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Nov. 14th, 2009 11:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
issenlloHow long has it since I posted? >_> RL has been particularly RL-ly of late.
But I got a bunch of stuff done! I got started on a new shawl that I (dun! dun!) designed myself using a pattern from a book, and I finished reading the biography of Georgette Heyer (see below) and am just about done with The Return of Nightfall (see next week), and I finally got my story for imaginary beasts done (albeit five days later).
Though I totally bailed on NaNo. Ah, well.
Fic:
Desynchronization, chapter 16, part 1 and part 2, Ogata/Sai, Hikago, by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ontogenesis. Fic is completed. Yay!
Non-fic:
To develop your writer's intuition, you must first read like a maniac. Oh so true.
***
Just walked in on Mum and Dad are watching Demolition Man.
Sandra *bad at slang* Bullock: Let's go blow this guy.
Sylvester *irritated* Stallone: Let's go blow this guy away.
I'm weirdly impressed by the Chinese subtitles, which put it at "吹" and "轟" respectively, even if did disappear the sexual undertones. Heh.
***
Bookblog for The Private World of Georgette Heyer, by Jane Aiken Hodge.
Anyone who has ever read The Black Moth will have, at some point, exclaimed: 'She wrote that at the age of eighteen?!'
Except that emotion accompanying that will probably be: aghast or impressed.
I did read The Black Moth at the age of eighteen, and even now I remember thinking: "Whoa" and "How did this get published?"
But it's unworthy of me to start off with a reaction like this. I love Georgette Heyer a whole lot, though I have never been tempted to read The Black Moth ever again. She wrote it to entertain a brother in sickbed, and it was published when she was nineteen, and that early success meant that she would become one of the main (at times, the only) contributors to the family income.
Her grandfather was a Russian fur merchant who later settled in Islington. Her father was a teacher. She was born in 1902. The pronunciation of their family name, "Heyer", was changed from rhyming with "flyer" to rhyming with "hare" during the war years. She later suppressed four of her early novels, Instead of the Thorn, Helen, Barren Corn and Pastel. She disdained to spend much time with other writers, whom she called "inkies" and for much of her literary career, yearned for recogition from critics and tended to mock her own work, e.g., calling them "trivial romances". She fought a lifelong battle with the taxman. She Friends referred to her as "The Duchess". While her novels were famous in her lifetime (and beyond), she shunned to give interviews or go on tours to promote her books. She died of lung cancer.
Hodge weaves in them plenty of Heyer's own opinions about the characters and the plot from letters to her agents. Hodge notes that Heyer had two kinds of heroes, Mark I, "The brusque, savage sort with a foul temper" and Mark II, "Suave, well-dressed, rich and a famous whip". As she did for her heroines:
The Mark I heroine is a tall young woman with a great deal of character and somewhat mannish habits who tends to dominate the plots of the books she appears in; the Mark II is a quiet girl, bullied by her family partly because she cannot bear scenes.
That explains some of the similarities of the characters. Hm.
I was suprised to learn that she had a huge ongoing project, that of a trilogy of John, Duke of Bedford, the younger brother of Henry V, a project that later became My Lord John. She could never really get to writing all of it because demand for her historical romances simply grew to the extent that the public was expected "a new Heyer" every year, and her finances obliged her to put it aside.
Hodge notes her passion for the Middle Ages but speculates that she was never very good in novels set in the period, for example, My Lord John, because she simply did not understand the religious-laden climate of those times. Her talent lay in the Regency romances. In a way, that's a bit sad.
While I liked this biography, I did find it a bit stodgy here and there, but I guess it is inevitable when you try to document a life like Heyers's, which comprised mostly of her staying at home to write. Still quite readable, though.
Ok, a fantasy novel next time then.
But I got a bunch of stuff done! I got started on a new shawl that I (dun! dun!) designed myself using a pattern from a book, and I finished reading the biography of Georgette Heyer (see below) and am just about done with The Return of Nightfall (see next week), and I finally got my story for imaginary beasts done (albeit five days later).
Though I totally bailed on NaNo. Ah, well.
Fic:
Desynchronization, chapter 16, part 1 and part 2, Ogata/Sai, Hikago, by
ontogenesis. Fic is completed. Yay!Non-fic:
To develop your writer's intuition, you must first read like a maniac. Oh so true.
***
Just walked in on Mum and Dad are watching Demolition Man.
Sandra *bad at slang* Bullock: Let's go blow this guy.
Sylvester *irritated* Stallone: Let's go blow this guy away.
I'm weirdly impressed by the Chinese subtitles, which put it at "吹" and "轟" respectively, even if did disappear the sexual undertones. Heh.
***
Bookblog for The Private World of Georgette Heyer, by Jane Aiken Hodge.
Anyone who has ever read The Black Moth will have, at some point, exclaimed: 'She wrote that at the age of eighteen?!'
Except that emotion accompanying that will probably be: aghast or impressed.
I did read The Black Moth at the age of eighteen, and even now I remember thinking: "Whoa" and "How did this get published?"
But it's unworthy of me to start off with a reaction like this. I love Georgette Heyer a whole lot, though I have never been tempted to read The Black Moth ever again. She wrote it to entertain a brother in sickbed, and it was published when she was nineteen, and that early success meant that she would become one of the main (at times, the only) contributors to the family income.
Her grandfather was a Russian fur merchant who later settled in Islington. Her father was a teacher. She was born in 1902. The pronunciation of their family name, "Heyer", was changed from rhyming with "flyer" to rhyming with "hare" during the war years. She later suppressed four of her early novels, Instead of the Thorn, Helen, Barren Corn and Pastel. She disdained to spend much time with other writers, whom she called "inkies" and for much of her literary career, yearned for recogition from critics and tended to mock her own work, e.g., calling them "trivial romances". She fought a lifelong battle with the taxman. She Friends referred to her as "The Duchess". While her novels were famous in her lifetime (and beyond), she shunned to give interviews or go on tours to promote her books. She died of lung cancer.
Hodge weaves in them plenty of Heyer's own opinions about the characters and the plot from letters to her agents. Hodge notes that Heyer had two kinds of heroes, Mark I, "The brusque, savage sort with a foul temper" and Mark II, "Suave, well-dressed, rich and a famous whip". As she did for her heroines:
The Mark I heroine is a tall young woman with a great deal of character and somewhat mannish habits who tends to dominate the plots of the books she appears in; the Mark II is a quiet girl, bullied by her family partly because she cannot bear scenes.
That explains some of the similarities of the characters. Hm.
I was suprised to learn that she had a huge ongoing project, that of a trilogy of John, Duke of Bedford, the younger brother of Henry V, a project that later became My Lord John. She could never really get to writing all of it because demand for her historical romances simply grew to the extent that the public was expected "a new Heyer" every year, and her finances obliged her to put it aside.
Hodge notes her passion for the Middle Ages but speculates that she was never very good in novels set in the period, for example, My Lord John, because she simply did not understand the religious-laden climate of those times. Her talent lay in the Regency romances. In a way, that's a bit sad.
While I liked this biography, I did find it a bit stodgy here and there, but I guess it is inevitable when you try to document a life like Heyers's, which comprised mostly of her staying at home to write. Still quite readable, though.
Ok, a fantasy novel next time then.