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Grand Matriarch
You all think I’m just plain Robin McKinley, middle-aged, mild-mannered* blogster, hurtler of hellhounds, ringer of bells, plonker of piano and tormentor of songs**, wrestler of roses*** and slave of chocolate, black tea and champagne. Oh yes and I write stories for money.
But I’m not these mere and simple† things. I’m a Grand Matriarch of Fantasy.†† I know this because Putnams’ marketing plan says so. Snork.
I’m still being used as a football by the ME, sod its little cotton socks†††, so I don’t remember the chronology perfectly. But I think it was the end of last week when Mignon, my editor’s assistant, sent Merrilee and me jpgs of the jacket of the ARC ‡ just so we could see how nice it looked with the art all of you blog readers have already seen. And it does look very nice. Except there was a marketing plan plastered all over the back of it.
Wait, wait! Marketing plan? I thought we were still waiting to discuss the marketing plan! I don’t want to do my own skydiving, deploying winged banners at 12,000 feet! I don’t like heights! And I never promised to translate it into blank verse for the 2010 international bardic convention in Swindon!‡‡
If certain parties, like, perhaps—ahem!—the author, had got her frelling rear in gear and turned her frelling manuscript in on time, ample and relaxed discussion about a marketing plan might conceivably have occurred.‡‡‡ As it is, the marketing department is doing very well not to have said, huh?, when they were told that the ARC of PEGASUS was on its way down the conveyor belt.
But what’s on the back of the ARC is only a teaser. The real howler came later when they sent us the full shiny brushed-up marketing plan which leads off with the positioning of McKinley as Grand Matriarch of Fantasy. Hooooooo. After Grand Matriarch and Deputy Ringing Master§, what can be left in this world to attain?§§
* * *
* this translates as ‘wimp who shouts a lot’
** Including the odd^ new one, now and then. I think I’ve got the second and final part of the lullaby to take in to Oisin tomorrow.
^ Yes. Odd.
*** ow
† There is nothing mere and simple about ringing Cambridge
†† The queue for hem-of-garment kissing forms to the left.
††† Out staggering around after hellhounds today, I met Jenny on Connie. I didn’t quite burst into tears but it was a near thing. I asked after everyone—Roland’s been sold on and replaced by two young Irish mares—and inquired, pathetically, if I might drop round just for a cup of tea and some gossip some day and Jenny said absolutely that I must. I keep saying two things about horses: first, that of all the kicks to the head the ME has delivered, the one that apparently means giving up riding is the one that hurts the worst; and, second, that it’s not riding I miss so much as horses. Well, it’s not Jenny that’s keeping me away from her yard, it’s me. So maybe there is a semi-answer to this conundrum if I can develop a bit more flexibility of outlook.
‡ These are still bound galleys for all of me, but somewhere along the line when I wasn’t paying attention they started being called Advance Review Copies. They’re still bound galleys. When your manuscript is first typeset by a proper printer, the resulting pages are the page proofs or galleys. They look—or anyway they should look—like the pages of the finished book will look, but they’ll get proofed several times before the final pages start rolling off the press. Bound galleys or ARCs are when those early pages are bound and sent out to various people in the trade in the hopes of getting a buzz going before pub date. It’s nice when the bound galley pages have had at least one cursory proofing, but we’re running so late on PEGASUS thanks to the fecklessness of the author that these pages are going to be the rawest of the raw, so I hope there’s nothing too drastic wrong with them. I could tell you stories. . . .
‡‡ It may be Peoria this year. They’re a tough audience, those Illinoians, and they’ll heckle the iambs right out of you if your lines don’t scan.
‡‡‡ Of course it might not have too. People in publishing have no more available time than the international average, which is to say thirty-six hours are to be squeezed out of twenty four, and downtime^ is a philosophical construct, like quarks were originally invented to plug a hole in the visionary physics of itty bitty particles.
^ I found this article more interesting than I thought I was going to http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/03/a-week-without-books?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
although I found her easy equivalence of ‘genre’ with ‘junk’ just a trifle frelling irritating: ‘ . . . if what you’re reading is mostly . . . well . . . pulp, then sometimes you end up feeling as if books are eating you up instead of the other way round. Sure, there’s a smattering of literature and high art-type stuff in there, but mostly it is whatever I have fished off the shelf at my nearest Oxfam that morning – detective stories, romances, horror, sci fi . . . any kind of fiction that I can gulp down in large enough, quick enough bites. . . .’
