Y/N [Reading Challenge 2024]

American cover, top; British edition, below. I prefer the British one.

Y/N

by Esther Li
Penguin Random House, 2024
[ #23  Out of the park on first at-bat: A debut ]

Update on Authors Watercooler Reading Challenge 2024. I wasn’t getting anywhere with my paranormal pick, The Death of the Necromancer by Martha Welles. Who, unknown to me when I picked it in January, also wrote the Murderbot series. But, the truth is, I had to drop it for something else. Which is odd because it’s normally the type of fantasy novel I like: a alternate-world Europe (specifically, France), lots of interesting characters, magic and sorcerers, a revenge plot. I enjoyed the writing style. But I also didn’t have the time or inclination to sink into it. It was missing something for me… passion, maybe? A dash of shameless bad taste?

So, my new pick comes from a different category, #22 Out of the park on first at-bat: Y/N, by Esther Li. I’ve been wanting to read it for a while and it came up in my library availability list. It’s about a woman who becomes obsessed with a Korean Boy Band member and promised meta commentary on fanfics, Y/N fanfics, and Korean boy bands. In my world a guaranteed recipe for success.

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Fanfic Warning Labels

I was waiting for the right time to post this. Can be applied to non-fanfic writing as well.

The Convoluted World of Ruwenda

The book that started it all. Cover art by Mark Harrison, who nailed the essence of the story the best.

Technically its name is “The World of the Three Moons” but the country the series revolves around is called Ruwenda, so I’m going call the world Ruwenda as well, similar to how “Narnia” refers to both Narnia the country and Narnia the greater world around it. The purpose of this post is to give some clarification about the review I wrote for Andre Norton’s Golden Trillium, here.

To reiterate:

The Trillium series of fantasy novels was born in 1989 at the request of literary agent Uwe Luserke who was interested in representing a book penned by three female, well-respected, classic SF writers. Those were Julian May, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Andre Norton, all of whom were still actively writing in the 1980s. I’m giving links in the names in case you don’t know who they are, or were, as they’re deceased now.

May wrote the initial treatment, a novel that was never published, and from it, each writer took one of the three main characters and rewrote it from their chosen character’s point of view, trading off the chapters. Each character fit the writers’ typical protagonist: powerful yet self-doubting, for Bradley; a hot-tempered Amazon, for Norton; and a sensible yet cozy traditional female for May. It was a bold experiment.

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 10/16/24: Birds of Prey

Sulawesi Serpent Eagle, by Joseph Wolf

When the average person thinks of “birds of prey” or “raptors” eagles, hawks, and falcons come to mind. Owls are raptors too, despite their physical differences from these species.

But there’s much more to this family — vultures, condors, buzzards, harriers, kites. I was surprised to discover in doing research for this post that there are species out there even I’d never heard of: Harrier-hawks, merlins, bazas, honey-buzzards.

Want a unique raptor for your writing purposes?

 

Birds of Prey

Highlands Kite

Scrub Hawk

White-chinned Falconet

Brown Mountain Kite

Bush Butter Owl

Tonahee Falcon

Lion-headed Hawklet

Grassknocker Honey-buzzard

Jacaronga

Monk Eagle

 Cat-faced Harrier

Oderbach’s Gyrfalcon

Rusk’s Sea Eagle

Lark Kestrel

Buff-faced Buzzard

Harlequin Falcon

Dusky Goshawk

Vinestriker

Musket Hawk

Rice Paddy Harrier-hawk

 

Golden Trillium [Review]

Golden Trillium

by Andre Norton
Bantam Books, 1993

Golden Trillium is the third book in the Trillium series of fantasy novels, which debuted, with much fanfare, in 1990 with Black Trillium. Since that’s over 30 years ago, I’ll recap the project here.

