swan_tower | Entries tagged with help me o internets

I have a confession to make: I grew up in suburban Dallas, and I simply Do Not Grok Nature.

On the metric of effort-to-result, putting details about nature into my stories is probably one of the most labor-intensive things I do. And I don't even mean long, rapturous passages of lyrical description about fog creeping over a pond at dawn or something like that; I mean that unless I make a conscious decision to go do some research, my characters walk through forests of Generic Trees, listening to Generic Birds make Generic Noises. When I do the research, it winds up being half an hour of effort for half a sentence of result.

I'm making an effort to improve at this, and having discussed it with some writers, I think a large chunk of what I need is simply better resources for the information, or better ways of finding the resources. Field guides are helpful, but even more helpful are books or websites that talk holistically about a specific landscape, so that I get integrated information like "down by a watercourse you'll see these trees and these birds and these flowers," rather than separated lists of all the trees found in a region, and all the birds, and so forth. I feel like this is relatively findable for the United States, but much harder for other parts of the world, especially non-Anglophone parts. Any recs for such things? I mostly use this for secondary-world purposes rather than this world, but I'd love to be able to have characters ride across grasslands that look more like Mongolia than Nebraska, or cope with environments like tropical jungles that we mostly don't have here. Could be formal field guide-type stuff, or just somebody writing with really evocative specificity about not just the mood of a place, but the specific flora and fauna to be found there and how they behave.

(I know one bit of advice is "get out there in the naturez yourself!," but that would mostly only help me learn to write about the northern California landscape. I do get out in the naturez, but I can't just go hang out in Mongolia whenever I want.)

I need recs for INSTRUMENTAL music (no lyrics, or at least not in English) written in some form of quintuple meter: 5/4, 5/8, something more arcane, whatever. Songs which are only partially in such a meter are acceptable, though, y'know, not some complicated jazzy thing where it's like a measure here and three measures there and so forth; I'd like it to be recognizably quintuple without following along on the score to see where it changes.

I could talk about how the Bay Area is officially going under a “shelter in place” order for the next three weeks, and the surreal sight of my local grocery store completely denuded of flour, rice, chicken, and other staples . . . but you know what? My brain is desperate for other material right now.

So! Please recommend to me what you consider to be the best recorded performances of each of Shakespeare’s plays. I do mean each: not just the ones that have been done a bunch of times, like Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, but anything for which Shakespeare’s authorship is moderately certain. Cymbeline? The Winter’s Tale? Movies, TV miniseries, filmed stage performances, any of those are fine, but not adaptations that use the plot without the script (e.g. 10 Things I Hate About You).

This question brought to you by me thinking, hmmmm, I’ve written some Shakespeare fanfic for Yuletide — I wonder if I could sell some short stories in that vein? I need grist for the mill, basically.

(And feel free to pass the link to this post along to anybody who might have recommendations.)

Writing advice books tend to go into great detail on things like how to structure your plot, or develop character, or describe things, or whatever.

They do not — in my limited experience; hence this post — bother to say much about how to decide where to break chapters, scenes, or paragraphs, apart from telling you to start a new paragraph if you’re switching speakers in dialogue. Maybe a vague nod at “cliffhangers are exciting!,” but that’s about it. You’re just supposed to figure that stuff out as you go, apparently. Or else (and this is entirely possible) it never occurred to the writer of the writing advice book that there’s an actual skill buried in there.

But I haven’t read a huge number of writing advice books, so I’m perfectly willing to believe that someone out there has at some point unpacked this stuff for the reader. Any recs? Because it’s one of those things that I do instinctively, without much ability to articulate how the decision-making process goes — and since I enjoy teaching writing, being able to articulate it would be useful.

I know I have at least a few people reading this journal who know a bit about this topic. 🙂

Scholars in the ancient world: what exactly did they do? What sorts of things did they write? “Commentaries,” according to the references in the things I’ve read, but what exactly was the content and purpose of those things? What other kinds of works did they produce?

What sparked this question was thinking about the Library of Alexandria and the scholars who used it, but I’m also interested in answers from other parts of the world (since the purpose to which I’d be putting this is not historical fiction). Ancient Confucian scholarship, ancient Vedic scholarship, those and more would all be interesting to know about, too.

I’ve been given a nice-sounding recipe for pork tenderloin braised in white wine and elderflower liqueur with thyme, red onion, and fennel bulb. But I’m not a huge fan of that last item — what would the chefs among you recommend as a replacement? With or without altering other ingredients (e.g. a different herb, if something else would harmonize better).

Note that due to allergies and/or dislikes, mushrooms and squash are both out.

