tomes and polished oakwood halls.” Since I never got the woody element other people report for this, it was pretty much just identical to Irish Coffee Buttercream, which I tried before. But I’m going to hold onto it so I can compare the two; I’m curious what differences I’ll find between them, before I dump one or both.

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Perpetuating the Cult of the Badass — Or Not

I know some of you have started to read A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, either via my rec or elsewhere, so you’ll have already seen Devereaux’s sequence of posts about the idea of the “universal warrior.” (If not, then tl;dr — he thinks the notion is absolute bollocks.)

But I want to particularly highlight the last post in the series, about the “Cult of the Badass.” I’d picked up this general vibe before, of course: the idealization and idolization of a certain kind of tough masculinity that we see all the time in books and movies, in TV and video games, and in real life (at least aspirationally). And it isn’t hard to miss flaws like the toxicity of that concept, or the sexism baked pretty much into its core.

What’s new to me is the extent to which the Cult of the Badass maps to the values of fascism.

I’m not going to recap Devereaux’s points in that essay; you can go read them for yourself (the part about fascism is under the header “Echoes of Eco”). The reason I reference his argument — apart from the fact that it’s a good one — is because recently I also read an essay by Ada Palmer that . . . okay, has vanished from her blog in the time since I read it, and I’m not sure why. I guess this is what I get for not posting about this until now? Anyway, it was her transcribed remarks from (I think) a convention she was a guest of honor at, talking about how we commonly teach the Renaissance as being about these few visionary guys who knew what the future could look like and tried to bring that vision into reality, which — surprise! — is a massive misrepresentation. They were trying to change the world, sure, but not to look like the world we have now. And much of what we have now is the product, not of a few visionary guys, but of huge quantities of people having their own little conversations all over the place. The essay had a great example of this, in the form of how the unknown individuals who wrote the printer’s forewords to various editions of a particular Greek philosopher (I can’t remember which one, dammit) led to this philosopher being taught all over the place, in ways that very much influenced the change in culture.

Anyway, here’s my point, somewhat undermined by not having Palmer’s piece available for linking. When she talked about lots and lots of people having their conversations about things and the power of that to change society, I found myself thinking about Devereaux and the Cult of the Badass and fascism. Because the more we tell and consume stories about how awesome it is to be a warrior at heart, the more we repeat and reify the notion of a particular kind of strength (and implicitly, screw all the people without that strength) . . . the more we nudge society in that direction. But by telling other kinds of stories, by reading different books and watching different movies and recommending them to our friends, we dilute that trend.

I got tired of those stories a long time ago. But now I’m more than tired of them: I reject them. I don’t want to give them my time, my money, or a place in my skull. War is not the metaphor around which we should be organizing our lives. There are better ways, and I’m going to try to have the conversations that lead to them.

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New Worlds: Literary Storytelling

From the oral telling of tales, the New Worlds Patreon goes to those which have been written down — and the many, many conventions we’ve built up around the “right way” to do that. Comment over there!

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towards some thoughts on series

I’ve had discussions with other writers about how there’s tons of advice out there on writing novels, but very little on writing series.

File this one under “stuff I know how to do, but don’t know how to articulate or explain.” But this one will be less polished than the pieces I wrote on the structure of paragraphs, scenes, and chapters, because I’m really thinking out loud as I go here.

Step one, I think, is to take a look at what a series is. A set of interconnected books, okay. But there are ways and ways of connecting things, and they’re not all going to operate the same. After chewing on this for a while, I’ve decided that you can very roughly sort different types of series into a spectrum from discrete to linked (with two semi-outliers that I’ll note as we pass them.) So:

The Non-Series

At the absolute discrete end, you’ve got books whose only connection is that a single author wrote them. Not actually a series; ’nuff said.

