Sunday, April 25, 2010
a brace of bunnies
MOAR BUNNEEZ!!!!
Two this time. I think there are 4 or 5 of the black litter, and they seem to be happy in amongst the rebar and planks. Hopefully they won't stick around when the concrete is poured.
I'd post something of substance and content, but I'm a bit under the weather today.
Friday, April 23, 2010
spasm-inducing cuteness
It's spring! So there is rhubarb, and baby bunnies. Not as many as last year, which suggests the university's trap-spay-release program may have actually accomplished something.
Alis, put on goggles and helmet for this one!
Tiny black bunnies scurry around the construction site next to the library. Here, one grooms itself. Later I may post two tiny black bunnies sharing a piece of bread.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
for my own amusement
I took three of my 3-Day Novels, the ones set in the same alt-Europe, and muddled about on Lulu.com turning them into a pdf and giving them a cover. This was rather fun.
I ended up using the old-style cover templates, so avoided most of the 'Hey, why not pay us to do this?' shilling that Jim Macdonald speaks of over on Making Light.
Here's the message from Lulu:
Threefold(ID #8518393) is available only through a Direct Access web URL. To allow others to see and purchase this Book, send them this link:
http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/threefold/8518393
The book is at cost. The download is free. I will make no money if you get either, but will be mildly flattered and pleased.
If you got Fold a couple of years back, you already have 1/3 of this book. If I've emailed you Fold, Trading in Ghosts, or Culture Heroes, you have 1/3, 2/3, or all of this book. About all I can say in favour of getting the hard copy is that the cover is kind of cool and you can read it in the bath.
An update: the Lulu website is being stupid, and the Download (Free) link has vanished. So if you'd like the free pdf, you can still get it by going to my 'storefront', where under the button that says Add Print to Cart, there is a link saying Download for Free.
My Preview feature has also disappeared, and I haven't had any luck discovering where it might have wandered off to.
The cover pic is from a number of 'creepy doll pictures' that I copied from ebay 3 or 4 years ago, and unfortunately I never thought (at the time) of noting the auction number or seller's name. Whoever took this did a number of eerie and evocative auction photos, and I wish I could give him or her credit.
PLEASE NOTE! The texts are almost exactly as when I sent them off to the judges for the 3-Day Novel Contest. Editing was no more than adding a missing quote mark or restoring a paragraph break that had gone missing. I wanted to keep the flavour of desperation and fatigue that adds so much to the experience.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Oh no! It's worldbuilding!
While carrying on with Tom's story (1600s revenants & witchfinders), which is over halfway through, I've started muddling about with the Chimps on a Blimp story as the setting for a probably-YA novel. It's kind of relaxing to be able to move between stories, after the more-than-a-little intensive spells of revision of Willow Knot.
Tom's story is dead easy for world building, because it's Stuart England, barely tweaked. Sure, it has working magic, but since most people in 1600s England (and elsewhere) believed in magic, real magic doesn't change the society as much as one might think. I mean, there are legal and philosophical discussions about magic already in place.
With the short story (On the Transmontane Run With the Aerial Mail Express, plug, plug) I was able to do a fair bit of handwaving and 'quick, look over there!' to avoid setting-holes (like plot holes, but you can fall further and it's all mucky at the bottom) or at least direct attention away from unexamined areas. With a novel I can't do that nearly so much, just because the canvas is wider, and I'm not painting miniatures.
Also, there are things I will need to know about the world for my self, whether or not those aspects come directly into the story. What I'll need to know may not be what another writer in the same situation would need to know, and some of it I'll only realise as I write.
Obligatory link to Patricia Wrede's worldbuilding questions, both helpful and daunting.
The first and biggest question is: why no railroads? What makes airships commercially viable? In the short story the blimp travels over swamp and mountain, both difficult terrain for railways. But what about the plains? Do the rails run over the prairies, then stop as the foothills rise?
Then there's the weird ecology, the freshwater jellyfish that are a crucial plot point. And the flying squid, that don't show up in the short story, but might be real later on. I began to think longingly of Australia, and wonder about heaving some sort of Atlantis out of the sea, and supplying it with weird critters. Maybe I could crack North America down longways, put some massive waterway between prairies and Northwest coast.
I brought the question to the Scribblers, and bookherder said 'go and look at late Cretaceous maps'. Lo, there was the Western Interior Seaway, almost exactly as I'd pictured it.
Now I'm all excited, and need to find something like A Child's Illustrated Guide to Paleogeography, with fold-out maps. Research!
