Sleeping Soldier Release
Aug. 7th, 2023 08:48 amAt long last it has arrived! Release day for The Sleeping Soldier! (There is also a paperback available at that page.) Go forth, little book, fly free!
Sleeping Soldier Saturday, chapter 4
Aug. 5th, 2023 07:22 amOne last chapter in The Sleeping Soldier! The book releases in two days, so it's coming right up.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Preorder link
***
A cold wind whipped across the porch as they left the house. Russell closed the front door and locked it carefully, tossing the cheerful comment over his shoulder, “Now that ought to keep out intruders!”
Caleb laughed, his face flushing hot in the cold.
“Though it’s lucky I didn’t lock it before; or I shouldn’t have met you, and that’s the first bit of luck I’ve had in the future,” Russell said, flashing a grin, and Caleb’s flush deepened. Russell locked the gate too, then turned to Caleb. “Here, Freckles, let me take your arm.”
Instinctively Caleb jerked his arm out of reach. “Men don’t walk arm in arm these days.”
“Don’t they?” Russell looked startled. But then the smile was back. “Well, all right then, Virgil. I s’pose I know enough not to run into the street in front of the cars. That’s what you call ‘em, right?”
“Yes.”
They walked slowly down Hill Road, Russell’s head turning from side to side as he took it all in: the street lamps, the shining Christmas lights, the parked cars. Russell stared as a Cadillac backed down a driveway. “I can’t get used to these cars,” he said. “Mr. Huber drove me to his house even, so I’ve been inside one and everything, but still and all every time I see them, they are so much bigger than I expect… As the bride said on her wedding night.”
( Read more )
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Preorder link
***
A cold wind whipped across the porch as they left the house. Russell closed the front door and locked it carefully, tossing the cheerful comment over his shoulder, “Now that ought to keep out intruders!”
Caleb laughed, his face flushing hot in the cold.
“Though it’s lucky I didn’t lock it before; or I shouldn’t have met you, and that’s the first bit of luck I’ve had in the future,” Russell said, flashing a grin, and Caleb’s flush deepened. Russell locked the gate too, then turned to Caleb. “Here, Freckles, let me take your arm.”
Instinctively Caleb jerked his arm out of reach. “Men don’t walk arm in arm these days.”
“Don’t they?” Russell looked startled. But then the smile was back. “Well, all right then, Virgil. I s’pose I know enough not to run into the street in front of the cars. That’s what you call ‘em, right?”
“Yes.”
They walked slowly down Hill Road, Russell’s head turning from side to side as he took it all in: the street lamps, the shining Christmas lights, the parked cars. Russell stared as a Cadillac backed down a driveway. “I can’t get used to these cars,” he said. “Mr. Huber drove me to his house even, so I’ve been inside one and everything, but still and all every time I see them, they are so much bigger than I expect… As the bride said on her wedding night.”
( Read more )Sleeping Soldier Saturday, Chapter 3
Jul. 29th, 2023 07:36 amOnward in The Sleeping Soldier!
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Preorder link
***
Caleb screamed.
Russell Krause lunged forward and slammed Caleb against the wall. He jammed a callused hand over Caleb’s mouth, then tightened his other arm around Caleb as Caleb struggled to break free. “Be quiet!” Russell hissed. “My father will kill you if he wakes.”
Caleb stopped struggling. He trembled, his ears pricked, feeling the hard skin of Russell’s palm scraping against his mouth.
Suddenly the grip slackened. Russell’s hand fell. “No one heard,” he said, puzzled, relieved; and then he let out a gasp, then a groan, and he smacked himself in the face. “Oh lord, what a fool I am! Of course Father’s dead. Only I got confused for a bit, being back in the house and all… Oh, I had better introduce myself. I’m Lieutenant Russell Krause, 14th Indiana Cavalry, and—well, this is going to sound a little strange, but you’ll believe it if you just give it a moment to settle. When I was a baby, a fairy put a curse on me, and I’ve just last week awakened from a hundred years sleep.”
Caleb stared at him. He was trying to see some sign in Russell’s face that this was a joke, a prank. But Russell looked perfectly serious, and perfectly like that photograph; and although it was perfectly impossible, slowly Caleb said, “I believe you.” And he did. “But why do I believe you?”
He was asking himself as much as Russell, but Russell answered. “That’s part of the curse, I guess. It drove my friend Owen mad that he couldn’t doubt it, for he was a great freethinker and a proud Doubting Thomas; and he had to rethink all his fixed ideas about the supernatural, because, as he said, ‘I wouldn’t be much of a freethinker if I couldn’t change my mind based on the evidence; even if the evidence is that I can’t seem to disbelieve in this curse of yours, for all it makes no rational sense!’”
As he quoted his friend his voice grew deeper, and rather petulant at the end, and he underlined the exclamation with a little stomp of his foot. Caleb laughed, and Russell grinned, a pair of dimples flashing in his cheeks.
( Read more )
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Preorder link
***
Caleb screamed.
Russell Krause lunged forward and slammed Caleb against the wall. He jammed a callused hand over Caleb’s mouth, then tightened his other arm around Caleb as Caleb struggled to break free. “Be quiet!” Russell hissed. “My father will kill you if he wakes.”
Caleb stopped struggling. He trembled, his ears pricked, feeling the hard skin of Russell’s palm scraping against his mouth.
Suddenly the grip slackened. Russell’s hand fell. “No one heard,” he said, puzzled, relieved; and then he let out a gasp, then a groan, and he smacked himself in the face. “Oh lord, what a fool I am! Of course Father’s dead. Only I got confused for a bit, being back in the house and all… Oh, I had better introduce myself. I’m Lieutenant Russell Krause, 14th Indiana Cavalry, and—well, this is going to sound a little strange, but you’ll believe it if you just give it a moment to settle. When I was a baby, a fairy put a curse on me, and I’ve just last week awakened from a hundred years sleep.”
Caleb stared at him. He was trying to see some sign in Russell’s face that this was a joke, a prank. But Russell looked perfectly serious, and perfectly like that photograph; and although it was perfectly impossible, slowly Caleb said, “I believe you.” And he did. “But why do I believe you?”
He was asking himself as much as Russell, but Russell answered. “That’s part of the curse, I guess. It drove my friend Owen mad that he couldn’t doubt it, for he was a great freethinker and a proud Doubting Thomas; and he had to rethink all his fixed ideas about the supernatural, because, as he said, ‘I wouldn’t be much of a freethinker if I couldn’t change my mind based on the evidence; even if the evidence is that I can’t seem to disbelieve in this curse of yours, for all it makes no rational sense!’”
As he quoted his friend his voice grew deeper, and rather petulant at the end, and he underlined the exclamation with a little stomp of his foot. Caleb laughed, and Russell grinned, a pair of dimples flashing in his cheeks.
( Read more )Sleeping Soldier Saturday, Chapter 2
Jul. 22nd, 2023 08:37 amOnward in The Sleeping Soldier! The book is set to release on August 7 (preorder here), so we'll get through chapter 4 before then.
***
Caleb O’Connor first discovered the Schloss in October of his freshman year at Hawkins. His girlfriend Carol found a book in the library called Victorian Mourning Art, packed with photographs of dead babies (“Sleeping Beauties,” the caption intoned) and sunbursts woven of human hair.
