Books

Jane Austen, Master Worldbuilder

One area of interest that I’ve found a lot of fantasy and science fiction authors and fans share is the works of Jane Austen. I’m not sure what the connection is, other than perhaps the sense of worldbuilding. Austen wasn’t really doing worldbuilding the way we think about it. She was just writing what she knew, the society around her. But it’s such a vividly depicted world that’s utterly alien to modern readers that it functions like reading a fantasy or science fiction novel set in another world. We know exactly how her world works, what the social rules are, what the expectations are for each kind of person and how the different groups are meant to interact. We know what they do for leisure, what their spiritual beliefs are and how they vary from person to person in the way they actually carry them out. We know what their courtship rituals are and what the penalties are for violating those rules. If you’re writing about another world, reading Jane Austen will teach you a lot about how to depict that world in a story and use the rules of the world to create tension and conflict and to drive the plot.

Although there’s a lot more narrative exposition than you can get away with in a modern novel, the interesting thing about Austen is the way she lays out the rules and how they affect the plot. It usually comes through dialogue, and the dialogue happens because those rules are creating some kind of conflict, like Mrs. Bennet’s diatribes about entailment and inheritance laws that mean her daughters have to find good husbands because they won’t inherit their father’s estate. That drives most of what happens in the novel, and you come away from reading Pride and Prejudice understanding how it all works without there having been that much exposition.

PBS is currently showing the series Sanditon, which is based on the fragment of a novel Austen left unfinished when she died. She only wrote eleven chapters, and in those chapters she mostly established the main cast of characters and the situation they were in. The plot hadn’t really kicked in yet, other than setting up that it was going to have something to do with turning a small seaside town into a fashionable resort while a bunch of relatives are campaigning to inherit from a wealthy elderly woman who has no children to inherit. The TV series takes this setup and spins a story from it. I’m not sure it’s entirely successful. I suppose it might be okay if you just take it as a costume drama that happens to be set in the Regency era. It doesn’t really work as any kind of Jane Austen story for me, mostly because I think the screenwriter forgot that one of the keys to Austen’s works was a strong sense of how that world worked. This show goes far astray from any sense of those rules and structures, but also without a sense of real tension coming from those rules or consequences of those rules being violated.

I kind of think Jane is spinning in her grave. I’m watching because I’m curious how it will all play out. The edition of the novel I have is completed by “another lady,” and I may read the rest of it to see how that author sees it. It’s like Jane Austen left a writing prompt and it’s up to us to figure out how to finish the story.

Winter

We had something approaching winter yesterday. It was cold and rainy, with bits of sleet. I didn’t have children’s choir, and they canceled choir practice because there was a chance of it getting below freezing while the roads were still wet, so I had a delightful evening of snuggling under the electric blanket with candles going in the fireplace (I have a fireplace candelabra, which gives the flickering light of a fire without the mess or without having to open the damper and send all the warm air up the chimney), classical music on the radio, and a good book — basically, peak hygge. I even went to bed early.

And because I went to bed early, I seem to have forgotten to set my alarm. I woke up at about the usual time, anyway, then since there was nothing pressing, I let myself lie there for a while, which meant I went back to sleep. I have a thyroid condition, so I’m supposed to be watching for signs of low thyroid, like fatigue. I worried for a moment when I overslept in spite of going to bed early, but then I remembered that more than ten years ago I was using a TV show that came on in reruns at 9 a.m. as a way of forcing myself out of bed in the winter. Sleeping until 8 is actually an improvement. I really am part bear, I think. When Daylight Time begins, I’ll be hopping out of bed much earlier.

Today it’s colder than it was yesterday, but it’s sunny, so it feels less wintery. The annoying thing about this winter (for me) is that it’s been warm and sunny on weekends and the cold, rainy days have always been Wednesdays. On weekends, I could hide under my blanket and read, but on Wednesdays I have choir stuff, so I have to go out.

I’m willing to compromise and take a cold, rainy weekday other than Wednesday, and then I can switch workdays. Still, there’s something about a cold, rainy Sunday afternoon (with the rain starting after noon, since I have to go out on Sunday mornings) with a good book, a pot of tea, and the appropriate music as I lie on my bed or sofa under a blanket. It looks like Valentine’s Day is going to be cold and possibly rainy, so maybe I’ll indulge myself then. There may even be baking.

For today, though, I have writing to do. I’m making headway on the book I’m drafting, and I’ve set a deadline for myself.

