Supernatural Re-Watch: “Home,” “Scarecrow,” and female characters

I don’t have enough to say about “Home” to fill a whole post, so I’m just going to make a comment about it here before moving on to “Scarecrow” and the general topic of Supernatural and its female characters.

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Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

A Year in Pictures – Fushimi Inari

This work by http://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

This is pretty much the classic photo to take at Fushimi Inari. The site is famous for its torii, the red-orange wooden arches you see in abundance here; they are all. over. the mountain, in a dozen branching paths, leading to small shrines crammed onto every vaguely flat surface (and some that aren’t so flat). In most places the torii aren’t quite so closely packed, but when they are, they make for a very striking view.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Supernatural Re-Watch: “Faith” and the Dumber Than Dean Award

I promise I’ll post something other than photos and Supernatural analysis eventually. My brain’s a little wrung out from revision, so right now I’m just kind of coasting along, recovering.

Also — speaking of a wrung-out brain — ignore what I said last post about discussing “Scarecrow” some more. I managed to get my wires crossed, and mashed “Scarecrow” and “Shadow” together in my head. (They’re both one word starting with S, and they both have Meg, okay? And I don’t have much functioning grey matter at the moment.)

Instead, we will talk about “Faith” and the Dumber Than Dean Award.

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Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Five Things Make a Post That Is Not About Supernatural

1) The funny thing about having a release date early in the month is that it sneaks up on you. After all, we’re still in February. That means The Tropic of Serpents won’t be out for a while yet, right? Wrong — it’s out next Tuesday, i.e. March 4th. (For those of you in the U.S. and Canada, at least. UK folks, your street date is the 20th of June. After that, Tor and Titan should be publishing more or less simultaneously, so you won’t have the added wait.)

Kirkus, by the way, not only gave Tropic a starred review; they listed it as one of their Best Bets for March. They even used the cover art as the top image for the post, which is yet another sign that Todd Lockwood and Irene Gallo are awesome.

2) If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, you’ll have a chance to hear me read from The Tropic of Serpents at 7 p.m. on Sunday, March 9th, at Borderlands Books. It’s my intent to also publicly announce the title for the third book there, as an added treat for my hometown peeps.

3) Also for Bay Area types, I’m going to be at FOGcon weekend after next. I unfortunately had to back out of one of my panels because of a karate belt test on Friday night, but I’ll still be doing several things that weekend:

• Friday, 3-4:15 p.m. Narnia, Hogwarts, and Oz, Oh My!
  
  What are our favorite secret worlds? What do we love about them? Why is a secret world so useful for storytelling? What can we learn from the ways used to access these places? What about worlds which exclude some people from accessing them, such as adults or non-magical people–are these worlds problematic or necessary? Or somewhere between the two?
  
  M: Tim Susman. Marie Brennan, Valerie Estelle Frankel, Naamen Gobert Tilahun
• Saturday, 10:30-11:45 Secret History and Alternate History; their similarities, differences, and how to write them
  
  Tim Powers, in books like Declare and The Drawing of the Dark, has brought us into the realm of secret history — the events that really took place around known historical facts. Harry Turtledove, Philip K. Dick, and many others have brought us into the realm of alternate history — the what-if-things-had-been-different. (Indeed, one could argue that Mary Gentle’s Ash is secret alternate history!) What about these works fascinates us, and how do we put them together?
  
  M: Bradford Lyau. Marie Brennan, Tim Powers, Tim Susman
• Saturday, 4:30-5:45 Reading
  
  Marie Brennan, Alyc Helms, Michael R. Underwood

4) In non-Tropic-related news, I participated in the Book of Apex blog tour over at Books Without Any Pictures. There’s a review of my story “Waiting for Beauty,” a brief interview, and a guest post wherein I talk about how writing historical fiction helped me become better at worldbuilding in general.

5) And Now For Something Completely Different: I really love both of these art sets, one of Disney princess in historically accurate costumes (the last image is the best!), and one of celebrities cosplaying as Disney characters.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

More reasons to hate Google Hangouts

Dear Google,

I’m so glad you decided to link all of my settings to my Google account, rather than to device on which I’m using that account. Because of your decision, I don’t get to say that I would like chat notifications on my tablet, but not on my phone. I either get notifications in both places, or in neither. This is perfect! I get to choose between never seeing chat messages unless I’m on my laptop (where I use Pidgin, a wonderful program that does all the things Hangouts won’t), or having my phone pester me with pinging and buzzing every single time somebody sends me a chat message. Which is fabulous when I’m, y’know, in a public place.

This is such a brilliant move on your part. Even better than that time you decided to take away the nice Talk app and replace it with Hangouts, where I don’t get to see whether somebody’s status is Active or Away or Do Not Disturb. I just love having companies strip away utility and force me into some marketer’s pre-determined idea of how I’m going to use the program, rather than the way I was using the program. You’re doing a bang-up job of understanding your audience; if you didn’t have such a firm grasp of what we wanted, you wouldn’t be so successful at giving us the exact opposite.

No love,
Me

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.