There was also a photograph of a life-size waxwork: the Union soldier Russell Krause, so perfectly sculpted that he looked, at least in that black-and-white photograph, like a man asleep. His Civil War kepi perched on his curly dark hair. Thick dark eyebrows, round boyish cheeks, sweet soft lips that might easily part under the impress of a kiss.
“That’s right here in town,” Carol said, and Caleb jumped. He had forgotten that she was there, that there was anything in the world except the photograph of that beautiful boy. “See,” she said, and read aloud the caption: “This exquisite waxwork gave rise to the pretty legend that it was not a waxwork at all, but the boy himself, cursed to lie in an enchanted sleep that would last for a hundred years, unless he was awakened by a kiss of true love. It lies in state in Russell Krause’s childhood bedroom in the Schloss, high on a hill overlooking the Wabash in Aurora, Indiana.”
And there, on the facing page, was a photograph of the Schloss, with the street address underneath. “That house must be just up the hill behind Riley,” Caleb said, and then, with an effort, he grinned at Carol. “We ought to break in for Halloween. You could kiss him and see if he wakes up.”
“Oooh!” she said, and shuddered deliciously, and kissed Caleb. And he tried not to worry why her kiss didn’t thrill him like the photograph.
Of course they didn’t break in. But they stood a long time at the wrought iron fence gazing in at the Schloss: an enchanted palace, with the last few climbing roses peeping out among ivy turned scarlet with autumn.
They went back often. They both loved old things, old books, old houses, and this Gothic brick pile with its black fence and hexagonal tower fired their imaginations. It was ghostly in the moonlight at Halloween; soft in the first snowfall after they returned from Thanksgiving break. As the snow grew old and tired, the Schloss grew grim and brooding; and then the snow melted, and the ivy turned green, and the house looked almost friendly when the windows gleamed gold in the reflected sunset.
( Read More )
***
Caleb O’Connor first discovered the Schloss in October of his freshman year at Hawkins. His girlfriend Carol found a book in the library called Victorian Mourning Art, packed with photographs of dead babies (“Sleeping Beauties,” the caption intoned) and sunbursts woven of human hair.
There was also a photograph of a life-size waxwork: the Union soldier Russell Krause, so perfectly sculpted that he looked, at least in that black-and-white photograph, like a man asleep. His Civil War kepi perched on his curly dark hair. Thick dark eyebrows, round boyish cheeks, sweet soft lips that might easily part under the impress of a kiss.
“That’s right here in town,” Carol said, and Caleb jumped. He had forgotten that she was there, that there was anything in the world except the photograph of that beautiful boy. “See,” she said, and read aloud the caption: “This exquisite waxwork gave rise to the pretty legend that it was not a waxwork at all, but the boy himself, cursed to lie in an enchanted sleep that would last for a hundred years, unless he was awakened by a kiss of true love. It lies in state in Russell Krause’s childhood bedroom in the Schloss, high on a hill overlooking the Wabash in Aurora, Indiana.”
And there, on the facing page, was a photograph of the Schloss, with the street address underneath. “That house must be just up the hill behind Riley,” Caleb said, and then, with an effort, he grinned at Carol. “We ought to break in for Halloween. You could kiss him and see if he wakes up.”
“Oooh!” she said, and shuddered deliciously, and kissed Caleb. And he tried not to worry why her kiss didn’t thrill him like the photograph.
Of course they didn’t break in. But they stood a long time at the wrought iron fence gazing in at the Schloss: an enchanted palace, with the last few climbing roses peeping out among ivy turned scarlet with autumn.
They went back often. They both loved old things, old books, old houses, and this Gothic brick pile with its black fence and hexagonal tower fired their imaginations. It was ghostly in the moonlight at Halloween; soft in the first snowfall after they returned from Thanksgiving break. As the snow grew old and tired, the Schloss grew grim and brooding; and then the snow melted, and the ivy turned green, and the house looked almost friendly when the windows gleamed gold in the reflected sunset.
( Read More )Sleeping Soldier preorder
Jul. 21st, 2023 08:58 am
I am delighted to announce that I now have this beautiful cover for The Sleeping Soldier! And equally delighted to announce that The Sleeping Soldier is now available for preorder! It will release on August 7th. Then you can experience the thrilling tale of the Union soldier who awakes in 1965 to discover a future that seems like a paradise with its central heating and electric lights... but beneath that shining veneer, the future is a harsh place riddled with strange prohibitions, so that Russell can't even kiss his beloved guide.
There will also be a paperback, but there doesn't seem to be a way to set up a paperback preorder, so that one will be released manually on or around August 7.
Sleeping Soldier Historical Note
Jul. 17th, 2023 12:03 pmAs with so many of my books, The Sleeping Soldier grew from an observation in George Chauncey’s Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. Chauncey notes that when historians discuss passionate male friendship in 19th century America, they often “mistake the fact that men who passionately and physically expressed their love for other men were considered normal for their having been considered heterosexual, as if it were not the very inconsistency of their emotional lives with contemporary models of heterosexuality that made them seem curious to historians in the first place.”
What would happen, I wondered, if a normal nineteenth century man found himself in the twentieth century, and discovered that behavior that had been acceptable and even celebrated in his own time had come to be seen as homosexual, and therefore aberrant?
E. Anthony Rotundo’s “Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern United States, 1800-1900” provided an invaluable description of nineteenth-century romantic friendship, with its kissing and cuddling and passionate declarations of love. Jonathan Ned Katz’s Love Stories: Sex Between Men before Homosexuality defined the outer boundaries of acceptable romantic friendship (basically, you’re fine as long as there are no genitals involved), and shows how those boundaries contracted as the concept of homosexuality began to spread in America in the 1880s and 1890s.
John Ibson’s Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography provides a pictorial account of the same process. In the 1860s, Civil War soldiers cheerfully got their photographs taken holding hands or snuggling with their friends. By the 1960s, snapshots show straight men standing rigidly upright, with a carefully defined margin of space between them. The popularization of the idea of homosexuality had not, as many sexologists hoped, led to increased tolerance. Instead, it made many previously acceptable practices morally suspect, resulting in far more stringent boundaries on appropriate male behavior.
Exploring this century of changes required a massive research job. For Russell’s boyhood in the 1840s and 50s, I relied heavily on William Dean Howells’s childhood memoir A Boy’s Town. His novels offer invaluable (and often quite funny) explorations of nineteenth century life and mores. The Shadow of a Dream and Mrs. Farrell both include fascinating depictions of passionate male friendships, one begun during college and the other during the Civil War. (The titular Mrs. Farrell even observes of the friendship, “It’s quite like a love-affair.”)
One could spend a lifetime reading Civil War histories without beginning to read all that has been published about the war. John D. Billing’s memoir Hardtack and Coffee and
Bell Irvin Wiley’s history The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union are stuffed with fascinating information about the everyday life of Union soldiers. Bruce Catton’s Centennial History of the Civil War was the premier Civil War history in the 1960s, an immensely readable political and military history that tends toward the then-prevailing view that hotheaded abolitionists and secessionists were equally culpable in bringing about a tragic and unnecessary war.
Caleb’s Civil War professor is ahead of his time in his view that the Civil War was a just war against slavery - or else very much behind it: this was the view of many Northern abolitionists during and after the war. Many of the Civil Rights measures passed in the 1960s were reiterations or elaborations of laws first passed during Reconstruction, which recalcitrant white Southerners rolled back through a combination of politics and violence after Union troops left the South in 1877. (Charles W. Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition provides a harrowing local view of how this process played out on the ground.)
