A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Rebecca Romney’s Jane Austen’s Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector’s Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend, in which Romney tracks down many of the books Jane Austen admired (often as ebooks, which I must admit takes much of the romance out of the rare book hunt) and discovers many lost gems of literary excellence. (And also Hannah More, whom she did not take to.) An engrossing read.

D. E. Stevenson’s Mrs. Tim Gets a Job. Like all of D. E. Stevenson’s novels, this is cozy like sitting curled up in an armchair by the fire with a cup of cocoa while a thunderstorm beats against the window in the night. It’s not that she’s writing in a world where bad things don’t happen, or even where bad things don’t happen to our heroes, but by the end of the book it will all turn out right.

Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States, edited by Mikail Iossel and Jeff Parker. An essay collection published not long after 9/11, although only a few of the essays actually touch on that event. Many of them include potshots at American political correctness (hard to embrace the concept if you come from the country where you could literally be sent to a gulag for “political incorrectness”), as well as lists of American books the authors read at a formative age.

I thank my lucky stars that I didn’t read this before Honeytrap, as the book might have been delayed indefinitely while I tried to work my way through the works of Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, as well as some other authors I’ve never even heard of. With truth the author of this essay notes “the average Soviet person probably knew [American science fiction] better than the average American.”

What I’m Reading Now

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Sadly suspicious that none of these characters are ever going to make it to the lighthouse.

What I Plan to Read Next

Does my lightning zoom through Jane Austen’s Bookshelf mean that I will at last read an eighteenth century novel? MAYBE. The library boasts Fanny Burney’s Evelina, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Romance of the Forest, Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda. Any recommendations among those works?

Tramps and Vagabonds is now available for preorder, to release on May 9! Get it while it’s hot!

I also got a lovely review of Honeytrap on Smut Report! Which resulted in zero sales (as in, there were zero sales total on the day the review came out), so maybe hitting up review sites for reviews is not, as I had hoped, a winning sales strategy.

A wild historical note for Honeytrap appears! This came together much more quickly than the note for The Threefold Tie, possibly because I'm getting the hang of historical notes now, or perhaps because I didn't try to write it at work where I am always popping up to help someone send a fax.

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I would be remiss not to begin this note with a shout-out to Man from U.N.C.L.E., the classic 1960s TV show about a Soviet and an American spy who work together at an international counterintelligence agency. I always wished the show would dig deeper into the culture clash between Illya and Napoleon, and this book is the result.

I could never have written it without the wonderful Russian department at my alma mater. This book grew out of the classes, where we read Zoshchenko’s wonderful short stories and Tyutchev’s “Silentium,” and the conversation table, where we watched Cheburashka and listened to our TA Katya’s stories about her childhood longing to join the Young Pioneers - never to be realized, because the Soviet Union fell before she could get her red scarf. Most of all, it grew out of the incredible camaraderie of the department.

I also owe a great debt to Peter Carlson’s K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist, in which Carlson recounts Khrushchev’s madcap 1959 American road trip. The assassination attempt that Daniel and Gennady investigate is made up, but Khrushchev’s road trip is very real, and even more surreal than the title suggests.

Speaking of road trips, there are two different English versions of Ilf & Petrov’s American travelogue, which the two Soviet humorists wrote after driving across America in 1935. Little Golden America is a translation of the book they wrote about the experience; Ilf & Petrov’s American Road Trip: The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers is a translation of their photo-essays serialized in the magazine Ogonek. Much of the text was incorporated into the book, but the photos weren’t included in the first (1937) edition.

Ilf and Petrov are sometimes admiring, sometimes condemnatory, occasionally arch, and always funny. Gennady’s sense of humor owes a lot to Ilf and Petrov. See, for instance, their complaint about American movies: “The plot is always the same: love, uninteresting monotonous American love with strictly timed kisses (in Hollywood, the censors only allow kisses of a certain length.)” A fascinating read, hilarious and insightful about both the Soviet Union and the United States.

Another book that offered insight into 1950s America was Laura Shapiro’s Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America, which I read in hopes of digging up some interesting food tidbits. Instead, it served as a reminder that 1950s America, for all that it now has the reputation of a static time, was actually a period of social tumult. (But then, what age is not an age of tumult?)

