Marie Brennan's Blog, page 85
October 23, 2018
Nighty Knights!
Many of you may recall that I’ve written several times for the TinyD6 RPG line (Tiny Frontiers, Tiny Dungeon, Tiny Wastelands, etc). That’s all been through Gallant Knight Games, but now I’m parterning with a different company, WunderWerks, for a Tiny D6-based game called Nighty Knights!
In this one you play stuffed animals defending sleeping children from monsters and nightmares. Like all TinyD6 games, the rules are very minimalist; it’s designed to be the kind of thing you can easily pick up and play with a minimum of prep. My contribution this time around will be setting material for Underbed and the Dreamlands, detailing the realms your stuffed animal PCs can adventure through.
The Kickstarter campaign has only been running for a few days, but it’s already up to 200% of its goal, with stretch goals falling like ninepins! If this sounds like your cup of tea, get in on the action now, with lots of cool rewards.
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October 22, 2018
Lady Trent fan art!
For ages now I’ve been meaning to post about a lovely piece of fan art a reader sent me some time ago. Then, while I was failing to scan that and make the post, somebody else showed up online with a different lovely piece of fan art. And then, while I was drowning in finishing a book draft and still not making the post, yet a third reader made fan jewelry . . . and gave it to me as a present when I went to Borderlands Books for the LitCrawl.
Friends, three things make a post. So here, have fan art!
First up is from Chelsea Younglove:
“Dragon,” by Chelsea Younglove
Second comes from Craig Houghton, via Twitter:
“Lady Trent” by Craig Houghton
And the third is a necklace made by H. Emiko Ogasawara, based on Todd Lockwood’s sparkling sketch in A Natural History of Dragons:
“Sparkling” (necklace), by H. Emiko Ogasawara
This kind of thing is awesome enough (and now numerous enough) that I’ve made a Lady Trent fan art page on my website. If you have a piece of fan art you’d be willing to let me showcase there, just let me know!
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October 19, 2018
New Worlds: Witchcraft
From ghosts and corporeal undead, the New Worlds Patreon proceeds to witches! They’re about a lot more than just pointy black hats and brooms, whatever the holiday decorations aisle at your local drugstore might have you believe.
Comment over there!
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October 15, 2018
Sekrit Projekt R&R, Chapter 24: Finit
113 days after we started writing — and one year and twenty-four days after we said, “hey, what do you think of this idea for a novel we could write together?” — the book is done.
Not 100% finished and ready to go, of course. We’ve both done a lot of revision along the way, but there are still things we need to expand on or add in (D—‘s dog appears out of nowhere halfway through the draft), and there are a lot of brackets marking things we need to name: people, districts of the city, cards in the divinatory pattern deck, etc. But you could read it through from beginning to end and there would be no holes, and I don’t expect there to be any major changes to the shape or feel of the story between now and when it does go out. We’ll be refining what we’re doing, not replacing parts of it with something else entirely.
For now, though, we rest. 113 days — not writing every single day, but more days than not, and averaging 1826 words per day across that span, i.e. more than that much on the days we actually wrote. My normal drafting pace is 1000 a day, so I guess this kind of works out to “normal,” just doubled because it’s two people? Except I don’t think that’s how the math works.
Yeah. ima go fall over now.
Word count: 206,347
Authorial sadism: When you pride yourself on your skill as a player, it hurts to realize you’ve been played.
Authorial amusement: It’s a bit like Volkswagon preferring to confess to fraud than be thought incompetent.
BLR quotient: When the blood is over with, rhetoric is there with a mop.
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October 14, 2018
Sekrit Projekt R&R, Chapter 23
We budgeted two days to write the penultimate, climactic chapter.
We did it in one.
Word count: ~199,000
Authorial sadism: Turning V— into a chew toy.
Authorial amusement: Turning V— into a housemaid. Also, making people step repeatedly on the magical third rail.
BLR quotient: So very much blood. But if it weren’t for love, this all would have gone down in flames.
