A Writer's Paradise

Until We Meet Again

I'm off to the mountains. And the plains. And the lakes.

I'm about to embark on a lengthy car trip to Montana, by way of the Midwest. It should be educational in the extreme. One of the things I will learn is how to get by without a computer for two weeks. I can't think of the last time I did that. I suspect it has been more than five years.

While the internet withdrawals may be extreme, what I'll miss more is simple joy of word processing. I'm having this mental conversation with myself: is one notebook enough? Are two pens enough? If they aren't, you can buy more. But that's a pain. Take two notebooks and three pens. Four notebooks and a dozen pens. No, scrap it, just take the laptop.

And then I have to remind myself that we'll be cramped for space on the return trip, that the laptop will doubtless be more hassle than it's worth in terms of the amount of time I'll actually be able to use it in a given day, and so forth.

But still. It's been the vehicle for my mode of writing for a long while now, and I'm actually wondering how much I can stand writing something by longhand knowing I have to type it all in again later.

Hm.

The travails of the modern age, I guess. At least I'll have my iPod.

Rejection; Plus, Virtue and Transparency

29-day rejection from Strange Horizons. A bit of a form letter, at that. Note to self: previous publication does not assure future personalization.

On the happier side of things, it looks like not-"Bound by Spells" is now a go for issue #4 of FARthing. I'm enjoying my communications with Wendy tremendously--she has a light touch and yet remains professional. I still, however, dn't really have a title change for her, even though I went to the trouble of going to the bar and brainstorming with some friends.

Yes. Really. That was the reason I went to the bar.

Well, actually, there was even MORE virtue to it, because my attendance there meant some portion of money was donated to 826michigan.

Other writing work I've done:

• Did another pass through of not-BBS, tweaking language and trying to avoid having everyone stand around and look at each other. (Realized on the way home that I could easily turn the story into a screenplay, as it's mostly dialogue.)
• Used Douglas Smith's Foreign Language Market List to wade into the whole foreign markets scene, and ambitiously decided to write a cover letter in French to the French market I'd chosen, and then chewed my fingernails over it for like--well, I'm still chewing my fingernails over that choice. French business letters are so incredibly formal. I'm so incredibly past the point of trusting my written French. My ability to hear and read French is substantially better than my ability to create it.
• Wrote steadily for one hour on "Almanac for the Alien Invaders," attempting to finish the story. Three scenes left, and I knocked most of one of them out at lunch today.

Quite virtuous, no?

Additionally, I got a second email from Interzone about the story that's being held there for a second reading. Jetse described the whole second reading process down to the brass tacks, including the dates that my story will be going around to the second readers (one of whom is the brilliant Ms. Williams). The transparency of the process is lovely, and just the right amount of information. Lord knows I wouldn't want blow-by-blow updates, but just knowing what date I can't possibly hear anything before is comforting.

So, rejection aside, it's been a pretty good day.

New Sub

I'm really, truly done with "Wedding Dress Tea Parties of 2443" and I'm sending it out tomorrow (today). This marks my first brand new submission since, oh, January? And that's even with a bit of cheating the statistic, since the thing I sent out in January was a trunk story that probably should've just stayed in the trunk.

This one, however, has been critiqued, and polished, and rewritten, and yes, it will totally be The Kiss of Death to say this, but, I have faith in it. I had such a good time writing it that I cannot think of a dim future for it. I have my markets laid out in strategic order, and there will be no stopping until I have rejections from each and every one of them. Needless to say, I'm hoping it won't come to that, but it's a freakin' novella, so good luck me!

Actually, by Nebula rules, it's a novelette. Hm. Now what did I read that convinced me otherwise? Anyway, it's 16,700 16,606 words long after the last revision pass.

I put in some good work on "Gesundheit, Nantucket" this weekend, but I don't know if the story has that thing. Actually, I feel that the story doesn't have that thing, so I'm inclined to stop working on it. On the other hand, if I stop now, I may never start again, and if it's finished, I can at least rewrite it some day. (Some day!) I'm not sure if this story has anything going for it but the reveal--by reveal, I mean the next best thing to twist ending.

