Sarah Monette's Blog, page 67

Plus and minus

Plus: New bread pans! One of my old ones has gone from non-stick to stick, so it was clearly time. And these are very pretty. And red! I'm very curious to find out what the loaves they produce are like.

Minus: I've figured out why I'm not getting any writing done. It's because every time I go to work on something, some part of my brain says, quietly but very emphatically, This is a stupid story.

Now, rationally, I know that's not true. The stories I'm trying to work on right now are neither mor...

this is still amazing

I love living in the future. Someone recorded the four-horse chariot at the Midwest Horse Fair and put it up on YouTube:

Penguicon schedule

Penguicon is next weekend (April 30-May 2). I will be there, and doing the following panels and such like:

Saturday, 1 p.m., Writing the Other, Anne KG Murphy, Sarah Monette, Jim C. Hines, Steve Piziks
Saturday, 2 p.m., Non-Obvious Reflections of Contemporary Culture in Science Fiction, Sarah Monette, Doselle Young, Stewart Sternberg
Saturday, 6 p.m., Mass Autographing Session
Sunday, 10 a.m., The End Is Only the Beginning... of the Work, Sarah Monette, David M. Crampton
Sunday, 11 a.m., Author Re...

April twenty-third is a good day for writers

Today is Shakespeare's Birthday (observed), so have a sonnet:

Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof and proved, a very ...

5 things

1. I started wishing for pictures in Son of the Morning Star with Captain Frederick Benteen: "In not a single photograph does he look formidable, not even very military. He appears placid, gentle, benevolent, with feminine lips and prematurely white hair. Only after contemplating that orotund face for a while does one begin to perceive something rather less accommodating. Embedded in that fleshy face are the expressionless agate eyes of a killer. One might compare them to the eyes of John...

UBC: Son of the Morning Star

Connell, Evan S. Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn. San Francisco, North Point Press, 1984.


Usually when I say a book is interesting, I mean the subject matter is interesting, or the author's insights are interesting. Both those things are true of Son of the Morning Star, but it is also true that the book is interesting, because Connell made some definitely non-standard choices about his narrative.

This is not a linear exploration of the battle; the book starts with the fir...

Midwest Horse Fair

I have recently begun taking dressage lessons, so on Saturday, I played hookey from OddCon and went to the Midwest Horse Fair. I caught the Friesian exhibition, in which my instructor was riding, and which also included a man driving a chariot with a four-horse team. And that? Was INCREDIBLE. Aside from the basic fact of the guy standing in the chariot controlling four horses, his control was good enough for tight turns: the inside horse was basically turning in place, while the outside horse...

6 Degrees of Tombstone

I'm reading Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn (which, incidentally, is making me hate nineteenth-century white Americans--particularly, but not exclusively, the U. S. Army--like a slow burning fuse) and, hey, look! There's Billy Breakenridge!

Breakenridge was Cochise County Sheriff John Behan's deputy in 1881, and he published a book called Helldorado which is notable for being the print source of a lot of the misinformation about Wyatt Earp--and at least...

5 things

1. I'm not a Harry Potter fan, but today I am, by god, a J. K. Rowling fan.

2. Odyssey Con X is this weekend. Tobias S. Buckell, Harry Turtledove, and Monte Cook are the Guests of Honor.

3. I, too, will be at OddCon:

Friday, April 16, 4:30 P.M.: Novel Writing Q&A: Sarah Monette (M), Alex Bledsoe
Saturday, April 17, 10:00 A.M.: Baseball, Fantasy, and SF: James Frenkel (M), Harry Turtledove, Sarah Monette, Steven H. Silver
Sunday, April 18, 11:30 A.M.: But I wouldn't want to live there!: Richard Chw...

UBC: Inventing Wyatt Earp

Barra, Allen. Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends. 1998. Castle Books, 2005.

This is a wildly uneven book. When Barra is on his game, he's very good indeed; when he's off it, like the little girl in the nursery rhyme, he's horrid.

His purpose in the book is to explore the process by which Wyatt Earp became a legend. He's very interested in Wyatt's appearances in popular culture; he talks about the movies and the TV shows and also the children's toys and comic books and other ephemer...