The Heinous Bitca

I am to make a man for the Consulate. Having little time and no hard place to ground my pride, I make him shoddily. The fine detail will be up to my usual level, but his body is slapped-together mud around a strong but not enduring mesh. The mud’s dampness will have him rotting from the inside by the end of the year, but for this first month he will be perfectly fresh and stable and that is what my sponsors require. I set his body up under grow-lights, which shine through the wide-stretched drums of Luvian cloth and give the man history. The great dun zibeline above him drenches him in the subtle basics, years of walking and talking and eating. As it ages him he takes different time from the smaller, deeply-colored grow-lights. He is like a baby but not a baby, like a child but not a child. I mute and unmute the zibeline to draw him slowly through one phase and fast through another; I place and remove grow-lights so that his boyhood is strongly influenced by a calm nursery, but only enough of his adulthood to give him a formal way with children. Under neutral lights which keep him from sensory deprivation in the meanwhile, yet no longer change him, I sculpt his finer features. There he is: as though forty, a man of wide experience and learning who has talked politics at the cafes of Maroon and ridden rocs down the Fickle Stair. He never sees my face. I send him off to the party.


A week later I am informed that an important visiting queen has fallen in love with him and I should therefore perform any touch-ups necessary for a lifespan of thirty-odd years.


I am very good at what I do. This is impossible. I feign slow preparations for the procedure while starting work on a second man, as similar as I can make him.


Six months later I meet the first man face to face. We are in my receiving room, which is full of reminders of my craft and his nature. The queen’s attendants have been persuaded to retire with graphic descriptions of the work I am allegedly to be doing.


We look at each other. He is a fine piece of work and I gave him no inclination to foolishness. “To what degree will I survive this procedure?” he asks.


“You won’t.”


“Then pour me a little of the orange,” he says, gesturing to the low, black-glass drinks cabinet, “and tell me something about human memory. No one I have asked describes it well. Immersed too deep, I think.”


I could cheat him now: it would be prudent. Instead I turn my back on him with no further precautions. I am a slight woman and he remembers adventurous killing; and he loves life, and is good, by his own lights.


“Thank you,” I say when I have straightened up holding bottle and glasses.


He shrugs. “A great deal of nothing worth having. But I appreciate the offer. It was fair-minded.”


And we sit and drink and talk a little about human memory – what a spacious and perplexing thing it is compared to his, which all informs him in every moment – and he keeps his eyes open as I unravel him, watching a grey beetle flit in the corner.


The queen is pleased and leaves the city soon thereafter, and his replacement never sees my face. My work for the Consulate continues. I dream of places far away.

Intro/FAQ
Days 1-15

My check-in: Minor editing + researching details to fill in placeholders + meta info (title, tags, summary) for pod_together. My partner and I are doing a collection of stories instead of just the one, so there's going to be a lot of meta-info to write…

Day 16: china_shop, sanguinity, ysilme

When you check in, please use the most recent post and say what day(s) you’re checking in for. Remember you can drop in or out at any time, and let me know if I missed anyone!

"Old-timey" seems to be an emerging term for stuff either set or written before the 21st Century. Here we get an amusing confusion: Old-Timey regency romances, I noted when scanning reviews by what appears to be younger-than-me readers, refers to the regency romances written in the sixties-eighties, even the nineties.

I used to collect these in my late teens, once I'd gone through everything the library had. They were sold by the bunch in used book stores, fifty cents for ten, which suited my babysitting budget--I could read one a night once the kids were asleep.

I did a cull of these beat-up, yellowing volumes with godawful covers 25-30 years ago, donating the real stinkers* and keeping a slew of others because my teenage daughter had by then discovered them.

But she left them all behind--she stopped reading fiction altogether around 2000--and I always meant to do a more severe cull, perhaps dump the entirety. But thought I oughht to at least check them out first, yet kept putting it off until recently. While I was recovering from that nasty dose of flu seemed the perfect time.

I finished last night.

Of course most of them are heavily influenced by Georgette Heyer, or at least in conversation with. Some were written when Heyer was still going strong. Authors from UK, USA, Australia, etc. For the most part you could tell the UK ones not only because the language was closer to early nineteenth century--these writers surely had grown up reading old books, as had Heyer--but their depictions of small towns in GB were way more authentic than those written by writers who'd never seen the islands.

But there were common threads. Good things, as one reviewer trumpeted: they wrote in complete sentences! They knew the difference between "lie" and "lay"! In the best of them, characters had actual conversations. Even witty ones! (There's an entire chapter in Austen's Emma, when we meet Mrs. Elton, which demonstrates what was and what wasn't "good conversation." I can imagine readers back then chuckling all the way through at Mrs. Elton's egregious vigor in bad conversational manners.)

But those are the superficials. What about the plots? Here were common tropes shared with contemporary romances of sixties and seventies. A bunch of these tropes have long since worn out their welcome. I didn't know why I hadn't culled some of the books containing the most egregious examples--maybe they were just so common that they were invisible, and there was some other aspect of a given book that had made me chuckle fifty years ago.

