Marie Brennan's Blog, page 54

The Advent of Scent, Week 1

I actually started my “perfume advent calendar” on the thirtieth, because the perfumes were there and why not. So this is eight days’ worth of perfumes — and in fact, I’m likely to report in eight-day increments, for silly reasons that have to do with numerical magic in Rook and Rose. >_>

All scents from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab unless otherwise specified.

* Lemon Peel, Marshmallow, and Orange Blossom

Wow no. In the bottle, it smells like an orange creamsicle; on me, it smells like an orange creamsicle with something musty that I think is supposed to be the marshmallow, but if so, it’s gone off in the back corner of the pantry. This one was unpleasant enough that I looked online for advice about how to remove perfumes. The remedy I tried was olive oil — which didn’t actually remove it, but did, bizarrely, make it smell better. Still like an orange creamsicle, but more recognizable marshmallow. However, I don’t like that combo enough to want to go dousing myself in olive oil just to make the perfume work.

* Peach Brandy

Holy monkeys, in the bottle this smells like the world’s most cloying cough syrup. It got a lot better once applied, with hints of spice to go with the fruit . . . but it also faded fast and lost its interesting factors along the way, until it just smelled like I’d used some vaguely fruity hand soap.

* Honeyed Apple

This was very pleasantly seasonal! There was a brief moment as it dried where it had a kind of chemical tinge to it that I didn’t like, but it mellowed out into something sweetly apple-y, i.e. exactly as billed. I would use this again.

* The Wish

Described as “An incense of candied smoked fruits, Oman frankincense, red oud, labdanum absolute, sheer vanilla, patchouli, red musk seed, osmanthus, and datura accord.” I mostly just got florals from it, with traces of the frankincense and vanilla, with no fruit at all. It eventually dried down to an incense-tinged floral, which in my book makes it better than most things that feature flowers, but still not my speed.

* Honey Taffy Smut

The listed tags for this are “booze, honey, musk, smut, sugar, taffy.” I have no idea what BPAL means by “smut;” the overall effect I got from it in the early stages was a kind of burnt caramel or maple. Later on it dried to musk with a trailing edge of honey — and man, I can already see myself developing the weird idiosyncratic vocabulary necessary to discuss scent, because to me the honey really was this thing that only came through at the end of my inhale and sort of registered on the top of my soft palate. It’s not a bad perfume overall, but not as appealing as some others in this batch.

* Zephyr

Described as “A gentle white scent, breezes laced with the scent of springtime blooms and citrus. Lemon, lemon verbena, neroli, white musk, white florals, white sandalwood, China musk, bergamot and a drop of vanilla.” It starts off being sweetly floral with maybe a brightening touch of citrus, but when the sandalwood and musk come through, they wind up being the only thing left. And I don’t mind that combo, but having already begun to discover how interestingly complex some of these can be, it’s kind of boring.

* Flutterby (House of Gloi)

Described as “Clean cotton, warm summer winds, and linden blossom.” Pretty firmly in the “laundry detergent” category for me, or maybe “dryer sheet” would be a better description, but not nearly as obnoxious as Wolf’s Heart was — I wouldn’t refuse to wear my clothes if they smelled like this. I got a bit of a citrus note off it, and have no idea if that’s the linden blossom or what, since the description is profoundly unhelpful. Not one I’m likely to wear again.

* Mad Hatter

Described as “A gentlemen’s lavender-citron cologne unhinged by the feral pungence of black musk and a paroxysm of pennyroyal.” HELLO PAROXYSM OF PENNYROYAL. That’s in the mint family, Wikipedia tells me, and in the bottle it smelled like BPAL was trying to beat me to death with a candy cane. I maybe got a hint of the citron when it was wet, but after that it was just sort of minty lavender with a hint of musk. Which is certainly interesting (see above re: Zephyr and me finding it boring), but it wasn’t the sort of interesting I’m inclined to keep.