This is always a hard spot to be in. You can almost sense the story going stale as you write it. I'm beginning to wonder if my low finish rate is more related to fundamentals being off than my procrastinatory skills. If I don't feel an important element while writing the story, it's very hard to finish it. And of course, it's easier to say what's missing in each specific story that does this than to extrapolate widely as to what all stories need... but this one seems missing character. I guess that's my problem--the story is all concept and I have no idea what the characters are trying to do or become. Okay! I may have a path to take out of the wildwood now, actually... never let it be said that blogging about writing doesn't serve a purpose, even if it's just to talk myself around.

Of course, identifying the problem--and then having it be one of the potentially biggest problems there is--isn't solving the problem.

Right, anyway. What I actually meant to be saying by the time I got this far into my entry was that next up, I'm intending to rewrite "Rampion in the Belltower." It's at 8,000 words right now. I think it could be 6,500 if I'm diligent. After that, I aim to finish "Almanac for the Alien Invaders" and then go on vacation.

My mom is trying to convince me I don't need my laptop on vacation, and I'm half-convinced. We're pressed for space on this trip for starters, and I don't honestly see myself hauling the thing out in hotel rooms and trying to write hunched over on hotel beds. Well! Okay, then. A big ol' notebook it is. And a pen, of course. Probably even two.

I may, indeed, go crazy on this trip, but since that's actually a daily risk, I won't remark any further upon it.

Life

...a single life-bearing world might seed an entire galaxy with life...

(found via Dan Goodman)

Does that not just give you the shivers?

Now, the thing we have to realize as science fiction writers is that even if life throughout the galaxy were fundamentally interrelated because of something like this, you still can't have everyone show up being bilaterally symmetrical and walking on their hind legs. There's enough variation in the known fossil record of Earth to extrapolate plenty of good aliens without going the nobby-head Star Trek route. Which--I know--they did because they had humans playing the aliens. I'm not spanking Star Trek.

Book 40

How to Write a Damn Good Novel by James N. Frey (40) [non-fiction]

I dithered on this book for a while. I checked it out of the library--twice. I nearly took it back--twice. I kept it in my bag instead of tossing it in the book return because I paged through it in a moment of boredom at work and happened across a few interesting paragraphs. But every time I sat down to read it cover-to-cover, I lost the plot.

I've read a lot of books on writing craft in the last couple of years--more than I ever thought I'd read. It's nice when someone can explain a concept in a way that finally gets through to you, after all those years of wondering what the hell people were talking about exactly when they use the jargon of reading and writing. We learn about climax and denouement in eighth-grade English class (if not sooner), but you have to try writing a story a few times for it to pick up meaning, and even then, you might not be able to articulate exactly what you learned, or what you think you learned, or what you know you didn't learn.

So, I guess that's why I read writing books at this point. This book in particular was helpful with things like identifying how a climax actually works--Frey suggests the climax is the point where the story turns upside down, which is far more helpful to me than drawing a little peaky mountain graph about rising action. Frey also had the helpful advice to authors to make sure their characters are working to maximum capacity--I believe this is a good way to avoid idiot plots in short, and makes the characters more engaging in the long run. And doesn't it seem obvious, really? It probably is obvious. But it's something I needed to hear, and in this way.

Well worth the double double-checking out.

Is this the end?

I love Duotrope's Submission Tracker so much that it may be about to supplant my stats page in my heart. We'll see how long I happily maintain both before it becomes old hat. (I would probably keep up the scoreboard and do away with the monthly chart before giving up the project entirely.)

Of course, this is a free service being run out of the goodness of someone's heart (at the root of it), and of course, they take donations. Apparently, if everyone who used the service donated, it'd only cost about $4 a year per person--and I feel like I've already gotten $4 of use out of it this week alone--so I'm on board with donating. (The Theme Calendar alone may be worth it!)

And since stats reporting is the bread and butter of good rejectomancy:

Further Rain Delays

New site design has been delayed by weak geek-fu, and rolling six ones on my "implement new site" effort. I quite literally wrote over the new site with the old one while attempting to back up the old one.