Frederic W. Loring’s 1871 Two College Friends shows less literary skill than Chesnutt’s or Howells’ work, but makes up for it in sheer enthusiasm. Loring’s two college friends join the Union Army, repeatedly save each other from death, and address to each other panegyrics like “O my darling, my darling, my darling! please hear me. The only one I have ever loved at all, the only one who has ever loved me.”
These contemporary sources were also invaluable in helping me capture the cadences of Russell’s voice, as was Louisa May Alcott’s work, especially Little Women. Many grammatical rules that were codified later in the nineteenth century were still not set as of the 1860s, like the prohibitions on saying “ain’t” or “he don’t.” (“She don’t deserve to be forgiven,” cries Jo, after Amy burns Jo’s irreplaceable manuscript.) Russell’s attitude toward women’s changing roles in society echoes Alcott’s, while his stance toward Dan and Lacy’s romance was suggested by the characters’ easy acceptance of Annabel and Fun See’s engagement in Rose in Bloom.
(Lacy’s family history was inspired by Buwei Yang Chao’s delightful Autobiography of a Chinese Woman, which was translated into English by Chao’s husband Yuen Ren Chao (who also translated Alice in Wonderland into Chinese). Sometimes husband and wife bicker affectionately in the footnotes.)
Caroll Smith-Rosenberg’s Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America is an excellent resource about women’s nineteenth romantic friendships, and the changing social roles of women from the nineteenth into the twentieth centuries. Laura Shapiro’s Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America continues that story into the mid-twentieth century, while also offering tantalizing tidbits about mid-century food.
Hazel’s opinion column parodying anti-suffrage arguments is drawn largely from Marie Jenney Howe's satirical An Anti-Suffrage Monologue, as quoted in Judith Schwartz’s Radical Feminists in Heterodoxy: Greenwich Village 1912-1940. And yes, I did saddle Caleb with a research project about early twentieth-century college girls partly just to get in a little information about girls’ romantic friendships, which remained socially acceptable a few decades longer than romantic friendships between boys. See, for instance, Annie Fellows Johnston’s 1918 book for girls Georgina’s Service Stars, a book for girls in which Georgina mentions matter-of-factly that a younger girl has a crush on her, and gets a pretty severe case herself on an older girl named Esther: “She is so wonderful that it is a privilege just to be in the same town with her. Merely to feel when I wake in the morning that I may see her some time during the day makes life so rich, so full, so beautiful! How I long to be like her in every way!”
Like Russell, I’ve never cared for Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a literary production, but it is undeniably an excellent source of information about 19th century understandings of passionate male relationships. In the mid-nineteenth century he published lines like my dear friend my lover was on his way coming, O then I was happy, and the general reading public accepted this without demure until the 1890s.
In the nineteenth century, “lover” had a platonic as well as a romantic meaning. It was most often used to describe a young man who was in love with a girl, whether or not she returned the feeling, but it was also perfectly acceptable for a lonely Jo March in Little Women to sigh to her mother, “Mothers are the best lovers in the world; but I don’t mind whispering to Marmee that I’d like to try all kinds.”
Or, as Florence Morse Kingsley wrote in 1907 in Those Queer Browns (and I cannot emphasize enough that these Browns are queer because they’re socialists): “As for William, he could never have been so wise, so tender, so lovable, so altogether delightful and worshipful, had it not been for his long guardianship of [his sister] Agatha. He has been father, mother, brother and lover to her.”
Conversely, the word "friend" conveyed fervent emotional intensity. Louisa May Alcott, among many others, used it to describe Jesus, “the Friend who welcomes every child with a love stronger than that of any father, tenderer than that of any mother." And it was by no means exclusively attached to platonic relationships: during the Civil War, soldiers often began letters to their wives with the salutation “Esteemed Friend.”
The past is another country; they speak a different language there. Their words may look the same as ours, but they are full of different meanings, and the feelings of the heart are as difficult to translate as poetry. Therefore, let them speak for themselves. Listen to Alfred Dodd’s apostrophe to Anthony Halsey: “Dear, dearest Anthony! Thou art mine own friend. My most beloved of all! To see thee again! What rapture it would be, thou sweet, lovely, dear, beloved, beautiful, adored Anthony!”
What would happen, I wondered, if a normal nineteenth century man found himself in the twentieth century, and discovered that behavior that had been acceptable and even celebrated in his own time had come to be seen as homosexual, and therefore aberrant?
E. Anthony Rotundo’s “Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern United States, 1800-1900” provided an invaluable description of nineteenth-century romantic friendship, with its kissing and cuddling and passionate declarations of love. Jonathan Ned Katz’s Love Stories: Sex Between Men before Homosexuality defined the outer boundaries of acceptable romantic friendship (basically, you’re fine as long as there are no genitals involved), and shows how those boundaries contracted as the concept of homosexuality began to spread in America in the 1880s and 1890s.
John Ibson’s Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography provides a pictorial account of the same process. In the 1860s, Civil War soldiers cheerfully got their photographs taken holding hands or snuggling with their friends. By the 1960s, snapshots show straight men standing rigidly upright, with a carefully defined margin of space between them. The popularization of the idea of homosexuality had not, as many sexologists hoped, led to increased tolerance. Instead, it made many previously acceptable practices morally suspect, resulting in far more stringent boundaries on appropriate male behavior.
Exploring this century of changes required a massive research job. For Russell’s boyhood in the 1840s and 50s, I relied heavily on William Dean Howells’s childhood memoir A Boy’s Town. His novels offer invaluable (and often quite funny) explorations of nineteenth century life and mores. The Shadow of a Dream and Mrs. Farrell both include fascinating depictions of passionate male friendships, one begun during college and the other during the Civil War. (The titular Mrs. Farrell even observes of the friendship, “It’s quite like a love-affair.”)
One could spend a lifetime reading Civil War histories without beginning to read all that has been published about the war. John D. Billing’s memoir Hardtack and Coffee and
Bell Irvin Wiley’s history The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union are stuffed with fascinating information about the everyday life of Union soldiers. Bruce Catton’s Centennial History of the Civil War was the premier Civil War history in the 1960s, an immensely readable political and military history that tends toward the then-prevailing view that hotheaded abolitionists and secessionists were equally culpable in bringing about a tragic and unnecessary war.
Caleb’s Civil War professor is ahead of his time in his view that the Civil War was a just war against slavery - or else very much behind it: this was the view of many Northern abolitionists during and after the war. Many of the Civil Rights measures passed in the 1960s were reiterations or elaborations of laws first passed during Reconstruction, which recalcitrant white Southerners rolled back through a combination of politics and violence after Union troops left the South in 1877. (Charles W. Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition provides a harrowing local view of how this process played out on the ground.)
Frederic W. Loring’s 1871 Two College Friends shows less literary skill than Chesnutt’s or Howells’ work, but makes up for it in sheer enthusiasm. Loring’s two college friends join the Union Army, repeatedly save each other from death, and address to each other panegyrics like “O my darling, my darling, my darling! please hear me. The only one I have ever loved at all, the only one who has ever loved me.”
These contemporary sources were also invaluable in helping me capture the cadences of Russell’s voice, as was Louisa May Alcott’s work, especially Little Women. Many grammatical rules that were codified later in the nineteenth century were still not set as of the 1860s, like the prohibitions on saying “ain’t” or “he don’t.” (“She don’t deserve to be forgiven,” cries Jo, after Amy burns Jo’s irreplaceable manuscript.) Russell’s attitude toward women’s changing roles in society echoes Alcott’s, while his stance toward Dan and Lacy’s romance was suggested by the characters’ easy acceptance of Annabel and Fun See’s engagement in Rose in Bloom.
