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Jun. 12th, 2016
... okay tumblr
Jun. 12th, 2016 01:37 pmvia http://ift.tt/1sAyMTf:
ineptshieldmaid:
I know I follow @bomberqueen17, but you don’t need to give me wall-to-wall recommendations for historical warplane blogs.
OR DO YOU.
idk man, following you has not led tumblr to suggest me ANY blogs about shields or maidens, and this makes me a little disappointed.
ineptshieldmaid:
I know I follow @bomberqueen17, but you don’t need to give me wall-to-wall recommendations for historical warplane blogs.
OR DO YOU.
idk man, following you has not led tumblr to suggest me ANY blogs about shields or maidens, and this makes me a little disappointed.
Rereading Cloud Roads
Jun. 12th, 2016 03:33 pmvia http://ift.tt/1Ylse73:
kk-maker:
…and, having gotten to know Stone and Raksura culture by now, the early scenes where Stone has straight-up kidnapped Moon are unbelievably funny.
[if you haven’t read The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells and you don’t want spoilers, SKIP THIS POST]
Consorts are super, super precious and highly-regarded and not terribly numerous. Culturally, they occupy a space equivalent to ‘fairy-tale princess’, ‘First Lady’, or ‘dowager queen’, depending on age, mated status, and the status of their mate. They know it and everyone else knows it from infancy.
Finding one outside of a colony would be ridiculous to even imagine. Finding one alone, wearing raggedy groundling clothing a long-ass way from any colony at all, is unheard-of.
Stone is a consort himself, BUT he’s long since old enough to be in the ‘dowager queen’ category, has always been something of an odd duck, and has the advantage of being able to transform to roughly the size of a bus. He also happens to be on a mission matchmaking for his very eligible great-great-granddaughter. Might as well look, no? Even if this lone consort’s in exile, it’s good to know what the other courts are doing, maybe gain a little gossip for leverage.
Lone consort is quick and mean and wily, and gets away. (Again, Stone is is the size of a bus… because he’s CENTURIES OLD, with corresponding experience. The Little Princess gave Fin Fang Foom the slip.) Lone consort is next seen drugged, beaten, and shackled to the dirt by groundlings to be eaten by a local monster. Lone consort has torn himself bloody trying to get free and is making a solid effort to defend himself with rocks.
Stone is like, okay, clearly I need to learn what this kid’s deal is and see if he at least has an eligible sibling consort somewhere.
Then he picks him up, very slowly teases the story out, and, from Moon’s perspective, accepts the whole thing with equanimity. After picking up three books & change worth of cultural cues and personal backstory, though, it’s pretty clear that Stone is internally doing the wise-grandpa equivalent of ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME.
A rough timeline of Stone’s thought processes:
- Trying to strangle me with your bare hands? Seriously? I’m a few hundred years past your weight class; you’ve got either a serious concussion or more violent instincts than sense.
- Holy shit this kid is some kinda mean and suspicious for a consort.
- Why does he think I am going to poison him? He’s acting like I’m a crazy groundling.
- Kiddo, what did your colony even do?
- Obviously you’re not Fell, fool; I might only have one eye I’m not DEAD…
- He can’t be asking me what species I am. He’s either drugged or trying to pull one over—
- He doesn’t know what his own species is?
- HE SERIOUSLY DOESN’T KNOW SHIT.
- This is the saddest fucking thing I’ve ever seen and if any of his court are still living I am going to shred them so fine the Arbora will have to use them for fertilizer.
- After all that, he still thinks I’m going to kill him and eat him. Fucking hell.
- Pearl is going to lose her shit when she sees what I brought home.
kk-maker:
…and, having gotten to know Stone and Raksura culture by now, the early scenes where Stone has straight-up kidnapped Moon are unbelievably funny.
[if you haven’t read The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells and you don’t want spoilers, SKIP THIS POST]
Consorts are super, super precious and highly-regarded and not terribly numerous. Culturally, they occupy a space equivalent to ‘fairy-tale princess’, ‘First Lady’, or ‘dowager queen’, depending on age, mated status, and the status of their mate. They know it and everyone else knows it from infancy.