Excuse me? THE MOONSTONE? THE EUSTACE DIAMONDS? PRIDE AND PREJUDICE? JANE EYRE? CONFESSIONS OF A JUSTIFIED SINNER? FRANKENSTEIN? DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE? RAPPACCINI’S DAUGHTER? GULLIVER’S TRAVELS? FAUST? THE TEMPEST? BRAVE NEW WORLD? 1984? . . . Almost anything by Dickens—many of whose are detective stories as well—and I think MOBY DICK is sf/f, but my prejudices may be showing.
Grrrrrrr.
But the question of when necessary downtime starts taking over what ought to be up time is interesting, and I think any compulsive reader will acknowledge that there’s a . . . well, a compulsive aspect. On the other hand I found this article http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/04/evolutionary-psychologists-romantic-fiction?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter totally irritating. Romance isn’t my chosen form of bathtub reading but everybody needs downtime. This scans to me like a thinly veiled attempt to equate women with their hormones again. This is the 21st century, isn’t it? We didn’t go backwards through the 20th and pop out in the 19th?
§ Handbells tonight. I am seriously brain challenged at the moment so we stuck to bob minor, but it could have been a lot worse. At the end as we were synchronising our diaries, which requires a lot of, no, I mean the 18th, no, that’s the 25th, what do you mean you’re gone on the 8th? Colin said, are either of you coming on Mandy’s outing for the May Bank Holiday? We both allowed that we had not heard of Mandy’s outing. Well, said Colin, we’re going to Herefordshire and Wales, and it was going to be Saturday-Sunday-Monday, but everybody is having outings and it’s too hard to get towers, so she’s moved it back to Thursday-Friday-Saturday. Oh, said Niall thoughtfully, that sounds interesting. I think I’d like to come. Not me, I said resignedly. I don’t go overnight anywhere.^ . . . And then what Colin had said finished sinking in. THURSDAY, FRIDAY, AND SATURDAY? I squeaked. Niall, you’re not allowed to be gone on a Friday evening between 7:30 and 9 o’clock!
Yes I am, replied Niall. I have a Deputy Ringing Master.
^ Yes. We’re having a little trouble with the ‘national author tour’ part of the marketing plan.
§§ Fabulous global best seller in eighty-seven languages including several unknown till they emerged from the shadows and negotiated for translation rights?
Bookshelves and reality
A few days ago this email conversation occurred with my friend Tasmin, who is another writer. Another somewhat (ahem) book- and space-challenged writer.* She’s spent a lot of time (and money) over the last year or so in turning the second parlour in her old farmhouse into a library**, and now, finally, with the shelves in, she is beginning to unpack.
I asked her if I could use her email and my reply as a blog entry because I felt that rather a lot of you would understand what happened next. Indeed, will have already predicted what happened next. She graciously agreed.
And so I began, in true sympathetic, supportive friendship mode:
I’m not laughing. I’m NOT laughing. I’m NOT LAUGHING! MMMMMRMMMMMRRRRMMPH
—–Original Message—–
From: Tasmin Hohenzollern
Sent: 18 January 2010 23:09
To: Robin
Subject: Bookshelves are INADEQUATE
I know that you will understand this.
I’ve just about got the library bookshelves crammed full, and I have books that are Not On Shelves. Boxes of them. Thirty or forty boxes of them. “Oh, quelle surprise!” I hear you cry.
That would be pretty much what I’m crying, yes. Mmmmmrmmmrrrmph.
This is going to make me cull and cull again. Unfortunately it’s a slow process, culling.
Yes. You suddenly realise you have a crick in your back, need a pee, and are dying for a fresh cup of tea/coffee . . . and it’s two hours later, and you’ve been reading a book you decided two hours ago to cull. Yes?
Why, just this morning I got rid of PAVILION OF WOMEN by Pearl S. Buck and two of the three (why? Who knows?) copies of JANE EYRE.
Uh . . . I have several copies of JANE EYRE. I often have several copies, particularly different editions, of favourite books (aside from the dozen or so different editions of LOTR), and JANE’s definitely a favourite. Why should a good friend have only one suit of clothes?
At this rate it will take me… um… mathematically challenged, remember?*** this may take a moment or two… YEARS to reconcile the books with the space available on the bookshelves.
Yep. I still probably have a couple of months before I get to play this game at Third House. Atlas is Building Shelves now.†
Unless I make a clean sweep of the more prolific authors – Edgar Rice Burroughs, say, or Lovecraft, or Fay Weldon -
Not Lovecraft! Not Lovecraft!!! –But if you stick to just him, it’s not so bad. You can get rid of all the Derleth etc.†† I cut Edgar††† back in Maine–and I never developed the Weldon habit.‡
there is going to be a major, MAJOR space shortage.