(Lacy’s family history was inspired by Buwei Yang Chao’s delightful Autobiography of a Chinese Woman, which was translated into English by Chao’s husband Yuen Ren Chao (who also translated Alice in Wonderland into Chinese). Sometimes husband and wife bicker affectionately in the footnotes.)
Caroll Smith-Rosenberg’s Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America is an excellent resource about women’s nineteenth romantic friendships, and the changing social roles of women from the nineteenth into the twentieth centuries. Laura Shapiro’s Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America continues that story into the mid-twentieth century, while also offering tantalizing tidbits about mid-century food.
Hazel’s opinion column parodying anti-suffrage arguments is drawn largely from Marie Jenney Howe's satirical An Anti-Suffrage Monologue, as quoted in Judith Schwartz’s Radical Feminists in Heterodoxy: Greenwich Village 1912-1940. And yes, I did saddle Caleb with a research project about early twentieth-century college girls partly just to get in a little information about girls’ romantic friendships, which remained socially acceptable a few decades longer than romantic friendships between boys. See, for instance, Annie Fellows Johnston’s 1918 book for girls Georgina’s Service Stars, a book for girls in which Georgina mentions matter-of-factly that a younger girl has a crush on her, and gets a pretty severe case herself on an older girl named Esther: “She is so wonderful that it is a privilege just to be in the same town with her. Merely to feel when I wake in the morning that I may see her some time during the day makes life so rich, so full, so beautiful! How I long to be like her in every way!”
Like Russell, I’ve never cared for Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a literary production, but it is undeniably an excellent source of information about 19th century understandings of passionate male relationships. In the mid-nineteenth century he published lines like my dear friend my lover was on his way coming, O then I was happy, and the general reading public accepted this without demure until the 1890s.
In the nineteenth century, “lover” had a platonic as well as a romantic meaning. It was most often used to describe a young man who was in love with a girl, whether or not she returned the feeling, but it was also perfectly acceptable for a lonely Jo March in Little Women to sigh to her mother, “Mothers are the best lovers in the world; but I don’t mind whispering to Marmee that I’d like to try all kinds.”
Or, as Florence Morse Kingsley wrote in 1907 in Those Queer Browns (and I cannot emphasize enough that these Browns are queer because they’re socialists): “As for William, he could never have been so wise, so tender, so lovable, so altogether delightful and worshipful, had it not been for his long guardianship of [his sister] Agatha. He has been father, mother, brother and lover to her.”
Conversely, the word "friend" conveyed fervent emotional intensity. Louisa May Alcott, among many others, used it to describe Jesus, “the Friend who welcomes every child with a love stronger than that of any father, tenderer than that of any mother." And it was by no means exclusively attached to platonic relationships: during the Civil War, soldiers often began letters to their wives with the salutation “Esteemed Friend.”
The past is another country; they speak a different language there. Their words may look the same as ours, but they are full of different meanings, and the feelings of the heart are as difficult to translate as poetry. Therefore, let them speak for themselves. Listen to Alfred Dodd’s apostrophe to Anthony Halsey: “Dear, dearest Anthony! Thou art mine own friend. My most beloved of all! To see thee again! What rapture it would be, thou sweet, lovely, dear, beloved, beautiful, adored Anthony!”
Sleeping Soldier Saturday
Jul. 15th, 2023 07:25 amThe Sleeping Soldier’s release looms ever closer! So I thought I would post the first few chapters here, as I am wont to do.
I posted a version of this chapter a couple years ago, and it hasn't changed too much, though the rest of the book has morphed enormously in that time.
***
Chapter 1
Mr. Krause did not believe in fairies. In fact, although he liked to pretend he was a pious man, he believed in nothing but himself. He had come from nothing, a German immigrant who fled the draft in his own wretched principality and landed on the shores of America with no money and no English in the year of 1820.
He went west, and made his fortune cutting virgin timber in the wilds of Ohio. After twenty years he had enough money to build himself a beautiful house, a mansion in the style of the schlosses owned by the German landowners he had hated in his youth.
Once the house was built, he decided that he must find a wife who would be a jewel in this crown. Soon enough he wed a Welsh beauty with black hair and blue eyes and an adamantine heart to match his own; and she was the only thing he ever loved.
Neither of the Krauses cared for children, but of course there was need of an heir. So in the course of time Mrs. Krause had a baby boy, and they invited all the best society around to a great party after the christening.
The fairy arrived uninvited. She stood and watched a while, and smiled, because fairies like pretty things; and it was a time of elaborate ball gowns, wide skirts and low shoulders, the plainly-dressed men mere stalks for the shimmering flowers that were their partners.
Then the fairy lifted her hands, and the candles flickered and died. The orchestra stopped, and the dancers stopped, and there was no light in the ballroom except the silver glow of the fairy herself.
( Read More )
I posted a version of this chapter a couple years ago, and it hasn't changed too much, though the rest of the book has morphed enormously in that time.
***
Chapter 1
Mr. Krause did not believe in fairies. In fact, although he liked to pretend he was a pious man, he believed in nothing but himself. He had come from nothing, a German immigrant who fled the draft in his own wretched principality and landed on the shores of America with no money and no English in the year of 1820.
He went west, and made his fortune cutting virgin timber in the wilds of Ohio. After twenty years he had enough money to build himself a beautiful house, a mansion in the style of the schlosses owned by the German landowners he had hated in his youth.
Once the house was built, he decided that he must find a wife who would be a jewel in this crown. Soon enough he wed a Welsh beauty with black hair and blue eyes and an adamantine heart to match his own; and she was the only thing he ever loved.
Neither of the Krauses cared for children, but of course there was need of an heir. So in the course of time Mrs. Krause had a baby boy, and they invited all the best society around to a great party after the christening.
The fairy arrived uninvited. She stood and watched a while, and smiled, because fairies like pretty things; and it was a time of elaborate ball gowns, wide skirts and low shoulders, the plainly-dressed men mere stalks for the shimmering flowers that were their partners.
Then the fairy lifted her hands, and the candles flickered and died. The orchestra stopped, and the dancers stopped, and there was no light in the ballroom except the silver glow of the fairy herself.
( Read More )Sleeping Soldier Blurb
Jul. 13th, 2023 07:37 amSlowly, slowly, The Sleeping Soldier is coming together. I've written a draft of the blurb, so please tell me your thoughts!
***
After a century-long sleep, a Union soldier wakes up in 1965.
Cavalry lieutenant Russell Krause is all at sea in this strange new century of electric lights and automobiles. But he soon acquires a guide: Caleb O’Connor, a kind-hearted, history-loving college student with secrets he’s desperate to hide. Caleb is gay, and he’s completely smitten with this lively, warm-hearted soldier, who has swiftly become his best friend.
But Russell’s nineteenth century understanding of friendship is far more affectionate than any 1960s friendship is allowed to be. In between telling Russell about escalators, record players, and the Civil Rights movement, Caleb has to explain that men in 1965 are no longer allowed to hold hands or share beds or kiss… which is tough, because Caleb would love to be kissing Russell.
Despite these chilling changes in social customs, Caleb and Russell’s loving friendship grows ever closer. But the cultural divide may prove wider than even love can bridge.
