Category: WRITING

He’s No Isambard Kingdom Brunel, but…

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I know, I’m late to the party, but lately I’ve been reading Sydney Padua’s the webcomic The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (coming soon as a book, apparently?), and, well: Everyone loves Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and for good reason: though he was more like the Tony Stark of his age–“accomplished” barely touches how important an engineer he was during his short but influential career in early Victorian London–the Wolverine-like look he gets in Padua’s comic (and, well, in the photos, really) is, er… I’ll put it this way: as Padua has noted, he’s an extremely popular character. He even got …

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The Harlot’s Progress (BBC4) and The Georgian Underworld: A Study of Criminal Subcultures in Eighteenth-Century England by Rictor Norton

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Historical fiction–speculative or otherwise–is a challenge for a number of reasons, but probably the biggest challenge is the problem of texture: how to get the texture of that alien historical world right? This is what impressed me about China Miéville’s depiction of Bas-Lag in Perdido Street Station (a book I discussed here a decade ago): sure, as one friend commented, it reads like someone’s AD&D adventure… but the world is so utterly textured, so rife with details. It feels like a real city at some grungy, nasty moment in its history, like the festering horror-show that was London in an …

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Bluebell the Fairy’s Birthday Present

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A little break from serious posts… Late last year, I posted one chapter from the Reading Street textbook series that I cowrote with my former colleague Haeyoung Kim a few years ago. (That chapter was my second-favorite, a sort of anti-imperialist response to the kiddie portal fantasy subgenre, and a story I’m proud of, though it’s not quite the best of the bunch.) I also discussed the conscious ideological approach to writing this kids’ story, which from the beginning was simply intended for use in an English textbook. However, today I just noticed that my absolute favorite mini-story from the series, “Bluebell the …

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Literary Sampling and Remixing: Sterling & Gibson’s The Difference Engine

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I’ve intended to get around to The Difference Engine for years on end, but never started in on it in earnest until this year, for reasons I can’t explain, really. I’ve had a copy all these years, but never quite gotten around to it. Anyway, I picked up an audiobook edition of the novel using one of my Audible credits, since I’ve been listening to audiobooks a fair bit while walking, or doing chores around the house, and I’m enjoying it immensely. I remember reading an interview with the authors in Science Fiction Studies many years ago, and being very curious about the method they …

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Yeast, as Understood in 1736

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  I’m really glad I was able to get a second opinion on one little detail that has become of great importance to my ongoing novel project. That is: how well did brewers understand the function of yeast in brewing back in 1736? It might sound strange, but that detail is incredibly important in terms of a lot of things going on in the book! During my visit to Korea, I got a chance to read a fair bit of Jamil Zainasheff and Chris White’s book Yeast: The Practical Guide to Beer Fermentation. I wasn’t particularly blown away by the book: …

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Witches, Gin, and the 18th Century

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Research is an interesting hole to jump into, as long as you’re prepared to really jump in. For example, my novel plotting is coming together very nicely, but it led me to a place where I needed to know more about the persecution of witches in England in the 17th and 18th centuries. Sadly, I must rely on internet sources for a lot of my look-abouts, since I don’t really have access to a proper library with English resources, but I still seem able to uncover some interesting things. For example, did you know that in the 18th century–in the …

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Two Interesting Cases of Female Cross-Dressing in History

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Most of the time, one hears about male cross-dressers; one runs across female cross-dressers primarily in Shakespeare plays. But lately, I’ve run across two interesting cases of women dressing up as men, that seem worth sharing: First is Mary Hamilton, who was the subject of a pamphlet by Henry Fielding titled The Female Husband in 1746. (Okay, it was really titled The Surprising Adventures of a FEMALE HUSBAND containing the whimsical Amours, curious Incidents, and Diabolical Tricks. Okay, actually, it was… well, the “title” wasn’t really a title but an attention-grabbing page of text, so it seems to vary depending …

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Hacked, Hacking, Hackers

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The weirdest bit of today: I was finishing writing a story about a hacked, er, “computer”–it’s a mechanika story, but not an obvious one, so “hacked computer” means something much more steampunk than you might think: –when several friends alerted me to the fact that my Twitter account had been hacked. And earlier today, I’d been explaining to a ten-year-old that just because there aren’t many viruses for Mac OS and Linux, doesn’t mean you don’t have to worry about hackers and viruses. (Heartbleed being a recent example.) The funny bit: the story (which ended up being ~4,400 words by …

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More on the Stourbridge Fair

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I’ve mentioned the Stourbridge Fair here before, in terms of what Daniel Defoe had to say about it. Well, today I found a little more information that’s coming in handy for my novel-in-progress. Here’s a nice page on the Stourbridge Fair’s history: they sold more than hops–including ale and beer!–and from that page, here’s a segment regulating the sale price of ale and beer. (And yes, the seem to rules make clear a distinction between the two, beer being hopped and ale being unhopped. Evidently this is reflected in the provisions for soured ale, and the lack of same for beer, …

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Back on Track With “The Company of Distillers”

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So, I’ve finally figured out what the hell was wrong with the novel I’ve been trying to write, tentatively titled The Company of Distillers–why it was so damned stuck after I reached basically the halfway point or so. It means excising most of what I’d written since Christmas–about half the text I have on hand now–but that’s for the best, and I have a clearer picture of where it’s headed now. (And a clearer picture of what I was doing wrong, not just in this book but in the other one I’d been working on, too.) What helped me, besides …

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