nineveh_uk

I await the publication of a fourth Jill Paton-Walsh Wimsey novel later this year. It has the less-than-inspiring title The Late Scholar; I don’t know whether the ‘Lord Peter Wimsey investigates’ bit on the cover reflects the fact that there are going to be more of these, or the fact that the cover was put together hastily to get it out in time for the Christmas market. Or possibly – and I’m almost certainly being generous here – it’s a more sophisticated reference to the contents of the book and Golden Age titles. Like The Attenbury Emeralds it’s being published in hardback, so they are evidently expecting reasonable sales, or gluttons for punishment like me to buy it regardless.

The publisher’s blurb is as follows:

A new murder mystery featuring Lord Peter Wimsey - now a Duke - and his wife Harriet Vane, set in an Oxford college in the 1950s.

Peter Wimsey is pleased to discover that along with a Dukedom he has inherited the duties of 'visitor' at an Oxford college. When the fellows appeal to him to resolve a dispute, he and Harriet set off happily to spend some time in Oxford.

But the dispute turns out to be embittered. The voting is evenly balanced between two passionate parties - evenly balanced, that is, until several of the fellows unexpectedly die. The Warden has a casting vote, but the Warden has disappeared.

And the causes of death of the deceased fellows bear an uncanny resemblance to the murder methods in Peter's past cases - methods that Harriet has used in her published novels.

Cue the Chords of Doom.

I tell myself that at least unlike TAE it won’t be hampered by attempting to shoehorn in every possible bit of related DLS apocrypha. On the other hand, it means the author’s on her own… We will see. Oxford is hardly an original setting and invites comparison. I fear it may also invite re-using characters from Gaudy Night. I can’t imagine why on earth any Oxford college would want a random duke as a Visitor* - perhaps to ensure they were as ineffective as possible. I can’t help feeling that instead of Peter coming to sort things out, it would have been a lot more entertaining had the college had to appeal to Gerald (or the erstwhile Viscount Saint-George). And why** would any murderer with half a brain decide to murder according to methods that have already been solved and lead the perpetrator to the gallows? Unless these were Peter's duds and Harriet has consoled him by pioneering a murder mystery sub-genre in which the reader never finds out whodunit, so no nervous breakdowns are required.

It comes out in December. Consider my reading and reviewing it an early Christmas present.

*Not a concept easy to Google.

**oh why

(1) After my "maybe I should" angsting, I have now resolved that I am not going skiing at Easter. It's disappointing, but the right decision. I applied the lottery test* and confirmed that if being paid for out of a finite source, the guided bit of a guided trip really needs to be at exactly the right level or I'm going to feel frustrated. So that's that. Instead - and how's this for glamour - I shall go to the Turkish bath at Swindon and at least get a decent sauna, and save the holiday money (and the annual leave) for the summer.

(2) Writing seems to be progressing. Last night was not a success, but I think that's because the next scene is a significant one , and I am anxious about writing it not so much because I think it will be technically difficult, but because it’s a big step in the story and I’m thinking “but have I done everything I need to do in preparation”. Which is silly, because I can always go back and add material if necessary. And also because it is an essential part of a murder mystery that somebody die.

(3) From the department of "the old ones are not in fact the best", an episode summary from the back of a free disc of Upstairs, Downstairs episodes. So much for its being more realistic than Downton Abbey:

Elizabeth and Rose return home one evening after a concert to find that a certain Baron Klaus Von Rimmer, a friend of the people she stayed with in Germany,* has called on her parents. The Bellamys like their guest and invite him to stay and assign Albert to be his valet. It soon transpires that the Baron is actually a spy who has tried to bribe Richard into helping his armaments company to get a contract from the British Navy. This is not all, he has also seduced Albert.

I am absolutely not writing a Red Dwarf crossover.

(4) I have been listening to random Handel, as you do. Endless Pleasure, from Semele. Seldom has a song been better named.

*"What would I do about this issue if I won the lottery today?" It's excellent for addressing how one feels about all sorts of things, though I usually use it for analysing how annoyed or otherwise I am at work in the form of "how much notice would I give?"

**I think that must mean Elizabeth. Rose is the servant.

Yet again I have come back from holiday and caught a cold. So to entertain me between watching German historical drama (Nordwand, very good. Now I want to go to Grindelwald again and catch a cold there) and Yes, Minister, I have a meme courtesy of fallingtowers.

Pick a trope from this list and provide a fandom/pairing that I'm familiar with, and I'll tell you something about the story I'd write for that combination (i.e. write a snippet from the story or write not!fic or tell you the title and summary for the story I would write).

1. genderswap
2. bodyswap
3. drunk!fic
4. huddling for warmth
5. pretending to be married
6. what-if AU
7. amnesia
8. cross-dressing
9. forced to share a bed
10. truth or dare
11. historical AU
12. accidental-baby-acquisition
14. telepathy
15. high School / college AU

(I have cut out 13. apocalypse fic, not being in the mood.)

Meme from antisoppist.

1. Leave a comment to this post.
2. I will give you a letter. (Edited to point out, only if you ask for one, you can comment without having to do this yourself)
3. Post the names of five fictional characters whose names begin with that letter, and your thoughts on each. The characters can be from books, movies, or TV shows

Apparently antisoppist is a secret sadist. I got the letter O.

I can't even make a Story of O joke here as I haven't read it, though I've seen the episode of Frasier in which Ros dresses as her at a party*.

1. Mary Olivier I can't actually remember much about Mary Olivier, the eponymous heroine of May Sinclair's novel, because I read it as an undergraduate and haven't got round to buying my own copy. It's about an intelligent and imaginative upper middle class Victorian woman who gets stuck in the role of caring for the rest of the family. I vaguely remember her eventually publishing things, and a lover, but was principally stuck by her being incredibly angry that no-one had warned her about period pain.

2. Mary O'Neil I haven't yet got round to reviewing a Christmas present Persephone-published novel, Constance Maud's 1911 No Surrender about the women's suffrage movements. It's fantastic, not least in the fact that aristocratic Mary O'Neil is the sidekick and facilitator, whilst the heroine is millworker Jenny Clegg. That said, Mary is an interesting character herself. Fashionably 'Irish' (i.e. Anglo-Irish, but passionate and emotional, a theme of its own in contemporary literature.), she's a young woman in search of a cause, which she finds when she is taken to visit the mills owned by the Lancashire hosts she is visiting with her mother (who is, of course, hoping for a suitable marriage for her) and meets the suffragette/ist millworkers. Though Mary's social position is superior to Jenny's, she is equally trapped by male expectations of her role in life, and the novel's drumbeat that for women (and working class men) the question of suffrage is fundamentally economic and the scene in which she is force-fed in prison is the emotional climax of the book.

3. Ollivander If it is one of the frustrations of the Harry Potter novel that Rowling doesn't go further into so many of the intriguing little details she lets drop along the way as she tells the story, it is also one of the strengths. Possibly this viewpoint is supported by the fact that I first read the books during the Great Gulf between Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix, and when I had temp jobs with internet access. Ollivander of the silvery eyes and not so subtle admiration for Voldemort's abilities, if not his personality, is one of those details. Look, at least I can say more about him than I can about the Otways in Emma

4. Orsino and 5. Olivia I assume the absence of 'plays' in the meme instructions is an accidental rather than deliberate omission. If it is deliberate, then tough. I am delighted to learn that the Globe's Twelfth Night is to return this summer with Mark Rylance reprising Olivia [ed. I was, until I just now looked at the website and the whole thing is sold out, damn]. Twelfth Night was the first Shakespeare I read, aged 14 for GCSE, and like my entire class I adored it**, though I think we liked Viola and Malvolio at the time more than Olivia and Orsino. Olivia's still not my favourite character, but Rylance convinced me that she wasn't simly irritating. I don't remember the name of the actor who played Orsino, but he managed to be sympathetic and sincere, and deeply confused. I am a great fan of Toby Stephens (though, like Kate Clanchy speaking of Sir Galahad, I am a greater fan of his dad), but his version of Orsino in Trevor Nunn's film is a man in need of a good slap.

