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Hey, brother mine! Follow this link. :-)

I’m in another Mind Meld over at SF Signal, this time with Wil Wheaton! (And others.) The topic this time around is the iPad — what we think of it, whether we own one, whether we’re ever likely to. Attitudes generally seem positive, but if your mileage varies, feel free to say so in the SF Signal comments.

(You could say it here, too, but I suspect the livelier discussion will be over there. Me, I’m likely to just shrug. This isn’t a topic I’m deeply invested in.)

things that make me happy

. . . because this is the kind of language geek I’ve turned into.

According to the OED, I am now permitted to use “fucking” as a intensifier in sentences (e.g. “Get out of my fucking house”). It’s certainly attested by 1893 — in a slang dictionary, which suggests it wasn’t brand-new — and likely appeared as early as 1864. Which is delightful, because outdated vulgarity just doesn’t carry as much impact, and right now I need Dead Rick to be as forceful as I can possibly make him sound.

I’ve fudged my word choice a little in the previous books, in cases where I just couldn’t find an equivalent period term. (Like the use of “medieval” in Midnight Never Come: that’s a nineteenth-century word.) And a few of those instances were slang-related, because it’s so hard to find evidence of truly casual and non-standard speech from more than a couple of centuries ago. One of the lovely things about moving forward in time with this series is that my available vocabulary, standard and otherwise, gets larger with every book.

We now return to the scene that is causing Dead Rick to swear.

two links of a political nature

I’m hardly the only person to post this one, but it deserves as wide a readership as it can get: Imagine If the Tea Party Was Black.”

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protester — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic?

One of many examples, flipping the colors on Tea Party activity to expose the racism and white privilege that runs throughout the movement. This isn’t just about the hideously offensive signs some protesters have proudly waved; take those away, and race would still be a major element, however much they like to deny it.

And, on the class-warfare front: Profiling CEOs and Their Sociopathic Paychecks.

Only about 1 to 3 percent of us are sociopaths-people who don’t have normal human feelings and can easily go to sleep at night after having done horrific things. And of that 1 percent of sociopaths, there’s probably only a fraction of a percent with a college education. And of that tiny fraction, there’s an even tinier fraction that understands how business works, particularly within any specific industry.

Thus there is such a shortage of people who can run modern monopolistic, destructive corporations that stockholders have to pay millions to get them to work. And being sociopaths, they gladly take the money without any thought to its social consequences.

I can’t say for sure how strong the logic is; I wouldn’t be surprised if there are also social reasons, linking CEOs to shareholders such that the latter don’t mind paying hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to their friends. But at the very least, it offers an argument for why there isn’t enough competition to drive CEO pay down.

in which the gimpy feet begin to ungimp

Went for a walk around the neighborhood today. Partly because, although I don’t want to court skin cancer, I’m a little appalled at how pasty I’ve gotten; it means I’ve spent too much time indoors. Partly because yesterday a trip to the Stanford library (which requires a moderate bit of walking) was way more exhausting than it should have been, and if I’m going to walk around London again, I need to get me some endurance back.

Thursday was my first physical therapy appointment. The woman tested strength and range of motion on my left foot (for a baseline) and then on my right, and we talked about the ancillary problems I’ve got aside from the surgical recovery — collapsing arches, plantar fascitis, metatarsalphalangeal sprain (say that one five times fast), and some mechanics issues of long standing, to whit, my extremely limited range of dorsiflexion. For the time being, my primary assignment is to stretch out all the muscles stiffened by my time in the boot; to that end, I’m actually not wearing the brace all the time, because it would just continue restricting my range of motion. Plus it presses on one of the two incisions in a moderately uncomfortable way, which is less than ideal.

The orthopedist cleared me to start biking again, though he advised wearing the brace. I’ll probably give that a few days more before I try it, but the idea appeals. It gets me out in the sun (which we’re finally getting a bit of), and helps regain what endurance I had, and I can accomplish some errands in the bargain. All good stuff.

In the meantime, I sit around and make faces while I point my toes. I will get this mobility back; it’ll just take some time and mild suffering. But that’s okay by me.

more researching

I’m about to go pick up a mess of books on Irish immigrants in Britain, and I’ve recalled a couple of Scotland Yard histories from Stanford’s auxiliary library facility, but in the meantime: does anybody have a specific recommendation for a history book that would talk about the Fenian bombings of the 1880s, and the early history of the Special Branch in investigating them?

