Swan Tower

I don't suppose anybody can tell me the location of the party on the fifth of June, 1833, at which Ada Byron first met Charles Babbage? Passages doesn't say, nor does The Enchantress of Numbers, but I'd like to know so I can properly set this scene. I know Babbage invited her to see the Difference Engine a few weeks later, and that was at his house, but I doubt that's where they met.

Edit: Looks like it was at Mary Somerville's house in Chelsea -- but if anybody can tell me where in Chelsea, that would be fantastic.

The revised draft of The Tropic of Serpents is off to my editor. Now, I just want to fall over . . . but no, I should try to ride that wave of inspiration that was attempting to distract me from the work I needed to be doing. In other words, I should work on a short story.

The candidates which have recently been trying to distract me are, in no particular order:

• "To Rise No More" -- the Ada Lovelace Onyx Court story, explaining why she was involved in the creation of the Ephemeral Engine. (Status: started.)
  
• the sequel to "Love, Cayce," provisionally titled "Advice to a Young Lady on Her Way to Hell." (Status: a paragraph or so.)
  
• "The Unquiet Grave," based on the folksong of the same name. Do I have any idea what I'm doing with this story? No. But I keep getting the song stuck in my head, and it makes me want to write something. (Status: nothing.)
  
• Edward Thorne's Onyx Court story, about how he came to be a valet to faeries . . . aka "the Peregrin/Segrain Buddy Cop Tale." (Status: not even a title.)
  
• "This Living Hand," which is the Onyx Court Romantic poets story, except I'd have to do a lot of research for that one. (Status: a title, but nto much more.)
  
• "An Enquiry Into the Causes," ditto, except I'd have to research the Bow Street Runners. (Status: I know who I want to have show up in it?)
  
• Another Xochitlicacan story, a la "A Mask of Flesh," with a jaguar-woman and a temple that hasn't been decommissioned properly. (Status: uh, nothing.)
  
• "A River Flowing Nowhere," which is a new Driftwood story. (Status: vague plot outline.)
  
• A modern sort of punk-ish Tam Lin retelling. (Status: a paragraph or so.)
  
• alecaustin, I haven't forgotten that I owe you a story about the sacking of Enryaku-ji. (Status: I need to get that biography of Nobunaga out of the library again.)
  

. . . yeah, my brain wanted to do anything other than revise. I can't do a poll in DW, since I'm not a paid user, but tell me in the comments which one you most want to see!

mrissa has posted her Minicon schedule, with a panel on which comes first: the story or the setting. To quote the description,

Which Came First

The chicken or the egg? The story or the world? Does the story you want to tell determine the setting, or does your chosen setting demand a certain kind of story to be told in it? Are there some types of stories that simply cannot be told in a particular setting? How do creators balance these seemingly opposing forces in imagining their tales?

Which has gotten me reflecting on that question and how I would answer it. Off the cuff, I thought I probably start more with the setting -- hi, anthropology, yeah. But does that hold up when I actually look at the data?

(For simplicity's sake, I'm going to keep this to novels, but I will include unpublished novels in the list. It's probably a different ballgame if I look at short stories; that, however, would require more time than I want to devote to this right now, and a refresher course as to what the heck I've written.)

( Cut for length; I have more novels than you guys know about. )

Final tally: seven for setting, seven-ish for story, two for character, and three that don't classify easily (two that were both setting and story as a package, and one that was a thematic argument). It's noteworthy that four of the seven counted as story-first are later books in a series. In one sense you would think sequels would be setting first, since the milieu is already fixed; but I'd argue they're more likely to be story first, since the books I counted that way are born not from their world, but from me having another plot I wanted to explore. For contrast, I can offer up one I forgot to include in the list, namely the second of Isabella's memoirs: that one came about via "okay, now I want her to go to a West African kind of place," with the plot built around it. It's a distinctly different trajectory for me than when the setting is just lying there, and I think up a plot.

Unsurprisingly, the prime failure mode for my projects appears to be when there's a big lag time between those two components -- one shows up without the other close behind. The end-of-the-world thing has a plot, but only vague sketches of a setting; ditto the epic fantasy one. The dream piece and the pirate one have cool settings, but I'm not quite sure where the story is going. All of those have been sitting around for years, going nowhere. Of the other unfinished projects -- the lady knights and the Japanese one -- both of those are just waiting for their moment, i.e. me to get a contract. I could write either in a heartbeat.

As for the novels that got written, but not well, I don't think there's a clear pattern, except that their disparate elements never came together like they should. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with their starting points.

<looks at the last two questions in the panel description> Nah, not gonna touch those. The answer to the first is "yes," and the latter presupposes one agrees that setting and story are "opposing forces." Ah, panel blurbs -- you say the silliest things, even for good topics.

I'm going to take care of two problems here today:

1) I would like to raise funds for the American Red Cross in the wake of Hurricane Sandy,

2) I have way too many author copies around the house, that I'd like to get rid of.

So we're having a book sale here at Swan Tower. Comment on this post, or e-mail me at marie{dot}brennan{at}gmail{dot}com, and I will sell you the following books at the following prices, including autographs and (if you request it) personalization to you or another person of your choice.

Note that the prices are a bit higher than they might otherwise be, to ensure that packaging and shipping doesn't take too big a bite out of the Red Cross donation total. (I will send books overseas, too, but since this is for charity, I will probably ask you to kick in a few bucks extra to cover the increased cost of shipping.)

