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DEAR READER
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@jabbage
me when asked about sam and frodo: their relationship pushes beyond the strict boundaries of platonic versus romantic love, creating a uniquely beautiful narrative about devotion and respect as they bond together through the obstacles of corruption and war-
also me: of course gimli and legolas fuck why is that even a question
"At this time! In this place!" 🪻🥚 Happy Glorious 25th of May to those who celebrate. GNU Terry Pratchett
no nuance you have to decide
would jeeves have succumbed to the one ring?
no, he would diminish and go into the west and remain a valet
yes, he can't resist such power (burn bertie's ugliest trousers)
the ring has no effect on him, tom bombadil style
4 days left in the most important 'thoughts had just before going to sleep' poll I've ever made
"Well, Jeeves," I said, "That seems to be that."
"A consummation greatly desired," Jeeves agreed.
"The forces of darkness vanquished, the rightful king upon his throne, and all that. And, even more importantly, Tuppy Glossop disengaged from that horsy female and returned to the bosom of my cousin Angela."
"Indeed, sir."
"Rather a shock running into the Reverend Aubry Upjohn riding that fell beast, what?"
"I though you displayed great alacrity in relocating to that ditch in the nick of time, sir."
Far below us, the molten lava did a rather spirited impersonation of boiling soup. I mopped the p. off the b. with a handkerchief I'd improvised from an orc loincloth. I had been to some deuced uncomfortable country estates in my time, don't you know, but at least there one had been able to toddle downstairs and pour oneself a quick W. and S. as needed to stiffen the sinews. Galadriel's Buck-U-Uppo was excellent at vitalizing the limbs to forge on the last dreadful mile and all that, but it lacked the comfort that speaks to the soul.
I contemplated the glowing river. "Redirecting the army of Aunts to that Isengard place was a stroke of brilliance, I thought."
"You are too kind, sir."
"Still, all things must end, as they say. Travel is broadening to the mind and all, but it is past time to attend the call of heart and home. Among other considerations, I think something took residence inside this mithril shirt somewhere around the Morgul Vale and has been wandering about biting hither and thither ever since, and I am filled with the desire to strip it off and do battle with the blighted thing."
"Understandable, sir."
"I heard rather a good one the other day: Sing hey! for the bath at close of day that washes the weary mud away! -and by Jove if I don't think they were on to something, Jeeves."
"It is undeniably felicitous to be surrounded by the comforts of home," he assented, and yet I couldn't escape a certain sense of firmness about his gaze.
I sighed, for I knew what he wanted. Well, I mean, I'm all for taking a firm stance and not being trodden on in one's own home and all, but as far as rallying around to save the young master goes, none could have rallied more greatly than Jeeves. If a little firmness was the price I had to pay, well, so be it.
Slowly I undid the old school tie from around my neck. It was harder work than one would have thought; as if it could hear what was rattling around in the old brain, the ring that was threaded on it put in a last surge of effort in the gleaming and enticement department, filling my mind with heady visions: Freddie Widgeon gnashing his teeth as I sank yet another dart into the bullseye, Aunt Agatha wreathed in tears and begging my forgiveness for ever having misjudged me, Jeeves gazing admiringly as I displayed my newest waistcoat for his edification…
It was the last that broke the spell. Cursed objects of all-consuming power were all well and good in their sphere, but there were limits, don't you know? And yet I hesitated. "You don't think I could slip it on and just have a quick total domination of the world before I toddle around to the Drones for a stiff one?"
Jeeves gave a gentle cough of reproof. "I think you will find it for the best, sir."
It was a wrench, but one could not deny the man had earned it. With a heavy hand, I held the ring out to him. "Take it, then. You will know what do with it, I'm sure."
He took it from me with the sort of shimmer that showed he was exceptionally gratified. "Thank you, sir."
I watched as the ring fell from his hand into the depths below. It hit the lava and rested there for a moment before slowly sinking beneath the glowing surface, and as they caught fire I almost felt that the Old Etonian colors glowed brighter in approval. That Wooster, they seemed to say: not much in the brains department, but he gets the job done.