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New Worlds: Sacred Holidays

Whether you’re gearing up for a religion-based holiday right now or not, you may be interested in this week’s New Worlds Patreon essay, about holidays based in religion. Comment over there!

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An Advent Calendar of Scents

I posted the other day about testing the BPAL samples I picked up at DragonCon, as an early stab in the direction of training my nose to pick out the different notes of perfume. In response, Yoon Ha Lee offered to send me some of the samples he was getting rid of . . .

. . . and today, fifty-seven perfumes showed up at my door.

So, uh, 1) thanks, Yoon!!!! and 2) I have (more than) enough perfume to do an advent calendar. Which I will probably drop the ball on because I’ll miss days here and there, but hey, I might as well give my experiments some structure. I won’t post every single day, though; more likely I’ll collect them into weekly reports.

But first, let me report on what I had before the bonanza arrived! I’d grabbed seven random bottles from their booth, and attempted to do the organized thing of sniffing each one in the bottle, then immediately after application, then about ten minutes later, then about twenty minutes after that, to see how the scents changed. Huh, people are not kidding about that latter part! There’s a definite modulation over time. As for the scents themselves:

Incubus — musk, musk, and more musk. In theory this has lots of other notes; in practice, I don’t think I could smell a single one, and neither could my sister. The best we could do was theorize that they were taking the edge off the musk, as it smelled fairly “gentle.” Also, holy crap, I could still smell this on my wrist twenty-four hours later; in fact, a lot of these last on me a very long time. Not bad, but also not interesting.

Seraphim — started out as PUNCH YOU IN THE FACE FLORAL (I’m not yet anywhere near the point of being able to tease the different flowers apart), then later mellowed to sandalwood with floral. Only much, much later could I maaaaaaybe tell there was some frankincense in there. I’m not very keen on florals, so this is also probably a no.

Wolf’s Heart — in the bottle? A little spicy and maybe citrusy. On me? LAUNDRY DETERGENT. Mellowing to baby powder hours later. Firm NO. But I’m curious to put it on my sister and see if skin chemistry does something different there.

R’lyeh — my sister dubbed this “the potpourri aisle;” I’d say it mostly comes across as evergreen, with some citrus coming through in the middle stages, and possibly some musk very later on (this is one where BPAL doesn’t list the ingredients, so I’m wildly guessing). It also had an interesting element that I can only describe as salt — it produced a dry sort of feeling in the back of my nasal passages, like I was breathing sea air. Interesting, and I might try it again.

Vasilissa — very floral to start; after a while I get a little bit of the warmth of the sandalwood and I think the resin of the myrrh. Still way too floral-heavy for me, though.

Thieves’ Rosin — I smell like Christmas! Starts off incredibly sweet and reminiscent of baking spices; then something like pine starts to come through, and maybe a bit of musk. It doesn’t last as long as most of the others, but I can see myself using this during the holidays.

Bastet — HELLO WINNER. It’s golden and sweet in the bottle; immediately after application, it’s almond and something a little brighter (might be the saffron or lotus?). Then it mellows into musk, cardamom, some almond sweetness, and just a touch of floral. I seriously kept sniffing my own wrist because it made me happy.

Goodreads giveaway!

If you can’t bear to wait until January 19th to read The Mask of Mirrors, then get thee to Goodreads and enter the giveaway currently running there. Our publisher is giving out a hundred free copies!

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When a mommy note and a daddy note love one another very much . . .

Yoon Ha Lee has, after eight years of labor, released “Ninefox March,” a song he composed for his Machineries of Empire series. Which, how cool is that? How many authors do you know who compose orchestral pieces for their novels???

Especially because I do. not. get. how composers do what they do. I asked Yoon once about how composing works, and he started telling me all the things you could do with your melody, to which I said, hang on, you gotta back up: where do melodies come from? When a mommy note and a daddy note love one another very much, what happens?

Any time somebody asks how writers come up with ideas, I remind myself that I have a similar degree of bafflement with regards to composition.