Finding one outside of a colony would be ridiculous to even imagine. Finding one alone, wearing raggedy groundling clothing a long-ass way from any colony at all, is unheard-of.
Stone is a consort himself, BUT he’s long since old enough to be in the ‘dowager queen’ category, has always been something of an odd duck, and has the advantage of being able to transform to roughly the size of a bus. He also happens to be on a mission matchmaking for his very eligible great-great-granddaughter. Might as well look, no? Even if this lone consort’s in exile, it’s good to know what the other courts are doing, maybe gain a little gossip for leverage.
Lone consort is quick and mean and wily, and gets away. (Again, Stone is is the size of a bus… because he’s CENTURIES OLD, with corresponding experience. The Little Princess gave Fin Fang Foom the slip.) Lone consort is next seen drugged, beaten, and shackled to the dirt by groundlings to be eaten by a local monster. Lone consort has torn himself bloody trying to get free and is making a solid effort to defend himself with rocks.
Stone is like, okay, clearly I need to learn what this kid’s deal is and see if he at least has an eligible sibling consort somewhere.
Then he picks him up, very slowly teases the story out, and, from Moon’s perspective, accepts the whole thing with equanimity. After picking up three books & change worth of cultural cues and personal backstory, though, it’s pretty clear that Stone is internally doing the wise-grandpa equivalent of ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME.
A rough timeline of Stone’s thought processes:
- Trying to strangle me with your bare hands? Seriously? I’m a few hundred years past your weight class; you’ve got either a serious concussion or more violent instincts than sense.
- Holy shit this kid is some kinda mean and suspicious for a consort.
- Why does he think I am going to poison him? He’s acting like I’m a crazy groundling.
- Kiddo, what did your colony even do?
- Obviously you’re not Fell, fool; I might only have one eye I’m not DEAD…
- He can’t be asking me what species I am. He’s either drugged or trying to pull one over—
- He doesn’t know what his own species is?
- HE SERIOUSLY DOESN’T KNOW SHIT.
- This is the saddest fucking thing I’ve ever seen and if any of his court are still living I am going to shred them so fine the Arbora will have to use them for fertilizer.
- After all that, he still thinks I’m going to kill him and eat him. Fucking hell.
- Pearl is going to lose her shit when she sees what I brought home.
via http://ift.tt/1UcJF6K:
i… swear i wrote a whole bunch of stuff for chapter 5, including a bunch of stuff about the TIE pilot, and I even gave him a callsign, and– I’m looking through all my WIP docs and I can’t find a blessed word of it.
It’s easy enough to search– I’d nicknamed him Bolt, so I’m just ctrl+f the name. And it does not appear in any of the documents I thought I had been working in.
Of course, it’s much harder than usual, see, because I’ve been looking through my older WIPs, so if I look at my “recent documents” queue it is longer than my arm, and has a lot of irrelevant material in it, only some of which I can easily identify as irrelevant.
But this is really annoying and kind of a problem and really just what I get for being so stupid as to think I could work in more than one fictional universe at once.
I swear to Christ I wrote a couple thousand words and I remember that I was going to discard most of them but– come on, I was going to mine them for what I’d figured out by writing them, and now I can’t even find them!
WTF.
i… swear i wrote a whole bunch of stuff for chapter 5, including a bunch of stuff about the TIE pilot, and I even gave him a callsign, and– I’m looking through all my WIP docs and I can’t find a blessed word of it.
It’s easy enough to search– I’d nicknamed him Bolt, so I’m just ctrl+f the name. And it does not appear in any of the documents I thought I had been working in.
Of course, it’s much harder than usual, see, because I’ve been looking through my older WIPs, so if I look at my “recent documents” queue it is longer than my arm, and has a lot of irrelevant material in it, only some of which I can easily identify as irrelevant.
But this is really annoying and kind of a problem and really just what I get for being so stupid as to think I could work in more than one fictional universe at once.
I swear to Christ I wrote a couple thousand words and I remember that I was going to discard most of them but– come on, I was going to mine them for what I’d figured out by writing them, and now I can’t even find them!
