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Angela Korra'ti

Valor of the Healer

Hiatus report

Here I am on Saturday, so I thought I’d go ahead and tell y’all about what progress I’ve made on Lament of the Dove. Short form–not as much as I would have liked. Chances are high I’m not going to be finished by tomorrow.

But, and this is the important thing: I’m really happy with what I’ve achieved. I made it into Chapter 20, only to discover that I had to rewrite pretty much 2/3rds of the entire chapter in order to accomplish one of the last remaining changes on the Carina editor’s request list: i.e., giving Faanshi a better path of development, and demonstrating to the reader that she begins to progress in getting a handle on her power.

For the last few days I’ve therefore been inching my way through rewriting Chapter 20. I’ve made substantial progress on it, and I think the result’s going to be a much more dynamic chapter overall. It’s not only aiming for the Faanshi goal I mentioned, but also to raise the stakes on her link with Kestar, as I’m trying to demonstrate that yes, it is an active danger to both of them.

This means I’m likely going to have to rewrite some of Chapter 21 as well, since that’s the next Kestar chapter, and he’ll have to react to some of this new stuff I’m writing in Chapter 20. We’ll see how far I get by tomorrow night, and if I can keep up the momentum over the next couple of weeks. I still want to get Lament squared away soon, ideally with enough time to let beta readers look over this hopefully final draft before userinfosolarbird and I take off for VCON at the end of the month.

Wish me luck, all!

September 10, 2011 by
Other People's Books

Sometimes, bigotry doesn’t pay

I know, I know, I’m supposed to be rigged for silent running this week. I’m waking up again to post this, because it’s important.

As y’all know I’m a member of the Outer Alliance, and the word broke today over the OA’s mailing list about a particularly noxious little adaptation of nothing less than Hamlet, by Orson Scott Card. Those of you who’ve been following this issue already, or who already know about Card’s rampant homophobia, you know where I’m going with this.

According to this review, his big shocking change to the story is that Hamlet’s father was not only gay, he was also a child molester. That he molested Horatio and Laertes and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, thereby turning all of them gay. And, as a cherry on top of the bigotry sundae, Hamlet’s dad’s ghost is looking forward to his “beautiful son” joining him in Hell.

Folks, I’m not inherently opposed to adaptations of the classics. Modern popular culture is full of excellent adaptations of many of Shakespeare’s works, and SF/F certainly has its share of them. But I’m opposed to them when they go out of their way to perpetuate lethal stereotypes about queer people. And even aside from that, if the reviewer’s description of the prose tasting like “saltines without salt” is any sign, this particular adaptation is wretched even aside from its being a hatefest.

Another member of the OA mailing list has, however, pointed out a gem of hope and light here: i.e., that the small print run of this novella has not in fact sold out, indicating that not too many have elected to throw their money at it. Ditto for how the previous Tor release in which Card’s work appeared isn’t selling too well either on Amazon.

So to all of you who never knew about this work, I’m a bit sorry to have brought it to your attention, and can only hope you will continue to not only not buy it, but will specifically not buy it because bigotry is not okay. To those of you who already knew about it and elected not to buy it on that basis, I thank you.

To counter its existence, I’d like to commend to your attention the Lethe Press anthology Time Well Bent, in which userinfocatherineldf has a story in which Shakespeare isn’t queer, but his sister Judith is–and so is his friend Kit Marlowe. Hayden Thorne has Arabesque, a dark m/m adaptation of Snow White. And I’ve mentioned this one already, but it’s worth mentioning again in a post whose theme is “adaptations of classic stories”: i.e., Ash by Malinda Lo.

And now I’m going back on silent running, because I need to finish my edits. But while I’m gone, I invite y’all to share with me in the comments any queer-positive adaptations of classic stories, of any genre!

September 6, 2011 by
Valor of the Healer

One last thing before I rig for silent running

I will need beta readers for this hopefully last draft before I fling it back to Carina. The plan will be to finish the six chapters left that I need to do, let it simmer for a couple of weeks (and be beta read, ideally), then make one more read-through myself before I send it off.

Which means, assuming that I finish the edits in the next few days, I’m going to need people who think they can commit to reading the manuscript some time in the next two weeks.

If you’ve already read Lament before and are up for taking another crack at it, what I would need from you is to sanity check the changes I’ve made in response to the letter I had from Carina, and make sure the story still holds together.

If you haven’t read Lament before, pretty much the same–just read through the book like you would any other book, and tell me if you think it holds together well.

I would not, repeat, NOT require an in-depth proofread. I’ve already edited the hell out of this text, mostly to whittle down my propensity for verbosity, and I’m to the point of not wanting to whittle it any further because just about every word left in here is a word I very specifically want there. However, any glaringly obvious typos, missing words, or words I clearly should have used in place of words that are actually there should definitely be pointed out.

