gothicsparrow

Congratulations to the Nebula Award winners!

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I’ve posted the first chapter of Libriomancer [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] on my website here as a .pdf file. I’m hoping to get an .epub file up as well, but one step at a time.

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The Hugo Voter Packet is up. Attending and supporting Worldcon members can now download a whole bunch of cool stuff from the Hugo nominees, including books, stories, artwork, and more. My thanks to the Worldcon volunteers for putting this all together.

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My guest article at Booklifenow went up late last week: Do I Have to Have a Facetwiblogger+ Page?

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Metalbending is awesome. (This observation inspired by the Legend of Korra episode And the Winner Is…) I never saw the original Avatar show. I think I need to remedy this.

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

Mirrored from MCAH Online.

Originally published at tansyrr.com. You can comment here or there.

No one has been waiting for these books as long as I have! Well, except maybe Rowena herself… I can’t wait to see what she’s done with them.

Originally published at tansyrr.com. You can comment here or there.

The weekend was a blur, roadrunner style. Thank goodness I was caught up with my wordcount so I wasn’t actually trying to write at the same time as juggling the two daughters and their need for snuggles, soccer parenting, the birthday card factory line, actual birthday party attendance involving two year old’s first dip in a pool (only mildly traumatic), the desperate need to catch up on Futurama movies as a family unit, the weekly grocery shop, picking up daughter after Polish dancing and, oh yes, a migraine.

Whereas what I actually wanted to do all weekend was to lie on the library bed and read my new Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story book constantly. And/or listen to the novelisation of the Dalek Masterplan which I got out from the library in a flurry of Jean Marsh & Peter Purves adoration (their recent audio play The Anachronauts totally did for me, and Jean Marsh’s brilliant audio rendition of the original Upstairs Downstairs novel complete with grumpy Scottish butler impersonation DID NOT HELP).

May is disappearing at a frantic rate. People keep asking what I want for my birthday. More time please, instead of it ribboning out of my fingers and disappearing into the sunset.

June is upon us, and with it comes not only the school holidays (which I rather look forward to these days – my elder daughter is old enough that having her home is marginally more compatible with me getting some writing done than is having to juggle her school & activity routine) but also Continuum travel, and one of my twice-yearly bouts of actual outside-the-house work.

So… the novel writing is likely to slow in the first half of June, which is frustrating as I’m currently on something of a roll. Luckily I have signed up for the Clarion Write-a-thon (proper link to my page here – I think it wasn’t set up yet last time I linked) to get me back on track.

This year’s goal is simply to produce more stuff. Stories, books whatever. Words, Tansy, words!

In passing:

• I have submitted my Ten Markers, Ten Days sketch project to Kickstarter, which you can see in preview here. But it’s just what it sounds like: ten days to raise the money to do at least ten sketches (and more, if we go over the goal).

• Last week was the first week since I started offering multiple Black Blossom episodes that we didn’t get any! We got pretty close to the donation cap but never quite over it. Maybe next week, then.

• I am currently kicking around plans for the One Card Draw Kickstarter. Since I don’t want to run into the “self-help” issue that got the art business book project rejected, I think I might reframe it as a “get a One Card Draw painting” project, and have the card draw just be an incidental effect of backers deciding to get card paintings. That should solve that issue.

• The new art archive look is in place! Thank you, Tabard and Engineer Sam, for your hard work. I think it looks swanky! I hope you all agree.

Mirrored from MCAH Online.

1. How many servants & other civilian staff, and of what sort, would a top-ranking general of high noble status have with him while on campaign? (I'm thinking someone like Turenne, Condé or Luxembourg). I know that Condé for one never seems to have gone anywhere with less than two secretaries, and in the 1690s the teenage Duc de St. Simon, as a volunteer & very junior officer, had at least 5 grooms & 2 "gentleman servants" in attendance. 
2. Where would these servants & civilian staff be housed, while the army is encamped? I assume that given the opportunity the general would have commandeered the biggest house in the vicinity for his headquarters, but that doesn't work so well while you're on the march or laying siege to some town. Most of the descriptions of camp life I've seen date from the 18c, by which time there were a lot fewer servants traveling with the army, and a lot more separation in ordinary life between masters & servants, so I don't really want to extrapolate too much from them.
3. What were officers' tents like? Would all officers be expected to camp in the same place as their men, or did they congregate separately? How big would a general's tent be? How many tents might he have, & how arranged? (George Washington had 3 - one for sleeping, one for dining, and one for his baggage. But again, it's hard to extrapolate from Washington to a Condé or Turenne.)
4. Who was the general supposed to feed every night? i.e. Besides himself & his servants & staff, who would be expected to dine at his table on a routine basis? When officers were not invited to dinner with their commander, what were their normal meal arrangements?
5. What did the commanders eat? What did their senior/junior officers eat? Was their bread issued every 4 days like the troopers' ration, or did they get their bread fresh?
6. Were the horses that hauled the artillery & the baggage kept in the same place as the cavalry mounts, or separately?    How far from the troops would they typically have been? How about the grooms, the smiths, etc. who tended the horses? Were any of these ever mingled with the teams & personnel of the (civilian contractor) supply convoys?

