Marie Brennan's Blog, page 76

New Worlds: Three If by . . . Something Else

This week on the New Worlds Patreon, we wrap up the topic of travel (for now) with air travel, space travel, magic travel, and so forth. Comment over there!

And remember that patrons get extra bennies, like photos every week, ebooks, chances to vote in the topic polls, extra essays, and more. More details on Patreon!

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Substitute for fennel bulb?

I’ve been given a nice-sounding recipe for pork tenderloin braised in white wine and elderflower liqueur with thyme, red onion, and fennel bulb. But I’m not a huge fan of that last item — what would the chefs among you recommend as a replacement? With or without altering other ingredients (e.g. a different herb, if something else would harmonize better).

Note that due to allergies and/or dislikes, mushrooms and squash are both out.

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New Worlds: Two If by Sea

The New Worlds Patreon tour through the subject of travel continues this week on the water! Which is a very different game from traveling over land, and everything from physics to religion gets involved. Comment over there!

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Three Things meme

There’s been a meme going around where people give you three random things to talk about. Mine, from Larry Hammer, are:

1) Feathers

The “swan” thing goes back a long way, and stems from the fact that people who know German but not Swiss German often think my legal last name has something to do with swans. Possibly that’s why the family coat of arms has swans on it? Anyway, I didn’t want my website to be mariebrennan.com because at the time I expected to go into academia, studying science fiction and fantasy, and I wanted a site that could serve for both purposes. (In fact, the first incarnation of it had two distinct halves, one for each part of my work.) My thoughts drifted to swans, and then the phrase “Swan Tower” popped into my head, and it sounded good.

As for swans themselves, I like how they’re beautiful and elegant and can break your leg with their wings. I played a swan pooka several times in a Changeling game, but she was more the dream of a swan than the physical reality of one; if I were doing it now, I might try to stat her in a way that reflects the dichotomy.

Also, my husband is allergic to feathers.

2) Polyhedra

Thanks to RPGs, I interact with a much wider range of these than most people do.

New Worlds: One If by Land

I’m totally riffing off of “Paul Revere’s Ride” for this installment of the New Worlds Patreon. Since I need some principle on which to divide the topic of travel, I’m using the different modes by which we go: on land, by sea, and then . . . well, you’ll see.

What a difference technology makes

I’ve spent the last two days holed up in our den, which the lowest part of our split-level house and rather cavelike — therefore the coolest room we’ve got. Our thermostat caps out at 84 degrees Fahrenheit, so I can’t say for sure what temperature it’s been in our dining room, but whatever the answer is, the top floor — which holds both my office and the bedroom — was hotter. Much hotter.

I grew up in Dallas. Highs in the high 90s were a totally normal feature of my childhood summers. But that was a place where nearly everybody has air conditioning. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area? Not so much. And living in a house without A/C means that when our temperatures spike, the experience is very, very different.

The extent of that difference got hammered home to me yesterday, when I’d been at the (air-conditioned) chiropractor’s office. When I walked outside in the late afternoon, it felt . . . not nice, exactly. But familiar. And pleasant enough. Yes, it was very warm, but my subconscious said “that’s okay.” Which was very different from how I’d felt leaving my house an hour and a half earlier; then I was going from a sweltering indoors to a sweltering outdoors, barely any contrast at all, and vastly more unpleasant. I know I’ve lost soem of my heat tolerance (I used to do marching band in Texas, navy blue wool uniform and all), but a lot of it is also just the artificial environment. Give me A/C, and I still don’t mind the heat all that much. Without it, though . . .

Let’s just say I’ve learned a lot about low-tech measures against the heat, from keeping blinds closed that we normally open for light (and angling them upwards to reduce the amount of direct sunlight that enters the room), to occupying myself with books instead of heat-emitting laptops, to the dance of opening windows and turning on fans once the temperature outside drops below the temperature inside.

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New Worlds: Traveling the World

From the start of the New Worlds Patreon, I’ve been offering my patrons a weekly photo, many of them drawn from my travels around the world. It’s appropriate, therefore, that our topic du mois should come around at last to travel — beginning with some top-level considerations, like why people travel, what happens when they do, and the importance of infrastructure. Comment over there, or become a patron over at Patreon itself!

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NEW WORLDS, YEAR TWO is now in print!

If you like having your writing references in hard copy and not just pixels, you may be glad to know that you can now buy the print edition of New Worlds, Year Two! And now is a great time to become a patron of the series — I’ll soon be sending out the next poll for what topics I should address, and of course all patrons get weekly photos. It’s patron support that is keeping New Worlds strong, and I thank all of them for it!

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Lessons in people pictures

Over Memorial Day weekend I was hired to do candid and portrait photography at a three-day LARP (one my husband plays in, which I’ve played in before, but not regularly).

This was . . . an adventure.

