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Monthly Archives: August 2008

So, I used to think RWA was the loudest, the most crowded, the most emotional group experience there was. But that was before I saw 80,000 people screaming as fireworks went off, confetti flew, and history got made. It was truly amazing. I don’t want to bore everyone here by prattling on about politics. I can only say I see now what drove women like the Duchess of Devonshire and the Countess of Bessborough (and Abigail Adams and Elizabeth Cady Stanton) to get out there and work so very hard. The idea that it’s within our power to affect real change in our lives is wonderful stuff, especially since within the space of just two generations we have come so very far (when my grandmother was born in early 1920, women still had four months to go before they got the right to vote). No matter what happens in November, I saw great things happen this week, and I will always be grateful for that.

And now, I am exhausted and hoarse, running on little sleep and lots of strong tea! But I want to say happy 211th birthday to another extraordinary women, Mary Godwin Shelley. Mary Shelley was born August 30, 1797 to the philosophers and radicals Mary Wollstonecraft (who died in childbirth) and William Godwin. In 1814, she fell in love with one of her father’s political acolytes, Percy Bysshe Shelley (who was married), and eloped with him to the Continent (along with her wild stepsister, Claire Clairmont). She didn’t marry Shelley until 1816, after the suicide of his first wife Harriet and the death of their first baby.

In 1817, she spent a famous summer with Shelley, Claire, Byron, and John William Polidori in Switzerland, where she came up with the idea for her most famous work, Frankenstein. They went to Italy in 1818, where they had 3 more children (only one, Percy Florence, survived childhood). In 1822, Shelley drowned when his sailboat sank during a storm in the Bay of La Spezia. A year later, Mary returned to England, devoting the rest of her life to the memory of her husband, the upbringing of her surviving son, and literary endeavors. She died in 1851 at the age of 53.

She is mostly (only?) known now for Frankenstein, but she also wrote historical novels such as Valperga and Perkin Warbeck, and the apocalyptic novel The Last Man, as well as travelogues such as Rambles in Germany and Italy.

A couple of sources on Mary Shelley I really like are Miranda Seymour’s biography Mary Shelley and Janet Todd’s Death and the Maidens. (When I was a teenager, there was a terribly cheesy movie I rented once. I think it was called Haunted Summer, and it was fun, though I don’t know if it’s still out there! Young Frankenstein is also fantastic, though maybe not strictly in the tone of Shelley’s book…)

Happy Birthday, Mary Shelley! And happy Long Nap Weekend to me! What is your favorite Mary Shelley work?

Like many of you (and I know I’ve even blogged about it here before), I delight in finding words new to me. Without being boastful, lemme just say I have a large vocabulary. Which is why it’s so much fun to find new words. And now another generation has joined the fray: My son.

Yesterday, we did some back-to-school shopping. At the counter, I picked up a pocket dictionary for the boy because lately he’s been asking me what words mean, and I want him to be able to find them on his own. Mommy doesn’t always know for sure what the words mean, and I don’t want to lead him astray.

On the way back to the car, I showed it to him, he made a sound of glee, and immediately dove into it. His first word to look up? Despondent. Apparently a supervillain has that as his last name, and he wanted to know for sure what it meant. And then, little nihilist that he is, he looked up ‘death.’

Me, I had to text a friend to define “ichor,” which is the blood of Greek gods, rumored to be in ambrosia. I couldn’t wait for a regular dictionary, and it wasn’t in the son’s, and it was driving me crazy. And then I looked up “coruscate,” which was there, which means sparkling. Both those words were in the book I was reading.

I like interesting phrases, too; we are at the Jersey Shore (“down the Shore,” for those in the vernacular know), and we always go to a candy store that has “own make” candies.

My husband and I talk a lot in shorthand, citing phrases and lyrics that have come to mean something particular to us. It’s fun being married to someone as word-geeky as I am, although it’s REALLY ANNOYING when one of us uses a word incorrectly, and the other one corrects her.

What are your shorthand phrases? Or favorite idiosyncracies? What word did you look up most recently?

