a_t_rain: (Default)
2025-06-02 10:07 am
Entry tags:

It's summer and I have time on my hands, so...

Real!Aphra Behn now gets to battle AIphra the chatbot in her very own fanfic. Because, honestly, what can you do when the world is going to hell in a handbasket except have a little fun with it along the way?

Off to Toronto in a few days (assuming they are still letting Americans in) for this all-day medieval drama extravaganza, which should be awesome. Plus as many shows at the Stratford festival as I could fit. I haven't been there in close to twenty years, so I spent some time reading old travel journals, and being amazed at 1) how large Internet access loomed as a concern, in those pre-smartphone days; 2) how large cash access loomed as a concern (apparently my frugal grad-student self was very reluctant to put anything on a credit card unless absolutely necessary, and it was something of a crapshoot whether your card would work in any given ATM abroad); and 3) how amazingly social everyone was in hostels, and how easy it was to find people to go out with. (Pretty sure this, also, is a smartphone thing. I haven't actually changed my travel habits a whole lot, although it obviously does help to be twentysomething and reasonably cute instead of fortysomething -- but it appears that younger-me was perfectly happy to chat with the sixty-something backpackers off on their retirement adventure, and wrote after one such encounter, "May that be me in forty years." Amen.)
a_t_rain: (Default)
2025-04-24 08:24 pm
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hey I thought this canon was supposed to be over and done with

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!)
a_t_rain: (ravenclaw)
2024-10-27 09:30 am

massive fic roundup post

So, I am still here, and have been writing a bunch of stuff, I just forget to post about what I'm writing in the moment! Histories Ficathon XV reveals were today, so this seems like a good time to do a roundup. But first, thanks to MossGrownTowers for my awesome giftfic, Shakespeare & Co.. Yay for fic about the Lord Chamberlain's Men hanging out and being creative!

I also wrote a couple of stories for the ficathon: Remember Everything I Told You (Northumberland and Kate after Hotspur's death), andk as a palate cleanser after all that angst, Quoth the Starling, "Mortimer!". (In which Hotspur actually follows through on his threat to train a starling to say nothing but "Mortimer" and sends it to the king.)

(In case it's not obvious, I was really feeling the Kate Percy love. She is SUCH a Shxian comedy girl, and it's her bad luck she got stuck in the wrong cycle of plays, and on the wrong side of a losing war.)

Other new-ish stuff:

Genesis, a prequel to my own ever-growing Lord Chamberlain's Men / King's Men saga, set in the 1580s and covering John Heminges's theatrical origin story and first meetings with future wife Rebecca and future friend Will Shakespeare. Also, there's a camel, because apparently the grocer's guild kept their own camel?! Who knew?

Legacy, because after all these years I finally wrote a new HP fic. Minerva McGonagall and Madame Pince's replacement, gen.

The Chatbot's Tale, Canterbury Tales crackfic inspired by reading way too many AI-generated papers.
a_t_rain: (Default)
2024-08-02 08:41 pm

random musings about 2 Henry VI

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.
a_t_rain: (Default)
2024-05-05 02:54 pm

Well, *score*...

Apparently, Word of God dovetails ... eerily well with my own far-future fanfic. Right down to the use of the phrase "Our Man on Jackson's Whole," and no, I don't know whether to be elated or freaked out :)
a_t_rain: (titus)
2024-04-23 10:19 pm
Entry tags:

Happy Shakespeare's birthday!

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.
a_t_rain: (Default)
2024-04-19 01:56 pm
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grumpy Shakespeare-authorship journalism rant

AARGHH GUARDIAN STOP BEING STUPID!!!

Admittedly, The Guardian is often stupid about Shakespeare, but it's usually in ways that are at least entertaining, like suggesting, on the basis of a wildly out-of-context reading of Sonnet 76, that he preferred pot to the fancy designer drugs of his day. (N.B., "weed" in this poem does not actually mean ... weed, and the "compounds strange" are linguistic ones.) Also, Elizabeth Winkler is exactly the wrong person to hire if you want to make any pretense of doing objective journalism on this particular issue. (And she does, in fact, seem to be ... trying to pretend that she is doing objective journalism? Like, there's enough both-sidesery here that unless you KNOW something about the topic, it sounds superficially like a normal news article, and you miss that the "new research" consists of using a bunch of cabalistic numerology to try to "prove" that a period source is saying the opposite of what it literally says.)