What happens if the prairies are covered with water? No giant buffalo herds, for one thing. How much of Europe should I allow? Does the land bridge last longer?
Such fun to come.
Tom's story is dead easy for world building, because it's Stuart England, barely tweaked. Sure, it has working magic, but since most people in 1600s England (and elsewhere) believed in magic, real magic doesn't change the society as much as one might think. I mean, there are legal and philosophical discussions about magic already in place.
With the short story (On the Transmontane Run With the Aerial Mail Express, plug, plug) I was able to do a fair bit of handwaving and 'quick, look over there!' to avoid setting-holes (like plot holes, but you can fall further and it's all mucky at the bottom) or at least direct attention away from unexamined areas. With a novel I can't do that nearly so much, just because the canvas is wider, and I'm not painting miniatures.
Also, there are things I will need to know about the world for my self, whether or not those aspects come directly into the story. What I'll need to know may not be what another writer in the same situation would need to know, and some of it I'll only realise as I write.
Obligatory link to Patricia Wrede's worldbuilding questions, both helpful and daunting.
The first and biggest question is: why no railroads? What makes airships commercially viable? In the short story the blimp travels over swamp and mountain, both difficult terrain for railways. But what about the plains? Do the rails run over the prairies, then stop as the foothills rise?
Then there's the weird ecology, the freshwater jellyfish that are a crucial plot point. And the flying squid, that don't show up in the short story, but might be real later on. I began to think longingly of Australia, and wonder about heaving some sort of Atlantis out of the sea, and supplying it with weird critters. Maybe I could crack North America down longways, put some massive waterway between prairies and Northwest coast.
I brought the question to the Scribblers, and bookherder said 'go and look at late Cretaceous maps'. Lo, there was the Western Interior Seaway, almost exactly as I'd pictured it.
Now I'm all excited, and need to find something like A Child's Illustrated Guide to Paleogeography, with fold-out maps. Research!
What happens if the prairies are covered with water? No giant buffalo herds, for one thing. How much of Europe should I allow? Does the land bridge last longer?
Such fun to come.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
book reviews!
A mixed bag, strangely full of troubled adolescents.
Tamsin, by Peter Beagle, Firebird 1999. Jenny is a plain, resentful teen whose mother's remarriage uproots her from New York and dumps her, all bare roots and wilting leaves, in a crumbling Dorset farm. There she meets Tamsin, a ghost girl who died during the time of the Bloody Assizes, and finds that Tamsin herself is haunted, and that more dangerous spirits than a wistful ghost girl walks by night.
On the whole, I liked this (I'm sure Mr. Beagle is relieved to hear it). Jenny's misery and self-aware sulkiness are well-conveyed, with her devotion to Mr. Cat and her steadfast aid to Tamsin demonstrating that she is more than self-pity and snappishness. The Dorset countryside is brought to life, in more ways than one, and the secondary characters are distinctive. I'm still reading with my cutting goggles on, though, and I did wonder whether the story demanded both the pooka and the Wild Hunt? Sure, they Do Things In the Plot, but.
One for Sorrow, by Christopher Barzak, Bantam 2007. When Adam's classmate and almost-friend Jamie is murdered, his ghost comes to Adam for comfort and acknowledgement. Adam too needs comfort, as his family breaks apart and he slides from his high-school niche of nobody-much to outcast status. Even though Jamie's ghost-world is cold and dangerous, with skinless men lurking by the gates, it is a place where Adam seems to have purpose, and for a time living companionship with the girl who found Jamie's body and is also haunted by him.
One for Sorrow has several themes & tropes in common with Tamsin - the ghosts' memories are fragmentary and easily lost, and trying to recall traumatic memories breaks them apart; the living teens are faced with losing their ghost friends by helping them move on - but Tamsin is a fairly conventional mystery at its heart, and Barzak never attempts to solve Jamie's murder, which I liked. It did feel like a first novel (if that isn't a pretentious thing for me to say), with the story wandering about rather once Adam runs away from home, and the spunky black girl who befriends him being, um, kind of Magical Negro, and Adam's family getting their act together perhaps a little too much while he's hiding out. Still and all, this was a memorable and original story.
I Am Not a Serial Killer, by Dan Wells, Headline 2009. I bought this at World Fantasy because of his elevator pitch, and damn if it doesn't deliver more than what was promised. I'm not keen on using terms like 'compulsively readable', but I'm awfully tempted in this case. As I was getting near the end of the book, I was scared not only of what John might do but scared for him, and wondering how in heck Wells was going to pull a satisfactory conclusion together without being false to John. (spoiler: he does it.)
