a_t_rain

So, reveals for Histories Ficathon were today, and I can now lay claim to the two stories I wrote:

This Vile Politician, Bolingbroke: Kate / Hotspur, modern-day US politics AU, longish. (To my shock, I think this is the only time I've set a story of any length in more or less the same time and place where I actually live -- although this is still kind of a handwavy version, set in a MAGA-free world* where everyone's biggest concern is microplastics, and in an imaginary state whose laws roughly parallel those of Mississippi but the political landscape is closer to Georgia or North Carolina. Anyway, this is the fic that was eating my brain for a couple of months, and I'm excited to finally share it.)

Mercury: Poins and Hal, gen, a lot shorter. Because one of the unclaimed prompts was for a story where Poins becomes the Chorus in Henry V, and I found the idea too weird and wonderful not to explore.

Also, new-ish installment in the Lord Chamberlain's / King's Men RPF verse: Fantastic Master Fox, in which fourteen-year-old Will tells a story to his siblings. (Because I'd already decided some stuff about his home life and what the little Shakespeares were like, and then I stumbled across this English version of the Bluebeard story that both Shakespeare and Spenser evidently knew, and it seemed like too much fun not to use. Plus I wanted to play a bit with an idea that had always been in the background, namely, that those Elizabethan grammar school boys were probably very much like first-generation college students today, with some of the same pressures and dilemmas.)

* Or possibly a near-future world where MAHA took a very weird turn and all of the characters are actually Republicans. Hey, you never know!

So, I think this was my first time coming back to a book I really loved when I was a teenager but haven't picked up in at least thirty years. (My mom has been nagging me to move my books out of their house, so I've been doing it bit by bit with the ones that I feel sentimental about, and I grabbed Fahrenheit 451 off the shelves this summer because it seemed timely.)

It is. Like, there's a lot of stuff that is obviously, amusingly dated, like Guy's salary being six thousand dollars a year,* and some stuff that didn't really bother me in high school but does now. (Clarisse is very, very obviously a Manic Pixie Dream Girl now that we have a name for it, and Millie ... well, there are hints that might have been developed in really interesting directions, like the way she's clearly miserable enough to attempt suicide but wholly unable to acknowledge THAT she's miserable, let alone why -- but they just aren't.** Also, Guy, maybe you should try talking to your wife's friends without haranguing them and randomly bringing their reproductive choices into it?)

But there is also stuff that didn't make much sense to teenaged-me that seems grimly logical now, like the ease with which a whole culture can make the leap from "books disturb us and make us uncomfortable" to "books should be banned." Also, the idea that people might actively prefer an immersive, participatory simulacrum of human relationships to the real thing seems way too prescient for comfort, even if the "participatory" part involves the adorably quaint method of sending scripts through the mail.

I'd been vaguely thinking of this as a 1960s sort of novel, but it isn't, it's McCarthy-era. (I guess the treatment of nuclear war should have been a tipoff that it had to have been written in the narrow window between Hiroshima and mutually assured destruction, but I'd sort of forgotten there was a nuclear war in this book.) And, as such, it feels an awful lot like it belongs to our times as well.

* Bradbury (wisely) didn't specify the exact year in which the story is supposed to take place, but it's definitely after 1990.

** If you have fic recs, I'm all ears!

With new fic in the ever-more-sprawling Lord Chamberlain's / King's Men-verse: Counsel. (John Webster PoV, set in the aftermath of the 1606 Act to Restrain Abuses of Players. Why no, this is totally not about anti-DEI legislation, why do you ask?)

I didn't really do any extended travel this summer, but I went to Ontario for eight days and saw lots of good theater (and got to meet moon_custafer in the flesh, which was lovely), and to Ecuador for just under two weeks. Ecuador is stunning and I want to go back so much. It is also blessedly cool, apart from the two days we spent in the Amazon on the tour I did. (Which were also good, we saw lots and lots of monkeys and some interesting frogs and also a big tarantula, although I think if I were super-into birding I might have been disappointed with it.) Otherwise, I saw many mountains and lakes and Baroque churches, and it was all ridiculously beautiful. I think I want to go to Peru next, although both of my experiences with uphill-hiking-at-altitude on this trip have convinced me that I need to get in some serious training before attempting the Inca Trail.

