Marie Brennan's Blog, page 90

Update on the book sale fundraiser

The fundraiser I launched last week has raised over six hundred dollars for the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services — $621 to date. Thank you so much to everyone who has participated, whether you bought one book or eight (!). I’m in the process of shipping everything out, which is taking longer than expected due to sheer volume . . . which is excellent news.

New Worlds: The Social Economy of Clothing

The closest I’ve come to making an item of clothing from scratch was when I used an inkle loom to weave a very long strip, then cut the strip into shorter strips and sewed them edge-to-edge to make a piece of fabric, then sewed the fabric into a pouch. (It was for a costume. I couldn’t find any fabric in the colors I wanted.) It was very small, and I didn’t spin the thread myself, and it still gave me a strong appreciation for how much work went into making clothing before industrialization. This week’s New Worlds Patreon post is all about the labor involved, and how that affected the way people interacted with their clothing.

Comment over there!

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R&R, Chapter Three

I used to blog my progress through writing novel drafts, back when it was the Onyx Court books. Fell out of it with the Memoirs, and I’m not sure why. But I was remembering that I used to log three things with each post: the current word count, Authorial Sadism, and the LBR quota, i.e. “love, blood, and rhetoric.” Since Alyc and I announced Sekrit Projekt R&R yesterday, and moreover it is very much an LBR kind of book, I think I’ll take another crack at progress-blogging!

Current word count: ~26000

LBR quota: With our first fight scene and our first dead body (not, as it happens, produced by the fight scene), you would think blood would win out this week. But I think that in hindsight this chapter will be more memorable for love, non-obvious though it is.

Announcing . . . a Sekrit Projekt

Lately I’ve felt like a duck: serenely gliding along the water, but furiously paddling beneath. Lots of things in progress and/or hanging fire; not much I can talk about publicly. But after some discussion with the other party involved in one of those things, I’ve come to the conclusion that I should flip over and show you what my feet are doing. Or something. Pretend I came up with a metaphor that doesn’t involve drowning a duck.

This video is not what I’m doing. It is merely to set the mood:

Now imagine that feeling, in epic fantasy novel form, written as a collaboration with Alyc Helms, aka my best writing buddy for the last eighteen years. When I get stuck with my plot, Alyc is the person I throw the manuscript at wailing “helllllp meeeeeee,” because they think like I do when it comes to story.

And, well. Do that for long enough, and you start thinking, “Why don’t we try to write something together?”

So we’re giving it a shot. We’ve managed to write over 25000 words in less than three weeks, so I’d say we’re off to a good start. It’s got love, blood, and rhetoric, more false-identity hijinks than you can shake a stick at, all the worldbuilding you would expect when two anthropologists decide to write a novel together, and all the character shipping potential you would expect when Alyc gets involved.

Fundraiser for immigrants and refugees

I’ve already donated to one of the organizations working to oppose the Trump administration’s cruel imprisonment of refugees and immigrants and to reunite the separated families, but I want to do more. Since I’ve also been thinking that I should cut down on my stock of author copies, that provides me with a way to raise some more money for the cause.

The plan is simple. I’ve listed the available books below; all of them will be signed unless you specify otherwise. If you want to buy one or more, drop me a line at marie{dot}brennan{at}gmail{dot}com telling me which ones you want, who if anyone you’d like them inscribed to, and where I should send them. After I’ve confirmed that the books you want are still in stock, donate the price of the books to RAICES, Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, an organization in Texas, and send me a copy of your receipt (after deleting or blacking out any personal information you’d prefer me not to see).

Shipping is covered anywhere in the U.S. For shipping internationally, I may ask you to PayPal me a few bucks to help mitigate the cost, because that can add up incredibly fast.

So here’s the list of books. Note that I have numerous foreign-language copies of the first two Memoirs, in a variety of translations; if you would like something to keep your hand in, or know someone who reads that language and might like the book, please do consider picking one up! It’s hard for me to find good homes for them in the normal way of things.