Most of all though I would need a commitment to step up and do this in the rough two weeks or so after I finish the edit pass. I really want to get this done and dealt with, and once the edits are finished, I don’t want to let the manuscript sit too long before I send it back to Carina. I’ve screwed around long enough. I want this done.

So! Four of you have already expressed interest (many thanks to userinfotechnoshaman, userinfogerimaple, Heidi, and Annie), but if anybody else out there wants in, let me know. The best way to do that will be to fling me an email (my gmail address of annathepiper will be fine) and let me know what email address I can reach you at, for purposes of sending you a manuscript.

And watch this space for when I announce being done.

Off to edit, people! Kestar, Julian, Faanshi? Let’s do this thing.

September 2, 2011 by
Valor of the Healer

Six chapters left

Tonight, hoping to get a head start on the Great Editpalooza next week, I did some poking at the rest of Chapter 18 of Lament of the Dove. I am pleased to report that I have actually finished the edits on that chapter, as of this post!

This means I have six, count ’em, six chapters left to do and a nine-day vacation to do them in. I can do this thing. I WILL do this thing. And if I finish before the nine days are up, I’ll shift immediate gears into resuming throwing words at Bone Walker or whatever else will take them; the Internet hiatus will still be in effect.

So get your Anna in while supplies last, people! I will not be monitoring any of the social networks at all next week, and I cannot guarantee I’ll pay attention to journal or blog comments either. I will however keep an eye on regular email.

And for the curious, Lament is currently clocking in around 107K, which is about 3,500 words added back in as of this draft–most of which have come in with the entirely new scene I’ve written to replace the beginning of Chapter 18. This is still well within the range of word count limits Carina Press’s editor asked for. It’ll be interesting to see if any further substantial word count changes occur.

Wish me luck, folks.

September 1, 2011 by
Books

Haven’t done one of these in a bit

And since I’m going on Internet Furlough next week, here, have a massive book roundup post!

Picked up from Alert Nerd:

  • One Con Glory, by Sarah Kuhn. Checked this out from the library, after hearing it raved about on Smart Bitches, and liked it quite a bit. So I bought the PDF version of it. Very quick read, very geek-friendly short romance. Recommended!

Picked up from Carina Press, electronically:

  • Lure of the Mummy, by Janis Susan May. This is Carina’s first horror release, and I grabbed it partly on those grounds–just to support Carina’s releasing of non-romance-related genres. But also, the protagonist is described as ‘pudgy, balding, and awkward’, and I felt I wanted to support a story with a non-pretty protagonist on general principle.
  • A Line in the Ice, by Jamie Craig. An SF Carina release, likely to be sci-fi-romance based on the description, but I’m okay with that!
  • Last Car to Annwn Station, by Michael Merriam. Urban fantasy. The title alone got my interest.
  • Quarter Square, by David Bridger. Again, urban fantasy.
  • The Devil’s Garden, by Jane Kindred. A fantasy novella, which I grabbed in no small part because the character is genderqueer and spends some time living as both a female and a male, given what’s in the blurb. Stories about non-traditional gender roles FTW!
  • Endless Night, by Maureen A. Miller. Romantic suspense.
  • Courting Death and Courting Disaster, by Carol Stephenson. Romantic suspense.
  • Portrait of Seduction, by Carrie Lofty. Historical romance.
  • Alchemy of Desire, by Crista McHugh. Historical/steampunk romance, it looks like.
  • Hunting Human, by Amanda E. Alvarez. I’d call this urban fantasy except it doesn’t seem to have an urban setting. There are werewolves!

Picked up from Barnes and Noble:

  • The Hour of the Time, by Vincent Hobbes. Short story, available for free. Grabbed it because I like free things!
  • First, There Is a River, by Kathy Steffen. Historical fiction, grabbed it when it was the Nook freebie of the week.
  • Untouchable, by Scott O’Connor. Another Nook freebie. Looks like it’ll probably be grim. Will hold this one until I’m in the proper mood.
  • What Angels Fear and When Gods Die, both by C.S. Harris. The first two of her Sebastian St. Cyr historical mysteries, re-purchased in ebook form.
  • Raven’s Shadow and Raven’s Strike, by Patricia Briggs. A fantasy duology of hers. I’d already read the first in print and wasn’t very impressed at the time but want to give it another shot, so I re-bought it in ebook and got the second one as well.
  • The Flower to the Painter, by Gary Inbinder. Picked up because Gary’s a fellow Drollerie Press author and because I liked his previous book, Confessions of the Creature, his Frankenstein sequel.
  • Southern Gods, by John Hornor Jacobs. Picked up after seeing this in a Big Idea column on John Scalzi’s blog, and because the idea of a Southern Gothic horror story with blues and Lovecraftian monsters is RIGHT UP MY ALLEY, yo. Also, Mr. Jacobs, I totally see what you did there with your mysterious bluesman’s name.

