I had plans to introduce a book today, but … maybe next week. Some books have to be read a few pages at a time, and this is one. Also, today I have a profound envy of everyone who doesn’t have chronic fatigue. Why this week? Because the energy other people spend on planning and adjusting plans and making their daily lives work is energy I do not have. More than once recently I’ve had to skip events I wanted to attend or cancel dinner parties because someone had to check something with me and changed this or that and, in spending energy in these small discussions… I ran out of spoons.
I do that a lot right now. I know the triggers and I’m handling everything almost well enough. The trick is in the ‘almost.’ Even typing this is exhausting. Several friends have given me advice, because they know it will help. The thing is, I’ve had chronic fatigue for around 40 years. At this point, advice does not help. I have a list of things that must be done… these things help. And some friends listen, but most, right now, don’t. So… bed.
The moral of this week’s very short post is, “If you know anyone who handles chronic fatigue, when they say they’re not dealing, keep things simple.”
Next week, however, I should have some comments on a book where I feel seen. Very, very seen.
Once again, this week got away from me. Here’s a piece from 2018.
I read an article on Salon a few years ago: “Is Michael Pollan a Sexist Pig?” by a writer named Emily Matchar. The title is, of course, very tongue in cheek; the article is about the omnivore/ locavore/ femivore movements, and about the myths we make up about the past. In this case, the past in question is the good ol’ days of cookery from the writers’ childhoods, and how much better everything was in the days before feminism led us to processed food.
Now, all things being equal I like to make my food from scratch, I love the farmer’s market, I do read labels, and I attempt not to buy things that I can make myself. But I do these things because I’d just as soon know what I’m eating, because I have family members with nasty allergies. I don’t do them as a political statement. I’m fortunate that I can afford to buy organic at least some of the time, that I have the time and the leisure to cook the way I prefer to. And oh yeah: I like to cook. Not everyone does. Not everyone likes to eat, for that matter. There are people who regard food as fuel, something they have to be prodded to remember. (I know: bizarre, right?)
Full disclosure: for a potluck at the time I made a chocolate tart with gingersnap crust, and a jam tart, and (possibly) some truffles made with leftover ganache. Because I am insane, but also because doing this stuff is fun. For me. As it is for many people in the “femivore” movement, which started out about making food (or raising chickens, or gardening or baking bread) as craft or art. But an awful lot of the omnivore/locavore/femivore rhetoric is distinctly anti-Feminist (seriously, go read the article, particularly the quotes from the like of Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan, and Marguerite Manteau-Rao). In looking for a more “authentic” diet are these writers valorizing a time that never was?
Look at many of the cookbooks from the 30s, 40s, and 50s (never mind the 60s, when I, and many of the writers, were kids) and they’re full of short-cuts: use canned soup, top your casserole with deep-fried onion strings, use prepared ketchup or mayonnaise or Jell-O™ or corn flakes or instant oats. Use instant pudding. Use frozen spinach (or, even scarier, canned spinach. Have you ever had canned spinach? It’s like eating soggy green tissues). A decade before Betty Friedan put pen to paper to discuss the feminine mystique, ads in womens’ magazines touted wash-day miracles and labor-saving devices and wonderful, wonderful processed food. Because doing this stuff wasn’t a creative outlet. It was work.
There used to be a rhyme that outlined a woman’s work week: Monday (when you were rested up from your day of rest and going to church on Sunday) was laundry day. Laundry was a brutal task, involving boiling and stirring or wringing and hanging of an entire household’s clothes and linens. Tuesday was ironing day (yes, you put the iron on the stove to heat it, or on the coals of your fire if you didn’t have a stove, and yes, those irons were made of iron and weighed a young ton). Wednesday: sewing day, making your own clothes and clothes for your family, repairing, darning, stitching new sheets (yes, women hemmed and darned their sheets). Thursday: marketing, getting all the things that you couldn’t make, to last you a week. Friday: cleaning. Scrubbing on your hands and knees, polishing, beating rugs, dusting, scouring. Finally, Saturday, baking–for the week. All those pies and cake and breads–which explains a lot of recipes using “stale bread,” since by the end of the week whatever bread was left was likely to be rock-hard. And Sunday, like every day, three times a day: feed the family.