Outside, there came a hideous wailing as of something ages old abruptly losing the power which bound it to this mortal plain and all that, which I took as our signal to leg it down the nearest drainpipe before things got sticky. The road goes ever on and on, what? Yet I paused there, at the end of all things, because some things have to be said.
"No, thank you, Jeeves."
THANK YOU for understanding the assignment, bally good work, this.
Oh thank god in all his heavens, finally a spot of mashup writing on this website that understands both works it is engaging with to a degree of articulate comprehension.
People on the internet love to criticize work by Some Guy putting stuff up online for free like it's made by Disney Studios, and talk about Disney movies like they're made by their personal friend Amy, who is just trying her best,
I loved running Letters from Watson, so many good things came from it, but I was thinking today how it exposed me to the raw coalface of the internet in a way I really wasn't prepared for, and it was pretty stressful.
I had people saying I was anti-Semitic for sharing texts contained antisemitic attitudes, or racist for not explicitly noting within the emails themselves that the racism within the text is morally wrong. At one point someone was saying I'd said things I simply had not, and was stirring people up against me. At the same time I also had conservative Americans emailing me and accusing me of disgusting censorship for including content warnings (and being quite personal about it).
The things I blogged about on my personal blog were suddenly being scrutinised too. I used to share a lot of reaction GIFs of the actor Vasily Livanov who played Sherlock Holmes in the 70s, but when I heard he was still around and using the credibility his famous role earned him to support the invasion of Ukraine, I apologised in case me using him as a Wacky Meme had hurt anyone, and said I'd stop posting the GIFs. Suddenly I'd annoyed a bunch of vocal Russian Holmes fans who felt I was being performative, and another group of Ukrainian Holmes fans who felt that the GIFs in combination with me mentioning taking a handful of Russian classes (for my job, mind you) made me a Russophile. Someone still periodically anonymously sends me a YouTube video of the Russian national anthem, and I have no idea what they're accusing me of.
Literature is inherently steeped in politics, and I've been on the internet long enough to know that it can be a toxic place, but I wasn't expecting the act of sending out a public domain text would thrust me into these issues, and expose me in the way it did.
I think it's because I accidentally became an avatar of powerful men, but I am not a powerful man (I'm a queer woman). Watson is fictional, Doyle is dead, Livanov is inaccessible, but I was available, and I'm a gentle person who doesn't like to fight. It was safe take things out on me.
Safe for other people, I mean. It wasn't great for me.
It's been years, and I'm still kind of scared to talk about any of this in case it stirs any of it up again.
So, yeah . I could write a much longer piece on the good things which came from it, but I'm hoping the internet doesn't catch me in it's net like that again.
(Do we think Matt Kirkland gets this with Dracula Daily, or...?)
Gérard Philipe as Méphistophélès in La Beauté du Diable (Beauty and the Devil) by René Clair, 1950
obviously this is AI generated slop but I keep laughing at ophelia labeled “hamlet’s brother”
very interested in the 523 likes in the corner supporting this groundbreaking interpretation of ophelia
king blyssffsttt my good friend king blyssffsttt
HAMLET My brother? KING BLYSSFFSTTT No, the other Ophelia
i'm going to be honest, i was shocked when i first read a scandal in bohemia to learn that irene adler appears in only one story. all she wanted to do was BE FREE to be with her HUSBAND who she LOVED and YET so many modern adaptations decide to drag her back in to be holmes' love interest. they saw one woman that sherlock holmes NEVER EVEN had a real conversation with and decided that she must be the love of his life, ignoring the ENTIRE first paragraph of the story about her and also everything about sherlock holmes. i honestly thought she was a recurring character in the original novels because of how much emphasis is put on her in adaptations (likely to distract from the tangible homoeroticism between holmes and watson that, no matter how they try to delete it, simply cannot stop appearing in their scripts)
Good job, Bertie, you finally did it. You broke Jeeves.
this makes me want to cry
First of all, “…they were surrounded on all sides by echoes and images of themselves, in a world where image and object had not yet torn themselves apart” is one of the most poetic phrasings I’ve ever heard.
Second, here’s the original source, “What the caves are trying to tell us” by Sam Kriss.
Third, the original opens with: “Every so often, I get the urge to drag someone into a cave, and show them something unspeakable.”
I had another point, but it got lost in the artful prose of this article.
I feel like “every so often, I get the urge to drag someone into a cave and show them something unspeakable” is something that’s okay for a paleolithic cave art expert to say, but like, absolutely no one else
"sir, ya tell me dat the pellet with the poison's in the vessel with the pestle, is that right? and so tha chalice from the palace has the brew dat is true...say, wait a minute. that couldn't be right! it's jus' that they broke the chalice from the palace, ya see? so dat means the pellet with the poison's, in the er, uh, lemme think about tis for a momen'...hey, i got it! tha pellet wit da poison's in the flagon with the dragon and the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true! gee whiz, an' i thought gettin' my morning joe in was a hassle..."
I've just finished To Say Nothing of the Dog and it was just as excellent as I had hoped for and I was already completely enamored with Doomsday Book
Now, I have follow up questions:
- Without spoilers please, is the Blitz duology as good as the first two books in the series ? It seems more divisive but I'm interested in your opinion (well, in any case, I'm likely going to look for used copies to make my own, but it's always nice to hear what others think)
– By the way another book in the series is planned for 2027 –
- Are there other Willis' novels (I know she also wrote short-stories but I'm more into full length novels lately) you've liked ? Which ones ? I really do enjoy her writing and may give them a try
Thank you for sharing!
I haven't yet read Doomsday Book, but I personally think Blackout/All Clear is better than To Say Nothing of The Dog. Very different vibes though! Dog is much lighter - Blackout/All Clear is very serious (WWII), but I learnt so much history from it and I love how it weaves different time travellers stories together. Agree with the commenter who said it is one long novel, so have All Clear ready to go for when you finish Blackout!
I'm really looking forward to the new book 😊
Thanks!
Doomsday Book -that deals with pandemics- also has much somber vibes but I love it to bits.
I love Connie Willis' books because they're so well researched and I learn so much stuff reading them. Especially since it's UK history and I'm less used to it. Also, I learnt quite a few words while reading it: penwipers, jumble sales, bird's stump, coconut shy...
I'll make sure of it! I can't wait to read it!
:D
I think To Say Nothing of the Dog is my favorite in the series, but I do think that Blackout and All Clear are very, very good as well. The above commenter is correct in saying the tone is more serious, but I'd say it's still less tragic than Doomsday Book. And Colin returns! (Not a spoiler, he's on page one.) If you've been able to get your hands on the Firewatch short story, I'd say that's the general vibe you should expect.
I'm on the edge of my seat waiting for The Spanner in the Works to be released next year
Thank you for telling me! As much as I love Doomsday Book, it's a true emotional wreck and I wondered if I needed to be prepared for Blackout (as in, read it during sunny days in full delight instead of at night like I did with To Say Nothing of the Dog)
I've heard about Colin and I'm very happy about it! I love Colin!
Oh right, there are short stories! I'll try to hunt them down too eventually!
I've read the summary and I can't wait for it too, it seems fantastic!
I'd call it serious but hopeful
I think "Firewatch" is actually the only short story in the collection (also titled Firewatch) that takes place in the Oxford Time Travel universe, though it's been a while since I read them all. But iirc you only have the one short story to track down (I enjoyed the other stories in the collection too though, especially "Blued Moon")!
Oh, I'm SO excited to see this post, because I have MANY thoughts on this and nobody else I know has read multiple of the Oxford Time Travel series.
I am, however, going to be rather more critical than the other people here, which I hope doesn't come across as trying to spoil anyone's fun. I do count myself as a fan of Connie Willis; it's very possible that To Say Nothing of the Dog is the book I've read more times than any other as an adult, and I read Doomsday Book for the first time in high school and loved it (and read it again during early lockdown and was gobsmacked by how prescient it was).
