Lilith Saintcrow's Blog, page 153

Storium And Other Stuff

Well. There’s news!

First, I’m now a Storium stretch goal! It’s a Kickstarter for an online storytelling game. The world I’d build for it centers on a Keymaster–someone who can open doors between here and elsewhere. The only trouble with opening a door is that things from the other side can come through, and those things might be what the Brothers Grimm kept warning everyone about. It promises to be a lot of fun.

The Selene ebook is now available at Amazon, Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble as well as directly. I’m also happy to report the paperback is coming in June–or before, if the proof copy I receive is up to snuff, and I have every reason to expect it will be. Further bulletins as events warrant.

Last but not least, The Ripper Affair–the last Bannon & Clare book–is now available for preorder at B&N, and also at Amazon! It’s very exciting.

Regular blogging will resume next week. In the meantime, enjoy the first few days of the merry month of May.

photo by:


Moyan_Brenn

The Squiwwel Who Hauntth The…

A number of you sent me a link about an attack squirrel yesterday. While this warms my heart, it also makes me paranoid, because yesterday was also the day Odd Trundles almost caught one of the little furry bastards.

Napoleon and Josephine survived the winter, of course–it would take more than a few weeks’ worth of deepfreeze to put the tubby Emperor of the Cedars down, and his coeval-consort had plenty of hanging Metamucil bars to gnaw on. She–I’m going to assume that’s her pronoun of choice, fully aware of…what? Why are you looking at me like that?

Yeah, I fed them. Sort of. I hung a single bar of pressed squirrelfood on the dogwood in back. It was getting cold, you see, and…well, our crotchety old Fox-News-watching stray-cat-rescuing neighbor (he’s a complex man) kept them in peanuts and bagged squirrel food too. No, I have not told him about Neo and the old backyard. I don’t think he’d believe me. Although he has seen me shoeless and screaming on the deck, mostly when I saw one of the goddamn tree rodents digging up my daffodil bulbs and tripped over Odd Trundles trying to get to the stairs to chase that motherfucker down. I went down hard and barked my elbow, Odd decided I was wounded and walked all over me trying to help, Miss B herded the squirrel away and started digging to find out what they’d been so interested in, and it began to snow.

That’s a different story, though. Where was I? Oh, yes. I bought one bar of squirrel Metamucil to hang in the dogwood, it doesn’t mean I really fed them, right? It just means my soft heart got the better of me that one time.

ANYWAY.

Yesterday was unseasonably warm and sunny, and in between beating my head on the current book(s) I went out to do a little weeding and turn over the compost heap. The heap, its container cobbled together out of wood pallets and spare lumber, is actually doing quite well, and by the time fall comes I should be able to spread a lot of it in the garden to soak in through the winter, and next spring even more so my tomatoes get the size of human heads.

That is, if the dogs don’t eat the entire thing, and the damn squirrels don’t take up residence as they may have been trying to do yesterday. Or, more precisely, one squirrel.

So. Me, a pitchfork, a compost turner, and the dogs approached the compost heap. A tumbleweed drifted past–wait, no, sorry, that was in the cyborg Western.

I may have been humming this, though.

Anyway, I rounded a corner and came face-to-face with a squirrel.

She crouched atop the steaming pile of decaying vegetable matter, and my first thought was that she was after the sprouted garlic heads I’d tossed in the previous day. (Better to have too much garlic than not enough, I always say.) She chittered, a little–what?

How did I know she was, well, a she? Easy. She had no nuts–um, she did not possess dangles of a testicular nature. Of course I looked, she was standing straight up and–Christ, never mind.

Anyway, she made a very soft, very dangerous chattering sound, and I had to decide what to drop.

I wasn’t going to face a squirrel without a weapon, for God’s sake. I had the pitchfork, and while it could do a lot of damage, I had my doubts about my agility rolls overcoming its inherent speed deficiency. Which left the compost turner, fast but exceedingly difficult to bludgeon a dancing squirrel with in any meaningful way.