A Natural History of Dragons , UK trade paperback (1 copy) — $12
A Natural History of Dragons , German translation (3 copies) — $12
A Natural History of Dragons , Romanian translation (2 copies) — $12
A Natural History of Dragons , Russian translation, hardcover — $12 SOLD OUT
A Natural History of Dragons , audiobook on CD (2 copies) — $35
The Tropic of Serpents , UK trade paperback (2 copies) — $12
The Tropic of Serpents , French translation (2 copies) — $12
The Tropic of Serpents , German translation (4 copies) — $12
Voyage of the Basilisk , US trade paperback (2 copies)– $12
Voyage of the Basilisk , UK trade paperback (1 copy) — $12
In the Labyrinth of Drakes , hardcover (3 copies) — $20
In the Labyrinth of Drakes , US trade paperback (7 copies) — $12
Within the Sanctuary of Wings , hardcover (18 copies) — $20
Within the Sanctuary of Wings , UK trade paperback (10 copies) — $12
Within the Sanctuary of Wings , plain paper ARC (2 copies) — $8
Within the Sanctuary of Wings , audiobook on CD (3 copies) — $35
Midnight Never Come , US trade paperback — $12 SOLD OUT
In Ashes Lie , US trade paperback (1 copy) — $12
A Star Shall Fall , US trade paperback (1 copy) — $12
A Star Shall Fall , UK trade paperback (5 copies)– $12
With Fate Conspire , US hardcover (1 copy) — $20
With Fate Conspire , UK trade paperback (6 copies) — $12
Lightning in the Blood , trade paperback (7 copies) — $8
Witch , US mass-market paperback (100 copies) — $6

(That last one requires a bit of explanation. I recently bought out my publisher’s remaining stock of the book in order to get the rights to revert so I can republish the series; as a consequence, I have a lot of copies on hand. I’m not even sure how many, but suffice it to say that I have more than I’m going to move via this fundraiser. Though hey, prove me wrong!)

If you have any questions, drop them in the comments or send an email. Let’s raise some funds!

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New Worlds: Clothing Basics

For reasons having to do with a project I’m currently working on, I’ve decided that this month I’m going to discuss clothing! Starting with the basics: what we make it out of, and how we make it.

Discuss over there!

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July 4th

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

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Spark of Life: Ruthanna Emrys on DEEP ROOTS

Like most people who don’t know Lovecraft’s fiction all that well, I associate him pretty much entirely with coastal New England towns. I didn’t know, until I read Ruthanna Emrys’ words about her sequel Deep Roots, that he also wrote about New York City. Of course in typical Lovecraftian fashion he found it utterly horrifying — but for Ruthanna, it’s an opportunity for her Deep One protagonist to rebuild her community.

***

Ruthanna says:

The spark for Deep Roots came years before I wrote it. Years before I read Lovecraft, or imagined Aphra’s first steps into freedom as she left the internment camp, or thought up the details of her family’s life beneath the Atlantic. That spark struck, and sputtered out, in half a dozen stories before this one: two chapters of a cyberpunk dystopia in high school, scattered post-apocalyptic dreamworlds, a half-written urban fantasy about magical infrastructure failure. And at long last that spark caught, and burned, for the second Innsmouth Legacy book.

Aphra’s insular community of amphibious humans—considered monsters by their neighbors—was destroyed in a government raid when she was twelve. She spent eighteen years imprisoned, watching her friends and neighbors die one by one in the bone-dry air of the desert internment camp, finally released at the end of World War II into a world she barely recognized. In Winter Tide she returned to the ruins of Innsmouth, hoping to recover the esoteric knowledge buried there. In the process she found new family, made fraught alliance with the government that once caged her, and came away determined to rebuild what they destroyed.

And then what?

Aphra’s story is, among other things, a transformation of H.P. Lovecraft’s wildly creative and infamously bigoted horror stories. Winter Tide took place among his imagined Massachusetts coastal towns: Arkham, Kingsport, and of course the remnants of Innsmouth. Lovecraft found such towns scary because they were full of people not descended from rich white Anglo-Saxons, and also old houses. Aphra finds them scary because they’re full of people who abetted or ignored her family’s destruction.

