Victorian Book Report: The Rise of Scotland Yard, by Douglas G. Browne

This book is a bit dated, having been written in the early 1950s, but it’s one of only two I could conveniently get that addressed the early years of policing in London. As far as readability goes, it’s on the dull side of the middle of the road; not too much of a slog, but not a shining example of nonfiction entertainment, either. (Which is a pity, because I expect this history would bear a much livelier retelling.)

Its virtue, though, is that it begins by summarizing the systems that preceded the Metropolitan Police — and not just the Bow Street Runners. Chapter 1 covers 1050 to 1600, talking about sheriffs, Justices of the Peace, watchmen, constables, etc. Then there’s a chapter about corruption among magistrates, that led to the Fieldings and Bow Street, then some very useful information about the Runners if (like me) you’re thinking about writing a short story in that period; then it dives into the politics of founding and developing a police force in London.

It still isn’t what I really need, which is a book that will give me details about how the Special Irish Branch went about dealing with Fenian conspirators in the 1880s. But I’ve e-mailed the Metropolitan Police Archives to see if I can get help there, and in the meantime, this at least gives me some background to work from.

bookbookbooksiesBOOK

Ahem. What I meant to say was, I have ARCs of A Star Shall Fall, and I am doing my very best not to hug them and squeeze them and call them George, but it’s hard, because you put in months and months and months of work, and this is the first point at which it really starts to seem like that thing you poured your brain into is actually going to be a book.

In honor of that, I’ll jump the gun by three days and give you what I planned to post one hundred days before the street date: the prologue. More excerpts will come later, and other goodies too; and if you leave a comment to this post, I’ll put your name into the hat for a drawing, the winner to receive a signed ARC of A Star Shall Fall. (With bonus copy of In Ashes Lie, if the winner doesn’t already own it; I’ve ended up with an absurd number of those, and need to send them to good homes.)

So. Enjoy the prologue, comment here if you want an ARC, and while you’re at it, think about bidding on a piece of Onyx Court history.

Edit: this particular giveaway is now closed. But stay tuned; there will be others.

30K!

Got today’s writing done early, largely by dint of putting back in a half-finished scene I’d cut at the beginning of the month. Had to redo various bits of it, of course, but at least half of today’s wordage only required polishing, not invention from scratch. And this means I can run game tonight with a clear conscience, and not have to drag my brain to London after the session is done.

Word count: 30,006
LBR quota: We’re back to the Fenians, so it’s definitely rhetoric, with a forecast of blood.
Authorial sadism: No, Eliza, you still don’t get to talk to Miss Kittering.

translation question

I don’t suppose anyone reading this journal speaks Castilian Spanish? (i.e. the Spanish of Spain, not Latin America.) I could use some help with incidental words of a casual variety, like endearments and insults, that probably vary from culture to culture (and therefore shouldn’t just be pulled from a dictionary).

In which the Cat preaches it, again

Cat Valente on Lost:

But here’s the thing, guys. If you don’t want to get tarred with the SF brush, you don’t get to play with our toys, either. That means you do not get any of the following exciting action figures: monsters, immortal beings, time travel, alternate universes, glowcaves, Egyptian mythology, electromagnetic magic, insta-healing, psychic powers, Dark Lords, Lords of Light, magical touched by an angel fatecakes, teleportation, mystical islands, or bodily possession. Get your sticky hands off them–you’ll only break them. Make a sitcom and shut up, if you want to howl about not being SF. Make a gritty procedural. Make Thirty-Something, I don’t know. But don’t make an SF show and then prance around telling everyone it’s SUPER REALISTIC while trying to conceal your painful giant quantum rabbit erection. You can’t trot out all those shiny SF baubles and then refuse to develop them or treat them seriously.

And while we’re on the topic of TV and not respecting stuff? I’m at a point where I would like to ban all shows from touching the topic of sf/f community, including but not limited to: comic book fans, LARPers, Renfest folk, players of video games, and anything else of a remotely geeky stripe. Just leave them alone, TV people. You don’t understand those groups, and what’s worse, you don’t want to understand them; you just want to toss them in because you’ve decided to do an episode about people who are totally detached from reality and can’t keep their non-fantasy lives in balance with anything else. And you’ve decided we are those people. Kindly piss off, leave the geeks out of your police procedural or whatever it is you’re making, and stick with things you actually have respect for.

It’s not what Cat was ranting about, but it was on my mind, so I decided to kill two birds with one ineffectual blog post. After all, that’s what the internets are for.

