Because this blog doesn’t have enough nerdery already.

So as I was saying last time, this trip to Phila. was in search of three pretty specific things that I couldn’t find in books or the net–at least not to this degree of time, place, and personal specificity. So here’s what I did for them:

First-hand sources like letters and journals, from which I could glean both language information… and a general look at the concerns of the class of people on which I was focusing.
For this, I browsed the online catalogs of both the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the Athenaeum. The latter had been recommended in the notes to a series of books I’m very much enjoying right now (Cordelia Frances Biddle’s Martha Beale Mysteries–Victorian Philadelphia fun!). Their collections of primary source material are so extensive that it took me a couple of hours to figure out how to effectively use the finding aids, but my education didn’t fail me! (Well, not completely.)

I found a few very likely ladies of similar age, class, and interest to my girls in The Resurrectionists, and located the numbers of the boxes in which their correspondence, journals, albums and such could be found in the HSP. So I’m walking in there thinking maybe they’ll let me see photocopies–or transcriptions. There’s no way some librarian-curator is going to dig in the vaults and bring me up some fragile 184 year old letters just so I can write some silly novel. I’ll need academic credentials at least–and I haven’t had those for ages.

But the lovely librarians at the HSP did just that. Follow a few simple rules, and all the information in the world is yours, huh? And this is some research I’ve been wanting to do since Neuronaut Reenie told me that’s how Georgette Heyer found some of the more clever phrases she used in her lovely Regency romances, so– well, that’s totally squee-worthy. Yeah, okay, I felt a little weird reading letters from husbands and wives, friends, mothers, and sons… but it was too cool for the discomfort to last.

What went on at UPENN’s medical school on a day-to-day basis.
I didn’t have much hope for this one, honestly. Finding out in a general way what would’ve been a popular lecture topic is easy enough, but I thought something this specific would be lost to time.

Wrong again, Kate. College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the lovely people who run the famous (or is it infamous, considering?) Mütter Museum, have an extensive library on the history of medicine. Seeing as it’s in Philadelphia, home of the first ever medical school in the US (UPENN– oh hey, my little proto-doctors attend UPENN!), I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised to find what I did in their catalog:

“Lecture notes from the University of Pennsylvania,1826; 1852./Fowler”
“Notes on Dr. Coxe’s lectures on materia medica and pharmacy delivered in the University of Pennsylvania,1826-1827 /by W.W.G.”

etc. etc. And these aren’t just notes typed up and printed, these are the actual notebooks in which these eager young medical men scribbled down, often word for word, the lectures of their professors. People like Dr. Philip Syng Physick (dubbed the “Father of American Surgery”) and co. And precisely the lectures my boys would’ve been attending over the course of The Resurrectionists.

And now I know exactly what Dart would do for Tom’s gunshot wound, and exactly who would’ve told him to do it. Among other exciting and extremely nerdy things!

Newspapers! … Obviously, the papers had the pulse of the people, and I needed to know how it was flowing during the months in question.
I think this day ended up being my favorite, because I spent it at the lovely Library Company of Philadelphia. I’d been in touch with a wonderful librarian beforehand, since the periodicals aren’t quite cataloged online like some of the other materials they have, and when I got there she helped me sort out exactly how to find the precise periodicals I required. I spent the day taking snapshots of The National Gazette and Literary Register and The Aurora and Franklin Gazette, those being the two that had popped up in my earlier research as important rags of the time.

From the "National Gazette and Literary Register", Apr 19, 1826 courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia

So I have reviews of theater events, art shows, international gossip, philanthropic societies, neighborhood emergencies, political scandals, and all other sorts of things that will inform the general tone and color of my characters’ days. That and of course a wander around the chosen neighborhood, a tour of Dr. Physick’s house with some excellent tour guides, and all that sort of thing so it’ll be fresh in my mind when I go back to it in–two weeks and counting, now. I’m so excited!

