Marie Brennan's Blog, page 7

New Worlds: Idealized Bodies

Pivoting slightly from where this month’s New Worlds Patreon theme started (clothing) to other aspects of appearance: it’s time to take a look at the bodies underneath the clothes, and what we want them to look like. Comment over there . . .

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Fit for purpose

There is a simple but deep pleasure in finding the right object for your needs.

I’ve been thinking for a while that I really ought to get rid of a bunch of my jewelry, because I almost never wear it except when out in Performing Author Mode, and then it tends to be a limited set of possibilities. But a few weeks ago I suddenly lost all patience with the assortment of boxes I was storing my jewelry in — especially my earrings, which were crammed eight to a compartment and I could barely pull a pair out without spilling others everywhere. I went online, discovered the stackable jewelry box layers I’d seen before were now all but impossible to get in the types I wanted and matching colors, got annoyed, browsed some more, found another possibility, ordered it.

Something like two days after it arrived, I ordered a second, because YES THANK YOU I had found the correct jewelry box for the purpose.

And guess what? I’m wearing my jewelry again, even when I’m not leaving the house. Because in transplanting everything from its crowded, insufficient quarters to its new home, I kept going “oh, I forgot about that!” and being delighted to see old friends. (Also getting rid of some stuff that I was deeply unexcited to see.) Now, with everything sorted into different layers so each pair of earrings has its own compartment and so do the pendants and the necklaces are no longer crammed onto three hooks and hey have I ever even worn that bracelet, I can actually see what I have. And get to it easily. Sure, I’ve got a spare lid because I had to order two stackable sets to get enough space for everything — you wouldn’t believe it to look at me in daily life, but I own a lot of jewelry — but it’s worth that slight overshot to make this big of an improvement.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go make tea in the Best Mug and then take some more research notes with the Best Fountain Pen. I’ve had a few great instances lately of finding the right object for my needs, and I treasure every one.

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website addition: Statement on AI

Since it’s good to have my feelings on the matter stated clearly in a more prominent place than scattered across various blog posts, I’ve added a statement on AI to my website.

Next task: updating the copyright page in all my BVC ebooks to state that I do not grant permission for them to be used in training AI models, and any such use is prohibited.

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New Worlds: The Flow of Fashion

Continuing with the clothing theme, the New Worlds Patreon is asking: what makes fashion change? Who drives that change? Comment over there!

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Our Toxic Friend

We’ve all got a friend like this.

They used to be great. Always there for you, super helpful whenever you needed a hand with something. They were the friendly gossipmonger, full of news about how friends were doing, and they even got you into some new hobbies and communities where you made a ton of new friends. And in turn, when they had a problem or two, you of course did what you could to help them past it, because they meant so much to you.

But lately . . . that friend hasn’t been so great.

They started getting needier. Calling you at all hours of the day, to the point where you started using caller ID to screen them out, because you just couldn’t deal with it. Then they started emailing you all the time — five, ten, fifty times a day. You bin some of their messages, read others, and a bunch more languish in your inbox because one of these days, when you have some spare time, you’ll get around to them. Even though a lot of what’s in those emails is out of date now, and even more of it was never actually that important in the first place.

If that was all, it would be fine. But lately . . . okay, can we be honest? This is your friend, we don’t want to speak ill of them, and you remember all those good memories from years past. But lately, “not so great” is kind of an understatement. Your friend — our friend, because I have one, too — has gotten toxic.

They’re messaging us constantly, not just in email, not just in texts, but in Slack and Discord and every social media app we’re on. We block what we can, but we can’t stop it entirely, not without abandoning those apps entirely, which means losing touch with the people who aren’t so toxic. We go to text our mother on her birthday but there’s five pop-over notifications from our friend, and we can only see the first few words of each one, so we can’t really tell what they’re about (they might be important?); we have to click through and look at them. Of course they’re mostly trash, as usual, but oh, here’s a cute video they sent, and what was it we were doing? Right, texting our mother. But now our friend is pestering us to say what we think about the gift we got her, and hey, here are some other products we might also like to buy, and they keep doing it even when we tell them to stop. Fliers even show up on our doorstep — how did our friend get our home address? We specifically tried to keep it from them!