The food tidbits (particularly the perfection salad and the Ne-Hi cola) come instead from Bill Bryson’s memoir of his 1950s childhood, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. This book is also a source for Daniel’s (somewhat earlier) childhood recollections, which also grew out of my love for children’s books from the 1930s and 40s, like Doris Gates’ Blue Willow.

Gennady’s reminiscences about his childhood grew out of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya’s memoir The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia, about Petrushevskaya’s childhood during World War II. Another invaluable source was Anya von Bremzin’s description of her mother’s World War II childhood in Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing. which is also full of vibrant (if not always appetizing) descriptions of Soviet food and daily life. Gennady’s comparison of his own childhood home and Daniel’s relies heavily on von Bremzin’s memories of home life in a Soviet communal apartment.

Von Bremzin comments on the widespread Soviet appetite for Western books and movies, a topic explored in wonderful detail in Eleonory Gilburd’s To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture. This book is entirely responsible for the used bookstore scene: of course I had to give Gennady a chance to find that as-yet-untranslated Hemingway novel to take back to Moscow.

Gennady’s memories of Moscow more generally draw on the wonderful 1964 film Walking the Streets of Moscow, which is available in full on Youtube. The main character, Kolya, inspired Gennady’s physical appearance.

Ben McIntyre’s The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War is an irresistibly readable book that offered fascinating insight into the internal squabbles of the Russian intelligence agencies, as well as illuminating glimpses of a Soviet defector’s post-defection life. It also tells the story of a homosexual honeytrap that a western spy agency attempted to spring on a KGB agent after he bought a gay porn magazine. Alas for their attempted honeytrap, the agent bought it not out of suppressed gay urges, but because he was so astonished that such a thing could be published.

David Tuller’s Cracks in the Iron Closet: Travels in Gay & Lesbian Russia offers fascinating insight into the unsuppressed gay urges of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. The book grew out of Tuller’s friendship with a tight-knit circle of queer Russians, and records their life stories, their attitudes toward not only sexuality but a wide range of topics, and their jaded response when American LGBTQ+ organizations rushed in during glasnost, intent on proselytizing their vision of LGBTQ+ identity.

Although Honeytrap makes no direct reference to the Soviet gulag system, I would be remiss not to mention Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope, Eugenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind, and especially Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago for their unparalleled insight into Soviet society and human nature. Solzhenitsyn’s description of the prisoners’ fatalism, in particular, influenced Gennady’s outlook: "Submissiveness to fate, the total abdication of your own will in the shaping of your life, the recognition that it was impossible to guess the best and the worst ahead of time but that it was easy to take a step you would reproach yourself for - all this freed the prisoner from any bondage, made him calmer, and even ennobled him."

Finally, I have to mention Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, which is about post-Soviet memory of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The mother of a girl who was badly injured in a terrorist bombing on the Moscow Metro tells Aleksievich, “You’re a writer, you’ll understand what I mean: Words have very little in common with what goes on inside of you.” And yet she keeps talking, and Aleksievich keeps recording: words are insufficient, but they are all we have.

I actually took the last week of December off from writing, on the grounds that (a) it is a holiday!, and (b) I’ve been having difficulty writing new material since the pandemic began and attempting to bulldoze through has not, so far, been successful, so maybe I should try a new strategy, i.e., taking a break.

During my bulldozing attempts, I have racked up an impressive number of partially-finished books (including two f/f novellas about college girls around 1900), so if/when I get my finishing-things mojo back, I ought to be able to knock books over like bottles on a fence. Right? That’s how it works, yes? This may be wishful thinking.

The only project I’ve made much progress on is David and Robert, which grows more unmarketable by the day. It’s fine. I’m telling myself that I will never publish it anyway so I don’t need to worry about pleasing anyone but myself. Sure, I could just stop in 1920, after our heroes get together (if I do so, I already have a complete draft!)... but why not continue for the next twenty years so I can drag them through the vast dysfunctional polycule that is the interwar English intelligentsia? David could get married! Robert could have a Bad Boyfriend!

