Marie Brennan's Blog, page 5

poetry bonanza day!

Today has just brought a bunch of poetry news! I mean, one part of it was a form rejection for a packet of poems, but to take the sting out of that, another place bought two from me in one go, “Our Rewards” and “Hallucination”. I knew that could happen with poetry (since most markets want you to send them more than one poem at a time), but it’s the first time I’ve unlocked that achievement!

And on top of that, I have a poem out today! Eye to the Telescope has done a plant-themed issue, to which I contributed a poem about the World Tree, “Axis Mundi”. You can read the whole issue online there!

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New Worlds: Yes, Minister

Why do governments have ministers, and what kind of work do they do? That’s the question the New Worlds Patreon takes on this week — comment over there!

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Another special edition: the Memoirs of Lady Trent!

Man, it just be raining news around here this week . . .

Coming soon to a Kickstarter near you: a special edition of the Memoirs of Lady Trent!

If you follow the Kickstarter now, you’ll be alerted when it launches (and it’s worth noting that first, this does not commit you to backing it, and second, more pre-launch followers = better visibility in the Kickstarter algorithms once it goes live).

I should also mention that this is a Kickstarter for the first of two omnibus volumes: this one covers A Natural History of Dragons, The Tropic of Serpents, and Voyage of the Basilisk, while the second one will have In the Labyrinth of Drakes, Within the Sanctuary of Wings, and the short fiction — including “The Incident at Booker’s Club,” a new and previously unpublished story! In addition to that, there’s new cover art, new interior dust jacket art, new interior art, the whole shebang.

Should you be interested in picking this up, you will definitely want to back the first Kickstarter — it’ll be cheaper to get them one at a time rather than waiting for both, and there’s no guarantee of how many copies will be on hand for sale after the campaign ends. Wraithmarked (the publisher) has had it happen before where they run out of Volume 1, due to post-campaign popularity, before Volume 2 is available. But for now, just click that “notify me on launch” button, and we’ll see you when the Kickstarter goes live!

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Return of the books read!, March 2025

It’s been a minute since I posted one of these! And by a minute, I mean a literal year.

As I mentioned a while ago, I stopped blogging about what I was reading because everything I was reading was research for a book series (The Sea Beyond) that I couldn’t talk about yet. Then I was able to talk about it, but all my reading was still research, and while I know some of you would be interested in hearing about that, it was draining enough of my brain that writing extra about it, beyond my notes, was really not an appealing prospect.

But! While this post does contain one book from the tail end of that binge, and there are a few others I’ll probably work my way through later (as we get started on the second volume of the duology), for now, I’m actually reading some other stuff.

Fiesta y tragedia: Vivir y morir in la España del Siglo de Oro, Enrique Martínez Ruiz. Last of the research binge, and the fifth book I read in Spanish. This was actually the one I started with, but there are two reasons it took me forever to get through: first, it’s over six hundred pages long in ebook, and second, a Spanish friend has confirmed that this guy’s writing sometimes gets a little impenetrable. As in, I clocked a 127-word sentence, and that might not even be the longest one in here. For someone like me, barely muddling through a second language, daisy-chaining that many clauses together makes following the point of the sentence rather challenging. But there are few enough books on daily life in early modern Spain that beggars could not be choosers, and I got some very useful information out of here even if I had to do a lot of work to get it.

Language of Liars, S.L. Huang. Disclosure: I know the author through the Codex Writer’s Group, and I got sent an advance copy of this for blurbing purposes.

Forthcoming SF novella about linguistics that is, among other things, taking some potshots at nineteenth-century anthropologists (my comment about that was “it’s like shooting fish in a barrel, where the fish deserve it”). The story itself is not for the faint of heart, and I won’t be surprised in the slightest if it winds up on awards lists.

Dragonsong, Anne McCaffrey. Re-read, or rather re-listen, for an upcoming book club. I remember really liking the Harper Hall trilogy; I’m not sure how much of that memory owes itself to later books in the series, and how much is rose-tinted glasses. But man does this one take a while to get started. You’re fully a quarter of the way in before it gets to what I remembered as the plot; everything before that basically consists of detailing just how much Menolly’s life at Half Circle Hold sucks. And then even once the plot gets started, way more time and attention is spent on what other characters are doing than I recalled — in fact, parts of it felt rather like they were more there to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the other Pern books than to really tell a story about Menolly and her fire lizards. It was a quick listen, and doing it in library audiobook meant it was filling time I spent in the car rather than leisure time at home, so I don’t really regret it, but . . . yeah, I was not impressed this time around.

