Category: nonfiction

While you read this, I will be Medievalisting in Melbourne. Monday is my recovery day, so I’m seeing friends and family Tuesday I have in-service training which basically means really good behind the scenes tours at a major library and a major art gallery. Wednesday to Friday is the conference proper. My paper is written, my slides are almost there* and I don’t feel at all ready for any of it.

I’ll report back next week! There may be pictures, or there may not. It depends…

It’s rare that I can visit any campus these days, because I’m Jewish, but a friend has given me her phone number and the security number and, hopefully, all will be well.

• My cutest slide is of the word ‘ritter’ scratched on a slate in Hebrew characters. I am so dreaming of writing a story where a Medieval Jewish school boy dreams of becoming a knight. If you want to see this picture, let me know, and I’ll share it when I’m at my own desk.

For a few months now I’ve been getting odd emails. They start out reading like fan mail, and fan mail from some unusually perceptive reader who gets exactly what I’m trying to do. Flattering (and yes, I am not above being flattered, being just another pixel-stained techno-peasant working in the fields of fiction). So I am flattered for the first two to four paragraphs.

And then it becomes clear that these are sales pitches.

The first one I received was for Petty Treason, and mentioned the characters and the plot the the sense of place, and seemed to get what I was trying to do with the book, and to appreciate it. “Why don’t more people know this book?” she asked–a fine question, although of course with the number of books out there, how does anyone have the chance to find a book except through serendipity and marketing? And it turned out that the author of the letter was pitching her marketing services. As I was, at that time, in the process of re-issuing all three of my Sarah Tolerance mysteries (of which Petty Treason is the second) I was intrigued. I loathe marketing chores, and would have been willing to throw a bit of money to someone who would take on the task. So I wrote back, asking what she had in mind.

We exchanged two or three more emails, with proposed programs and low-cost, medium cost, and wotthehell let’s have it all cost options (no actual numbers were given). So I wrote back to find out what was included in each of the programs, and what the price tag was, and then… she vanished. Ghosted me.

Meanwhile, back at my inbox, I’d gotten another such email, effusive and flattering about Sold for Endless Rue, my retelling of Rapunzel. The writer called out the research (of which I’d done a ton, and it’s nice to have it noticed, see above re: being flattered) and the characters and the feminist underpinnings of the story. This time the sender wasn’t in marketing, but “managed” a group of 2000 avid readers who would positively swoon over my book, and write reviews in all the places that reviews get written and posted. But by this time my spider sense was tingling and I began to doubt that there was an actual human at the other end of the emails.

Why? The language of the approach emails is very polished, but more sales oriented than pure fan mail (I mean, “It’s rare to find historical fiction that feels both so authentically of its time and yet so urgently relevant today…”. Really?) And the emails focused on the things in the books that I was proudest of. And I began to imagine the person at the other end of the emails saying “Hey ChatGPT!” (Or Claude, or Grok, or whatever) “Write a marketing-approach letter that the author of Petty Treason will find hard to resist!”

“Ah!” my less cynical side murmured. “But how would ChatGPT/Claude/Grok know anything about Petty Treason and its author?”

And my increasingly sour side responded, Because Petty Treason and Sold for Endless Rue and The Stone War and Point of Honour (for all of which I have now received similar approach emails) were all scraped and used for Large Language Model training for AIs. As are all sorts of reviews and literary analyses and suchlike. I know this because I’m one of thousands of authors whose work is part of the Anthropic settlement (the first in a series of cases where the Authors Guild and other organizations have filed suit against AI companies that carelessly used other people’s intellectual property because it was there and they could).

So now these emails go into the trash. I’m not the only one who’s getting them–John Scalzi mentioned getting several a day, and if there is anyone who doesn’t need to pay for “a managed group of 2000 dedicated readers” to write reviews of his work, it’s Scalzi.

I am late, even for the US timezones. It’s still Monday in Hawaii, though, so I shall consider this post not too late. My reason is one that I find hilarious, every single time it happens. The US has elections the first Tuesday in November… Australia has a horse race. I usually write my posts for US time, which means often it’s Tuesday my time and today… I forgot. Last night I knew I had to write it, but things happened last night and I went to bed thinking “What haven’t I done?” And then I ate strawberries and cherries and chocolate with friends, as I do every year and turned home and made dinner and then realised I had nearly missed Monday. The cherries are important, because they are new season’s, just in time for the first time we normally eat them, which is the first Tuesday in November.