The Setting Series

In this type, the connection between the books is that they take place in a single setting, but otherwise they share no connection of character or plot. (They may not even share authors.) I’m having trouble thinking of any pure examples of this; most often this tends to be a superset of other series, e.g. Discworld or Valdemar being settings that contain both stand-alone novels and series within them, or a shared world like the Forgotten Realms. If you can think of an example that is purely stand-alone novels, whether written by the same author or different ones, let me know. (I think it would need at least three books to serve as a good example; two books in the same setting is a series by the most technical definition, but I’d like something stronger.)

The Cast Series

This is the type of series you commonly find in romance, where each book follows a different set of protagonists and a different plot, but characters from one book appear in another. (Romance often sets this up by presenting you with a group in the first book, e.g. a set of siblings, with the implicit promise that you’ll get to see each of them get their own story eventually.) These naturally share a setting as well.

*The Reset Button Series

As the asterisk indicates, I think this one’s an outlier. It’s the Nancy Drew model: each book shares a setting and a core cast with all the others, but in between books the slate gets wiped clean, which means they have less plot continuity than the Cast Series. Nancy will always be eighteen; Ned will never graduate from college. I’m not sure this is very popular anymore, except maybe in children’s fiction — and maybe not even there?

The Episodic Growth Series

Closely akin to the Nancy Drew model, this has a core cast and a new plot with each installment, but there’s no reset button. As a result, change and growth do happen over time. You see this a lot in mystery novels and police procedural TV shows, because it’s very well-suited to those genres: each installment starts with a crime and ends with the crime being solved, while in the background there might might be some ongoing character-based subplot about the detective’s marriage falling apart or whatever.

The Episodic Arc Series

This one is a hybrid between the previous and the subsequent types. It has self-contained episodic plots, especially early on, but there’s also a longer-term metaplot that those episodes may be helping to set up, and the episodic structure tends to fall away toward the end. Examples include Harry Potter and each season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and yes, I realize the creators of both those works are not exactly looking great right now, but they’re well-known illustrations of the model). Many trilogies feel at least a bit like this, because it’s sensible from a business standpoint to write a more or less stand-alone novel that can serve as the foundation for the later two installments.

*The Perpetual Motion Series

Our other outlier, which I think I’ve only seen in soap operas on TV. Here there can be many arcs going at once, such that while an individual plot may end, the series as a whole doesn’t (until it gets canceled). This would be an extraordinarily hard trick to pull off in traditional novel publishing, I suspect, though it could work in indie.

The Metaplot Series

Here there’s no real attempt to wrap up a self-contained plot in any particular installment. From the start, you know you’re getting a long-term story, and unlike that trilogy approach I described above, the first volume doesn’t feel like it could stand on its own. A Song of Ice and Fire is a prominent example of this, along with TV shows like Lost.

The Single Book

And to cap off the other end, we have our other form of non-series: a single novel that just happens to have been published in multiple volumes, i.e. The Lord of the Rings. The difference between this and the Metaplot Series is that in theory the author of the latter type gives each book its own satisfying structure, even if that structure doesn’t end in resolution; the author of the Single Book non-series just whacks it apart at the necessary intervals.

I think that covers the whole gamut. Obviously some things are going to straddle the divisions, because no system of categorization is ever perfect; the goal here is to distinguish what shifts of interconnection happen along the way, rather than to make clean boxes that absolutely everything will fit neatly into. And series can change over the course of their lifetime, e.g. what the author intended to be Episodic Growth sprouts an arc plot along the way. I’ll chew more on those bits of the concept later. But for right now, I think this is a decent framework? Is there anything significant I’m missing?

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several bits of publishing news

Five things make a post, right?

* About two hours from when I post this, Alyc and I will be doing an event with Tubby and Coo’s, a New Orleans independent bookseller! We’ll be in conversation with fellow author Bryan Camp, and three attendees will get their very own Rook and Rose astrological chart from Alyc.

