A fun place to play

Some time ago, I started reading the Making Light blog, because a number of people I admired on rec.arts.sf.composition had been mentioning it (and, in some cases, had more or less left rasfc to go hang out there instead). It took me quite a while to work up the nerve (and find the right context) to post some comments there myself, since it has a very definite feel of a tight-knit community and ... well, you know me and how talented I am at breaking into new social circles. (Not.) But periodically there are random creative-writing threads where people start riffing on some theme and you just have to stare in awe at the casual talent abounding there. (This is somewhat of a self-serving observation, given that it was a couple of these threads that finally gave me an opening to contribute and introduce myself there.) Currently, there is a thread that ... well, to say anything more specific in advance would spoil some of the fun. But I shall merely say that if you like literature and poetry and have a playful sense of humor, you are unlikely to hate me if you follow my suggestion to check it out.

Review: The Watsons & Emma Watson

As I have mentioned on previous occasions, I'm not only a serious Jane Austen fan, but have a possibly unhealthy fascination with Austen "fan fiction" of various flavors. So it was a natural reflex to pick up a copy of The Watsons & Emma Watson, an unfinished Austen fragment worked up into a completed story by Joan Aiken, whose forays into this genre I had not previously noted.

I suppose it is every successful novelist's nightmare that, after their death, an industry will spring up to exploit their every sketch and abandoned draft. This, of course, is what fireplaces are for, though later fans are always grateful when they aren't used. It's hard to know what might have come of this fragment if Austen herself had returned to it and redeemed by a happy ending a protagonist whose life perhaps hit a little too close to home. All I know is that, having read past the Austen segment and two chapters into the Aiken work-up, I find myself completely uninterested in proceeding. It isn't that the character couldn't be made interesting -- she has every bit as much potential as other Austen heroines. But Aiken's writing is, to me, hopelessly pedestrian, awkward, and infused with "the researcher's disease". This last was obvious from the first page where the title character and her sister Elizabeth are doing the laundry together and we get an excruciatingly detailed catalog of Regency stain-removal approaches:

'Indeed yes!' agreed her sister Elizabeth, briskly giving a stir to various tubs of laundry soaking in solutions of household soda and unslaked lime. 'Those cloths you have there, Emma, can go straight into the copper, unless any of them is badly stained.'

'Only this handkerchief of my father's, which as ink on it.'

'Spread it out in a pan of oxalic acid. Or spirits of sorrel. You will find the bottles next door, on the shelf.'

To be fair, no other passages have been quite so egregious, but it was an inauspicious start. So Thursday evening, when I decided to go off and get a somewhat-overdue haircut, I went looking for a book to take with me for the waiting room and the post-haircut sushi that is part of my ritual (one of my favorite sushi places being a couple of blocks from where I get my hair cut). And given that I found myself rejecting The Watsons for casual restaurant reading, I concluded that I should acknowledge the failure and move on to a more deserving member of my to-read stack. (Whereupon I finally started Jo Walton's Farthing and immediately became hooked.)

Oh, and the sushi place? Has gone downhill since changing management recently. The quality of the fish was lacking; the crab nigiri that were my favorite were absent; and the place was infested with screaming children, including one who was being allowed to randomly snatch trays off the sushi boats that were then returned to the display by a parent. Well, there are plenty of other fish-houses in the sea.