I tell ya, my brain . . . .

I rarely remember my dreams, but I know that last night my brain decided it should mash together the two big things sitting around in it. Which is how I ended up trying to find my orthopedist’s office in the V&A.

I don’t know; I just work here.

Speaking of work, time to finish Eliza’s adventures in Regent Street and get to the bit where Special Branch is breathing down her neck.

things I have not been able to suss out

Hey, historians! Can anybody tell me when the north bank of the Thames was properly embanked/walled/whatever, east of the Victoria Embankment? That one formally ends at Blackfriars, and I’m trying to figure out what the riverbank would look like to someone standing a bit further east (between Blackfriars and Queenhithe) in 1884. As in, is it a mess of wharves and wooden pilings and what-have-you, or has someone built a nice tidy stone wall by then?

Why yes, I am obsessive about my details. How could you tell?

Anyway, my books don’t say, and I can’t get the Internet to help me. Possibly my fu is just not on tonight. And yeah, Peter Ackroyd has that whole book on the Thames, but it’s 11 p.m. and even Amazon Prime can’t teleport things to my desk. So I figured I’d ask and see if anybody can answer the question without me having to add to my research shelf.

Okay, I’ve got one.

I found something new to post, that didn’t require much jinking to make it web-ready: “But Who Shall Lead the Dance?”

This originally came out in Talebones, whose fourteen-year run came to an end last fall, much to my sadness. Patrick Swenson published three of my stories in total: this, “The Twa Corbies,” and “The Snow-White Heart,” which was in their final issue. (You can still buy back issues here.)

. . . you know, posting this has reminded me of something I forgot. Namely, that this story tried to turn into a ballad as I was writing it. You can see that in the style — this was the first real stylistic experiment I ever tried writing — the rhythm of the “But who shall lead the dance?” suggested the end of a ballad stanza to me, and everything else followed from there.

Maybe I’ll revisit that, and actually try to write it as lyrics, just for fun. No doubt I’ll fall on my nose; poetry and related forms are not something I’m good at. But hey, it’ll be good exercise. And the silly thing’s halfway there already.

Happy International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day!

Oh! I do have a fifth thing. Today is International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, when writers celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday by collectively thumbing their noses at a certain past vice-president of SFWA and posting fiction for free online.

I was all proud of myself for having picked out a story to post this year, only to discover two minutes ago that it’s one I posted in the past. So I, er, don’t have anything new to share at the moment. But this page lists all the fiction of mine that is readable for free online (either in e-zine archives or on my own site), and if I manage to get something else sorted out today I’ll be back to post that later.

The IPSTP community has many, many more links. Enjoy!

cleaning out Firefox

March for Babies — The link is to the fundraising page for the family of a friend, but I link to it because of a different friend, who has endured one of the most difficult pregnancies I’ve ever heard of, and will soon be giving birth to a pair of preemies. So supporting maternal and infant health is something I’m a bit keen on right now.

On a lighter note: Why the Library of Congress is Archiving Tweets — I find this deeply nifty, because they’re right: the value of an individual tweet is fairly low. But taken in the aggregate, they form a corpus of high historical value, for certain kinds of research. And Twitter and the LoC seem to be taking a reasonably sane approach to what they’re archiving and how, and how access to it will be managed.

On a note of high hilarity: Marella Sands on the language of sex in vampire fiction — specifically, comparing old-school Polidori and Stoker approaches to the Anita Blake series today.

Another Sirens update — Registration costs go up after April 30th, so if you’re on the fence about going, try to decide quickly!

That’s four links, and everybody says five things make a post, so my fifth thing shall be, uh, me apologizing for only having four. (I actually do have a fifth, but it deserves actual discussion, so I’m saving it for later.)

Victorian Book Report: Strange and Secret Peoples, by Carole G. Silver

I first read this book just because I owned it. Then I re-read it three years ago, when I thought the Victorian book would be the next one I wrote in the Onyx Court series, before detouring through In Ashes Lie and A Star Shall Fall. Now I’m re-reading bits and pieces of it for reference, because this, ladies and gents, is the nineteenth-century answer to Katherine Briggs’ Pale Hecate’s Team. Briggs was analyzing fairy folkore and its literary expression in Shakespeare’s day; Silver is doing the same for the Victorians.

