Historical Notes
Sep. 21st, 2021 04:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI've been wistful about the fact that I didn't include historical notes when I published The Threefold Tie and Honeytrap, and it has occurred to me that since I will need to update their backmatter ANYWAY to include links to The Larks Still Bravely Singing, I could definitely rectify this mistake by writing those now and bunging them into the ebook files.
OTOH, I am not sure the world is Ready for a historical note for The Threefold Tie which is 50% facts about the sexual mores of 19th century American utopian experiments (do you KNOW how much information about the Oneida Community I had to cut out of the infodump scene? Do you KNOW), 50% William Dean Howells books, and 0% 19th century American attitudes about queerness because I definitely did not research that at all for this book. Although now that I HAVE done some research on it, I don't think I did too badly, so I guess I did a REALLY good job extrapolating from the snippets of Anthony Rotundo's "Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern United States, 1800-1900" that George Chauncey quotes in Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940.
Also for Honeytrap I have about twenty sources about the Soviet Union and, like, two books about the US. I feel that the distribution should perhaps be less uneven and also, perhaps, that is too many sources for one historical note. But they are all so good! How could I cut any more of them! I already sacrificed the gulag memoirs (waffling about whether to add a few back in; I really feel some of the stuff about fatalism illuminates Gennady's character, even though he was never in a gulag) and the Soviet movies. Surely that's as much as anyone can ask.
OTOH, I am not sure the world is Ready for a historical note for The Threefold Tie which is 50% facts about the sexual mores of 19th century American utopian experiments (do you KNOW how much information about the Oneida Community I had to cut out of the infodump scene? Do you KNOW), 50% William Dean Howells books, and 0% 19th century American attitudes about queerness because I definitely did not research that at all for this book. Although now that I HAVE done some research on it, I don't think I did too badly, so I guess I did a REALLY good job extrapolating from the snippets of Anthony Rotundo's "Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern United States, 1800-1900" that George Chauncey quotes in Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940.
Also for Honeytrap I have about twenty sources about the Soviet Union and, like, two books about the US. I feel that the distribution should perhaps be less uneven and also, perhaps, that is too many sources for one historical note. But they are all so good! How could I cut any more of them! I already sacrificed the gulag memoirs (waffling about whether to add a few back in; I really feel some of the stuff about fatalism illuminates Gennady's character, even though he was never in a gulag) and the Soviet movies. Surely that's as much as anyone can ask.
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Date: 2021-09-22 07:44 pm (UTC)