The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett. Also read for that book club. I very much enjoyed Bennett’s Divine Cities trilogy, and I was very interested in the premise of a detective story in a fantasy world, but the basic principles of the setting here are not as much my cup of tea — I’ve never been a fan of the New Weird/body horror/etc. The notion of engraving is cool, and I liked Din reasonably well as a character (Ana a bit less so; you could get a pretty good bender on by drinking every time she grins), but I’m not sure I’m invested enough to continue. I do get the feeling that there is an Inevitable Revelation coming concerning certain things, and I’m curious to know what that is, but I might be at the level of “ask a friend” rather than reading the rest of the series myself.

Filling Your Worlds With Words: A Writer’s Guide to Linguistic Worldbuilding, C.D. Covington. Disclosure: Turning Darkness Into Light is one of the books discussed in here, because back when the author was doing her linguistics column for Tor.com/Reactor, I shamelessly asked her if she’d like to read my novel about translation.

This is a Kickstarter-funded book about many aspects of language and worldbuilding. It starts off with a fairly technical discussion of things like sound production and how those might differ for non-humanoid species, but this is not a book about conlanging; instead she touches on things like how names and speech styles reflect culture, how difficulties of translation can play into your plot, and why universal translators will never work outside of straight-up magic. The formatting for the print edition is not great, but the information is excellent, if you’re interested in this sort of thing.

Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling, Henry Lien. This admits up-front that it’s making sweeping generalizations about “Eastern” and “Western” storytelling, and that it’s deliberately taking the piss out of the latter in an attempt to shake up the brains of readers for whom that’s an unexamined default. It’s a slim book (I read it in an evening) that unpacks the four-part story structure usually referred to in English by its Japanese name, kishōtenketsu, as well as nested and circular storytelling, and also the cultural values that tend to go hand-in-hand with these forms. Lien uses various bits of fairly well-known media to illustrate his points, so it’s not all abstract discussion. Lots of food for thought here!

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Hugos 2025!

I went for a hike this afternoon so I wouldn’t just spend the entire middle of the day haunting social media — but as some of you have now seen elseweb, I am once again a finalist for the Hugo Awards!

. . . in the category of Best Poem!

If your reaction to that news is “wait, you’re a finalist for Best Poem?” — no, you didn’t miss a category in previous years. Every Worldcon has the right to pick a Special Award; Seattle chose poetry. It’s possible this might become a regular thing in future years, as happened with Best Series, especially since the Nebulas have instituted that as a new category. But for now, it’s a Special Award.

If your reaction to that news is “wait, you’re a finalist for Best Poem?” — trust me, I was as surprised as you are! I only started writing poetry in 2021, and at the time of this posting, I have a whopping six such publications to my name; my nominated poem (“A War of Words”) was my fourth. So yeah, this is almost as new to me as it is to the Hugos, and I’m still a little croggled.

(And also amused that I have boomeranged from what is generally going to be the longest single category — Best Series — to what is generally going to be the shortest — Best Poem.)

I am in splendid company, and there’s something particularly cool about being part of this unique (or, dare we hope, inaugural?) cohort. I can’t wait to sit down and read all the finalist poems!

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New Worlds: Regencies

No, not the popular genre of romances. The New Worlds Patreon is taking a look at the practice that era was named for, having a formally recognized mismatch between the person on the throne and the person actually running the country. Comment over there!

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New Worlds: Performance Notation

The theme for the New Worlds Patreon this month has been the performing arts, so to close it out, we’re taking a look at something very challenging: how you can write down performances to be read by other people later. Comment over there!

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New Worlds: On Stage

The New Worlds Patreon is ready to strut its stuff upon the stage! Or at least to talk about the people who do so, and the types of stages they use. Comment over there!

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New Worlds: Puppetry

The New Worlds Patreon will be talking about theatre very shortly, but first, a detour into a specific subcategory thereof: puppets! Comment over there.

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New Worlds: Let’s Dance

To launch the New Worlds Patreon into its next year, my loyal patrons have voted for a topic I’m very fond of: dance! Comment over there . . .

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