Sarah Monette's Blog, page 28

we don't have to drive it, we can park it out in back

This is just to let everyone know that I'm going to be off the internet for the next couple of months. Do not panic; although it is a medical issue, it is nothing life-threatening or paradigm-shifting.

Hopefully, I'll be back, at least in a limited capacity, by the New Year.

In the meantime, two things:

1. Since someone asked & I suspect other people will be interested in the answer: no, there is not currently any legally available e-format (or paper format for that matter) of either Mélusine or The Virtu. This is because I, personally, do not have a useable electronic version of either book and thus cannot self-publish them through Lulu and/or Smashwords (or another of their ilk), which I promise you is still the plan. I am really, wretchedly sorry about this state of affairs, but making any of the files I do have into useable versions of the text of the published books is something I cannot do right now.

2. If you need to get in touch with me, to ask me a question or tell me about something important, my email address is semonette (at) sarahmonette.com. I will be checking my email, although not necessarily every day.

Best wishes to you all for the rest of 2012.

2 things of which I am a part

1. Lightspeed Magazine is reprinting "Boojum" (by Elizabeth Bear and myself) this month. There's also an interview.

2. At WorldCon, I got drafted from the audience onto the live Squeecast, with Lynne Thomas, Elizabeth Bear, Seanan McGuire, Paul Cornell, Cat Valente, and their actual guest star, Jay Lake.

free listening!

"The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward" by matociquala and me, which is set in the same universe as "Boojum" and "Mongoose," is a free podcast up at The Drabblecast (2 parts, here and here).

Evolution of a Swan

Have been sick for a week with a vertigo-inducing virus. So of course I'm watching ballet dancers.

This is a lovely little article about Anna Pavlova, and the fact that you can find actual footage of her dancing on the internet. I followed Mackell's advice also to watch Lopatkina's Dying Swan and then I followed links, and inadvertently taught myself a tiny bit about the history of ballet in the 20th century.

If you can stand Saint-Saëns 4 times in a row . . .

Here's Pavlova's Dying Swan in 1925.

Here's Maya Plisetskaya in 1959.

Here's Plisetskaya in 1986.

And here's Uliana Lopatkina in 2010.

Lopatkina and Pavlova are very nearly not speaking the same language, but Plisetskaya shows the evolutionary path.

It's full of things.

1.
2. The Xerces Society has a whole section on their website about conserving bumblebees.

3. A Typgraphical Glossary--I now know the term for a written language that does not use vowels is an abjad, and that's only the first entry.

4. Nineteenth-century German marzipan makers. (I love this photograph with a love that is pure and true and not smirking even a little bit at the mustaches.)

5. I was looking up Richard Trevithick for reasons which I swear to god are totally research related, and learned that in Cornish mines, his technological children were called puffer whims. ...You're welcome.

Lagniappe: Wooden churches from northern Russia.

answers to some questions plus new story!

(0. Yes, it is too hot for capslock.)
1. Yes, the new book will be published under my pen name, Katherine Addison.
2. No, I don't know when it's going to be published. Trust me, I will let you know as soon as I can.
3. The July issue of Apex Magazine has stories by Ken Liu, Kij Johnson, Alec Austin, and me. My story is "Coyote Gets His Own Back." Please feel free to spread the word!

ANNOUNCEMENT

I HAVE TURNED IN THE GOBLIN EMPEROR. CAPS LOCK MAY NEVER BE OFF AGAIN SO VAST IS MY JOY AND THE JOY OF THOSE AROUND ME. SERIOUSLY YOU HAVE NO IDEA.

*THUD*

5 random Sunday morning things

1. mia_mcdavid has discovered what it's like when moths get into your unspun wool.

2. An alert reader asked me to tell them that this isn't a Titan Clock. Unfortunately, I can't.

3. Specialty Purebred Cat Rescue could really use some help (scroll down just a little & be prepared for some distressing pictures of neglected cats).