The List (mostly)

For those who have been following the Adventure of the Book I’m Totally Not Working On, I Swear, here is the present list of knightly names:

  • Audacia (Courage)
  • Castimonia (Purity)
  • Justitia (Justice)
  • Misericordia (Mercy)
  • Obedentia (Obedience)
  • Patientia (Patience)
  • Reverentia (Reverence)
  • Sollertia (Skill)
  • Sophia (Wisdom)
  • Temperantia (Temperance)
  • Valentia (Strength)
  • Vigilantia (Vigilance)

I may end up tweaking it, but for now, that’s the set.

Now I’m off to see if I can convince myself to do my Victorian writing now, making my evening simpler, and also leaving me time to play with this . . . .

Victorian Book Report: The Victorian House Explained, by Trevor Yorke

I never wrote up a report on the first book I read out of this series, Georgian and Regency Houses Explained, but this can stand for both; they’re pretty similar works. Skinny little books with a lot of pictures, seemingly intended for a market consisting of people who occupy or otherwise have an interest in the houses of different periods: there’s a timeline at the back, showing when different features came into and went out of fashion, so you can try to ID your house (or renovations thereof) by time period.

But in the course of serving this need, Yorke does two very useful things: first, he gives an overview of how styles changed over time (between the Georgian and Regency periods, or throughout the loooooong Victorian period), and second, he breaks the houses down by class of room, giving sample floorplans, and talking about how those rooms would be decorated. He’s much more interested in fixtures than furniture — with this book in hand, I could probably date a coal grate to within about twenty years — but where the actual structure is concerned, his books are a minor goldmine. (The Victorian book of this series lacks the stultifyingly boring section showing different kinds of drainpipes and door styles that the G&R book had; I tried to pay attention to that bit last time, but really, unless you’re trying to date the house you live in by the depth of the window-box, its use is limited.)

He’s done a whole series of these things — “England’s Living History” — not just for houses but also bridges, churches, even narrowboats. They’re all fairly small, but based on the data sample I have so far, clear and useful for the topics they cover.

Okay, new question

My brain is blurring out from staring at lists of Latin nouns, so I’m going to throw this a bit wider open and see what the commentariat can suggest.

In this totally hypothetical story that I’m totally not working on, there is a group of female knights under holy orders, in a secondary-world setting modeled on medieval Europe, serving the Queen of a place that will probably look like France. I want their names to form a list of the virtues they are supposed to uphold. (There is room for irony here, as they will not always live up to those names.)

What virtues would you expect to see on that list?

I need a total of twelve; suggest as many as you like. Bonus points if you can provide me with Latin nouns matching your suggestions, ending in either -tas or -ia — I’m trying to see if I can get a satisfactory set without having to rejigger any of the Latin. (I can put together twelve on either pattern, but not without leaving out some concepts I think I’d like to include.)

a question for the Latin geeks in my readership

Imagine you are reading a story wherein members of a particular group are all named with Latin nouns for virtues or good qualities. (This is not simply a meta trick on the author’s part; the meaning of those names is acknowledged in-story. The setting is, however, a secondary world, wherein Latin is being used to fulfill a role more or less like it does in reality.) Most of the names are genuine third-declension nouns following the -tas, -tatis model — e.g. Pietas, Honestas — but a few are clearly adapted from first declension nouns so as to make for a consistent pattern — e.g. Justitas from justitia. The rest of the Latin in the story is grammatically correct.

Feel free to elaborate on your perspective in comments.

belated link

This is two days late — I was out of the house more or less all of Sunday, and busy yesterday — but I wanted to link to this month’s SF Novelists post, “Who Mary Sue Isn’t.” (Shorter version: I’m really tired of hearing the term, because I think it’s gotten so vague as to be near-useless, and its implications frequently bother me.)

Comment over there; no login needed.

two charitable causes, again

Because my first Onyx Court history offer went in less than two hours, I’m doing a second one, this time without the “Buy It Now” price: go here to bid on your own piece of historical faerie fiction. (Now with bonus “Special Richard III Disclaimer.”) The auction ends on May 23rd, so get your bids in soon!

Also, the Brenda Novak auction for diabetes research is still ongoing, and there are still a pair of signed Onyx Court novels up for sale.

NO.

Dear Brain,

No. No, no, no, no, NO.

There are many things we need right now — an answer to the question the stranger just asked Dead Rick, a precise outline for how Eliza and Miss Kittering are going to achieve a state of conflict-balance, some sense of what’s going on with the Society — but NONE of them are the premise for a random secondary-world YA fantasy series.

Even if it involves an order of holy lady knights who run around spying for the Queen they’re sworn to protect.