WTF.
not-even-even replied to your post “i…
Jun. 12th, 2016 04:12 pmvia http://ift.tt/1Xh7Btk:not-even-even replied to your post “i… swear i wrote a whole bunch of stuff for chapter 5, including a…”
you can search for it in the whole of your computer, there is a “documetn wit hthat word in” kind of option afaik
Is there a way to search through a selection of Google Docs for a word? I already know how to search my computer, and all my writing on my computer is neatly organized (ish) in Scrivener, so finding things there is basically a non-issue. (I love Scrivener! but I do most of my work on not-my-own-computer!)
My problem is Google Docs, which is sort of not exactly the most user-friendly experience. I can’t even figure out how to reliably put documents into folders, let alone anything else; also they don’t tell you when they were last edited, only last opened, so every time you click on one to search through it and realize it’s not at all relevant, it gets bumped up to the top of your recents again.
But surely there’s got to be something– Gdocs tracks your revisions, so even if it doesn’t show it to you, it knows which of your docs were most recently actually edited, instead of opened and then instantly closed again???
Ugh I don’t know. I just blew all the free time I had to actually write.
you can search for it in the whole of your computer, there is a “documetn wit hthat word in” kind of option afaik
Is there a way to search through a selection of Google Docs for a word? I already know how to search my computer, and all my writing on my computer is neatly organized (ish) in Scrivener, so finding things there is basically a non-issue. (I love Scrivener! but I do most of my work on not-my-own-computer!)
My problem is Google Docs, which is sort of not exactly the most user-friendly experience. I can’t even figure out how to reliably put documents into folders, let alone anything else; also they don’t tell you when they were last edited, only last opened, so every time you click on one to search through it and realize it’s not at all relevant, it gets bumped up to the top of your recents again.
But surely there’s got to be something– Gdocs tracks your revisions, so even if it doesn’t show it to you, it knows which of your docs were most recently actually edited, instead of opened and then instantly closed again???
Ugh I don’t know. I just blew all the free time I had to actually write.
via http://ift.tt/1YlBQi8:
rederiswrites:
Sometimes I feel like we authors circulate a lot of “please comment on fics” posts and I don’t want people to feel pressured or guilty because they’re too anxious or tired or busy or whatever reason you have for not commenting. But definitely getting comments is really important to keeping me upbeat and inspired about my writing in a way that kudos or likes or whatever just really isn’t, and I think the reason, for me at least, is that while kudo count is just a number, a commenter is a person–a person that I now have a relationship with.
If you leave me an excited comment, you gain a ‘face’. If you comment fairly regularly, you become someone that, believe me, I think of with fondness. The thing is, you become someone I’m writing for. When I’m plain tired, or unsure how the next bit goes, or staring some potentially unpleasant research down, you’re in my head as a reason to keep pushing. If you’re insightful–you notice things, you remember things–you’re part of what keeps me pushing to be good, you’re part of my reason for continuing to make the effort to slip these details in and keep track of all my threads. You’re paying attention, and that means so much, in a way that clicking the kudos button just can’t do.
Of course I write because I love to write; otherwise it’d be a fairly ridiculous misallocation of time. And I write because the stories in my head want out and because I love my characters and want them to live and because I want to improve. But writing is storytelling, and storytelling isn’t done in a void. There’s nothing wrong with wanting–needing–an audience. And when you leave comments–even if it’s just a moment of incoherent yelling in reblog notes–you become part of my audience, a real person that I can make metaphorical eye contact with as I spin my story.
oh I like this better than the “please comment!” posts, because this is so much more specific. And it’s true! It doesn’t take a lot for it to become a motivating thing.
Now. I’m not saying to make requests from authors, sometimes that makes me stubbornly not want to write something, even if the request was polite. It’s not a manners thing specifically (though, that helps)– it’s a motivation issue. The muse can be fickle and if it’s not handled gently, gets contrary.
