A Certain Slant of Light

I know I've linked T. H. White's character notes on Lancelot before, but littlerhymes just sent me a version which included not just White's numbered list but also some extra thoughts he appended, not least of which is a sub-list of People Lancelot Is Like... which includes T. H. White himself. There it is! He just came out and said it! Glad to see the self-awareness, buddy.

On the other hand, at the end T. H. White muses about what Lancelot considered his big flaw, his fundamental lack. "On first inspection one would be inclined to link it up with no 17 ["Homosexual? Can a person be ambi-sexual - bisexual or whatever?"], but I don’t understand about bisexuality, so can’t write about it," White wrote... then proceeded to write Lancelot as a classic disaster bi. Absolutely flawless depiction of a completely catastrophic bisexual. No notes!

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I've finished revisions on A Garter as a Lesser Gift, and have been contemplating (due largely to the enthusiastic boosterism of skygiants, who is already responsible for the fact that the Gawain retelling has become a reality) a companion Art/Lancelot/Gwen story. If this comes to pass there will ABSOLUTELY be a scene where Lancelot asks plaintively, "Can a person be ambi-sexual - bisexual or whatever?" Probably of Gwen, possibly while they're in bed together.

My hesitation about this project arises from the fact that I couldn't lift the plot wholesale as I did from "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." There are Lancelot and Guenever stories that don't immediately end in the fall of Camelot, but the basic structure seems to be Guenever is ACCUSED and then Lancelot has to CHAMPION HER because Arthur as king cannot... I don't know, maybe if I switched it around and Lancelot was ACCUSED and Guenever has to CHAMPION HIM, in a less literal sense as people were not doing trial by combat in World War II.

Or I could just plot something myself, but at some point doesn't it stop being an Arthurian retelling and become an OT3 with some Arthurian names attached for decorative purposes? Also, let's be real, part of the point of a retelling is that I don't have to plot the story myself.

I have been thinking that I should, perhaps, give this esoteric thing called "outlining" a try. I have worried in the past that this would constrain my spontaneity (insert tragic musings about smudging a butterfly's wing and destroying one's literary gifts), but there was really a lot to be said for knowing the exact outlines of the story in A Garter as a Lesser Gift, and just having to color it in. Does anyone have an outlining process they particularly like?

6. What’s the longest you’ve ever been in a fandom? What fandom was it? Not necessarily your oldest fandom, but a fandom that you started and still continue to read/write/create content for in some way.

I feel that this question is making a lot of assumptions, viz, that the fandom you’ve been in the longest is one that you’re still in today. What if you had ten lovely years with a fandom but ultimately parted ways in an acrimonious divorce? What then??

This is actually a hypothetical what-if, as the longest I’ve ever been in a fandom is Captain America fandom, and although my period of greatest activity ended maybe a few months after I finished writing by Steve/Bucky epic Reciprocity, I still put out a new fic now and again. My latest was a Natasha-centric fic in March 2021. I don’t read much fic anymore but I do remain a sucker for the fanart. (Speaking of: have I linked this fanart of Steve & Bucky in the style of a Leyendecker illustration? Gorgeous. Perfect.)

And of course I keep getting suckered back into new MCU content, most recently Black Widow. So far I’ve resisted Loki, but we’ll see if that lasts. And I’m probably going to end up seeing The Eternals (because it was directed by Chloe Zhao!) and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (because Awkwafina is in it and I am weak).

Admittedly, I often go in kicking and screaming “MCU, why can’t I quit you???” but honestly I think that proves the depth of my attachment rather than otherwise.

On Friday at 8 pm UTC (3 pm EST) I'm going to be giving an author interview about Honeytrap over on the Queer Romance Readers discord. One of the bits and bobs of information they wanted was an author website... which I had not bothered to set up... but now I have an author website!

It is extremely bare bones and likely to remain that way: basically just a list of my available books. With links! Which will take you to the appropriate Amazon site anywhere in the world! You would think that is something that Amazon would make easily available to authors, but no, in fact they do not, I had to ask plaintively for aid on a different author discord to discover that the way to get a universal link is Booklinker, which is free as long as you aren't using affiliate links. (Leaving that link here in case any fellow authors have been yearning for this knowledge, as I was!)

