two historical bits

First of all, since everybody and their brother seems to be sending it to me right now: yes, I am aware of the online version of the 1898-99 Booth Poverty Map of London. (Apparently BoingBoing precipitated this flood?) My thanks to those of you who told me about it, but you can stop now.

(Not pissy; just a little bemused.)

Second: it’s buggy as hell, but Channel 4 in Britain has put up a flash game connected to their TV show, City of Vice. Both focus on the mid-eighteenth century Bow Street Runners, created by the magistrate Henry Fielding and his brother and successor John, who were arguably London’s first police force. I haven’t seen the show (since it isn’t out on DVD yet or anything, and I’m not the BitTorrent sort), but the first episode of the game is a fun little murder mystery. Unfortunately, the game is prone to hanging at odd points — I discovered a lot of complaints online, when I got frozen during a particular bit — so we’ll have to see if they fix those problems.

Don’t play it without a mouse, though; the bits that require coordination are apparently hell on a trackpad or any other such device.

Ich habe Buch!

You know what’s a wacky experience?

Flipping through a book and thinking, “I wrote this . . . but it’s all in weird funny-looking words with too many capital letters!”

Or, to put it differently — I have the German edition of Doppelganger! They sent me four author copies, which arrived yesterday. It’s very strange, I tellya. I can pick out enough words in German to be able to figure out which bit of the story I’m looking at, but not enough to read it much at all, so it’s very alien-looking. And man, some of those nouns get long. But it’s also boggling to think that somebody — one Axel Plantiko — spent who knows how many hours reading over my words and working this strange alchemy upon them.

It’s my book . . . but it isn’t.

Anyway, many thank-yous to Herr Plantiko, and eeeee! German book!

handwriting

One last follow-up on the signature thing, which is really just a ramble about handwriting.

I was thinking thinky thoughts about handwriting, of course, during that whole affair, and fortuitously happened across an article in Slate about the difficulties of deciphering various people’s scripts. Man, I pity the folks having to wade through that kind of stuff.

Which brings me to Elizabeth’s handwriting. One of the books I got out of the library while working on the contract language was a collection of her letters, poetry, etc. The book I was looking for was checked out, unfortunately, but I went to the appropriate section anyway, and sure enough found another one I could use. Not until I got home did I realize that fate had handed me a little gift: while the book I’d been after had modernized her spellings, this one consisted of direct transcriptions of every document we have that’s verifiably in Elizabeth’s handwriting. Not only did that mean her idiosyncratic spellings (which can be used, in part, to reconstruct her pronunciation!), but also strike-outs, marginal insertions, re-drafting of speeches . . . and a few photo images of the documents themselves.

First of all, that means the contract is written wherever possible with the spellings Elizabeth favored. (Geekiness, yes, yes, we know.) But it also means I got to look at her handwriting.

The first image is of a translated poem written either by Princess Elizabeth or her tutor. Nobody can tell which, because she, like many students, was copying her tutor’s hand scrupulously. It’s a very nice, clean italic hand, but lacking in personality, as you would expect. Later on they show a letter to Edward Seymour, and there you can see her developed italic, with various flourishes and personal touches that make it distinctively Elizabeth’s handwriting, and nobody else’s. If we’d had more time on the contract thing, I would have been supremely tempted to try and make a font out of it, so we could print the entire document in Elizabeth’s actual hand. But that’s neither here nor there.

The third document gets me right in the gut. Shortly after Mary ascended the throne, she sentenced Elizabeth to imprisonment in the Tower. Elizabeth, stalling for time, asked her guards for leave to write a letter to Mary; she took long enough over it that the tide changed on the Thames, and so her imprisonment was delayed by a day. The image shows the two pages of that letter: in that same italic hand, but messier, less artfully controlled. The lines slant upward, the letter-forms are sharper, and on the second page, uneven diagonal lines cross out the white space between the conclusion and the signature, so that no one could insert additional material that could compromise her already precarious position. The evidence of her worry and fear is breathtaking; looking at her handwriting, I see Elizabeth as a person, not as the much-mythologized Gloriana. She was young and scared and desperate not to be imprisoned. It’s a priceless glimpse into the past.