She breaks it down thematically: the origins of fairies, changelings and abductions, fairy brides, “racial myths and mythic races,” fairy cruelty, and flitting, the departure of fairies for their own lands (or sometimes Australia). Furthermore, she questions what these things meant to the Victorians, why these kinds of stories became popular; in the case of changelings, for example, she talks about disease (both physical and mental), and about social response to deviant behavior, and about the class-based and racial tensions within Victorian society, that strongly affected the way these stories were told and received, and who was doing the telling and receiving.

In other words, pretty much everything you’d want to write a Victorian fairy novel.

If I have one complaint, it’s that I want this book to be bigger. Only 234 pages, counting the endnotes; I’m sure there’s more to be said here, and I wish Silver had said it.

10K!

Thanks to April’s “500 a day” rule, missing several days has not prevented me from arriving at the 10K milestone on schedule.

For the record, the title hunt is still on. If you’ve sent me e-mail and not gotten a reply yet, I promise to take care of that soon. In the meanwhile, keep on suggesting; I appreciate all the help.

Word count: 10,025
LBR quota: It’s the River Fleet. I think it counts as blood.
Authorial sadism: Leaving Dead Rick standing knee-deep in the aforesaid Fleet, wondering whether he’s going to run into a tosher or Blacktooth Meg first.

Advice from the pro side

Keep notes.

Keep notes from the start. Write down what the characters look like, and where things are. If you invent a town or something along those lines, make a map, even if it’s just chicken scratches on the back of an envelope.

By taking such steps, you will save yourself the effort of having to reconstruct these things by scrounging for details in the three novels, one novelette, and one novella you have already completed. And when the thing you’re trying to map is a faerie palace which (you have abundantly established) doesn’t correspond in a logical fashion to the city above it, you will be very grateful that you have saved yourself this tedious and problematic work.

If you fail to keep notes, you will use up all your scratch paper trying to find a way to make it all fit together, so you can then decide where and how to break it for the purposes of the fourth book. So be smart from the start.

In other words, don’t be like me.

Freeeeeeeedommmmmmmm!

BRACE!!!

Ahem. That is to say, I have achieved Early Release from the boot (the four weeks will be up on Friday), and am now back to the ankle brace I was wearing prior to surgery.

Man, I had really grown to hate this thing in March. Now? It’s my bestest friend. Because it isn’t the boot.

I’m sitting here in my jeans — jeans!!! I haven’t worn these things for almost a month!!! — and I could put on a second shoe if I really wanted to, and I could also drive, or walk to the bank to deposit checks, though I’m not going to do that because it would be really easy to overdo this. I’ve already discovered that we’ll still be going down stairs the two-feet-on-one-step method for a while; trying to walk down them normally produced a twinge that said clearly, you’re not ready for this yet. Okay. Fair enough. Heck, I still feel off-kilter after (nearly) four weeks of having my right foot be higher than my left. Standing flat feels like my left leg is now longer than my right.

Physical therapy starts Thursday. I am very much looking forward to it.

in which I blame the gimpy feet

I’ve reached this weird point of procrastination, where I feel like I’m putting off practically everything until I get out of this damned boot. Folding laundry? I can do it later. Cooking anything? We’ll get back to that in a week or so. Research reading? I have no idea how I manage to blame this one on my foot, but I do. Everything can wait until I’m more mobile again.

So if you haven’t gotten a reply to some e-mail or LJ comment, blame my foot. It’s what I’m doing.

Things I am looking forward to, once I’m out of the boot:

  • Wearing two shoes again.
  • Wearing something other than sweatpants.
  • Carrying things down the stairs without worrying that full hands will compromise my already-compromised balance badly enough for me to fall.
  • Taking a shower without being paralyzed by an utterly irrational fear that I will somehow, against all odds, contrive to slip and fall and rip the ligament apart again.
  • Driving.
  • Physical therapy.

Yes, I really am looking forward to physical therapy. Because it’s something I can do, beyond just waiting. As I said after the surgery, this is the boring stage; I’m eager to get on to the stage that involves active progress, even if it’s tedious and/or painful to do.

thoughts on re-reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell

What a peculiar book this is.

I’ve said before that I kind of feel like it’s alternate genre history: if fantasy had been established as a publishing category on the basis of Lud-in-the-Mist instead of The Lord of the Rings, then books like this would be our giant blockbusters. Which is why it’s so peculiar that it was a giant blockbuster; sure, I can see the appeal of Harry Potter for a broader audience, but how on earth did an eight-hundred-page nineteenth-century fantasy novel, complete with footnotes, get so much mainstream love? Heck, how did it get published? You hear all these stories about editors reading a manuscript and saying, “I love it, but I can’t buy it because our sales people have no idea how to market it” — yet somehow they decided they could market this one. And they were right, but I’m still boggled that it happened in the first place.