This fits with my current thoughts. I’m trying to work out why, right now, so many of us do not see the lives of others. We place our own life or our own assumptions about their lives onto the life we think they have. This does not actually help get rid of the really nasty bigotry I see in the world. I need to think more about the paths we walk and how to remember to look over and see and respectfully appreciate the paths of others. When I do, I may post about it. What I want to do is write a book, but the reason I keep being late and forgetting time is ME/CFS and I’m rather lucky I finished both my thesis and the last book before my current relapse, because it’s more severe than it’s been for a while. I can do more than I thought, but writing a whole new book from scratch is currently not possible.

What is even more fun than being publicly Jewish in a country that is lapsing into extreme racism? Being publicly Jewish with chronic fatigue.

Expect some of this to appear in my next novel… when the fatigue is sufficiently diminished to finish it. My brain is working on it even when my body can’t, so that piece of writing is still happening, just not on paper yet.

Since most of you who read this blog are from the US, I want to wish you the very best with your Tuesday elections. Every Melbourne Cup I want to talk about how elections and horse races are so similar and yet so different, but not this year. This year you have enough to deal with. You do not need additional bad jokes. Good luck!

I am re-reading a book that was published in 1969 (Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede*). As I was enjoying the things that go along with a re-read (the comfort of a known plot which allows you to sink into the characters, renewed enjoyment of the writing, discoveries of things you slid past on the first readings) I realized that I was also reminded of the way the books of my youth were made, which is different from the way they are generally made today. Lemme ‘splain.

For eight years I was the Operations Manager at the American Bookbinders Museum. In practice, this title included a bunch of functions including Design Department, Chief Docent, Rental Manager, and Covid Czar–but the important thing is that I learned to look at the objects which had been, for my entire life, vessels for story. Looking at this book (which is a decommissioned library book with WITHDRAWN stamped on the inside cover, still in its mylar jacket cover) it’s… elderly. Probably the same vintage as many of the books I took out of the library when I was a teenager: full “adult size” books from the Adult section of the library (this one is the 6″x9″ trim associated with the top of the publisher’s list–what the publisher believes will be important and sell well, as Brede did). And it swivels a little because the binding has loosened over the years.

Until the advent of paperbacks, books (almost all, at least in the Western world) were sewn. In the photo on the right you can see the stitches at about 1″ intervals. (Here’s a good description of the anatomy of a sewn book, from the Princeton Public Library). The structure of a book is meant to keep all the pages together in the correct order, safely. Sewing signatures (or gathers) into a larger text block, was the way this was done for a thousand years. Most sewn books have a hollow spine (which is to say, the sewn spine is flexible, and the spine cover “floats” above it to protect the spine without making the structure more rigid. Then came the paperback, where the pages are glued together in a block. This has some serious benefits, but paperbacks are ephemeral. Granted, I still have paperbacks I stole borrowed from my parents that were published in the 1950s, but most paperbacks were not expected to live very long. Their structure did not hold up (when I worked in Production at Tor Books we would get letters calling us uncomplimentary things because eventually the spines of really thick paperbacks would begin to split or separate–this was a function of the process and the glues then available).

Then, in the mid-late 1990s, the technology changed. The glue used in “perfect” binding (that’s what paperback bindings are called in the trade) improved hugely. Wonder why trade paperbacks suddenly went from being a rarity to being a dominant format? It’s because suddenly you could do a trade-sized book at a price that was much more buyer-friendly, without the fear that the latest Big Horror (or Fantasy or Biography) Book would fall apart while you’re reading it.

So picking up In This House of Brede and really looking at it was a bit of a time capsule for me. The original purpose of books–all books–was as a container for information. Vessels, as I said above. You wanted to protect the information and keep it organized so that you can move back and forth as needed (the codex form on which the modern book is based makes that easier than the earlier format, the scroll). And you wanted to be able to keep that protected information out of the hands of the people you didn’t want to have it, whether because it would give them an advantage, or because you didn’t think they were worthy of it. The information in those books–whether it was an epic poem or a history or an alchemical formulary–had value. By the time this particular book was published, the point was not to keep this story or any other out of the public hands–it was to make it widely, broadly, lucratively available. The shift in binding technology helped with that. (But I can still pick up this book and sniff it and be transported back to 14-year-old me at the library.)

