Don’t Annoy the Writer
I tweeted last night that Fiona, who was here again yesterday*, had brought me the best tote bag ever. Isn’t it wonderful? I ask you, was this designed for meeeee or what?
I do however like the idea that cranky authors are enough of a commonplace that it is worthwhile to create tote bags on the subject.** Although the fear does linger that this is more about the myth of The Writer than it is about the truth . . . or that if it’s the truth, the perceiver of said truth has left out the part about how just before the writer snapped and started throwing stale popcorn, apple cores and old ink cartridges*** at the perceiver, the perceiver had been saying things like, when are you going to write a sequel to x? You owe us a sequel to x.†
However this will also do as an excellent moment to recommend another book I read ages ago, really liked, was going to blog about it, and have never got round to it because I Would Do It Wrong.††
Someone sent Peter a copy of the galleys of THE CASE OF THE IMAGINARY DETECTIVE by Karen Joy Fowler††† and I fished it out of the pile of books that one or the other of us is going to read any minute now about a year ago. I was riveted from the page after the dedication, which holds only a brief quotation by the writer responsible for the imaginary detective of the title: “It seems only fair that I live with the people I’ve killed. —A. B. Early”
::Blinks::
The book begins:
“Miss Time was seated with her feet on the floor and her head on the table. . . . A tiny clutch purse had fallen to the floor beside Miss Time’s leg. Among the contents spilling out were a lipstick, keys, and a pair of reading glasses. . . . The purse was the size of an aspirin, the lipstick slightly larger than a grain of rice, the kitchen floor about as big as a sheet of typing paper. Poor murdered Miss Time was only three inches tall. And the whole tableau was on the bedside table under the reading light, where Rima would see it first thing every morning and last thing every night.”
Rima is Addison Early’s goddaughter, and has come to stay for an indefinite period—a fortnight, forever—at her godmother’s house, pleasingly named Wit’s End. Rima is at some emotional ends of her own, following the death of her father—which followed the deaths of her mother and her only sibling: “Rima had heard once . . . that when someone important to you dies, they come back in a dream to say good-bye. She was still waiting for the dream about her mother and her mother had been dead almost fifteen years. (Aneurysm.) Her little brother, Oliver, had died four years ago. (Car crash.) Probably her father (leukemia) was caught in the queue. . . .
“‘You know I was very fond of your father,’ Addison had said, which Rima did know, because her father had always said so, though her mother used to say that Addison had a mighty funny way of showing it.” You could say that: she put him in a book and made him a murderer “who killed his wife with her own cat [sic] and almost got away with it.”
The quirkiness of both the plot—Addison gives Rima her own mystery to figure out, concerning her father, Addison, the theft of one of the characters from one of the murder-tableau dollhouses and a fan who sends curiously intriguing letters to Addison’s imaginary detective—and the writing I found entirely charming. It is full of dry, throwaway lines that made me laugh out loud: “That first morning Rima was slow to get up. . . . Getting up would very likely involve chatting; her good mood was too baseless to survive a chat.” “Don’t tease the arsonist. Rules to live by.” “It was a bright day, and the ocean a glassy green. Rima had never seen E coli looking more beautiful.”
Many of you already know and treasure Karen Joy Fowler—and read this one while Peter’s copy of the ARC was languishing unappreciated in one of the piles in the hall at the mews—and don’t need telling. Any absent-minded laggards however, listen up: The Case of the Imaginary Detective is highly recommended.
* * *
* organising things. The problem is she can only organise what I give her to organise, which means I have to have organised it enough for someone to organise it. Sigh.
** http://www.cafepress.co.uk/+writers_warning_tote_bag,14929968
There are also t shirts.
http://www.cafepress.com/+dont_annoy_this_writer_shirt,14928660
And magnets.
http://www.cafepress.co.uk/+real_writers_refrigerator_magnet,14929466
(Yes. I keep my Green & Black’s in the fridge. I like the rush when that cold mint filling hits the tongue.)
And buttons.
http://www.cafepress.co.uk/+a_dr_button_button,38220356
*** Old ink cartridges pile up, you know. You’re always going to take them to the recycler. The apple cores go into the compost and the popcorn goes into the trash. Except there never is any leftover stale popcorn. This is like saying ‘leftover stale Green & Black’s.’
† In which x shall remain nameless. I am trying to learn to find it funny that the kudzu vine of ‘paranormal romance’ appears to work retroactively, as well as having bled into the wider fabric of romantic fantasy. I’ve had mail since SWORD and HERO were published complaining about my heroines’ morals—I always find this especially impressive in SWORD readers, since you have to be paying extremely close attention even to notice that Harry and Corlath get it on before they get back to the City and married—but it’s only been in the last few years that I’ve started receiving mail saying they wanted to know where exactly everybody is putting their body parts and that they almost really liked the books except for this. Arrrrrrrgh. Go. Away. Please make a note: There is nothing remotely resembling sex in PEGASUS.^
^ I make no promises one way or the other about PEG II.
†† Yes. This is weird and twisted and I’m going to try to get over it. I’m a writer! I love good reviews! And I’m not hugely picky about them if they merely put the point across that the reviewer really liked the book and is recommending that people read it! ^ I admit some faint resemblance to the book in question with any plot summary the reviewer may be moved to bestow is preferable, but even that’s not absolutely required. Okay, I admit that misspelling characters’ names makes me testy, but then I am a cranky writer.
^ Which is really all a review is for. Deconstruction and close textual interpretation is mostly for people with too much time on their hands.+
+ Nope. Am not an academic. There probably are some good ones out there. I’d rather ring bells.
††† Probably because this appears on p 230: “After parking, [Addison] walked a few blocks to the used book store to check out the bottom floor, as was her habit, see if any Peter Dickinsons had shown up. It was a crime that man was out of print.” Yes. It is. But he’s slightly less out of print than he used to be:
http://felonyandmayhem.com/category/author/peter-dickinson-author/
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