And it isn’t because I’m not musical. I studied piano beginning at about the age of five, not because my parents intended to start me in lessons that early, but because (I’m told; I was too young for me to recall this now) I would sit down at the piano after my older brother was finished and proceed to play what he’d been playing, without the sheet music. Later on I picked up French horn. My mental jukebox always has something playing, sometimes to my extreme annoyance. I also have a very good sense of pitch — and I don’t know if this is how it works for other people with good senses of pitch, but mine is very much based in memory. Even now, nearly twenty years after I played horn regularly, I can hum for you a D on that instrument . . . because that was our opening note in “Mathis der Maler.” I don’t so much know what a D sounds like as know a song that starts with a D.

Which I think winds up interfering with that “coming up with a melody” thing. 99.99% of the time, it turns into — or turns out to already be — something I know, floating up out of the memory banks. I don’t know how to get away from that, how to prod my brain into creating instead of remembering.

It makes me wonder what the musical equivalent of fanfic would be. Not filk, where you’re coming up with new lyrics for an existing song; I’ve done that, but that gets back to words rather than notes. Maybe if my instruction in musical theory hadn’t ended when I was roughly ten, I would have a better sense of how I might take an existing piece of music and transform it (by any means other than simple transposition) to get something new. I think that if I were to try to take a melody and just say, okay, starting from here I’m going to jump to a different note, it would sound wrong. I can’t even transpose well, not as a matter of performance; if you start singing a tune I know in a different key from the one I know it in, I have a hell of a difficult time singing along. Any music I’m familiar with has worn a deep and intractable groove in my brain, and deviating from that groove makes record-scratch noises happen.

Maybe what I need is a paint-by-numbers beat sheet equivalent. Chorales? I’ve heard that composing a chorale is about as mechanistic as you can get.

Or, y’know, I don’t actually have to learn this. I don’t subscribe to the idea that one must be born with ~talent~ to do a thing, but if I’ve gone forty years of my life not manifesting even a baseline inclination toward the generation of melodies, then I’m like those people who go forty years without a story idea. It’s possible they could become writers, but is it worth the uphill slog just to get to the starting line? On the other hand, it’s annoying to have this black box sitting there, its contents impenetrable to me. I’m not much of a visual artist (barring photography, which is a different ballgame), but at least I feel like I kind of understand how an artist might come up with an image. And I think there might be an alternate universe where I became a dance choreographer. Music, though . . . I love it, and I don’t understand where it comes from.

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New Worlds: The Wrong Side of the Blankets

Have you ever been called a bastard, or called someone else by that name? This week the New Worlds Patreon takes a look at illegitimate children, and how and why they’ve been stigmatized. Comment over there!

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Books read, October 2020

If I manage to post about November in a timely fashion, I will finally be caught up! (For now.)

A Phoenix First Must Burn: Sixteen Stories of Black Girl Magic, Resistance, and Hope, ed. Patrice Caldwell. Caldwell says in her introduction that “Though some of these stories contain sorrow, they ultimately are full of hope;” I found the balance to be tipped a bit more toward darkness than that led me to expect. Not a bad thing; just an observation. My favorite here was probably “Tender-Headed,” by Danny Lore, which is all about hairdressing — a very political crux, but that’s left implied, while the focus of the narrative is very much on the personal. And I’m a sucker for stories that connect magic with the everyday mundane in this kind of fashion.

The Silence of Bones, June Hur. YA historical fiction (no fantasy) set in Joseon Korea. The main character is a damo, a “police servant” responsible for examining the dead bodies of female victims and other tasks her male Confucian superiors can’t perform. She’s looking for her missing older brother, and all of this is paired with the persecution of Christians in that time period. The ending could be a setup for further adventures, which I would happily read, but the book appears to be a stand-alone (and works just fine that way). I definitely want to look for more of Hur’s work, though, since it looks like her novels are all set in different periods of Korean history.