$10

• A Star Shall Fall, mass market paperback (17 copies, was 19)
  
• Warrior, mass market paperback (2 copies)
  
• Witch, mass market paperback (1 copy)
  

$15

• A Natural History of Dragons, unrevised Advance Bound Manuscript (1 copy)
  
• A Star Shall Fall, Advance Uncorrected Proof (1 copy)
  
• With Fate Conspire, Advance Uncorrected Proof (3 copies, was 4)
  
• Hexenkrieger (German translation of Witch) (1 copy)
  

$20

• In Ashes Lie, UK trade paperback (1 copy, was 2)
  
• A Star Shall Fall, trade paperback (1 copy)
  

$25

• A Star Shall Fall, Science Fiction Book Club hardcover (1 copy)
  
• With Fate Conspire, Science Fiction Book Club hardcover (3 copies)
  
• With Fate Conspire, regular hardcover (10 copies, was 12)
  
• Doppelgänger und Hexenkrieger (German omnibus of Warrior and Witch) (2 copies, was 4)
  

Please spread the word wherever you think people would be interested. I'll try to keep this list updated in a timely manner, so that you'll know how many books are left of each type. ETA: Total raised thus far = $245

The sale will run for one week (so, through next Thursday morning, the 8th of November).

1) I should have written Irrith's letter after Delphia's. She's a terrible influence on my attempts at nice handwriting. :-)

2) Re-reading bits of the books to get myself back in the heads of the characters . . . and you know what? I still like them. Quite a lot.

3) Certain songs from the book soundtracks still get me right in the gut. (Particularly "The Monument," from A Star Shall Fall. But others, too.)

4) I really, really need to write that short story about Edward Thorne. Though I should decide which I want more: for it to be from his point of view, or for it to be the Sir Peregrin and Dame Segraine Buddy-Cop Extravaganza. (The two are, alas, mutually exclusive.)

5) Ditto "This Living Hand," aka the Story About the Willow Tree What Killed All the Romantic Poets.

6) Although I do love my new series, and my new protagonist . . . I miss the Onyx Court.

One week (plus a leap day) left to get a letter from the Onyx Court! (I'm slightly behind on answering a few letters I've received, but vow not to let "slightly" become "a lot.")

A while ago I mentioned the Spencerian System of Practical Penmanship, which kniedzw had bought a while ago -- a reproduction of an 1864 course in penmanship. I struggled with the conflicting impulses to doooooo iiiiiiiit and to run far, far away, and ended up falling partial victim to the former. Being a grown adult with fine motor control and experience in writing, I decided I didn't need to fill out every workbook in its entirety . . . but it wouldn't hurt me to do the first line of each page.

(This was mostly true. Hand cramps were, however, a genuine factor.)

So if you would like to follow me on my odyssey through the nineteenth century -- including many illustrative photos -- come behind the cut . . . .

( In which the system is both too fascist, and not fascist enough. )

. . . and if you get an Onyx Court letter with some really awkward-looking capitals, you'll know to blame P.R. Spencer. :-)

So I wrote the first Onyx Court letter tonight, and after abandoning one slightly messy-looking attempt two sentences in, succeeded at producing fair copy.

Then I folded it up, got out the sealing wax stick -- which has a wick, like a miniature candle designed to drip copious wax -- and nearly lit the damn letter on fire.

Need to experiment and figure out if it's wick length or what that caused burning bits to drip off it along with the wax. Or, y'know, give up on the sealing wax thing. But I have this stuff, and never use it! This seems like the perfect excuse! I just didn't consider this as one of the possible hazards when I set out to write these letters.

Trotting out the old Elizabeth icon for the occasion:



I had the wrong setting on my camera, so it's unfortunately blurry, but you get the idea. I am so. doomed. I haven't tried to write in cursive, except for that thing I laughably call my signature, for years.

Admittedly, my writing got better when I realized that a tiny notebook is a very bad choice for hand support and such. Practicing on better surfaces, and relaxing into it a bit, the result looks less awkward. Of course, if I relax into it, I'm prone to turning my n's into m's and my m's into some alien thing with far too many little humps . . . which is only the most common of my errors. There are others, too. The letters I send may have more than a few things crossed out and corrected. (Which is part of the whole handwritten letter thing, right? Not everybody bothered to send perfect copy. I guess it all depends on which character I'm writing as. Dead Rick probably doesn't worry much about errors. Delphia, however . . . .)

I'm tempted to follow in the shoes of Mary Robinette Kowal and participate in the Month of Letters . . . or rather, have my characters participate.

But I don't want to advertise my home address to all the world, so I'd need to get a P.O. box. And that means I need to take the temperature of the Internet first, to see if there's any interest. Would you like to receive a letter from the Onyx Court? If so, drop a comment here, on Twitter (@swan_tower), or via e-mail (marie[dot]brennan[at]gmail[dot]com) to let me know.

I figure all characters from that series (including the short fiction) are fair game, though be warned that some are better correspondents than others. :-) If I do this, I'll probably ask that you put a date on your own letter, so that I'll know when the character should be responding; after all, Lune would write a very different response in 1588 than she would in 1757. (Mortal characters contacted before their births or after their deaths are not likely to respond at all.)

I even, like Mary, have quill pens with which to respond -- though it may become a tossup between authenticity of writing implement and legibility of the handwriting . . . .

Normally I'm not a big fan of AU crack, which is to say, fanfics where the author has thrown in something totally random ("what if Frodo and Sam became pirates?") that really doesn't relate to the original source.

There are exceptions.

This is one of them.

It's a fic for the new BBC series Sherlock, the one that updates the characters to the modern day. You don't have to have seen the series, I think, to enjoy the story. But if you've read the Onyx Court books . . . yeah. Especially With Fate Conspire. It's so much of what I think about London, in terms of its history and the relationship between a city and its people, with lots of little details that ring such familiar bells for me. gollumgollum pointed me at it, and I'm so glad she did.

Go. Read. Enjoy.