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October 13, 2018
“The Faces of Halloweentown”
Back in 2013 I wrote a small treat for the Yuletide fanfic exchange called “The Faces of Halloweentown,”, about the nature of the place Jack Skellington rules in The Nightmare Before Christmas. That movie always hovers on a knife-edge for me — do I want to watch it around Christmas? Or around Halloween? The story I wrote falls firmly on the latter side of that question, so I thought I might link to it now, in celebration of the season.
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October 12, 2018
Sekrit Projekt R&R, Chapter 22
Ooof.
One down, two to go.
Which is to say: after making our absurd plan to finish the book even more fasterer than we had originally planned (I say “originally” — that was, like, the third or fourth plan after the original original plan), we successfully finished Chapter 22. In which there is more humor than I had necessarily expected for the chapter in which the characters realize just how screwed they are, before they’re in a position to actually fix it. But we had one character high as a kite and getting distracted from telling people what they need to know, and Alyc continues to be good at thinking up vile language for a twelve-year-old to use, and man, you wouldn’t like T— when she’s angry and armed with a knitting needle.
Sunday and Monday, we write the climax. Before then, we need to patch two small holes earlier in the narrative — one a scene that needs to be rewritten to match the later story; the other a small interaction that’s getting added to an existing scene — because Alyc and I share the tic of needing to feel like there aren’t any holes in the draft before we write the end.
And tomorrow we get to take off and play a fun tabletop game, because oy vey do our brains need a break.
But it’s close.
So close.
Word count: ~192,000
Authorial sadism: M— has always been a terrible person, but one of the scenes here is where all masks and gloves come off and you see just how deep that goes.
Authorial amusement: Seriously, O— is the worst. minion. ever.
BLR quotient: Blood’s on top, but really, at this point in the story, the three are all pulling in harness together.
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New Worlds: The Undead
October continues in the New Worlds Patreon with the corporeal undead! Of which there are many kinds — more than you tend to see in the zombie-and-vampire landscape — and nearly as many things they can represent, from disease to sexuality to the Vietnam War.
Comment over there!
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October 10, 2018
Sekrit Projekt R&R, Chapter 21
I put my cursor into the window to start typing this post, and my mental jukebox cued up “The Final Countdown.”
. . . which is pretty apt. We have three chapters left, but it doesn’t feel like it, because the avalanche has begun. Shit Went Down in this chapter, and while we have one more to go before the big confrontation, that’s all basically the overture, rather than something separate from the throwdown.
We had a nice, sensible plan for how we were going to approach that. Chapter 21 this week; Chapter 22 next week; Chapter 23 over the weekend (when neither of us have anything else scheduled and could give it two days of our unbroken attention); Ch 24 denouement the week after that, finishing up by the 26th. But, well, you’re getting this post on a Wednesday, because we finished Chapter 21 on Tuesday. And while we have something scheduled for this Saturday, Alyc declared that they could take a day off work. Like, say, Monday.
New plan, much less sensible. Chapter 21 and 22 this week; Chapter 23 Sunday-Monday; denouement next week. Done by the 19th.
We have no sense of self-preservation.
And neither do our characters, because they’re charging headfirst into danger. Allons-y!
Word count: ~182,000
Authorial sadism: Cities are easy to save. Broken hearts? Much harder to deal with. (Also, and much less seriously, making a Big Scary Character sit through a chiding, knowing that the random dude rowing the boat is listening to the whole thing.)
Authorial amusement: G— doing his not-so-subtle best to bail out of a Very Awkward Conversation. (Also, making the Big Scary Character sit through the aforementioned chiding.)
BLR quotient: It’s more or less blood from here on out.
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October 9, 2018
Doppelganger reborn!
Ladies and gentlemen, the Doppelganger series is back!
I mean, it technically never went anywhere. But in the decade-plus since it was published, it was getting harder and harder to find the books, and so for the last year or so my agent and I have been working on getting the rights reverted to me. Once that happened, we turned around and produced some shiny! new! ebooks! Not only of Warrior and Witch, but also the prequel novella Dancing the Warrior, and then for those who prefer to get the whole thing in one fell swoop, there’s an omnibus edition that contains all three titles.
(Note that I did these through my agency, so if you’re used to picking up my ebooks through Book View Cafe, they are not on sale there. You can, however, get them from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, iTunes, and Kobo, as well as Indigo in Canada and Amazon in the UK.)
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