I salvaged three pages. It will take some time to turn them back into 15/20 pages, as I'd done some heavy editing.

I'm going to put the internet away now, and muse on how lucky I am that it wasn't a novel that I lost.

Updates on Rain Delay, but Blueberries Today

I had a couple of dandy things to blog about yesterday and the day before, but access to my website was intermittent if not nonexistent. And when I decided to roll out my new site design, similar problems intervened.

I've got a beautiful blue bowl full of blueberries--the blues don't match, but they do complement each other. It helps that the interior of the bowl is cream-colored. It wouldn't be as pretty if it were blue on blue.... I thought I would be eating them more slowly than I am, but I'm gobbling them six or eight at a time.

Oh, and I just finished watching the movie The Love Letter with Kate Capshaw and Tom Selleck... I thought I'd read the book within the last five years, but I guess not (it doesn't appear anywhere in the blog). I remembered it quite well--the movie followed the plot rather stringently. I also remember not really liking the book all that well, but the movie was pretty, and the characters were more likeable for having likeable actors portray them. Altogether an unusual event, for me to like a movie better than a book, so I thought I'd note it.

I'm very nearly finished on my "Wedding Dress Tea Parties" rewrite. As it happens, I don't technically have to add anything else new, but I think there is maybe a two-paragraph scenelet that might help smooth things along. But after that, it's all smoothing, so that the worldbuilding makes sense from beginning to end, esp. now that I've got it totally worked out. I'm now up past 16,000 words, but I adore this novelette so much that I don't think my love would die were it to become a novella.

It's interesting to me that I'm all right with being in love with my story. It goes against my objectivizin' heart, and I've been burned fairly badly by loving stories that probably don't deserve it. Nonetheless, here I am, in love again...

Site redesign goes live v. soon now. After that, the next project is switching out Movable Type for Wordpress. I'm still weighing the pros and cons of that, but I'm pretty sure WP is going to win in the short term. If I back the whole thing up properly and WP sucks, I can just go back, right? Right.

And also, the blueberries are gone now.

A Day's Work...

Laziness was my day's work. I slept later than I intended (I got up at 7:30, wandered around the house, couldn't find anything compelling to do, and went back to bed), coming fully awake at 10:30. I read Princess Academy until Dann woke up (sometime later), and wandered downstairs to watch television and eat not-lunch until it was nap-time again. Got back up at 4:30, went to dinner, came back....

At 7:30 I prepared to prepare to write. I set an alarm for 15 minutes later, and filed papers. When it went off, I set another 15-minute alarm for cleaning my office. It's very nearly bearable in here now. Another 15 minutes for checking internets. Then I opened "Wedding Dress Tea Parties" and poked at the rewrite. The final scene is much, much better. Good? I don't know. It's so much better than it was that it seems good, but at the same time, it was so hard to end, I don't think it is good, after all. These characters just don't know how to shut up. And they want to be schmoopy, and I can't let them.

Then, back to the extended grind of rewriting the beginning. I hit the right note with the new opening scenes, yes, but now there is the first dinner, and I am balking. There's a bit of exposition that I'm trying to make more friendly. Elizabeth Bear and her circle call what I'm trying to do inpositioning, which sounds so much like "impositioning" when you say it out loud that I think that these two things must be kissing cousins: do it wrong, and it's an imposition on your readers, and far worse than what a lump of exposition would have done.

Naturally, after my second snack run downstairs, the telly lured me in and I had to watch two episodes of Spaced, which has so many geekly in-jokes that it feels like a show my friends would make just to entertain us.

Now I'm back upstairs and full of cheese popcorn... I'm back to avoiding the WDTPfinal.doc file and wondering if it will be a hugely bad thing to write something completely different tonight. I've got another couple hours before the sleepies kick in, and I'm in a weird mood. And weird moods make for some pretty interesting fiction, I've found. Plus, the moon is up and I'm a bit melancholy. Time to be all that I can be, or something like that...

Books: Fashion in Costume and Princess Academy

Fashion in Costume, 1200-1980 by Joan Nunn (38) [non-fiction] (reread?)

