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Marie Brennan@swantower.bsky.social |
751 followers 115 following 386 posts
Author of the Memoirs of Lady Trent. Also one half of M.A. Carrick. She/her.
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Marie Brennan
@swantower.bsky.social
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@morningtransport.bsky.social will be making all their July stories free to read, but if you subscribe, you can read June's "The Dinomancers Dance" by Ng Yi-Sheng, which is just delightfully bonkers:
www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/the-dinoma...
1 replies 6 reposts 5 likes
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DreamForge Magazine
@dreamforgemagazine.bsky.social
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74% funded! Can we make that 75% today? ($37 more would do it!) DreamForge Magazine is fighting for our 6th year! PRINT SF & Fantasy featuring color illos and great stories, online & digital ebooks, DreamCasters writing group, Webinars and more! Pledge our Kickstarter at kck.st/3XupZ6W
0 replies 4 reposts 3 likes
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Marie Brennan
@swantower.bsky.social
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And right now, @morningtransport.bsky.social subscriptions are discounted, making this a great time to pick one up!
www.sundaymorningtransport.com/subscribe?co...
0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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Marie Brennan
@swantower.bsky.social
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@morningtransport.bsky.social will be making all their July stories free to read, but if you subscribe, you can read June's "The Dinomancers Dance" by Ng Yi-Sheng, which is just delightfully bonkers:
www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/the-dinoma...
1 replies 6 reposts 5 likes
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Marie Brennan
@swantower.bsky.social
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A conversation on our Discord has prompted me to say again: remember, y'all, what really sells books is not the author talking about their work, but *readers* talking about it. Word of mouth drives far more sales than advertising or any other engine. So if you loved a book, tell your friends!
17 replies 425 reposts 1304 likes
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Marie Brennan
@swantower.bsky.social
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If I'm included in that, you should know The Waking of Angantyr is a standalone! No waiting required.
1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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Zeno Agency
@zenoagency.bsky.social
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New month, new eBook deals! Six Zeno titles are amongst July's #kindledeals! (Ranging from 99p to £2.29, for Brennan's)
- @jrdawson.bsky.social; @jeremyteg.bsky.social; @rrvirdi.bsky.social; @swantower.bsky.social; Charlaine Harris & Brandon Sanderson!
0 replies 8 reposts 6 likes
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Kaija Rayne 101625/70000 Hiatus until?
@kaijarayne.bsky.social
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Please tell people if you loved our work. Word of mouth is absolutely the best form of advertising there is.
0 replies 2 reposts 3 likes
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psudonym
@psudonym.bsky.social
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Someone's probably written a 2-hour long YouTube video about this, but I'm just sitting here thinking about how when Lucas and the team made Star Wars, it was them remixing little bits of everything he was a fan of. But now, when making Star Wars, it's just people remixing Star Wars itself forever.
30 replies 42 reposts 471 likes
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WobblyPython: Playing Every Metal Gear
@wobblypython.bsky.social
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I find this is true for a lot of mediums. Games, streamers, movies. It's all driven by the good fun of sharing.
0 replies 2 reposts 2 likes
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Marie Brennan
@swantower.bsky.social
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It's run by me and Alyc Helms for our readers; you're entirely welcome to join, but it's not a general-purpose book server, if that's what you're looking for.
discord.com/invite/uyqXY...
0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
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Marie Brennan
@swantower.bsky.social
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Dude, you're a *reviewer*. You absolutely do this!
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Noctis (No Promises To Keep)
@fuckmelikea.dog
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literally how "This Is How You Lose A Time War" blew up
0 replies 3 reposts 11 likes
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Beth Winter
@bwinter.bsky.social
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I generally avoid YA but the Hugo packet brought me two gems: Moniquill Blackgoose To Shape A Dragon's Breath (Native American girl in dragon training academy run by Norse colonizers) and P Djeli Clark's Abeni's Song (West African folklore and a girl's journey to find her stolen people).
0 replies 1 reposts 3 likes
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Marie Brennan
@swantower.bsky.social
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Delighted to hear it! And legitimately, it's people like you who have kept that series continuously in print for a decade and counting.
1 replies 0 reposts 2 likes
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Marie Brennan
@swantower.bsky.social
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Boringness is highly underrated in presidents. I would like an unbroken series of people who will quietly get on with the business of governing, rather than seeing what they can set on fire today.
