Marie Brennan's Blog, page 92

New Worlds: Unarmed Combat

As a card-carrying black belt, I felt obliged to close out a combat-focused month of essays in the New Worlds Patreon with a discussion of unarmed fighting: what it is and isn’t good for.

Comment over there!

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Photography 001

I recently got into a conversation with someone who wants to do more/better photography, and as such things usually do, the conversation went immediately to “what camera should I buy?”

Which made me realize there might be value in writing up a post about how that isn’t where most people should start.

It’s easy to see photography as a matter of gear: if you have better gear, you’ll take better pictures. There’s some truth in this, of course; your light sensor is your light sensor, and if you have a bad one you’re going to get crappy low-light pictures. You can’t take a good telephoto picture without a telephoto lens. Etc. But the way I see it, that’s, like, step three in the process of becoming a better photographer. If you’ve taken steps one and two already, then by all means let’s talk gear — but if you haven’t, then let’s back up for a moment and talk about what comes before that.

To me, step one is composition. People argue about what goes under this term and what doesn’t, but when I say composition, I mean the question of what you do and don’t include in the frame, and what angle you’re shooting from. For example, the natural instinct is to put the thing you’re taking a picture of right in the middle of the frame — and sometimes that’s a good idea! This is one of my favorite photos I’ve taken, and the bridge is basically dead center. But there’s something called the rule of thirds, which often makes a photo more striking: put the actual feature point at the crossing of two lines, rather than the center. Bonus points if you can put something else in the opposite corner, like this, where the gap in the clouds adds some secondary interest.

Or try shooting from a different angle, instead of doing everything straight-on. From below, or from above. (I spend a lot of time on trips crawling around on the ground, and the reason I like the full swivel arm on my camera’s display screen is because it facilitates shots from any angle.) Put one thing in the foreground and another in the background. Zoom in more, so that the focal element takes up most of the image, with not much else around it, or even crop the focal element so that it runs right past the edges of the frame. Or zoom way out, and make your focal element a small thing in a much larger field (this one generally only works if the focal element pops somehow). Take a picture of a detail: the door I looked at in Okinawa wasn’t interesting in its own right, but I liked the texture of the rusted lock against the wood. Dramatic lighting may be hard to arrange, but it’s nice when you can get it.

This is step one because you can do all these things with your phone. Or whatever camera you have with you. If it can take a picture, it can help you improve your composition.

Step two is technique. (It’s also steps four through seventy-nine, because this is something you’ll come back to again and again; I still have vast oceans of technique to learn. Same is true of composition, frankly, but right now we’re talking about what comes before gear.)

When I put technique in second position, what I mean is learning the basics of how a camera operates: ISO, f-stop (aperture), shutter speed, focus. This verges slightly into gear because at this point you probably do need an actual camera, because most of the phones I’ve seen don’t give you a lot of control over the details. I’m not going to explain the whole system here, but after several years of improving my composition skills, I finally learned what all those words mean and how they’ll affect my photographs, which let me take pictures like this one — see how the background is blurry? That’s aperture at work. On its automatic settings, your camera might guess correctly that you want it to take a that kind of photo . . . but I have some shots from the Bangalore zoo that show the chain-link fence in splendid detail, with a blurry smear behind it that a clever person might guess is a peacock. Once I learned my way around the basic settings, I knew how to make the camera focus on the peacock, not the fence. I knew how to take low-light photos without them coming out any grainier than necessary (see above re: light sensors). I theoretically know how to get non-blurry shots of things moving at high speed — I say “theoretically” because I haven’t practiced it enough to be very good at it.

Nearly any dedicated camera these days will let you work on your technique. That little dial with “A” and “S” and “M” on it? That’s how you access these controls. Notice a button or a menu item that says “ISO”? Yep. Get to know your camera’s manual. Learn to love it. Fiddle with settings and thank the gods that digital photography means you don’t have to pay lots of money to find out whether what you did turned out well or not.

