Marie Brennan's Blog, page 88

New Worlds: Religious Specialists

Another week, another New Worlds Patreon post! There are five Fridays in this month, so next week you’ll get a “theory post,” but today we wrap up this pass through religion with the question of religious specialists: shamans, priests, monastics, diviners, and so forth.

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Sekrit Projekt R&R, Chapter 11

Slow start this week on account of Worldcon fatigue, but we still managed to get a chapter done.

Whole lotta character stuff in this one, largely because in the next chapter we’re going to be dropping the Plot Hammer on them, which means it’s good to have a quieter moment first. And having laid a bunch of crossing threads between various people, now it’s time to show the full extent of the web. We’ve got running motifs on everything from a prose to a worldbuilding level about faces and masks; here you get to see some of those layers, and notice how that makes certain characters oddly similar, often in ways they wouldn’t want to acknowledge.

I’m honestly really pleased with how this chapter turned out. Going in, it felt to me more like setup for the exciting stuff in the next one, and it’s easy for something like that to come across like we’re just marking time. But since the reader knows something is coming, even if the pov character doesn’t, there’s a little bit of a “ticking time bomb” feeling here. Add in the character stuff, and some good old-fashioned spectacle, and a very pertinent question being asked with no warning at all, and there’s real meat here, instead of just a platter for what follows.

Word count: ~89000

Authorial sadism: A grieving character being happy for a moment, and then feeling guilty for feeling happy. Also, rubbing some nice salted lemon juice in a wound later on. Also also, the end of the chapter, but that’s really setup for next week . . .

Authorial amusement: Dressing one of our male characters like a legendary courtesan — and then finding legit reasons to use that for exposition, character development, and plot. And then playing out the reaction to him being dressed that way.

BLR quotient: I’m . . . going to go with love, even if the insights R— had into people during this chapter are actually a really bad thing for reasons that are not apparent right now? But we also had our first onstage kiss, so I’ll say that counts. I dunno; this is one of those chapters where the blood, love, and rhetoric are kind of neck-and-neck.

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New Worlds: Religious Texts

I might be at Worldcon, but the New Worlds Patreon continues! This week it’s religious texts, looking at the different types of thing that get venerated as scripture, and how such things get marked out from secular material.

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Sekrit Projekt R&R, Chapter 10

Through heroic effort, we got this one done before Worldcon.

One of the interesting things about our method of collaborating is, it’s making me much more aware of my own writing process. For example, it isn’t uncommon for me to drop in a detail or a bit of exposition, write onward, realize it would fit in much better three paragraphs later, and move it. But when that detail or exposition is something Alyc wrote, I’m much more self-conscious about relocating it. Or what I used to not think about at all, and now think about enough that I’ve borrowed the poetic term “enjambment” for it: not always having a paragraph break when the narrative focus shifts between characters, but sometimes having Character A’s thought or reaction at the start of a graf and then shift to B’s response for the rest. Because we are each more or less taking on certain characters in any given scene, there’s a tendency for us to always paragraph break when we hand it off, so now I’m watching for that and looking for ways to smooth it out with occasional enjambment. Which is a thing I do normally — but now it’s conscious, rather than reflex.

In other news, we — and by “we” I mostly mean “Alyc” — have now figured out the astrological system built out of the numerical magic system, and have fallen down the rabbit hole of calculating the charts for the various major characters. With the added complication that one of them is lying about their age and when they were born, so then we needed to figure out what that chart looks like and how to make the discrepancy narratively interesting. We managed to massively confuse ourselves for a while, but it turns out this exists, which is AWESOME — we were able to program it to the calendar we’ve made up, complete with 20-hour clock and two separate lunar cycles. So that has made our lives infinitely easier, and means we can be consistent to a degree no reader will ever notice anyway, i.e. if our protagonist R— was born on the equivalent of a Saturday, then the novel begins on the equivalent of a Wednesday. (These things matter, when you start assigning metaphysical significance to them in the narrative.)

Word count: ~81,000

Authorial sadism: One of the characters just sold another out. Complete with lots of rationalizations for how it isn’t really selling them out . . .

Authorial amusement: All the horoscope stuff. And some fun banter between two characters whose previous meeting was kind of fraught. And my god, some of the shipfic for this story writes itself.

BLR quotient: Rhetoric wins the crown this week, with a whole lot of manipulation and political horse-trading going on.

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Ask Me Anything!

Today I’m over on Reddit’s r/Fantasy doing an AMA in support of The Pixel Project to End Violence Against Women. So if there’s something you’ve been dying to ask me — or if a random question just wandered into your head — now’s your chance to get it answered!

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Sekrit Projekt R&R: Chapter 9

Last week was stupidly productive: we wrote most of Chapter 8 and all of Chapter 9. And they weren’t short, either. But it may be a while before I report in on Chapter 10, because Worldcon is going to eat a lot of this week.