There’s a lot of agitation in certain quarters about keeping information out of the hands of… oh, children, or innocents, or people who think. Everyone. I’m hoping that technology–the genie that’s been let out of the bottle–will make that impossible in the long run. Fingers crossed.

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* I have, for all my total lack of religious background, a fascination with monastic practice and life. Don’t ask me why.

In honor of Banned Books week, I offer this memory of my daughter’s stand against book burning.

It would be difficult to find a neighborhood more concentrated with left-leaning intelligentsia than the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Which is not to say there are not conservatives, curmudgeons, and random people who think the world is going to hell in a handbag, but the traditional Person On The Street on the Upper West Side is likely, at the very least, to be four-square for the First Amendment.

Which is why my daughter burning a book on the sidewalk occasioned considerable outrage.

It was a perfectly gorgeous Saturday in spring; Julie, age 11 and at the tail end of 6th grade, had to do a multi-media report on a book of her choice, and the book of her choice was Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. She had discussed the project with her teacher, and decided to do a three dimensional collage representing the pile of books that are burned in the book; ringed round the pile would be text from the novel (one of the major discussions was which quote; the book is chock full of good lines).

If there’s one thing we have around the house, it’s books. Some of them so old and tattered they would probably go up in smoke at an incendiary glance; others still young and green enough that a match would be required. And I’m afraid I feel rather proprietary–nearly maternal–about all of them. It took us several hours to find a grocery-bag full of books that could be sacrificed in the name of education, and I insisted, for safety’s sake, that this all be done outside on the sidewalk, where nothing much could catch fire. A book-burning kit was added to the bag: matches, oven mitts, a bucket (to be filled with water just before we went downstairs), a couple of tired old dish towels which would be sacrificed if necessary to smothering flames. In my head I had moved beyond issues of censorship and was thinking of getting my kids through this alive.

Saturday morning Julie and her little sister and I went downstairs and found a nice clear patch of sidewalk on our quiet side street, and set up for business. I supervised and distracted Becca (who was six, and to whom this was Just Another Inexplicable Thing Her Sister Did) while Julie went to work.

The first book burned too fast. Kid didn’t want a pile of ashes; she wanted books in various stages of char. This was how we decided that old, worn paperbacks were a bad idea. She took up a book of actuarial tables and had better luck with that, although working out the routine of lighting the page, blocking the breeze, pulling on the oven mitt, and putting out the flame when just the right amount of book had been burnt, took a little work. About the time the third book had been lit, an elderly couple came down the street, moving urgently. The man was practically waving his cane. The woman yelled: “WHAT ARE YOU DOING!”

Julie, to her credit, finished putting out the book before she turned around. “It’s for a class project,” she said.

“WHAT KIND OF SCHOOL ASSIGNS YOU TO BURN BOOKS?” (I was not sure if the woman was upset or deaf or both, but she was very loud.) “DON’T YOU KNOW WHO BURNED BOOKS?”

For a moment Julie looked a bit confused; in her mind at that moment, the answer would have been Montag, the “fireman” from Fahrenheit 451. “My school didn’t assign me to burn books; I’m doing an art project about a book about a man who–”

“BURNING BOOKS IS A TERRIBLE THING TO DO!”

“I know! That’s what the book is about.”

“WHAT BOOK IS THIS?”

Fortunately, we’d brought her copy of Fahrenheit 451 downstairs with us. Julie took off the oven mitt and showed the book. The woman reached for it, but the old man, whose caterpillar-like eyebrows had been working up and down with alarm, suddenly looked enlightened.

“Ahh,” he said. He turned to his companion. “She’s making art.”

“SHE’S BURNING BOOKS!”

He nodded. “I’ve read that book. It’s says that burning books is a terrible thing. She’s making art to show that.” He smiled at Julie. “Go ahead, sweetheart.” And he looped his arm through his companion’s and continued onward toward Amsterdam Avenue.