But small New England towns weren’t the only places that Lovecraft thought terrifying. He spent a few years living in New York City—and his stories and letters from that time are full of vile rants against the immigrants living (and horror of horrors, speaking languages other than English) there.

Some of those immigrants were my family. He described them, or people much like them, with the same language he used for his invented monsters.

My parents moved from New York to rural Massachusetts a few years before I was born. But I grew up visiting the city. I learned to find my way around the subway, and keep my balance as the trains juddered beneath the street. To walk in starling synch through the crowded sidewalks. To gravitate to menus describing all the treasure you can carry through Ellis Island, and love foods that couldn’t be found anywhere on Cape Cod. And every time we crossed the bridge into Queens, I could feel the city’s heartbeat, a thrumming, wakeful energy linking me to millions of people jostling to do those same things.

I tried to write that rhythm, and that sensory palette, for years. The smell of the subway and the primal shriek of the train coming in, the echo of tiled foyers in Greenwich Village, the music of all those languages that Lovecraft feared. And it never quite fit—it didn’t belong to the cyberpunk assassin or the meditative AI. It belonged, it turned out, to Deep Roots.

Of course Aphra would go to New York. It was only logical: she wants to find her remaining relatives on land, and you can find ten of anything there. But New York also accentuated her internal conflicts. Aphra grew up in a small community of people who shared a culture and a faith and a set of assumptions rarely found outside their walls—and she thrived there. But whatever she does, she can’t rebuild that. Even if she finds a town’s worth of people with Deep One ancestry, they won’t have grown up there. They won’t take the same things for granted. The family she’s making for herself now includes people from many cultures, many faiths, many sets of assumptions. So New York, with all that cosmopolitan community that I love and Lovecraft hated, is both the opposite of what she finds comfortable, and the epitome of the new kind of life that intrigues and terrifies her.

So that’s the spark—that rhythm I’ve felt since childhood and can imagine in my sleep, finally finding its place in a late ‘40s New York full of Deep Ones and aliens and—truly terrifying—ordinary humans.

***

From the cover copy:

Ruthanna Emrys’ Innsmouth Legacy, which began with Winter Tide and continues with Deep Roots, confronts H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos head-on, boldly upturning his fear of the unknown with a heartwarming story of found family, acceptance, and perseverance in the face of human cruelty and the cosmic apathy of the universe. Emrys brings together a family of outsiders, bridging the gaps between the many people marginalized by the homogenizing pressure of 1940s America.

Aphra Marsh, descendant of the People of the Water, has survived Deep One internment camps and made a grudging peace with the government that destroyed her home and exterminated her people on land. Deep Roots continues Aphra’s journey to rebuild her life and family on land, as she tracks down long-lost relatives. She must repopulate Innsmouth or risk seeing it torn down by greedy developers, but as she searches she discovers that people have been going missing. She will have to unravel the mystery, or risk seeing her way of life slip away.

Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Powells
Indiebound

RUTHANNA EMRYS lives in a mysterious manor house on the outskirts of Washington, DC, with her wife and their large, strange family. Her stories have appeared in a number of venues, including Strange Horizons, Analog, and Tor.com. She is the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, which began with Winter Tide. She makes homemade vanilla, obsesses about game design, gives unsolicited advice, and occasionally attempts to save the world.

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Books read . . . lately

For a while there I completely stopped not only posting about what I was reading, but keeping track of what it was in the first place. So here, have what I’ve read in the last two months + what I can remember from before that.

Nine Hundred Grandmothers, R. A. Lafferty. Collection of short stories. Lafferty is one of those names I’ve heard a bunch but never read; I picked up this book at a used bookstore ages ago, and finally took it off the shelf when I joined a challenge on Habitica for reading more short fiction. As with any such collection, it was very hit or miss; Lafferty has a certain type of character he writes in multiple stories who just leaves me cold. On the other hand, “In Our Block” (with alien creatures doing a terrible job of pretending to be human) made me laugh out loud, and “Land of the Great Horses” managed to dodge making me cringe over its depiction of the Romani — in part because of how the story ends.