*And in which David Hyde Pierce puts in his bid for a US adapation of the Wimsey novels.

**And not, unlike some, because it was an excuse to go round saying "How will this fadge?"

I fear that an awful lot of my attitude to life and work can be summed up by my finding it far more fun to speculate about 1920s magical science as it might be applied to what happens to the body after the Dementor’s Kiss, than to actually get down to writing more serious stuff. And then I find myself walking to the station to buy a train ticket thinking “But hang on, I’m composing this in 1920s magical pseudo-science English, but the actual lecture is being delivered in German (which, thanks to canon, Peter Wimsey naturally speaks perfectly, resolving other potential plot issues at a convenient stroke), what is the German word for soul anyway, since the character is electing not to use it, it being a layman’s term in this context, and oh damn, has this character read Freud/Jung, and does that mean I need to, and obviously witches and wizards are the sort of people who would attempt to see if a Dementor could suck the soul of a chimpanzee*, but only if they’d got to the point of considering whether a chimpanzee has self-awareness, so when did Muggles come up with that?” Meanwhile all this is taking place in Wittenberg about which I care so little it's only just occured to me to see where it actually is. Answer, not where I had imagined.

Short version: I am not going to go and read Jung to see if it fits with my total bollocks theory. It’s total bollocks. If I feel the need for completeness I can address with half a sentence of “and obviously we’re talking about physical processes, not psychological ones”.

There is some plot function to all of this, but far less than the time devoted to it deserves.

*And dolphins, and whales. Oh blast, what about Beasts? I can’t remember the Beast/Being categorisation. There’s no way that they won’t know already if Dementors can suck the souls of e.g. goblins. But since magical theology agrees with, and indeed in some respects was the foundation of, the theory that Dementors do not actually suck out people’s souls, but something along the lines of consciousness (except consciousness+plus, as lecture will demonstrate, hence the word challenges), then the possession of a soul could still be a hot topic in the Beast vs. Being lists.

Inspired by a postcard spotted (by bookwormsarah)in the People's History Museum in Manchester, an irresistible crossover.

***

"You see, Lady Peter," said Dr Baring, "after we had recovered from that appalling business, and had time to reflect on it in a scholarly spirit, we wondered if perhaps we were partly to blame. Not for upholding above all the importance of the honour and integrity of scholarship, but for allowing that importance to be felt only here, within these college walls, and only some of those. Why should we be surprised that a woman like Annie Wilson has no sympathy with our ideals, when we have never invited her to share them?" The Warden tapped her cigarette impatiently and continued.

"In brief, Lady Peter, Miss Barton invited the Principal to High Table one evening, and we proposed a collaboration. We have offered places to their most talented students, and a new degree is to be taught between us - though I'm afraid that it's the University of London external examination. The results you see before you. I may say that we are feeling rather proud of ourselves."

Harriet looked around the hall, the usual students in their gowns augmented by a handful of older faces, and even a couple of - presumably non-resident, one could not imagine Shrewsbury had changed so much in two years - men, and hanging at the far end of the room above the great double doors, the proud gold-bordered banner.

"But Warden," she said weakly, "Trade Union Studies?"

Oh hurray! Also, I don't seem to have bacterial sinusitis. More hurray! Still going to ask for a consultant referral, though. I can even justify it on economic grounds if I cost working days lost. But mostly, I would like to just be miserable with a cold because I've got a cold, and troughing the necessary amounts of OTC drugs really cannot be good for one.

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They didn't even pay me for that.

But mostly, it is the weekend!

I am going to:

- see The Artist tomorrow afternoon. It is striking how many people who have seen it have said that they scarcely noticed it was a 'silent' film.
- tackle my ironing to the accompaniment of skiing on TV.
- watch Borgen, the office's new obsession (who knew there were so many fans of Danish crime drama? Or that the head of one of our faculties is so obviously aware of the wilder shores of fanfic.)
- get up late one day.
- go to the gym/for a run. Only 9 weeks until holiday, so some intensive training is now required.
- get back into the fic-writing too. I reckon I can get Peter Wimsey in bed with a very attractive witch within two thousand words. Unfortunately first I have to get him through a slightly boring conversation with a portrait.

I have only three weeks left at work until Christmas. This is both good and bad...

My colleague won't be in the office today because she is in Stockholm for a long weekend. A romantic long weekend with her new boyfriend, who is a barrister. Am I envious? Too right I am!

To the cyclist turning right last night on Woodstock Road in dark clothes, no bike lights or reflectors, and wearing a helmet: O HAI U BE DOIN SAFETY RONG!

Went to WNO's Barber of Seville last night at the New Theatre. Fun production and good singing, but the theatre decoration makes it feel like one is sitting inside a pink and red jukebox, and the leg-room in the balcony - ow! Ruddigore at the Barbican tomorrow.

My picowrimo production for the month has hit 8000! I am resolved to keep going and try and finish the story this time. Of course, it would help if it didn't just seem to be betting longer. For a story I think of as "Potterverse/Wimsey mpreg Corsican crossover (with bonus valet-rogering" we aren't yet anywhere near either mpreg or Corsica. Or rogering.

As we wait for nominations for fandoms to go up, I think it is time for another round of Yuletide Hell!

The rules of the game are simple: write in comments the Yuletide prompt that you would hate to get. Others are then invited to try and write a sentence of it. Ed: Or just explain why your fail.

Remember, to be true to the spirit of Yuletide Hell, without which you will totally ruin Yuletide for the whole internet, your prompt cannot be too entitled, self-contradictory, and generally batshit. A reminder of the actual Yuletide rules: the writer is required to write in the fandom and using the characters specified by the requester. That is all. Optional details are entirely optional. Nonetheless, I expect that all prompters on this page will have many optional details that they will fully expect their writers to cover, and will also be dreadfully, mortally offended if writers do not merely cover the prompt, but fail to intuit what the requester wanted but forgot to write down.

A couple to get you started:

(1) The Blue Castle, Cissy Gay. I have such a kink for pregnancy fic! It would be awesome if you could write about how Cissy Gay got pregnant (but make sure that you promote safe sex because it’s really important that we use fic to educate people). Maybe she had an affair with Gilbert Blythe, lol, when he was teaching at the school at White Sands, because Anne had rejected him, and Cissy looks a bit like her. Then Cissy gets pregnant and Gilbert tries to drug her so he can force her to have an abortion, but Cissy wants to keep the baby even after she faints from morning sickness in church and everybody guesses and thinks she’s a slut. Sex-positive fics only, thanx!

(2) Bredon/Bunter. Bredon looks just like Peter and Bunter can’t help having dirty thoughts about him, but then Bredon finds out and they have a really hot affair. Obviously it’s really important to me that your fic not contain any fail or -isms and have due regard to the kyriarchy. Also, I think that non-con is really squicky so please don't write that (also that means no under-age, cuz if you can’t legally consent then it’s alwaysgoing to be non-con). Must be really explicit! Don’t make Bunter over 65, old people sex is SOOOOO gross ;-) I know that you're going to write something wonderful, I hope it's really long!

Thanks to being off sick and thus finding myself bored on Tuesday afternoon I have rescued the overly foxglovey dress of this post. V neck replaces round collar, sides taken in just under the arms, and a self-fabric belt. It’s the belt that really makes it work, turning it from a shape that simply doesn’t suit me to one that does. So hours of work are not wasted, and I have another outfit for the office. I suppose that making sure something actually works on you and looks good is the point of sewing if yourself...

Random question, does anyone know of Vorkosigan fics in which Ekaterin leaves Miles?

ETA: And very long shot, fic in which dark!Miles gets himself cloned in order to get the Ivan-like body he never had?