* Last summer I was a guest on the Aurora Award-winning Worldshapers podcast. One of the neat things about this podcast is that the guy who runs it, Edward Willett, edited an anthology featuring stories from the guests he had in his first year. Now he’s doing it again, with a Kickstarter to fund the second volume! I’m on deck to provide a story for that, and I’ve also offered some fun goodies in the rewards: signed copies of The Mask of Mirrors, ebooks of Maps to Nowhere, and even some photographic prints.

* The reason I was on Worldshapers last year was because of Driftwood, which is my segue to the next item: my publisher, Tachyon, has teamed up with Humble Bundle and the Carl Brandon Society to offer a truly massive superbundle of Tachyon titles, Driftwood included. The bundle as a whole has a value of $441, and you can get all the levels for just $28. Proceeds support the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Carl Brandon Society, the latter of which helps support readers and writers of color in speculative fiction.

* Publication news! I crowed here when I sold a story to F&SF (after nineteen years of trying); now I can hold the proof of my success in my hands. They’re having some website problems right now that mean there’s no direct way to buy a physical copy, but ebooks can be gotten through Weightless Books, or you can subscribe here.

* And finally, one of my horror-style flash fairy tale retellings, “The Snow-White Heart,” has been reprinted in Frozen Wavelets! This and its fellow tale “Waiting for Beauty” are among my most-reprinted pieces, which is funny because I don’t generally think of myself as someone who writes horror . . .

I think that’s it for now. But my brain is like a sieve lately, so who knows.

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The Advent of Scent, Week 12

The Kurayami Hime Citrus Collection continues . . .

* Honeysuckle Lemon Curd (Haus of Gloi)
Described as “rich lemon curd with a touch of fresh honeysuckle.” This wound up smelling a good deal like Lemondrop from their summer collection: very sweet lemon in the bottle, tarter when it goes on, a brief appearance of a floral note, but then settling down into a nice, smooth, mellow lemon that I can only think to describe as “cushioned with honey.” This is going in the keep-for-now pile!

* Mandarino di Sicilia (Perris Monte Carlo)
Described as “green mandarin, bitter orange, yellow mandarin, petitgrain, jasmine, geranium, orange blossom, cedar, amber, and musk.” The citrus element fades pretty rapidly, but something in here manages to rein in the floral notes so they don’t tip over into that quality which usually makes them annoy me so much. It isn’t enough to make me like it, but it’s much less objectionable than most of its ilk.

* Chypre Azural (Les Indemodables)
Described as “Sicilian tarocco orange oil, Egyptian centifolia rose absolute grand cru, Indonesian patchouli, ambergris tincture, and tarragon from the Alps” (which I’m sure smells oh so different from tarragon that comes from elsewhere). In the bottle, it reminded me strongly of the yuzu soda I’d just drunk, but it went soapy as I wore it. Not horribly so — like Mandarino di Sicilia, it stayed mild for some reason — but still not desirable.

* Bess
Described as “rosemary, orange flower, grape spirit, five rose variants, lemon peel, and mint.” Very medicinally mint in the bottle, with the faintest after-whiff of grape; wet, it turned into Vicks Vapo-Rub. That fortunately went away and turned into mild roses with some fruity hints, but the best I can say for it on me was that it was inoffensive.

* The Cobra and the Canary (Imaginary Authors)
Speaking of offensive . . . this one is described as “lemon, orris, tobacco flowers, leather, hay fields, and asphalt.” Even allowing for the fact that Imaginary Authors’ last ingredient is always something random and unreal, blech. Starts out medicinal and then turns into asphalt leather tobacco. No thank you.

* Amber Cologne (Bortnikoff)
Another competitor for “way too many notes” with bergamot, lemon, white and pink grapefruit, sweet orange, cardamom, frangipani, jasmine sambac, Virginia cedarwood, sandalwood, grey and brown ambergris, oud from Sri Lanka, Bouya oud, and vanilla. Unsurprisingly, it’s a bit hard to sort through; it’s sort of floral and/or aquatic citrus early on, but later I think I might be picking up on the ambergris, as there’s something kind of warm but in a different way from sandalwood or vanilla. I’m going to try this one again, less because I like it, and more because I want to investigate it further.