I was saved the trouble of choosing–even now, the conundrum has no clear answer–by Odd Trundles, who snuffled up behind me and found out the Stinky Pile had hatched a basilisk for him to play with. “NEW FRIEND!” he bugled, and threw himself for the board holding the bottom of the pile in place. “NEW FRIEND NEWFRIENDNEWFRIEND!”

“OhChrist–” I began, but that was when the girl squirrel–oh, let’s call her Moxie, that’ll work–opened her mouth.

“FWEEDOM!” she bellowed, and leapt sideways. I flinched–I have a healthy respect for those little furry barstids–but she wasn’t aiming for me. She gained the top of the pallet-wall, an explosion of decaying matter below her showering the other side of the compost heap and causing a respectable divot in the pile, and…

…tripped. She landed with a splat in the rosemary next to the compost. Odd, of course, saw this as an invitation to play, and his considerable bulk shot forward. (Bulldogs, like Gimli, are very dangerous over short distances.) He landed in the middle of the rosemary too, and I began swearing, dropping both pitchfork and compost turner. Moxie!Squirrel shot away for the very large pine tree in the middle of the yard–this is the tree that SQUIRREL DEATHRIDE 5000 hung from–in a series of bounds that were quite impressive, and a reddish streak from the other side of the yard was Miss B, whose midafternoon elimination break (translated: she was pooping in her favourite corner) had been truncated by this new excitement. (Further translation: there were still dangles.)

“FWEEDOM!” Moxie screamed again, having become cognizant of this new danger. “I CHAWWENGE YOU, CANINE FIENDTH!”

She got to the ring of rocks around the pine tree, and tripped again. Odd Trundles, shaking himself out of the poor rosemary (serious, that bush is flattened now, and keeps muttering stupid fleshsacks whenever I water it) was hot on her furry heels. Her very fortunate stumble meant Miss B slammed on the brakes, thinking it was some manner of juke-out, and that meant Odd trundled, at high speed, right into Miss B.

The lisping squirrel made it to her feet (paws?) in short order, leapt for the tree, almost fell off as some dead ivy peeled free of the bark, and scuttled up a little further. She froze, tail twitching, surveying us all, and cackled.

The sound drove Odd to new heights of ecstatic wriggling, and he was so excited he scrabbled up the rock-ring and ran straight into the tree, perhaps expecting it to dodge (again). You’d think he’d learn. He staggered away, and since Miss B was in the process of levitating to try to bring down the hysterically-laughing squirrel, he ended up right in the space where the Aussie needed to land.

She, um, forgets about gravity sometimes.

The resultant fracas fursplosion was notable only in that it shook the dangles from Miss B’s hindquarters and distracted Odd Trundles handily. I stood there with my heart hammering and checked my shoes. Yep, still had them on, point for me.

Then I looked up to see the squirrel still clinging to dead ivy, studying us all balefully. “BEWAWE!” she screeched, upon noticing my agonised, fear-laden gaze. “I AM THE SQUWWEL WHO HAUNTTH THE NIGH–” She slipped, regained her footing, and scampered up the trunk.

This does not bode well.

Heat

End of April, and the weather forecasters are telling us eighty degrees. (That’s between twenty-six and twenty-nine for you Celsius folks.) Beltane is going to be like August, for God’s sake, and right after that we go back to mid-sixties, as is normal and reasonable this time of year. GO HOME, WEATHER, YOU’RE DRUNK.

The Fireside serial continues apace. I have Chs 1-3 in to the editor and we should have finals on those in a couple weeks. It premieres in August, but before then, you still have time to get in on Chuck Wendig’s Forever Endeavor. I highly recommend you do. In any case, I have the cyborg in a desert town, about to fight off others of her kind. It’s a showdown, and you can see the tumbleweeds. Something tells me I’ll be listening to a lot of Ennio Morricone for the remainder of that particular story.