Whatever the rhetoric of feminism, women didn’t want frozen food, store-bought bread, and labor-saving devices because feminism told them they were being oppressed. They wanted these things because their work was really, really difficult and time consuming and exhausting. If these things freed some women up to do other things–run Hewlett Packard or become Secretary of State or write science fiction, that wasn’t the point. The point was to get out from under all that backbreaking, repetitive work.
Valorization of a better, simpler, more wholesome time drives me nuts. Because it’s fantasy. I love the gorgeous, candy-colored rendition of small-town turn of the last century Iowa in The Music Man, but I don’t confuse that with real life, which included diptheria, weevil-ly flour, bedbugs, and food that often teetered on the edge of spoiled. Taking on some of the tasks of yesterday, while using some of the tools of today to avoid the nastier work, and disdaining people who cannot or don’t want to do the same, is a mug’s game. It makes it all about aesthetics, when what most people 100 years ago, and many people today, are worrying about is survival.
Eat what you love, eat what is healthy, eat what you can afford and what you feel good about. Cook or eat out or call for a pizza. Grow tomatoes, spin flax, make poetry or pottery or raise llamas for the wool. It’s all good. But don’t blame Betty Friedan if you don’t like what’s for dinner.
I suspect that some of the stuff I experience everyday is about to go into my fiction. A part of this is intentional: how can I not use the hateful things people send my way because I’m Jewish and use them as triggers for vampire attacks? What vampire wouldn’t react to a really wrong insult that tells them who and what they are and gets it entirely wrong? What vampire wouldn’t get bloodlust and rage and remember how much, how very much they will always hate Bram Stoker?
And then there is the “If you don’t think like me, you do not belong.” This is hidden under other words, but it’s the useful subtext. And it explains why we do not clearly identity the vampires and werewolves in our midst, because why would they self-identity when we’ve already told them they don’t belong if we do?
The concept behind this is not new at all. It’s much easier to address the hate we experience everyday when we have vampires and werewolves and fae and other beings to act as a channel.
And that’s all I have to say this week, because this week is one of those weeks when I have a solid amount of despite targeted at me and, if I were a vampire, I would be both triggered and well-fed.
Fortunately, I am not a vampire. Why fortunately? I’m so glad you asked.
Have you ever wondered how a Jewish vampire would explain to a rabbi that they live on blood?
Imagine that you own a small, 20-acre farm in California’s Central Valley. You and your family have cultivated this land for decades, but drought, increasing costs and decreasing water availability are making each year more difficult.
Now imagine that a solar-electricity developer approaches you and presents three options:
You can lease the developer 10 acres of otherwise productive cropland, on which the developer will build an array of solar panels and sell electricity to the local power company.
You can select 1 or 2 acres of your land on which to build and operate your own solar array, using some electricity for your farm and selling the rest to the utility.
Or you can keep going as you have been, hoping your farm can somehow survive.
Thousands of farmers across the country, including in the Central Valley, are choosing one of the first two options. A 2022 survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that roughly 117,000 U.S. farm operations have some type of solar device. Our own work has identified over 6,500 solar arrays currently located on U.S. farmland.
Our study of nearly 1,000 solar arrays built on 10,000 acres of the Central Valley over the past two decades found that solar power and farming are complementing each other in farmers’ business operations. As a result, farmers are making and saving more money while using less water – helping them keep their land and livelihood.
A hotter, drier and more built-up future
Perhaps nowhere in the U.S. is farmland more valuable or more productive than California’s Central Valley. The region grows a vast array of crops, including nearly all of the nation’s production of almonds, olives and sweet rice. Using less than 1% of all farmland in the country, the Central Valley supplies a quarter of the nation’s food, including 40% of its fruits, nuts and other fresh foods.
The food, fuel and fiber that these farms produce are a bedrock of the nation’s economy, food system and way of life.
But decades of intense cultivation, urban development and climate change are squeezing farmers. Water is limited, and getting more so: A state law passed in 2014 requires farmers to further reduce their water usage by the mid-2040s.