So, I am back now and I officially take over as temporary department chair on August 1, and I also need to revise this article that I really don't want to revise (basically: two of the peer reviewers really liked it and the third one hated it, and it's clear from Third Reader's comments that they want me to have written a different, more theory-inflected article altogether, and I'm trying to brush up on some of the theory but also find a polite, editor-satisfying way to explain why I'm blowing off most of the rest of what they said. And, despite the fact that I'm tenured, at a school where teaching and service are the only things that really count and research is gravy, it still kind of stings.)

TFW someone posts exciting new research in your academic field, and all you can think is "oh shit, what is this about to do to my WIP?"

(Not a whole lot, as it turns out; I've read a preprint, and the author's theory of the case is that Anne Shakespeare is in London with her husband around 1599-ish, is present as a witness when he makes certain promises regarding John Butts, and later, around 1607, an unidentified friend of Butts writes to her and pleads with her to give Butts some amount of money that William has apparently refused to pay. There's something written in different handwriting on the back of the letter; it's very fragmentary, and may be something completely unrelated, but if it is Anne's reply, it appears to be a "no." She also seems likely to have been back in Stratford by this time, which would explain why she's apparently unaware of whatever has recently passed between her husband and the writer, but also has access to her husband's money. So she really doesn't have to have stayed in London all that long, and I already had her coming for a visit in 1600 and basically acting as Will's Stratford business agent the rest of the time, so ... yay?

The author seems to have considered, and rejected, the hypothesis that this might be a hitherto-unknown wife of Edmund Shakespeare, which was actually my very first thought when I read the news articles, and which would leave me with much bigger plot and characterization problems.

He also seems to kinda-want them to be a small-scale Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, conspiring together to cheat a poor orphan, but Butts evidently grew into a rather ill-behaved young man. I can see William having perfectly reasonable reservations about handing over a large sum of money to someone who seemed likely to squander it, and the letter-writer then sending an emotionally loaded appeal to Anne under the impression that she would be a softer touch. As always, a bit of a Rorschach test!)

So, I wrote Henry VI fic about Cade's rebellion, because I think I'm going to take my first shot at teaching (3/4 of) the first tetralogy this fall, and apparently fanfic is one of the ways I think through things before teaching them? At any rate, it's stunning how timely that bit feels. I think I went in thinking "oh, this is going to feel really different after 1/6, and thank God I never published my dissertation, because twentysomething-me was way too much of a Cade apologist." Which I was, but it's also layered in ways that I hadn't anticipated -- Lord Say pretty much says the most tone-deaf things possible without having the least idea they're tone-deaf, in ways that feel uncomfortably familiar if you're a red-state academic who spends a lot of time cringing at blue-state academics.

These are really good plays. I remember being surprised by that when I first read them in my MA program, and I was surpised again upon re-reading. I haven't come back to them that often, in part because they feel so unrelentingly bleak, and one of the things I usually like the most about (older) Shakespeare is how redemptive his vision of people tends to be, how even the characters who do deeply horrible things aren't usually reduced to those things. And you see glimmers of that in 2 and 3 H6, maybe in Eleanor and Queen Margaret in particular, but it's mostly not quite there yet.

Another random thing that surprised me was just how different the rebellion scenes were in the Quarto. I didn't look up the current scholarly consensus on how they relate to each other, but they both "feel" plausibly Shxian to me, like we might be looking at revision-over-time, maybe different versions for different casts? There are a lot of names, and the editors of the Norton Shakespeare seem to think they might be actor-names rather than character-names in some cases, and I actually suspect they may be both / and? At any rate, it turns out that the character who is "Smith the Weaver" in the Folio text is simply "Will" in the Quarto, where he's also described as having courted a woman named Nan -- which is, naturally, where my imagination started running away with me, as in, "oh wow, did Shakespeare actually write himself IN as the play's most vocally anti-intellectual character?" Which would be awesome, if true.

I wrote really long Shakespeare-hanging-out-with-Ben-Jonson fic to celebrate. (Also, from earlier this month: Chaucer and Shakespeare hanging out with their daughters, and writing the Wife of Bath's Tale and All's Well, respectively.) This is all instead of doing revisions on the Chaucer article that I should have been working on this whole time, because that's the way I roll.

I made cupcakes for my students, too! I haven't done that in ages, not since before the pandemic. It was nice, although only three of my ten World Lit students actually showed up (we are still in this weird cultural shift where students seem to have become accustomed to attendance being optional, although this is an Honors class, so I was surprised). At least my other two classes were mostly present and engaged, and seemed to appreciate the cupcakes.

