What is it about half-weeks before a trip that makes them so odd, even when you’re not missing school or work to travel? I’m not leaving for Wiscon until Thursday morning, but I still feel rushed. Partly this is self-induced dissertation pressure; it’s weird to realize that Wiscon will consume the last few days of May and drop me into June. I’m starting to build some real momentum on this chapter, but I’ve been enjoying thinking to myself, oh, it’s still May, I have so much time. In fact: no. From mid-July to mid-August, I’ll be teaching an intermediate fiction workshop at UT — fiction-writing boot camp, basically, meeting M-F for 75 minutes a day. I’m really excited but fully aware that I won’t get much else done during those five weeks. Fortunately, it looks like the 2010-2011 school year is now going to be completely dedicated to writing (of the diss and of Killingly — I’ll say more once everything is confirmed).

I’m going to try to write up a Wiscon report, since it’s my first time going. I’m especially curious to see how panels work and what kinds of conversations they create. I’ve gotten so accustomed to the academic humanities style of conference presentations that I could feel my hackles rise, a few days ago, when I stumbled across a non-academic’s blog post complaining about the way academics organize and perform at conferences. I actually do think that the conference paper can be a valuable genre, though I get why it bothers people. But I’m curious to see how academic round tables, for example, compare to the more free-form discussions I’m anticipating at Wiscon.

Also, I’m looking forward to geeking out.

A few things I’ve been geeking out about recently:

This map of movie locations in California and the other places they’re meant to represent.

This essay about how flawed theories about scurvy led to a temporary loss of the cure for it.

And Janelle Monae’s “Tightrope”:

I cannot believe it’s the middle of May. My friends: what happened to this spring? I mean, I know what happened — my book came out, I traveled around a bit, I wrote another giant dissertation chapter, I started the next novel (just a wee bit), I started yet another dissertation chapter. But despite all those very good reasons for busy-ness I still feel like this semester has just gone FWOOSH.

Here are some things I learned this spring, in no particular order:

Thing 1: Sarah Waters is brilliant. I knew this; I love her faux-Victorian novels, though I was slightly less enthused about The Night Watch. But The Little Stranger impressed the hell out of me. It’s so cleverly managed and yet reads in so natural a way that the trappings of the haunted house plot seem realistic and psychologically appropriate. This interview with Waters, from last May, is worth watching, and she’s also got a short piece on Angela Carter, here. Every time I read an interview with her or one of her essays about writing I get even more fangirly. I totally want to buy her coffee and talk about pacing.

The Little Stranger was one of the books on my new year’s resolution list — so far, I’ve also read Emma Donoghue’s The Sealed Letter and The Woman in White. You can see brief responses to those books on my Goodreads account, if you’re curious. The Little Stranger was definitely my favorite of these, though I was startled by how much I loved the first two-thirds of The Woman in White (the last third is bit draggy, in my opinion). The Sealed Letter I found readable and interesting but oddly unenchanting; I felt compelled to finish it, but when I was done, my reaction was mostly: “Huh.” Even though it suits my genre interests and contains a lot of things I like. Not sure why that was.

Thing 2: Job interviews for a job you really want to do can be fun. I had a couple, and I actually enjoyed them (even the one that got extended by a day by a snowstorm). The academic job market isn’t at its best right now, and the process of waiting to hear about interviews and offers and all that is always going to be frustrating, but the conversations themselves were entertaining and even MLA wasn’t too stressful.

Thing 3: Doing promo for a book is shockingly time-consuming, especially when you’ve never done it before. It offers far too many ways to procrastinate on other work, too. And, like job interviews, promo can actually be pretty fun, especially when you have the chance to talk to individual readers about your book. (Or even to spy on individual readers, via, for example, Goodreads.)

Thing 4: Apparently my fondness for watching L&O reruns at the gym places me in a recognizable demographic. Note the mention of UT.

Thing 5: It can be a pain to apply for fellowships, jobs, grants, etc., but it’s worth it. (More on this soon.)

Did you learn anything useful or entertaining this spring?

A few weeks back, I did an interview with Alex Telander of BookBanter, and it’s now available on the site as a podcast — BookBanter’s 30th episode, in fact. Alex also wrote a short review of Alcestis, which you can read here. The interview was great fun, and I hope you’ll enjoy listening to it, too. You can also follow BookBanter on Twitter.

I’m still dissertating away over here, with occasional breaks to think about Killingly, my next project — and Twitter’s been surprisingly helpful for that. I follow a bunch of historical fiction enthusiasts, which means that my Twitter stream often features links like this NYPL image of a giant wooden elephant at Coney Island from 1885. I’m not sure how that particular bit of history will fit into my 1890s Massachusetts setting, but you better believe I’ll try hard to make sure it does. I much prefer e-ink to backlit screens for reading, but this is the kind of thing that makes me understand why people might get excited about books augmented with video and internet content.

Let me show you it!

(Wiscon is the annual women’s SF convention held in Madison, Wisconsin. This is the first year I’m attending, and I’m really excited about it; my writing tends more toward the mainstream end of the fantasy spectrum, but my love for SFF is deep and true.)

What’s the Future of the Past?
Sat, 1:00–2:15 pm Conference 4

Katharine Beutner [moderator], Alma Alexander, Christopher M. Cevasco, Joyce Frohn, Linda McAllister

What alternative histories, if any, do a good job of showing a world where there were real differences in gender or racial politics? Which ones fail and why? How can writers get the past right?