Three respected female writers of classic SFF, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Andre Norton, and Julian May, were approached by a literary agent to jointly write a SFF novel. May authored the original novel, an outline of sorts, which was about a set of royal triplets who must save their beleaguered kingdom. The idea was to rewrite it, with each writer taking on the POV of their chosen princess: Haramis, the cold but talented mage written by Bradley; Khadiya, the hot-headed warrioress and lover of nature, by Norton; and Anigel, sweet and home-oriented, but with a steely will, by May.

It seemed a project destined for success. The world these authors created is a science-fantasy one with magic and obscure technology that might as well be magic. The location is a planet coming out of its last glaciation with the central part of its continent still wild and covered by ice. Various lands exist around the borders as well as two pre-human, Ewok-like races with psychic powers. Ruwenda, the kingdom of the princesses, is a swampy land of temperate bayous and canals. It’s well-detailed and almost real, the best part of the book. In fact the worldbuilding was the best part, but a concept does not a satisfying novel make.

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Wonderful Tonight [Review]


Wonderful Tonight

by Patti Boyd and Penny Junor
Three Rivers Press, 2007

I’ve got a soft spot for rock and roll biographies. I must have consumed 50+ over the years, including those of bands. It’s not so much understanding the musicianship that attracts me as getting to know the real people behind the songs that had the power to transport me to another world.

Patti Boyd’s autobiography took me back into the 1960s and 1970s, the decades in which I was a child and teen. Though not a musician herself, she moved in their circles thanks to her relationships with George Harrison and Eric Clapton, circles that included hobnobbing with trendy boutique owners, fashion designers, photographers, and other denizens of Swinging London. Her anecdotes about them are enlightening. Who knew wild man Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones was also an accomplished artist?  No bio of the Stones I’ve read have ever mentioned that tidbit. And that dentist who inspired the Beatles song “Dr. Robert?” He put them, and their wives, under anesthesia before he worked on them, and Patti hints that he could have been doing anything to them while they were lying unconscious in the chair.

Yet Patti is also surprisingly humble, and I kind of wish, even, that she’d gone more into detail about her own family. Born of upper class roots, she spent time in colonial Africa with her grandparents and later suffered under the English boarding school system that separates children from the parents and forces them to live in sparse, even hellish conditions. Yet, many of those children grew into independent and restless beings, becoming the artistic shakers and movers of the 1960s. (Of course, family money may have played a part in their rejection of the 9-to-5.) Patti moved into modeling at a young age thanks to her fresh good looks, and with hard work was given a ticket into that golden world, and I can’t help feel, as with many rock star wives, girlfriends, and groupies, her fractured family played a part in her remaining there and putting up with a lot of BS. Also like many of those women she never received credit for the inspiration and even the co-creation she gave her men. In the bio she states her own spiritual yearnings predated George’s, and in fact were what inspired him to join her in exploring Indian religion. If not for Patti, there might never have been the George we know now (or did; he passed in 2001.)

Eric Clapton, sorry to say, comes off as a dick in the book, even as Patti puts a good spin on her experiences with him. He was a raging alcoholic, didn’t know how to handle his finances and live in the real world, and cheated on her, even siring two children out of wedlock, one of which she discovered only as she was divorcing him.

A good addition to your rock star bio collection.

 

AI Art Adventures: Fiddler on the Ref

After a year or so mucking around on Midjourney I’ve only recently begun using the –sref and –cref functions. What are these, do you ask? Well, they are offshoots of the basic reference pic users can paste into their /imagine prompts. Midjourney calls them Imagine URLS. As the user’s manual says, “Imagine URLS can be added to a prompt to influence the style and content of the finished result. ” You simply find a pic online that you like, copy the URL, and paste it into the prompt before the main text.

This prompt was used to generate the pic of the white-hatted fiddler at the start of this post. If you have a stash of pics online, say through your own site or an image cache such as Pinterest, so much the better.

After this, Midjourney does its magic by compressing and saving the image from the URL. Not sure how long it’s stored in there — for a few days at least. I’ve revisited the same prompt a week or so later and it still worked. The Imagine URL puts limits on the generated image by copying its style or subject matter to it in a random way. Random — that’s a word to remember.