Can’t wait for the next chance I get to do it all over again. But for all this lovely research, it’s weird how so very, very little of it will be directly referenced. It’s more a question of me understanding what their days were really like, of making the setting sit more easily for everyone involved.

And maybe a question of me just being carried away by my own historical obsessions. Now the idea is to make something entertaining out of them!

And my parting words, as a solemnly promise to stop talking about this now: Librarians are rad. Love them. I know you don’t need me to tell you, but it’s worth saying all the same.

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Now playing: Aaron Copland – Appalachian Spring
via FoxyTunes

Well I’m home from Philadelphia and feeling beat up, thanks! I don’t mind because I also feel pretty damn accomplished. Three days is nowhere near enough time to dig through the vaults of historical goodness there, but I ran my ass off trying.

I don’t know how many people who see this blog are interested in writing historicals, but I know one or two of you have done it already, and several others have more than a passing interest in the subject. So I figured I’d put up the story of my research for The Resurrectionists, my first novel-length historical (historical-paranormal-romance-medical… somethingorother?) and see if y’all wanted to compare notes or give suggestions. And hell, it’s about the most interesting thing I’ll ever have to talk about here anyhow, so why not?

Brief background on this plot: boys go to medical school, girls have their scholarly reading circle. Ambitious boys entangle girls in dubious experiments (not to mention dubious lifestyle choices), clever girls complicate said experiments with their own concerns (and some dubious lifestyle choices of their own). Experiment ends in gaping face wounds, insanity, suicide, terrifying medical breakthrough, and severe guilt complexes for all. Also some broken hearts, though by that time it seems incidental.

I knew this much when I started prep reading. My research shelf at GoodReads gives some indication of just what I was looking at, but there are also a lot of articles and documentaries I dug up on the relevant subjects. I also read a lot of historical fiction to the same end, but there are two problems with that:

1. Fiction involving early modern medical types is generally Victorian, whether British or Colonial, which makes it too late to be useful; what doctors talked about then would not be what my doctors should be talking about. Also, fiction involving grave-robbers and resurrection men is almost always British, in spite of the fact that we imported the trend, not to mention a few actual grave robbers, late in the 18th c. Alas, fictional period grave robbery seems to be the province of the country that gave us the very real Burke and Hare*. Admittedly, this was part of the impetus for writing about some American resurrectionists, so at least I saw that one coming.

2. American historical fiction usually clusters around the Revolutionary or Civil War eras– and I’m landing squarely between those. (War of 1812? What was that? Yeah, we hate talking about wars wherein American ass got kicked, don’t we? None of it happened but the Battle of New Orleans!) So that means a lot of Brit-centric Regency fiction, which is of course my favorite historical sub-genre, but worried me in terms of day-to-day life and how people spoke.

So then I did my first Philadelphia trip to learn the lay of the land, choose an appropriate neighborhood, and just get a general education on How Things Worked. By the time that was accomplished these characters were bouncing around in my head like mad, and I thought well, I’m comfortable enough with this whole concept to at least hammer out a rough draft.

Those of you who are long-time sufferers of this blog will recall a series of WIP Wednesday posts involving pistol duels, grave robberies, medical experiments, ladies’ charitable societies, Madeira wine, early feminism, and of course, cravats. Naturally the whole thing was about 20k too long when I was done, but so’s everything I write.

Then and only then did I know precisely when the action in the book took place. I had chosen a year that seemed interesting (1826) and decided the seasons (spring-summer) based wholly on what sort of weather and activities the plot required. Ah, I realized, now comes the time for the real research. I started a new round of reading (also on the GoodReads shelf) and wondered how the hell I was going to get my hands on:

• First-hand sources like letters and journals, from which I could glean both language information– despite reassurances that Philadelphians sounded very like their cosmopolitan English cousins, there are obvious turns of expression that were different– and a general look at the concerns of the class of people on which I was focusing.
• Newspapers! American men were infamous for their attachment to newspapers, in all walks and classes of life, in everything I read about them. American woman not much less. Obviously, the papers had the pulse of the people, and I needed to know how it was flowing during the months in question. What were they doing on May 23, what criminal activity or stock prices were they discussing on street corners, and what was running at the New Theater on Chestnut?
• What went on at UPENN’s medical school on a day-to-day basis. This one was the hardest for me to fathom. There are plenty of excellent medical history books out there, America-centric ones abound, but specifics like this are neglected. Even just finding a listing of the faculty at this time is difficult, let alone finding out what they said in their lectures.