Paris, 1200, John W. Baldwin. This was not as much of a “daily life” book as I was hoping for. Baldwin says up front that it can’t be, because we have very little evidence about what the life of an average person was like in that period, compared with a century or so later . . . but when your windows into French life at the turn of that century are the King of France and a very influential churchman, you’re really not getting anywhere near most people’s lived experience. I found the book dry in places, but if you want a better understanding of the church and state of the period — especially things like the transition from a peripatetic kingship with very little governmental structure to something more settled and bureaucratic — it’s useful for that.

Harukor: An Ainu Woman’s Tale, Honda Katsuichi, trans. Kyoko Selden. I’ve had this book on my shelf for years and only just now got around to reading it. It’s fascinating! The Ainu are the indigenous people of northern Japan, ethnically and linguistically distinct from their southern neighbors. This book is layered: the core of it is a historical fiction narrative about an Ainu woman a few centuries ago, followed by a brief narrative of her son during a period of turmoil (meant to be continued in a second book; I don’t know what the publication status of that one is), and prefaced by an ethnographic section by Honda giving both ethnographic and archaeological information on traditional Ainu life. Then Selden’s introduction puts Honda’s work in context, explaining for Anglophone audiences the oppression of the Ainu by mainland Japanese and how Honda is deliberately focusing on the celebration of Ainu culture as a way of awakening support for them among his own people. The thing I found most interesting is that Ainu oral tales are traditionally recited in the first person, which is why the fictional narrative that makes up the bulk of this book is likewise first-person (otherwise I would have found that an odd stylistic choice for someone who is not Ainu himself).

Persian Myths, Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis. An extremely short and broad overview of everything from the titular myths to more recent epics and legends. I noticed it on the shelf, thought, “I don’t believe I’ve ever actually read that,” and polished it off in a night. Not remotely in-depth, but there are worse Cliff Notes out there, even if this book is fairly old.

Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, trans. N.J. Dawood. My immediate reasons for reading this lie at the beginning of a long and winding road involving a short story collection and me having slight OCD tendencies, but it’s also good to get myself past the baseline familiarity bestowed by cultural osmosis and into some more specific tales. Even though this is just a selection of the tales, boy howdy can you see some patterns emerging. That’s generally how folklore works, though.

Burning Roses, S.L. Huang. Novella that pairs up Little Red Riding Hood and Hou Yi, both of them middle-aged and the latter as a woman, and makes them both deal with the pasts they’ve left behind. Without spoiling anything, I’ll say that I was very pleased to see the narrative swerve at the very end rather than stopping with the trajectory it was on — that made for a lovely surprise.

Night Parade of 100 Demons my own work doesn’t count.

Intelligence Activities in Ancient Rome: Trust in the Gods, But Verify, Rose Mary Sheldon. The subtitle isn’t just a funny line; the author makes the point that augury was an early form of intelligence work, trying to get information on what might happen. Her focus here lands largely though not entirely on military intelligence (in part because she’s a colonel and a professor at the Virginia Military Institute, but also because that’s what we have the most evidence of). My main takeaway from this book is omgwtfbbq how did the Roman Republic manage to accomplish anything with that lack of organization — and there are some points on which the Empire wasn’t a lot better. Like, they were shockingly content to rely on other people to tell them when an invading force was headed their way. Sheldon also isn’t afraid to throw shade where it’s deserved; during her discussion of Caesar’s howling failures of intelligence-gathering during his lackluster attempts at Britain, she says that “more than half of his own campaigns were consumed in extricating himself from the results of his own mistakes. To spend over half a war extricating oneself from difficulties created by the enemy may or may not be good generalship; but to have to do so as a consequence of one’s own mistakes is incontestably bad generalship, even when the extrications are brilliant.” It got a bit too far into the weeds at the end, when it looked at the topic of signaling; I got the point about how defensive installations like Hadrian’s Wall were set up more to monitor and pass information on approaching forces than to stop them outright, and didn’t really need the in-depth analysis of why X fort on the limes in Germany was put in this particular location because it made for a better transmission chain. But it was interesting reading apart from that, and has led to an unexpected draft of a short story inspired by the clades Variana.