Aaaand then <snicker> there’s the fourth and last image. The introduction to the book had talked about the distinct shift in Elizabeth’s handwriting after she became Queen, as she adapted her style to her position. Honestly? I though at first that they meant it had become more ornate and regal.

She developed doctor handwriting.

The letter to Sir William Cecil is a nigh-illegible scrawl only vaguely recognizable as italic, or even as Engl — oh, wait, it’s Latin. <g> You can’t even tell at first glance what language it’s in. But (looping back around to that link up above), I understand now why people working on her manuscripts nowadays run into trouble. The letters m and n become vague horizontal wobbles; a’s might be caret marks or o’s. Often they can’t tell her n’s from her u’s, which leads to real trouble in her French letters; whether a word is “us” (nous) or “you” (uous, i.e. vous) can change the entire meaning of a sentence. Throw in the abbreviations and idiosyncratic spelling of the time, swirl it all in a blender (which I think she did), and you’ve got another powerful statement of personality. Elizabeth herself referred to it as “skribling” in a letter to James of Scotland, and a court secretary called it “Queen Elizabeth’s running hand.” It looks like she wrote while running.

It’s an incredible gift, being able to see her handwriting. Whether you buy into graphology or not, certainly our writing expresses our personalities very powerfully.

results of the signature contest

Now that I’ve heard back from everyone, I’m finally free to post, not just the winner of the signature contest, but all the entrants. I know a lot of people were curious to see what got sent to me, and I think everybody who contributed deserves recognition for their effort. (For the record, they are all receiving copies of Midnight Never Come; the winner also gets other goodies.)

In the end, fifteen people sent me entries; some sent more than one. You can see my favorite contribution from each contestant on my website, where I’m keeping them for posterity. As I said to several people, I’m very grateful to have gotten enough that I had the luxury of contemplating what to me looked the most like Invidiana’s handwriting; in the end, it came down to that. And it was a tough choice!

Second runner-up: Maggie Stiefvater, who sent me two entries. The other was more ornate, and I liked it a lot, too, but in the end, this was my favorite of the two:

First runner-up: John Pritchard. I liked this one a lot; the rough edges to the strokes looked very realistic, and in correspondence later he proved that (as I suspected) he knows a lot about the writing of the period:

And finally, the winner: Karen Jolley-Williams! She, too, knew what she was talking about when it came to period handwriting, but in the end she won by stepping back one degree into an older style, as she described in her e-mail to me: “I made the Faerie Queen’s letters blacker, more angular and cold, less Humanistic and certainly less approachable in personality than Elizabeth’s italic hand.” And indeed, the blackletter look ended up being the deciding factor for me. Step behind the cut to see . . . .

(more…)

for the curious

The Intergalactic Medicine Show has a blog, “Side Show Freaks,” where they regularly post short essays by their writers, about the stories published in the magazine. My piece about “Lost Soul” is up there right now, if you’re curious.

And then there were nine.

1686 yesterday, 5195 today, and we. are. done.

60095 words, not including the title, because this is the first time I’ve hit the end of the book without finding an acceptable name to slap on it. I blame the fact that it’s so damn short; if I had another 40K to think, maybe I would come up with something.

Not that I want another 40K, mind you.

The little niggling slave-driver in the back of my head is reluctant to count this as my ninth novel, since it’s less than half the length of some of the other ones I’ve written, and only three-quarters the length of even my shortest adult novel. But that’s YA for you. It’s a book by SFWA standards, so a book I shall call it, and it is the ninth such I have completed. And my first YA!

Time to go flop around like a landed fish and try to turn my brain off. (It hasn’t quite yet noticed that we’re done.)

a short fiction debate

That is, a debate about short fiction, not a short debate about fiction.