Some days our friend refuses to talk to us unless we download this new app they insist on using. We’re not sure why; they swear the app is more convenient for us, but it’s janky and loaded with ads and we have to pay money if we want to be able to scroll back and see the conversation we had last week. Plus now our friend’s messages are showing up out of order, for . . . reasons? Because of course we’d rather hear again about the car accident they got in two years ago, the one where a toddler died, than about the new energy drink that’s helping them lose weight — sorry, no, that was an ad, and now we’ve forgotten what message of theirs we were looking for in the first place. Probably one where they were having yet another problem, and if you stopped to count the hours, you’d realize you’ve spent far more time managing your friend’s issues than they have helping you with yours. Or hey, here’s one where they’re trying to interest us in a new hobby, a new community, but is it just me, or do those people look really sketchy? Every conversation goes slowly, every interaction with this friend is full of distractions and scams and we don’t like to admit it but we’re pretty sure they’re stealing from us when we’re not watching.

We’ve got only two choices, and both of them suck. We can spend seconds, minutes, hours of our one wild and precious life managing our friend’s bullshit, trying to reduce it to a minimum since we can’t get rid of it entirely. Or we can give up on managing it and just let the sea of chaos wash over us, drowning out everything else.

And all around us, people are moaning that they’re such bad friends these days, they have a hard time knowing how to keep up with or interact sensibly with Their Toxic Friend.

It’s not you. It’s your friend. And mine, and that of every other person who hasn’t sworn off all interaction with computer, smart phones, and digital technology.

The tech experience has gotten bad. It’s not you, it’s them.

But we can’t just break up with Our Toxic Friend. Because they’re everywhere in our life, and they’re constantly getting worse.

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New Worlds: Clothing as Communication

Six years after starting the topic, the New Worlds Patreon returns to other aspects of how clothing can communicate something about the person who wears it! Comment over there.

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New Worlds: A General’s Job

For the last essay of December, 2024, and this particular sub-topic, the New Worlds Patreon turns to the top brass of a military force — and more specifically, what a good general does. (Hint: very little of the nonsensical “genius” moves TV and movies love.) Comment over there!

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oops I lied

I thought I was done with publications for the year, but one more has slipped in under the wire! My flash story “Ten Minutes” is free to read online at The Cosmic Background. It’s born of my brain’s invincible impulse to narrate everything, including my own attempts at meditation — which led to me writing a story about meditation! And about something else, but you’ll have to read to find out what . . .

I’m particularly honored by this timing because The Cosmic Background is running a Kickstarter right now, and so the editor chose my piece as one to showcase what the magazine is doing. I’ll note that, very unusually for our field, TCB pays its slush readers — most markets rely on volunteers for that — so this is part of what your money will support if you pledge! Rewards include your very own eldritch horror in the mail, so check out the Kickstarter page and consider kicking a few bucks their way!

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New Worlds: Chain of Command

This week’s New Worlds Patreon essay blends a bit into the previous, split apart mostly by the semi-arbitrary standard of having each piece be about a thousand words long, give or take. Having acquired our officers, how do we organize the authority they hold? Comment over there . . .

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The 2024 Roundup

This looks like a slow year only because the couple of years before it were bonkers. Asterisks mark the things in each category that I’m the most proud of (unless there’s only one thing in the category, in which case, well, it wins by default).

Novel The Market of 100 Fortunes (concluding my Legend of the Five Rings trilogy)Short stories*“Embers Burning in the Night” (free to read online)“Any Rose My Mother Raised, Any Lane My Father Knows” (free to read online)“Dead Man’s Map”“Legio XVII Inquieta”Flash fiction“In the Paradise of the Pure Land” (free to read online)Poetry“Draco Urbis”“To the Angels Alone” (free to read online)*“A War of Words” (free to read online)Collection A Breviary of Fire (gathers up most of my folklore and mythology-based stories)Nonfiction New Worlds, Year Seven (latest Patreon volume)

I need to write more short fiction again if I want to have much coming out in 2025 or 2026 . . .

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