And that takes me to this week. But I’ll come back to that in a day or two, as this is already longwinded even for me.

ETA: Just got the okay to post this image I took this week. Eeee! Cravat Stiffeners!

From "The Philadelphia Directory and Annual Advertiser", 1825, courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia

*Oh my god, Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis are playing them in a movie this year?! Tim Curry. Christopher Lee. Tom Wilkinson?! How did I not know about this?!

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Now playing: Kasabian – Underdog
via FoxyTunes

Really long entry incoming. I apologize ahead of time, but it’s been a while, so why not?

While I had my head up my– er, buried in the sand and Plaguebringer, I mean to say, there was a sort of metaphorical conflagration over fanfiction. Yet another author decided to get offended that people imagine her characters screwing other characters she never intended them to screw, or something.* Anyhow, I’m really late to the party, but I have to represent here just for the record.

Loads of authors are squicked by seeing someone doing things, bad or good, to their babies, and that’s cool because it’s theirs. Thing is, daydreams and fics can’t threaten that ownership in any real way. Perhaps this is part of the reason why, legally speaking, there’s no way to stop someone imagining your story ending another way, continuing forever, or getting sucked into an alternate dimension where it meets up with Luke Skywalker and Homer Simpson for a can of True Blood at Merlotte’s. Nor can you stop fans sharing this abomination with like-minded individuals (because oh, they will find them, thank you internets), so long as they’re not getting paid or claiming the work as their own. It’s the internet equivalent of kids writing stories and passing them around a slumber party. If you want to, you can tell the kids to get their slumber party off your damn lawn. Totally cool, and personally I respect that.

But you have no legal shotgun on this metaphorical lawn– you can only hope the giggling fans will be scared away by the threat of extensive defense fees. Not to mention prosecution fees for you. And perhaps a significant loss of book sales because you were a jerk to your giggling fans, but that’s another issue.

I had many many issues with the whole thing, and all of them were very well expressed by Corinne Duyvis in a series of posts at the time:

The Great Fanfic Debate , pt. 1: Why Fandom Is Good For Authors (As in, the authors whose works are being ficced)
The Great Fanfic Debate, pt. 2: Why Fandom Ain’t As Bad People Think It Is (As in, a few of the reasons people pan fandom, and why those reasons are pretty lame)
The Great Fanfic Debate, pt. 2.5: Why Fandom Is Good For… Er… Authors (As in, those who hope to one day publish novels worthy of generating their own fanfiction)

The final post deals with the point that I think stunned me the most, this misconception that [Fandom]’s not a good place to grow as a writer. Create your own characters/worlds – at least that way you’ll learn something. Tied in with the implication, of course, that it takes no talent or skill to work within a world that did not spring fully formed from your own brainmeats.

Yeah, I can’t let that one go without saying something, and I’ve had plenty of time to simmer down since my initial reaction, so I feel safe now.

There’s a huge list of respected authors who write what is essentially fanfiction for a living (think comics writers, TV writers, Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms authors other than Weis/Hickman and Greenwood, Star Wars and Trek writers, hell, Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore with 1602 and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). Yeah, all those are authorized or in the public domain, which is why they can make money off it, but my point is that they are fucking talented. So let’s do away with that right there.

The thing about it being impossible to learn anything there, that’s just inane. Corinne has the list of well-known current authors who proclaim the wonders fanfiction did for their writing skills at her post. It’s impressive, and there’s more where that came from– and not only writers, but many agents and editors have fandom roots, too. Not only is it supportive and a great learning environment, but it’s also an incredible networking score.