4. In good feline news, the Jellicle Ninja's kidneys are functioning! Still not entirely sure what went wrong, but we are very happy and cautiously starting to taper back her meds.

5. matociquala has some fabulous photo references for the horses in her Eternal Sky books.

Guilty pleasures: "True Crime" and the narratives of criminology

I apologize for the overly academic subject line, but it kind of did write itself. Y'see, I was recently in New Orleans for a week and a half (day job--trade show--nothing to see here, we are a hedge), which of course meant I had access to cable and occasionally a spare hour or so, when FRIED TO THE BONE after work, to watch it. Which meant, in turn, that I had the opportunity to watch trashy true crime tv shows. Case in point: the Oxygen Channel's Snapped (which specifically labels itself a guilty pleasure in its current opinion poll).

Snapped is kind of the epitome of my aversion/compulsion relationship with "True Crime" (a label which is in itself kind of iffy, as I'll get into below: the hysterical insistence on truth merely emphasizes the inherent falsity/fictionality (and do we think those two words are synonyms or antonyms or exist in some other relationship to each other entirely?) of the whole damn enterprise). I find it deeply, deeply problematic for its penny-dreadful sensationalism, its exploitation of both victims and murderers (and the double exploitation inherent in its chosen focus on women murderers, even though, if the sample I watched was representative, it has a little trouble finding women who actually committed murder themselves, as opposed to being accomplices before or after the fact--and please note that the show is not interested in why women commit murder; it just wants to wallow in the emotionalism of Women! Murderers! It's the Human Interest Story run amok). And then there's the whole thing about "reality TV" and how utterly repellent I find it.

And yet, I sat there for two hours and watched Snapped, and I would have kept watching if I hadn't had to be up at 6 a.m. the next morning.

I've been wondering, in a kind of appalled by my own bad behavior way, what the draw is--why I will stop channel surfing for true crime, even when I know it's morally questionable trash with which I have severe ethical problems--and this morning, as I was driving the hour round-trip to take a urine sample to the vet*, I think I figured it out. Or, at least, part of it.

(Part of it, you see, I already knew, because the character traits that make me a horror writer also make me fascinated by violence and death and, well, penny-dreadful sensationalism. You have to dance with them what brung you.)

The thing that fascinates me about true crime is the chance to see storytelling in its rawest form. Snapped is actually a brilliant source for this, because they do their best to interview both sides, so you get the alleged murderer or the defense attorny or the alleged murderer's family (or some combination thereof) and you get the prosecutors and the cops and/or the victim's family. Snapped doesn't make any effort to decide which story is true (and they're very bad about not giving the whole story, which drives me nuts), but they present both sides. And you can watch the competing stories being constructed.

Sometimes, the alleged murderer isn't articulate enough to put a good story together. Sometimes, you can only see what she's told her family and friends in the reflections she casts. Sometimes you get a smart, articulate, even funny alleged murderer, and she can tell a really compelling story. And then on the other side, you have the cops and the prosecutors, who are telling a story based on the evidence they found (and, in some cases, on the obviously prejudiced opinions they have formed). And on both sides, it's the same thing: here are the facts presented by the crime scene and the documentable behavior of the people involved. How do we explain them?

I love this stuff. I love it even when it's annoying me by how badly it's done or how manipulative the genre is. True Crime is, with rare exceptions, an utterly manipulative genre: the cards are always stacked before you sit down at the table. And that's because it's a forensic genre (to make another pun); if it isn't just sensationalism, à la Snapped, it's the case for the prosecution--as, for example, the essays in The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper --or the case for the defense. You can see the storytelling happening, even in very good true crime, and in bad true crime, you can see the storytelling fall apart.