What Is Feminist Romance?
Sun, 8:30–9:45 am Caucus

Robyn Fleming (moderator), Katharine Beutner, Emily Horner, Neesha Meminger, Megan

Romances in short stories and novels often follow traditional patriarchal rules, even when feminist individuals are writing. What does a feminist romantic storyline look like? Do we see these or are they rare? How can writers who consider themselves feminist avoid falling back on the old standbys?

Broad Universe Rapid Fire Reading
Sun, 4:00–5:15 pm Assembly

Julie Andrews, Katharine Beutner, Ada Milenkovic Brown, Lori Devoti, Moondancer Drake, Gwynne Garfinkle, Catherine Lundoff, Jennifer Pelland, Katherine Mankiller, Trisha J. Wooldridge, Phoebe Wray (and others, I believe)

Members of Broad Universe share tidbits of their available work or works in progress with the audience. Enjoy a buffet covering a wide range of speculative fiction from disturbing horror to humor, paranormal romance to dystopian action/adventure, poetry to prose… and all the realms in between.

(I’ll be reading from Alcestis. )

If you’ll be at Wiscon, please do say hi!

Linky post! Because I’m a bit headachey again.

• Women studying anatomy, circa 1905, via Twitter, as usual; I’m definitely going to be using this as a reference for Killingly.
• This dog has been appearing at Greek demonstrations for the last two years. He has to belong to a protester — he is wearing a collar. But it’s awfully easy to think of him as some little god of protest — Eris as a mutt?
• And speaking of little gods, do read Sarah Johnson’s long interview with Guy Gavriel Kay, in which they discuss, among other things, writing historical fiction that treats the culture’s religion as real rather than symbolic (something I’m also interested in, of course).
• See also David Mitchell’s essay in the Telegraph about historical fiction. Tonally, this feels a little weird to me; it’s very cheery and flip. Mitchell has just published a historical novel, though apparently not on purpose, as he explains: “I didn’t set out to write a historical novel just for the heck of it – you’d have to be mad.” (You would? Also, who ever writes a novel “just for the heck of it?”) The breezy tour through the history of historical fiction also rang a bit false for me at times, though that’s partly because I love nothing better than nitpicking at other people’s generalizations about eighteenth-century literature. I also find his suggestion about “Bygonese” both accurate and, again, a little tonally weird; as with the whole piece, it’s written in a manner that suggests it’s more original than it is, especially since Mitchell then suggests a set of features common to historical-fiction dialogue (“Commonly, shall is used more often than will …”) and lists errors to avoid (using ahistorical vocabulary: “such as brinkmanship: duh, it’s a Cold War term.” As Omar would say: indeed). I’d love to see Mitchell write a piece about historical fiction intended for historical fiction writers and readers rather than a general newspaper audience.

Via Twitter, yet again, I’ve found a few links to a production of Euripides’ Alcestis being performed at St Thomas’s College in Sri Lanka. This review includes quotations from the actors, who are all male. There’s just something delightful about this passage, though I obviously went with a very different interpretation of Alcestis’s motives:

“She’s a loving wife,” explains Adam Kenny (18) speaking about his role as Alcestis, “She’s the type of wife, willing to do anything for her husband. She has no options. She has to do it.”

And speaking of re-interpreting the motives of well-known characters, I’m really looking forward to checking out Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, especially now that I know it’s part of the Canongate Myths series. This interview with Pullman is worth reading for many reasons, including the bits about his pugs, but particularly for this lovely description of how Pullman thinks his storytelling abilities were shaped by his work as a teacher:

… it was not so much his grand- father’s sermons, he insists, that affected his own storytelling so much as the years he spent as a teacher. “Telling stories aloud and making up stories. You learn such a lot when you tell great stories like the Iliad or the Odyssey, over and over again. You learn what a good story shape is, you learn how to time it — I used to like getting to a good bit just when I knew the bell was about to go. It gave me great pleasure when they wanted to stay in rather than go out and play.” Pullman talks quite tenderly about his past.”And you learn what you can do and what you can’t do,” he adds. “I can’t do funny stories. Can’t do them at all. I can do them on the page, but I can’t deliver them. There’s something I haven’t got. And I’ve tried, but I haven’t got it. But I can do tension and suspense and action, and I can paint a scene so that it comes clearly before the listeners.”

Noted via Twitter today, this post at Salon: the therapeutic value of the mystery novel. The author of the post doesn’t actually talk much about why she finds mystery novels therapeutic; most of the post is spent recommending some recently released books. I also find mystery novels therapeutic at times — often, when I visited my parents during my dad’s illness, I’d pick up one of the mysteries they always had around the house rather than doing my academic reading. That’s how I discovered Tana French, for example — I remember seeing In the Woods sitting on their kitchen counter.

I like to read mysteries for therapy for the same reason I like watching Law & Order episodes, even ones I’ve seen before: I love procedurals. I think it’s a side effect of being a structure geek. (These days, I usually see about a half hour of Law & Order at the gym, two or three times a week, and that keeps my addiction manageable.)

What do you read therapeutically? Do you go back to favorite books, or do you get more therapeutic benefit out of finding new books in a favorite genre?