I think I read this book long ago in Durham. If so, it had nearly the same squiggles around various medieval ensembles as this copy did, with notes from community theatre costumers: "Juliet" and "Nurse," for example, all through the 14th century costumes. Honestly, I think I recognized the drawings, not the text...

Since I'm not an expert, merely a writer trying to keep some sort of authenticity in her fantasy medieval worlds (and Regency and Renaissance worlds, too), I can't tell you how good the book is. I thought it was good. I dutifully copied down bits of information like the fact that it wasn't until the early 1600s women had night chemises instead of just sleeping in their day chemises or the buff. Good stuff. I hope it doesn't lead me astray...

Princess Academy by Shannon Hale (39) [young adult]

Different than I expected, but satisfying enough for all that. The plot seemed a little heavy on the love parts, but the introductions to diplomacy and commerce were very cool. I was kind of hoping for a view of the wider world; it was a little bit as if Mel in Crown Duel never made it off her mountain. Perhaps that's the problem with mountain books? I don't know. I had a brief moment of trepidation in realizing this was a YA fantasy about mountians and royalty, but I can safely say it's nothing like what I've written. (I'm still worried about The Giver, though. And not for the mountains.)

Anyway. It's good to read fresh YA.

On the other hand, I don't know how to give up

...sometimes I think the real problem with The Bitter Road is that it's a book about setting as much as it is anything else, and I can't properly write a book about mountains while living in a flat land.

I'm going to see how I feel about shelving the book after I visit the Grand Tetons in a few weeks.

(In the meantime, I'm going to declare this short story month, part deux--helpful now that it's half over and I've already been writing short stories for all of it. The goal is to do my rewrites on the two stories I completed recently, to finish a third and rewrite it, and to rewrite one to two more stories. If I am successful, this will bring my inventory up from five to nine or ten. This is still three shy of my ideal--I have a superstition that I sell best when there are thirteen stories in inventory, though lately I've had ample evidence to the contrary--but it's a good start, and enough to feel like I'm in the game whilst working on novels again.)

Ponderations

I don't know if it's Mur Lafferty's familiar Southern accent* that swayed me, or her sweet reason, but her recent podcast about choosing to shelve her first novel really spoke to me.

I'm not quite to the same point yet on my first novel, but I'm 75% there. I know I can make it better than it is. I don't believe I can make it good enough to sell. I think I'd be better served by writing another novel and then taking a stab at rewriting The Bitter Road. It's just a matter of convincing myself that it's really okay to revise my plan yet again, since that makes me feel... flighty. On the other hand, recent successes have led me to think that maybe it's okay to be flightly as long as I'm getting results.

There are so many good things in The Bitter Road, and so many good things to add to it, but I may have to face facts: there aren't enough good things in it. I don't think it's the kind of book I'd have wanted to read when I was eleven. But I don't think it's an issue of I don't know how to do such a thing--it's just that I didn't manage it on the first time through. The plot is too constrained by being the first book in a trilogy, perhaps, and when the time comes to rewrite it, maybe I can bust out* of that mindset.

I don't know. I do think I'll declare this my self-indulgent month and think about Brook and her road after I get back from Montana--at the earliest.

Thanks for sticking with the angst-pangs of the first novel--if you've read this far.

* It's very clearly a North Carolinian accent, the kind of educated Southern accent I grew up with that sounds nothing at all like any kind of Southern accent I've ever heard anyone pretend to do. Even Andy Griffith's NC accent doesn't sound quite right to me--too much mountain twang, I guess?--but Mur's is like "pretend you're back in Durham." Soothing, after twelve years of hard Midwestern nasals, many of which insultingly come from my own sinuses now.

** Another North Carolina memory: the president of Food Lion walking through a green house on a TV commercial and saying "Spring is bustin' out all over!" and my 8th grade grammar teacher freaking out about it in class.

Predictive Power

Yesterday I wrote: Either my response got lost in the spambox, or they're actually considering the story.

And today I got a note that said they are actually considering the story.

So. Rejectomancer 1, Universe's Perverse Sense of Humor 0.