Dunno. But in this cull, as soon as I hit the evil aging mistress who will do anything to hang onto the (total jerk) hero, including setting the young and pure heroine up for rape and ruin (which she always j-u-s-t escapes), out it went, the rest of the novel unread: the plot-armored heroine will get her HEA. my sympathy lies with the mistress, whose grim situation veers closer to historical accuracy. Ditto I dumped unfinished the ones where the hero, who can't seem to control his raging hormones (or you know, talk like an adult) mistakes the pure and innocent heroine for a lightskirt and corners her at every opportunity for "can't-say-no" making out, while she castigates herself afterward, moaning, "Whatever is wrong with me?" Basically, while these heroines (and their readers) did not want to be raped, they did want to be ravished. And they weren't guilty of being bad girls if they were overpowered, right?

That was a VERY common trope in the early contemporary romances, the ones read by my mom by the literal sackful, and traded with other women at the local shop. In the seventies, Mom and her buddies organized themselves. None had the budgets to read everything coming out, so one woman would buy the new books from the Dell line, and another the Kensington line, and so on, then they'd trade them back and forth. Mom saved a sackful for my visits--she thought they were something we had in common, and I never disabused her of this, though I was fast getting sick of the "virginity" plotline. I read them all, noting patterns.

I could say a lot about why I think Mom and her buddies couldn't get enough of that plotline, but I'm trying to get through these regencies. In which the authors did understand the social cost of straying. But the heroine gets her reward at the (abrupt, usually) end, a ring from the guy who'd been cornering her for bruising kisses two chapters ago, and wedding bells in the distance. As I got older, I wondered if those marriages would make it much past the wedding trip. As a teen, I read uncritically for the Cinderella story--as I recollect all the weirdness about the heroines and their main commodity, their virginity (and their beauty) whizzed right over my head.

That said. Every so often you'd get a storyline that was a real comedy of manners, and while the research/worldbuilding was never as period-consistent as Heyer's secondary universe, they'd be fun stories. Like Joan Smith's Endure My Heart, which I'd remembered fondly for the battle of wits between hero and heroine--she the secret leader of a smuggling ring, and he the inspector sent to nab whoever was running that successful venture. Now, on rereading it, there were plenty of warts, but I remember the fun of the early read--and the only two attempted rape scenes were done by a villain, not the hero.

The regency romance has staying power, but it's evolved over the decades since these "old-timey" regencies for the 21st C reader who wants on-page sex, without real consequences. And only vague vestiges of the manners of the time. Few, or no, conversations or even awareness of the dynamics of salon socializing. Basically modern women in sexy silk gowns, and guys in tight pants and colorful jackets and rakish hats, with all the cool trappings--country houses, carriages, balls, and the elegant fantasy of the haut monde.

In the donation box the old ones go.

*I'll never forget the one that had to have been written in the mid-seventies, which had the pouting heroine stating on the first page that she was bored, bored, bored with Almack's and why did she have to participate in the marriage mart anyway? She wanted, and I quote from memory, "actualize her personhood!" Then there was the one that featured the hero, leader of fashion, sporting a crew cut and a "suit of flowing silk of lime green"--I think the author meant a leisure suit.

Then there was Barbara Cartland. Whether or not she hired a stable of writers to churn these out once a month under her name or not, she boiled the story down to the barest skeleton of tropes, padded out mostly by ellipses. Except for one early one, published in the thirties or early forties that lifted huge chunks of a Heyer, stuffed into a really weird plot...

The Battlezoo Bundle presents the Battlezoo line of monsters and monster hunters from Roll for Combat for D&D 5E and compatible tabletop roleplaying systems, compiled from winning designs from the annual RPG Superstars competition.

Bundle of Holding: Battlezoo

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I continue to progress in my quest to read the books I took from my grandmother’s house after she died. This time, Lucy M. Thruston’s A Girl of Virginia, which I took because I had started reading it and wanted to finish it (although clearly not enough to get to it any time in the last decade…), in part because it has that “(A Girl) of (Someplace)” title style so popular around 1900. Anne of Green Gables, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Alice of Old Vincennes, Rose of Old Harpeth, Beverley of Graustark... this last one is a cross-dressing Ruritanian romance. I should read it sometime.

ANYWAY. A Girl of Virginia is set at the University of Virginia, and offers a fascinating picture of life at campus and more generally in Virginia society at the time. Also the heroine picks the right hero in the love triangle! Heroines are so rarely allowed to pick the man that I personally believe they should pick. GOOD FOR YOU, FRANCES!

Anne McCaffrey’s hilarious misnamed The Mark of Merlin, which is not even slightly related to Arthurian legend. The titular Merlin is the heroine’s completely non-magical dog, who neither has nor makes any plot-relevent marks. Our heroine, Carla, is a little tiny spitfire on her way to frozen wastes of New England, where she gets snowed in with her big, brawny, scarred-in-mind-and-body-from-his-recent-service-in-World-War-II guardian Major Laird.

