Technical Difficulties

I realized this morning as I was brushing my teeth that Golden Age detective fiction would make ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT Jacobean plays.

(And revenge tragedies are also, in an odd way, almost murder mysteries.)

The deaths are grotesque and imaginative (I've been rereading John Dickson Carr's Henry Merrivale books, and trust me, Jacobean audiences would have loved this shit); the books always have a layer of meta (Carr and Crispin in particular); detectives love both acting and stage-managing (really, starting with Sherlock Holmes, but flowering emphatically in the 30s and 40s--and Ngaio Marsh named her hero for an Elizabethan actor, which is a clue I don't know why I didn't pick up on before), and I can easily imagine Burbage stomping up and down the stage and forcing, by the sheer pressure of his theatricality, the poor benighted murderer to give himself away.

It's perfect.

And now I want to write one.

Draft of a short story finished. (Well, except for all the [1], [2], [3] all the way up to [71] where proper nouns (and a couple common ones) go.) I can't tell you how long it is, because I wrote it entirely longhand (although it runs from the bottom of p. 31v to the top of p. 57 in the knock-off Moleskine notebook* I'm currently using. I can't tell you the title, either, because it doesn't have one. (I thought it did, but it turns out the title I thought it had was not correct at all.)

It has given me a lovely example of the moss-troll problem though: Caesarian section. Even though Julius Caesar was probably not born by Caesarian section, the adjective makes no sense in a world without the word "Caesar."

Notice that although this is not the work I should be doing, I am very grateful nonetheless to have a complete draft of anything.

And on that note, I'm going to give this "sleeping" thing a whirl. I've heard it's fun if you do it right.


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*I will not be buying the Picadilly Moleskine knock-offs again, even though they are about 1/3 as expensive. The bookmark ribbons come out, and the elastic does not elastic properly, and both these things get more annoying rather than less over time.

So help me, I just figured out the main plot arc of The Sidhe Tigers, the postcolonial literature of elves baseball novel.

This is indirectly elisem's fault, because Sidhe Tigers is her work, as is Engineering for Elves and Eating the Dark Flower, and last night she put up earrings called Elves in the Wheatfield Breakdown: a song for banjo, which I was not, alas, quick enough on the draw to bag. But it made me start thinking about The Sidhe Tigers again. And this morning I know things I didn't know last night.

The human protagonist is an African-American slugger named Marigold Dempsey. Last night I didn't know there was a human protagonist.

I don't really groove with the concept of Muses. What I think I have is Cats of Creativity. And one of them just dropped half a very dead vole on my foot.

The Second Son: 301 words

Every word written is a good word. It may not be right, but it's still good.

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Muses resemble women who creep out at night and give themselves to unknown sailors and return to talk of Chinese porcelain.
    --W. B. Yeats, quoted in Brenda Maddox, Yeats's Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats (New York: Perennial - HarperCollins Publishers, 2000).

unexpected short story: 1,200 words

Chapter 2 of The Mirador: Ha, she said bitterly.

AWBTWYSBD.