Well, that's today's score. It's really more like, Rejectomancer 1, UPSoH 3,847.

(Have you ever noticed that numbers ending in seven are funnier?)

I think I've got a new title for this blog, by the by... The Rejectomancer.

This is the way we rejectomance...

So, I'm a few days late in updating my stats page--I'm archiving June and putting a fresh July on the board.

Here's how it goes.

First item on the short story list was "Bound"--my shorthand for "Bound by Spells," which won't, of course, be called that in the end. It's satisfying to take it off the tally board, yes, but it's always a bit sad to bring down the "sold!" signs. On the other hand, "Bound" has been on and off the board since June of 2004, though it hasn't been to all that many markets really. The time it spent off the board, it was being rewritten--mostly, anyway, though I did hit that one period of depression where I thought no one anywhere would ever get the story, and it spent one sad month in the trunk before I gave myself a talking-to.

Buh-bye, "Bound." Your position at number one will now be taken by "Library"--shorthand for "The Library Seed," which has been to hardly any markets, and has a semi-storied history. Or, as storied as it gets for an unpublished short story written on spec by a neo-neopro. It was Kelly Link's Editor's Choice at the OWW, something I keep failing to put in my cover letters. And by failing, I mean, "am slightly unsure if I should include that or not." Anyway. Its rejection slides off the board, and its slot is all pretty and pristine now. Each submission is a fresh start.

"Lonesome"--code for "The Lonesome Dark"--moves to slot two. I had a response from the editor at some point that was half acceptance and half rewrite request, but since resubmitting have gotten no new feedback. I should query again. I'm a bit of an idiot for not having done so sooner, but I didn't want to be a goof. I know slushers at that mag, though, and keep thinking I should ask them, since if my mail isn't getting through... I didn't want to be a pest, and I didn't want to get a rejection, and now it's six months after my last query, and I'm not a rejected pest, but I am a moron. Resolved: query tomorrow. If no answer this week, ping the slushers I know.

Item three is "Souls"--"Souls on a String." Now we actually get into the science of rejectomancy. Right-click on that link to the Black Hole and choose "open link in new tab." (Or "window" if you're not a Firefoxian.) I know "IZ" has a rather lengthy average turn-around on the Black Hole, but Jetse de Vries seems to get stuff done rather more quickly these days, and my earlier opinions about "IZ" have been overwritten, so I click through to the data. 'Kay, my sub was on 5/29, and the last sub on the list was on 5/25. They got a response by 6/24. By that logic--and the logic of the last few rejections on the list, I should have a response by now.

Either my response got lost in the spambox, or they're actually considering the story, but I won't actually consider querying for another month. Probably not for two months. I find the stated response time and the Black Hole average and pick some time semi-related to those periods and query based on that. There's a sliding scale involved, of course. I also check Rumor Mill topics and other forums before querying just in case that there are some circumstances at play. But in this case, I'll give it another two months first. And I'll probably get a rejection tomorrow, because that's how these things work out 90% of the time.

I have to think about "Sun" even less. "Sun" is code for a variety of titles, my favorite being "Sun's East, Moon's West," but I've had others because I keep hearing no one likes my title. Oh, well. Anyway. Off comes the rejection. Clean as a whistle. Won't even think about getting antsy here. I just sent it off in June, and for this mag, the stated response times aren't.

Now--"Tertio/PP" is code for a story with a similarly changeable title which was the flash version of a story I don't know how to write as a short story. I sent that to the Interfictions anthology. Their guidelines say something like "you'll hear something after July 2006" and it's not after that yet. So--I expect to come home from vacation to a response. Naturally, I expect rejection, but that's because it's a smarter thing to do than expecting a sale. Also--I'm not sure I know what interstitial means. I was rather thinking format, not content, when I submitted there. Hm.

Finally, my submission to A Field Guide to Surreal Botany, which is rather a one-off sort of thing, but I'll certainly count it in my stats. Honestly--besides the subject matter, which is awesome--it was the payment terms that deeply attracted me to the anthology. Besides the $.01 a word and the copy of the anthology, authors will be paid with "a certificate conveying lifetime membership in the Surreal Botanists Association." Anyway, there's no querying on that (sez me), and I can only hope that if rejected, said rejection comes soon so that I can make another submission before the reading period closes...