Other than that, Rattlesnake Wind is doing well, but May 1 is the drop-dead date for me to start revisions on the first Jeremy Gallow book. True to form, the editor wants more–more details, more backstory, more of everything. I tend to produce very lean and light first drafts, because the story is so clear and vivid inside my head. I often forget the reader doesn’t have a window into my brain. Which is just one of the many valuable services an editor provides, like telling me when I’m being ridonkulous and threatening me when I kill off characters. Heh.

So the order of the day is: editing work, as much of Rattlesnake Wind as I can write, and maybe weeding. Because getting out and getting my hands in the dirt is a Good Thing.

Over and out.

photo by:


MSVG

Broken Time

Poor Felix stopped ticking.

The Week In Trundles

Odd Trundles

Living with a bulldog is an exotic experience. Let’s take a look at what Odd Trundles has done just in this past week:

* Helped Miss B eat a half-stick of butter. To be fair, I think it was knocked off the counter by the Little Prince in the frenzy of table-clearing that follows dinner each night, both kids competing to see who can bring the most dishes into the kitchen–no, I did not push them to these lengths. In fact, they perform this ritualistic contest in silence, because after a collision cost us a plate and a half-full glass of milk, I banned the damn race but they don’t listen, surprised I am not, as Yoda would say. Regardless, I noticed both dogs were 1. not in the office with me after dinner and 2. suspiciously quiet, which led to me striding into the living room and finding them engaging in a contest of their own over aforesaid clump of dairy product, now sadly mangled. I said “OH FOR GOD’S SAKE” and they both jumped guiltily, and I picked up the sad slobbery remainders of the butter and started thinking about how I was going to deal with two dogs with greased insides. Fortunately, Odd has a cast-iron digestive system and very few Bowel Disturbances. Miss B’s stomach is much more finicky, but Odd’s greedy gulping meant she probably didn’t get much of the buttery prize.

I should note that because it takes something superlative to give Odd Intestinal Troubles, those disturbances, while few and far between, end up being…well, noteworthy, i.e., massive.

* Decided to add “Despoiler of Mum’s Garden” to his list of titles. I don’t know what prize he gets for that achievement, but it’s sufficiently shiny to keep him going back to attempt it. Note that his list of titles includes: Last of the McSchnorgles, JOWLS (“much scarier than JAWS”), “Oh My God What A Broken Dog”, The Methane Factory, Mumsy’s Little Teapot, He Who Chews The Pillows–I could go on. Anyway, he was in chomp and snuffle mode, and managed to uproot four of the small tomato plants I carefully nurtured from seed. Normally this would only be annoying, but since tomatoes are part of the Solanaceae family, their fruit is edible but the greenery is full of poisonous alkaloids, and that was enough to give me a heart attack until I realized he hadn’t eaten the tomato plants, just destroyed them because he was more interested in chewing dirt. (Don’t ask.)

* Started obsessively licking a light socket. I was brushing my teeth, getting ready for bed, and I suddenly realized that instead of grooming Miss B or licking his own paws (both of which he does a LOT) or attempting to groom the Mad Tortie (she puts up with it, God alone knows why) he was licking a light socket, and I dropped my toothbrush and yelled, spraying the mirror (and myself) with foam as I whirled to hurry out and save him from becoming a barbecued bulldog. Odd Trundles just looked up at me, licking his chops. “WHUT? YOU LOOK FUNNY. DID YOU MEET MY NEW FRIEND? HE TASTES ZINGY.” Then he tried to go back to licking the light socket, which meant I had to drag him away while Miss B decided the toothpaste on me was FOOD GLORIOUS FOOD and she NEEDED SOME OF DAT. Which gave me the bright idea of trying to distract Trundles with toothpaste foam I scraped off my cheeks, but he was having none of that because the light socket was apparently lonely and begging for his especial company. I finally got him into his crate with a chew toy, zipped the crate shut, and crouched there hyperventilating while Miss B, happy to have found one thing Odd would not eat, tried her level best to clean all the toothpaste off me and Odd stared reproachfully at his mean mum who wouldn’t let him play with his friends.

And people wonder why I’m crazy. Christ.

* Tried to mate with the cat, the footstool, Miss B, my sneakers, and a feather pillow, all in the space of twenty minutes. I’m…just going to let that speak for itself.