Trail of Shadows, D.G. Laderoute. Another Legend of the Five Rings clan novella, this one focusing on the Crab. I usually find the Crab relatively uninteresting, because their schtick is holding the line against the monsters of the Shsadowlands, but this one engaged me more . . . in part because the main character makes some excellent points about how his clan maybe valorizes holding the line too much. There’s a strong hint here of “adapt or die.” The narrative also goes into the Shinomen Mori instead of the Shadowlands, and I find weird mystical forests much more intriguing than a straight monster war. I particularly liked how the central conflict got resolved.

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If you have a gift-giving holiday coming up . . .

. . . then this year, even more than most, please do consider buying from local businesses as much as you can. They’re hurting badly in the pandemic, whereas Amazon is in no danger of going under. And if what you want to buy is books, and you also want to support independent businesses (whether they’re local to you or not), I highly recommend Bookshop.org. Every time you buy from them, a portion of the proceeds goes to supporting independent bookstores.

(While I’m offering up good links: Ecosia is a search engine that both doesn’t track your data, and works to plant trees around the world. I’ve been using it for several months now.)

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New Worlds: A Bit on the Side

Adultery: illicit crime, or expected behavior for a man in power? This week the New Worlds Patreon continues its study of marriage by looking at what happens outside of marriage. Comment over there!

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Adventures in Smelling Good

When I was at DragonCon last year, I picked up a bunch of ampoules of perfume from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab (because Alyc and I were trying to work out scents for different characters in Rook and Rose — a project that would have gone more smoothly if either of us were a perfume aficionado). Recently, inspired by a friend’s explorations of their own stash, I decided I should actually experiment with these: not just smelling them in the vial, but putting them on, seeing what they were like initially vs. later on. (I have learned the term “drydown,” and the fact that I didn’t know it before is a measure of my ignorance in this realm.)

This is an interesting experiment because I have a very sensitive nose. I can smell alcohol on my husband’s breath hours after he drank it — not in a “hah, I caught his secret alcoholism” way, just in a “hmmm, I smell something; did you have a gin and tonic?” way. I take chicken packaging out to the trash bin immediately after prepping the raw chicken for dinner, because I will pick up the stench from it long before anybody else here thinks the kitchen smells funky. I refuse to smell the milk to see if it’s gone bad because if it has, I’m going to be having flashbacks to that for the rest of the day.

What I don’t have is the ability to parse what I’m smelling.

I think the musical equivalent here would be if I could pick up tiny whispers of sound, but couldn’t tell you what instruments are playing if you paid me. I recognize individual scents, but blend them together and it frequently becomes indistinguishable. I can listen “into” a piece of orchestral music to find what the French horns or the oboes are doing and follow along with them; the first BPAL ampoule I tried theoretically had sage in it, and even after going to my spice cabinet and huffing a container of sage for orientation, I still couldn’t find any trace of that in the perfume. The reviews commented on the pleasant mintiness or the warmth of the caramel: all I got was musk. (A gentle musk, probably because it was being mitigated by all those things I couldn’t pick out. But still.)

Of course, there’s an extra twist in this game, which is that (again, I am told; I know so little about this) individual skin chemistry can play all kinds of idiosyncratic games with the source material. Going back to music, it would be as if some audience members are sitting there going “holy crap, composer, enough with the trombones already” while others are grumbling that their ears never seem to be able to hear clarinets. So maybe the mint and the caramel and the sage just . . . weren’t actually there for me? I really don’t know.

Which means that this particular experiment is less about “let me explore random bits of the BPAL catalogue!” and more about “let me try to train my nose!” I have less than perfect hearing but a well-trained ear; the reverse is true when it comes to scent. But if one can learn to pick out the French horns and the oboes, I imagine one can also be taught to find mint in a cloud of musk.

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