Yep. Reality. Don’t worry, it’s just reality. Happens to all of us. Like breathing. Shortage of bookshelves. Breathing.
There are Too Many Books (and mind you, I haven’t even touched the contents of my office upstairs, or the bookshelves in my room or the one in the guestroom or the ones on the landing. Sigh. THERE ARE TOO MANY BOOKS!
There are NEVER too many books. THAT’S the problem. Shortage of bookshelves and breathing is just the way life works, badly planned and built as it is.
And that’s not even counting the many boxes of my own books – something I’ve always been religiously opposed to keeping around the house, but when you buy up the copies before they’re remaindered, well, damn, there they are, first they cost you money and then they’re right in your way in the form of a stack of boxes. Eek.
Oh, well, I DO keep backlist in boxes. You weren’t fantasizing wasting shelf space on BACKLIST were you?!? Are you feeling quite well??
Perhaps you should plan to come and spend a week or two helping me cull. It’s always much easier to cull other people’s books (and then you can take lots of them home with you, heheheheh).‡‡
Yes, THAT’s why it’s easier to cull other people’s books! I KNOW that scam!!!!
Doesn’t that sound like a lovely holiday? And just think how you would enjoy convincing me that I don’t actually NEED twenty different editions of specific books… only, of course, I DO.
Well, I think twenty might be the upper limit. Except for LOTR. And possibly JANE EYRE.‡‡‡
[Here ends the amusing bit of the email. The rest of it trails away into mutual inquiries about the behaviour of respective domestic fauna, meteorlogical insults, the inexplicable behaviour of publishers, etc.]
* * *
* Is there another kind? Well, Peter might be another kind, only he married me.
** Which is to say she too went through the Weight-Bearing Floor follies. She, however, was only dealing with the ground floor. No fabulously expensive additional staircases were demanded of her. No perfectly respectable second bedrooms were turned into cupboards with stairs running through them.
*** He has also begun building the brick planter in front of the cottage. So that the next time some moron in an SUV swings grandly out of the driveway across the road^ and slams into my pots, it’s going to hurt him a lot more than it hurts me. For a change.
^ Note that these are not my neighbours themselves, but they hang out with some overvehicled riffraff. The thing that totally gets up my nose is that for the four big, heavy pots I’ve lost . . . not one person has ever knocked on my door and said, Er, I’m really sorry but . . . And no, there is no way they can’t have noticed. These are—were—big heavy pots. Grrrrrr.
† Yes. Tasmin and I have a lot in common.
†† I can be cruel and decisive when there’s no longer space for . . . a bed^, say, and a kettle to boil water for tea.
^ In extreme circumstances, hellhounds could sleep on the bed.
††† Cruel! Cruel! Cruel! Especially toward writers who write by the yard. I got rid of my 1,000,000 E Phillips Oppenheim at the same time.
‡ I’m a cow, remember? Moooooo.
‡‡ Yes, I know. This is what happened the last time I visited Tasmin.
‡‡‡ And . . .
Leftover Twitter
Way way long ago I didn’t finish responding to some forum comments that I meant to respond to, because I ran out of time/energy/brain/thingummywhatsit logic. Since then there have been a lot more comments I have meant to respond to and I haven’t managed to do that either. But here’s a start on the end of the thread that followed ‘A few days ago this happened on Twitter’:
hedgehog wrote in response to my:
| Alternatively I can snicker and say, this is why I write *cheap genre,* and not LIT’RATURE. |
You can say it, but I won’t agree. “Lit’rature” isn’t what the Critic says it is; it’s what people of good taste choose to read, across generations and epochs. Real people will be reading Robin McKinley’s books with intense pleasure a century from now — and perhaps a millenium, or three! — and the self-proclaimed Critics of that future Day will be pretending that her works are “Lit’rature” because they study it. The truth is: it’s Literature because we read it, not because the Critic blesses it . . .
. . . I do know why I haven’t managed to make those thoughtful, considered responses; because thoughtful and considered take too much time and energy (and thingummywhatsit) and I’m always writing the blog at the end of the day when I’m running downhill fast and the 1,000,000 things I haven’t done yet that I was absolutely going to get done today are bleating in my ear and when I’m at the mews, and I usually am at the mews in the evenings, the piano is right behind me as I sit at the kitchen table and she doesn’t have to bleat or murmur. Or sing. She just sits there and looms.* It’s a lot easier to write blog entries about bell ringing and hellhound hurtling and then maybe get back to the piano before I totally crash for the night/morning. And the question of ‘lit’rature’ or the worth of one story or another or one sort of story or another is important.