0 replies 2 reposts 17 likes
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Marie Brennan
@swantower.bsky.social
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Non-zero chances you make the day of the author and/or other fans of that obscure book!
0 replies 0 reposts 2 likes
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JenTheTracy
@jenthetracy.bsky.social
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This sells art, too. Talk about the art you like. Talk about the books you like. Ask your friends what they are reading. Make supporting creative people your small talk.
0 replies 25 reposts 57 likes
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Jan Murphy
@packrat74.bsky.social
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💙📚 Talk about the books you love. Just posting the book cover and saying the book is significant to you is not enough. The cover alone is just like a pile of promo postcards or bookmarks, sitting unheralded on the bookstore counter (which customers rarely take with them). Your words matter.
0 replies 7 reposts 21 likes
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Homo-snek-ual Подонок 🔞
@goldeneyesblind.bsky.social
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an author can talk a book up all day long but folks are well aware its our job to sell our books but when readers talk about it? that usually means they really liked it and want to talk about it which is obviously much more convincing than a sales pitch
0 replies 6 reposts 11 likes
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PeterS
@paradiddletriplets.bsky.social
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Also: join a book club! In person, online, Zoom, whatever. Word of mouth multiplier!!!!
0 replies 2 reposts 3 likes
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Marie Brennan
@swantower.bsky.social
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No worries! I should just put my money where my mouth is (or, well, convince other people to put *their* money, heh).
0 replies 0 reposts 2 likes
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Katie Mack
@astrokatie.com
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We got tricked by science fiction into thinking a futuristic city is all about flying cars and crystal towers and hologram billboards but what it really looks like is nice apartment blocks, good mass transit, pedestrian zones with shade trees and safe bike lanes.
147 replies 1360 reposts 5269 likes
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Andy McGlashen
@amcglashen.bsky.social
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Welp, looks like you’re not getting any work done this morning 🪶 www.audubon.org/magazine/202...
14 replies 145 reposts 643 likes
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Marie Brennan
@swantower.bsky.social
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Fair point -- so I should say that I recently played and really enjoyed both Return of the Obra Dinn (mystery-solving of how everyone aboard a ship died) and Pentiment (murders and social conflict in sixteenth-century rural Bavaria)!
1 replies 1 reposts 6 likes
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wade of mutilation
@waderockett.bsky.social
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This goes for TTRPGs too! Small and mid-tier publishers have very little budget for marketing and advertising, and can’t make game stores promote their books. If nobody you know has heard of your favorite game, tell them about it!
5 replies 55 reposts 109 likes
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Mr Dr Bae
@dallas-taylor.bsky.social
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Currently rereading Iain M Banks' Look to Windward and I can't stress enough what a loss it was when he died. SF as litfic, absolute best of both worlds. A giant.
0 replies 1 reposts 4 likes
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doc
@docseuss.bsky.social
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Same with indie games!
2 replies 4 reposts 19 likes
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Kalum
@rolistespod.bsky.social
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Not only it's the best way to reach more fans, it's also a what fills us with juice. ...no wait that sounds a bit weird.
0 replies 3 reposts 19 likes
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Marie Brennan
@swantower.bsky.social
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A conversation on our Discord has prompted me to say again: remember, y'all, what really sells books is not the author talking about their work, but *readers* talking about it. Word of mouth drives far more sales than advertising or any other engine. So if you loved a book, tell your friends!
17 replies 425 reposts 1304 likes
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drow zelensky
@dov.bsky.social
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One of the worst things that Game of Thrones has enabled (involuntarily) in a particular kind of almost exclusively male nerd is a permission structure for going UMM WELL ACTUALLY at "unrealistic" depictions of medieval life (which aren't even unrealistic, you're just an undereducated twat)
19 replies 31 reposts 413 likes
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merritt k
@merrittk.com
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we live in an age in which we have near limitless storage for data. unfortunately at this time we must erase all works of culture to make room for the infinite sea of machine slop
28 replies 629 reposts 2645 likes
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Dr Abeba Birhane
@abeba.bsky.social
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no, I don't want to scan a qr code or download an app to order food at your restaurant/cafe... really don't want to have to deal with cookies and trackers, especially not when I'm tired and grumpy. just give me the goddammed physical menu
56 replies 143 reposts 1043 likes
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Marie Brennan
@swantower.bsky.social
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I feel like they're conjoined, yeah.
