Margaret Donsbach from HistoricalNovels.Info interviewed me about Alcestis, which she calls “full of poetic passages.” (There’s a short review of the book at HistoricalNovels.Info, too, and Margaret will soon be reviewing it for the Heritage Key site.)

Tonight I’m going to see an adaptation of Pride & Prejudice at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, one of the best things about visiting Ashland. I’m hoping that it’ll be better than the adaptation I saw at UT this fall, which I have to admit was pretty painful. (Actors who can’t manage British accents should not try to pretend that shouting in a higher-pitched voice is a worthwhile substitute.) Yesterday, I also discovered some exciting Austen news, from Diana Peterfreund, who explains why she loves Persuasion so much, and then reveals the following:

Children’s: Young Adult

Author of the Secret Society Girl series and Rampant Diana Peterfreund’s FOR DARKNESS SHOWS THE STARS, a post-apocalyptic retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, to Kristin Daly at Balzer & Bray, in a good deal, for publication in 2011, by Deidre Knight at The Knight Agency (NA).

This actually makes a lot of sense — much of the literary criticism written about Persuasion focuses on the uncertainty and anxiety evident in Austen’s portrayal of the diminution of the landed gentry, so transposing that class anxiety into a more explicitly dangerous post-apocalyptic world should be really interesting. Looking forward to this one. Diana answers more questions about it here.

Regarding another genius, Hilary Mantel writes about the Shakespearean authorship debate, which she calls “a tale of snobbery and ignorance, of unhistorical assumptions, of myths about the writing life sometimes fuelled by bestselling authors who ought to know better.” Ouch, and nicely put.

Finally, in exciting news for dorks like me, Patton Oswalt is writing a Wash-centric comic set after the conclusion of Serenity.

The fabulous historical blog Wonders & Marvels is giving away four copies of Alcestis! The deadline for entering to win a copy is this Sunday, February 28. To enter, visit the blog post linked above and post an answer to the following question as a comment:

What little-known character in history deserves to be in the spotlight and have his or her story told?

There are some great responses in the comments already. I would love to read a novel about Alcibiades and Socrates. I think some of the women writers I’m analyzing in my dissertation would make excellent subjects for historical fiction. I can’t believe that nobody’s written a novel about Laetitia Pilkington yet, and Delarivier Manley would also be a fine candidate for fictionalization, as long as you didn’t let the most boring lawsuit ever dominate the story, the way she does in her own fictionalized autobiography. But the delightful Charlotte Charke would top them all — probably literally, if that were possible.

That’s Charlotte as Damon, one of her popular breeches roles. Her Narrative is way funnier than her father Colley Cibber’s Apology, should you ever have the desire to read a mid-c18 autobiography about the life of a player.

Anyway, many thanks to Wonders & Marvels for hosting this giveaway! I look forward to reading everyone’s suggestions.

I’m offering a signed copy of Alcestis in the Con or Bust auction being run by the Carl Brandon Society. The money raised in this auction is available to fans of color who request assistance in order to attend Wiscon, the feminist SF convention held annually in Madison, Wisconsin. (I’ll be going for the first time this year!)

And some links!

• A great essay on modulating your responses when writing critiques.
• Urban legends from Meiji-period Japan.
• And something very close to my heart: Austin’s No Kill Coalition, which will be presenting a No Kill Resolution to the City Council on March 1. Join the coalition, email the council — do what you can.

Lessons I have recently learned: when people say that you should only go running while sick if your illness is above the neck, they’re not kidding. I went for a short run on Friday and my lungs are still in revolt. (I apologize to everybody who had to listen to me cough my way through part of a panel at the Harrington symposium at UT yesterday!)

In nicer news, I recently received my first copy of the Historical Novels Review, the review publication of the Historical Novel Society. The February issue contains a review of Alcestis and a mention of me and the book in a short feature on debut historical novelists, as well as articles on magic in historical fiction and Jane Austen and the new gothic, interviews with writers, and more. It’s a great publication and I’m sad that I put off joining the HNS for as long as I did — my grad student poverty notwithstanding, it’s basically an organization devoted to everything I like. I’m delighted that Alcestis appears so prominently in the Review.