Also ... I dunno why Supreme Court justices and actors are the two professions most prone to embracing this particular brand of weirdness, but you'd think the actors would think twice about it, given that the not-so-subtle subtext is that Shakespeare-the-professional-actor-of-middle-class-origins can't possibly have been smart enough to be Shakespeare-the-poet.

Also-also ... it turns out that Heminges-and-Condell denialism is a thing as well. (Not mentioned in the article -- courtesy of some dude who has been posting his own cabalistic proofs all over a Facebook page that I belong to, until the mods banned him.) It goes all the way back to the late 19th-early 20th century, apparently. Because somebody decided that the Folio dedications are so well-written that they had to be the work of a "man of letters," and came to the conclusion that a couple of actors, one of whom was also a grocer and a pub owner, could not possibly qualify. Never mind that they spent decades in a profession that required you to have some serious rhetorical ability; never mind, also, that these guys were among Shakespeare's chosen circle of close London friends, and one might reasonably expect them to be smart and well-read. (There's a good deal of overlap with Shakespeare deniers, but the Venn diagram isn't a perfect circle.)

Why yes, I do feel all bristly and protective of John and Harry these days, thanks for asking :)
a_t_rain: (Default)
2024-03-28 08:55 pm

old-school fannish meme

Courtesy of [personal profile] 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.
a_t_rain: (janeshore)
2024-01-21 08:06 am

Shakespeare-related ramblings, both fannish and professional

So, it's a new semester, but I've barely met my students yet, because between MLK Day weekend and the ice storm, there haven't been any F2F classes for nine days. I hope this doesn't make things too weird when we finally meet again. I always feel like those first few weeks are delicate, while classes are finding a vibe that's going to last for the rest of the semester, and rapport is getting established, or not.

On the other hand, I had plenty of time to write fluff about a hapless boy actor ordered to capture a toad because Master Burbage is taking his side-part as Paddock way too seriously, with some help from John Heminges's unruly pack of daughters: Familiars.

Other fic-roundup stuff from the last couple of months: Improving Fortinbras (Hamlet, post-canon, all the dead characters stay dead for once); Five Shakespeare Characters Who Accidentally Earned an Advanced Degree By Fighting a Snake (and One Who Didn't). (What it says on the tin. Because there clearly needed to be a crossover between FAQ: The Snake-Fight Portion of Your Thesis Defense and the complete works of Shakespeare.)

Otherwise, I've been rejiggering syllabi to deal with a missed week of classes and, simultaneously, looking over the table of contents for the new Norton Anthology of English Literature, which is coming out later this year.

Let's see if I can still remember how to put stuff under a cut )
a_t_rain: (Default)
2023-12-29 02:22 pm
Entry tags:

quick Yuletide rec post

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.
a_t_rain: (titus)
2023-11-08 07:59 pm

(no subject)

Happy 400th First Folio anniversary, everyone! Without John Heminges, Henry Condell, and the work they put into preparing their colleague's works for publication, we wouldn't have about half of Shakespeare's plays, including a bunch of the famous ones: Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest, among others.

I wrote a bit more fic about Shakespeare and his fellow-actors by way of celebration: Succession (1595, a private performance of the deposition scene in Richard II, written for Banned Books Week) and Stripped (1609; Heminges and Condell, King Lear, grief, and possible encounters with Dionysus; WIP but it'll definitely be finished before long).

It's all been so interesting. I still don't know if the Burbage story I started off with is fanfic or an actual novel in the perfectly respectable genre of historical fiction, so I've been holding off on posting it. (I mean, I think it's fanfic, because it hasn't got much of a plot, and the narrative voice is that of a chatty ghost with no respect for the fourth wall because it didn't exist in his day, and I don't give a crap what anyone wore or what their houses looked like; but I keep fiddling with it because I want to get at least the big stuff right, and I keep learning all these fascinating things that I feel like I ought to have known, but didn't.) Anyway, it feels really good to be doing something creative again, even though there are several dozen other things that I probably should be doing instead!
a_t_rain: (Default)
2023-09-14 07:50 am
Entry tags:

misc. fannish stuff

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.
a_t_rain: (Default)
2023-08-18 04:27 pm
Entry tags:

and yet more new fic

So, I wrote some new Shakespeare fan-stuff, because apparently this is what I do these days instead of a) getting ready for Week 2 of classes; b) writing that article I'm supposed to be writing; c) getting started on the extremely complicated side editing gig I've been offered (but don't yet have a formal contract for, so I guess not getting too deeply into the weeds for the moment is justified); or d) doing revisions to the other extremely complicated thing I'm hoping to publish, eventually. It'll happen, I guess. (At least, if this is my new fandom of choice, I can sort of pretend all the stuff I'm learning has some bearing on my academic life? I mean, I found out about this super-interesting lady printer who is pretty much certain to have been part of Shakespeare's social and intellectual circle, and why has no one ever mentioned this before?)