I have an aggrieved relationship with ‘lit’rature’. In the first place, I got my BA in it. And there’s nothing like a few semesters in a rarefied intellectual atmosphere—especially a tweedy, masculine rarefied intellectual atmosphere—to bring out the not-very-hidden hellgoddess in me. I can feel my blood pressure rising just remembering my two and a half years in the Bowdoin College English Department. Bad language. Well, that was a long time ago, and I hope that as the memory of the first years of women undergraduates** fades to that neutral history colour the whole patriarchal thing at Bowdoin has died a painful, richly deserved death.***
But one of the things that struck me then, even then, in my more-intimidated-than-I-was-going-to-admit, flimsy, emotional, female way, is that there were at least two kinds of literature: pretentious and silly. And dead. Sometimes the dead stuff was pretentious and silly too, but a lot of the ‘stood the test of time’ stuff is just rip-snorting good story telling, if you’re a fluent enough reader to get past some (mostly) minor language and social strangeness.† Charles Dickens and George Eliot, for example, were the rock stars of their day—Dickens even toured like one.†† They wrote populist crap! They wrote cheap genre! They just happened to write extremely good cheap genre, which is to say . . . literature.
Pollyanna forbids me to mention any names of current ‘literary’ authors I think write cheap pretentious-and-silly genre. And I’m sufficiently aware of myself as an evil-cow reader to accept that some of my loathings are just me being an evil cow and the work’s good. Some of it, however, isn’t, and in a hundred years nobody will be bothering with it.††† When I talk about writing cheap genre I’m saying this half sardonically and half proudly. If you’re right that people will be reading Robin McKinley in a hundred years, I’ll have become literature too, because I write good populist crap.
Maren also responding to:
| Alternatively I can snicker and say, this is why I write *cheap genre,* and not LIT’RATURE |
I think I’ve mentioned before that my beloved 17th-century conteuses deliberately chose the very frivolous fairy tale genre because they knew most critics would not take them seriously enough to suspect them of anything subversive (political allegory, Girls Who Do Things, jokes at the expense of males–all of which did feature prominently in their stories, of course), so they were relatively free to explore the issues that interested them without interference.*
But still they apparently couldn’t resist a dig at critics when the opportunity presented itself. I can’t find which story or even which author this was right now, but one of them said in an aside that some critic was surely going to protest a huntsman in her story having a musket, since it was set many centuries before her time. She preemptively responded to this unseen critic that there were talking animals in the story, so there could certainly be anachronistic muskets as well.
*Which is not to say some critics didn’t still hate them (notably Boileau who mentioned fairy tales in his tenth satire, Against Women), but that was more disdain than criticism of the actual works.
I am proud to be a fellow fairy tale reteller in this company.
emljones:
There are even books that don’t suck dead bears, but DO have technical flaws that keep them from reaching their potential… i.e., book I read recently in which the name of a minor but significant character CHANGED partway through! I finished the book puzzled as to whether the publisher had fired all the editors, or what.
Oh dear. I think you’re being a bit harsh if you’re going to declare a book hasn’t reached its potential because there was a small but glaring editorial failure. I try different names for characters sometimes when I feel prickly-itchy about someone, when it seems to me I’m failing to ‘hear’ their real name and am still trying to get the mumble in my ear to turn into nice sharp consistent letters on the page. I occasionally don’t get them all changed to the final result—the same final result—especially when I never do manage to assuage the prickle-itch—and then I have to hope that someone questions the renegades. But the mortality of writers, editors and proofreaders is a source of continuing permanent dismay to all of us on both sides of the Great Publishing Divide. And it keeps most of us on this side of the divide awake nights.
But criticism is a tricky thing. I’m an academic and my writing is for academic journals, and . . . I’ve discovered that when I find myself saying any version of “this person just doesn’t understand” I’m usually resisting some well-founded criticism. But . . . academic work (mine, anyway) is almost always work in process so criticism can be used for the next article. It’s writing as learning process, rather than creation of a story.
It’s something I’ve always wondered – are reviews useful for fiction authors, at all?? I’m getting the sense from everyone here that a useful (for the author, that is) fiction review is at best exceedingly rare!
I don’t know about everyone here. And perhaps it depends on what you mean by ‘review’; a lot of writers like to work by workshopping, when they send work-in-progress out for criticism, and then use that collected criticism as a basis for rewrites. And I know writers who read every published review of every published book with close attention because they expect to learn something from it that they can use writing their next book.
I’m not like that. I am a solitary clunch, and a ratbag with it. First, last and most of the middle . . . I listen to the story. And I only listen to the story. Other voices are an infuriating distraction. This is why I don’t send early drafts out for reader responses. Reader responses will only confuse the issue. The story will tell me what it wants and needs. The more closely I listen to it the better I will write it. Go away and leave me alone and let me get on with it.
