Marie Brennan's Blog, page 6

New Worlds: Socially Sanctioned Rudeness

It’s the end of the eighth year of the New Worlds Patreon! To close that out, we’re gonna be super classy — nah, just kidding. We’re going to talk about lying, boasting, and insulting people for fun. Comment over there!

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“The Poison Gardener”

New story out today, in The Sunday Morning Transport! This one is for subscribers only, but subscribing gets you a story in your inbox every Sunday morning. My contribution this week is “The Poison Gardener”, a vicious little science fantasy piece entirely born out of me thinking poison gardens are cool . . .

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New Worlds: I Swear to God

Since this month’s New Worlds Patreon theme is (this is genuinely how I listed it in the poll) “A Verbal Miscellany,” we’re segueing from mottoes and proverbs to the serious business of oaths and vows. Comment over there . . .

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New Worlds: Proverbial Wisdom

Hey, remember how I had a book out just a couple of days ago, about the proverbial wisdom that gets passed around among authors? Now the New Worlds Patreon is taking its own look at such adages, for use in writing rather than about writing: comment over there!

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In which I take on the old saws of writing advice

Two things make a series, right?

Continuing what I began with The Writer’s Little Book of Naming — in other words, mini ebooks on writing-related topics that I don’t feel are big enough to support a full-size book — today marks the publication of The Writer’s Little Book of Platitudes! This one was sparked by the rants that periodically circulate among writers about how thus-and-such piece of advice is stupid and wrong. Which is true . . . sometimes. This book is me taking on some of the most common soundbites of advice — not the detailed principles, but the short, pithy stuff like “murder your darlings” or “write every day” — to see where it came from, how it can go horribly wrong, what problem it sets out to address, and how to decide whether it’s good advice for you or not.

And, for bonus points, the end of the book has the One True Universal Writing Rule! Guaranteed good for all writers in all situations!

So check it out, and stay tuned for more Writer’s Little Books in the future!

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New World: That’s My Motto!

The motto of the New Worlds Patreon is . . . okay, you got me; I don’t really have one. But other people and organizations do! Comment over there.

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New Worlds Theory Post: The Setting Bible, Part 2

Back in November, the New Worlds Patreon theory post broached the topic of how to record your worldbuilding. Now it’s time to loop around and talk about specific tools and techniques for that — comment over there!

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New Worlds: Physiognomic Nonsense

Sometimes it’s fun for the New Worlds Patreon to take a look at pseudoscience. But the ideas behind physiognomy and phrenology are pretty ugly . . . comment over there.

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Book read: La Valencia del XVII, Pablo Cisneros

Last year I stopped posting about what I’d been reading because it abruptly became All Research, All the Time for The Sea Beyond, and I couldn’t talk yet about what Alyc and I were working on. Then I could talk about it, but it didn’t make good fodder for the usual “here’s what I’ve been reading” posts, and I didn’t have the time or energy to work through the backlog to do the kinds of individualized book reports I did back in my Onyx Court days.

But this book gets a report, because this is the first time I’ve read an entire book in a language other than English.

Mind you, I wouldn’t give myself full, unadulterated credit. I did rely on Google Lens to check my comprehension of each paragraph after I’d read it, or to assist with sentences I couldn’t quite make sense of. (Some of which I did in fact read correctly the first time, but what they said was so unexpected, I needed verification.) Machine translation also helped a great deal with the quotations of undiluted seventeenth-century Spanish — though after a while I got better at coping with “hazer” and “dexar” and “avía” and “buelta” — and I flat-out needed it for the untranslated Catalan, from which I can pluck out at most fifty percent of the words via cognates.

Still and all, I read this book. On the basis of three years of Spanish classes from ages thirteen to fifteen, a reading comprehension test in graduate school that I passed with an assist from four years of Latin + watching a bunch of familiar movies with their Spanish subtitles running, and a headfirst dive into a Spanish practice app when this series got officially greenlit. I am stupidly proud of myself for doing as well as I did.

And I’m glad I attempted it! In the grand scheme of things, Cisneros is no Liza Picard; he quotes abundantly from the writings of period travelers and Valencian observers, but he doesn’t seem to have gone digging deeply into other kinds of sources or context that might have fleshed out his description in greater detail. It’s all fine and well to tell me what kinds of development was done around the Palacio Real, but I had to look elsewhere to verify my guess that, in the usual absence of the monarch, that was the residence of the viceroy instead. Cisneros is very obviously writing to an audience of fellow Valencians — there’s a constant evocation of “our city” and “our ancestors” — and his goal is mostly to glorify things about the city that date back to the seventeenth century and to describe things that are no longer there. He does acknowledge some of the less-attractive parts, like the rather dingy houses occupied by non-elites or the truly massive amount of interpersonal violence, but he’s not trying to fully explore daily life back then.

Beggars can’t be choosers, though. There’s an astonishing paucity of books in English about daily life in Golden Age Spain — as in, I’ve found a grand total of two, plus one about sailing with the New World treasure fleets — and even in Spanish, it’s hard to find works that focus on Valencia, which is where a significant part of the story will be set. But for every bit where Cisneros goes into stultifying detail on the Baroque renovations of individual churches (almost all of them late enough to be irrelevant to our series), there’s another bit where he tells me exactly which parts of the river embankment will be under construction when our protagonist arrives there, or how Valencians were required to water the streets in the summer to cool off the city and reduce disease, or what now-vanished traditions represent what they did for fun. (At Carneval, they pelted each other with orange skins filled with such delightful stuffings as bran, fat, and the must left over from wine-making. Apparently injuries were not uncommon: he quotes a poem whose title more or less translates to “From a gentleman to the lady who put his eye out with an orange.”)

So this gave me a decent amount of very useful concrete detail that will help Valencia feel like Valencia, not Generic Early Modern European City. It may have taken me weeks to read its 228 pages, because I could only manage about ten pages a day before my brain shorted out and stopped processing any Spanish at all, but in the long run, it was worth it!

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Building Cathedrals

I’ve long thought that the closest thing we have to medieval cathedrals is NASA projects (and those of other scientific space agencies). People work on those in the full awareness that they themselves will often be long gone by the time their mission reaches its destination, returns its data. And yet they do it anyway, devoting themselves to a cause that stretches beyond the everyday horizon of today, tomorrow. Just as the cathedral builders of past ages patiently hewed stone, raised walls, framed roofs, knowing they would not live to hear the psalms sung within the sanctuary they built.

The cathedral of a better United States has been under construction since 1776. Its original blueprint was badly flawed. Sometimes its fabric has crumbled, and what was built had to be built again. Very likely, none of us here today will live to see its true completion.

We must keep building it anyway.

We may hope for a victory in two years, in four — but a victory is not, will not be, the victory. We have to think in the longer term. The Republican Party didn’t get to where it is now overnight; it’s the fruit of decades spent working toward their goals, at every level from school boards and city councils on up. Pushing that back, making a truly progressive society, will be the work of more decades.

So we must celebrate the victories as they come, even when they are small. We may say “there is still more work to be done,” because it will be true, but that must not become a mantra of discouragement. We are building a cathedral, one stone at a time. We may not live to see it completed, but the work itself is still worth doing.

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