It’s such a sprawling narrative that I know I lost track of many details the first time I read it; things were clearer a second time around. I was particularly struck by the resemblance to The King of Elfland’s Daughter — “We want magic!” <they get some> “Aaagh no take it back takeitback!” — the powerful sense of Elfland/Faerie being untamed, untameable, and not everybody’s prepared to deal with it but that’s what’s awesome about it. I think it’s no accident that everything I find myself comparing it to was written in either the 19th century or the 1920s. And it’s possible that’s why I find myself still a bit disappointed by the ending; the lead-up seems to be climbing this epic mountain, but it diverts just shy of the summit, as if the author can’t quite bring herself to do something so vulgar. But I really wanted to see the view from that summit, because it isn’t the same mountain all the so-called epic fantasies are climbing, and I think it could have blown the top of my head off. Instead it stopped about one step short, and started climbing back down.

For all that, though — and various other flaws — it still gives me many things to love. The footnoted commentary on different books and articles is a particularly excellent touch, at least if you’re the sort of geek I am, and of course I adore the humour created by an elegantly-phrased understatement. I just wish it would have climbed that one last step.

video games as art

Link from jaylake: Roger Ebert on why video games can never be art.

I’ve got a lot of respect for Ebert, but in this instance I think he fails signally to construct a rigorous argument for his point, even as he’s taking apart Santiago for the same failure.

I could go through his article responding line by line, but that would produce an incredibly long and rambling post, so I’ll try to just hit the central points. First off, he dings Santiago for “lacking a convincing definition of art.” Given that no one has yet managed to come up with a truly convincing definition, that’s a bit unfair. And indeed, he immediately follows that criticism by asking, “But is Plato’s any better?” Okay, so he recognizes the contentious nature of definitions in the first place — but then the rest of the paragraph is spent on his own definition, which at the end, boils down to taste. Art is the amazing stuff. Everything else is . . . something else.

He clearly means “art” as a category of quality, rather than anything structurally defined. Which is an approach I fundamentally disagree with. To pick the simplest way of pointing out the flaw of that argument: Ebert says video games aren’t art (and won’t be) because none of the examples he’s seen impress him. But I guarantee you there are movies that do impress him which would bore me stiff, while there are video games I consider artful. The message I take away from his argument is that my opinion doesn’t matter; only his does, and people who agree with him. And that’s why quality as the delimiter of “what’s art?” is a bad way to go.

More ways in which he’s wrong . . . .

GOT YOU.

Okay, fine, I was totally wrong about the remaining wordcount; you’re 7,410 words and obviously want to be a novelette since I know I rushed the ending. FINE. You can be a novelette.

You can be a novelette later, once I’ve mustered the will to revise you. But for now, “Mad Maudlin,” you are DONE. And that’s all I care about.

I go fall down now.

so. close.

Gaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh I am thisclose to being able to finish “Mad Maudlin” (no, I didn’t get it done last month) and the end of it is driving me batty. (Which is a funny joke, given the subject matter.) I just need to figure out what message Maud gives Peter, and then how to make the next bit happen in a dramatic way, and somewhere work in Peter doing that thing he shouldn’t do (moreso than he’s done already), and then it’ll be the tag scene and I’m done. We’re at 5,698 words, and there can’t be more than a thousand left, and WHY IS THIS STORY NOT DONE ALREADY.

Because I haven’t threaded my way through the last few twists yet, that’s why. Come on, brain, help me out on this one, and then we can sack out and watch Dexter. But until you do, we’re not going anywhere other than this chair, except maybe the bed to roll around and stare at the ceiling and try to figure things out. Work with me, here. We’re almost done.

Updated with revelation: Duh. You promised yourself this was a hack draft. This is you getting the framework down on the page, so you can go back and have experts help you make it better. So all that crap you’re worrying about is stuff you can fiddle with later. You’ll run it by three or four people to get the research stuff right, and then once you have that you can apply writer-brain and make it more exciting, and then you can have your crit group look at it and tell you where it still needs improvement. Obsessing over the finer points now may even prove to be a waste of time, as your clever ideas might get cut on account of being Wrong.

So just write the end, and let it suck, and worry about it later.