My own work, read for editing purposes, does not count.

The Drowning City, Amanda Downum. Secondary-world fantasy that does the thing I crave, creating a world that feels rich and three-dimensional and lived-in. I could have done with a little more exposition early on to help me keep the various polities straight, but Symir doesn’t feel like Generic Fantasy City; it feels like Downum’s experience in Malaysia shaped the place from the ground up, until you can feel the humidity against your skin. The story involves a foreign agent sent to foster revolution in a colonized city, and the various things the colonized peoples are up to on that front. I especially liked one character whose name I won’t specify, whose situation turned out to be different from and much more complicated than what you initially think.

Aru Shah and the End of Time, Roshani Chokshi. First book from the middle grade “Rick Riordan Presents” imprint, which as near as I can tell is Riordan supporting authors who want to tell stories like his (Percy Jackson etc), with mythologies that are not his. In Chokshi’s case, that’s the return of the Pandava brothers from the Mahabharata to deal with a terrible threat. Except the Pandavas do not show up where they were expected to, starting with the fact that both of the ones who have awoken so far are girls, who were not given the training they should have had for this sort of thing.

The Mummy Case, Elizabeth Peters. I recently played in a one-shot LARP based heavily on these books (I was cast as Amelia Peabody). I read one of them years ago — I think the first one — some time before I wrote the Memoirs of Lady Trent; between the game and the frequent comparisons readers have made between Peabody and Lady Trent, I was in a mood to check one out. This happened to be the only one my library had in ebook, so it was the one I read. It unfortunately suffered from the presence of Ramses, who might be the most insufferable Plot Moppet I’ve seen in a long time; he drove me up the wall in every single scene where he appeared. I’m sort of tempted to grab a book from later in the series and see what I think of him as an adult rather than a five-year-old who drives more of the plot than his parents do.

Unpublished manuscript, read for a friend.

Trickster Lives: Culture and Myth in American Fiction, ed. Jeanne Campbell Reesman. Read for research. A collection of academic pieces on tricksters, not as much from the folkloric end as how they show up in modern fiction. The first essay dropped me headfirst into a pit of academic jargon the likes of which I haven’t seen since I left grad school (sample quotes: “”The Erdoes and Ortiz reader organizes a polyphonic overview that inculcates and imbricates the wide terrain;” “transgressive, contraestablishment tricksterisms offer a carnivalesque post-postmodernist creativity whose central sociopsychological drive promotes important community formation;” “what I like to name the affective-effective overdetermination of mythical dynamism”), but after that it got better. I especially enjoyed the article by Sacvan Bercovitch, “Deadpan Trickster: The American Humor of Huckleberry Finn,” which digs into the ways that Mark Twain himself is being a trickster in how he presents Huck to the reader.

Archivist Wasp, Nicole Kornher-Stace. Copy provided by the publisher, because I’d been asked to blurb the sequel and hadn’t read the first one. This kept skating right up to the edge of a level of grimness and grossness that would have made me put the book down, but never quite crossed it. Wasp is the Archivist, a young woman responsible for catching and destroying ghosts in a post-apocalyptic world — assuming she can survive the yearly challenges in which three of the “upstarts” training to become Archivist try to kill her to take her job. The unrelenting cruelty of Wasp’s situation lets up, though, when she follows a very strange ghost into the otherworld they come from, and starts uncovering the history of how the world broke.

Latchkey, Nicole Kornher-Stace. Copy provided by the publisher for blurbing purposes. If you like post-apocalyptic and post-traumatic community building, this one is for you. Bad things still happen here, but it’s no longer Wasp Against the World; it’s a group of people working step by step to improve their situation, and then to preserve what they can when the world decides to smash what they’ve managed so far. Also much more digging into the pre-apocalyptic past, and figuring out what can be preserved and rebuilt from that.