But if you always comment with keen observations about a specific thing, I’m a whole lot more likely to think about that specific thing, and write more about it in the future. So if I think of Reader A with pleasure whenever Character X does Y in a scenario- or if I know Reader B is an expert in this obscure thing and answered all my questions so now I can confidently use that in a story–
it just is another big source of pleasure while writing, and is a reason to do the thing, you know?
rederiswrites:
Sometimes I feel like we authors circulate a lot of “please comment on fics” posts and I don’t want people to feel pressured or guilty because they’re too anxious or tired or busy or whatever reason you have for not commenting. But definitely getting comments is really important to keeping me upbeat and inspired about my writing in a way that kudos or likes or whatever just really isn’t, and I think the reason, for me at least, is that while kudo count is just a number, a commenter is a person–a person that I now have a relationship with.
If you leave me an excited comment, you gain a ‘face’. If you comment fairly regularly, you become someone that, believe me, I think of with fondness. The thing is, you become someone I’m writing for. When I’m plain tired, or unsure how the next bit goes, or staring some potentially unpleasant research down, you’re in my head as a reason to keep pushing. If you’re insightful–you notice things, you remember things–you’re part of what keeps me pushing to be good, you’re part of my reason for continuing to make the effort to slip these details in and keep track of all my threads. You’re paying attention, and that means so much, in a way that clicking the kudos button just can’t do.
Of course I write because I love to write; otherwise it’d be a fairly ridiculous misallocation of time. And I write because the stories in my head want out and because I love my characters and want them to live and because I want to improve. But writing is storytelling, and storytelling isn’t done in a void. There’s nothing wrong with wanting–needing–an audience. And when you leave comments–even if it’s just a moment of incoherent yelling in reblog notes–you become part of my audience, a real person that I can make metaphorical eye contact with as I spin my story.
oh I like this better than the “please comment!” posts, because this is so much more specific. And it’s true! It doesn’t take a lot for it to become a motivating thing.
Now. I’m not saying to make requests from authors, sometimes that makes me stubbornly not want to write something, even if the request was polite. It’s not a manners thing specifically (though, that helps)– it’s a motivation issue. The muse can be fickle and if it’s not handled gently, gets contrary.
But if you always comment with keen observations about a specific thing, I’m a whole lot more likely to think about that specific thing, and write more about it in the future. So if I think of Reader A with pleasure whenever Character X does Y in a scenario- or if I know Reader B is an expert in this obscure thing and answered all my questions so now I can confidently use that in a story–
it just is another big source of pleasure while writing, and is a reason to do the thing, you know?
via http://ift.tt/1UKcFmt:
ineptshieldmaid reblogged your post and added:
Another relevant function: you can’t sort by most…
I can’t… make that triangle appear next to the search term in the search bar like in your screenshot. All I get is an X, to clear the entry, or nothing if the search field is blank. Because those seem like really cool things to be able to sort by, but I cannot make that whole, I don’t know what it’s called, panorama of exciting options come up (field? meadow?) to let me refine my search.
(I assume that whole… it’s not a field. The fields are the individual thingies where you can input stuff. Meadow? Chunk. Of window. Thing. would be called Advanced Search Options in like, any program. I can’t access that from the search bar. In a regular program it would probably be in one of the menus at the top but since I’m in Chrome all the menus at the top refer to the program, not the page I’m on. So I honestly am completely baffled as to how to access any advanced search options if there’s no shortcut to it from within the search function itself. Fuck, I’m having a really bad brain-word day and I don’t know what to call things and this is really getting to me, I sound like some sort of ignorant moron, I swear I know what things are called usually.)
HOWEVER. I would have been wrong anyway, because just searching every Google Doc I’ve ever written for a fairly common English word, as it happens, eventually turned up the document in question, which was not edited within the last week at all, which would explain why I remember it so poorly and also why it wasn’t with anything I did this week.
So, I found it, but not by any intelligent means. Sigh.
I also do seem to have an option to sort recent documents by “last modified by me”, as opposed to “last opened”, so that’s… something?