* Safran Colognise (Nishane)
Described as “cedrat (which I think is citron?), passion fruit, pink grapefruit, saffron, magnolia, pink pepper, musk, ambergris, and leather.” Somehow it had that “cold” note I’ve picked up from other things, even though it shares no ingredients except for musk with them, and musk is absolutely not cold. I’m wondering if it might be some non-scent component in the perfume instead — I don’t know enough about perfume chemistry to know if such a thing might be in there. Anyway, cold and bitter citrus turns to leather and citrus turns to musk and leather with the faintest citrus edge. Meh.

* Arancia di Sicilia (Perris Monte Carlo)
Describe as “blood orange (brown extraction & sfuma torchio extraction (whatever the heck that means)), almond, cinnamon, labdanum, coffee, iris, musk, and amber.” In the bottle, it splits the difference between the sweet orange and bitter orange scents I’ve tested. On, it . . . practically vanished. As in, I probably swiped myself ten or twelve times with the wand from the sample vial in an attempt to make it something other than a ghost of a scent. It got a touch stronger later on, but I think what happened is that the citrus broke down instantly upon hitting my skin, and I had to wait for the other notes to do their thing. Which started out as almond and amber, then transitioned to what I suspect is the iris — that or the labdanum, which is a thing I still haven’t really learned to ID. Something earthy and sweetish but also kind of rough? Anyway, I don’t like it enough to experiment with it more, especially as I think I’d empty the bottle in another pass or two.

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New Worlds: Oral Storytelling

I feel like it’s been ages since I posted one of these! Which it has been — but not from your perspective. In order to facilitate getting the Year Four collection ready as soon as possible, I wrote and scheduled the January and February essays back in December; now I’m getting back on the horse.

And the first piece up is on oral storytelling! Comment over there.

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Books read, February 2021

Son of a Trickster, Eden Robinson. I can’t remember where I saw this recommended, but it’s got an excellent strapline in its cover copy: “A compelling coming-of-age novel in which everyday teen existence crashes up against indigenous beliefs, crazy family dynamics and cannibalistic river otters . . .” Having said that, man did it take its time getting to the cannibalistic river otters. For a very large percentage of this book, it’s just about the main character trying to stay afloat amid a giant pile of incredibly dysfunctional people, struggling with his own alcoholism, and so forth, while a lot of those dysfunctional people take advantage of him. Once the magic stuff really came to the fore, though, I enjoyed it enough that the sequel is on its way to me.

Digger, Volume 1, Ursula Vernon.
Digger, Volume 2, Ursula Vernon. (Not actually read back-to-back, but I might as well write them up that way.) Wow am I late to this particular party — but it is so worth showing up for. I also understand why, although multiple people I know had raved about Digger, it’s hard to pitch in a way that explains why you ought to read it; anything with starts that “so the main character is a wombat” is already in eyebrow-raising territory. But the wombat is awesome! So is the hyena! And the shadowling thingy that might or might not be a demon! I have confirmed that not only am I not the first person to think Digger is a lot like a friend of mine, said friend has decided that’s one of the nicest compliments she’s ever received. Digger’s pragmatism and face-palming (face-pawing?) are great. I read the first volume, liked it enough to order the second, read the second, and promptly ordered the remainder of the series. Expect that to show up in a future booklog, and not very long from now, either.

Heroine’s Journey, Sarah Kuhn. Third of an urban fantasy series about Asian-American superheroines in San Francisco. I have to take these in smallish doses, because part of the brand here involves the characters screwing up for a long time before they sort themselves out, which can be frustrating to me even if I know they will sort it out eventually. And I was particularly uninclined to be patient with Bea’s kind of screwing up, which features her trying to prove how mature she is in some pretty immature ways. But I am glad to report that the story, in the long run, does not agree with her opinion that the ways she’s using her mind-control powers are totally fine — my tolerance for that sort of thing has declined sharply over time. It also made me tear up with some of the stuff about grief and the ways Bea and her sister Evie have or have not been dealing with the loss of their mother. (Not a spoiler; their mother is gone before the series begins.)