The trade-offs of installing solar on agricultural land
When the solar arrays we studied were installed, California state solar energy policy and incentives gave farm landowners new ways to diversify their income by either leasing their land for solar arrays or building their own.
There was an obvious trade-off: Turning land used for crops to land used for solar usually means losing agricultural production. We estimated that over the 25-year life of the solar arrays, this land would have produced enough food to feed 86,000 people a year, assuming they eat 2,000 calories a day.
There was an obvious benefit, too, of clean energy: These arrays produced enough renewable electricity to power 470,000 U.S. households every year.
But the result we were hoping to identify and measure was the economic effect of shifting that land from agricultural farming to solar farming. We found that farmers who installed solar were dramatically better off than those who did not.
They were better off in two ways, the first being financially. All the farmers, whether they owned their own arrays or leased their land to others, saved money on seeds, fertilizer and other costs associated with growing and harvesting crops. They also earned money from leasing the land, offsetting farm energy bills, and selling their excess electricity.
Farmers who owned their own arrays had to pay for the panels, equipment and installation, and maintenance. But even after covering those costs, their savings and earnings added up to US$50,000 per acre of profits every year, 25 times the amount they would have earned by planting that acre.
Farmers who leased their land made much less money but still avoided costs for irrigation water and operations on that part of their farm, gaining $1,100 per acre per year – with no up-front costs.
The farmers also conserved water, which in turn supported compliance with the state’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act water use reduction requirements. Most of the solar arrays were installed on land that had previously been irrigated. We calculated that turning off irrigation on this land saved enough water every year to supply about 27 million people with drinking water or irrigate 7,500 acres of orchards. Following solar array installation, some farmers also fallowed surrounding land, perhaps enabled by the new stable income stream, which further reduced water use.
Irrigation is key to cropland productivity in California’s Central Valley. Covering some land with solar panels eliminates the need for irrigation of that area, saving water for other uses elsewhere. Citizen of the Planet/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Changes to food and energy production
Farmers in the Central Valley and elsewhere are now cultivating both food and energy. This shift can offer long-term security for farmland owners, particularly for those who install and run their own arrays.
Recent estimates suggest that converting between 1.1% and 2.4% of the country’s farmland to solar arrays would, along with other clean energy sources, generate enough electricity to eliminate the nation’s need for fossil fuel power plants.
Though many crops are part of a global market that can adjust to changes in supply, losing this farmland could affect the availability of some crops. Fortunately, farmers and landowners are finding new ways to protect farmland and food security while supporting clean energy.
Farms are much more than the land they occupy and the goods they produce. Farms are run by people with families, whose well-being depends on essential and variable resources such as water, fertilizer, fuel, electricity and crop sales. Farmers often borrow money during the planting season in hopes of making enough at harvest time to pay off the debt and keep a little profit.
Installing solar on their land can give farmers a diversified income, help them save water, and reduce the risk of bad years. That can make solar an asset to farming, not a threat to the food supply.
I’m late with this post because I’ve been wrangling antisemitism again. It’s become worse… again. And so I’m behind on things… again. The good news is that the book I’m writing on how a bunch of people see and share the Jewish history of Germany from before 1700 is reaching the end of a first draft. It may be difficult to find a publisher because things Jewish are not popular right now, but I’ve been exploring how museums and tourist places, and books, and strangers, and community presentative, and historians and archaeologists and even occasional random antisemites are part of how we see the past.
In one way, this is Gillian as she always is. My life revolves around story and history, after all.
In another way, it’s a new path, because I’ve not had the confidence to question some of our big assumptions about who we are and how we came to be. Just today I saw a comment about Ashkenazi Jews not being actually European. I want to revolt when people say things like this, because it shows how very little they know about Jewish history. Most of us were first brought into Europe by the Romans nearly 2000 years ago. Some came earlier, some came later. If we’re not European, then there are a lot of other people counted as European who are not.
The heart of Ashkenazi Jewish culture was formed in what’s now France and Germany in the Middle Ages. Our religion is from the Levant and our religious culture is from the Levant, but our popular culture and how we shape our world is European. yet there are many people who question this and yet accept eastern and central Europeans whose ancestors arrived in Europe far more recently. And I know why this is.