You can read about it over on Scalzi's Big Idea, which is probably more to the point than me blathering.
The Witch's Boy, by Michael Gruber, Harper 2005. I bought this for the astoundingly beautiful cover and for the opening: "Once upon a time, in a faraway country, there was a woman who lived by herself in the middle of a great forest. She had a little cottage and kept a garden and a large gray cat. In appearance, she was neither fair nor ugly, neither young nor old, and she dressed herself modestly in the colours of stones. None of the folk who lived nearby (not the oldest of them) could tell how long she had dwelt in that place."
Terri, if you haven't read this book, do so - you will love it. Gruber plays with any number of fairy tales, with incidents and characters wandering in and out of the plot, some central, others only winks or nudges to the well-read reader. He takes a risk by having Lump, the ugly goblin-like child that the witch absently adopts like a stray kitten, be as damaged, angry and selfish as he is, but when I fell out of sympathy with Lump, the other characters kept me involved, from the cat who becomes a man (a mercenary soldier, because 'he does so love killing') to the grown-up Hansel and Gretel, a cheerful and resilient pair through all their fortunes and misfortunes, to the daughter of Bluebeard and his last wife, who drove him to his death by her utter lack of interest in his locked and Bloody Chamber (yeah, I weep bitter tears there, that my conceit for Bluebeard Contented has been used).
I was thinking I should post about The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, by Diana Wynne Jones, in terms of how it influenced my plotting and worldbuilding - but that's probably another post altogether.
Tamsin, by Peter Beagle, Firebird 1999. Jenny is a plain, resentful teen whose mother's remarriage uproots her from New York and dumps her, all bare roots and wilting leaves, in a crumbling Dorset farm. There she meets Tamsin, a ghost girl who died during the time of the Bloody Assizes, and finds that Tamsin herself is haunted, and that more dangerous spirits than a wistful ghost girl walks by night.
On the whole, I liked this (I'm sure Mr. Beagle is relieved to hear it). Jenny's misery and self-aware sulkiness are well-conveyed, with her devotion to Mr. Cat and her steadfast aid to Tamsin demonstrating that she is more than self-pity and snappishness. The Dorset countryside is brought to life, in more ways than one, and the secondary characters are distinctive. I'm still reading with my cutting goggles on, though, and I did wonder whether the story demanded both the pooka and the Wild Hunt? Sure, they Do Things In the Plot, but.
One for Sorrow, by Christopher Barzak, Bantam 2007. When Adam's classmate and almost-friend Jamie is murdered, his ghost comes to Adam for comfort and acknowledgement. Adam too needs comfort, as his family breaks apart and he slides from his high-school niche of nobody-much to outcast status. Even though Jamie's ghost-world is cold and dangerous, with skinless men lurking by the gates, it is a place where Adam seems to have purpose, and for a time living companionship with the girl who found Jamie's body and is also haunted by him.
One for Sorrow has several themes & tropes in common with Tamsin - the ghosts' memories are fragmentary and easily lost, and trying to recall traumatic memories breaks them apart; the living teens are faced with losing their ghost friends by helping them move on - but Tamsin is a fairly conventional mystery at its heart, and Barzak never attempts to solve Jamie's murder, which I liked. It did feel like a first novel (if that isn't a pretentious thing for me to say), with the story wandering about rather once Adam runs away from home, and the spunky black girl who befriends him being, um, kind of Magical Negro, and Adam's family getting their act together perhaps a little too much while he's hiding out. Still and all, this was a memorable and original story.
I Am Not a Serial Killer, by Dan Wells, Headline 2009. I bought this at World Fantasy because of his elevator pitch, and damn if it doesn't deliver more than what was promised. I'm not keen on using terms like 'compulsively readable', but I'm awfully tempted in this case. As I was getting near the end of the book, I was scared not only of what John might do but scared for him, and wondering how in heck Wells was going to pull a satisfactory conclusion together without being false to John. (spoiler: he does it.)
You can read about it over on Scalzi's Big Idea, which is probably more to the point than me blathering.
The Witch's Boy, by Michael Gruber, Harper 2005. I bought this for the astoundingly beautiful cover and for the opening: "Once upon a time, in a faraway country, there was a woman who lived by herself in the middle of a great forest. She had a little cottage and kept a garden and a large gray cat. In appearance, she was neither fair nor ugly, neither young nor old, and she dressed herself modestly in the colours of stones. None of the folk who lived nearby (not the oldest of them) could tell how long she had dwelt in that place."