And at the risk of sounding like I think I’m any good now, I want to point out that 10 years ago I was such a terrible writer. I mean really fucking terrible, technically and– in every way imaginable. I’d been writing since I was a little kid, but no one but my best friend (who loves me far too much not to love whatever I write, bless her) had seen any of it. I went through one of my angry periods with Marvel and started writing my own comic book stories– my first fanfiction!– and suddenly there were people who would read them and say things like:

“Hey, this is a great idea, but you need a beta reader. I can help!”
and
“I’ve been thinking about this kind of thing too– maybe we could work together on something…”

Yeah you get your dickish types in there, fandom has more than its share of attention whoring, anyone will tell you. But the good far outweighs the bad, and man, the things I have learned from these people. Yeah, there are things you can only learn from writing your own stuff, no one denies this. But to this day, with only two exceptions, everyone who’s ever beta read anything I’ve sold has been a friend from fandom writing.

I’m currently working on two collaborative projects, both of them with people I originally met in fandom. One’s a short story, the other’s a graphic novel. A lot of you know the partner on the latter, too, because it’s Corinne. And that’s how I met her originally– like six years ago, or something. (I’m only using her name because she’s obviously not shy about it. See her blog posts! Really!)

I get that it’s cool to pan fangirls and fanboys and bark about some of the twisted shit people imagine Harry Potter characters doing. Hell, I once stumbled over a John Adams fanfic that involved dom!Alexander Hamilton, sub!Thomas Jefferson**, and a lot of rope; though I didn’t read the thing, I was still scarred by the very idea. Which is saying a lot, seeing as I do much scarier things to my own characters on a daily basis.

But actually cool people got that way by not caring if they were cool or not. So haters, no one who matters is impressed. Just sayin’. Fanfiction has some excellent points, and just how helpful it is to an aspiring writer happens to be my personal favorite.

*Okay, I’m oversimplifying and being a dick on purpose. For anyone who didn’t see it but actually cares, Diana Gabaldon was upset because a fan was auctioning off a fanfiction using one of her characters to raise money for a sick friend’s hospital bills. Which is completely valid, because it’s putting the author in a crap position– at the very least, she ought to have been asked first. I’m not going to get into the morality of the whole auction thing, that’s the author’s watch. What bothered me was not that at all– it was her initial vitriolic reaction to fanfiction and fandom in general that made me a bit ill. She has since retracted it, but it started the fire. This time.
**Are you morbidly curious to know how I might’ve come across such a thing? Or are some things better left unsaid?

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Now playing: Julian Plenti – Girl On the Sporting News
via FoxyTunes

First, the good news: I get to take up residence in my favorite creepy little town, New Bedlam! Looks like my ridiculous little Horologist, George LaFleur, will be allowed to creep into town this July. Poor man and his American-Victorian sensibilities. It’s a hard road.

Have you checked out the new issue yet? Spring fever takes on a whole new meaning in that town, man.

Now, the– well, not news. I would like some opinions on endings, if you have a second and any thoughts on either or both of these:

1. Say you’ve read a book with two major plotlines– one a speculative sort of thing, and the other a romance, and the two of course come together in the end to make a complete mess of everything. Having followed this romance from the beginning, would you be completely disappointed and unfulfilled if said romance did not end up working out in the end– particularly if the other plotline is a total catastrophe as well? You know they say it’s not a romance novel without the Happily Ever After, but this is not really a category romance. So can it be done without making you throw the book against the wall?
2. How important is a satisfactory ending to you as a reader? Do you need all the strings tied up? Do you need only the important strings tied up, and the little frayed edges left alone, as they usually are in life? Does something need to be accomplished, or are you happy if the main character has come from point A to point B and taken you along for the ride? I don’t mean winning or losing, I just mean a real ending with an acceptable combination of hope and danger on the horizon for your MC? How does genre affect your expectations of satisfaction in terms of happiness or lack thereof in the end? How does length?
   