The other day I was at the grocery store, and the cheese counter had samples out of something. Another customer was standing between me and the actual blocks of cheese the samples were taken from, so I had no idea what they were, but I went ahead and popped one in my mouth.

Train of thought: “Oh, wow, this is amazing, this is — UGH BLEAGH IT’S GOAT CHEESE GET IT OUT GET IT OUT GET IT OUT.”

I have no idea what’s going on chemically with goat cheese, but invariably I have this type of reaction, where for a second or two it’s lovely, and then I get hit by a freight train of something so unpleasantly pungent, it lingers with me for a good five minutes afterward. Much as with cilantro, I don’t think I could train myself into liking it if I tried for a year: when that taste kicks in, my brain utterly rejects the possibility that what I’m eating is food.

Those of you who like goat cheese — is that pungency a selling point for you? Or does it not even hit you in the same way? (Wikipedia describes goat’s cheese as “tart,” which is not remotely the taste I get off it.) I’m wondering if this is anything like the “supertaster” deal where some people can’t taste phenylthiocarbamide or propylthiouracil, while for others (I’m one) they are unspeakably bitter. I know my reaction to cheese in general is linked to the fact that I have a very strong sense of smell; your stinkier classes of cheese are Right Out for me because all I wind up tasting is the stink. But this wasn’t a strong-smelling cheese, and it still bowled me over with that unpleasant funk two seconds after I bit down. So I’m kind of curious what’s going on there, chemically speaking, and whether the experience is just qualitatively different for people who like the stuff.

It’s the return of the Tin Chef!

As some of you know, I’ve finally started actually cooking, after thirty-some-odd-years of basically never doing it. I now have a nice array of recipes I like and can do, and enough confidence now that I’ll happily browse a magazine or cookbook and go “oooh, that sounds tasty, maybe I should try it,” as long as the recipe isn’t too daunting.

But almost everything I make is a single-dish meal, or if it isn’t, then we just throw some spinach on the plate as a salad. I’m still not much good at making a main dish and a side dish to go with it. Partly because that type of multitasking is still a little difficult for me — making sure things are ready around the same time, but don’t demand my attention at the same instant such that something winds up burning — but also just because . . . I have a hard time judging what things will go well together.

I know that to some extent the answers to this are a) it doesn’t matter that much and b) I can experiment and see what works and what doesn’t. But I’ve got a whole list of side dishes I’d like to try someday, and every time I look at them and go “I dunno, would that pair well with this main item?” I wind up going back to the single-dish things I’m comfortable with. So I put it to you, the cooks of my readership: how can I get better at this? I have two different “meat with balsamic + fruit sauce” main dishes I like — one chicken with balsamic vinegar and pomegranate juice, one pork chop with balsamic vinegar and dried cherries — and the fruitiness keeps making me second-guess whether a given side dish would make a good complement. And there are a lot of main dishes I haven’t even really taken a crack at yet. If I had some guiding principles for figuring out what combinations are good, I might experiment more.

Mirrored from Swan Tower.

I've always liked the "point and click adventure" style of video game. You know, the kind of thing Sierra was known for, back in the heyday of this genre: games where you wandered around talking to people and clicking on everything that was clickable to add it to your inventory, and then when you got to a challenge sticking your inventory items on it (or on each other, to make a new inventory item) until you figured out how to solve the problem. Many of these games were low-stakes, in that you could only die at a few specific points, and their overall focus was on story.

Does anybody have recmmendations for more games of that type? Either classics that are available on Steam or GOG, or newer games made in that mold. I'm a huge fan of the Gabriel Knight series, and I've also played various King's Quest and Monkey Island games; I recently finished the more recent Blackwell series, and have also played Gray Matter, by the creator of the GK games. I like 'em because they don't take too long to play and they don't make me worry my character is going to die, and it would be nice to have some more to entertain myself with in my spare time. Fantasy genre preferred, but feel free to recommend whatever.

If your initials are A.L. and you contacted me about card naming, try again? The email address you gave is bouncing when I try to respond.

Mirrored from Swan Tower.

I have a favor to ask!

For Sekrit Projekt R&R, Alyc and I have some divinatory cards we need to name. The catch is that we want their names to more on the metaphorical side, rather than directly literal, and neither of us is exceptionally good at thinking in those terms. Example: one of the cards represents travel and journeys. The obvious thing would be some kind of name involving roads or paths or whatever. But our placeholder name for it was “Horizon,” and now it’s “Dawn and Dusk,” because the city where the story takes place sits in the middle of a major trade network that extends east and west. That’s one we’re very pleased with . . . but we need a bunch more.