(And apologies for not coming back to comment last week and this, I am on dial-up down the Shore, it’s hard to get online).

Megan

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Over at the Wet Noodle Posse this month we’re winding up a series on inspiration but I haven’t participated (sorry!). The reason is I don’t know what inspires me or gets the writing juices flowing, and I regard it as such a delicate process I don’t want to mess around with it.

Truly, for me it’s like walking a tightrope.

But occasionally I hear about something fascinating that sticks in my mind and I think about it and wonder how I could work it into a story. Even if I can’t, I believe that this sort of speculation breeds other stories, other ideas.

One story that sticks in my mind is from a 2004 episode of PBS’ History Detectives. Archaeologists working on the Lost Towns Project (Anne Arundel County, Maryland)–that is, the seventeenth century settlements before Annapolis became the capital–discovered a skeleton in the basement of the house. It wasn’t a burial, in fact the corpse seems to have been thrown in with the rubbish. At first they thought it might have been a casualty, or an executed prisoner from the only Civil War (English) battle fought on American soil, the Battle of Severn (1655).

But the skeleton didn’t have battle wounds. Examination of the bones revealed that he was a young male who had done hard physical labor all his life. His horrific dental decay alone would have made him very sick, and he also suffered from tuberculosis. He was regarded with such indifference that his body was thrown away like garbage when he died at around the age of sixteen.

The conclusion the History Detectives reached was that he was an indentured servant, one of the many who came to the New World hoping that after a specified number of years working for someone else they would be able to make a living. Some came as punishment, some because options at home were so few. By the Regency/federal period slavery was a more viable financial option for landowners.

The History Detectives found that abuse and neglect of indentured servants was very common. In addition, the Commonwealth of Virgina was obliged to pass legislation around this time requiring that indentured servants be given proper burial, which implies that throwing bodies into basements or ditches was all too common.

The story of this poor kid whose name we don’t even know has haunted me. After several years of dithering around I’ve started writing a story, not about him, but about the lost settlements of Maryland.

What stories have stuck with you?

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I was going to tell you all about my travels but I’m still getting my life and household back in order. After our 10-day trip, I took my kids on a weekend camping trip with a group from our UU church, then had my parents visit for an overnight, followed the next day by my husband’s cousins from Chicago. The sink is still full of dirty dishes and I can’t even find our camera to upload our Monticello pics!

So I’ll talk to you about a book I’ve been reading on and off this summer: WOMEN WHO RUN WITH THE WOLVES: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. I first read about it on a writers’ listserve and recently my friend Therese Walsh urged me to read it.

Having been a sensitive girl, raised full of Catholic guilt, I used to try hard to be “good”, to not make waves, to not seem too different, yet the mold that was prepared for me never quite fit. Over the years, and especially with motherhood, I’ve grown stronger and more assertive. This book is a powerful aid, an exploration of myths regarding the Wild Woman archetype and an exhortation to transcend the boundaries imposed by a judgmental society and dark elements in one’s own psyche.

One chapter that especially spoke to me at this point was 9, on “Homing: Returning to Oneself”. Estes writes that all women need to occasionally return to themselves and practice intentional solitude.

“There are many ways to go home… My clients tell me these mundane endeavors constitute a return to home for them… Rereading passages of books and single poems that have touched them. Spending even a few minutes near a river, a stream, a creek. Lying on the ground in dappled light… praying. A special friend. Sitting on a bridge with legs dangling over. Holding an infant. Sitting by a window in a cafe and writing. Sitting in a circle of trees… Beholding beauty, grace, the touching frailty of human beings.”

Through a summer spent with kids and visiting with friends and family, I’ve managed a few stolen moments to “go home.” I’m feeling the need for a longer stay there, though, along with a bit of guilt for wanting to be alone. I know it’s good for me, but it’s nice to read Estes’s reassurance.

