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Sep. 13th, 2012 11:23 amI know I'm running messages today, for it's wet. I'm sorely tempted to put them off until tomorrow, except that tomorrow is supposed to be my quiet day. It's going to be a busy weekend, you see. Except...I don't want to walk in the rain today. So, tomorrow.
This means that I have the whole afternoon to write an article and to do one more stage of Medievalishness, then I teach, and then I wonder whether I can slack off this evening. Which I can't, for I need to get most things done by Rosh Hashanah, and from Saturday lunchtime until Monday there will be no writing time. How odd.
On a related note, Google-docs has changed and I have lost my password. Google always changes things and then I lose passwords. I wish Google weren't so many peoples' default for shared work! Dropbox is a lot easier.
On another related note (the cause of the need for document access) I will be part of Coyote Con again this year. It's much smaller, but looks as if it's going to be fun. It has the same great advantage as last time: it's all online. That's the end of October.
In November I'll be in Melbourne and giving a paper at a gender conference. It's called "The Gender Games: Stories in the Contemporary World" and I shall be looking at how gender choices affect worldbuilding in a particular writer. I do not expect to make myself popular with this paper, but I'm glad to have found it a home.
In February I'll be giving a paper at AMZAMEMS, which I've already said at least once. I've been nervous of even turning up to ANZAMEMS for so long that even though I've been a member for many years, I've never been to the conference. Finally, this will change. If any of my old teachers express surprise at my strange career, though, I might find the nearest bar. So many of us born the year I was born have had strange careers, for a series of changes hit us worse than they hit most others. We had great educational opportunities, but so few job prospects that I look back now (when so many people are telling me "There are no jobs" because, really, there's been some nasty shrinkage recently) and thinking "This is still ten times better than when I finished my first doctorate."
If anyone thinks they saw me at ANZAMEMS in Tasmania, I will have to say (for about the twentieth time) "That wasn't me, it was a paper about my book." I still find it curious that so many people (some of whom know me) confuse a paper with an actual person. It shows how memory operates. Or that we notice names more than people unless we actually sit down with them and exchange personal stories. Or maybe I really am a paper and just didn't know it.
It was a very good paper, BTW. The scholar in question got all but one thing entirely right. The thing she got wrong was assuming that the story was autobiographical. Lots of people get this wrong about my writing, however. The bits that are autobiographical have so far escaped comment and the bits that aren't have been clearly pointed out as part of my life. Something in my fiction blurs these boundaries beyond the capacity of even people who know me well to sort out, so it's not surprising the paper got that one thing wrong. Even my mother tangles my fiction and my reality at times.
What the paper in Tasmania got entirely right was the subtext of historiography that underpins the novel's worldbuilding. It was quite an evil subtext, and I wrote it for me and didn't try to make it terribly easy for readers to pick up. In fact, I didn't really *want* most readers to pick it up: I wanted the book to be read as a straightforward adventure with touches of comedy. I was being quite wicked in Illuminations and telling a story that was - at heart - worse than unreliable, and I was pointing out a bunch of idiot mistakes that certain historians make over and over. If the paper gets published one day, I might find myself in well-deserved hot water...
And now I must return to the Middle Ages. My work until lunchtime is about manners and behaviour in polite society. I might quickly finish the edit of an article first, and get that sent off, though. That will mean I move from weapons and armour to courtesy, which, as a direction, has a nice feel.
This means that I have the whole afternoon to write an article and to do one more stage of Medievalishness, then I teach, and then I wonder whether I can slack off this evening. Which I can't, for I need to get most things done by Rosh Hashanah, and from Saturday lunchtime until Monday there will be no writing time. How odd.
On a related note, Google-docs has changed and I have lost my password. Google always changes things and then I lose passwords. I wish Google weren't so many peoples' default for shared work! Dropbox is a lot easier.
On another related note (the cause of the need for document access) I will be part of Coyote Con again this year. It's much smaller, but looks as if it's going to be fun. It has the same great advantage as last time: it's all online. That's the end of October.
In November I'll be in Melbourne and giving a paper at a gender conference. It's called "The Gender Games: Stories in the Contemporary World" and I shall be looking at how gender choices affect worldbuilding in a particular writer. I do not expect to make myself popular with this paper, but I'm glad to have found it a home.
In February I'll be giving a paper at AMZAMEMS, which I've already said at least once. I've been nervous of even turning up to ANZAMEMS for so long that even though I've been a member for many years, I've never been to the conference. Finally, this will change. If any of my old teachers express surprise at my strange career, though, I might find the nearest bar. So many of us born the year I was born have had strange careers, for a series of changes hit us worse than they hit most others. We had great educational opportunities, but so few job prospects that I look back now (when so many people are telling me "There are no jobs" because, really, there's been some nasty shrinkage recently) and thinking "This is still ten times better than when I finished my first doctorate."
If anyone thinks they saw me at ANZAMEMS in Tasmania, I will have to say (for about the twentieth time) "That wasn't me, it was a paper about my book." I still find it curious that so many people (some of whom know me) confuse a paper with an actual person. It shows how memory operates. Or that we notice names more than people unless we actually sit down with them and exchange personal stories. Or maybe I really am a paper and just didn't know it.
It was a very good paper, BTW. The scholar in question got all but one thing entirely right. The thing she got wrong was assuming that the story was autobiographical. Lots of people get this wrong about my writing, however. The bits that are autobiographical have so far escaped comment and the bits that aren't have been clearly pointed out as part of my life. Something in my fiction blurs these boundaries beyond the capacity of even people who know me well to sort out, so it's not surprising the paper got that one thing wrong. Even my mother tangles my fiction and my reality at times.
What the paper in Tasmania got entirely right was the subtext of historiography that underpins the novel's worldbuilding. It was quite an evil subtext, and I wrote it for me and didn't try to make it terribly easy for readers to pick up. In fact, I didn't really *want* most readers to pick it up: I wanted the book to be read as a straightforward adventure with touches of comedy. I was being quite wicked in Illuminations and telling a story that was - at heart - worse than unreliable, and I was pointing out a bunch of idiot mistakes that certain historians make over and over. If the paper gets published one day, I might find myself in well-deserved hot water...
And now I must return to the Middle Ages. My work until lunchtime is about manners and behaviour in polite society. I might quickly finish the edit of an article first, and get that sent off, though. That will mean I move from weapons and armour to courtesy, which, as a direction, has a nice feel.