What I haven’t understood is how deeply I and all my teachers accepted the othering. I’m now de-accepting it and discovering that the reason I’m so comfortable analysing English and French and German history is because the heart of Ashkenaz is not only in Germany (I was there last year, exploring for the book) but even Ashkenazi Jewish educational teaching has a French and German heart.
We are both Levantine and European in equal amounts. They’re not separate things, either. There’s not a section of my European ancestral cultures that’s European and another section that is from Jerusalem. There’s a wonderful integration. Maybe I’ll explore this hen I’m finished the five big projects I’m currently engaged in. Or maybe I’ll just sit back and think, “This explains so much.” Last night I explained how much and why to a friend who is a chazan and he was mindboggled because … once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
There are so many reasons I adore research. Being mindboggled is definitely one of them. Also, it’s such a very Jewish thing to experience more and more hate and to turn to learning for comfort.
I’m traveling this week, so here’s something from 2020…
So there I was, working on a short story that took over my brain, right when I ought to be working on the book that took over my brain when I was supposed to be working on the new Sarah Tolerance book. (For those following along at home: 1) Sarah Tolerance Book < 2) Urban Fantasy Thing < 3) Short Story. This is why Madeleine cannot have nice things.)
So I want to finish this story. When its finished I can go back to #2, so I can return to #1. In aid of these goals, I’ve been writing on the train home from work. Because that means I’m writing by hand, it also means there are gaps. There are also gaps where I cannot quite figure out how to get from point A to point B (trust me, this is part of my process. Assuming I have a process). This weekend I’ve been trying to fill up the gaps, knit the thing together so I can start doing the really important stuff of going through and making all the words stack up into story order. I’ve actually written the last scene of the story–yea, even the last sentence–yet I still have this vertiginous feeling that the ending is constantly receding into the distance, as if it were trying to enact one of Xeno’s paradoxes (the one where you keep halving the distance between you and your objective, and therefore never quite reach the objective itself).
In my imagination, the ending just keeps getting up from its seat, taking ten steps back, and sitting down again. And there am I, adding more and more words to get the middle part done, and watching the ending of my story recede from sight. In my imagination, my story is taunting me each time it gets up and moves away from me. Malicious story: it’s not a happy thing to imagine.
Fortunately, I’ve been here before. At some point in almost every piece of fiction I’ve ever written, it seems the book will never end, that bits will keep appending themselves in different places, and that the whole concern will simply fall over from its sheer ungainly largeness and lie on the metaphorical floor like a dead thing.
Part of writing (or any creative process) is persevering even when every iota of your diminishing brainpower is insisting that you should have listened to your Uncle Larry and taken up air conditioning repair. Go forth and persevere.
I’m still in Eden. I leave at 7 am tomorrow and my very nice neighbour just knocked on my door and checked that all is well. I cannot get to the bus stop on foot, you see. It’s over a kilometre and all uphill. She’s lovely and is driving me. We both checked up on bus stops and we both want to make sure I’m there on time and I feel very reassured.
What have I done in Eden? First, I’ve done a truckload of research for a novel to be set here. I have two other novels to finish first, but Eden has such a lovely complex history that it makes the perfect setting. Also, it has a lovely climate, charming and chatty people and once had a Jewish whaler. The killer whales were characters of their own until they moved on for better harvests and… it’s perfect for my weird Australia. I suspected it might be, which is why I spent so much time here.
I don’t have proper access to internet (the wifi is too weak) so the big things, as I said last week, remained undone. I have, however, almost finished three short stories and completely finished 7 short pieces of non-fiction. My Monday and Tuesday will be all about editing, once all this writing is on my own computer.’