I can’t figure out how to get the window you showed with the two panes to get the detail and info views of an individual file, either…
Ohhhh if you access all of this through the Drive app, you can get to those things. I don’t, though, because by default Drive shows me documents that were shared with me years ago and I have to search in order to find the things i worked on recently. I use all of this by going into Documents, which just shows me my documents. But doesn’t let me actually search them at all.
(Drive also won’t load on my work computer, but Documents will, so I have completely abandoned using the Drive [missing noun] ever at all, and forgot that it was different from Documents.)
(BUT WHY IS IT DIFFERENT. Why can’t Documents’ search interface have the little triangle next to it???? Why not???? Why do I HAVE to remember that there’s a whole separate [missing noun] that lets you search things, if I want to search my documents under more than one criterion? Why does it have to work like that?)
Yeah, in there there’s search options. Wow I can’t believe I just wasted like twenty minutes of my life trying to use Drive through Documents.
I also can’t fucking believe those are entirely separate – word, I don’t have a word. Well. Things. The documents are in both places at once, and accessible in both places at once, but. App? Program? Interface. I don’t know.
I am having a day of bad brain function and this all seems to slot very neatly into portions of my brain that are currently offline.
At least I found it.
ineptshieldmaid reblogged your post and added:
Another relevant function: you can’t sort by most…
I can’t… make that triangle appear next to the search term in the search bar like in your screenshot. All I get is an X, to clear the entry, or nothing if the search field is blank. Because those seem like really cool things to be able to sort by, but I cannot make that whole, I don’t know what it’s called, panorama of exciting options come up (field? meadow?) to let me refine my search.
(I assume that whole… it’s not a field. The fields are the individual thingies where you can input stuff. Meadow? Chunk. Of window. Thing. would be called Advanced Search Options in like, any program. I can’t access that from the search bar. In a regular program it would probably be in one of the menus at the top but since I’m in Chrome all the menus at the top refer to the program, not the page I’m on. So I honestly am completely baffled as to how to access any advanced search options if there’s no shortcut to it from within the search function itself. Fuck, I’m having a really bad brain-word day and I don’t know what to call things and this is really getting to me, I sound like some sort of ignorant moron, I swear I know what things are called usually.)
HOWEVER. I would have been wrong anyway, because just searching every Google Doc I’ve ever written for a fairly common English word, as it happens, eventually turned up the document in question, which was not edited within the last week at all, which would explain why I remember it so poorly and also why it wasn’t with anything I did this week.
So, I found it, but not by any intelligent means. Sigh.
I also do seem to have an option to sort recent documents by “last modified by me”, as opposed to “last opened”, so that’s… something?
I can’t figure out how to get the window you showed with the two panes to get the detail and info views of an individual file, either…
Ohhhh if you access all of this through the Drive app, you can get to those things. I don’t, though, because by default Drive shows me documents that were shared with me years ago and I have to search in order to find the things i worked on recently. I use all of this by going into Documents, which just shows me my documents. But doesn’t let me actually search them at all.
(Drive also won’t load on my work computer, but Documents will, so I have completely abandoned using the Drive [missing noun] ever at all, and forgot that it was different from Documents.)
(BUT WHY IS IT DIFFERENT. Why can’t Documents’ search interface have the little triangle next to it???? Why not???? Why do I HAVE to remember that there’s a whole separate [missing noun] that lets you search things, if I want to search my documents under more than one criterion? Why does it have to work like that?)
Yeah, in there there’s search options. Wow I can’t believe I just wasted like twenty minutes of my life trying to use Drive through Documents.
I also can’t fucking believe those are entirely separate – word, I don’t have a word. Well. Things. The documents are in both places at once, and accessible in both places at once, but. App? Program? Interface. I don’t know.
I am having a day of bad brain function and this all seems to slot very neatly into portions of my brain that are currently offline.
At least I found it.
Sex and the Single Raksura
Jun. 12th, 2016 08:25 pmvia http://ift.tt/1U86Imu:
marthawells:
It took two years to sell the completed manuscript of The Cloud Roads to a publisher. (My agent was the one doing all the work. I was just sitting at home writing The Serpent Sea and Emilie and the Hollow World (which didn’t have a publisher either at that time), and quietly freaking out.) But one of the comments my agent got back on The Cloud Roads was that it was hard to follow.