Chapter 9 is in some ways an exemplar of the book, I think. Much of it is taken up with politics of the social variety: not the formal, “let’s negotiate a treaty” kind of work, but rather the ways in which things like being fashionable can translate into attention and therefore into connections and therefore into power. The ability to get something done politically in exchange for talking the right person into publicly having tea with a social outcast, thus tacitly granting that outcast readmission to polite society. Offers of marriage as a strongarm tactic. Etc.

But it isn’t all social politics. Some of it is also a duel with bonus trash-talking. Or breaking into a house while disguised as a servant. Or flirting. Because we’re us, and we enjoy those sorts of things, too.

Word count: ~73,000

Authorial sadism: Some sick burns in that trash-talking. And some actual burns later on — evidence came out regarding a certain fire. But I might give the nod to the thing I didn’t see coming, which was Alyc realizing that, logically, what we had set up would mean a certain character unexpectedly caught sight of their mother.

Authorial amusement: We’ve been waiting seventy thousand words to stick those characters in a very small closet together.

New Worlds: Religious Practices

From the sites of religion, the New Worlds Patreon continues onward to the practices of religion, from prayer to asceticism to sacrifice to hallucinogens.

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TURNING DARKNESS INTO LIGHT

I’ve been cagy in talking about the standalone sequel to the Memoirs of Lady Trent because I realized a short way into the draft that the title I’d initially given it wasn’t really working for me, and it took me quite some time to decide what to replace it with. But I found something, and it has gotten official approval:

Turning Darkness into Light

I’ve wanted to use that as a title for nearly twenty years, ever since I encountered the source during my trip to Ireland in 2000 — but the book it was originally earmarked for honestly may never get written, and the phrase fits far too well here for me not to use it. Some of you may recognize it as the ending of Robin Flowers’ loose translation of the “Pangur Bán” poem. That is, in turn, taken from Psalms 18:28, and the layering of connections there — scribes, religion, the imagery of the early parts of Psalm 18 — makes it truly ideal for this book.

So there you have it! Turning Darkness into Light will be out some time next spring; I’ll of course announce a more specific date as soon as I have it.

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Sekrit Projekt R&R: Chapter 8

We’re more than sixty thousand words into the book. I commented to Alyc that by this stage I’ve usually had some days where I’m all, “ugh, I don’t want to write; the story is so boring” — non-writers think the job must be fun every day, but the truth is that it isn’t. Sometimes it’s a slog, even though the story turns out well. But here? I have yet to have a day like that. There’s been a few where getting started was hard or things didn’t feel entirely lively, but none where forward progress felt like pulling teeth. And we’re excited enough for the next several chapters that it’s unlikely to come any time soon.

Mind you, that effect normally hits somewhere after the halfway point in the book. Since this one might be as much as 200K, maybe we just haven’t gotten far enough in to reach the slog stretch. Alternatively, normally it takes me about two months to get this far — not less than a month and a half — so maybe in a few weeks the momentum will start to flag. I’m trying to bear in mind that we may hit some periods where the work feels a lot harder, and that’s okay; it happens with every book, and doesn’t mean there’s a serious problem here.

So far, though, there’s no problem at all. We’re working at well over the (conservative) pace we set for ourselves, and if it weren’t for Worldcon in the way, it would look like full steam ahead for the next several weeks.

Word count: ~64000

Authorial sadism: It’s never a good sign when you coordinate the next scene by saying “you remember what it looked like on Supernatural when [spoiler] happened?” (My sister has been reading each chapter as we finish them. We apologized to her ahead of time for that scene.)

Authorial amusement: We saw an opportunity to get G— with his shirt off, and took it.

my Worldcon schedule

I’m going to have a busy Worldcon . . .

Thursday, 1-2 p.m. — Writing About Fighting (panel with Fonda Lee (M), Kristene Perron, Tony Barajas, Joseph Brassey)
Friday, 11 a.m.-12 p.m. — The Power of Names — Naming Characters: Techniques and Thoughts (panel with S. Qiouyi Lu (M), Mimi Mondal, D. A. Xiaolin Spires, SL Huang, K.M. Szpara)
Friday, 5 p.m. — signing at Borderlands Books booth
Saturday, 11 a.m.-12 p.m. — We Have Always Played Games: Women at the Gaming Table (panel with Donna Prior (M), Diana M. Pho, Veronica Belmont, Erika Ensign)
Saturday, 1-2 p.m. — autographing (with Cat Rambo, Eric Flint, Bryan Camp, Mackenzie Lin)
Saturday, 2-3 p.m. — Reading: Hugo Finalists – Best Series (with Brandon Sanderson, Martha Wells)
Saturday, 3-4 p.m. — In For the Long Haul: The Ups and Downs of Writing a Long Series (panel with Brandon Sanderson (M), Robin Hobb, Seanan McGuire, L.E. Modesitt Jr)
Sunday, 12-1 p.m. — kaffeeklatsch

And, y’know, that whole “Hugo ceremony” thing. >_>

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