It’s my habit to drop my own work onto my kindle so that I can refer to it at my leisure, and the last time I did an upload I also put up some drafts. Just in case, you know, this might ignite a spark to continue working on them. I forgot all about this until recently, when I was having a cup of coffee and decided to check my “My Stuff” folder. My heart leapt at the sight of some of the titles…

…for all of four or five seconds, which is how long it took me to realize that I hadn’t actually finished any of them.

In a fit of pique I brought out the sketchbook and started drawing, and thus was born the “Books I Wish Were Finished” sketch series.

I am half-tempted to finish these.

They’d probably get done before the books. -_-

Books I Wish Were Finished Already #1: The Tsipia Translator Novel

Books I Wish Were Finished Already #2: The Faerie Farmer Novel

Books I Wish Were Finished Already #3: The College Novel

Books I Wish Were Finished Already #4: the Sequel to Shell

Books I Wish Were Finished Already #5: the Isla

Mirrored from MCAH Online.

I remember vividly reading Anne McCaffrey for the first time. I was twelve years old, sitting in the glassed-in patio in our New Orleans house, with the bright syrupy sunlight of summer lying like a blanket on the patio furniture beside me. In my lap, I had an enormous copy of the New American Dictionary, a tome that dwarfed my legs. I kept it open and set the novel on top of it, and read it with an uncapped red pen in my hand. To my right I had an open spiral notebook.

Every few words, I would stop, painstakingly underline an unfamiliar word, leaf through the dictionary, read the definition and then copy it into my notebook. And then… I would resume reading from the beginning of the sentence with new understanding of the phrase but a rather interrupted sense of the narrative.

And I did that… for the entire book. It was full of red ink. But it was the only way to get through it, because it was so full of big words that twelve-year-old me knew she wouldn’t even grasp the story unless she did the work.

My kindle would have delighted young jaguar. Instead of having to go through all that trouble, she could have just highlighted the word with a pointer or finger and… pop! There’s the definition. And she could have merrily gone on reading with a lot less interruption; no hunting in a giant book, no copying so she could find it again faster, no uncomfortable weight on her lap.

As an older reader, when I ran into a word I didn’t know, most of the time I just skipped it and got what I could out of context before moving on. I didn’t (and still don’t) have Young Me’s tolerance for interruption. But since getting my kindle, I use the dictionary look-up feature constantly. Why be confused or have to make do with context? I think. I use it even on words I vaguely know, or think I know but want a refresher on. It’s fabulous. I love the look-up feature. I love it so much, apparently, that I take the habit with me off my e-book reader. I was reading a paper library book not long ago and ran into an unfamiliar word, and I touched it in full expectation of enlightenment.

Seriously. Not as a joke. It had become a reflex. “In response to confusion, touch for more information.” When nothing happened, my reaction was to be startled: the expected response had not happend! And then I was chagrined, and I kept reading, and caught myself starting to do it a couple more times.

(I did not go look up those words later, I’m sorry to say.)

A few days ago, my kindle spontaneously loaded a software update. Imagine my reaction to discover that when I highlight a word now, I can look it up… on Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s reliability is always an issue, of course. But now I think of all the historical personages referred to in the historical fantasies I’ve been reading, or the Sherlock Holmes mysteries that refer to traditions, current events, and locations I know nothing about, and have a moment of glee. At last! Context!

But still, that was not the coolest thing I got with that software update. That one I found when I ran into a foreign word I was fairly sure was Spanish but had such a weird verb ending that I thought it might be Italian. I highlighted it with a ‘why not’ feeling, checked ‘more’ and found a ‘translation’ function. When I chose it, it itself detected the language and then furnished the translation…!

This is Spanish. It is this verb case. It means ‘differentiate.’

…

This was so cool I just started loading random books with foreign words in it and translating them.

I recently read the unabridged Les Miserables, and I feel like between the (then) contemporary cultural references and the untranslated French, I understood maybe 65% of it… if I’m being generous. To think of what a different experience it would be to read it now…!

When I first bought an e-book reader, I thought of it as a handy replacement for books. Lighter, easier to store, more convenient. Now I think of all the ways it makes my reading experience more fulfilling, and I know I could never go back.

Now if I could just get them to let me bundle an author-specific dictionary with an e-book, so that people could touch an alien word and get the right definition… *rubs hands together*

Mirrored from MCAH Online.

Done, appropriately, in dim lighting, and photographed in the dark.

Mirrored from MCAH Online.