I’ve had a productive couple of days before I must head out of town on my way to Context. I’m hanging out with the parents tomorrow night (they live between here and there somewhere) and then it’s off to–I don’t know. Act like a professional all weekend. Wait, I am a professional. Er, then act like I’m not incredibly nervous in crowds. How’s that?

S’okay. Where there are books, I cannot feel out of place for long.

A few notes of interest before I go:

1. Pete Kempshall, one of my favorite writers and an all around excellent kind of guy, is up for a Ditmar Award for Best New Talent. He’s done a lot of awesome things, but I’ve made his acquaintance thanks to shared ToCs from Morrigan Books, both in Grants Pass and Voices. (We have another upcoming, too!) Pete’s work is stunning, and so if you’re voting–well, did I say he’s awesome? Because he is.

2. If you missed it, the link to the ToC for the first issue of The Red Penny Papers is up. The issue is entirely too much fun–and I can say that as it’s absolutely no credit to me at all and a lot of credit to the clever, wonderful authors who agreed to contribute. Also, the cover is cool.

3. … I’m pretty sure there was a #3, but I guess not. Huh. Well, I like things in threes, dammit.

And now, to our section of the 30 Days of Books meme for the week.

Day 06 – Favorite book of your favorite series OR your favorite book of all time
Mm, let’s say The Great Gatsby. I love Fitzgerald and his hateful characters so much–but in Jay Gatsby there’s actually a lot to love, and that’s why this one is my favorite. (In truth, The Picture of Dorian Gray is my “desert island book”, but that’s the answer to a later question!)

Day 07 – Least favorite plot device employed by way too many books you actually enjoyed otherwise
Male MC. Female character falls in love with him–or so our narrator keeps telling us. It’s never explained why or how, nor is it shown, but since he’s The Hero, we are supposed to take their word for it, I guess. This of course makes her sacrifice all kinds of shit for him over the course of the novel, because as you know, that is a woman’s function. Because she loves him. Really. Did we mention that she loves him? Because she does!

I like stories of sacrifice for love, so don’t get me wrong there. I’d just like to actually believe there is love involved. For examples of this phenomenon, see The Last Legion by Valerio Massimo Manfredi (which I keep hoping just lost something in the translation, because it’s cool otherwise) and the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan (which has awesome aspects, but I gave up after book 8). Those are big offenders, but a lot of things do it to a degree.

Day 08 – A book everyone should read at least once
Animal Farm by George Orwell.

Day 09 – Best scene ever
“The Paths of the Dead” from The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King by JRR Tolkien. I was so pissed when they cut most of it out of the movie–but the extended edition saved the day. It’s not perfect, but it’s still pretty damn cool.

Day 10 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis. I love non-fiction in a general way, but business and finance bores my face off. Michael Lewis is my husband’s favorite author, though, so he insisted that I would love this one. You’d think I’d learn to stop doubting him when he says this, but no. (Not my fault, really. I can never get over him liking Tom Clancy. If you saw the comments on the last post, you now see the sense of humor I live with daily. God help us both.)

And that’s it for me. See you Monday-ish!

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Now playing: Arnold Schoenberg – Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4: I. Grave
via FoxyTunes

So I think something light and ridiculous is called for. Seeing as my “somewhat obsolete intellectual equipment”* is taxed to the limit between a certain bet (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE), organizing my Philadelphia research, the upcoming release of The Red Penny Papers, and soon, preparations for Context 23, well, I think a meme is called for, more specifically.

Amanda Pillar has been doing this awesome 30 Days of Books one, and I’ve been sort of messing with it for a while now. So let’s pretend I started it on the 15th or so, and am now going to do it five days at a time. I spam enough as it is. Here’s the deal, for anyone else who wants to have a bash:

