One plays the violin and sleeps inside a fridge
And today, Ajit Pai and the FCC burnt net neutrality. I guess this is one of the nights we sit up in the hills and plan how to hit the Seleucids so hard, Alexander's teeth will hurt. (Also he'll be confused, since his relations with the Jews were cordial enough to rate a touching if fabulous scene in Josephus and an equally positive appearance in Lights (1984), but you can't go around leaving empires where people live and expect not to get socked sooner or later.)
Here are some whiplashily different things.
1. Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
brigdh: I had of course encountered "absquatulate" in the works of Barbara Hambly, but I had never heard of "dumbfungled" or "goshbustified" and I laughed like a loon.
2. I was asked on Facebook if I knew any weird or spooky traditions associated specifically with Hanukkah. I did not, and said that I associate the tradition of ghost stories around this time of year almost strictly with British Christmas, but I could offer a literary option: Eric Kimmel's Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins (1989), an original tale of Hershel of Ostropol which has so successfully passed into folklore that I have heard it retold in the wild. (I put it into a poem myself.) I wondered if it had antecedents in two stories in Isaac Bashevis Singer's Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories (1966) in which demons visit households on Hanukkah—frighteningly but harmlessly in "Grandmother's Tale," with the real possibility of death and destruction in "The Devil's Trick"—but I just found this recent interview with Kimmel and the influence he cites is Dickens. I guess ghost stories for Christmas were relevant after all. I am honestly delighted.
3. Courtesy of David Schraub: Courtney Milan's #metoo story. It has since made the Washington Post. Since it becomes very clear in the course of her post that romance novels are the career she adopted after she was traumatized out of her previous profession, I figured the strongest gesture of support I could make was to buy one. I remember eitherphi or skygiants saying something that made Unraveled (2011) sound attractive to me, so that's where I'm starting.
ETA: I am sneezing my face off and going to bed.
Here are some whiplashily different things.
1. Courtesy of
brigdh: I had of course encountered "absquatulate" in the works of Barbara Hambly, but I had never heard of "dumbfungled" or "goshbustified" and I laughed like a loon.2. I was asked on Facebook if I knew any weird or spooky traditions associated specifically with Hanukkah. I did not, and said that I associate the tradition of ghost stories around this time of year almost strictly with British Christmas, but I could offer a literary option: Eric Kimmel's Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins (1989), an original tale of Hershel of Ostropol which has so successfully passed into folklore that I have heard it retold in the wild. (I put it into a poem myself.) I wondered if it had antecedents in two stories in Isaac Bashevis Singer's Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories (1966) in which demons visit households on Hanukkah—frighteningly but harmlessly in "Grandmother's Tale," with the real possibility of death and destruction in "The Devil's Trick"—but I just found this recent interview with Kimmel and the influence he cites is Dickens. I guess ghost stories for Christmas were relevant after all. I am honestly delighted.
3. Courtesy of David Schraub: Courtney Milan's #metoo story. It has since made the Washington Post. Since it becomes very clear in the course of her post that romance novels are the career she adopted after she was traumatized out of her previous profession, I figured the strongest gesture of support I could make was to buy one. I remember either
phi or skygiants saying something that made Unraveled (2011) sound attractive to me, so that's where I'm starting.ETA: I am sneezing my face off and going to bed.
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I appreciate the warning. I don't know what will or won't work for me, but I'm seeing a lot of people mention that they believe the relationships between her principals rather than just accepting them for the sake of the plot, and that can go a long way with me. Much of my problem with romance in narratives can be described with the shorthand "obligatory het couple." (Does Milan write non-het romance?)
I'll throw in another vote for her Brothers Sinister series (The Governess Affair, the first in the series, is a short novella and has a really interesting plot about the heroine recovering from rape – the way the sex scene with the hero was handled in particular impressed me.
Mental note made. The real problem, if I like her writing, may be the availability of her books in print rather than pixels. I spend a lot of time on screens and really prefer not to do my reading off them.
but it appears that a major plot, other than the romances, is going to be the Opium Wars and a criticism of British Imperialism, in a historical AU in which things go a bit better for the Chinese.
And that immediately gets my attention: I can't think of a lot of even non-AU fiction that deals with the Opium Wars beyond Laurence Yep and Amitav Ghosh. How are the extant books so far?
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'The Suffragette Scandal' has a very sweet f/f couple in a subplot. In 'Hold Me', her second contemporary, the heroine is a transwoman (I believe the hero additionally is bisexual, but I might be misremembering).
The real problem, if I like her writing, may be the availability of her books in print rather than pixels. I spend a lot of time on screens and really prefer not to do my reading off them.
Ah, yes. That can be a problem with romance in general; the genre has hugely exploded into the ebook market (possibly because more people are willing to read them without embarrassing covers, possibly become many romance fans easily go through a dozen or more books a month, and the lower price point of ebooks has enabled that), and lots of people aren't bothering to put out physical copies anymore.
How are the extant books so far?
It was quite good, though not my favorite of hers. It stars a heroine who once was rich and noble, but after her father and older brother were accused of treason (the father committed suicide, the brother was transported to Australia as a criminal), she's forced to move to a poor neighborhood, work for a living, and raise her younger siblings by herself. The hero is her former childhood friend, who was the one who testified at the trial to prove the treason. The heroine believes her family was innocent and the hero lied, but we eventually find out that the treason did in fact happen, and involved the father and brother aiding the Chinese for moral reasons; the hero and heroine come to agree with their choices. However, that part of the plot is pretty minor and is mostly just setting up the dominos for future books rather than playing a major part in this one itself.
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