Swan Tower

How the hell do you use a shimmer ink in a fountain pen without it clogging up the moment you look away?

I have tried this precisely once, and the results were so bad that for the first time in my life, I purged the ink out of a pen rather than using it up. I don't know if the answer is "the pen you used is clog-prone" (Pilot Vanishing Point; I haven't had issues with non-shimmer inks) or "only ink with shimmer if you're intending to write a bunch immediately, because six hours later it will be causing problems" or "use a dip pen" or what, but it seems like other people are able to use shimmer inks more successfully. Is there something I'm missing?

The Kickstarter for Wraithmarked's deluxe illustrated edition of the Memoirs of Lady Trent is live as of this morning! I can't actually tell you how fast it funded because that literally happened before I even woke up; all I know is that in the first four hours, it nearly QUINTUPLED its goal. These people know how to run a Kickstarter, y'all, and they have a large base of dedicated followers. I have absolute faith that what they produce is going to be gorgeous.

(And a reminder: if you're interested in getting the whole series + all three short stories, you're best served by backing this omnibus now, and the second one when that Kickstarter campaign happens. Obtaining copies later on is likely to be harder and more expensive.)

Also, I'm doing an AMA on the Clarion West Discord server today! Not posting a link because they asked it not be sprayed all over social media, but if you're on that server, do stop by!

It's that time of year again, when my annual Patreon collection goes on sale!



If you're accustomed to picking these up in hard copy, I promise, the paperback is on its way. It's just a little delayed this year because I ran into a snag right when I was eyeball-deep in revising the first book of The Sea Beyond to send to our editor, and when I had to choose between my sanity and getting the print edition ready by today, I chose the former. I'll post here when that's available, which hopefully won't be too long from now.

Meanwhile, the Patreon marches on into Year Nine -- join the ranks of my patrons here!

Today has just brought a bunch of poetry news! I mean, one part of it was a form rejection for a packet of poems, but to take the sting out of that, another place bought two from me in one go, "Our Rewards" and "Hallucination". I knew that could happen with poetry (since most markets want you to send them more than one poem at a time), but it's the first time I've unlocked that achievement!

And on top of that, I have a poem out today! Eye to the Telescope has done a plant-themed issue, to which I contributed a poem about the World Tree, "Axis Mundi". You can read the whole issue online there!

It's been a minute since I posted one of these! And by a minute, I mean a literal year.

As I mentioned a while ago, I stopped blogging about what I was reading because everything I was reading was research for a book series (The Sea Beyond) that I couldn't talk about yet. Then I was able to talk about it, but all my reading was still research, and while I know some of you would be interested in hearing about that, it was draining enough of my brain that writing extra about it, beyond my notes, was really not an appealing prospect.

But! While this post does contain one book from the tail end of that binge, and there are a few others I'll probably work my way through later (as we get started on the second volume of the duology), for now, I'm actually reading some other stuff.

Fiesta y tragedia: Vivir y morir in la España del Siglo de Oro, Enrique Martínez Ruiz. Last of the research binge, and the fifth book I read in Spanish. This was actually the one I started with, but there are two reasons it took me forever to get through: first, it's over six hundred pages long in ebook, and second, a Spanish friend has confirmed that this guy's writing sometimes gets a little impenetrable. As in, I clocked a 127-word sentence, and that might not even be the longest one in here. For someone like me, barely muddling through a second language, daisy-chaining that many clauses together makes following the point of the sentence rather challenging. But there are few enough books on daily life in early modern Spain that beggars could not be choosers, and I got some very useful information out of here even if I had to do a lot of work to get it.

Language of Liars, S.L. Huang. Disclosure: I know the author through the Codex Writer's Group, and I got sent an advance copy of this for blurbing purposes.

Forthcoming SF novella about linguistics that is, among other things, taking some potshots at nineteenth-century anthropologists (my comment about that was "it's like shooting fish in a barrel, where the fish deserve it"). The story itself is not for the faint of heart, and I won't be surprised in the slightest if it winds up on awards lists.

Dragonsong, Anne McCaffrey. Re-read, or rather re-listen, for an upcoming book club. I remember really liking the Harper Hall trilogy; I'm not sure how much of that memory owes itself to later books in the series, and how much is rose-tinted glasses. But man does this one take a while to get started. You're fully a quarter of the way in before it gets to what I remembered as the plot; everything before that basically consists of detailing just how much Menolly's life at Half Circle Hold sucks. And then even once the plot gets started, way more time and attention is spent on what other characters are doing than I recalled -- in fact, parts of it felt rather like they were more there to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the other Pern books than to really tell a story about Menolly and her fire lizards. It was a quick listen, and doing it in library audiobook meant it was filling time I spent in the car rather than leisure time at home, so I don't really regret it, but . . . yeah, I was not impressed this time around.