They weren’t the only ones to comment negatively on Julie’s project. By the time she had crisped the seven or eight books she required, four or five more people had come by and viewed with alarm. Each time she got a little better at explaining what she was doing, leading with “I’m doing an art project to demonstrate that burning books is bad.” She got into some interesting discussions. By the end of the hour or so it took her to get done, she was exhausted and a little annoyed at having had to explain what she was doing over and over again. From their accents, I think that the first couple were from somewhere in Eastern Europe, and likely immigrants from a formerly Communist country. The others who stopped were old and young, black and white. All were at least dismayed by what they saw happening. The protest I liked best came from a little kid who was out with his dad. “Don’t you like books?”

“I love them so much I don’t want anyone to do this. Ever. Plus, it’s for school.”

The little boy nodded and they went on. They’ll ask you to do anything if it’s for school.

When I was a kid we lived in New York City, but every weekend we commuted to our Barn in southern Massachusetts. This was a three hour drive (plus, on the trip north, a stop for dinner), and my brother and I were kids, which is to say, not always patient. We did not indulge in “are we there yet” because I think we had a sense of just how well (or poorly) that would have gone over. But we did get antsy. The radio was a distraction, but at some point the signal from NY would get too weak, and we clamored for something else. My parents would consent to play games–Geography mostly. But best of all was when my father told stories.

Some of his stories were autobiographical. Or pretended to be: I am pretty sure that the story he used to tell us about having been mistakenly rolled in a rug one year during spring cleaning and forgotten until the rug was unrolled months later was, shall we say, a metaphor for what it was like being the second youngest in a family with eight children.

And then there was “Breakfast in Space.” This was a story told in many parts, from one week to the next (it was a serial, thus the punny title). It chronicled the adventures of a pair of siblings named Madeleine and Clem who went to Little Red Space School (my brother and I went to a Greenwich Village school called Little Red School House). I don’t, at this remove, remember a whole lot of details except for a long sequence where the students were out in their spacesuits playing some variation on tag, when my brother discovered that he could cheat by farting, the afflatus being expelled through the exhaust ports and… (hey, this story was pitched to a 9- and a 7-year-old, and this detail delighted us).

The other tale was Little Red Riding Hood. In my father’s telling, Grandma was a famed courtesan (the sort who would have fit in nicely with Desiree Arnfeldt in A Little Night Music) named Rosamond Gemutlich. Rosamond spent all her time in a glass bathtub, drinking champagne and dictating her scandalous memoirs about her time with a Graustarkian Princeling with a long Germanic name which my father pronounced with relish exactly one time before explaining “but he was known as “Franzu.” Rosamond’s granddaughter, also named Rosamond but called Little Red, would come to visit. Little Red had a bit of a smart mouth, and occasionally Grannie would smack her in the chops with a frying pan. If Grannie got too enthusiastic this would require a trip to the  ER to enlist the services of Robert M. Clydesdale, M.D. (aka Young Doctor Bob)*. I don’t recall much in the way of plot for this story, but the details were outrageous, and doubtless pleased my parents as much as they did my brother and me. And yes, we were raised on Warner Bros. cartoons, so the notion of a grandparent hitting her kid with a skillet–often!–did not phase us.

The fact that my father would come back to one of these stories, week after week, both amazes and exhausts me. I’ve told innumerable stories to kids, many of them made up on the fly (when I chaperoned school field trips my kids would offer me up as sacrificial entertainment). I may have placed more importance on plot and an ending than my father did. But it’s a serious effort and takes a nimble mind. Oddly, as my mother was acknowledged within the family to be “the writer,” it never occurred to me to wonder why she was never the storyteller. As an adult, I realized that there’s a difference between being a storyteller and being a writer. My father was the former, my mother the latter.

It’s probable that those storytelling sessions didn’t last more than half an hour (but that’s a long time to keep leaping from story point to story point, wisecracking all the way). Replete with my father’s invention, my brother would fall asleep for the rest of the drive, and I would stare out the window, committing it all to memory so I could relate the story to a couple of friends at school who demanded I report back each week.

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*A few years later my father had to get some No Trespassing signs made up for our property, because in winter hunters–some of them neither bright nor respectful of property rights–would crawl all over the mountain looking for deer, and there was a very real danger of a shot hitting an unintended target. As a joke, he had some of the signs made up in the name of Robert M. Clydesdale, M.D. (Young Doctor Bob). My father was always his own best audience.