All right. The stats page is now clean. Reset all counters to 0... And on to the rewriting, so I can have something in the new subs column. I am all ready to take my two most recent stories by storm, and I think there's an older story lingering in the rewrite folder that I might be able to do justice to now. Or is there a statute of limitations on rewriting? Do stories between draft 1 and draft 2 ever go stale?

We'll find out.

Book: The Bronte Project

The Brontë Project : A Novel of Passion, Desire, and Good PR by Jennifer Vandever (37) [fiction]

Since anything I said about this book would be shadowed by the disappointment that this is not the book I hoped it was, I'll say nothing. Or at least, not much. This should have been my kind of book, but it just wasn't. I can't recommend it to anyone, because I don't think I know anyone whose kind of book this would be. But I don't have a particularly wide acquaintanceship, so.

But beyond the jacketflap managing to mislead me--and I admit, I wanted to be misled....

Mostly, I just didn't like the humor. If it was meant to be humor. And I wasn't moved by any of it. If there was meant to be movement. So. When I want a 21st century novel about 19th century novelists, I'll stick with The Jane Austen Bookclub.

*thud,* as they say

Done: "The Wedding Dress Tea Parties of 2443," complete at 15,000ish words.

My first novelette. It's probably too much opera, not enough space (in fact, it's not space opera at all, in spite of early assessments.) It is intended to be a comedy of manners crossed with a screwball comedy, but I don't know how well I did.

But it's done.

It's been a rocky road. (Mmmm. Rocky road. Ice cream.) I wrote the first two thirds of it a while ago, and have been chipping away at it for some months years. Okay, a year and a half. Maybe two (man, I love having a log). I had some worldbuilding problems, really. I had to talk them over with my friend and best sounding board, Julie, two or three times, and she helped me see my way through this society.

I came up with the very basic core of the idea long before the spam got to me. I got the idea, in fact, in high school, when colleges were spamming me with their brochures. I'd begun reading Regency romances around that time as well (I started with Marion Chesney's very light, very bubbly Regencies), and the two notions crashed in my head. "My god," I wondered. "What if this is how you went about finding boyfriends?" I wrote the sentence: "Courtship like college brochures" in the little notebook I carried everywhere at the time, and then sat on it until... September of '04.

Anyway. *thud* So mote it be.

Why are the last 3 scenes always the hardest?

Good Advice

And I'm about to take some of it, by handing my wireless card over to my husband (I really don't know what I'm going to do come the day I have a laptop with built-in wireless)...

Matthew Stibbe's How to Concentrate on Writing, found via Mr. Shetterly.

After my little blogtantrum yesterday, I did manage to pound out 1,300 words, which, surprisingly, didn't complete the story. However the main crisis is over--I think--though I'm having a bit of a tangle with the "but I haven't shown my heroine being competent!"--and I'm feeling a bit bad about that, which is maybe why the last bit is reluctant to be written.

I woke up this morning thinking of new titles for the story formerly known as "Bound by Spells." So far, they aren't any better... "A friend, a foe, a gift, a beau, a journey go" was bouncing in my head with it, and I was wondering if I could make some subset of that work, but that would mean adding a few sentences into the story to explain it. Ideally, I should be able to derive a title from the story I have.

Dangit.

Writing stories can kick your ass.

10 AM

Ho-hum. Here I am, trying to write the last scene of a novelette I promised to have done three days ago for the inaugural meeting of our new writing group. They have the first 11,000 words already, I just need to send them the last 2,000. I was certain I'd be able to write two little scenes over the weekend, but somehow... it proved impossible. I struggled to get the penultimate scene written, and I think it's not terrible, but I lost the voice of the piece somewhere in there. I need to read more Jane Austen in prep for the rewrite.

Okay. Time to get to work. I struggled over the scene finish line last night around 1AM, and knew I'd hav to leave the rest of this for today.