The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett. Also read for that book club. I very much enjoyed Bennett's Divine Cities trilogy, and I was very interested in the premise of a detective story in a fantasy world, but the basic principles of the setting here are not as much my cup of tea -- I've never been a fan of the New Weird/body horror/etc. The notion of engraving is cool, and I liked Din reasonably well as a character (Ana a bit less so; you could get a pretty good bender on by drinking every time she grins), but I'm not sure I'm invested enough to continue. I do get the feeling that there is an Inevitable Revelation coming concerning certain things, and I'm curious to know what that is, but I might be at the level of "ask a friend" rather than reading the rest of the series myself.

Filling Your Worlds With Words: A Writer’s Guide to Linguistic Worldbuilding, C.D. Covington. Disclosure: Turning Darkness Into Light is one of the books discussed in here, because back when the author was doing her linguistics column for Tor.com/Reactor, I shamelessly asked her if she'd like to read my novel about translation.

This is a Kickstarter-funded book about many aspects of language and worldbuilding. It starts off with a fairly technical discussion of things like sound production and how those might differ for non-humanoid species, but this is not a book about conlanging; instead she touches on things like how names and speech styles reflect culture, how difficulties of translation can play into your plot, and why universal translators will never work outside of straight-up magic. The formatting for the print edition is not great, but the information is excellent, if you're interested in this sort of thing.

Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling, Henry Lien. This admits up-front that it's making sweeping generalizations about "Eastern" and "Western" storytelling, and that it's deliberately taking the piss out of the latter in an attempt to shake up the brains of readers for whom that's an unexamined default. It's a slim book (I read it in an evening) that unpacks the four-part story structure usually referred to in English by its Japanese name, kishōtenketsu, as well as nested and circular storytelling, and also the cultural values that tend to go hand-in-hand with these forms. Lien uses various bits of fairly well-known media to illustrate his points, so it's not all abstract discussion. Lots of food for thought here!

My original intent was to write this idea as a story. I even have a half-finished draft, 2500 words written in two stints separated by years; the problem was, I didn't know where to go with it. I had a neat concept and no actual plot.

Which is why, when I began writing poetry, this was one of the first ideas to pipe up and say "maybe I'll work better in that medium?" It was also my first foray into writing a villanelle, a form that people often find daunting because of its repeated lines . . . but in this case that dovetailed perfectly with the material, because it's a poem about one would-be hero after another dying amid the brambles surrounding Sleeping Beauty's castle.

It has found a home at The Rialto Books Review -- my first sale to a literary market, and my first print poetry publication! It appeared in issue #27, which you can buy here.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/cLyhZH)

New story out today, in The Sunday Morning Transport! This one is for subscribers only, but subscribing gets you a story in your inbox every Sunday morning. My contribution this week is "The Poison Gardener", a vicious little science fantasy piece entirely born out of me thinking poison gardens are cool . . .

Sometimes it's fun for the New Worlds Patreon to take a look at pseudoscience. But the ideas behind physiognomy and phrenology are pretty ugly . . . comment over there.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/5lpZXx)

I've long thought that the closest thing we have to medieval cathedrals is NASA projects (and those of other scientific space agencies). People work on those in the full awareness that they themselves will often be long gone by the time their mission reaches its destination, returns its data. And yet they do it anyway, devoting themselves to a cause that stretches beyond the everyday horizon of today, tomorrow. Just as the cathedral builders of past ages patiently hewed stone, raised walls, framed roofs, knowing they would not live to hear the psalms sung within the sanctuary they built.

The cathedral of a better United States has been under construction since 1776. Its original blueprint was badly flawed. Sometimes its fabric has crumbled, and what was built had to be built again. Very likely, none of us here today will live to see its true completion.

We must keep building it anyway.

We may hope for a victory in two years, in four -- but a victory is not, will not be, the victory. We have to think in the longer term. The Republican Party didn't get to where it is now overnight; it's the fruit of decades spent working toward their goals, at every level from school boards and city councils on up. Pushing that back, making a truly progressive society, will be the work of more decades.

So we must celebrate the victories as they come, even when they are small. We may say "there is still more work to be done," because it will be true, but that must not become a mantra of discouragement. We are building a cathedral, one stone at a time. We may not live to see it completed, but the work itself is still worth doing.

Since it's good to have my feelings on the matter stated clearly in a more prominent place than scattered across various blog posts, I've added a statement on AI to my website.

Next task: updating the copyright page in all my BVC ebooks to state that I do not grant permission for them to be used in training AI models, and any such use is prohibited.