And if you’ve done those things, then you can start worrying about your gear. I replaced my old Leica in large part because its light sensor was abysmal; I techniqued around that problem as much as I could (bracing my camera against nearby objects and figuring out via trial and error that a low f-stop, i.e. wide aperture, would let in as much light as possible and therefore mitigate my problems at high ISO and exposure times), but in the end, I needed a better sensor, a tripod, or both if I wanted to take pictures in dark places and not have them look terrible. But there are many, many people in the world who throw thousands of dollars at expensive camera equipment and then shoot everything on auto with no understanding of composition beyond “point the lens at the thing and click the button,” and they stay mediocre photographers.

So if you want to improve, work on your composition. When you’ve gotten as far as you can with that, learn the camera controls. You’ll be surprised how far that gets you, without much expense.

Oh, and: don’t use the flash. Seriously. Turn it off. It has a place and a time, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred, your picture will look better without it.

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Born to the Blade, Episode 6: “Spiraling”

This week the first season of Born to the Blade hits its midpoint with the sixth of eleven episodes, written by yours truly. It’s called “Spiraling,” and that tells you about how well things are going for our characters . . .

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Spark of Life: Kate Heartfield on ARMED IN HER FASHION

I’ve talked before about how some of my stories have pivoted on pieces of music, with lyrics or just the general feel making my subconscious decide which way the plot needed to go. And the entire Great Cataract sequence in The Tropic of Serpents? That came from a photo of Iguazu Falls. So it’s no particular surprise to me that not just the initial inspiration but the spark of life for Kate Heartfield’s Armed in Her Fashion came from a painting.

***

Kate says:

My debut novel, Armed in Her Fashion, was inspired from the beginning by a piece of art: Dulle Griet by Pieter Bruegel. I suppose it was only natural that when I got stuck, near the end of the first draft, I returned to the painting for fresh inspiration.

Bruegel was a 16th century painter in the Netherlands. He was influenced by the monstrous, surreal visions in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, a century before. But Bruegel merged those grotesque imaginings with images of ordinary peasant life, and in Dulle Griet, we see a very ordinary-looking woman, holding a frying pan, leading a raid on the mouth of Hell.

Griet herself, a traditional Flemish figure who sometimes represents greed or shrewishness, was the beginning of my story. I wanted to know what would lead a woman to raid Hell; what was she looking for? What could she hope to gain? What could she teach us about how women have provided for themselves and their families throughout human history, and about how their communities saw them?

I set my own version of Griet in the Bruges of 1328, in a city under siege. Margriet de Vos is very ordinary: a wet-nurse, and a widow. Determined, pragmatic, sharp-tongued and old enough not to care what names people might call her.

But the weirdness in the background of Bruegel’s painting influenced the novel’s world. This is an alternate version of 14th century Bruges, in which monsters are very real. The Hellbeast in my novel is a literalization of the Hellmouth that appears in Bruegel’s painting, which is itself a late version of the Hellmouths that appear in medieval European art. As I considered the amalgamations of human figures with musical instruments, birds and devices that appear in so many Bosch and Bruegel paintings, the novel began to explore the promise of body modification, and the horror of non-consensual weaponization of the body.

As I neared the climax of my plot, I knew what had to happen, but I didn’t know why; I didn’t know what events in the world of the story could force my plot in the direction I needed. One day, I glanced at Bruegel’s painting again, and I realized there was one element I had not yet included in the novel: Eggs. They’re everywhere in Bosch and Bruegel. Maybe they’re an alchemical symbol, or maybe they signify greed, or gluttony, or fragility, or the promise of new life. Probably all the above. I knew what they signified for me: a deeper level of world-building, and a new twist in my plot. They represented change and renewal, and I knew right away what these eggs were and why they mattered to my characters.