And last but not least, just grabbed from Drollerie since this sounded halfway intriguing:

  • Iodine, by C.L. Hilbert. A futuristic/apocalyptic treatment of the Little Red Riding Hood story.

185 for the year.

August 30, 2011 by
Quebecois Music

Anything that gets me to practice

I may not have reached GBS levels of fangirling with these new boys from Quebec, but Le Vent du Nord have done something only GBS has seriously been able to do before: they’ve gotten me to pick up my instruments and try to play along, especially now that userinfospazzkat has gotten Apple TV working on our big TV at home. This means I can bring up YouTube videos on my iPad and channel the right onto the TV, which is super cool.

Because it means I can do things like watch this video or this one of Le Vent du Nord, and try to pick apart the songs they’re playing and see if I can do it too!

“Laniaire” is currently my favorite LVN song sung by Simon Beaudry, and he’s very easy to follow on the melody line in that–I picked out the melody pretty quick, just by whistling the first couple of notes into a tuner to get the starting pitches and then picking up the piccolo to get the whole tune. But Simon’s capoed on his fifth fret in that video, and based on what the piccolo was telling me, I was fairly sure the key was G minor.

Which gave me a bit of a fit. I had to backtrack down the neck to try to figure out what key’s chords he must have been playing in order to wind up in G minor, and that told me he’s playing chords in D minor. Which, for a fairly beginner-level guitarist like me, is CRAZYTALK. D minor has never been my friend. Fortunately, capos are mobile! So I capoed on 3 instead of 5 and instantly got a set of chords much better matched to my skill level. I love you, E minor. (heart) (heart) (heart)

(ETA: D minor, not C minor like I’d originally thought. I forgot about the frets going up by half steps! See what I mean, people? Beginner-level guitarist.)

Now, though, the trick is to try to work out the actual changes. I’m not as comfortable with minor chord progressions as I am with major ones, so I’m going to have to step through this song slowly and see if I can figure out what Simon is doing based on what’s described here. Also, any guitarists out there want to chime in on basic progressions I should get to know for purposes of Celtic-flavored music, by all means, please do!

Meanwhile, “Cré mardi” is my favorite LVN song sung by Nicolas Boulerice, the hurdy gurdy player, so far. This thing’s in G, which is about as friendly a key as you can get. I was able to more or less pick out the first half (where they’re all doing call and response vocals) on the piccolo; the second half is harder, where they’re going into the mouth rhythm and Olivier Demers is echoing them on the fiddle. The tune is called “La turlette du rang des Sloan” according to the album this song comes from, but Googling for that basically gets me hits about that exact track on that exact album. TunePal doesn’t know it either. So I guess I get to figure this thing out the way a proper traditional musician should: BY EAR. 😉 Fun!

Also, as soon as I can figure out how to say “my fandom plays bouzouki” in French, I am totally going to have a Simon icon. Possibly also Nico, because the hurdy gurdy is AWESOME. And very possibly also Olivier’s stompy!feet, because that’s +20 to Awesome on top of his being a fiddle player. \0/

On a final (not related to Le Vent du Nord) note–HA, I have in fact managed to get “Banish Misfortune” into my brain enough that I can stumble through it without consulting Matt’s PDF of session tunes! Now if I can do this again on my octave mandolin, that’d rock.

August 26, 2011 by
Great Big Sea, Music

Bring out your Great Big Sea videos!

People, I am experiencing a potentially life-changing event here. I ain’t up to GBS levels of fangirling on Le Vent du Nord quite yet, but those lads from Quebec now very well and thoroughly have my attention, and it’s very significant that at an earlier point today, the number of LVN fan videos I’d added to my YouTube playlist had in fact outnumbered the Great Big Sea videos!

And that, my friends, is pure crazytalk. The lovely Monsieur Beaudry is laying down a very, very compelling case. But this is THE HONOR OF THE DOYLE at stake here. So I put out a call on Twitter and Facebook and Google Plus for people to hit me with their favorite GBS vids on YouTube–and I now repeat that call here! Link me up with your favorite Great Big Sea vids, people! Bonus points if they’re from shows I actually attended!

Remembering that userinfoangelina_zooma had pointed me at a vid of hers I’d never looked at, I finally looked at that tonight. And I gotta tell you, you have never heard “Cod Liver Oil” until you have heard it performed by Murray Foster. Behold!

And for the record, yes, C minor IS the key of someone who’s been drinking until five-thirty. ;>

August 25, 2011 by