You know perfectly well what this is. We’ve entered into the Stage of Oooh Shiny, where everything looks enticing except the book we’re supposed to be writing. Put the shiny down, and get back to Victorian England.

(After all, I’ve already written half a page of notes for the YA-knights idea. Maybe we can do more later tonight.)

Er, I mean, NO! No new shiny. Work on old shiny instead. I promise, there’s plenty of fun to be had there.

Not nearly as cross as she should be,
Your Writer

slogging through tonight’s words

On the bright side? I’m saving my editor a lot of work. Because I’m pointing out to myself things like “it would be better to actually show Miss Kittering sooner than the 25K mark” and “if you don’t get Ailis in here somehow, she’ll come out of nowhere in Part Two” long before this manuscript comes anywhere near him.

Mind you, it leaves me in fear that this is going to be the most recursively-written novel I’ve ever produced — but since the recursion is at present adding to my wordcount rather than subtracting or replacing, I’m okay with that.

Back to the last hundred words. Then I get to sack out and watch TV.

Best of Talebones

For those who enjoyed my story “The Twa Corbies” (audio here), you’ll be pleased to know it’s going to be included in Patrick Swenson’s upcoming Best of Talebones anthology. I’ll announce the full ToC when he sends it out; given the great fiction the magazine published in its fourteen-year run, I expect there will be a lot of awesome names included.

Admittedly, there *is* a downside.

Not counting a one-shot LARP, I’ve run two games in my life: Memento and the Scion game currently in progress.

The year I ran Memento was the year I did not write a novel.

If there’s a causal relation there, it goes in the direction of “no novel, ergo free time for a game.” I was in negotiations with my editor for what I would write next, and reluctant to commit to a spec project just to fill time, when odds were good that I’d have to drop it halfway through in order to do something contracted instead. The causality was not that running a game ate the energy which would have otherwise gone into a novel.

(And the negotiations ended up settling on Midnight Never Come anyway, which grew directly out of Memento. So.)

But it is true that I did not write a novel while running that game. This year is the first time I’ve tried to do both at once, and the result is . . . interesting.

I’ve been thinking for a while that I need to find a way to build some downtime into my noveling process. The usual way of things is that I work virtually every day for three or four months straight, and at the end of it I have a book. But that’s exhausting, and after two months or so I start getting really bitter about not having weekends or days off.

One idea I’ve toyed with is giving myself a break on Thursdays. That’s the day I run the game, and it turns out to be singularly difficult to get anything done then — especially since I have physical therapy appointments Thursday afternoons, too. So I spend part of my afternoon at PT, and the rest of it prepping for game; since I am not a morning writer, that leaves me with only the time after the session ends to do any work. Which requires a rather massive change of gears in my head: game and book may be only about nine years apart temporally speaking — 1875 and 1884, respectively — but one’s in the Western frontier and the other’s in London, and their vibes are VERY different. Last week I managed 733 words after game because I knew where the scene was going, but last night I did jack, because the scene needed chewing and my brain already had its mouth full.

I’ve built in enough margin of safety that I could afford to take Thursdays off and still finish the book on time. But it does eat a large portion of that margin of safety: if the book runs long, or I miss days for reasons of backtracking or being sick or whatever, I’ll still end up with some crunch time — though hopefully not as bad as it was for Ashes and Star. On the other hand, once PT is done, odds go up substantially that I’ll be able to do at least some writing during the day, so I can then give my brain over to Scion with a clear conscience. So I think what I’ll do is this.

Until PT is done, I have permission not to write on Thursdays. I should, however, try to make up that lost ground in subsequent days, if I can do so without too much trouble. After PT is done, I’ll try to write something every Thursday before game, even if it’s not the full quota; if I manage that, I’m not required to play catch-up afterward. Put that together with the more complicated background math (involving certain things that add to the word total of the book, but don’t get counted toward quota, etc), and this should work out.

But yeah. Unsurprisingly, running a game eats many of the same processing cycles in my brain that book-writing does. (Moreso than if I’m just playing in a game, by quite a bit.) I do believe I can do both — I will certainly try — but this is going to require some awareness and planning on my part.

London Trip IV: Return of the Revenge of the Bride of the Trip

la_marquise_de made me realize I hadn’t actually said anything about this publicly.

I’ll be making my fourth research trip to London at the beginning of June, arriving late on the first and leaving on the tenth. I don’t have my schedule for that planned out yet, but if you are London-local, drop me a line (either here or by e-mail), and I may try to arrange some kind of dinner one night. No promises — it depends on what the schedule ends up looking like — but I think it would be fun.