Stepsister, Jennifer Donnelly. I’ve read enough fairy-tale-based things now that I’m rather jaded about them; it takes something significant to make me invest in a new one now. This? Succeeds in spades. Partly because Donnelly clearly knows that it isn’t enough to say “I’ve got a new spin on this story” — because honey, at this point I’m not sure there are new spins. You’ve got to bring something else. In this case, that’s a contest between the personification of Chance and the eldest personification of Fate, about whether he’ll manage to change the fate of one of Cinderella’s stepsisters, post-tale. That plus a somewhat creepy faerie queen breathes some much-needed life into a story I’ve seen done dozens of ways, and makes good room for some meditations on what one’s “heart” might be (hint: it isn’t always charity, kindness, and goodness). And the narration is strong, too. If you like fairy-tale stories but seem to be tired of all of them these days, this one might jar you out of that rut.

The Never-Tilting World, Rin Chupeco. Does anybody remember a . . . miniseries, I think it was, or maybe just a special, on TV something like twenty-plus years ago, about a world where it was always daylight on one side and always night on the other? I remember nothing else about it beyond that, but the memory made me interested in this book, which has a similar premise. Do not look for solid worldbuilding here, not of the practical sort: there’s a nod toward it being hard to survive in the seventeen years since a mysterious cataclysm caused the world to stop turning, whether you’re on the day side or the night side, but somehow there are still cities (two of them, one per side) that manage to stay fed and produce things like books even though the world outside their walls seems to consist entirely of monster-haunted wilderness and some nomads straight out of Mad Max. On the other hand, I really liked the Avatar-esque spin on magic, where you get different variants depending on what element you channel and what type of gate you channel it through (so that a Starmaker, for example, channels air patterns through a fire gate to make light). And there’s some intriguing mythological worldbuilding verrrrrry vaguely based on Inanna’s descent into the underworld, with twin goddesses and some kind of ritual whose failure caused that cataclysm. I wound up feeling odd about the pacing and characterization, which somehow seemed to spend a lot of words without developing the things I wanted to see developed, but I’m also still intrigued by the unanswered questions about what went wrong. There’s a sequel (and I think this is intended to be a duology), which I . . . may read? We’ll see if this sticks with me well enough to prompt that. The book also has a central f/f relationship, for those of you looking for that kind of thing.

Elfquest: The Final Quest, Volume 1, Wendy and Richard Pini.
Elfquest: The Final Quest, Volume 2, Wendy and Richard Pini. I’m finally catching up on this arc, very late. I’ve read Volume 1 before — possibly twice — and I couldn’t remember anything about it; re-reading it now, I can see part of the reason why. A big focus of this part of the story is on how there are so many different groups of elves in so many different places, and the question of how (if at all) their various ways can be reconciled . . . but the result is that the first half of Volume 1 hops around a lot, making it feel rather unfocused. Even once it starts to gain more momentum, I think it’s choppier than Pini’s storytelling of yore — though admittedly my ability to follow through isn’t helped by the fact that I never knew the later material as well, so I’m constantly going “whose kid is that? Where did they find that guy? How did they get over there, again?”

The story finds its footing much better in Volume 2, where it starts to focus on that big question of ways of life. I’m honestly interested to see how the story addresses that, since as presented, it’s kind of unanswerable: it’s fine to say that people can choose Way A or Way B as they please, but that starts to unravel when, say, two people who have been married for centuries are leaning in different directions, and it’s pulling them apart. You can’t just say, well, he should accept that she’s changed, when what she wants is making him miserable, what he wants is making her miserable, and they both love each other too much to just shake hands and go their separate ways. I don’t know how that’s going to be resolved.