Speaking of fascinating historical information, check out Kathryn Hughes’s write-up in the Guardian of this book about arsenic in Victorian England (not yet released in the US, but coming in March). Hughes calls it “a lovely book, a near-perfect blend of rigorous scholarship and jaunty storytelling,” but even more remarkable than that praise is Hughes’s summary of the perniciousness and pervasiveness of arsenic in Victorian material culture:

Perhaps most sinister of all, though, was the way that arsenic insinuated itself into the very fabric of the Victorian home. The poison was used in the production of green dyes, which were incorporated into everything from ribbons to playing cards. The scene was set for a neo-Websterian tragedy in which beautiful maidens and society bucks crumpled to their deaths following a gift of haberdashery or quick game of whist. Even more fateful was the craze for deep green wallpaper, which led to thousands of families meeting their deaths as a result of their taste in home furnishings. Not that they actually licked their walls: the dye was very unstable, so the slightest breeze could dislodge a puff of toxic dust. Queen Victoria herself was so appalled by the homicidal tendencies of green wallpaper that she ordered every room in Buckingham Palace to be stripped of the stuff.

Makes you wonder which ubiquitous chemicals in our daily lives might be looked at this way in hundred years, no? Creepy.

A few links for today — I hope to be back later with video from the book launch party, too, assuming I’m capable of figuring out iMovie for the first time while suffering from cold-induced stupidity.

First, a story about ancient stone tools discovered on the coast of Crete — on a section of shore covered in soil deposited 100,000 to 190,000 years ago. The tools themselves may be as old as 700,000 years. Previously, the oldest stone tools on Crete were around 10-20,000 years old, so if the dating of these tools is accurate, humans (or pre-humans) were seafarers a lot earlier than previously thought.  CRAZY.

New studies of King Tut’s remains reveal that he died of malaria and a broken leg — the hole in his skull was not the cause of death. I could not stop imagining Temperance Brennan speaking the text of this article while I read it, except she’d probably be pricklier and use larger words.

An excellent post about what makes a good title for a story, and how helpful bad titles can be.

It’s a bullet-point kind of day, I’m afraid. First up, Alcestis news!

• Earlier this week, I was interviewed by Kate Ergenbright of UT’s newspaper, the Daily Texan.
• Photos from the book launch party are here, in case you missed them.
• Don’t forget about the AuthorBuzz giveaway of five signed copies of the book: details here.
• I linked this guest post I wrote for Wonders & Marvels last weekend, but it may have gotten buried. If you’re curious about how I decided to afflict poor Hippothoe with asthma, that post is for you.
• This review, by Kelly Lasiter of Fantasy Literature, makes me VERY happy. (I found it on GoodReads. Did you know that it’s really hard to resist looking at your book’s page, even when you’ve logged on intending to add yet another book to your own TBR list? It’s an amazing feeling to see, for example, that people are reading the book at that very moment.)

And some Friday afternoon links:

• Some excellent advice about making writing a habit.
• A cat actually making the NOM NOM NOM noise while she eats.
• A video of San Francisco traffic in 1906, a few days before the earthquake. (I’m slowly reading Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell, which makes this film extra fascinating.)
• Really horrifying details about just how sketchy the casting process for the Avatar: the Last Airbender movie was.
• The Times article about the plantation diary that inspired Faulkner.
• An intriguing piece in Scientific American about the gut’s “second brain.”

I’m getting ready to head over to BookPeople in an hour or so to set up for my launch party, but before I go, I wanted to share the guest post I wrote for Wonders & Marvels, a great blog about history. Wonders & Marvels will also be offering copies of Alcestis in a giveaway, about which I’ll post more details tomorrow. But for now, off to the party!

Today, two interesting news articles about the difficulty of deciphering historical symbols, particularly those associated with death.