The –sref and –cref commands let the user further tune these linked reference pics, and make them less of a crap shoot for the result, by copying the pic’s style (–sref) or character (–cref). Broadly, –sref is best for inanimate images, –cref for ones with a live subject. But, they can also be used out of this context.

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 10/2/24: Paintings by Velásquez

The Infanta Maria Theresa of Spain (1651) by Diego Velázquez

Diego Velázquez is regarded as one of the most prominent painters of the 17th century and a forerunner of realism. So said my art history professors. Los Meninas was considered by them to be the height of his innovation, as it depicts him, the artist, sitting and painting a portrait of the Spanish court life that goes on all around him, with the focus being on the young princess Margareta Theresa. He never did another painting like it again. I can guess he got bored with the same old, same old, of Royal portraits and wanted to try something new, and the reception was not enthusiastic.

Even if you haven’t studied art history you may be familiar with Velazquez’s work from his painting The Triumph of Bacchus and his series of portraits of the spectacularly unattractive Phillip IV of Spain and Mariana of Austria, his wife, both of them encumbered by the mighty Hapsburg jaw. These paintings look odd and stilted to me compared to the personalities that came across in his other portraits. It looked like he was trying to make the best of the face he was given, but there was only so much he could do to make it attractive while still being recognizable.

He also did some tender portraits of children and paintings of the Spanish middle class and had a soft spot for jesters and dwarves, not considered appropriate subjects at the time. His religious pictures are so-so, IMO — too much pink and blue — but he also worked pagan Roman themes. One thing he did not do was still lifes. But I’m going to assume he did and they were just lost over the centuries. Shit happens; there are fires and uprisings, canvases are trimmed down, works are stolen or destroyed. Therefore, here’s a list of some Velázquez paintings that yet to be rediscovered.

 

The Lost Artwork of Diego Velázquez

A Coin Minter of Seville

Two Dwarves Posing in Armor Before a Fountain

The Widowed Scholar

The Boisterous Cavalier

Still Life with Coins and Keys

Merchant Alarmed by a Mouse

Christ and the Juniper Tree

The Young Chatelaine and Her Lute

The Island of Forgiveness

Virgin Crowned with Laurel Leaves

 A Fool and His Whipped Hand

Head Study of the German Envoy

Sketch of a Cottage in a Rainstorm

Bacchus and His Maenads

The Serpent’s Gluttony

Self-Portrait with a Lance

The Young Farmer and His Wife

The Infanta and the Jester Sanchez

Mercury and Mars Observe a Comet

Saint Aloysius in the Wilderness

Essence of a Golden September Afternoon

AI Art

I like the way this turned out, even if the bottle isn’t symmetrical and the white bird a little odd in its feather placement. It was inspired by another series of AI artwork I’m working on.

Worldbuilding Wednesday 9/25/24: Elvis!

 

What if Elvis had been born in Tibet instead of Tupelo, Mississippi?

When Elvis died in 1977, no one could dream that he’d become an American icon on the level of Mickey Mouse or Marilyn Monroe. See even a crudely drawn figure with a pompadour, a guitar, and a lopsided posture, it’s impossible NOT to think “Elvis.” Or one of his many impersonators, also an American icon, as Mae West impersonators once were.

But what if Elvis had some other name in some other dimension? Or you want to create your own version?

(The term “Elvii” was conjured up by authors Jan and Michael Stern to cover Elvis’s many imitators.)

 

Alternate Elvii

Alwis Podshay

Ossil Warey

Altros Zhezbay

Elmo Crispy

Oswip Kelly

Orlost Norway

Alvin Sonka

Urton Streulton

Uthan Gaudry

 Elias Palley

Elvin Pasteur

Egbert Prussain

Elvin Saretzky

Edsel Mitsva

Olvin Zlotzky

Magnus Cleris

Edel Prostjoy

Ulthis Westfay