Every day brings a new adventure for Odd. He is, as I remarked on Twitter, like a hyperactive, housebroken toddler on hallucinogens. His various physical ailments and low cunning instead of intelligence (to be fair, again, most of what brain he has is occupied in the problem of breathing through compromised airways and piloting his dense, unruly, corkscrewed body through space) would make a lesser dog cranky, I think, but Odd has been blessed with such a friendly and joyous disposition that even handicaps, hindrances, and hissing, clawing cats are seen as NEW FRIENDS to be loved and cherished and slobbered on. (Seriously, everything he meets is a NEW FRIEND, and there’s nothing he loves better than a NEW FRIEND unless it’s perhaps BACON or EAR RUBS OMG.) It’s a damn good thing he’s so idiotically good-natured, because a cranky, intelligent Odd Trundles would be trouble.

As it is, Miss B is occupied daily with herding him around and reminding him to breathe, which is as good a job for her bossy self as any I could name. And he’s endlessly devoted to his humans, including MUM OH MUM I WILL PROTECT YOU FROM FIRMLY BETWEEN YOUR ANKLES.

Seriously, if ankle-biting zombies ever attack, Odd will be our hero. Until then, he’s damn fine entertainment, and keeps us all on our toes…

Soundtrack Monday: Devil’s Right Hand

“But wait,” I hear you say. “What about Dead Man Rising?”

DMR is one of the few books I didn’t do much of a soundtrack for. The entire book was so painful, from plumbing the depths of Rigger Hall to Jace’s misguided heroism, Eddie’s bravery and Polyamour’s too, and Keller’s final sacrifice, that I just didn’t want to. It remains one of the most emotionally difficult books I’ve written to date, partly because of everything that happened inside it, partly because of everything happening in my life while I wrote it, and partly because of my fears that I wouldn’t be able to do Danny’s story justice. Dante’s aching grief through most of the book has a counterpart in my own life, my homage to a memory.

The Valentine series isn’t really a quintet, it’s more of a duology followed by a trilogy. Devil’s Right Hand was when we found out that the game had been deeper all the time, and Japhrimel really started to show the fact that he was not and never would be human, for all that he loves Dante and will protect her–even, in some cases, from herself. Her stubborn, very human tenacity, while it allows her to love such a creature fiercely and with absolute devotion, is also one of the things that drives him to horrible lengths trying to keep her safe. Right Hand was where I started figuring out just how alien Japh is, and how he didn’t (and never will) think the way a human man does.

I suspect this is a lesson Dante won’t ever learn, and part of the attraction she holds for him.

Anyway, onto the music!

1. In Novo Taliano (A Gift For My Hedaira) Lovers in Dangerous Time, Barenaked Ladies (cover of a Bruce Cockburn song)

2. Dante and Anubis Solsbury Hill Peter Gabriel

3. The Prince Has Called This Is Hell, Elvis Costello

4. Abandoned, Again Flowers Become Screens, Delerium

5. Freetown New Prague Go It Alone, Beck

6. I’m Your Man (Lucas Villalobos) Katana Groove, Tomoyasu Hotei (If you listen very hard, you can hear Lucas laughing at the end of the track.)

7. Vann & McKinley Attitude, Hardknox

8. Velokel To The Shock of Miss Louise, Thomas Newman

9. Dante & Japh Sparring (Angry Enough) The Echo Game, Shigero Umebayashi

10. Dante vs. Lucifer Living Dead Girl, Rob Zombie (In the very beginning you can hear Eve. “What are you thinking about?”)

11. Eve Silicone, Mono

12. The Devil’s Right Hand The Hand that Feeds, NIN

13. Dante vs the World Cost of Freedom, Experiment (One of the scenes that didn’t make it into later books was Danny almost killing both Vann & McKinley in a factory.)

14. Eve and Lucifer Life In Mono, Mono

15. Lucifer’s Game I Alone, Live

16. Do Not Doubt Me, Dante Silence, Delerium

photo by:

Exothermic

Pliny’s Stars

Look up, old man.