I also don’t know what’s going to happen with the odd strand that started to crop up toward the end of the second volume, with some characters expressing views that I . . . suspect I’m meant to find sketchy. There was a particular bit with one character revealing something big to another, in a context where I was sitting there thinking, “I assume I’m supposed to find this cool, but it’s actually, uh, kind of weird, and I’m not sure I’m very on board with it.” Then I got to the end of that scene, and the character getting that revelation responded by running screaming into the hills. Like, literally. So now I’m pretty sure I am in fact meant to be dubious of some of the stuff going on here. As with Digger, the remaining volumes are on their way to me!

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The Advent of Scent, Week 11

Now begins the Kurayami Hime Citrus Collection! My sister’s favorite perfume has been discontinued, and while she has enough to keep her going for a while, she’ll eventually want a replacement. We’ve been testing a whole lot of things. Therefore, the theme for this post and the next is going to be “citrus” — a category I haven’t really tried so far!

Lavender Lemonade (Haus of Gloi)
Described as what it says on the tin, “lavender and fresh tart lemonade.” Pretty straightforward, the only variation being that it smells more strongly of lavender early on, then more evenly of both notes later. It’s nice, but on me it also fades unfortunately fast.

Pink Pepper, Orange Blossom, and Lemon Peel
No description, but these trios obviously don’t need it. Peppery in the bottle, and lemon with a pepper edge when it goes on, but as it dries this just turns into pepper and floral. Bah.

Tweedledee
Described as “kumquat, white pepper, white tea and orange blossom.” Wow does this smell like orange Starburst at the outset — it’s exactly that juicy, sugar scent. It acquires a floral tinge over time and keeps the orange (more mellowed, less candy), but the pepper and tea never really come through. It’s not bad, but it isn’t for me.

Falling Into the Sea (Imaginary Authors)
Described as “lemon, bergamot, grapefruit, lychee, tropical flowers, warm sand.” This is definitely citrus, but on the bitter rather than the sweet end. Too bitter for me, honestly, especially since its other aspect is floral, and as usual I’m very meh about that.

Lemondrops (Haus of Gloi)
Described as “freshly squeezed lemon juice with a touch of lemongrass and little hint of honey.” In the bottle it’s very sugary, but it gets a little more tart when it’s applied. After it’s applied, it’s a nice, mellow, smooth lemon that I can only describe as sitting “on a cushion of honey,” so I guess I know why perfumers wind up writing ridiculous metaphorical descriptions for their products. Not bad!

Soleil d’Italie (Mancera)
My sister ordered a “citrus sampler” from LuckyScent.com, so you’ll see a few random companies appearing in here. This one is described as “pink pepper, cardamom, bergamot, bitter orange, mandarin, lime, aquatic notes, patchouli, rose, vetiver, cedar, ambergris, white musk, and gaiac,” which between you and me I think is waaaaay more notes than a single scent needs. Not that I can really pick them out: it really just smells to me like . . . perfume. Very, very generic perfume. I guess as it dried there was a brief patch where I could maybe pick out something aquatic, and then later something warmer that might have been the musk and/or cardamom, but . . . yeah, it just wound up as slightly warmer perfume. Very boring, and not to my taste.

Shanghai
Described as “green tea touched with lemon verbena and honeysuckle.” Goes pretty straightforwardly from “citrus tea” to “tea and honeysuckle.” I love honeysuckles in real life, but I have yet to find a perfume with that note which I like, so, meh.

Sundrunk (Imaginary Authors)
Described as “neroli, rhubarb, honeysuckle, rose water, orange zest, and first kiss” (because the final listed ingredient in their perfumes is always something randomly metaphorical). Like Falling Into the Sea, we’re firmly on the bitter end here, the zest of the orange rather than its juice. It also is too floral for my taste.

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