it's like the eye of a duck

I am working on A Project(TM).

Some of y'all already know about this but for those who don't: Through a combination of self-teaching, practice, and online/in person classes, I'm learning creative writing.

The main impetus for this is because I am seized with an idea for an original work of fiction. I don't know what it will turn into, but right now I'm focusing on writing something I want to read - what to do with it will come later.

It's a work of historical fiction, so this necessarily means a lot of research, and I am LOVING it! So much to know, such a complicated timeline - I know I'm going to have to break the historical reality to make the story work but I want to have enough info to know exactly where I'm deviating.

I have often marveled at my friends who are already published/recognized for their work (be it writing or something else) and wondered where their persistence to see a project through to the end came from. I think it was Shem who told me once that "obsession helps", and while I have always made stuff this is the first time I've really understood what it is to be in that kind of intellectual "grip".*

So if I fall silent it's because I'm hip-deep in notes and timelines and writing mini-projects.

*Unless you count fencing as a creative act. It sort of is and I'm still plenty obsessed, but it's not the same thing to me.

Most costume/fashion; one not:

• The Full Bust Adjustment, for use by ladies who are larger than the "standard" B cup that most commercial patternmakers assume. Related: the adjustment for the opposite problem. Have not tried either, but am familiar with the technique and these are the first well-illustrated online guides I've seen.
  
  
• Comme de Garcons S/S 2011 collection is scrumpdillyicious. Love the uneven, unmatched-sides jackets. And say, don't I have saddle shoes kind of like those?
  
  
• Speaking of things to DIY: Von Kottwitz nuts, chains and pearls - a trip to Home Depot + glass pearls = a fun afternoon with a pretty at the end.
  
  
• Julian Roberts subtraction cutting patterns and books - am intrigued because I found out about him on a Miyake mailing list and he studied with Vivienne Westwood - what's not to love?
  
  
• hrj on writing female same-sex historial romance while avoiding the "coming out angst" trope. I find myself nodding, and wishing my own thought processes were this ordered yet still this creative and out-of-the box.

• 09:47 These tights....do not suck. I would even venture to say that they rock. Let's see how the rest of the day goes...
• 10:43 Hey, sewing sorts - free/cheap copyright free patterns! Good ones too: www.burdastyle.com/patterns . HT @sewgirls
• 11:13 RT @FashionHistoria: Colonial Williamsburg are putting their collection (including historic costume and fashion) online bit.ly/2nC0zp
• 12:17 All your characters speaking in the same voice (and how to stop that): tinyurl.com/yk6jrwb #writing
• 12:24 A Southern food blog. It's not all fried: biscuitsandsuch.com/

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Just sitting here nodding along to writer Mur Lafferty's musings on enemies, in life and on the page. She's right - true enmity can only come out of love. Genuinely felt antagonism can only come out of deep admiration, after all - why be envious of someone you don't care about?

Do I have any enemies? I don't think so, not really. Plenty of people on and off the strip that I'm happy for when they do well. I have to admit that I do sometimes wonder "when's my turn?" in different endeavors, but ultimately that's more about me and circumstance than it has to do with people around me.

I take it as a good thing that I'm not eaten up with burning jealousy. Warm jealousy, sometimes, but no consuming hatreds.

But Mur/J.R. Blackwell are right, it makes for far more interesting reading than one-dimensional baddies.

Tangential afterthought - I find it amusing that "arching" (v. the act of being an archvillain) and "henching" (v. the act of being a henchman/henchperson) are verbs now. I blame/credit Venture Brothers :P

Expanding on a Tweet from earlier in the day, I enjoyed this article from Tor books blog describing the liberties Hollywood takes with historic accuracy. I agree with the author that the real story is often more interesting than the watered down, simplified version movies give us, and I'm often frustrated with the cut corners, compressed timelines and/or modernization/"sexing up" that shows up in movies covering time periods I actually know something about.

At the same time, I think it's inevitable given that historic stories (rather like science fiction) are interesting to modern audiences primarily because of what they tell us about ourselves, and apart from the comparative few who know the historic context of any given film I'm aware that allowances must be made to tell a story modern audiences can relate to (this is in addition to any limitations set by budget, actors, 2 hour limit, etc.)

( deliberate anachronism )

[L]anguage isn't just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. It is a flash of the human spirit, a vehicle though which the soul of a particular culture comes into the material world. And when we lose a language, we lose a vital element of the human dream." - Anthropologist Wade Davis, from here.