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Marie Brennan
@swantower.bsky.social
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That is SO COOL.
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Mary Robinette Kowal
@maryrobinette.bsky.social
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I've just learned that the International Astronomical Union has named an asteroid after me.
I'm... I'm a little overcome.
It's out near Jupiter, so there's no danger of it hitting the Earth.
ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_l...
121 replies 144 reposts 1670 likes
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Marie Brennan
@swantower.bsky.social
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Me: "The protagonists of Torchwood couldn't among the lot of them assemble all four points of a moral compass." . . . which led to me and my husband debating what the four points would be. Trustworthiness, compassion, justice -- not sure what to choose for the fourth?
1 replies 0 reposts 10 likes
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Marie Brennan
@swantower.bsky.social
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And yet companies want to use it to answer our load-bearing questions, where getting the answer right *matters*. (And, y'know, put artists and writers out of work, because we insist on things like being paid.)
0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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Marie Brennan
@swantower.bsky.social
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Keep saying it loud and often: generative "AI" is not intelligent, it is riddled with inescapable errors, it is structurally incapable of ever doing half the things its hypers claim it will do, most of it is snake oil in search of a mark to scam, and it's environmentally destructive to boot.
9 replies 213 reposts 566 likes
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Marie Brennan
@swantower.bsky.social
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Turns out to be perchance.org, if anybody else would find this kind of thing useful!
0 replies 0 reposts 6 likes
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Marie Brennan
@swantower.bsky.social
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Trying to remember the name of a website that lets you create a random generator -- e.g. supply it with two lists and tell it to pick one from A and one from B, then output five combinations. Doesn't seem to be random.org; anybody know what it might have been?
1 replies 1 reposts 5 likes
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Marie Brennan
@swantower.bsky.social
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Kickstarter is underway for the next year of @dreamforgemagazine.bsky.social!
www.kickstarter.com/projects/sco...
0 replies 5 reposts 9 likes
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Marie Brennan
@swantower.bsky.social
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Sometimes I think fantasy characters who are devoted to cruel, uncaring gods that only acknowledge them if they succeed are unrealistic, and then I remember how many people more or less worship capitalism.
1 replies 11 reposts 52 likes
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N. K. Jemisin
@nkjemisin.bsky.social
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It's increasingly clear that the people who make generative AI don't like films, don't like books, don't like art of any kind, and don't understand why anyone else does.
110 replies 1610 reposts 4964 likes
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G. Willow Wilson
@gwillow.me
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You have to love these flaccid Calvinist hot takes by highly successful people. Systemic inequality is good, actually, bc it allows the elect to demonstrate their profound virtue and genius. If you are truly pious, you will achieve prosperity via God's special underwear gnome economics
92 replies 311 reposts 1554 likes
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Marie Brennan
@swantower.bsky.social
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With stories, poems, and art from @mytherea.bsky.social, @jennreese.bsky.social, @priyajsridhar.bsky.social, @stephanieburgis.bsky.social, @adriabailton.bsky.social, @acsaville.bsky.social, @ianli.bsky.social, Devin Miller, Joshua Gage, and Lena Ng!
0 replies 3 reposts 5 likes
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Marie Brennan
@swantower.bsky.social
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My second poem ever is out now from @omgjulia.bsky.social's Worlds of Possibility! You can pick up this very dragon-themed issue here:
1 replies 12 reposts 22 likes
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Micah
@rincewind.run
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if there’s any issue on which “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” applies to Biden it’s climate - the IRA has been a tremendous success beyond all expectations and the news on the renewable energy front is excellent depressing to see it lumped in with issues on which he’s actually bad
31 replies 250 reposts 1111 likes
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Marie Brennan
@swantower.bsky.social
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With stories, poems, and art from @mytherea.bsky.social, @jennreese.bsky.social, @priyajsridhar.bsky.social, @stephanieburgis.bsky.social, @adriabailton.bsky.social, @acsaville.bsky.social, @ianli.bsky.social, Devin Miller, Joshua Gage, and Lena Ng!
0 replies 3 reposts 5 likes
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Marie Brennan
@swantower.bsky.social
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My second poem ever is out now from @omgjulia.bsky.social's Worlds of Possibility! You can pick up this very dragon-themed issue here:
1 replies 12 reposts 22 likes