10:30 AM

Hm. CSS style sheets, while frustrating at first, prove to be very useful once you overcome the learning curve. Why, the new site design--

AH, CRAP! I'm supposed to be writing.

11 AM

"Lydia was awakened early by pangs of conscience."

Hm. Is there a better way to say this? She's had a restless night, driven by dreams of guilt. Granted, it's all unearned guilt, really, and I don't want to overplay or overwrite this...

I'll think on it and check Bloglines.

11:30 AM

I want a lemon poppyseed muffin, but Stepdaughter ate the last one. Actually, she half-ate it. She ate the top off. Dammit.

*our not-so-heroine prowls the kitchen, then goes over to the table*

*looks at file*

I've written one sentence of the last scene.

*heads over to the couch to sulk and watch Wimbledon*

11:45 AM

"I don't even like tennis."

*gets up*

*wanders back to computer*

*announces* "I am not getting up from this computer until I write 400 words!"

12 PM

Oof. I wish I hadn't promised that. I'm hungry. Why can't I just get going and write this? Is that I'm scared I don't know enough about horse jumping? She doesn't even have to jump on-screen. You forget, the agoraphobia attack interrupts this.

Or am I scared that I lost the voice of the piece?

Or am I just hungry?

I know. I'll fire up Movable Type. I didn't say that they had to be 400 words of the story.

My writing group is never going to forgive me.

Books: His Majesty's Dragon, Elizabeth and Mary, Lady Elizabeth's Comet

His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik (34) [fantasy]

You know how when everyone hypes a book to death and you think, "I will not be taken in by this hype," and you prepare to be hard on a book--and then you utterly fail, because it actually is that good? Yep, that's this book. It does exactly what it needs to do, and it does it well.

Dragons. In Napoleonic warfare.

It's my wish-fulfillment version of Patrick O'Brien. It's Age of Sail without learning every bloody sail and rigging arrangement. It's Regency romance outside of the drawing rooms, and even has girls captaining dragons just as they ought. It's Pern for grownups. And it has Nelson and Trafalgar and Napoleon.

Excuse me while I join the hype.

Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens by Jane Dunn (35) [biography]

As biography goes, it was a bit heavy handed in spots, often repeating or over-emphasizing certain bits of key information. I came to this book with a solid grounding in Elizabeth's life and almost none in Mary's--so while I feel greatly enriched in my understanding of Mary Stuart, I felt that so much of Elizabeth's life was glossed over that I wonder what I was really missing about Mary. On the other hand, the glossing was done to maintain the focus on the relationship between the two queens. As pivotal as Elizabeth was to Mary's life, being her jailor for half of her life and her ultimate executioner, Mary was significantly less important to Elizabeth overall, so perhaps the proportions were right.

It's always tempting to make parallels in history, or to try and fit dual forces on a seesaw and argue that when one goes up, the other goes down--see my AP European History essay on the Spanish Hapsburgs and the French Bourbons to see just how tempting--but not everything fits that way. I'm not saying Dunn is wrong, I'm just saying it's tempting, and what is tempting is sometimes too facilely undertaken and stretched past the point of necessary credibility. So--while I happily add this to my inventory of biographies, I will also happily seek other sources. I have a big fat Mary, Queen of Scotts bio lying around somewhere, and I think a smaller ERI lurking as well.

Nonetheless, a riveting read.

Lady Elizabeth's Comet by Sheila Simonson (36) [romance]

Easily one of my favorite books ever, this Regency romance subverts the genre by being narrated in the first person by a lady astronomer who ends up engaged to a breezy, charming old friend while falling in love with a quieter, self-contained man. It may, in fact, barely fit inside the genre at all. The subtitle on the cover is "A Romance of Regency England," as if to say, "Not Quite a Regency Romance."

The self-deprecation of the narrator is perfect--light and not overdone. I could wish for more, but I don't know how I could get more. Everything hangs together just as it ought. This book serves as my ideal for a Regency; were it a bit broader in scope, it would be perfect (and I think that's what I mean by "more"--it feels a bit narrow because we rely on the first-person narrator, and don't get to dig around in other heads as we do in Jane Austen).