***
After a century-long sleep, a Union soldier wakes up in 1965.
Cavalry lieutenant Russell Krause is all at sea in this strange new century of electric lights and automobiles. But he soon acquires a guide: Caleb O’Connor, a kind-hearted, history-loving college student with secrets he’s desperate to hide. Caleb is gay, and he’s completely smitten with this lively, warm-hearted soldier, who has swiftly become his best friend.
But Russell’s nineteenth century understanding of friendship is far more affectionate than any 1960s friendship is allowed to be. In between telling Russell about escalators, record players, and the Civil Rights movement, Caleb has to explain that men in 1965 are no longer allowed to hold hands or share beds or kiss… which is tough, because Caleb would love to be kissing Russell.
Despite these chilling changes in social customs, Caleb and Russell’s loving friendship grows ever closer. But the cultural divide may prove wider than even love can bridge.
June Writing and July Plans
Jun. 30th, 2023 07:41 amAfter many months of starting various projects and then struggling to write, I have at long last decided to take a vacation from writing. How long a vacation? I don’t know. As long as it needs to be, I guess.
This vacation doesn’t include revisions on The Sleeping Soldier: I’m enjoying those, so I’m still working on them. I would still like to get the book out in July, but it may end up as an August release. August 25th is my hard deadline.
This vacation doesn’t include revisions on The Sleeping Soldier: I’m enjoying those, so I’m still working on them. I would still like to get the book out in July, but it may end up as an August release. August 25th is my hard deadline.
April Reading and May Goals
Apr. 30th, 2023 09:43 amAfter a blockbuster March in which I steamrolled through a complete draft of Sleeping Soldier, I didn’t do a lot of writing in April. Some Sleeping Soldier edits, some ficlets for Patreon, publishing some of my books wide with Draft2Digital… D2D sales have been sloooow, although this is partly because I started with two f/f works. Last week I put up an m/m short story, and you will be unsurprised to hear that it has already sold four times as many copies as the two f/f stories, which have been up longer.
This is atypical only in that my m/m sales overall are seven times my f/f sales. Is this pretty representative of the relative sizes of the m/m and f/f markets?
(You might imagine that there would be some overlap between the f/f and the m/m audience - this was certainly my hope as I started out. But it seems to be pretty small.)
So part of the reason I haven’t written much in April is that I’ve been contemplating my career direction. For philosophical reasons (and also I DO WHAT I WANT reasons) it feels bad to focus solely on m/m, but for “earning enough money to go to France” reasons it’s clearly the right choice, and as I commented to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
littlerhymes, the choice is not set in stone… can always change course later…
Although the math in favor of all m/m all the time is only going to get stronger the more of it I write.
***
Anyway, my goals for May:
1. Finish the first round of edits on Sleeping Soldier and send it to a second round of betas. (Is that an excessive number of betas? Maybe. I’ve just been working on this book for so long… I want it to be perfect…)
2. Cover for Sleeping Soldier! Contemplating whether I ought to find a new cover artist? Yes/no, and if yes, any cover artist recommendations?
3. Continue to put things on Draft2Digital. Contemplating whether to start putting up the Jennifer Montgomerys… I want to release the Christmas book close to Christmas, but if I did one every three months, say, that would work. Or would it be better to wait and release them all close together?
4. Start a new book project. I’ve been poking at a couple things but nothing is demanding to be written right now.
This is atypical only in that my m/m sales overall are seven times my f/f sales. Is this pretty representative of the relative sizes of the m/m and f/f markets?
(You might imagine that there would be some overlap between the f/f and the m/m audience - this was certainly my hope as I started out. But it seems to be pretty small.)
So part of the reason I haven’t written much in April is that I’ve been contemplating my career direction. For philosophical reasons (and also I DO WHAT I WANT reasons) it feels bad to focus solely on m/m, but for “earning enough money to go to France” reasons it’s clearly the right choice, and as I commented to
littlerhymes, the choice is not set in stone… can always change course later… Although the math in favor of all m/m all the time is only going to get stronger the more of it I write.
***
Anyway, my goals for May:
1. Finish the first round of edits on Sleeping Soldier and send it to a second round of betas. (Is that an excessive number of betas? Maybe. I’ve just been working on this book for so long… I want it to be perfect…)
2. Cover for Sleeping Soldier! Contemplating whether I ought to find a new cover artist? Yes/no, and if yes, any cover artist recommendations?
3. Continue to put things on Draft2Digital. Contemplating whether to start putting up the Jennifer Montgomerys… I want to release the Christmas book close to Christmas, but if I did one every three months, say, that would work. Or would it be better to wait and release them all close together?
4. Start a new book project. I’ve been poking at a couple things but nothing is demanding to be written right now.
March Writing and April Plans
Mar. 31st, 2023 08:06 amAs aforementioned, I finished a draft of The Sleeping Soldier! A draft that I am willing to let other people clap their innocent eyeballs on, no less! It took a mere three years… nine attempts… blood, sweat, and tears… okay I think there was no literal blood involved, but there were in fact tears.
What finally cracked it:
1. Accepting that I was simply going to have to spend a few chapters dealing with Russell’s grief about the fact that, you know, everyone he loved died while he was in that hundred year sleep, which ultimately meant rejiggering the timeline to include an extra year;
2. Making an outline, which is what got me excited enough to give the book another try despite copious failed attempts; and
3. Retyping the whole thing rather than copy-pasting from old drafts, as suggested in Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts. To be honest I thought this advice was barmy when I first read it, and it’s possible that it will never work again for any of my other projects, but at the moment I am a CONVERT.
Conveniently, I have another project ideally suited to this method! My YA novel Sage has existed as a complete but imperfect draft since 2016 and I would love to finish it and get it out there, even though it has the commercial prospects of a rutabaga. I love these girls! Everyone else should have a chance to meet them too! And I really do think it will make it slightly more saleable if Sage’s enemies-to-friends arc with her nemesis’s head minion Angelee extends to enemies-to-friends-to-lovers…
Oh, and I’ve got some prompt fics I need to write for Patreon. Maybe I will take a little break to tackle those before diving into Sage.
What finally cracked it:
1. Accepting that I was simply going to have to spend a few chapters dealing with Russell’s grief about the fact that, you know, everyone he loved died while he was in that hundred year sleep, which ultimately meant rejiggering the timeline to include an extra year;
2. Making an outline, which is what got me excited enough to give the book another try despite copious failed attempts; and
3. Retyping the whole thing rather than copy-pasting from old drafts, as suggested in Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts. To be honest I thought this advice was barmy when I first read it, and it’s possible that it will never work again for any of my other projects, but at the moment I am a CONVERT.
Conveniently, I have another project ideally suited to this method! My YA novel Sage has existed as a complete but imperfect draft since 2016 and I would love to finish it and get it out there, even though it has the commercial prospects of a rutabaga. I love these girls! Everyone else should have a chance to meet them too! And I really do think it will make it slightly more saleable if Sage’s enemies-to-friends arc with her nemesis’s head minion Angelee extends to enemies-to-friends-to-lovers…
Oh, and I’ve got some prompt fics I need to write for Patreon. Maybe I will take a little break to tackle those before diving into Sage.
Call up the brass band! Bring out the fireworks! After three years and nine attempts, I have at long last finished a good solid draft of The Sleeping Soldier!