Someone's Daughter: In Search of Justice for Jane Doe, by Silvia Pettem, is a good/bad example. I bought the book (because it was on sale, used) because it's all about a fifty year old cold case and the use of modern investigative techniques to . . . well, to not quite solve it. Or to maybe solve it. Or something, because that's where Pettem's narrative-building ability fails. What Pettem wants to do is write a story about how her search for the truth about the Jane Doe found in Boulder, Colorado, in April 1954, and never identified, changed her life and the life of the officers who agreed to reopen the case and the people who contacted her wondering if her Jane Doe was their missing cousin/niece/friend and on and on and on, rippling outwards in a beautiful Random Acts of Kindness sort of way. The truth won't go there with her, and she's not dishonest enough to force it, but she's not . . . what's the word I want? brave enough? clear-sighted enough? to let go of her cliché and either write a piece of existentialist despair about the people who go missing in America every year and are never found or write a straight up piece about the investigation of a cold case, how a theory about the victim's identity and the murderer's identity can be constructed, and about how tenable, or tenuous, that theory is. (Or, you know, no need for the false binary, a book that did both would be stone cold awesome.) Pettem, I think, really wanted her search to end with definitive answers, and when it didn't, she didn't quite know what to do with what she had.

Pettem and I were, unfortunately, fascinated by different aspects of her Jane Doe. I couldn't care less about the wonderful people Pettem met over the internet because of her search; she's not very interested in either the way people fall through the cracks or the forensic/historical grunt work of creating a pattern out of the facts that have randomly survived fifty years of entropy.

But the thing that compels me is still there, even encumbered by somebody else's narrative: Here are the facts. What can we make of them? And that's while I'll watch true crime, mesmerized, even when I'm appalled at myself.

---
*Tangentially, because I know people worry, the urine sample is from the Jellicle Ninja. She's actually doing extremely well, for a kitty with Mysterious Kidney Problems (she has gained! weight! and is now actually, once again, on the chubby side), and the sample is mostly just to see how that whole urine conentration thing is working out for her.

A cautionary tale

So, basically, all I want out of a toothbrush is that it will clean my teeth. I have no brand loyalty, I don't care about fancy bristles or contours, I just want a goddamn toothbrush so my teeth don't rot and fall out of my head. Okay?

I went to brush my teeth this morning and noticed that my toothbrush looked like a dandelion clock. Aha! says I. The last time I was at Walgreens, I thought to purchase a new toothbrush. So I fished it out of the bag where it was reposing with the cough drops . . . and discovered that the manufacturer felt it necessary to package the toothbrush so impregnably that it required scissors to get at it. No, really, they say so themselves: CUT HERE. And you can scrabble at the package with your fingernails as much as you want--you ain't getting in.

I found a pair of scissors and cut the package open. WIKTORY! THE TOOTHBRUSH IS MINE! Threw the package away, turned toward the sink, and thought, Why am I suddenly in a cloud of artificial mint?

I looked suspiciously at the toothbrush.

It was all blue and green and contours! and fancy bristles! because you can't buy a toothbrush at Walgreens that isn't, and I just went for the cheapest one that wasn't some eye-wateringly awful color because I really do have better things to do with my time than comparison-shop the toothbrushes.

And, yes, it smelled of artificial mint. Strongly of artificial mint.

I turned back to the wastebasket and fished out the package. And here I quote, because I could not possibly make this up:

SCOPE® Scented Handle
Enhances brushing
experience through
release of fresh Scope®
scent from the handle.

o.O said I. And also O.o

But I needed to brush my teeth and the goddamn toothbrush was already in my hand.

I've never thought particularly about my brushing experience before, but I have to tell you that it is not in the least enhanced by the release of Scope® scent from the handle of my toothbrush. Frankly, I feel disturbed. And weirdly disenfranchised from my own dental hygiene. And like a tiny army has invaded my head wielding weapons soaked in artificial mint.

O.o I say. And also o.O

But this is apparently what you get if you don't stand in the aisle of Walgreens and read the packaging of the toothbrushes.

Here, mintily, endeth the lesson.