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.

As tomorrow (Wednesday) is Honeytrap release day, I’m doing the Wednesday Reading Meme a day early this week.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

George MacDonald’s The Light Princess is a delightful fairy tale about a princess who is cursed by… well, lightness: she’s both unaffected by gravity, liable to float away on the lightest breeze, and terminally light in spirit, unable to feel any emotions with any degree of gravity.

This being MacDonald, there is of course a moral/philosophical underpinning here, but the main feeling of the book is one of, well, lightness: it’s frolicsome and fun and full of puns. There’s a wonderful scene where her parents bat terms to do with light back and forth. Her father, determined to make the best of the curse, comments that it’s good to be light-footed, lighthearted! - while her mother, more realistic, sighs that it is good neither to be light-fingered nor light-headed.

On the other end of the nineteenth-century fantasy spectrum, I also read William Morris’s The House of the Wolfings, which is an excellent book to read if you loved Lord of the Rings but thought that it was just too bad that the characters, while capable of reciting poetry at the drop of a hat, did not actually speak their lines in verse. Morris has you covered! As his Goths head out to face the Romans, they declaim, sometimes for multiple pages!

Suffice it to say I found The House of the Wolfings a bit of a slog. But at the same time the book is just so very much itself that I can’t help but feel a certain admiration for it. It may not be what I want in a fantasy novel, but by God it’s what Morris wanted and he did it to the very utmost. (And if you are a Tolkien fan, there’s an added interest in that this is a book he read and liked. It may be the source for the name of the forest Mirkwood in The Hobbit.)

When I was a child, I never read the Babysitters Little Sister books; I was, in fact, invincibly opposed to them, in the way that children sometimes are opposed to things that are aimed at children ever so slightly younger than they are. (I also disdained Barney.) But piggybacking on the success of the Babysitters Club graphic novels, two Little Sister books (Karen’s Witch and Karen’s Roller Skates) have also been adapted into graphic novel form, so I decided that I had to check them out, and…

Well, to be honest, I still find Karen Brewer annoying. I guess some things never change!

But also sometimes things do, because as I mentioned last week, I didn’t get on with Willa Cather when I was in college (one of my friends had become a Cather fangirl and I just Did Not Get It), but over time I’ve grown to appreciate her, and quite liked O Pioneers!, especially from a sociological standpoint; it was interesting to see Cather’s viewpoint on all these disparate immigrant groups meeting in the Nebraska plains: Swedes, Bohemians, the French, etc.

What I’m Reading Now

Tamar Adler has had a new book out for two years and I didn’t even notice, WHY, HOW, anyway, I am making up for lost time by reading Something Old, Something New: Classic Recipes Revisited, a work of minor culinary archaeology (I believe the recipes are mostly from within the last two hundred years, not like this Atlantic article about recreating ancient Egyptian bread, which sounds amazing but NOT a project for my home kitchen). The only thing I love more than history is history that is EDIBLE.

I’m also reading James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, about which more anon, but for now I just want to leave you with this quote from a review of Carmen Jones, a 1950s black cast musical based loosely on the opera Carmen. The actors, Baldwin notes wearily, “appear to undergo a tiny, strangling death before resolutely substituting ‘de’ for ‘the.’”

What I Plan to Read Next

Did you know that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a sequel to Kidnapped, called various Catriona (UK) or David Balfour (USA)? Like The Light Princess and The House of the Wolfings and even O Pioneers!, this is research for the boarding-school-friends-reconnect-after-World-War-I book, let’s just call it David & Robert for now so I don’t have to recapitulate the book every Wednesday Reading Meme, as it may affect my reading for quite some time.

Perhaps I ought to read more early twentieth century boarding school books. You know, for research. Maybe I ought to take another run at Mike & Psmith. (Actually, it looks like Mike & Psmith is the sequel to Mike, so really I ought to start there.)