(The Bad Boyfriend is a gift to myself; I love writing bad boyfriends. You can’t imagine how much extraneous Paul material there was in Honeytrap. I really grieved when I had to cut out his maniacal insistence that he and Daniel could never share a bed all night because BOTH BEDS NEED TO LOOK SLEPT IN, DANIEL, obviously it’s NOT ENOUGH to just throw back the covers in the morning.)

...Anyway, my plan in January is to start myself off with a Very Low daily word count (I’m thinking 250 words a day), plus a generous number of days off, and see if that strategy doesn’t work a bit better than bulldozing.

Look at this Honeytrap fanart on Tumblr with Daniel and Gennady as cats, a.k.a. Agents Pawthorne and Catskevich. LOOK AT IT. LOOK AT IT. LOOK AT THIS GLORY.

After this post I should stop pestering you with Honeytrap news for a while, but I just wanted to say that Amazon has FINALLY gotten the Honeytrap paperback published, so here’s a link. I’ve ordered my author copies and they will arrive... whenever Amazon in its wisdom feels like passing them on, I suppose.

Amazon did at least sync the paperback and the ebook more or less immediately upon publication, so that’s nice.

(I also feel compelled to link the Honeytrap discussion post - there are so many excellent comments there!)

Today is Honeytrap’s release day! Go forth and read!!!

The pandemic has for obvious reasons cut back on possibly release day celebrations - no dinner at St. Elmo’s etc. - but I HAVE treated myself to a grande hot chocolate from Starbucks, and soon I will drive to my hometown to take care of various small errands, acquire ice cream, and also get myself away from the computer, because otherwise I will spend the day doing the Amazon equivalent of refreshing the AO3 page every five minutes and wailing "WHY AREN’T THERE ANY KUDOS YET?"

The moment we have all been waiting for has arrived! Honeytrap is available for preorder!

The book itself will be coming out on September 2. Yes! In just a week, the long-awaited Honeytrap saga CAN BE YOURS!

(I will try to release the paperback to coincide with the release date, although obvs it will depend on how quickly Amazon decides to release it from purgatory after I hit publish. Maybe I will just plan to hit publish on the last day of August to ensure that it’s out in time.)

In July I finished editing the proof copy of Honeytrap, and I’ve also nailed down a cover designer to make the cover in mid-August, so we’re looking at an early September release date.

I’ve also a short story this month for an f/f charity anthology on the theme “magical pets,” which is coming out this autumn. You should buy it! Not just because of my story (“The Mating Call of the Teleporting Warbler”), and not just because it’s for a good cause, but because it will be full of adorable magical pet goodness, and who doesn’t need some of that in the year of our lord 2020?

I also intended to finish a story for the m/m companion anthology, but instead I finally - FINALLY - got an idea that seems to be shaping up for a new novella (1920s bohemian New York m/m, currently ~10,000 words long), so I’ve been writing away on the theory that you’ve got to strike while the iron is hot. However, I imagine I will bog down sometime in August (there’s generally a middle of the story “why did I ever think I could write anything?” slump), at which point I will turn my attention to the m/m magical pets story.

I... I think I might have finished Honeytrap edits? I still have copyedits to do, and there are usually some incidental edits as I do that, and then I need to get the proof copy and discover all five thousand typos that were somehow completely invisible on the computer screen...

So there's still quite a lot to do. But the major structural revisions are complete, almost exactly a year after I started the book.

...I am having a little trouble letting go, so I've been writing a few Honeytrap DVD extras, which I would post except alas the ones I've written so far contain spoilers for the ending. It worries me slightly that I have so much to write about what happens after the ending - have I ended the book too abruptly yet again? But, one, the book is already nearly 110,000 words long, if I add much more the paperback will be physically painful to hold, and two, whenever you end a story, there's always going to be more story after that, unless you end with "And then they died hand in hand and the gods turned them into two intertwined trees like that Greek myth."

Anyway, if there's some Honeytrap scenelet that you've always yearned to see, now is the time to ask; I'm giving myself till the end of June to write Honeytrap things. littlerhymes suggested Daniel and Gennady going to a pizza place for Gennady's first pizza.