Terri, if you haven't read this book, do so - you will love it. Gruber plays with any number of fairy tales, with incidents and characters wandering in and out of the plot, some central, others only winks or nudges to the well-read reader. He takes a risk by having Lump, the ugly goblin-like child that the witch absently adopts like a stray kitten, be as damaged, angry and selfish as he is, but when I fell out of sympathy with Lump, the other characters kept me involved, from the cat who becomes a man (a mercenary soldier, because 'he does so love killing') to the grown-up Hansel and Gretel, a cheerful and resilient pair through all their fortunes and misfortunes, to the daughter of Bluebeard and his last wife, who drove him to his death by her utter lack of interest in his locked and Bloody Chamber (yeah, I weep bitter tears there, that my conceit for Bluebeard Contented has been used).
I was thinking I should post about The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, by Diana Wynne Jones, in terms of how it influenced my plotting and worldbuilding - but that's probably another post altogether.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Saturday, March 20, 2010
I promised book reviews
and my spam promises me a 'Massage from International Monetary Fund Unit London'. I guess the economic crisis is really calling for desperate measures.
Obligatory Monty Python reference: "And now, a massage from the Swedish Prime Minister."
Anyway, yes, I have been reading. Stacking up the recently-read, I saw that I had still managed to knock off a few books through the revision blitz, in part because I can't revise on my lunch hour or while waiting in lines. Add to that more intensive reading last week, and it makes a stack I'm at least not ashamed of.
The Cup of the World, by John Dickinson, Random House 2007. Phaedra, only child of the Warden of Trant, refuses all suitors, both for fear of dying in childbirth and for love of a man she has met only in dreams. When the king's son courts her, her dream-lover comes to take her away, and proves to be the mysterious and ill-famed lord of the province across the inland sea. Her elopement is the trigger for war, and she hardly knows who to trust, who will betray her, or who she must betray next.
Not an ordinary fantasy. The world setup is nothing unusual - a continent with an inland sea, ringed with provinces & city-states, unstable politics and a king holding on by the fingernails. But the rulers came in ships, and there were aboriginal people, so there's a conflict rarely examined. The hillmen (shades of Kipling perhaps?) have a mythology involving a Great Mother, quite different from the near-Christianity of Phaedra's people. Phaedra is not an entirely sympathetic character, somewhat cold and self-centred (also only 15 in the first chapter) but with an inner core of toughness and endurance. What really stands out is how much of the story is what happens at home while the battles and raids and treaties are happening elsewhere, and how much of the intrigue and discovery is Phaedra's story and coming of age.
Thirteen Orphans, by Jane Lindskold, Tor 2008. I really like the premise of this - that when the first emperor of China 'burned the books and buried the scholars', he unknowingly created another world, the Lands of Smoke and Sacrifice, an alt-China. I admit to some disappointment that the story takes place in our world, where the characters' ancestors (the Thirteen Orphans) fled after dynastic overthrow in the Lands. Within a couple-three generations of assimilation, the descendants mostly believe the the history of how the Twelve protected the Thirteenth (true heir of the overthrown dynasty) and how they were exiled to be delusions or bedtime stories. But the Lands are once again in turmoil, and about to spill over into our world again.
Perhaps it is my increasing age, but I was more interested in the older characters, Pearl and Des (whose full name is the wonderful Desperate Lee, because of a birth certificate misunderstanding) than in the younger Brenda, discovering some unexpected powers as she takes on the role of the zodiac Rat. I was also made a bit uncomfortable by Brenda's nemesis from the Lands, a slinky sexpot who seems like a Dragon Lady in training - I really hope she's humanised in the sequels.
I tell you, it's hard to read big thick books when coming off a revision high. My cutting goggles are still on, and I keep asking 'does this scene need to be here?'
Which brings me to The Apocalypse Door, by James D. Macdonald, Tor 2009. In which there may not even be a superfluous syllable, let alone scene. This moves at a dead run, with black humour gasped out here and there. Not what you'd read for lyrical description or introspective character development--the main character does have a crisis of faith, but he has to keep running while he has it. It's great fun, but I wouldn't describe it as a romp, because there's an edge of seriousness throughout, not so much because of the threatened apocalypse (which is almost a staple of urban fantasy: Buffy stalled it at least once a month) as the questions of faith and purpose that move the characters.