See, my usual attitude toward people photography is “I will wait here with my camera poised until you get out of the frame.” My tastes, as you can probably tell, lean firmly toward architecture, objects, and landscapes. Sometimes I can’t avoid having people in the picture, and every so often they add a great deal to the image — the dude in the punt in Cambridge (though I wish the two up on the wall weren’t there), or the guy walking in front of the church in Basel — but people are rarely if ever the reason I’m taking the picture.

But hey, it’s good to challenge yourself! The adventure aspects were more about trying to work within the constraints of the environment. I don’t own the nice lighting setup portrait photographers have, the kind that casts a bright but indirect light, so that people don’t wind up with weird shadows behind them or on their faces; we had to jury-rig something with clamp lights and fabric over them to diffuse the beam. (LED lights: no risk of the fabric catching fire.) And I learned some salutary lessons, too late to benefit from them this year, about going through and making sure the floor is as clean as possible, so I won’t later have to do twenty spot removals to get rid of detritus.

The candid aspect was the real challenge, though. My camera’s light sensor isn’t terrible, but it also isn’t as good as the ones pros have; if I raise the ISO too high (making the camera more sensitive to light), the resulting photo will be too grainy. You can partially compensate for that by dropping the f-stop (making the shutter open wider and admit more light), but that reduces the depth of field, which means either picking a focal length and trying to always stand about that far away from your subject, or a crash course in manual focusing at speed . . . which, since I’m usually photographing things that aren’t moving, isn’t a skill I’ve practiced much. And even those tricks couldn’t fully make up for the fact that the lighting inside the venue was, from the standpoint of a camera, not very bright. Which meant the shutter was open for longer (to gather enough light for a usable photo), which is, uh, a bit of a problem when your subjects insist on moving all. the. time. >_<

The result is that every time I found an interesting set of people to photograph, I wound up taking somewhere between three and eight of the same shot, sometimes more — trying to get one where nobody was blurred because they were gesturing or shifting their weight or turning to look at something nearby. Or where I myself wasn’t moving slightly and screwing up the shot, since carrying my camera around on a tripod would have been more disruptive to the game. And the third night, I decided it was worth shooting on burst mode, which means that “three to eight” estimate turned into more like “seven to fifteen” of each shot (but better odds of getting a usable one).

. . . for an hour each night.

Yeah. I took 624 pictures the first night, counting portraits; 883 the second night; and 1664 the third. Of which I have deleted more than 90%.

I’d asked my father for advice ahead of time, since he’s very good at candid street photography, and one of the things he told me was to keep hitting the shutter button: when people are active rather than posing, the shotgun approach is more likely to catch them with a great expression or gesture or standing in the right place to be framed by something interesting. And he’s right — but ye gods it makes for a lot of work after the fact, sorting through all the shots to find the ones that came out well.

I did learn a lot about both the shooting and the sorting, though. On the shooting end, I was unsurprisingly inclined toward the people with interesting costumes and makeup. People who sat near the set decorations or interacted with props also drew my eye; that added a visual element beyond “people standing around in a pavilion” that helped distinguish one shot from another. Expressive body language, too . . . but the flip side to that coin is the blurring mentioned above; I had countless photos where somebody’s hands were just smears, or their whole body if they were turning away with laughter or something. But sometimes the shots I chose to keep weren’t actually the crispest — I wound up deciding it was better to accept a degree of blur if the overall composition of the shot was more engaging.

The processing is a little more intensive, too. It probably wouldn’t be as bad if I were shooting in brighter conditions, but I find myself dropping gradients on the edges of the photos and then raising the exposure on the faces so the viewer’s eye will be drawn toward the people that are the focal point of the image, rather than being distracted by something in the background. And, of course, all the spot removal on the portraits, much of which I could have saved myself if I’d been more obsessive about cleaning the floor in the portrait corner.

L5R novella!

I have been sitting on this news for A YEAR AND A HALF.

Not too long after relaunching the game Legend of the Five Rings (and its associated story), Fantasy Flight Games announced that they would be doing a line of related novellas, one per clan. Since most of the stories I’ve been writing for them have been about the Dragon Clan, I leapt on that immediately, with a pitch for a story about a character I helped develop for the story in the first place.

The monks of the Togashi Order are known for their wisdom, their strength, their mystery, and the superhuman powers they gain from their unique tattoos. For Togashi Kazue, completing her training is only the beginning—discovering the true power of her enigmatic tattoo may be the true test.

Accompanied by the experienced monk Togashi Mitsu, Kazue embarks on a journey to learn the power of the newly acquired knot design on her forehead. When Kazue discovers the danger her tattoo poses to others, she contemplates the unthinkable. But she soon learns that attempting to deny her destiny is the truly dangerous path.

For those of you not familiar with L5R, The Eternal Knot is a reasonable entry point: it doesn’t require you to know anything about the setting or the ongoing story. It does very clearly take place in a world that’s much larger and more complex than this particular narrative needs, and there are some threads left dangling at the end in a way that is obviously bait for future fiction, but the story it tells is self-contained. So if mystical tattooed monks sound like your jam, you can pre-order it here!

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