If you’ve read it, you know it’s not a multi-character, multi-storyline epic. Moon is the only POV and the story is pretty linear. After talking to other readers about it for a while, I think the reason for that comment was the Raksura’s gender neutral names.
For me, this was a feature, not a bug. I found it hard to talk about the bisexuality or pansexuality of the characters when they had no concept of heterosexuality, so I tried in various ways to show it. And our concepts of gender don’t map exactly onto the Raksura’s concepts of gender. Using gender neutral names helped me keep that in mind while I was writing. But for some people it was too confusing; they had to assign a gender to identify who the character was.
There were other things people didn’t like. Raksura form intensely close bonds with each other, but are not romantic in the way most earth humans would interpret it. The closest they come to kissing is biting, and they don’t say to each other “I love you.” The queens and consorts are the only ones who form single permanent sexual relationships that we would recognize as marriages, and even they aren’t exclusive with each other. (Though a consort wouldn’t sleep with another queen unless he wanted to start a war.) Moon is the only Raksura in the book who has seen any other type of relationship, and even he only has an outsider’s understanding of them.
For infertile warriors and fertile Arbora, sexual relationships are friendly and casual. Having children is a serious business, and partners are selected with a lot of attention toward the court’s bloodlines and what the court needs. But the relationships between Arbora child-bearing partners aren’t exclusive and aren’t marriages, the way we’d think of marriages, and children are raised communally. (When it’s normal to give birth to five babies at one time, it takes an organized segment of the community to take care of all of them.)
The entire court is basically a very large, often cranky, extended family.
I had beta readers for The Cloud Roads who tried to see the Raksuran relationships as marriages and nuclear families, and it just didn’t work for them because the relationships didn’t make sense that way. To me, trying to see the relationships of your flying lizard ant lion people as being exactly like earth human relationships was what didn’t make sense.
marthawells:
It took two years to sell the completed manuscript of The Cloud Roads to a publisher. (My agent was the one doing all the work. I was just sitting at home writing The Serpent Sea and Emilie and the Hollow World (which didn’t have a publisher either at that time), and quietly freaking out.) But one of the comments my agent got back on The Cloud Roads was that it was hard to follow.
If you’ve read it, you know it’s not a multi-character, multi-storyline epic. Moon is the only POV and the story is pretty linear. After talking to other readers about it for a while, I think the reason for that comment was the Raksura’s gender neutral names.
For me, this was a feature, not a bug. I found it hard to talk about the bisexuality or pansexuality of the characters when they had no concept of heterosexuality, so I tried in various ways to show it. And our concepts of gender don’t map exactly onto the Raksura’s concepts of gender. Using gender neutral names helped me keep that in mind while I was writing. But for some people it was too confusing; they had to assign a gender to identify who the character was.
There were other things people didn’t like. Raksura form intensely close bonds with each other, but are not romantic in the way most earth humans would interpret it. The closest they come to kissing is biting, and they don’t say to each other “I love you.” The queens and consorts are the only ones who form single permanent sexual relationships that we would recognize as marriages, and even they aren’t exclusive with each other. (Though a consort wouldn’t sleep with another queen unless he wanted to start a war.) Moon is the only Raksura in the book who has seen any other type of relationship, and even he only has an outsider’s understanding of them.
For infertile warriors and fertile Arbora, sexual relationships are friendly and casual. Having children is a serious business, and partners are selected with a lot of attention toward the court’s bloodlines and what the court needs. But the relationships between Arbora child-bearing partners aren’t exclusive and aren’t marriages, the way we’d think of marriages, and children are raised communally. (When it’s normal to give birth to five babies at one time, it takes an organized segment of the community to take care of all of them.)
The entire court is basically a very large, often cranky, extended family.
I had beta readers for The Cloud Roads who tried to see the Raksuran relationships as marriages and nuclear families, and it just didn’t work for them because the relationships didn’t make sense that way. To me, trying to see the relationships of your flying lizard ant lion people as being exactly like earth human relationships was what didn’t make sense.