If you would be willing to help brainstorm card names, drop me a line. We’re especially interested in suggestions from people with a poetical bent, or people with a visual bent who might think in terms of what the image on the card would be, and then come up with a name to describe that image. I’ll send you a rundown of what the cards are that need naming, and also a little information about the setting to riff off in terms of knowing what details might be appropriate. There are thirty-four that need names; you’re welcome to suggest more than one for any given card, and you don’t need to suggest things for all of them if you don’t have ideas that seem fitting.

We’d like all suggestions to be in by the end of the month.

So if that’s something you can help out with, let me know. We’d be very grateful for the assistance!

Mirrored from Swan Tower.

It feels to me like every time I read about the evolution of a language over time, the general pattern is one of it becoming grammatically simpler. They go from having lots of cases to fewer or none at all, shed moods or aspects or dual forms, even (on the phonological rather than grammatical end) give up on more difficult to pronounce sounds in favor of easier ones.

Which leaves me wondering: when and how do the complicated features develop in the first place? Are there particular conditions (e.g. isolation) under which a language is likely to make itself into a more elaborate system?

Or is this just sample bias, and the pattern I think I've been seeing isn't really a pattern at all?

I'm very hit or miss when it comes to liking poetry, and I most frequently miss with free verse, because part of what draws me to poetry is the rhythmic effect of meter. But I've taken to copying out poems I like in a small notebook, and a couple of the recent ones have been free verse -- and in writing them down (which forces me to pay finer-grained attention to the arrangement of the words), I found myself reflecting on one of the things I find most puzzling about the style:

How do the poets decide where to break their lines?

In a poem with meter, the answer to that question is set for you, and the challenge is to figure out how much of your idea you're going to put into a given line and how you'll make it fit. But with that element gone, you can end your line anywhere you choose. Sometimes I can see why the choice was made in a certain way; for example, two lines might be structured so that they echo one another, and the positioning of the break draws your attention to the similarity. But other times, it seems to be completely arbitrary.

And yet I'm sure there's an aesthetic principle, or more than one, guiding the decision. So my question for the poets among you is: what are those principles? If you were critiquing a poem, what would make you say "it would be better if you moved this word down to the next line/joined these two lines together/broke this one apart"? What are you looking at, or for, when you give someone feedback like that, or choose the placement of the breaks in your own work?

I feel like, if I understood this, I might enjoy free verse more. Because things that register on me as arbitrary are rarely impressive, so seeing through to the underlying reason might increase my appreciation.

My husband, to me: "You probably want to see this." <sets his laptop down in front of me>

Me: <reads the best tumblr conversation I've seen possibly ever in my life>

Seriously -- “Can I use my pet dragon to light candles on Shabbat?” is an actual debate religious leaders would have to have in Isabella's world. Because they have dragons, and a sizable percentage of Anthiope is Segulist (i.e. Jewish), so that scenario is a thing that could actually happen. Probably has. And now I'm regretting that I'm not conversant enough with Judaism to write a short story that is entirely about Segulist magisters arguing over something like using a pet dragon to light a candle on I don't think I ever came up with a replacement term for Shabbat (it would run from sunset on Eromer to sunset on Cromer, i.e. Friday-Saturday, but there ought to be another word for it). I had enough trouble writing "The Gospel of Nachash"; this would be harder, especially since I don't think I can ethically yoink the things people said in that Tumblr thread for my own commercial purposes, and figuring out how to turn it all into a workable story would require me to go beyond what's there into the wilds of stuff I don't even know enough about to ask the right questions.

<wanders away from half-finished blog post for a while, thinking>

<comes back>

Okay, screw it. We're doing this thing.

And I do mean "we," because I am actively soliciting ideas from people who know Judaism better than I do, that you're willing to let me use to write a Lady Trent story about religious debates concerning the proper role of dragons in pious Segulist life. I have no idea what form this is going to take; right now in my head it reads like a "Dear Abby" column, with some magister who is here for all your dragon-related religious queries, but it would be hard to give that enough shape to pass for a short story rather than just a novelty piece. Really, I can't plan the story itself until I know what material it's going to be built around, because that will probably suggest to me a context for why and how and of whom the questions are being asked.

So toss me some suggestions, people. Other than using a dragon to light a candle on Shabbat (probably a sparkling or a Puian fire-lizard; I don't recommend desert drakes for the purpose), what other questions might come up? I know enough about kosher laws to be pretty sure dragon meat does not qualify, assuming you would even want to eat it, which you probably would not. After that, I don't know what would be interesting to consider. Any thoughts?

Okay, here's a random one for y'all.