I have a fairly similar response to reviews of the published work. It is vanishingly rare that a reviewer—back in the days when I still read negative reviews—told me something that I could use. They may be right that this, that or the other thing fails for this, that or the other reason. I am not saying that I write flawless, unimpeachable prose limning‡ lapidary plots and breathtakingly exquisite and agonisingly resonant characters.‡‡ I am saying that I’m my stories’ best and, effectively, only, arbiter. This isn’t arrogance‡‡‡; it’s the way my story-telling faculty is built.
librarykat
I don’t know if reviews are useful for the authors; I know that many libraries depend on them for collection development purposes. A library’s collection development policy may say that it will only purchase books and other materials that have at least two positive reviews in certain qualified journals (usually library professional journals, Publishers Weekly, etc). . . .
Yes. Bingo. And this is precisely why snarky, subjective, axe-grinding, soap-box, having-a-bad-day, don’t-like-this-genre, this-isn’t-the-book-I-wanted-to-read, this-isn’t-the-book-this-author-should-have-written, the-world-should-be-a-different-shape-because-I-say-so reviews make me incandescent. As I say, I don’t read my own reviews any more unless Merrilee clears them first—why should I make myself miserable (because I will make myself miserable) over a bad review when it won’t do anything but make me miserable?—but I read other people’s, and there are a lot of reviewers I have seriously wanted to whap up longside the head. Of course there are a lot of writers I want to whap up longside the head. I’m generous with my whapping impulse. But this is the real world where people have to earn a living as well as the artistic world where we’re trying to hang a few more stars in the interdimensional firmament, and every snarky review loses that author sales§ that he/she probably needs to pay the mortgage and feed the hellhounds. I’m not talking about either deserved trashings or genuine uncertainty or puzzlement or even flat dislike. These happen, like hailstones and headaches (speaking from the recipient’s point of view). I’m talking about blind prejudice and sheer bleeding snark, for which there is no excuse.
Ah, life on earth with people. What a snakepit. I’m one of those overdone crusty types with a mushy centre however: I still believe most people are good at heart, do their best, and mean well. But it’s like Other Dogs: it only needs one or two that try and take your or your sweet hellhounds’ faces off to give you a somewhat twitchy attitude toward the sight of a few more of them streaking toward you across the greensward. Or the whitesward, lately.
* * *
* And speaking of 1,000,000 undone things, I’ve been trying to remember for weeks to ring the piano tuner.
** I’m pretty sure I’ve told you this: I was a transfer student, but I graduated in the first class of women who’d been there all four years.
*** What, me still pissed off, thirty years later? Little benign, forebearing me?
† Crinolines are rarely seen these days, and chaperones are pretty thin on the ground. I find that at this stage of my life the thing I find most troubling in reading my beloved Victorians is the racism. I’m somehow better able to say oh, go sit on a pitchfork, about all that melting femininity.
†† And while I don’t think cocaine had anything to do with it, he effectively died of it.
††† They’ll be producing their own silly and pretentious pseudo-lit, of course. It’s not like this ever goes away.
‡ ‘to limn’: one of my most-hated verbs. Right up there with ‘to craft’. Craft is a noun.
‡‡ Ick, actually
‡‡‡ Well, it may be arrogance too
§ A topic for another evening is whether All Attention Is Good Attention. The short answer is no. All notoriety may be good notoriety. I don’t know; I don’t have paparazzi leaping out of my shrubbery. But at the level of needing to make library sales to make ends meet, yes, negative reviews cost.
New Things
It’s a new year, it’s a new decade*, it’s our nineteenth wedding anniversary, it’s the middle of the night and I’ve just . . . finished PEGASUS.
More or less. Don’t break out the champagne**. I’ve got a short list of yanks and wallops I want to make before 5 pm Manhattan time tomorrow and I am not looking forward to seeing it back again covered in yellow sticky notes from the copyeditor in a few weeks but . . . yeah. I turned the last page about an hour ago and have been trying to remember what I do with myself in the end of an evening that doesn’t have PEGASUS in it . . . there’s this strangely half-familiar piece of furniture with the long narrow rectangular black and white tiles on top of a curious short shelf that make noise when you press them down . . . I have the feeling this odd contraption used to be important to me. . . .
And I need to go to bed so as to get up Bright and Early*** to get on with the yanks and the wallops. There’s quite a lot more to say on a subject that came up a little over a week ago, and I may go on with a little more of it tomorrow or next decade†, it being rather near to my professional heart, but meanwhile here are a few highlights from the forum responses to A Few Days Ago This Happened on Twitter:
librarykat
I have always done my best to review the book in hand and nothing else, and to make only fact-based, constructive criticisms if any are due.