My Books

New Anthology on Kickstarter

I mentioned a month or so ago when outlining what was coming up for the year that I’d contributed a story to an anthology that was going to be Kickstarted soon. Well, that Kickstarter is now live.

The anthology is called Where the Veil is Thin, and it’s a collection of stories about the fae from a range of authors, including me. I don’t write a lot of short stories, and if this book ends up happening (it has to be fully funded up front), it will be my first official short story sale.

Here’s the Kickstarter page if you’re interested or want to support it.

I’ve toyed with the idea of doing a Kickstarter for a book, mostly as a way of raising awareness/excitement, but I think for now that it would be a lot of work, so I think I’ll just keep funding the production costs myself and hope that the books turn a profit. It is cool that things like this exist to help people get their dreams out into the world, though.

I should probably try to write more short stories, but I’m more of a novelist and most of my stories tend to grow into novels. I think having a prompt helped. They invited me to contribute to this book, which was a huge honor. I guess it helped that I knew one of the editors. We met at the Serenity premiere event in LA years ago and ended up sitting together at the movie. It’s strange how something like that ended up coming around to something work-related. You never know. The world is a funny place.

Don’t Know Much About History

For the fantasy world I want to build so I can set a bunch of loosely related stories there, I’ve been reading a lot of history. I’ve always been a big history buff. I read history for fun and most of my electives in college were history courses. And yet I’m still learning new things. There are aspects of history that I’m only just now starting to understand.

I know it’s a broad topic, but in general, I think the way history is taught in American (or possibly just Texan) schools is woefully inadequate. All my junior high and high school history teachers were coaches. That meant they taught history by telling us to read the chapter in the textbook and answer the questions at the end of the chapter while they sat at their desks and read the sports sections of all the newspapers the library got. Occasionally, they’d show a film. Even so, they never seemed to get all the way through the textbook. In eighth grade, American history, part one, ended just before the Civil War, even though the textbook covered the Civil War (though I guess we were lucky there because some schools in the south never cover much other than the Civil War). Then in 11th grade, it picked up after Reconstruction but barely got beyond WWII. World History was even worse. I got so frustrated in that class that I took over and started teaching it in a vain attempt to make it even slightly interesting.

If all you knew of history was what you learned in school in the schools I went to, you’d be utterly ignorant, which explains a lot about our nation today. Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it, and all that.

I picked up more in college, but those were deep dives into particular topics, and I was focusing on modern European history because at the time my goal was to be a foreign correspondent.

I didn’t get a really good understanding of the American Revolution and the issues relating to it until I started researching the Rebels books. In my recent reading, I finally get what was going on with the Thirty Years War, in spite of growing up with ruins from it all around me. I’m starting to have the big picture of world history click into place, which makes some current events make more sense.

The problem with the way they tend to teach history (at least, in my experience) is that they focus on names and dates, when really it’s about stories. Some of this stuff, you couldn’t put it in a fantasy novel because it would be considered too outrageous to be believed.

I kind of love that it now counts as “work” to read lots of books about history. I seem to be working my way through the history section of my local library branch.

movies

Fun Fantasy Movies

Since I had a free couple of nights and I was enjoying my newly repaired living room, I thought I’d do a couple of movie nights over the weekend. And then I ran into a problem: there’s very little of the sort of thing I want to watch, and I’ve already got those things more or less memorized.

I wanted a kind of romantic fantasy adventure — something that’s more about a small group of characters than about an epic cast of thousands, as fantasy tends to go these days. Basically, I want Stardust, but that I haven’t seen a gazillion times and almost have memorized. Or The Princess Bride, and ditto. If you go back to the 80s and don’t mind bad (to current eyes) special effects, there’s Ladyhawke (but I wish we could get the edition with the music from the European release because the US music is so out of whack with that movie) or Willow. A couple of the “fantasy cheese” movies they used to show on Saturday nights on SyFy kind of fit, but they can also be rather painful.

And that seems to be about it. I did a lot of scrolling and searching on Amazon Prime and a few other services and didn’t come up with much of anything. I ended up watching Thor on Friday night because I figured that his backstory would be more fantasy-like (it was), and there was romance and action, but it didn’t quite scratch the itch. For Saturday night, I rewatched the Disney live-action Cinderella, which is pretty much my “happy place” movie. I guess the big carriage chase sort of tips it into the “adventure” category, so it might loosely fit what I’m looking for.