Queen's Leap (The Tempest, Ferdinand / Miranda, chess, canon attempted rape)

Handy (young!Shakespeare dealing with class / education snobbery, plus various people expecting him to fight a duel)
a_t_rain: (Default)
2023-07-27 06:28 pm

more new fic

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.
a_t_rain: (Default)
2023-07-19 08:45 am

Hi, everyone!

I'm alive! I see that I haven't posted here in two years, which is kind of wild, but I simply haven't been doing a lot of fandom stuff, and that tends to be what this journal is for. Anyway, that has abruptly changed, because a few weeks ago I woke up at 3 a.m. with, I swear, the voice of Richard Burbage's ghost in my head and an urge to write early modern literature RPF. I don't actually know if there is an audience for early modern literature RPF, particularly if it has a) no sex; b) almost no Christopher Marlowe; c) definitely nobody having sex WITH Christopher Marlowe. But I figured if there was an audience, it would most likely be people who know me here, rather than people randomly stumbling upon it on AO3.

So: a story. This isn't the Burbage fic, because that one started off as a short, snarky buddy comedy set in the Elizabethan theater, with a slightly more serious undercurrent about ambition, and somehow morphed into a novella-length monster with death and ghosts and envy and proto-feminism and lots of random musings about specific plays, and about the nature of artistic partnership, and about exactly how one manages stage business like biting out one's tongue. I thought for about half a minute that it might be publishable for real, and then I realized that it was not only exceptionally self-indulgent even by fanfic standards, but it had no plot other than "a couple of guys really like each other and their jobs." So AO3 it will be, whenever I finish it and think of a better title than Dick.

Meantime, here's a very short side story featuring Ben Jonson and a young Lady Mary Wroth:

Equals.
a_t_rain: (Default)
2021-04-30 08:51 pm

So, I wrote a thing...

It may be the most-niche-interest sort of thing I have ever written, viz., Antony and Cleopatra fic, from the point of view of one of the servants, about the characters hanging out and playing historical board games. Nevertheless, here it is: In the House of Beauty.
a_t_rain: (Default)
2019-07-27 05:38 pm

Vorkosigan canon question

Are we given any details about the names / overall structure of governmental positions on Beta other than the presidency? Legislative and Cabinet-equivalent positions, specifically?
a_t_rain: (Default)
2019-05-18 06:45 pm

Hamlet crackfic

So I haven't been in much of a fic-writing mood for ages, but I am ALWAYS in the mood for increasingly cracktastic ways to save Hamlet, so have The One Where Hamlet And Laertes Decide To Settle Their Differences With A Crocodile-Eating Contest Instead Of A Fencing Match. This is totally and completely [profile] angevin2's fault.

The Great Danish Crocodile Cook-Off.
a_t_rain: (Default)
2019-04-09 08:25 pm

renaissance drama stuff

So, I'm still not dead! And I went away to New York for the weekend mid-semester, which is something I apparently haven't done since 2011, but should really do more often. I saw the Red Bull production of Webster's The White Devil on Saturday afternoon, which was clever and interesting and in a nice, intimate little theater in Greenwich Village, and I was kind of tempted afterward to skip King Lear and see it again in the evening, on the grounds that I'd seen lots of Lears and who knows when I'm going to get to see The White Devil again.

That would have been a bad, bad mistake.

King Lear at the Cort Theater, performance spoilers )
a_t_rain: (Default)
2018-04-14 08:37 pm

new Hamlet fic

... because if there's one thing I can't resist, it's making up new ways to save Hamlet. Special thanks to whoever it was on my f-list who wondered, years ago, why Bernardo and Marcellus seem to think Horatio's status as a scholar gives him special expertise in how to speak to ghosts.

Graduate Seminar in Practical Necromancy; or, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead