deborahjross | Reading

Sunday book summaries are my casual log of what I’ve been reading this week. These are not formal reviews. They’re more my reactions and musings as taken from my journal when I complete the reading, and at times will contain notes about how they influence my thoughts on what I’m writing.

This one has a couple of weeks’ worth of reading, so again…”periodic.”

Another hectic period but hopefully things might settle. Nonetheless, there’s books to comment on in this installment, including my first Did Not Finish and a couple of books that seemed to have escaped my notes.

First up are the escapees. I decided I wanted to take a look at some classic time travel books because of the notions I have in mind for Vortex Worlds. Non-review stuff—the less-than-stellar sales of Vision of Alliance have pretty much decided for me that the Goddess’s Vision trilogy is just not going to be what I do for 2026. Which means part of 2025 ended up being a loss, oh well. Apparently no one wants to read epic fantasy with powerful women, including a disabled protagonist with hella lot of agency. So be it.

Vortex Worlds has time travel in it, along with a multiverse, so I decided I wanted to review some older work, then look at newer stuff. So I’m starting with a couple of classics—Poul Anderson’s Time Patrol stories as well as Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time.

The Big Time has had some visits from the Suck Fairy, given that the main female characters are…well…”entertainers.” But it’s a closed room mystery drama as well, because the Spiders locked into the Time War have somehow been shoved into a protected space while time goes weird around them—and one of the characters just started a bomb ticking. It was an okay read, but the characters were…well, products of their era. There’s more than a few tropes that have become cliches in this day and age, and it is more about characters figuring out this problem rather than it being time travel.

The Poul Anderson—a collection of four Time Patrol stories in Guardians of Time also has a dose of Suck Fairy visitation. Each story except for the last one revolves more or less about men getting stuck in the past, ending up liking it better before they were retrieved to return to women in their time who…know less about them than the women those men knew in the past. The final story is about a big muckup by fanatics wanting to create a new order which changes a LOT of history. Which…that story made me very, very glad that time travel is strictly fantasy because the baddie ideology is far too reminiscent of…certain thought leaders in this era.

Each story features all sorts of workarounds to fix time anomalies and, well…the plots are good, even if the characterization is not the best.

Next up is a nonfiction read. Glitz, Glam, and a Damn Good Time: How Mamie Fish, Queen of the Gilded Age, Partied Her Way to Power, by Jennifer Wright. Which—well, the title says it all. Think we’ve seen excess? Oh, let me tell you, Mamie Fish could still outperform a certain coterie around a particular presidential property in Palm Beach. Fish definitely introduced the concept of over-the-top partying and it shows. Parties for dogs? Oh yes. And more. It was a world of competitive partying, though rather formal and staid until Fish came on the scene and decided to compete by creating more and more spectacles…right up to the Depression. An interesting read, but far too close to what we’re seeing these days for a lot of comfort.

Next comes a duology from D. E. Stevenson, Celia’s House and Listening Valley. Celia’s House covers the inheritance of a property by an unexpected couple, in trust for an as-yet unborn daughter who will share the name of the bequeather. We end up seeing the heiress toward the end of the book, and there’s a parallelism between the two Celias and their romance. Listening Valley covers side characters from Celia’s House, though we see Celia as well. Both books are lovely little stories about how an overlooked and humble adopted family member comes into her own. I’m beginning to see that theme frequently in Stevenson’s work.

I also read Julia Cooke’s Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World, about Emily (Mickey) Hahn, Martha Gellhorn, and Rebecca West. Three ground-breaking journalist/writer women whose work made a huge impression, especially when it came to covering wars. It was a fascinating read in so many ways, but oh, the price they paid, especially when they tried to marry and have children. Their story is very much like Jessica Mitford’s, including the struggle with domestic life. I learned some things I hadn’t known, such as Rebecca West’s affair with H.G. Wells.

Nevertheless, these three women were amongst those who became the foundation for many modern woman journalists, and moved the perception of female journalists as either being tied down to domestic/home coverage or as “stunt girls.” It’s a good read. And, on a personal note, one of the pictures in the book of Mickey Hahn with US Army troops at Monte Cassino may include my father—at least, one picture looked an awful lot like he would have in pictures I’ve seen of him at that age, and he was at Monte Cassino (I have a vague memory of him talking about that battle).

And finally, the Did Not Finish. I’ve only read Thomas McGuane’s short work, so when I saw his Nothing but Blue Skies book I picked it up, expecting a nice read. Well. About halfway through I got tired of the male midlife crisis story, especially since it started out trying to read like a Tom Robbins book. Nonetheless, it didn’t engage me.

That’s it for now.

If you like what you’ve read, please feel free to check out my books or drop a tip at my Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/joycereynoldsward

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dw_maintenance

Happy Saturday!

I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!

If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.

rachelmanija

A French children's book in translation from 1961, in which five children are trapped in a cottage by a landslide.

14-year-old Laurent's family is concerned that he spends all his time reading and doing chemistry experiments, and isn't engaging with other people. So they dispatch him to stay with his younger brother and sister in a cottage only occupied by a 14-year-old girl and her younger brother, who are alone because her mother is having surgery. The idea is that Laurent will have to take care of the other kids, and this will make him come out of his shell more. His parents do leave him the out of being able to pack up his siblings and return to Paris if he really hates it.

I am honestly not sure if it was even vaguely normal in 60s France for five kids ages 14-5 to stay alone in a remote mountain cottage for ten days, or if this was just a literary convention. Anyway, Laurent unsurprisingly hates it and packs up his siblings to leave. But while they're on the train platform with the other kids, he has a change of heart and they all head back to the cottage. But they stop in the cottage of a family friend, who is out at the time.

It gets buried in a landslide! They're all trapped in pitch darkness! In an only vaguely familiar house! They can't use the stove because it already nearly suffocated them with carbon monoxide! Their only air is from a narrow shaft leading to a giant canyon! There's very little food! No one knows they're in trouble because one of the kids wrote ten postcards dated for every day of the vacation, then arranged with the post office to send one per day!

The kids having to do everything in total darkness for most of the book is a really cool twist on this sort of "trapped in a space" book. (One of my favorite moments is when enough dirt slides away that some light gets in, and they see that they've been half-starved in pitch darkness with two huge hams and a lantern hanging from the ceiling.) It has some cozy elements - they're trapped with goats, which they can milk but which also get into everything and poop everywhere, and one goat gives birth to twin kids - but gets desperate quickly when Laurent gets an infected cut and the main milking goat drowns in a flooded cellar. But it all ends up okay when they first signal with Morse code in a mirror (in a nice touch of realism, it takes a long time for anyone to figure out the message as the kids get some of the letters wrong, including signaling OSO instead of SOS) and then make and set off gunpowder!

Not an enduring classic, but an entertaining read.

rachelmanija

Gyre explores the tunnels of an alien world in a mechanical suit, her only connection to the outside world the voice of Em, her handler who she’s never met, who may or may not have her welfare in mind, and who definitely has boundary issues.

Gyre has less experience caving than she claimed, and caving is extremely difficult. There are sandworm-like creatures called Tunnelers that will kill multiple parties of cavers for unknown reasons, so cavers go in alone, unable to take off their suit for weeks on end, with their handler as their only link with the outside world. Em can literally take control of Gyre’s suit/body, can inject her with drugs, etc - and not only has little compunction about doing so, but won't tell Gyre what the actual purpose of the mission is.

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

This is a type of story I don’t see very often, in which there’s one main science fiction element – in this case, the mechanical caving suit – which is explored in depth and is essential to the story, and it’s also set on a (very lightly sketched-in) other planet. Generally the “one science fiction element” stories are set on Earth. Apart from the Tunnelers, this novel actually could take place on an Earth where the suit exists.

The Luminous Dead, like The Starving Saints, has a small cast of sapphic women and takes place almost entirely in the same claustrophobic space; if it was on TV, we’d call it a bottle episode. I normally like that sort of thing but unlike The Starving Saints, it outstays its welcome. It has about a novella’s worth of story, and while it’s very atmospheric and any given portion is well-written and interesting, considered alone, as a whole it’s very repetitive and over-long. I would mostly recommend it if you like complicated lesbians with bad boundaries.

sartorias

One thing that one has to accept with Dickens is that his heroines will be long-suffering, and that men will decide what's good for them, for which they will be grateful.

Given that, I think this the best of his books.

It has the fewest Victorian-plot coincidences, and it has the most and best swathes of bitingly funny satire of soi-disant high society. How the Lammle marriage comes about, and how each of them, in becoming a couple, brings the other down from spoken moral rectitude to the barest pretense of it is as horrific in a quiet way as all the rantings, drownings, and so on.

Bradley Headstone is a remarkably believable depiction of the stalker boyfriend who can't seem to stop himself from sinking into obsession--and violence. Eugene Wrayburn is a fascinating, witty guy for an idle dog.

There are some bits of brilliance--the depiction of the riverside society; Mr. Boffins' educational plan; the Veneering parties.

There were signs of actual personality on Bella's part (when we meet her, she is mourning over being forced to wear black because the guy she was engaged to--whom she had never met--had drowned, which pretty much has finished her socially. Why shouldn't she mourn?) even if the machinations behind her romance are quite wince-worthy.

Dickens also tries to make up for comfortably unexamined antisemitism, and the subsidiary characters are wonderfully memorable.

Altogether it's a real page-turner. Glad I reread it.

duskpeterson

ONLINE E-BOOK (html, epub, mobi, pdf, and xhtml)

Free at my website.

Blood Vow (The Three Lands). He has taken a blood vow to the Jackal God to bring freedom to his land by killing Koretia's greatest enemy. But what will he do when the enemy becomes his friend?

New installment:

Side story | Heir. Secrets can destroy. Secrets can also heal.

New omnibus:

Blood Vow: Novel and Side Stories.

BLOG FICTION

Tempestuous Tours (Crossing Worlds: A Visitor's Guide to the Three Lands #2). A whirlwind tour of the sites in the Three Lands that are most steeped in history, culture, and the occasional pickpocket.

New installments:

Stadium.

Entrance to the Emorian palace.

Behavior in the palace.

Entrance protocol.

( News & upcoming fiction )

My fiction announcements are also available by e-mail and feeds.

julesjones

It's PicoWriMo time. :-)I missed the first couple of days, because the comm is on LiveJournal and the RSS feed to DreamWidth has broken at some point in the last few weeks, so I didn't know it was on this month until a friend mentioned it. It's a small comm for people who like the idea of NaNoWriMo (RIP), but can't do 50k in a month. People set their own target, and share their progress, so we get the community support for something that's manageable for us.

First week's progress for me:

( Read more... )

asakiyume

We eat rice almost every night, so I buy it in 20-pound bags--Goya medium-grain rice. For us, it's pretty much as good as Japanese short-grain rice and less expensive. (Sometimes we have different rice--basmati or jasmine or wild rice, or any style of brown rice, but generally it's white Goya medium-grain rice.)

I like the look of the bags, and I thought it would be fun to use an empty bag as a bag ... and finally I got round to making one:

Here's the front, with a fold-over flap

woman modeling a long-strapped bag made from a 20-lb Goya rice bag

And here's the back

woman modeling a long-strapped bag made from a 20-lb Goya rice bag

Might take it grocery shopping with me next time I go!

Current Music: Gitkin: Night Tripper

alfreda89

Charles is offering the story in PDF and in EPUB.

ICE cane to Newford, that magical boundary where faerie and humankind can meet.

Big mistake.

https://www.charlesdelint.com/IceOut.html

jreynoldsward

So here I am again, pulling out notes and past writings and assorted research materials, organizing my thoughts and thinking about worldbuilding.

Guess that didn’t take long. It’s been just over a week since Vision of Alliance’s launch spluttered and crashed, in spite of me doing advance work that included an absolutely marvelous blurb from a writer and friend whose work I respect. Just under a week since I decided that nope, I’m not going to continue with drafting the Goddess’s Vision trilogy, even though I have a somewhat solid outline and 15,000-some words into the second book.

Sometimes the Universe needs to clobber me with a clue-by-four. Let’s just say that this trilogy has been a real struggle for me and…well…someday I might pick it back up. Or not. I’m not going to let it suck 2026 down the drain, though. Major relief washed over me when I made that decision, which tells me that it was the right choice to make.

Meanwhile. I’ve been poking at the concept of a SFF/Western crossover for some years now. A big chunk of the Martinieres was about letting me play in that world in a more contemporary/near future setting. However, I’ve been wanting to do more with alternate histories and how could things have gone differently and perhaps better with regard to European expansion into the Pacific Northwest.

The history of the region where I grew up is deep in my heritage, at least as far as such things go. My mother’s family was among the early Oregon settlers but, unlike the ancestors of a number of other settler descendants I’ve known over the years, they didn’t seem to aspire to fame or notoriety, even at a local, “old family,” level. I like to joke that they deliberately sought out obscurity. There are several family stories claiming good relationships with the Modoc and Klamath peoples—all fairly obscure connections, of course. Hard to say what the truth of it is, and I’m really not in a good position to prove it one way or the other.

However, I find myself wanting to tell stories in the nineteenth century Oregon Country setting. I suppose it’s something vaguely similar to what John Steinbeck was trying to do with East of Eden (to be honest, I had a high school teacher get me hooked on Steinbeck so he’s been an influence on me for a long time). I’m not as ambitious as Steinbeck, though he has inspired my desire to write about the country where I’ve lived. The land is a living, vibrant character of its own in Steinbeck’s Salinas novels. I’ve found myself drawn to Pacific Northwest writers who evoke that same deep love and knowledge of the land, both realistic and fantastic alike. Ivan Doig. Molly Gloss. Ken Kesey. Mary Emerick. H. L. Davis. A host of others, and…the queen of them all, Ursula K. Le Guin.

My perspective on writing in this land and this setting isn’t about historical realism. There’s lots of that about. Nor am I particularly interested in writing a historical romance. Science fiction and fantasy is the world I like to play in when I’m writing, and…I had several ideas on tap whispering that it was their turn to come out and play.

These ideas don’t slot nicely into categories of “Weird West,” “alternate history,” or “steampunk.” Oh, there are elements of all three categories in the two major ideas I have but the notions don’t fit into any one of them. As a result, I’m calling it all “neoWestern fantasy.” The story I’ve picked to work on is set in the world of my Bearing Witness novella, with something malevolent attacking the multiverse at roughly the same time and place in each universe’s history, around the mid-nineteenth century in North America, and the characters are rallying to protect the multiverse’s last refuge, Kalosin, against the baddies. Time travel gets involved because the baddies want to homogenize all the universes in their image, and they are from the far future. One of the characters is a nineteenth century person abducted from her world at a very young age and conditioned to be a time cop for the baddies due to her skill with languages. Then…she finds out the truth and flees to Kalosin.

Sounds more complicated than it really is, but I’m still building that world. There’s going to be a lot there because I may end up fleshing out some short stories to get a deeper understanding of this particular world. Lots of backstory present, and some of it may well appear in different books. I have a loose idea of what the story is going to be—but where I start it will be what needs to emerge as I rough out my plans and research over the next month. I may start at the beginning…or not.

In any case, off I go on another worldbuilding adventure. We’ll see where it takes me. I’m planning to share the journey of this novel on an irregular basis, but hoping to shoot for weekly updates. At the moment, it has the working title of Vortex Worlds. But whether that becomes a book title or a series title…remains to be seen.

(Will the Martinieres sneak into this series, given that it’s a multiverse and by all logic they’d be part of it? Probably not. Oh, Etienne might make a cameo appearance but the Vortex is not the same thing at all.)

Anyway, right now I’m promoting a bundle on Itch that features several of my women characters with agency. If you haven’t read my work before, it’s a good introduction to several of my series. $18.90 for ten books, or 50% off of individual books. Check it out!

https://itch.io/s/181380/joyces-womens-history-month-special-sampler

duskpeterson

The protocol for entering the palace changes from time to time, so I can only offer a general outline. If your business is with the court or council, you should present yourself and your credentials to the guards at the southern gate of the outer wall of the palace. It is best to arrange beforehand for your visit. If this not possible, or if you cannot provide an exact time for your arrival, expect to wait as your credentials are sent into the palace to be checked.

Normally, you will be provided with an escort into the palace. If you arrive at a time before the palace begins its day, you will be expected to make your own way to the eastern gate of the inner wall. There your credentials will be inspected again, along with any document that the palace has sent out, permitting your entrance. You will then be allowed to enter the inner wall and make your approach to the palace itself.

The palace being located atop a high hill, you will find yourself faced with the steepest and longest set of stairs in the world. Pace yourself. You may wish to bring refreshments to partake of at the halfway mark.

At the top of the stairs, once you have recovered your breath, you should show your credentials and palace document to the guards at the gate, holding them up for inspection. The guards may not appear to look at you or even notice you. Do not be deceived. Those are real spears they are holding across the doorway.

If the guards grant you entrance, they will lift the spears. If they do not, you must retreat to the palace's inner wall and determine there what the problem is.

Assuming you manage to pass all these barriers, you will find yourself in the entryway to the palace. You will be guided at this point through the remaining stages of reception, which vary according to your rank and status. At some point, however, you will be let loose from Emor's protocol and permitted to take your own path. Let us start with a general introduction to the Chara's palace.

[Translator's note: This breathtakingly long procedure can be cut short if you possess the right credentials, as can be seen in Breached Boundaries.]

asakiyume

I was so shocked to hear you have left us,

minoanmiss. You are a fountain of art and fic and joy at making babies smile. You've sent me poems, you've sent me stickers that have decorated letters I've sent people. When the pandemic hit and I posted about the Japanese amabie, you made a fridge magnet of one. She's on my fridge above your Minoan dancers.

photo of fridge magnets

Do you remember when you sent me a postcard for a pine tree, and I took it there?

You made magic happen.

I will think of you every time I see someone making a baby smile. I will talk to that pine tree about you. Maybe it has your forwarding address, and I can send you a postcard.

asakiyume

In 2018, Wakanomori and I went for the first time to Colombia. We went just as an election was happening. We were in Bogotá, and we ended up walking through rallies for both candidates--the progressive ex-guerrilla and the conservative son of privilege. We ended up with some of the flyers for the progressive guy--they were bright and optimistic, and I made them into postcards:

We didn't know much about Colombian politics at the time, but we hoped he'd win:

But he lost. The conservative candidate, Iván Duque, won.

But then in 2022, the progressive ex-guerrilla won. And that's Gustavo Petro, who's in office now. So you know ... change does happen.

( My microfiction for today was partially inspired by the memory of picking up those flyers. )

Current Music: Grupo Bahia: Vamo' a levanta'

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Deborah J. Ross

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Deborah's Journal

A safe & friendly place to talk about writing and life

Reading

Periodic Sunday Book Summaries--#5

Performing some traffic maintenance today

Landslide, by Veronique Day

The Luminous Dead, by Caitlin Starling

Wednesday reading--Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens

UPDATE: Heir (The Three Lands) + Blood Vow omnibus

ONLINE E-BOOK (html, epub, mobi, pdf, and xhtml)

BLOG FICTION

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Goya rice bag bag

A new free short story from fantasist Charles de Lint, a tale of Newford.

Onward--Journey of a Novel, Part One

FIC: Entrance protocol (Tempestuous Tours)

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live to fight another day...

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November 2020

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