I'm trying to name something for a story. It needs to be named with an English word, and for reasons of rhythm, that word has to be two syllables, with the accent on the first syllable. The thing in question is mystical, but don't feel obliged to go for obviously mystical-sounding words; in fact, it's probably better if I stay away from that (so no "shadow" or "dragon" or what have you). But it should be something that sounds cool -- no "sofa" or "laundry" here. :-P

Bonus points if it has the same form as both a noun and a verb, but that's icing on the cake.

Suggestions?

I seem to remember, back in high school, translating a poem by Horace where the first word (?) of the poem was a verb . . . but the subject of that verb was buried down in the second stanza. I don’t recall anything about its subject matter; it only stuck with me because it was the most egregious example I had personally encountered of how Latin can make an utter jigsaw of its word order.

But that poem doesn’t appear to be in our little booklet of Catullus and Horace, which means it was one of the ones the teacher gave us in a handout. And although I thought I still had those handouts, I can’t find them. So I turn to you, o Latinists of the internet: does this ring a bell? Can anybody point me at the poem in question?

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

This started out as a joke yesterday, but then I figured — why not?

SO! I am offering a signed book from my stash of author copies for someone who can provide me with a quick cartoon-style/chibi/super-deformed sketch of this man:

standing on a pressure plate and looking extremely grumpy, while this woman:

armed and armored like a D&D rogue, skips around sticking pink companion cube hearts on him:

. . . because yeah, last game session my PC left the Blackjack standing on a pressure plate in a hallway to disarm a trap while she went inside to plant a magical surveillance device. Which led to jokes that he was her companion cube, a la Portal. And then my sister said she would totally draw this cartoon if she could draw, except she can’t, and neither can I, but maybe one of you can! There’s a signed book in it for you if you do. 😀

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

My beloved Timbuk2 messenger bag is kind of dying. The bag itself is still pretty solid, but the waterproof lining on the cover has at this point cracked in enough places that just sticking electrical tape over the splits is no longer going to cut it.

The problem is, Timbuk2 doesn’t seem to make this bag anymore. It’s their convertible messenger bag/backpack — I don’t remember the product name anymore, but I don’t see anything like that on their site. (If I’m just overlooking it, do point me in the right direction!) Who else makes a good, solid product in that vein? My three requirements are 1) waterproof, 2) with a protected laptop compartment, and 3) convertible.

Mind you, there is an argument to be made that I’m better off with an actual backpack and an actual messenger bag as separate things, because this was never ideal as a backpack. But it was dead useful when I did my research trips for the Onyx Court books, because I could put it on my back while hiking ten or fifteen miles around London, and then switch it to a messenger bag to look more professional when I met with people. I’m not doing that type of trip these days, so the need is less pressing than it used to be. But still, I’ve gotten used to it, and don’t want to give up without at least a bit of a fight.

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

I’m trying to pick a song to serve as the “soundtrack” to a certain aspect of one of the games I’m in, and I’m coming up empty. So I turn to you, o internets, for recommendations!

The thing I’m trying to set to music is a situation where two character who both have a crap-ton of secrets (including false identities) are going through kind of a fencing match/cat-and-mouse game of figuring each other out and maybe developing something resembling trust. In a perfect world, the song for this would be a male/female duet, but that’s icing on the cake if I can get it; mostly I just need a song that fits the concept. Or, if I can’t get suitable lyrics, something instrumental that is both lush and a little playful. (With a library of over 17000 songs, you’d think I would be able to find something that fits. But nothing has clicked: the closest I’ve come is “Qué Viyéra,” which still isn’t quite right.)

Any suggestions?

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

Crossposts: http://swan-tower.livejournal.com/803535.html

I have a tradition of keeping one copy of every version of my books: paperback, hardcover, audio, translation, etc. And that includes ARCs . . . but I never got one of Cold-Forged Flame (an oversight on my part). If you happen to have one of those lying around that you’d be willing to sell me, please let me know! My collection is incomplete. 🙂

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

Crossposts: http://swan-tower.livejournal.com/794943.html

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Swan Tower

Entries tagged with help me o internets

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Nature details: how do???

Songs in 5

And now for something completely different

Things they never teach you

Scholarship in antiquity

Substitute for fennel bulb?

Goat cheese

Mains and sides

Point and Click Adventure Games

Confidential to A.L.

Calling all poetical/artistical types

A question for the linguists

A question for the poets: line breaks

“Can one use a dragon to light a candle on Shabbat” and other important questions

I need a cool two-syllable word

calling all Latinists

Bounty Offered: Book for Cartoon

messenger bag/backpack recs?

Help me find a song?

Anybody have an old ARC of COLD-FORGED FLAME?

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