Does the romance plot progress as expected? One hundred percent. McCaffrey loves a brawny man manhandling a bratty itty bitty girl. Does the plot otherwise progress as expected? Absolutely not. I was surprised at every turn, and not just because the title made me expect Merlin to be far more plot relevant than he was. A solid mystery with lengthy pauses for beef stew and apple pie.

Continuing my Tasha Tudor journey with The Private World of Tasha Tudor photographed in loving detail by Richard Brown, who also photographed Tasha Tudor’s Garden and Tasha Tudor’s Heirloom Crafts, the latter of which I also really want to read but also I can’t just let Tasha Tudor take over my entire life, can I? Can I? Should I. Would it be WISE. Will it end with me buying a corgi?

Like Tasha Tudor’s Garden, an enchanting book, putting the core in cottagecore. I especially enjoyed the details about Tudor’s dollhouse (there is of course a whole book about Tasha Tudor’s Dollhouse), and the marionette theater she and her children created, and her yearly holiday celebrations…

What I’m Reading Now

Slow but steady progress in Lord Peter. Most recently, Lord Peter found himself caught up in a ghost story, only the ghosts to turn out to have a non-supernatural explanation, of course. I would love to see him head to head with an actual ghost, though.

I also couldn’t resist starting Louisa May Alcott’s A Round Dozen, a dozen stories with illustrations by Tasha Tudor (which is how I stumbled across it). Most recently, a little boy witnessed a jamboree among the silverware set out on the dining room table awaiting the family Thanksgiving feast.

What I Plan to Read Next

The flesh is weak. I put a hold on A Time to Keep: A Tasha Tudor Books of Holidays. I love a holiday celebration, and I’m sure Tudor has some crackerjack ideas how to get the most holiday joy out of every season.

The only fate more glorious than dying for the uncaring empire is dying over and over for the uncaring empire.

Red Sword by Bora Chung (Translated by Anton Hur)

Title: Sunlight and Danger
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Author: veronyxk84
Characters/Pairing: Spike (implied Spuffy)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Some coarse language
Word count: 200 (Google Docs)
Spoilers/Setting: Set in S5, during ep. 5x08 “Shadow”
Summary: Spike’s POV when he sneaks into Buffy’s bedroom.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction created for fun and no profit has been made. All rights belong to the respective owners.

Prompt [#7]: Dance

Crossposted: drabble_zone, anythingdrabble, My journal, Sunnydale After Dark

—
( READ: Sunlight and Danger/Double drabble )

They gave me a 3 pm - 7 pm delivery window for the dishwasher today, which meant waiting around and stewing in my anxiety until they showed up around 3:30. The whole process - removing the old dishwasher and setting up the new one - took about an hour. Now it's running through whatever the initial cycle the installation guys set it to, and then I should be able to use it. It did cost me an extra $125 to get the electrical connection set up, since the old one was hardwired and the new one required a plug, plus I gave both guys a $20 on the way out, so overall it cost almost $1800 for everything, which is more than my stove and fridge cost put together, iirc. It's the most expensive birthday present I've gotten myself since 2016, when I replaced my laptop, but totally necessary. And it is very snazzy looking! (it's the Bosch 300 series 18" dishwasher in stainless steel.)

Anyway, that has been my birthday! I put all thoughts of cooking on hold until tomorrow, when I might make pulled pork (or I might not) and some kind of fancy dessert (I am thinking about this coffee icebox cake but without a stabilizer in the whipped cream I don't know how it could hold its shape if you turn it out of the loaf pan; on the other hand, I'm not taking it anywhere so I can just scoop it out without removing it, so I guess that's not really an issue), but we'll see how I feel tomorrow - it will be cool to not have to wash up by hand afterwards!

Sunday at Dom's was lovely - Baby Miss L was a mermaid in the pool (she kept exclaiming, "Mermaid!" and kicking ferociously - she hasn't had swimming lessons yet but she seems like a natural at this point) - and once she warmed up after her nap she was her usual delightful self. She enjoyed the books I brought her, especially "Be Brave Like Batman" (to go with the Batman and Robin t-shirts), and she wore her Superman dress, so we are covering all superhero bases.

I made the KAF fudge brownies again to take with me, since I was assured that they'd loved them last time, and this time I got to taste them and they were good! Slightly overbaked, but still chocolatey.

Then yesterday on my ride home, the driver took Jericho Turnpike all the way to the Cross Island, which made the trip longer, but did avoid traffic and construction, so I guess the extra 10-15 minutes was worth it.

And I still have 6 more days off before I have to go back to work!

*

What Is Write Every Day?
A roving writing support community, with a bias toward encouraging a daily writing habit. It's a decentralized community, without moderators or a fixed home; hosting duties are passed around among members of the community. nafs is hosting the first half of July; I'm hosting the second half, starting on the sixteenth. (By my time-zone: tomorrow.) zwei_hexen will take over in August. If you want the history of who hosted when, zwei_hexen keeps a list.

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An intelligent ship crisscrosses space-time to track the progress of the colonies it established

A Maze of Stars by John Brunner

May the prison you liberate have more than seven prisoners.