What else did I do? Besides walking as far as I could every day (I extended my physical capacity – I’d be very proud of myself if I had extended it to the distance most other people can walk, but I can now walk to my own local shops in Canberra, which is unexpected and good) and chatting with everyone and taking many, many pictures? I’ve been watching The Mysterious Cities of Gold. This was something I needed to see because it answers many questions about children’s television in Australia at about the time I stopped watching children’s television. I grew up on Astroboy and Kimba and The Samurai and The King’s Outlaw and, of course, Star Trek and Doctor Who. Anyone 15-20 years younger than me grew up on The Mysterious Cities of Gold. And other things. When I learn what those other things are, I can analyse them.
My TV viewing was, you see, work. I am trying to work out how hatred is suddenly everywhere. Why we other and mistrust and don’t see the very real lives of our neighbours. It’s very easy to see why I live in a wide world: I watched a Japanese detective series when I was still in primary school. I studied Christina Rosetti when I was in Grade Four. The weather poem was silly and Goblin Market was overwhelming for a 9 year old: I owe Mr Remenyi a lot for letting us grow through poetry. Furthermore, I could be very rude in Greek when I was in Grade Five. The antisemitism was there (it never fully goes away) but avoiding the toilets while I was at primary school and answering questions like “Why do you drink babies’ blood?” was part of a big and complicated world and wasn’t so scary. These days no-one asks. They make statements. Wrong and hateful statements. This cuts the world down in size and turns it claustrophobic. I knew not to ask questions about the childhood of anyone who wore long sleeves in summer, because they were Shoah survivors: these days I’m told all sorts of strange things about my own life. I’m waiting for one of them to be true, and then I can crow like Peter Pan. I may be waiting a while. While I wait, though, I need to understand the stories people carry from their childhoods so that I can know where all this comes from.
I know what I did and what I was taught. I do not know the same about the next generation. They’re the ones leading the hate. I need to understand them better. And I am starting in a safe place for all of us… with what TV they watched.
I am open to suggestions of what other television I need to see. It would help me immensely if you explained when what you’re suggesting was on television and where it was on television. That way I can see patterns. Patterns are far better for understanding hate than shutting the world down and deleting bits of it.
In the mid 1990s I worked for three years as an editor at Acclaim Comics. It was a fun job, and a frustrating job, and I loved it–I had been a comic book reader as a kid, my brother had been working as a letterer for over a decade, so I had some prior exposure to the world of comics. It all seemed to be fated… until Acclaim Comics’ parent company (which had, um, not been managed well) went under and took the comic company out as well. So I found myself unemployed, and took up La Vie Boheme Freelance. Since I had two young kids, this actually worked out pretty well.
One of the weekly routines I fell into was lunching with a bunch of friends who also worked in publishing/comics on Wednesdays at the Malibu Diner on 23rd Street (down the block from a good comic book shop, so that after lunch people could stroll down and pick up that week’s new comics). One of the Malibuvians (as we styled ourselves) was Keith DeCandido, who was then the editor for a line of Marvel Comics tie-in novels. And I was a freelancer, looking for work. When I said as much at lunch one day, Keith asked me who my favorite Marvel character was. “Daredevil,” I said without hesitation. Alas, he had a Daredevil novel in the pipes, but he promised to remember me for the next time Daredevil came up in the rotation. We finished our lunch. Life went on much as usual.
Until a couple of weeks later when he called me: the writer for his Daredevil novel had to drop out and how quickly could I get a detailed (like chapter-level, if not scene level) outline to him, and it had to be by the beginning of July (it was then mid-June). So I wrote a 30 page outline, detailed to the chapter and sometimes the scene level.
It was excruciating: I am, by nature, a semi-pantser: usually I write 20-40,000 words on a book and then I write an outline to tell me where I’m going to go from there. Sometimes the outline is as simple as four or five beats. Chapters? They’ll be in there somewhere. Scenes? Likewise. But Marvel wants what Marvel wants, and I wanted the gig. So I did it, turned it in. Keith called me back and said “Looks pretty good. I suspect they’re going to want this and this thrown in, but otherwise… start writing, and when the approval comes in I’ll tell you if there are any changes.
I started writing. I finished the book at the beginning of September, turned it in to Keith, and we got the approval of the outline two weeks later. Adjustments were made, Daredevil: The Cutting Edge was accepted, we all went along with our lives. That’s the cover featured above. (You will note there is neither a title for the book nor the author’s name… everyone was so in love with the art that they kind of forgot those essentials. Ah, well. My name made it to the spine.)