Librarykat is talking about nonfiction, which has (perhaps) clearer lines of good/bad or successful/unsuccessful than fiction does . . . and while I’ll grit my teeth and toil on with a nonfiction book whose style and charm are failing me if the subject is fascinating enough, I’m such a dilettante that I may change my enthusiasm and go find a topic that has better books written about it. But I nonetheless feel that ‘fact-based, constructive’ still applies to everything. And many reviewers need to try harder to differentiate between their personal feelings and the facts of the book they’re reviewing, whether it’s about nuclear fission or the furry green frelp from the planet Girmingrum. And possibly to look up the definition of ‘constructive’.
hedgehog
Once upon a time I took a course with a Professor of Literary Criticism . . . who insisted that the Literary Critic was entitled to spout criticism as if the Author’s frame of reference was identical to that of the Critic. “A Tragedy Is What I Say It Is.” He didn’t see any reason to suppose that the Critic should spare any attention (or squander any column-inches) on the question whether his perspective and Author’s perspective had anything whatsoever in common.
This is the comment that is still spinning in my brain eight or nine or something (I keep telling you I don’t do maths) days later. He WHAT? I am, I’m afraid, assuming that he was a white Anglo-Saxon male, and . . . a lot of the reason why the world is in a total abject mess†† has a lot to do with similar attitudes from similarly gene-blessed blokes in positions of dangerously greater power . . . stopping now, before I get myself in more trouble. . . . But . . . . GRRRRRRRRRR.
LRK
I find it rather odd when people express their own opinion as fact: “This is good/bad”, not “I liked/disliked it”.
YES.
Of course there is such a thing as shoddy workmanship – I liken it to food: people like different things, yet there is such a thing as a badly cooked meal.
Or when they have made up rules for what is and isn’t good writing – sometimes I feel as if I hear “show, don’t tell” one more single time I shall scream! Not because I disagree with it as such, but you can’t just make up that kind of rule that is invariably right or wrong. Like a scene in a book I recently read – and I read a lot of comments saying that that scene was one of their (if not their very) favourite scene in the whole book. Then along comes someone and says they didn’t like it because it was an infodump! As is, presumably: Infodumps are bad; this was an infodump; ergo it is bad.
Yes. Some people can do the tangential wandering off into who-knows-where††† and some people can’t. Infodump/expository lump is not necessarily a useful elucidation.
The “opinion as fact” thing is especially striking when one oneself doesn’t happen to agree with it. This scene “is eyewateringly bad” I read somewhere else about something else. But… but… I thought, I liked it! And this author can’t write humour. Indeed? So why do I keep laughing then? . . . .
True, an excessive use of “I” can across as self-centered, but better that than sounding so… so… arrogant!
YEEESSS. This is one of the journeys of my cranky, self-centred and deeply unconfident life. I’m old enough—I think brainwashing, I mean educative styles have changed—that I remember that being taught how to write an essay included never using ‘I’. You were supposed to get your facts right and then staple them to the page. Uh . . . about nuclear fission this may be possible, but about a novel it isn’t. I remember it coming like Zeus on a thunderbolt‡ that there is no such thing as absolute objectivity. It’s all subjective. We can’t help it; we’re mortal. There’s a range of neon pink subjectivity fading into polite khaki almost-objectivity . . . but no mortal will ever make it to true neutrality, and anybody who says otherwise is . . . ahem. Let’s say ‘deluded’. And before anyone tries to blind me with science, there aren’t too many scientific laws out there that don’t turn out to have a few confusing corollaries.
Diane in MN
Of course there are books that suck dead bears, and while in some cases the author deserves to be soundly taken to task–e.g., for writing a nonfiction book that gets facts consistently wrong–the reviewer’s job is to discuss the book without trashing the author.
Bold face mine. Not to mention first usage of that vividly explicatory phrase ’sucks dead bears’.
And a review that can be boiled down to “I really liked this book, so it’s good!” or “I really hated this book, so it’s bad!” might as well be a fifth-grade book report, because it’s not really a review at all.
Yep. Five-syllable adjectives and a nice turn of apothegm don’t alter this essential truth.
212Judy
I never did reviews for a living, but as am editor-in-training and then as an editor, the Rule was that even for in-house commentary and especially for anything going to the writer, we could NOT say that something sucked, or even “I don’t like this,” only “This isn’t working for me BECAUSE [fill explanation in here].” It was a useful distinction.
Yes. VERY useful.