February Writing and March Plans
Feb. 28th, 2023 09:51 amHave run aground in Fritzi & Magdalena, as Magdalena flatly refuses to have Fritzi shot. I believe this problem is fixable if I futz with the timeline so Fritzi shows up mid-revolution rather than a month later (that is, while everything is still in flux, everyone is overwrought, and it seems plausible that Fritzi might spearhead a counterrevolution and Must Be Stopped, By Firing Squad If Necessary) but this will require revisions… So I’ll come back to that later.
Instead I’m being very naughty and working on The Sleeping Soldier again. I KNOW, I said I would take a break for a year, but I hammered out an outline and it seems like a good outline and as I was outlining I kept getting inspired and writing bits… so I’m giving it a go.
In Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts, Matt Bell suggests literally rewriting one’s novel, that is, retyping rather than copy-pasting when working on a new draft. I scoffed at first, but I’ve been using it on this draft and… it seems to be working? The act of retyping seems to get the writing muscles working in the brain, so when I reach a part where I need to compose afresh it’s easier to get going - I already have momentum. Plus of course MUCH easier to catch small continuity errors!
Instead I’m being very naughty and working on The Sleeping Soldier again. I KNOW, I said I would take a break for a year, but I hammered out an outline and it seems like a good outline and as I was outlining I kept getting inspired and writing bits… so I’m giving it a go.
In Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts, Matt Bell suggests literally rewriting one’s novel, that is, retyping rather than copy-pasting when working on a new draft. I scoffed at first, but I’ve been using it on this draft and… it seems to be working? The act of retyping seems to get the writing muscles working in the brain, so when I reach a part where I need to compose afresh it’s easier to get going - I already have momentum. Plus of course MUCH easier to catch small continuity errors!
November Writing and December Plans
Nov. 29th, 2022 11:51 amDid not get much writing done this month. Feeling discouraged about writing in general, to be honest. I’ve been struggling to write (so many of this year’s writing posts are some variation on “didn’t get much writing done this month”!), and my royalties are considerably lower than last year, and it’s all very frustrating.
I have decided that for whatever reason I am simply not Ready to write Sleeping Beauty, so rather than continuing to bang my head against that wall, I’m going to set the project aside for at least a year, probably more, it seems optimistic to imagine that I’ll be able to stand the sight of it after a mere year has passed. I remind myself yet again that Ursula K. Le Guin had to sit on Tehanu for eighteen years before she was ready to write it. Eighteen years!
Have been noodling on a couple of projects but who knows if they will come to anything.
***
Anyway, in years past when I have been struggling to write, I have found prompt memes really helpful. (The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball originally grew from a prompt meme.) So I thought I would post one!
Tell me a little about a winter story I haven't written, and I'll give you several sentences from that story.
Winter doesn't have to mean holiday (although it certainly can!). Think snow, icicles, hot beverages by toasty fires, sledding and sleigh rides and being trapped by blizzards and unfortunate incidents involving holly dryads.
I will write ficlets for most any fandom I've written before (Captain America, Queen's Thief, various Sutcliffs, American Girl... I haven't actually written a Biggles or Worrals fic before but I've been thinking about trying) or for my own books, or for a completely original story.
I have decided that for whatever reason I am simply not Ready to write Sleeping Beauty, so rather than continuing to bang my head against that wall, I’m going to set the project aside for at least a year, probably more, it seems optimistic to imagine that I’ll be able to stand the sight of it after a mere year has passed. I remind myself yet again that Ursula K. Le Guin had to sit on Tehanu for eighteen years before she was ready to write it. Eighteen years!
Have been noodling on a couple of projects but who knows if they will come to anything.
***
Anyway, in years past when I have been struggling to write, I have found prompt memes really helpful. (The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball originally grew from a prompt meme.) So I thought I would post one!
Tell me a little about a winter story I haven't written, and I'll give you several sentences from that story.
Winter doesn't have to mean holiday (although it certainly can!). Think snow, icicles, hot beverages by toasty fires, sledding and sleigh rides and being trapped by blizzards and unfortunate incidents involving holly dryads.
I will write ficlets for most any fandom I've written before (Captain America, Queen's Thief, various Sutcliffs, American Girl... I haven't actually written a Biggles or Worrals fic before but I've been thinking about trying) or for my own books, or for a completely original story.
Photographs
Jul. 12th, 2022 03:19 pmReally should just let Sleeping Beauty rest and work on something else for a while, and I am trying, but the idea of Russell POV has caught me by the throat and just wouldn't let me go...
Here, Russell is recuperating from strep throat. To cheer him up, Caleb has given him a photograph of his fiancee Julia and his best friend Owen.
***
After Caleb left, Russell tucked the photographs in a drawer. The sight of the dear dead faces pierced his soul, and he could not look at them anymore; but once they were out of sight, and he rested back against his pillows, he gloated over the fact that he had them, that Caleb had given the photographs to him, that Caleb had taken the trouble to go to the archive and hunt them out for Russell. Wicked of course to steal the photographs from the archive; but that only made Russell love him more.
He would have given a great deal to know if Caleb loved him a quarter as much as he loved Caleb. He was glad, anyway, to have this proof that Caleb loved him at least a little, for it had shaken Russell badly that Caleb had seemed so unconcerned when Russell fell ill.
Of course it was because Caleb had known there was no reason to be worried: that penicillin would make Russell well. Russell could see that now. But at the time Caleb had seemed heartless, cruelly indifferent, and Russell felt even now an echo of the panicked choking in his throat when he realized that Caleb meant to leave him alone in the night. He had stayed only when Russell begged him.
And yet he had stayed. He saw that Russell was frightened, and took Russell in his arms and kissed his brow three times, and sat by his side until the fever broke.
Sheer Christian charity, perhaps. It was the pity of an angel that moved him to stay, just as the pity of an angel had moved him to hold Russell hand when Russell wept after visiting Julia’s grave.
In Russell’s own time, he could with confidence have read Caleb’s behavior this way. It was a reasonable, measured kind of friendship that Caleb felt for him: steady, even, affectionate, and cool. There were no signs of warmer friendship. They did not walk arm in arm, or contrive to share a pillow, or press sweet kisses to each other’s faces as they told secrets in the night.
But here, the fact that Caleb did not do these things said nothing about his feelings, because they were all forbidden. Probably it had been a transgression, even, for Caleb to comfort Russell in his grief and succor him in his sickness.
Certainly it was against the rules for Caleb to take Russell in his arms and kiss his fevered brow. Men in the future didn’t kiss each other unless they were drunk. Apparently if you were drunk enough it wasn’t homosexual.
Was it sheer obstinacy to resist these rules? After all people in the future knew so much more than he did, so much more than anyone in his own time. Here the streets were clean and well-lighted, and the people clean and well-fed. They had conquered distance with cars and airplanes, and night with electric lights, and disease with modern medicine…
“Lots of people think homosexuality is a sin, but it’s a disease, a mental illness,” Professor Stotz had explained to Russell. “The sin lies in society, which has no compassion for homosexuals even though they have no choice about being ill.”
Of course Russell thought it must be true: they knew so much about medicine now. (And he hadn’t even known about penicillin yet when Professor Stotz said it!) But then Don said his father, who was a doctor, didn’t think homosexuality was a disease after all, and presumably a doctor would know more about it than an English professor.
It was all so confusing.
Of course it was true, as Russell well knew, that when boys shared beds they did sometimes get up to mischief. Perhaps it was right to remove the opportunity for vice.