It does seem like the fantasy genre has gone to where it’s either a fairly dark epic with lots of battles, like Lord of the Rings, or it’s fairy tales done by Disney. I like the Disney fairy tales, but they’re not quite what I’m looking for.

A live-action version of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty might be fun — and not from Maleficent’s perspective where she’s the real victim (ugh). Do it more like Cinderella, where it was a new telling of the same tale, with a few nods to the Disney cartoon, rather than a direct remake of the Disney cartoon. Flesh out the relationships and characters, maybe have Philip and Aurora meet a few more times (they can have been running into each other in the woods throughout their lives), and then there’s the potential for an epic action sequence near the end with the battle with the dragon.

Are there any romantic fantasy adventure films I’m missing? Something along the lines of Stardust?

Back to Normal

The work on my walls is done, and I’m enjoying a day of having my house to myself. Now, though, I have some serious housework to do. I dusted away the worst of the fine, white powder that was covering everything, but now I probably need to do a thorough vacuum of the carpet and a more thorough dusting. And I probably should make use of my steam cleaner on the carpet. Then I need to put everything back in my hall closet, which was part of what was redone.

Now I can finally get around to thinking about replacing the flooring, but I so don’t want to deal with the hassle of waiting for workmen to show up. I’d also have to box up and move just about everything that’s downstairs, then put it all back. I’m not sure that any value new floors would add to the house when it comes time to sell would make up for the cost plus the lost productivity of about a week worth of work.

I’m trying to get back in the swing of my routine, but I couldn’t resist not having to worry about being ready and waiting for the workers to show up this morning. It’s been nice just sitting around and drinking tea.

One thing I’m realizing is that my quirk of not being able to read books in a series back to back without burning out may also apply to writing a series. I’ve generally had months between books, at the very least, and in between I’ve worked on something else. This time, I went straight from editing book one to trying to draft book two, and it’s not flowing. I don’t know if that’s because I was interrupted unexpectedly by all this disruption, which started last week with people showing up to assess the damage for estimates (sometimes with no appointment) or because of the burnout factor, or because the brain is trying to work on several things at once. I got some additional ideas for scenes I’ve already written last night, so we’ll see if doing a little revision will get me back in the flow.

Meanwhile, I used the time I was hiding in my room while the living room was being ripped out to catch up on bookkeeping. The accounting for my taxes is pretty much done. I’ll just have to plug the numbers into the forms.

Life

New Walls, New Home?

The repair work may not be as disruptive as I feared. They got most of the work done yesterday, and they’re supposed to come back today to paint. I’m glad I insisted that this get done, though, because it turned out that the insulation was rotting and moldy. The wood was fine, which is good. They ripped out the old insulation and put in new stuff before putting in new wallboard. I imagine this will make a big difference in my health.

Now I’ll have to decide what further work to do in this house. I need new flooring and the kitchen cabinets are really dated, but I’m not sure that I’d get the money back when it comes time to sell the house. I’d have to do it because I want to improve my living quality, but then there’s the hassle of getting work like that done. I’m tempted to just ignore it all and sell it as-is when it comes time to sell. Alas, in the years since I first started thinking of selling — and noticed the leak, which made the house unsellable — housing prices have really shot up while my earnings have gone down and I can no longer afford to buy what’s on the market. This is part of what led to last year’s existential crisis “I quit” moment. It’s getting harder to earn a living writing, and that means I’ve had to put a lot of other things on hold. Then I discovered that finding a real job that I actually want to do isn’t so easy.

But at least the one bit of the house issue that I couldn’t control (unless I wanted to pay for it myself) has been dealt with (well, almost, as soon as they show up to finish), so I will feel a lot less helpless, and then I can start to make other decisions. Before, there was no point in even thinking about new flooring. Now I have options to consider.

Productivity Busters

This may not be a very productive week. There was a leak in my house around the front window a few years ago, and it took the condo association years to get around to fixing it, so the baseboard and front wall were damaged. It’s taken years since then for them to get around to repairing it. I don’t know how many contractors have trooped through my house to look at it. There was an appointment set today for what I thought was yet another estimate, but it turned out they were here to do the work. At the moment, they’re cutting out sheetrock and ripping out baseboards.