My goal for May was to work on the line edits for Honeytrap, and I am happy to say that they are almost done. There are a couple of chapters in part two that I changed a lot during this round of edits, so they need one last going over (or rather, I hope they only need one last going over), but on the whole the thing is done, and I’ve already copy-edited part three (which is short) and begun copy-edits on part one.

My goal for June is to finish the line-edits, finish the copy-edits, and make some decisions about the cover. I’ve designed a cover (please ignore the watermark) and I can’t decide whether I should just go with that cover or not.

I would also like to start a new book, but who knows at this point? The pandemic took the stuffing out of my ability to write new material, and now the world is on fire (the headline of this Slate article really says it all: Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide), so… Well, 2020 is just going to be a year.

I'm behind on my movie reviews, but I wanted to toss up a quick review of Linda Hoaglund's Edo Avant Garde, because it's only available for free for one more day, so you should catch it now if it sounds interesting.

It's a documentary about screen paintings (mainly) during the Edo period in Japan (and also a little bit about how these paintings affected western art, mainly impressionists, and also later Japanese artists), and I really enjoyed its meditative and yet still absorbing pacing, the way that it lingers on the paintings and also the natural world that inspired them, and discusses the way that the screens were originally experienced - the fact that people lived with them, that they sat down on the floor and would feel themselves surrounded by the scene in the painting, the elegant cranes (I love the beautiful precise feathers on these painted cranes - similarly, the scales on fish) or the tall grasses.

I can see the intrinsic appeal of a crane painting, but I never really understood the grass paintings before (I mean... it's just grass), but the fact that the viewers would have been sitting down among the grasses made me get the point for the first time.

There's also a magical moment where we get to see one of these screens by candlelight, as they often would have been seen in Edo times, and the gold leaf background looks totally different and utterly bewitching in the flickering flame.

1. My payment came through for my story in the Moonlight werewolf anthology! I am RICH BEYOND MY WILDEST DREAMS OF AVARICE and filled with the desire to submit stories to more anthologies in hopes of multiplying my riches.

2. I've actually collected a couple of recent calls for anthology submissions, and I thought I would share them here in case you, too, want to hop on the anthology gravy train.

sovay mentioned the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Fiction Series, which is accepting short stories of up to 5000 words in the lesbian historic fiction genre, set before 1900, settings outside of 19th century America and England preferred. (Although, uh, probably mine will be set in 19th century America or England, given my areas of expertise.) Submissions must be sent in January.

Somewhere on Twitter I heard about Silk & Steel: An Adventure Anthology of Queer Ladies, "stories of high adventure that feature one weapon-wielding woman and one woman whose strengths lie in softer skills." They've already got a stellar author list (Ellen Kushner! Yoon Ha Lee!) so it's, um, optimistic for me to send in a story for this one, but you never know if you don't try! Suggested length 3,000-7,000 words, with 10,000 words as an upper limit. Deadline February 22, 2020.

3. If you know of other anthologies with open calls for submissions, this is the place to share them!

4. It has occurred to me that if I submitted a story to an anthology each month for all of 2020, at the end of the year I would have a nice pile of stories and if none of the anthologies wanted them I could release them myself, which is kind of a win-win situation.

Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow Americans! My family actually had Thanksgiving dinner on Tuesday because my brother got scheduled to work on the day itself (he works in the ER so I guess they do need to have someone on staff), so I have spent the day putting up the Christmas tree, eating up the last of the pecan bars (which are like pecan pie but with a more equal crust-filling-pecan ratio), and getting a jump on my first few Christmas cards.

I have also discovered that my favorite stationary shop (La Papierre) is having a sale, so I thought I'd pass that on in case any of you felt the need to replenish your stationary stocks.

One plaintive message to Amazon support later (they were actually v. prompt and helpful) and my paperback edition of Ashlin & Olivia is now listed on the same page as the ebook! So if you have always wanted a book of mine so you can clutch it to your heart and swoon, or possibly thrust it into the hands of your friends while shouting "READ THIS NOW," now is the time!

(I also have paperback editions of Briarley and The English Breakfast Affair. Just throwing that out there.)