Jay Lake linked today to a “Mind Meld” up at SF Signal, where they had a number of people weigh in on the purpose of short fiction. The responses were thought provoking, both in the “yes, what she said” and “what crack are you smoking?” kind of way.

It starts with Gardner Dozois, whose answer reminds me of nothing so much as the “interviews” football players give after games, where they spout off the standard talking points: just focused on the game, gave 110%, couldn’t have done it without the rest of the team, etc. I’ve seen his answer again and again — but I’ve also seen things calling into question the validity of that answer, on a small or large scale. “[Short fiction is] still where the majority of readers find new writers whose work they enjoy” — really? Then why aren’t the subscription numbers higher? Or to put it differently, how are all those thousands of people who don’t read short fiction finding all the new authors busting out today — especially when many of those new authors don’t write short fiction in the first place? “For writers, short fiction is still the easiest way to break into print” — I’ve seen this one debated all over the place. Break into print, sure, given the many semi-pro and for-the-love markets out there, but there’s been evidence to suggest you have better odds of selling your first novel than getting a story into, say, Asimov’s. Ultimately it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison, and finding equivalent metrics for both is harder than you think. “Even today, the best way to break in and establish a professional reputation is to write and sell lots of strong short fiction” — best? According to what measurement? It isn’t best if short fiction isn’t your natural forte, and one solid novel will establish your professional reputation pretty quickly. Sure, editors may offer novel contracts to really well-known short story writers, but they also offer them on a regular basis to people who have never sold a short story in their lives. The days when “build a rep with short fiction, then try a novel” was the standard path to a career are gone, by most evaluations I’ve seen.

Ellen Datlow repeats some of the same points, but usually with a phrasing that makes the fallacies more obvious: “Publishing short fiction is still the quickest way to recognition for a terrific short story writer.” That’s very nearly a tautology: be awesome, and people will recognize your awesomeness. Publishing a novel is the quickest way to recognition for a terrific novelist, too. She also brings up the one that always annoyed me, before I learned to write short stories: “short fiction remains the best breeding ground for new writers because the form provides a smaller canvas with which to perfect their craft.” Sure — if a smaller canvas is your thing. But if it isn’t, then you’ll be stunting your chances of development by trying to force yourself into a smaller box. And writing short fiction won’t teach you to write a novel; at their best, the two forms influence each other, teaching lessons to carry across the divide, but as Jane Yolen pithily puts it down-page: “First, what short fiction is NOT. It’s not training-wheel fiction. Authors don’t practice on short fiction, nor do readers. It is a singular writing and reading experience.” (Mike Resnick hits the same point.) I think the standard advice does a disservice to those who are naturally inclined toward longer lengths — as I myself was, for many years.

But the responses further along contained some thoughts I found very apt. First of all, as several people pointed out — Jonathan Strahan, Andrew Hedgecock, Rich Horton — the question of vitality or lack thereof needs to be split into two parts, artistic and economic. The short story market is not thriving financially. But artistically? Absolutely. I think there’s no question that our genre has matured a great deal, to the point where we’re now positioned to try all kinds of boundary-pushing experiments. And that is a way in which short fiction can be like training wheels: I wholeheartedly agree with the many people who said that it’s the perfect venue for trying out something new, whether it’s a different genre, a new setting, or an unusual voice. (Case in point: “A Mask of Flesh.” I can get away with a Mesoamerican short story much more easily than a Mesoamerican novel.)

Short fiction has a valorized position in our field, especially in SF (as opposed to fantasy). I don’t think that’s a bad thing, but it gets up my nose when people then take that too far. It’s the difference between John Klima’s response and Gardner Dozois’; John presents it as “here’s what I like about it,” from which I can generalize that other people share his opinion, whereas Gardner presents it more as some kind of universal truth. But it’s not a truth for me, or for many of the writers I know, who didn’t follow the Standard Path to Success — which suggests it’s not half so standard as advertised.

Regardless, though — an interesting set of answers, and worth reading through if you’re at all involved in the field.