What did I learn from this? Well, I learned that I can write an 80,000 word book in two months. But what I really learned is something that still marks my writing.
Daredevil, if superhero comics or TV or movies are not your jam, is a character who is blind. Stan Lee took the old cliche about a blind person’s other senses improving to compensate for the deficit and put it on steroids. As a kid Matt Murdock was hit by a truck hauling chemical waste through Manhattan; the accident took his sight, but somehow the chemical muck with which he was spattered augmented his senses. So every time Matt (who becomes Daredevil) walks into a room he can hear and smell, and taste, and feel everything that is going on around him. He knows where an adversary is by listening for a heartbeat–but also for the disturbances of the air through which the adversary is moving. He can tell what someone had for breakfast by the scent of eggs and ketchup on the guy’s breath, or on his tie. He has learned to sift through all the input of his heightened senses to get information that he can use, not just to navigate the world as a blind man, but to kick ass as a superhero.
What this meant for me as a writer was that I had to put in the sensory cues when Matt walked into a room or Daredevil confronted a villain. So for the two months I was writing the book, every time I walked into a room, or went around a corner, if I smelled or heard something, I found myself trying to parse it. Not just “that’s a smelly alleyway” but “cat urine, damp earth, brick dust, ammonia cleaning products.” Not just “noisy room” but which voices were dominant, and what the other sounds–an elevator moving behind the walls, traffic noise wafting up from the street–were. Tastes. Textures. Proprioception (very important when you’re a blind superhero fighting with others in a variety of settings).
Writing this book required that I confront, in a sense, my privilege as a sighted, and sight-centered person. And I’ve carried the lessons I learned with me since then. Perhaps it’s particularly important to me because a lot of the writing I’ve done since Daredevil takes place in a different time and place from our own. There’s nothing like smell, for example, for creating a place that is then: every hired carriage Sarah Tolerance gets into has its own, usually unpleasant, galaxy of smells. So does every large group of people, particularly in a time and place when daily or weekly bathing was the exception rather than the rule. Working on the Daredevil book reminded me that everyone has, not only a unique look, but a unique smell. That a voice is not just a tone or a timbre, but is shaped by a variety of factors including the speaker’s health and upbringing. That the surface of skin is composed, not just of the skin itself, but of the substances–sweat, oil, cosmetics, medicines–that may be on the skin, and their scents.
As an exercise, try writing a scene where the descriptors are all about sound and touch and taste and smell (and proprioception, if that seems a useful tool). It will feel awkward at first, especially in terms of describing a character physically. If Daredevil confronts a guy who is unkempt, maybe getting over a hangover, and trying to avoid giving some information about something he’s witnessed, he won’t be able to say whether the guy is blond or brunette, but he can judge his height and weight, smell the sour taste of stale alcohol on his clothes and his breath, and hear the heightened heartbeat that suggests he’s lying.
Try it. It’s just one more useful tool in a writer’s box.
I have for been several weeks preparing four books for publication: re-releases of the first three Sarah Tolerance Mysteries, to be followed a month later by the release of The Doxies Penalty, the fourth in the series. Because I’m publishing with an independent micro-press, I’m doing a lot of the production work myself, which means I have been engaging with my own text up close and personal.
The good news? I still like all four books. I can find passages that give me pleasure (and have found comparatively few that make me wince and say “what was the Author thinking?” This is not always the case when looking over your old work. But of course, as I read, I notice things. Like,” damn, the Author uses a lot of em-dashes.”
A thing to know about me: my major in college was theatre, and while I mostly did behind-the-scenes stuff (props and costumes and especially stage management) I did a good deal of performing. Having read a lot of plays and thought in terms of performance then, when I’m writing now I think in terms of the weight and rhythm of words as they’re spoken aloud. If I’m reading my own work I want markers, flags for performance. Thus em-dashes, which I think are most useful pieces of punctuation for capturing the rhythm of the way people speak.