The Thieves of Silence, Jean-Claude Dunyach, trans. various. Copy provided by the author. More short stories; much like the previous collection I read, The Night Orchid, these involve a fair bit of body creepiness and alienation. My favorite was “A Wish for the Fay,” which takes place on the border between the human and fay worlds, and looks at how those two cross.

The Tea Master and the Detective, Aliette de Bodard. Copy provided by the author. Short novelette? novella? in a setting where specially-crafted blends of tea can have all kinds of effects on the drinker and interstellar travel involves shifting from normal space into “deep spaces” that pose threats to the mind as well as the body. It’s a Sherlock Holmes-type story, except (as Mary Robinette Kowal’s blurb puts it) “Holmes is a woman and Watson is a spaceship.” I would have liked it to be a bit longer, not because I needed more complications out of the plot, but just because I would have liked more room for the story to explore the world; the taste I got here was tantalizing, but too brief for me to fully sink my teeth into it.

Why Crime Does Not Pay, Sophie Lyons. Not quite an autobiography so much as a rambling set of anecdotes by a famous nineteenth-century con woman and thief after she went straight. She is very eager to hammer you with the moral lesson that CRIME DOES NOT PAY (seriously, sometimes it’s written in all caps), by telling you about all the burglars and con artists she know who met bad ends. In between you get stories about how they pulled off various heists and schemes, careening into and out of prison, making fortunes and then blowing them with hardly a blink.

Revenant Gun, Yoon Ha Lee. Third and final book of the Machineries of Empire trilogy, but not quite the end of that setting or those characters, since I know Lee is working on other hexarchate stories. Like Raven Strategem, this changes the playing field under your feet . . . starting with the fact that you have two Jedaos running around (sort of). It’s hard to say more without spoiling the previous books, but it involves a war with more than just two sides and brings a lot of focus onto the various groups and intelligences the hexarchate tends to ignore.

The Elizabethan Underworld, Gamini Salgado. Not everything in here is underworldly (in the crime sense) so much as a study of the various outcast groups of the time, including wandering peddlers (who were sometimes criminals) and wandering entertainers (who were sometimes criminals) and wandering Romani (who were sometimes criminals) and wandering lunatics (okay, they didn’t wander so much as they tended to be locked up, so the ones on the roads were often charlatans pretending to be mad as a way of pursuing their own ends). Because my knowledge of English history really gets its feet under it with Elizabeth, I was startled to discover that the original plan for Bridewell, as conceived of during Edward’s reign, was astonishingly progressive — but unfortunately it got shafted by a loss of political support after Edward died.

The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld, Herbert Asbury. The book that inspired Martin Scorsese’s film. I read The Barbary Coast by the same author and found it hugely entertaining; this one is less so, though in places still quite funny. I think that may be in part because the focus really is on gangs — groups of (mostly) men who sometimes engaged in crime, but derived a lot of their identity from defending a territory against rival gangs. Reading about their conflicts very rapidly becomes like reading The Iliad or something, where it’s Yet Another Account of how X number of people on each side got into a fight in such-and-such place and here’s how many gang members and innocent bystanders died and so on. I think Asbury admired the manliness of it more than I do? Or something? Not that he thinks these were good people, but he seems to find their brawling more inherently interesting than I do.

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New Worlds: Gratuitous Worldbuilding

One of the earliest funding goals of the New Worlds Patreon was a fifth essay in the months that have five Fridays. (The baseline premise of the Patreon is four posts a month, but the calendar does not always agree.) Rather than having these all continue on with the same kind of culture-focused topics, I decided to devote them to “theory” — by which I mean both discussions of concepts that underlie certain social structures (like liminality), and discussion of how one goes about putting these kinds of things into stories.

This week’s post, on “gratuitous worldbuilding,” is one of the latter. It’s an ode to the details that don’t matter: the little setting touches that are there just because they would be, and because they make the story more flavorful. Comment over there!

And if you enjoy the New World series, remember, this is all brought to you by my Patreon backers. You can join their ranks here!

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