The next step is for them to spray stuff inside the walls to kill off any mold, and that will have to sit for a few days. Then they’ll put up new walls and repaint. I may be living with open walls for a while, and my schedule is going to be iffy because I have to be home when they’re working. It’s hard to concentrate on writing while people are in my house, ripping out walls, so not much writing is likely to happen. I’m holed up in my bedroom while they work in the living room. I need to get the office upstairs so that I can work in it later in the week. I’d been planning to do that this weekend, since I thought they were still getting estimates.

I’m not complaining (much) because I need this work done, and I think it will make me healthier if they take care of any mold and mildew. And it makes the house actually sellable. I want to get it over with. But the process is probably not going to be much fun.

I think I’ll be focusing on research reading and brainstorming, since getting in the writing zone is going to be hard. I’m not someone who can write at a place like a coffee shop. I need solitude and silence.

Life

The Princess and the Hotel Bed

Travel really shows me what a princess I’ve become. I’m starting to think that I would feel that pea hidden beneath a stack of mattresses. I don’t sleep well in hotel beds, and that makes travel less fun.

I think part of the problem is that I’ve made my bed at home so comfortable. Years ago, hotels were a treat. They had those lush pillow-top mattresses at good hotels, so it was a step up from what I had, and their down pillows were nicer than what I had at home.

Now, though, I have the fancy hybrid mattress with coils beneath memory foam and a layer of memory gel, so I have the perfect blend of support and softness. My mattress gently cradles my body. It’s on an adjustable base, so I can raise the head to sleep, and I can put it in a zero-gravity mode for reading in bed, with my head and knees raised. Even a really good hotel bed that doesn’t slant to one side because they don’t rotate the mattress is flat, which is hard for me to get used to.

Then there’s my pillow, which is a molded memory foam pillow designed for side sleepers, so it supports the neck. I have it in a satin pillowcase, which is smoother on the skin and keeps my hair from snarling and frizzing. I also have a weighted blanket to give me a really snug, cozy feeling. My alarm clock adds to the sleep ambience because it not only gently wakes me up with gradually increasing light, but it also has a bedtime mode that mimics a sunset, gradually dimming until it goes off.

No hotel can live up to all this. Even if I bring my pillow, the weighted blanket, and alarm clock with me on road trips, the bed is flat.

I really need a TARDIS, even one that doesn’t travel in time, so that I can carry all my stuff with me when I travel and not have to worry about getting there. I can just be in that other place and still come home to my own bed.

Life

The January Vacation

My mini vacation didn’t quite go as planned. Although the forecast temperature was warm and it was a beautiful, sunny day, it turned out that the wind chill was rather bitter. I stepped out of the car at the state park, walked a little around the edge of the lake, and immediately retreated to my car because it was like thousands of tiny needles attacking non-stop. It was really disconcerting because the sun was so strong that I’d had to turn my car vent to as cool as it would go and the fan on high. Inside the car, it was a warm day. Outside the car, it was arctic.

So, I decided to go to a different park deeper into the mountains, in an area that was likely sheltered from the wind. And, at the very least, the drive to get there would be fun because it was on a twisty back road through the mountains.

And there I got to see this, which made the trip worth it.


There was also a nice, sheltered hiking trail along a stream, through the woods, in a valley between hills, so it was rather pleasant. I got in a short hike, but the other trails at that park were on the sides of the mountains, where, again, the wind was pretty ferocious. After enjoying the scenery while driving around, I headed to the hotel and spent the rest of the afternoon reading and relaxing. By dinner time, the wind had died, which made the walk to a restaurant down the street not too bad. I came back from dinner, read some more, then decided to go for a swim at the hotel’s indoor pool.

Where, apparently, they’d decided to turn on the air conditioner in January. It was too cold to be in that room in just a swimsuit even before getting wet, and the water was icy. I’d thought the hotel web site had mentioned a hot tub, but I didn’t find it. It must have been outdoors. I gave up on the swim and went back to my room and watched figure skating while drinking cocoa.

I took the scenic route driving home, but unfortunately once you get into Texas there is no scenic route because the US highway merges with the freeway. I find freeway driving utterly exhausting. This area was really pretty and I’d like to visit that area again in better weather (and probably a different hotel), but I’ll need to see if I can find an alternate route. The freeway is quick, but it’s not fun. I think there are some back roads that might work, but I’ll need to research to be sure they cross the river that serves as the border between Texas and Oklahoma.

It was a nice little getaway that mostly served as a recon mission for things I might want to do when it’s not January. It’s close enough for a short trip, and it does look like there’s good hiking and scenery.

And now I need to dive back into my working schedule.