Also was a chance to say, “this is SO not my kind of story that I’m not giving it a fair shot.”
Yes. Dear gods and goddesses in all the heavens and other unplumbable regions, I wish this reminder of legitimate grounds of refusal were written in letters of fire and stone over every review journal/forum/instrument/agency in the universe.
. . . And on that trumpet-blast of intellectual honour and righteousness . . . I have to go find out which frozen car door is going to let the hellhounds and me in tonight, with or without the application of fire and imprecation. The sky this afternoon looked like snow.
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* And I want a better one, okay? No stupid frelling diseases.^ No frelling house moves that require me to reinvent my life as I thought I understood it. No dear friends lying crushed in hospital beds.^^ No more root canals.^^^ [Also Bleeeeaurgh, which is to say various things indescribable in a public blog because I’m only allowed to pillory myself.?] And I’d like to last out this decade with the current generation of hellhounds, healthy and eating well, not to mention this husband??.
I’d also like to keep the book-a-year-thing I’ve been doing lately.??? And the music lessons and the bell ringing. I don’t say it’s been a decade without virtues, just that I’d like the virtue/bloody awful bungle balance slightly realigned.
^ I got diagnosed with ME finally the autumn of 2001, after two years of Regularly Recurring Glandular Fever, which, as I’ve told you, is one of those classic scenarios. One of those classic scenarios you want no part of.
^^ Luke is, given where he’s starting from, doing very well. Which says nothing about how well he will continue to do. You can expect occasional Luke updates for . . . I’d guess the next two years or so.
^^^ Except I already know I’m screwed there. I have a redo pending . . . which I’ve been putting off till I got PEGASUS done. Whimper.
? And if I open it to global wishes, I’ll be here . . . all decade. Okay, let’s start with Obama pulling a whole series of hat tricks sorting America out and getting re-elected, saving the tigers and the rainforest, and that Copenhagen was just a bad dream and the real summit on climate change is next month and they’ve got it totally nailed.
?? Also healthy and eating well
??? Also AAAAAAAAAAAUGH. It’s the 3rd of January and I have ANOTHER novel to write by NEXT autumn. Winter. I really can’t do this last four months again. She moaned.
** No. Wrong. By all means break out the champagne. Always break out the champagne. And of course we broke out the champagne. It’s our anniversary.^
^ Nineteenth is bronze. Hunh. I don’t want a frelling statue. Is there any good bronze jewellery?
*** Cough cough. Ahem.
† Probably both
†† and why I’m a rabid, I mean rampant, no I mean rabid and rampant feminist
††† Possibly including footnotes. . . .
‡ preferably Athene on an owl, if you’re asking
Some Thoughts on ‘The Nine Tailors’
Since I am a literary bell ringer, Dorothy Sayers’ bell-ringing murder mystery, The Nine Tailors, has come up a few times on this blog. So when I read the following in the ‘letters’ section of The Ringing World last week I thought, ah ha! Blog entry! . . . RW is slowly beginning to develop a web site rather than just an opening page that says ‘hi, we’re the change-ringing weekly paper, you look way too normal, go away’ but they aren’t hanging their letters yet. First I looked up D G Rowlands’ home tower’s web site* and the only bell ringer contact info they offered was the church office phone number. So then I emailed RW and asked if they could put me in touch with D G Rowlands and they immediately sent me his home phone number. Which tells you something about how small and friendly the ringing world is. We’re all fruit loops but we tend to be sociable and hospitable fruit loops.
So then I spent 1,000,000,000,000 hours trying to ring D G Rowlands and getting a busy signal. I suspect an on-line cruising teenager and no broadband. When I finally did get through I abruptly discovered that saying ‘Hi, I would like to run your letter on my blog’ sounds really strange. But he said oh, fine, go right ahead, without even asking me to repeat what I had just said . . . slowly. Or to spell my name and then checking this blog first. Small and friendly and trusting, as I say.
There is I acknowledge safety in obscurity. I’m at the mews and my copy of Nine Tailors is at the cottage, so I have just been googling it in the hopes of finding listed somewhere what the method of the famous peal was—and for that matter why it was supposed to last nine hours. An average peal is three and a quarter hours or so. Nine hours isn’t a peal, it’s a . . . well, it’s a curious sort of masochism is what it is.** But in my fruitless search I kept running into these book reviews saying that the book is boring and/or hard to follow because of all the bell ringing.*** Er. I read Nine Tailors repeatedly in my Sayers-mad youth; it was one of my favourites. I loved the arcanery of bell ringing—who needs to understand it? Not to mention the Fens landscape, which I didn’t understand either but could still get all swoony over.†
However, people who can’t read Nine Tailors because of all the bell ringing probably won’t find a lot of the following letter interesting either. But then people who find disquisitions on bell ringing boring and impenetrable probably don’t read this blog regularly anyway.