“It is preferable to go home for a while, even if it causes others to be irritated, rather than to stay and deteriorate, and then finally crawl away in tatters.”
“It is right and proper that women eke out, liberate, take, make, connive to get, assert their right to go home. Home is a sustained mood or sense that allows us to experience feelings not necessarily sustained in the mundane world: wonder, vision, peace, freedom from worry, freedom from demands, freedom from constant clacking. All these treasures from home are meant to be cached in the psyche for later use in the topside world.”
“It is better to teach your people that you will be more and also different when you return, that you are not abandoning them but learning yourself anew and bringing yourself back to your real life.”

For me, going home includes walking, journaling, swimming and writing. How about you? How do you go home? Has anyone else read this book? If so, what did you think?

Elena
www.elenagreene.com

The first week in August, as soon as I returned from the Romance Writers of America conference in San Francisco, I flew off to Denver to attend the World Science Fiction Convention, a gathering of authors, artists, fans, agents, editors, costumers, musicians, and more, all to celebrate science fiction and fantasy. Whee!

The Guest of Honor this year was Lois McMaster Bujold, who’s won award after award for her science fiction and fantasy novels (and who’s one of my favorite authors ever.)

First, I read through the program to see which panels and events I didn’t want to miss.

On the first day I attended a reception held in Bujold’s honor, called Summerfair on Barrayar.

(In Bujold’s science fiction books, Barrayar is a planet recovering from centuries of a semi-medieval existence (complete with lords, duels, horses, and arranged marriages), and joining a much more sophisticated, modern galaxy in which — gasp! — starship pilots are often women, and sometimes hermaphrodites or clones.)

Some of us came in costume — and there was dancing. (Both are shown in this photo taken by the official Worldcon photographer, Keith McClune. Todd is the ghem lord in the makeup, and I’m the Vor lady on the left.)

The next day was Bujold’s Guest of Honor speech — and she made lots of interesting points about science fiction, fantasy, and romance.

Bujold also was on plenty of panels, and had two signings and two readings. (More on those later!)

One of her panels that I found particularly interesting was a discussion between her, SF author Lillian Stewart Carl, and fantasy writer Patricia Wrede (Regency fans may know her as the author of the Regency-set MAIRELON THE MAGICIAN books or as the co-author of the SORCERY AND CECELIA series.)

Pictured here (photo also by Keith McClune) with moderator Peggy Rae Sapienza, they talked about how they had come together as a critique group back when only one of them was published, and how they’ve stayed friends through all the ups and downs of their three very different careers.

By the way, Bujold herself has a Regency link — her A CIVIL CAMPAIGN is dedicated to Georgette Heyer, among others, and is a romantic comedy in the true Regency style (with science fictional twists, of course!)

When I wasn’t worshipping at the altar of Bujold, or buying way too many books and pieces of elvish pottery, I could often be found attending the panels of a bright young fellow named Todd Brun.

Here are two more Keith McClune photos:

(1) photo of Todd explaining quantum computers…

and

(2) photo of the rapt audience.

(Rapt.)

(Completely.)

(Some in cool costumes.)

(Or with other accoutrements.)

(Don’t you wish you’d been there?)


Todd was on several panels…

including one in which he explained how to build a time machine in your basement.

(See how serious he looks?)

(Because time machines are serious things.)

(You wouldn’t want to mess up and accidentally delete the human race or something.)

Todd, of course, is hard to equal…

But I must say the high point of the convention for me was when Lois McMaster Bujold read the first several chapters of the next Vorkosigan book!!!!!!!!

Even her editor hadn’t yet laid eyes on it.

And it won’t be published for something like two years.

And we got to hear it!!!!!

Here she is…

reading from her manuscript…

Ah.

What more could a fangirl ask?

So…that was me at Worldcon.

How about you? Have you ever been to a SFF convention, a fan convention, or similar? Have you ever read any Bujold (or Wrede or Carl)? Ever bought any elvish pottery? (I LOVE this stuff. The artist, Peri Charlifu, does AMAZING work.)

All answers welcome!

And be sure to visit us next Tuesday, when we’ll be discussing the film MASTER AND COMMANDER as part of our Jane Austen Movie Club!

Cara
Cara King, author of My Lady Gamester and fangirl extraordinaire

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