Having disposed of the gods, Pliny moves on to something much nearer and dearer his heart: the stars. I can’t shake the image of a wide-eyed little Roman boy staring at the night sky and wondering, his soul afire with wonder. It’s sort of like the image I get when I see pictures of Carl Sagan’s smile, only with more toga.

Even though Pliny knew the world was round, he couldn’t quite compass that it wasn’t the centre of the universe. Neither could anyone else, really, and a lot of my interest in the Natural History is to see how smart people in classical antiquity set about solving problems and hypothesizing. Pliny loves the stars, and he’s thought long and deeply about them. He has no trouble believing the geocentric model at all, because every bit of observation he can make bears it out.

He begins by scoffing at the widespread belief that each human being has a star in the firmament, and those stars “rise and fall” with great lives or even ordinary ones. His explanation of meteorites–stars falling–is that they are overfed with a stream of liquid and discharge it in a flash, like, he says, a stream of oil when an oil lamp is refilled. Educated Romans knew the earth was round and that the lights in the sky had a regular schedule, and kept trying to explain it, refining their theories over time.

Pliny mentions Anaximander of Miletus while talking about the zodiac; in the process, he says Anaximander “opened the portals of science.”

Anaximander Milesius traditur primus Olympiae quinquagesima octava, signa deinde in eo Cleostratus, et prima arietus ac sagittari, sphaerum ipsam ante multo Altas.p189.

This brings home just how much the Romans felt a debt to Greek culture. Philosophy was indistinguishable from “science” and largely from “Greek” in those corners of the world for a long, long time. (I had a long rant about philosophy and science both standing on the backs of female and poverty-level labor in the ancient world, but that’s another blog post.)

Pliny had no telescope, so Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and the moon were the “wandering stars,” or planets. His observations on how they move, and what their natures must be (frex, Jupiter’s influence is healthy because it’s balanced halfway between the “cold” of Saturn and the “hot” of Mars) tell us volumes about not only current medical thinking (hello, humorism!) but also about the nature of time in the Roman world.

Next, the sun’s course is divided into 360 parts, but in order than an observation taken of the shadows that it casts may come round to the starting-point, five and a quarter days per annum are added; consequently to every fourth year an intercalary day is added to make our chronology tally with the course of the sun. p191

In the absence of Greenwich Mean Time or atomic clocks, time depended on the sun’s shadow; since the irregularity of Earth’s orbit was unthinkable in a geocentric universe, they simply added days to make everything regular, as we still do in Leap Years. It’s a pretty elegant solution, but I think the real revolution lies a bit deeper here: our time doesn’t match what the sun says, so we’re going to alter our calculations to take account of the evidence instead of tailoring the evidence to fit the theory–at least, as far as we are humanly able. The approach fights against (and hence, takes into account) human nature and confirmation bias, even two thousand plus years ago. (I’m thinking now of the ancient tablets from Sumeria lamenting how kids in those days didn’t listen to their elders and the world was going to shit as a result. Humans don’t change much over the millennia, it seems.)

Another neat little detail, linguistic instead of strictly scientific, concerns Venus.

Below the sun revolves a very large star named Venus, which varies its course alternately, and whose alternative names in themselves indicate its rivalry with the sun and moon–when in advance and rising before dawn it receives the name of Lucifer, as being another sun and bringing the dawn, whereas when it shines after sunset it is named Vesper, as prolonging the daylight, or as being a deputy for the moon.pp192-193

Lucifer, of course, means “light-bringer[1],” and the gnostic, linguist, and student of religion pieces of me all sent up meeping little cries of joy upon reading this. That’s the thing about Latin–so much of our own language is built on it, and so much of Western culture is a direct descendant of Rome. As Anne Rice once had a character–probably Marius–say, Latin was a language that made it easier to think. Its peculiarities lent itself very well to this manner of inquiry, this manner of thinking about the world. Other languages do so too, of course, but my mother tongue is English, and English’s mother is Latin. (Her other mother is Anglo-Saxon, but that’s, say it with me, another blog post.)