Much as I love Jane Austen’s books, in real life people rarely speak in full sentences. People interrupt themselves–and others–all the time. For people interrupting themselves, I suppose one could use the parenthesis (another of my favorite forms of punctuation). But because there’s usually an imperative quality to interruptions, and abruptness, I prefer em-dashes.
Here’s a bit from my new Sarah Tolerance book, The Doxies’ Penalty:
“I would think you’d prefer to hand him to Sir Walter—”
“In the general way, we’d find ‘im some justice from our own—if ‘e’s one of ours. Look, I cannot promise to look out for the fellow, nor give him up, without I ask a blessing to it.”
There’s an interruption of the first speaker, which really demands an em-dash. And the second speaker interrupting himself to qualify what he’s saying. I could, in justice, use a comma to set off “if ‘e’s one of ours.” But the comma doesn’t imply the sort of emphasis that self-interruption usually requires.
You could say that I’m leaving myself—and other performers—information on how to read the words, aloud or otherwise.
When I was doing a final pass on the manuscript for Doxies I did a search for the old-style double-hyphen which (in typewriter days) stood in for an em-dash, which would be added later in typesetting. Because sometimes I use a double hyphen rather than Option-Shift-Hyphen (on a Mac keyboard). And inevitably I find some. I also find inconsistent spacing around my em-dashes, and other typographic horrors requiring repair. I am closing in on my deadline to hand the MS over to the formatter, and I want to make their work as pain-free as possible.
If all goes well, The Doxies Penalty, Sarah Tolerance #4, will be available mid-October.* And yes, that was a plug. When you’re working with a micr0-press you also have to pitch in on marketing where you can.
__________
*The first three books in the series, Point of Honour, Petty Treason, and The Sleeping Partner, will be re-released in September. See comment above about marketing.
I gave a paper on him at the International Robin Hood Conference on Friday and he’s still nagging me. There’s a vast and deep discrepancy about what we know about his life from documents of the time and the rather fun story written about him after his death. Why did I give a paper about Mr Busket at a Robin Hood conference? Eustace Busket, who was most commonly known as Eustace the Monk, was quite possibly a source of a series of Robin Hood anecdotes. It was very cold the day of the conference, and, although I was at my computer, my brain kept turning “Eustace” into “Useless.” This is hilariously wrong. Eustace was a bunch of things but useless was not one of them.
I described him in my paper as “not merely a once-a-monk. He was also Eustace the pirate or Eustace the traitor or Eustace the genius sailor and courtier and leader of men or Eustace the much-hated.” He lived from around 1170 and died in 1217.
Eustace knew John when John was king of England, and John’s rivals across the channel. He worked for one and then the other and then he swung back again. His moment of greatest glory was probably when he controlled the English Channel through residence on the isle of Sark, and his moment of least glory was when he died. It wasn’t just that he died, you see. A contemporary chronicler explains that he was found hiding in the bilges. Normally one did not execute rich and noble folk captured in battle (one ransomed them for money) but Eustace was not well-loved and it’s quite possible his executioner bore him a personal grudge.
Eustace lived story and his thirteenth century biography doesn’t echo this at all. Historians talk about him as a colourful character, but only a couple have looked into his work at sea. Those few have pointed that that he was an extraordinarily important and skilled naval officer. He was the person Louis (son of the French king) employed for an attempt to invade England.
Understanding Eustace helps me understand two things. One is the nature of politics in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century and how the volatility and sometimes sheer craziness of those politics worked. The other is my usual area of how stories told about someone tell us a great deal about the nature of stories and how they work in a given place and time. While this latter statement is true of any story, Eustace’s is special. Because of the fascinating discrepancies between Eustace’s life and the story told about him after his death, and because Eustace faded from popular story when Robin Hood came on the scene, Eustace tells me more than most. In his story he was a trickster, like Merlin and an outlaw, like his contemporary Fulk Fitz-warin. This points to one thing that the real Eustace and the fictional Eustace had in common: they undermined and disrupted others’ lives.
I’m giving my Patreon folk my whole conference paper to cogitate upon, but this is, I suspect not the end of my adventure with Eustace. I don’t have time now, but I will return to him one day.
Or at least my writing.