As I've said before, I'm not a good writer, but perhaps it's not quite true. I'm ok - better than some, with a decent vocabulary and enough understanding to deploy the occasional 25 cent word with aplomb (see! there I went). But I read enough to know that I can't make words sing, not the way I see in some fiction or poetry.

Right now I'm in the middle of the the second Captain Alatriste novel and I'm finding that there are some really beautiful bits in this series, many about love of country (there is one wonderfully melancholy section in the first describing the poet Quevedo's love for Spain despite its corruption and decline) and some of the most moving prose about young love I've ever read - I find myself really feeling for poor Inigo (the narrator), and his childhood crush on Angelica de Alquezar. He makes it clear that she breaks his heart in some undescribed way when they're adults, but he still describes her as "as beautiful as Lucifer before his expulsion from Paradise" (p. 79).

And this is just the English translation. I wish I could read the original Spanish. I've never spoken or read another language fluently but I often suspect I'm missing some nuance or art that simply isn't translatable from the original.

On a more practical level, there's a lot of costume (and other) research out there in languages I can't read. I've been feeding two Spanish articles into Babelfish and cobbling together a textile-specific glossary as meanings become apparent, but I know I'm missing something. I'm even told of magnificent finds in the Czech Republic, but all the research is in Czech!

One day when I have abundant free time and single-minded, laser-like concentration, I may well pick up a Rosetta Stone for one language or another and give it another stab, though frankly I don't give myself much hope as 4 years of high school French and 3 of (admittedly half-hearted) college Italian haven't managed to stick :P But still, knowing only English (and incompletely, IMHO, at that) I'm aware that I'm missing some flavors and shades.

One buttonhole. One phone call. One careful line of prose....

I may be slow, but I get there in the end.

This fact will not stop my lamenting that there aren't more hours in a day.

Some things that have tossed up in the netsurf over the past week:

The Writer's Digest Character Naming Sourcebook: I should get a (used) copy just to have on hand, because for all my silly writing I have a painfully bland record for names (girls are usually called Elizabeth, right? Or Mary...)

Level 1 Streaming Radio: brainspraining acidy techno; I've not kept up with the genre in years so this might be completely pedestrian but it's new to me! The "Rush Hour" show in particular is like having your teeth drilled with a jackhammer. FYI if you're not familiar with electronic music post 1995 this is a GOOD thing...

Austen/Bronte quiz gacked from realm_of_venus and others:
( can I have the model wearing skin tight doeskin breeches, please? )

D. has made me a new computer. Or, at least, he has done a staggeringly good job of cobbling together what we have, fine tuning it carefully and setting it up immaculately - he can squeeze more power out of a motherboard than I thought possible! I'm not going at light speed, but I am going substantially faster than I was before - no more waiting on graphics to chew....

And Filezilla rocks my socks!

I have spent a regrettably large part of this holiday weekend doing web work - this grieves me, but the hours sitting at my desk managed to spawn 1) some pretty good fic, if I do say so myself, and 2) the urge to move around motivated me to clean up the kitchen and stovetop (Greased Lightning also rocks my socks) and even some of my sewing area - I can see part of my cutting table again (!). So all is not lost.

I also managed to steal some reading time for myself. I finished "The Night Watch" - EXCELLENT book - not as merry or sexy perhaps as Waters' previous books, but written so well that it practically breathes, leaving you wishing you were there, even if it's in the middle of London during the Blitz.

Also still reading (or rather, skimming - it's not exactly an action-packed thriller) Henry VIII's inventories. Despite the archaic spellings most of it makes sense, and there are little things that are somehow so human - in the middle of the section on jewels and plate there are listed the contents of a small coffer that contained hoods and medicines for Henry's hawks. Sure, he wasn't the one medicating them, but it's nice to know that someone cared enough to do that, even if it was just to keep the hawks in hunting condition.

I do have some vocabulary questions I might post later for the historians reading, if I can't find the answers on my own.

And because I can't leave y'all without a clicky thing, here it is courtesy betnoir: Serenity: The MST3K Version ("THE OPERATIVE: I’ve seen your war record.
TOM: It had a nice beat and you could dance to it.")

Found thru fanthropology: Fanfiction Comes Out of the Closet from afterellen.com. What slash is, why there's more m/m than femslash, the role of the internet, more linkage.