Courtesy of nineveh_uk: post the first sentences of your last ten fics, and look for patterns. (Everything archived here, in case you're curious. About 50% Elizabethan / Jacobean theatre RPF, plus two straight-up Shakespeare fics, two Vorkosigan Saga, and a bit of Rape of the Lock crackfic.)

1) Rebecca greets her unexpected caller: Winifred Burbage, all brown curls and dimples and an extremely fashionable hat, accompanied by a group of women Rebecca recognizes vaguely as friends of Winifred’s from before her marriage.

2) It was the sight of By’s hands that hurt her, when he first came back from a month undercover.

3) “It seems to me,” says Nick Tooley, who is playing the First Witch, “that I have to be reacting to something when I say ‘I come, Graymalkin'.”

4) “No,” said Dr. Valdes, the chair of the Philosophy department.

5) It was not until the very end of the longest and most painful day of Horatio’s life that he had an opportunity to ask Lord Voltimand and Lady Cornelia, who had lately been emissaries to Norway, their opinions of the new king’s character.

6) John reaches for Macbeth’s part, and dips his quill again.

7) It was many, many years later, long after Belinda and her guardian sylph had been translated to the heavenly realm, that she finally thought to ask Ariel a question.

8) James contemplates the scene before him: one red head and one dark one, bent together over a playscript.

9) “Are you doing anything after church on Sunday?” asks Dick. “Why don’t you come to dinner, and then we’ll go look at some skulls.”

10) “You’re going to have how many?” said Ivan, in horrified fascination.


I think the most obvious pattern is the one I already knew about, namely, that fictional characters get past-tense narrative, and real, historical individuals get present-tense (or, occasionally, first-person past). For some reason, I have a hard time writing people who have been dead for 400-ish years in past tense ... maybe because it makes the fact that they are dead feel overwhelmingly important? I dunno.

Also, I seem to spend a lot of my of first sentences explaining who the characters are, sometimes at rather clunky length, and I think punctuation has more to do with cadence than grammar.

Lots of fun stories up this year! A few I've particularly enjoyed:

The Death of Sven Hjerson Poirot; longer, plotty whodunit with a terrific Ariadne Oliver voice.

An Invigorating Life. This is ... well, hard to describe, but sort of fix-it fic for Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, picking up on the touch of magical realism that's there in the original and running with it.

Soul Clap Its Hands and Sing. Guy Gavriel Kay's Sarantium books, WITH THEATRE HISTORY. (OK, this one may be in the niche-personal-interest category, but it's very, very good.)

The Lost of Winter. Goblin Emperor / Cemeteries of Amalo universe. Longer, plotty, Thara Celehar-centric, and feels just like the third novella I've been waiting impatiently for.

Anything's Possible. Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. OK, so I don't usually like fanfic written in script format even if it's for a play, and I don't usually like stories that kill of characters who aren't dead in canon; this is MORE than good enough for me to love it anyway.

So I wrote some more Elizabethan theater RPF (Vanity, in which Richard Burbage's idea of a suitable activity for a date is to drag a whole bunch of people off to look at paintings of skulls), and also got around to posting a bit of really old Vorkosigan saga fluff that had been sitting on my computer for ages (In-Laws, Ivan-and-By banter, post-canon).

And now that I seem to have found myself a new fandom ... I'm noticing that LJ / DW comms just don't seem to be a thing any more. Has anything replaced them, in terms of spaces to rec / plug / find recs for other people's stuff / generally nerd out with people who might be writing the same sort of thing you are? (Hopefully not Tumblr, I just don't get how to navigate Tumblr.) It feels kind of like a ghost town here, and I guess I've been spoiled with Vorkosigan fandom, where there's a lively enough built-in audience on AO3 and an abundance of character- and plot-driven genfic.

So, I'm supposed to be writing a sober article about the medieval / Renaissance dice game of hazard (as depicted in The Canterbury Tales specifically). Apparently what I do end up writing, under those circumstances, is semi-Shakespeare fic, semi-historical RPF about the game of hazard, Antony and Cleopatra, metatheatricality, and, um, seventeenth-century ideas about chance, gaming, and probability, but definitely not anything to do with The Canterbury Tales whatsoever.

FWIW, I recommend scrolling past the character and fandom tags without reading them if you really want the full roller coaster ride on this one. It's short.

Hazard.