30 Days of Books
Day 01 – A book series you wish had gone on longer OR a book series you wish would just freaking end already (or both!)
Day 02 – A book or series you wish more people were reading and talking about
Day 03 – The best book you’ve read in the last 12 months
Day 04 – Your favorite book or series ever
Day 05 – A book or series you hate
Day 06 – Favorite book of your favorite series OR your favorite book of all time
Day 07 – Least favorite plot device employed by way too many books you actually enjoyed otherwise
Day 08 – A book everyone should read at least once
Day 09 – Best scene ever
Day 10 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
Day 11 – A book that disappointed you
Day 12 – A book or series of books you’ve watched more than five times
Day 13 – Favorite childhood book OR current favorite YA book (or both!)
Day 14 – Favorite character in a book (of any sex or gender)
Day 15 – Your “comfort” book
Day 16 – Favorite poem or collection of poetry
Day 17 – Favorite story or collection of stories (short stories, novellas, novelettes, etc.)
Day 18 – Favorite beginning scene in a book
Day 19 – Favorite book cover (bonus points for posting an image!)
Day 20 – Favorite kiss
Day 21 – Favorite romantic/sexual relationship (including asexual romantic relationships)
Day 22 – Favorite non-sexual relationship (including asexual romantic relationships)
Day 23 – Most annoying character ever
Day 24 – Best quote from a novel
Day 25 – Any five books from your “to be read” stack
Day 26 – OMG WTF? OR most irritating/awful/annoying book ending
Day 27 – If a book contains ______, you will always read it (and a book or books that contain it)!
Day 28 – First favorite book or series obsession
Day 29 – Saddest character death OR best/most satisfying character death (or both!)
Day 30 – What book are you reading right now?

So here goes!

Day 01 – A book series you wish had gone on longer OR a book series you wish would just freaking end already (or both!)
Call me super predictable, but I’m ready for about 7 more Harry Potter books. I know, I know, best to leave the party while you’re having fun, but I miss them something fierce. JK Rowling is a great writer, a brilliant worldbuilder, and so good with character. (Except when it comes to Draco Malfoy, who as it turned out was just a foil for Harry all along after all. *sadface*)

Day 02 – A book or series you wish more people were reading and talking about
Vanity Fair. I don’t get why Thackeray isn’t more popular nowadays. When I’m reading him, I think I like him better than Dickens. (Then I stop and think, no, that’s not possible. Then I read more Thackeray and realize that yes, it is.) It’s got to be the birth of the modern novel as we know it. After all, it’s called: “Vanity Fair: A Novel Without A Hero”.

Day 03 – The best book you’ve read in the last 12 months
Drood by Dan Simmons. Speaking of Dickens and Thackeray, who are both characters therein, though the former far, far more than the latter for obvious reasons. In truth, I think it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read.

This is also an example of exactly the sort of book I want to write when I grow up. I don’t honestly believe myself capable in my heart of hearts, but the mere fact of its existence makes me want to work–hm, I already want to work my ass off for it. Well it makes the desire that much more intense, let’s say.

Day 04 – Your favorite book or series ever
My favorite story ever is the one related by Sir Thomas Malory in Le Morte D’Arthur. It’s this incredibly deft amalgam of scattered and varied French, German, English, Irish, and of course Welsh mythologies into a single beautiful whole. Perfect, no, of course not–but as near as an Arthurian Legend can come, to my eyes.

Day 05 – A book or series you hate
I really dislike Tom Clancy. That Jack Ryan stuff bores me to tears. Can I get a character, please?

*Quoting one of my favorite characters from television, Yes, Prime Minister’s Sir Humphrey Appleby. I love him because he embodies yet another excellent quote, this time from Ben Franklin in HBO’s John Adams: “The English love a good insult, Mr. Adams. It’s their only measure of a man’s sincerity.”

How’s that for a convoluted attribution?

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Now playing: The Charlatans – Feeling Holy
via FoxyTunes

Words have been failing me since I heard the news about Jamie and Ann Eyberg. For the first 24 hours all I could really say was, “God, I don’t even have the words.” Which, you will note, is not much worth saying.

What I was trying to get out was that I’ll miss talking about his family and imagination, and his cheerful, supportive presence as a fellow writer on a long, long journey. That kind of thing leaves a vacuum when it disappears, and there’s no ignoring it.

Even more than that, I’ll miss all those stories, the ones he didn’t get to tell, and remember him by the ones he did.

My family is thinking of his now, as I’m sure you all are. But since I finally found the words, I thought I’d use them.

Chris Fletcher of M-Brane Sci-Fi has collected a lot of the memorial posts gone around these past few days. There are links in those posts to the memorial fund set up for their children, and efforts by a lot of our Venn Diagram (as Alan so aptly put it–with Aaron’s help) writing communities to the same end, and to honor their memory. There can’t really be a bright spot, but it does warm the heart a little to be reminded that people are awesome.

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