Oh yes, and SPOILER ALERT. If by some mysterious chance you haven’t read Nine Tailors and still think you might like to some day, you don’t want to read the following.
Sir,— The technical aspects of Miss Sayers’s bellringing in The Nine Tailors have been argued over and debated many times, not least in this journal, but there are a number of other questions that arise also. They are all fairly obvious and I don’t claim any originality in setting them down here, though I haven’t seen them posed in print before.
In particular, the circumstances leading up to the death of Jeff Deacon suggest several problems to the literal mind. According to Will Thoday’s account (“The Dodging”), he put Deacon up in the bell chamber and tied him to a beam there, leaving him overnight. Would Deacon, a murderer, have submitted to being tied up there in the cold? The bell chamber would be open to the weather unless the louvers were blocked with snow and freezing cold. We will skip the problem of his bodily functions, as does Miss Sayers and just about every other fiction writer of the period†† (Walter de la Mare excepted) ††† and note that in the morning before daybreak, when Will took Deacon food and drink he found him “all right only very bad-tempered and perished wi’ cold . . .” I’m not surprised! Just that ordeal might well have killed him—freezing cold with very little freedom of movement. Then, how did he get Deacon to submit to the tying up again? Because Will collapses with ‘flu’, Deacon is then left the whole of the day and evening in the bell chamber, still tied up in the freezing cold. When did he die?
With a 9-hour peal intended, it is impossible that the conscientious steeple-keeper Jack Godfrey would not have gone up to check the ropes and adjust them. He might well have fitted new or repaired ropes a few weeks before and gone to adjust them before the New Year’s Eve ringing. He could hardly have missed seeing Jeff Deacon tied to a beam of the bell-chamber even if after dark and with only a lantern.‡ Then again, after the handbell practise‡‡ for Wimsey’s benefit—and before dinner that evening—the ringers go to the tower and ring up the bells for the service. It would only need one bell to go up “wrong” (easily done on heavy old bells on plain bearings)‡‡‡ and Jack or someone would have had to go up and put it “right.” They would also have seen Deacon.
As has often been said, it is debatable whether the noise of the bells even in such close proximity could kill anyone, but if we accept it for the sake of argument, did Deacon survive the ringing up and later the ringing (on 6 bells only) before the Watch-night Service? If so he then had the 9 hours of peal ringing during which time Wimsey/Miss Sayers implies that he died.
I reckon that he died a lot earlier and from cold (despite Will Thoday’s coat), not the bells. It was purely his bad luck that Jack Godfrey or another didn’t discover him tied up there and raise the alarm.
The one technical (ie “ringing”) point that I’ve not seen mentioned is that unless Hezekiah left “Tailor Paul” up at backstroke after the service ringing (back six?) or the raising, then ringing The Nine Tailors for the Old Year (9 + 12 strokes) would have left him at the wrong stroke for starting the peal.§ But being a downy old bird, no doubt that’s what he did!
D. G. Rowlands
Ivor, Buckinghamshire
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* I am still not really accustomed to the fact that everyone and his/her axolotl has a web site these days, but I’m learning that looking for everyone’s axolotl’s web site is the first thing to try. And I get really cranky when there’s a web site and nothing on it. Content! I want fascinating content from the comfort of my kitchen table! To read in my copious free time! When I should be writing my blog entry! So I can get back to PEGASUS before my single firing brain cell closes down for the night!
** And Lord Peter just would be a bell ringer. Of course. Gah.
*** Note that whoever wrote the Wiki entry on Nine Tailors is glaringly not a bell ringer.
† I have long been capable of becoming swoony over British landscape.
†† Something that bothered me a lot when I was a kid. Was I the only human being in the galaxy who had bodily functions?
††† I don’t remember this at all. But then, my memory makes a sieve look like a bank vault. Maybe it’s my excuse for a long leisurely de la Mare wallow.
‡ And one might assume Deacon would be trying to catch the attention of any unexpected visitor
‡‡ Handbell practise? Okay. Must read this book again.
‡‡‡ ‘Wrong’ means the clapper is lying on the wrong side of the bell as it stands mouth-up waiting to be pulled off for change-ringing. Yes, it matters. You don’t really want to know, do you? I could explain this and plain bearings if you really wanted me to, but I’d have to think about it earlier in the day when I’m awake first.
§ Usually you ring a few rounds before you start your method. He could have just not rung the first handstroke, and picked up on the second (back) stroke. Or maybe I’m missing something.