Next up, Pliny talks about the moon, and things get a little, ha ha, loony…

[1]For example, matches were once called lucifers.

Gifts

Little things to mark places in my world. Shrines to love.

Do Better

Dear Superheroes:

Sexual harassment isn’t an occupational hazard. It’s not a glitch in the complex matrix of modern life. It’s not something that just “happens.” It’s something men do. It’s a choice men make. It’s a problem men enable. It’s sometimes a crime men commit. And it is not in the power nor the responsibility of women to wage war on this crime.

It’s on us.

How do we fight this war? We stop enabling. We check ourselves and, when necessary, wreck ourselves. Do you know a guy who’s hate-following women on Twitter just to troll them? You check him. Do you know a guy who’s writing disgusting screeds to women journalists because they don’t like the same things he likes? You check him. Do you know a professional whose discourse with women in his field is loaded with gender-specific language and condescension that could enable further abuse? You check him. Are your Twitter followers identifying you as a sympathetic ear for their sexist views? You check yourself. Is your website’s message board a cesspool of ignorance and hate? You check it like you actually give a damn. Do you know a guy who’s sending rape threats to women for any reason? Oh, you report that guy.

Let me make it plain:

A woman objecting to the content of a comic book — even if you think she’s dead wrong — does not rise to the occasion of vicious name calling and rape threats. –Fake Geek Guys: A Message to Men About Sexual Harassment

Thank you.

A Temporary Thing

Tax day! I have never, ever been so glad for my accountant. Every time I see her I want to hug her. She’s bemused by this, of course–mostly, people see her as the bearer of bad news around this time of year. For me, however, she’s saving me from hours and hours of stress my stomach is not equipped to handle, and worth every (tax-deductible, as a professional expense!) penny I pay. If you’re a writer in my area, I highly recommend her entire office. It’ll save you time you can use for more writing, that’s for damn sure. Or for plotting the downfall of your enemies. Whatever works.

Today’s morning is for revision work on Ruby’s story–one more pass before we go into CEs and proofs. I’ve received assurances that KIN will indeed be published, so that’s good. The first rough chunk of the Fireside serial is resting with the editor, and this afternoon will probably be for another chunk of it and at least one session with Rattlesnake Wind.

My crisis of career confidence, springing from two series abruptly showing bad numbers, proceeds apace. Part of me wants to say people just didn’t understaaaaaand the fairy-tale retellings, but every time I see a writer say that I cringe internally because the fault lies with the writer, right? My bad. I thought they were good when I finished them. Some parts I thought were flat-out great, I was growing as a writer and Trying New things…but it wasn’t what people wanted, I guess. There’s some comfort in chalking a bit of it up to “I’m just not a mainstream writer”, but that comfort is erased by the fact that I honestly thought Cami and Ellie and Ruby had fucking fantastic stories and I was just the person to tell them…and I was maybe very wrong.

Oh well, live and learn.

As for Bannon & Clare petering out, well, in my humble opinion steampunk isn’t a genre, it’s an aesthetic, and the market of an aesthetic gets saturated really quickly. (For those asking, don’t worry, the Ripper Affair IS coming out, you can preorder it.) I’m endlessly glad that my Orbit editor is always open, honest, and flexible when it comes to my work, and that she believes in me so strongly. That belief is an anodyne on days I don’t feel so well.

In the end, this is a temporary thing. Every writer’s career has points like this, and my own is a mild case compared to some stories of “career bed-death” I’ve heard on loops and during some extremely honest barcons[1]. I’m still making the mortgage and I still have the best Readers ever. (That’s YOU, my chickadees.) So it’s been nice to wallow, but I’m back at work now, determined, in Louisa May Alcott’s words, to “take Fate by the throat and shake a living out of Her.” Every other part of writing for a living has been about endurance, outliving and out-stubborning the forces arrayed against one.

This, indeed, is no different.

Over and out.

[1] The part of a convention where writers converge on the bar and in vino veritas begins.

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Tax Credits