(He ought to have stricken that perhaps from the beginning of the sentence. Surely it was right to remove an opportunity for vice. But he loved the dear old custom; he would have given his right hand to sleep with Caleb in his arms.)
But it couldn’t be right for a whole society to have become as suspicious as a crabbed old preacher who sees a Jezebel in every pretty girl with a ribbon in her bonnet. They saw homosexuality in everything: crossed legs, a too-long smile, a friendship that wouldn’t fall to pieces at the lightest touch. The college boys were all young men, older in fact than most college boys in Russell’s time. But when they were sober they acted like little boys of eight, who can only express their affections by throwing rocks at each other.
It came out when they were drunk, though. Then they fell on each other’s necks and slurred out, “I love you, man.” But they would have been ashamed to say it sober. Someone had sold their birthright for a mess of pottage and they didn’t even know it.
Russell had been sitting all this time propped up against his pillows, gazing vaguely out the window at the empty campus. Now he leaned over and opened the drawer again, and drew out the photograph of Owen, and held it on his lap.
In the photograph, Russell perched on Owen’s knee, with Owen’s hand at Russell’s waist. The photographer had suggested the pose, and very pretty Russell thought it when the photographs came back. He had passed it round among his messmates, and kept a copy in his wallet so he should never lose it, and sent a print to Julia, pleased and proud that his dear girl should see his friend.
He had cried over the photograph after Owen died. He felt tears rising now, not only because Owen was dead, but because he couldn’t even frame this photograph and hang in on the wall.
Did it really matter if Caleb loved him? Even if the warmest possible friendship burned in his breast, Caleb could not act otherwise than he was acting now. He had already reached the limit of what was allowed: had indeed surpassed it, in kissing Russell’s brow. The custom of the country was inimical to true friendship, and Russell had better let it go.
But nonetheless he would have liked to know.
Here, Russell is recuperating from strep throat. To cheer him up, Caleb has given him a photograph of his fiancee Julia and his best friend Owen.
***
After Caleb left, Russell tucked the photographs in a drawer. The sight of the dear dead faces pierced his soul, and he could not look at them anymore; but once they were out of sight, and he rested back against his pillows, he gloated over the fact that he had them, that Caleb had given the photographs to him, that Caleb had taken the trouble to go to the archive and hunt them out for Russell. Wicked of course to steal the photographs from the archive; but that only made Russell love him more.
He would have given a great deal to know if Caleb loved him a quarter as much as he loved Caleb. He was glad, anyway, to have this proof that Caleb loved him at least a little, for it had shaken Russell badly that Caleb had seemed so unconcerned when Russell fell ill.
Of course it was because Caleb had known there was no reason to be worried: that penicillin would make Russell well. Russell could see that now. But at the time Caleb had seemed heartless, cruelly indifferent, and Russell felt even now an echo of the panicked choking in his throat when he realized that Caleb meant to leave him alone in the night. He had stayed only when Russell begged him.
And yet he had stayed. He saw that Russell was frightened, and took Russell in his arms and kissed his brow three times, and sat by his side until the fever broke.
Sheer Christian charity, perhaps. It was the pity of an angel that moved him to stay, just as the pity of an angel had moved him to hold Russell hand when Russell wept after visiting Julia’s grave.
In Russell’s own time, he could with confidence have read Caleb’s behavior this way. It was a reasonable, measured kind of friendship that Caleb felt for him: steady, even, affectionate, and cool. There were no signs of warmer friendship. They did not walk arm in arm, or contrive to share a pillow, or press sweet kisses to each other’s faces as they told secrets in the night.
But here, the fact that Caleb did not do these things said nothing about his feelings, because they were all forbidden. Probably it had been a transgression, even, for Caleb to comfort Russell in his grief and succor him in his sickness.
Certainly it was against the rules for Caleb to take Russell in his arms and kiss his fevered brow. Men in the future didn’t kiss each other unless they were drunk. Apparently if you were drunk enough it wasn’t homosexual.
Was it sheer obstinacy to resist these rules? After all people in the future knew so much more than he did, so much more than anyone in his own time. Here the streets were clean and well-lighted, and the people clean and well-fed. They had conquered distance with cars and airplanes, and night with electric lights, and disease with modern medicine…
“Lots of people think homosexuality is a sin, but it’s a disease, a mental illness,” Professor Stotz had explained to Russell. “The sin lies in society, which has no compassion for homosexuals even though they have no choice about being ill.”
Of course Russell thought it must be true: they knew so much about medicine now. (And he hadn’t even known about penicillin yet when Professor Stotz said it!) But then Don said his father, who was a doctor, didn’t think homosexuality was a disease after all, and presumably a doctor would know more about it than an English professor.
It was all so confusing.
Of course it was true, as Russell well knew, that when boys shared beds they did sometimes get up to mischief. Perhaps it was right to remove the opportunity for vice.
(He ought to have stricken that perhaps from the beginning of the sentence. Surely it was right to remove an opportunity for vice. But he loved the dear old custom; he would have given his right hand to sleep with Caleb in his arms.)
But it couldn’t be right for a whole society to have become as suspicious as a crabbed old preacher who sees a Jezebel in every pretty girl with a ribbon in her bonnet. They saw homosexuality in everything: crossed legs, a too-long smile, a friendship that wouldn’t fall to pieces at the lightest touch. The college boys were all young men, older in fact than most college boys in Russell’s time. But when they were sober they acted like little boys of eight, who can only express their affections by throwing rocks at each other.
It came out when they were drunk, though. Then they fell on each other’s necks and slurred out, “I love you, man.” But they would have been ashamed to say it sober. Someone had sold their birthright for a mess of pottage and they didn’t even know it.
Russell had been sitting all this time propped up against his pillows, gazing vaguely out the window at the empty campus. Now he leaned over and opened the drawer again, and drew out the photograph of Owen, and held it on his lap.
In the photograph, Russell perched on Owen’s knee, with Owen’s hand at Russell’s waist. The photographer had suggested the pose, and very pretty Russell thought it when the photographs came back. He had passed it round among his messmates, and kept a copy in his wallet so he should never lose it, and sent a print to Julia, pleased and proud that his dear girl should see his friend.
He had cried over the photograph after Owen died. He felt tears rising now, not only because Owen was dead, but because he couldn’t even frame this photograph and hang in on the wall.
Did it really matter if Caleb loved him? Even if the warmest possible friendship burned in his breast, Caleb could not act otherwise than he was acting now. He had already reached the limit of what was allowed: had indeed surpassed it, in kissing Russell’s brow. The custom of the country was inimical to true friendship, and Russell had better let it go.
But nonetheless he would have liked to know.
June Writing and July Goals
Jul. 1st, 2022 07:19 pmAs aforementioned I have finished a draft of Sleeping Beauty, which I am TRYING to allow to rest although, unhelpfully, I keep thinking about it and coming up with new ideas that might? perhaps?? make it better??? Currently contemplating whether Russell ought to have at least a few POV chapters.
HOWEVER I know that what would REALLY make the book better right now is to let it rest for a while, so I can come back to it with fresh eyes. Therefore I am trying to sink my teeth into another project. Possibilities include:
1. Chris and Josh, in which a vampire snack bar attendant falls in love with a vampire snack. (You may recognize this as an iteration of one of the novels I wanted to inter in this post. In fact that post was singularly unsuccessful at laying books to rest: the 1910s college girls Goblin Market also refused to die, as did Fritzi and Magdalena.)