I tend to expect some satisfaction from a novel, but with a short I like being left a little harried. Like the time investment needs to be returned somehow. (The former question is obviously about a specific plot of mine, the latter is more general, but something I like to think about.)  And that really only applies to certain genres– with darker or so-called literary fiction, we tend to expect the worst when we pick it up; we do it because we want to have to face that awfulness. And sometimes I get downright irritated with the general lack of a proper ending in a book, not so much that it’s unhappy, but just that it doesn’t go anywhere.

I wonder where other peoples’ preferences lie in a very general sense, as they seem to be all over the place, and that always fascinates me. What makes a good ending for you?

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Now playing: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club – River Styx
via FoxyTunes

Over the past month I’ve seen a lot of articles about talent and writing. Mary Rajotte, in one of her groovy writer articles for the Toronto Examiner, asked, “Are good writers born or made?” She stressed the importance of technical mastery, and asked some good questions about families in which certain art forms seem to run in the blood. In the same week, there was an article on The Blood Red Pencil called The Pull to Write, about talent and effort. There were more– but I didn’t save the links. I know, I am lame.

Anyhow, all this and a general enjoyment of such subjects makes me want to bring the conversation up in here. Because I don’t believe in talent.

Well no, I believe that it exists. Some people obviously have a natural ability in certain activities. Your brain takes to language like a fish to water, your vocal cords are formed perfectly for opera, your legs are long enough to be a ballet dancer, you understand how shadow informs our sense of vision and how to reproduce its effects on canvas, you pick out aesthetic trends and human reaction to them without reading Kant or Schopenhaur– or maybe those guys just articulate things you’ve already thought. That’s what makes a prodigy, for sure, or even just a head start.

And there are environmental factors. My parents are musicians; my brother grew up having his singing technique gently corrected, and the guitar was never at all mysterious to me because it was literally always there. Same for children of artists, athletes, businesswomen, etc. everywhere. It’s like being raised bilingual– it’s hard to become conversant in multiple languages when you’re grown up, but if they’re always there, it just happens effortlessly even if you aren’t a natural with languages. It’s not in the blood any more than speaking (arguably — I’m American, after all) English.

But in my experience with so-called talented people– you can imagine that my upbringing meant I was pretty much always surrounded by them– I’ve noticed that as long as there is something, some kind of core understanding or appreciation for something, lack of head-start ability can be overcome; cultivation is what really matters. I’ve seen people everyone thought were tone-deaf learn how to carry a part. Of course, even when there is talent, cultivation is necessary, which no one would deny. My brother is a badass singer, he cultivated it. Okay, I very likely wouldn’t have been a badass guitarist– but who knows. The point is that I’m a mediocre guitarist at best, in spite of what the world would have me believe is every advantage.

What I mean is that most of the time when people say, “she’s so talented,” unless they’re talking about the next Mozart* (hint: there has never been a Next Mozart), they mean “she’s obviously gone into the subject thoroughly, and has enough of a grip on it to produce results herself.”

I think that if you want it, you’ll surround yourself with it, be open to learning and experience, and you cultivate every little hint you get in the process. Unless there is something actively working against you– in most cases such things can be overcome, but not all– why the hell not?

Or maybe I just need to believe that because I’ve always wanted to write, but there never was and certainly never will be anything precious about my drafts. I’m okay with it either way; I’m either too oblivious  to feel like a talentless hack, or there’s no such thing, and hacks are a product of willful stupidity rather than a lack of talent, as I suspect. It’s an accident of birth, so’s environment. Working your ass off is an accomplishment.

Think so?

*In the name of historical accuracy, I feel I should point out that while Mozart was undeniably a prodigy, there were some serious environmental factors at work there too. As in pushy stage father. The bane of the truly talented.

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Now playing: The Clash – Jimmy Jazz
via FoxyTunes