If we threw every writer out of the canon who wasn’t, at least part of the time, a jerk and an asshole, we might be left with Jane Austen and the Venerable Bede. And I’m not completely sure about Jane.
Tag: games writers play
The Things That Rattle Around in Writers’ Heads
One of the things I used to wonder about when I read C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle was that literal died-in-a-train-wreck ending . . . it always seemed to me like a rabbit pulled out of a hat. Then one day while idly mousing around the internet, I found out about the 1952 Harrow and Wealdstone railway crash, a three-train collision where 112 people died and 340 were injured, and I thought, “Yeah . . . for a book published in 1956, something on that scale that happened in 1952 would have still been taking up space in the author’s mind during the writing process.”
Writers aren’t necessarily in control of what sinks into their memories, and they don’t always have a say in how it may bubble back up to the surface later.
A Not Entirely Disinterested Public Service Announcement
Fantasy writer Jo Walton is running a Kickstarter for Scintillation, a small convention to be held – provided the Kickstarter succeeds — in 2018 in Montreal.
Jo (who deservedly often has Homeric epithets like “acclaimed” and “award-winning” affixed to her name) ran the Farthingparty convention in Montreal from 2006 to 2014, before time-management issues and the stress of worrying every year whether or not the convention would draw enough members to break even brought the run to an end. She’s coming back now with the new Kickstarter model, which she explains in detail on the project page.
I really really want this Kickstarter to succeed. (Yes, I’ve already thrown in my mite, and will throw more as more becomes available.) Farthingparty was the closest convention to where we live,† and I think we made every single one of them, even the one which we had to do as a Saturday day trip because we were moving one of our offspring into their dorm in Boston on Sunday. I’ve missed it ever year since it ended, and having a new convention we could attend in Montreal would be a wonderful thing.
†Yes. We live that far north in New Hampshire.
A Truth Universally Acknowledged
From the Sibling Cabal’s No Story Is Sacred podcast, this trenchant observation – now with accompanying graphic – is available for purchase on mugs and more at Redbubble.
The Hugo Awards
Congratulations to everyone I know and like who got a Hugo!
And congratulations to everyone whom I don’t know personally, but still like, who got a Hugo!
Looking over the results, I don’t think there’s anybody whom I know well enough to dislike who did get a Hugo (unlike some years past), so that’s good, too.
It’s nice to see that science fiction’s signature award is still doing well.
It’s a Magical Place
Jim Macdonald did magic again last weekend, and over at his place, he blogs about it:
(With bonus writing-related content!)
Elsewhere on the Internet
Over at the Madhouse Manor blog, my co-author waxes political.
His previous post – a review of an 1871 book of magic tricks and parlor games – is also amusing.
The Play’s the Thing…
…wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.
Shakespeare in the Park is doing Julius Caesar this summer, not Hamlet, but the reference is an apt one nonetheless.
Somebody’s conscience (or self-love, or something) has definitely been caught by this year’s modern-dress, Trump-inflected production of Julius Caesar, and they’ve unleashed the flying monkeys roused far-right protesters to disrupt the performance.
Shakespeare himself would have no doubt at all about what’s going on here. The twin questions of what makes a good ruler, and what can or should be done when the realm is suffering under a bad or unjust ruler, run like a streak of red through all his plays, from early ones like Richard III to later ones like Hamlet and The Tempest. He never comes up with any definitive answers – he was a playwright, not a political philosopher – but he certainly gives the matter a thorough inspection from all sides.
Make no mistake, what he was doing was Serious Business. The Elizabethan censors didn’t worry about bawdry†; they worried about sedition. Fretting too obviously about, for example, whether or not it could ever be a good and necessary thing to overthrow a reigning monarch could definitely be regarded as seditious if there wasn’t a convincing enough veil of “this all happened a long time ago, or in foreign parts, or both” thrown over things.
Art mattered. Shakespeare knew it. The lords and the groundlings at the Globe Theatre knew it. The Elizabethan censors knew it.
Furthermore, art still matters. The people who put on Shakespeare in the Park know it. The audience knows it. And the alt-right protesters and those who egg them on sure as hell know it, or this production wouldn’t worry them so.
†The general rule for reading Shakespeare, as articulated by Elizabeth Bear: “If it looks like a dick joke, it’s a dick joke. If it doesn’t look like a dick joke – it’s probably a dick joke.”
A Winter Treat
Over on Jim Macdonald’s blog, a piece of original fiction, for the entertainment of our friends and readers.
My Co-Author is Having Fun Again
The current political circus (although if it’s a circus, it’s rapidly turning into an old-style Roman one) has inspired him to take up the partisan cudgels on behalf of . . . the Whigs. No, not the Modern Whig party, and not the historical British Whig party, either. He’s cheering for the old-style American Whig party of the mid-nineteenth century, some of whose positions became more popular in retrospect than they were at the time, such as favoring Emancipation and opposing Indian Removal.
To that end, he has unearthed from the depths of the internet The National Clay Minstrel, and Frelinghuysen Melodist, for the Presidential Canvass of 1844. Being a collection of all the new popular Whig songs, and is amusing himself with providing annotations.
(Did you know that the symbolic animal for the Whigs was . . . the raccoon? I didn’t, until just now.)
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