2. Sage, the YA novel, although it has occurred to me that extending the enemies-to-friends plot to have a -to-lovers component is going to be rather more work than I initially realized. I sort of envisioned banging it off in a week as when I revised The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball but TTPB was basically done, whereas Sage would be getting not just a new subplot but probably a sub-subplot about coming out, as well.
3. Kip and Alec, the tale of two men who feel unworthy of love: one because he was desperately unpopular at school, and the other because he lost half his face in the Great War as a result of a tragic wound as a fighter pilot. (Thus, any Biggles-related purchases henceforward are RESEARCH).
HOWEVER I know that what would REALLY make the book better right now is to let it rest for a while, so I can come back to it with fresh eyes. Therefore I am trying to sink my teeth into another project. Possibilities include:
1. Chris and Josh, in which a vampire snack bar attendant falls in love with a vampire snack. (You may recognize this as an iteration of one of the novels I wanted to inter in this post. In fact that post was singularly unsuccessful at laying books to rest: the 1910s college girls Goblin Market also refused to die, as did Fritzi and Magdalena.)
2. Sage, the YA novel, although it has occurred to me that extending the enemies-to-friends plot to have a -to-lovers component is going to be rather more work than I initially realized. I sort of envisioned banging it off in a week as when I revised The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball but TTPB was basically done, whereas Sage would be getting not just a new subplot but probably a sub-subplot about coming out, as well.
3. Kip and Alec, the tale of two men who feel unworthy of love: one because he was desperately unpopular at school, and the other because he lost half his face in the Great War as a result of a tragic wound as a fighter pilot. (Thus, any Biggles-related purchases henceforward are RESEARCH).
Friends! Romans! Countrymen! After two and a half years of struggle, yesterday I completed a draft of Sleeping Beauty!!!!!
As I have come to praise Caesar, not to bury him, I will not itemize the revisions this draft will need (MANY), nor commit a post-mortem for why this god-forsaken draft took so long to write (UNCLEAR although I have some theories), but merely revel in the fact that at last there IS a complete draft. I have conquered!
As I have come to praise Caesar, not to bury him, I will not itemize the revisions this draft will need (MANY), nor commit a post-mortem for why this god-forsaken draft took so long to write (UNCLEAR although I have some theories), but merely revel in the fact that at last there IS a complete draft. I have conquered!
May Writing and June Goals
May. 31st, 2022 03:46 pmStill creeping forward in Sleeping Beauty. I’m at 105,000 words now, with God knows how many left to write. It’s going to be ludicrously long… if it ever ends…
I took a little break to work on revisions of Sage, a YA novel that has been living on my hard drive (in various states of completion) since 2011. I love these girls so much and I want to get them out in the world and it occurred to me that way more people would read it if I made Sage’s enemies-to-friends subplot with her nemesis’s chief minion Angelee into a full-blown enemies-to-friends-to-lovers arc.
I am a little sad to be tossing romance into the mix, as my Vision for the book was a YA novel about friendship rather than romance. However, the friendship story will remain the heart of the book, which is the important thing surely, and I think it will strengthen the book as a whole to make the queer subtext into text.
Anyway, after this brief sojourn in Sage-land, I returned to Sleeping Beauty, and the middle section which has been the bane of my existence… has abruptly disentangled itself? I performed a few ruthless cuts and suddenly things fell into place. If any of the cut material really HAS to be in there, I can always add it back in later.
I honestly think one of the difficulties with this book is that there are SO many interesting ways that Russell would find the 20th century discombobulating (“What the hell is basketball?”) that I keep wandering off on tangents that are really just distractions from the main point.
I took a little break to work on revisions of Sage, a YA novel that has been living on my hard drive (in various states of completion) since 2011. I love these girls so much and I want to get them out in the world and it occurred to me that way more people would read it if I made Sage’s enemies-to-friends subplot with her nemesis’s chief minion Angelee into a full-blown enemies-to-friends-to-lovers arc.
I am a little sad to be tossing romance into the mix, as my Vision for the book was a YA novel about friendship rather than romance. However, the friendship story will remain the heart of the book, which is the important thing surely, and I think it will strengthen the book as a whole to make the queer subtext into text.
Anyway, after this brief sojourn in Sage-land, I returned to Sleeping Beauty, and the middle section which has been the bane of my existence… has abruptly disentangled itself? I performed a few ruthless cuts and suddenly things fell into place. If any of the cut material really HAS to be in there, I can always add it back in later.
I honestly think one of the difficulties with this book is that there are SO many interesting ways that Russell would find the 20th century discombobulating (“What the hell is basketball?”) that I keep wandering off on tangents that are really just distractions from the main point.
April Writing and May Goals
Apr. 30th, 2022 07:28 amMost important writing news of the month: Tramps and Vagabonds is now available for preorder! It will release on May 9.
Knocking Tramps and Vagabonds into shape took up a good deal of April, but I have been trundling away on Sleeping Beauty as well. I’m up to 90,000 words! I would love to say I’ll finish a draft in May, but honestly June seems more likely.
Once I have a complete draft I’m going to set it aside to cool, as it were, and work on something else. Perhaps at last those 1910s college girls will get the attention they deserve? I’m toying with the idea of mushing this story together with the Goblin Market retelling, because of COURSE vivacious trickster madcap Judy is exactly the sort of person who WOULD eat the fairy fruit.
The girls are going to make a one-reel film, on the topic of fairies of course. Judy plays the Puck character, who kisses the eyes of a sleeping maiden to give her the fairy sight, and then leads her into the fairy mound. Judy’s acerbic roommate Ruth directs.
Knocking Tramps and Vagabonds into shape took up a good deal of April, but I have been trundling away on Sleeping Beauty as well. I’m up to 90,000 words! I would love to say I’ll finish a draft in May, but honestly June seems more likely.
Once I have a complete draft I’m going to set it aside to cool, as it were, and work on something else. Perhaps at last those 1910s college girls will get the attention they deserve? I’m toying with the idea of mushing this story together with the Goblin Market retelling, because of COURSE vivacious trickster madcap Judy is exactly the sort of person who WOULD eat the fairy fruit.
The girls are going to make a one-reel film, on the topic of fairies of course. Judy plays the Puck character, who kisses the eyes of a sleeping maiden to give her the fairy sight, and then leads her into the fairy mound. Judy’s acerbic roommate Ruth directs.
March Writing and April Goals
Mar. 31st, 2022 07:58 amIt still seems dangerous to say that Sleeping Beauty is going well, but I’ve hit 75,000 words, and at least the book feels like it has a firm foundation and a good, solid structure, so perhaps… it is… going well? Perhaps seventh time is the charm!
At some point I should do a postmortem on What the Fuck Went Wrong with this Drafting Process so it never happens again. But probably I should wait till the book’s done because otherwise the postmortem might crush me with despair.
In April, I intend to continue Sleeping Beauty (I think it’s too early to make “finish a draft” a goal, but we are getting closer) and to prepare Tramps and Vagabonds for publication. Time to bite the bullet and write that blurb and historical note.
At some point I should do a postmortem on What the Fuck Went Wrong with this Drafting Process so it never happens again. But probably I should wait till the book’s done because otherwise the postmortem might crush me with despair.
In April, I intend to continue Sleeping Beauty (I think it’s too early to make “finish a draft” a goal, but we are getting closer) and to prepare Tramps and Vagabonds for publication. Time to bite the bullet and write that blurb and historical note.