The first focuses on a mysterious heart-shaped symbol found on a coffin in a colonial-era African-American burial in Manhattan — it may or may not be a sankofa, a sigil printed on funereal clothing in Africa.

The second article describes rare bamboo-strip books found in a grave in Hubei province, in China:

Archaeologists will have to wait until excavation of the tomb is completed next week to attempt to read the strips, he said. “Sorting out those bamboo strips is like sorting out well-cooked noodles, you have to be really careful so as not to damage them.

“There is a possibility the strips contain an introduction written by the owner of the tomb, “like a letter of recommendation the deceased would carry with them to the underworld to give Yanluo, the god of death”, Shen said.

Such an evocative idea — a letter of introduction to the god of death. I wonder what Alcestis’s might have said? She was illiterate; I don’t mention that much in the book, as it’s simply a fact of her life. But even if she had been given a scroll to take with her to the underworld, she’d have had no idea what it contained.

A brief break from Alcestis today to talk about novel #2, the one that’s still a twinkle in my eye, as it were. I haven’t said much about it  here because I haven’t begun writing it yet — I’m keeping busy with the dissertation. I’ve researched and outlined it, and much as I wish I could be delving right into it, I’m also enjoying the process of collecting little bits of information related to 1890s America and to specific elements of the book — a sort of mental collage. (I’m also using Scrivener for the first time, since I’ve finally got a Mac laptop again. Not sure how well I’ll like it for actual writing, but it is great fun to make up loads of note cards.)

Yesterday, for example, I read a rather grim but also fascinating article in the Times, complete with not-actually-grisly slideshow, about the Windsor Hotel Fire in 1899. (See also this contemporary letter to the editor about the possible causes of the fire. I love that the Times finally took down the pay wall for old articles.) The bit that stuck with me was the mention of bricks from the collapsed building being reused:

Tens of thousands of those survive anonymously, reused on other building projects for rear or inner walls.

The notion of anonymously surviving bricks is sort of poetic — like buildings in England that still have bits of Tintern Abbey’s roof in them, or like the vanished slabs of marble from the sides of the Pyramids. Or, to use the comparison in the article itself, like the metal recovered from Ground Zero and recently used to build a new Navy ship — though that re-use is martial in a way the others aren’t. The main building at Mt. Holyoke burned down only a year before the events of my novel, but I don’t remember reading about whether or not any materials had been salvaged and used in the new dormitory buildings constructed afterward.

Today, via Holly Tucker on twitter, I found this article about “bachelor girls,” a subset of “New Women” who achieved financial independence but often had trouble finding suitable living situations as young unmarried ladies.

The more domesticated form of New Woman idealized at women’s colleges in the 1890s was the All Around Girl, described in another Times article from 1895, here:

There is no virtue of womanliness or of a strong, healthy nature that this typical American girl does not possess … . She realizes that upon her, individually as well as collectively, rests the duty of upholding all womanhood, and she is true to the trust.

No pressure or anything, ladies.

The all around girl was somewhat like a bachelor girl in her self-sufficiency, but societally safe — she was supposed to be independent, gregarious, charming, and intelligent, but not too serious about her studies, and all her talents were valued because they’d make her an excellent wife and mother.

There’s one all around girl in the novel-I-have-yet-to-write. Those of you who have read Alcestis will perhaps not be surprised to hear that she’s not one of the main characters. One of the main characters is based on a real girl; the other one’s my own, and like Alcestis, she tries to build a new life out of old bricks.

A quick link to an article in the Guardian about a new Athenian exhibition of Greek visual art depicting all sorts of sexuality. The author notes that Aristophanes “devis[ed] 106 ways of describing the male genitals and 91 those of the female,” which I feel is remarkable all on its own. Even more remarkable, maybe, is the sensible age limit imposed for viewing the exhibition. Museum visitors under 16 are encouraged not to enter the most graphic section of the gallery without accompaniment by an adult:

“We felt it prudent for children under the age of 16 to be warned,” said the professor. “By the age of 16 they’ve heard about everything that they see here and read about it in magazines or on the internet.”

Indeed.