I also read The Confessions of Peter Crossman, ordered from Lulu.com, three stories of the Knight Templar special agent and his rival and occasional sidekick, Sister Mary Magdalene, leather-clad assassin and Bride of Christ. A nice warm-up for the Apocalypse Door.
Oh, and I wrangled around with pdf and jpgs and put together my three alt-Europe 3-day novellas to make a single volume on Lulu. Not public, but so I can have a convenient hard copy. After I've seen my first copy and discovered whether the cover or anything needs fixing, I can share the url for private ordering, which is $8 US for pbk, or free download.
I titled it Threefold, in case anyone wondered.
Obligatory Monty Python reference: "And now, a massage from the Swedish Prime Minister."
Anyway, yes, I have been reading. Stacking up the recently-read, I saw that I had still managed to knock off a few books through the revision blitz, in part because I can't revise on my lunch hour or while waiting in lines. Add to that more intensive reading last week, and it makes a stack I'm at least not ashamed of.
The Cup of the World, by John Dickinson, Random House 2007. Phaedra, only child of the Warden of Trant, refuses all suitors, both for fear of dying in childbirth and for love of a man she has met only in dreams. When the king's son courts her, her dream-lover comes to take her away, and proves to be the mysterious and ill-famed lord of the province across the inland sea. Her elopement is the trigger for war, and she hardly knows who to trust, who will betray her, or who she must betray next.
Not an ordinary fantasy. The world setup is nothing unusual - a continent with an inland sea, ringed with provinces & city-states, unstable politics and a king holding on by the fingernails. But the rulers came in ships, and there were aboriginal people, so there's a conflict rarely examined. The hillmen (shades of Kipling perhaps?) have a mythology involving a Great Mother, quite different from the near-Christianity of Phaedra's people. Phaedra is not an entirely sympathetic character, somewhat cold and self-centred (also only 15 in the first chapter) but with an inner core of toughness and endurance. What really stands out is how much of the story is what happens at home while the battles and raids and treaties are happening elsewhere, and how much of the intrigue and discovery is Phaedra's story and coming of age.
Thirteen Orphans, by Jane Lindskold, Tor 2008. I really like the premise of this - that when the first emperor of China 'burned the books and buried the scholars', he unknowingly created another world, the Lands of Smoke and Sacrifice, an alt-China. I admit to some disappointment that the story takes place in our world, where the characters' ancestors (the Thirteen Orphans) fled after dynastic overthrow in the Lands. Within a couple-three generations of assimilation, the descendants mostly believe the the history of how the Twelve protected the Thirteenth (true heir of the overthrown dynasty) and how they were exiled to be delusions or bedtime stories. But the Lands are once again in turmoil, and about to spill over into our world again.
Perhaps it is my increasing age, but I was more interested in the older characters, Pearl and Des (whose full name is the wonderful Desperate Lee, because of a birth certificate misunderstanding) than in the younger Brenda, discovering some unexpected powers as she takes on the role of the zodiac Rat. I was also made a bit uncomfortable by Brenda's nemesis from the Lands, a slinky sexpot who seems like a Dragon Lady in training - I really hope she's humanised in the sequels.
I tell you, it's hard to read big thick books when coming off a revision high. My cutting goggles are still on, and I keep asking 'does this scene need to be here?'
Which brings me to The Apocalypse Door, by James D. Macdonald, Tor 2009. In which there may not even be a superfluous syllable, let alone scene. This moves at a dead run, with black humour gasped out here and there. Not what you'd read for lyrical description or introspective character development--the main character does have a crisis of faith, but he has to keep running while he has it. It's great fun, but I wouldn't describe it as a romp, because there's an edge of seriousness throughout, not so much because of the threatened apocalypse (which is almost a staple of urban fantasy: Buffy stalled it at least once a month) as the questions of faith and purpose that move the characters.
I also read The Confessions of Peter Crossman, ordered from Lulu.com, three stories of the Knight Templar special agent and his rival and occasional sidekick, Sister Mary Magdalene, leather-clad assassin and Bride of Christ. A nice warm-up for the Apocalypse Door.
Oh, and I wrangled around with pdf and jpgs and put together my three alt-Europe 3-day novellas to make a single volume on Lulu. Not public, but so I can have a convenient hard copy. After I've seen my first copy and discovered whether the cover or anything needs fixing, I can share the url for private ordering, which is $8 US for pbk, or free download.
I titled it Threefold, in case anyone wondered.
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