Like many writers, I often turn to the art created by others when I feel my creative well running dry. Often, that means putting on a piece of music or watching a movie. But when I really need to recharge, I go to the art gallery.

***

From the cover copy:

In 1328, the city of Bruges is under siege from the Chatelaine of Hell and her army of chimeras. At night, revenants crawl over the walls and bring plague and grief to this city of widows.

One of those widows, Margriet de Vos, will do anything to make sure her daughter’s safe, even if it means raiding Hell itself.

Amazon
Indiebound
Barnes and Noble
ChiZine Publications

Kate Heartfield is the author of Armed in Her Fashion, a historical fantasy novel from ChiZine Publications, and The Road to Canterbury, an interactive novel from Choice of Games, set for release in spring 2018. Tor.com Publications will publish two time-travel novellas by Kate, beginning with Alice Payne Arrives in late 2018. Her fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies including Strange Horizons, Podcastle, and Monstrous Little Voices: New Tales from Shakespeare’s Fantasy World. Kate is a former newspaper editor and columnist and lives in Ottawa, Canada. You can find her at her website or on on Twitter.

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New Worlds: Armor

From weapons, the New Worlds Patreon continues on to armor! Which people did not generally wear while running around town, contrary to what my favorite video games would have me believe.

Comment over there!

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BORN TO THE BLADE sharpens its steel

As of yesterday, Born to the Blade is five episodes into its eleven-episode season. The first plot arc concluded with “The Gauntlet” last week, written by Michael R. Underwood; this week Malka Older enters the arena, meaning that everyone on the writing team has now done at least one ep. So if you want to try the story out without committing to the full season, this is a good, solid, representative chunk — and I believe the way Serial Box handles things, if you buy episodically at first and then decide partway through to go for the whole thing, they pro-rate your season purchase to account for what you already own.

Next Wednesday I’ll take the field again with the sixth episode, “Spiraling.” I’ll also be in France when that happens, so I may not be as on top of things as I normally would. So mark your calendars now!

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Ebook bundle giveaway!

I’m currently participating in a science fiction and fantasy BookSweeps giveaway, with my short story collection Maps to Nowhere. The setup is that you enter by following one or more of the participating authors on BookBub. They’re a promotional service that offers lots of deals, but what following an author there does is notify you when they release a new book, which I find really handy.

The giveaway itself contains eighteen ebooks and a chance to win a Nook Tablet or a Kindle Fire. So if that sounds shiny to you, head on over here to take part! You have until Wednesday, May 23rd.

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New Worlds: The Social World of Weapons

The New Worlds Patreon discussion of weapons continues on with the social forces that shape what people use to attack each other. What are you allowed to carry? What are you trying to do with it? Do you even know how to use that thing?

Comment over there!

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The Complete Memoirs of Lady Trent now available as an ebook omnibus!

If you’d like to own the entire (Hugo-nominated!) Memoirs of Lady Trent series in ebook, now it’s easier than ever to do! Just head on over to Barnes and Noble, Google Play, iTunes, Kobo, or Amazon and pick up The Complete Memoirs of Lady Trent, an ebook omnibus of all five titles.

To head off two questions people are likely to ask: no, this isn’t available in the UK, because it’s something my US publisher decided to do, and at the moment it is ebook only. We may have a print omnibus eventually, but among other things it faces the inconvenient problem of how to group the books: you can’t bind all five of them together very easily, so does Voyage of the Basilisk (which also happens to be the longest book) go in the first half or the second? Ebooks do not pose these problems, so an ebook omnibus it is, at least for now.

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New Worlds: Sticks, Swords, and Very Sharp Rocks

It’s no secret that I have an interest in combat. But it’s taken me until the second year of the New Worlds Patreon to start discussing that corner of worldbuilding, beginning with the materials and application of different kinds of weapons. Comment over there!

Also, we keep dancing along the threshold of the next funding goal. So if you’ve been thinking of becoming a patron, now is a great time to start!

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