But Willis is probably the one writer, by a wide margin, whom I have the MOST mixed feelings about. The good parts of her work are incredibly good, but she also has a great number of very frustrating weaknesses, and these weaknesses become much more noticeable in Blackout/All Clear than they were in the previous two books because it's so long (and, to be honest, a bit repetitive). I'd like to quickly give a disclaimer that it's been... almost seven years? since I last read Blackout/All Clear (the other two I've reread more recently), so my recollection of the details may be patchy, and if anyone notices that something I said was wrong, feel free to correct me.
Good things first, one of the best parts of Willis' writing is the historical settings that she does an immense amount of research to make as accurate as possible. This really struck me the first time I read Doomsday Book; when Kivrin goes back to the Middle Ages, you feel like you're there. She includes so much fine detail, particularly sensory detail, that it's totally immersive AND you feel like you're learning about the past. This is especially true of Blackout/All Clear, for which she actually went to England and interviewed people who had been shop girls, ambulance drivers, etc. during the Blitz in London.
My other favorite thing about WIllis' work is the time travel system she set up, and in particular the concept of slippage and the timeline protecting itself. To Say Nothing of the Dog literally changed the way I think about history; I was so fascinated by her explanations of how massive events can turn on tiny, easily-overlooked details. Loads of writers have done the "step on a butterfly, Germany wins WWII" plot, but Willis actually provided a plausible chain of events for how a cat going missing in the Victorian era could actually endanger the outcome of the war.
The time travel system is developed more in B/AC, though to be honest, I found some of the directions she went with it in this book a bit... I guess I'll say "dubious" (more on this later). To be fair, I recently reread To Say Nothing of the Dog, and that made me realize that I'd been somewhat unfair to B/AC for a while. Without spoilers, I thought that they had basically learned the same lesson about time travel at the end of B/AC that they did at the end of TSNotD, but I've now realized that the lesson is similar but different enough to actually constitute a new piece of the Understanding Time Travel puzzle.
Now the negatives; these are things that tend to be present in all of Willis' books, but again, are more noticeable here because of the length. Some of these are just mildly annoying, but others can actually be something of a problem for the storytelling. My original plan was to make a bulleted list in rough ascending order of how much they bother me personally, but then some of the bullets got long enough that they needed full paragraphs, so I'm doing it this way. I'll try for no spoilers, but if there's anything I think could count as a spoiler I'll put it in rot13.
Characters
In my opinion, characterization as a general category is Willis's biggest weakness as a writer. Within this category, my biggest issue is that her protagonists are not really characters, they're vehicles for the plot. This is something she could largely get away with in the previous two books because the plot was so much the main focus. In TSNotD, your attention is captured by the zany madcap shenanigans and interlocking mysteries, and in Doomsday Book, you're so caught up in the tension of what'll happen to the medieval village and whether they'll be able to get Kivrin out that I legitimately didn't notice until WELL after I'd finished it that I don't know a single thing about who Kivrin is as a person.
I'll keep using Kivrin as an example because the nature of Doomsday Book makes her really illustrative of this. I mean, we can gather that she has a few broad personality traits; we can assume she's tenacious and intelligent because she had to convince her department to let her go to the medieval period when no one else had done that before, and she grows to care a lot about the medieval villagers, so we could say she's compassionate. But she doesn't really have any interiority or distinctive quirks that bring her to life. Does she have any interests other than medieval history? Does she have hobbies or friends? She literally believes that she's going to be trapped in the Middle Ages for the rest of her life, and not ONCE does she think about any friends or family members back home she's scared she'll never see again.
Now, again, in a book like Doomsday Book, this isn't the worst thing. The book is really about the two epidemics and the medieval society, not Kivrin, and having her be such a blank slate might make it easier for readers to project themselves onto her, which could make that sense of Really Being There even stronger. But in B/AC it becomes a real problem, because not only are there three main characters (two women and one man), it also has a somewhat non-linear plot structure, and two of the three leads have multiple secret identities with different names. So not only did it take me ages to consistently remember which female protagonist was which, because the only discernible difference between them is that one is more experienced with time travel than the other, sometimes it would randomly cut to a different character in a different year with a different name. Who I would presume was one of the already-named characters, but it was really hard to tell, because none of them had any strong personality traits or a distinctive thing they would do that would clue me in that "oh, it's you!! I know you, of course!!"
Credit where credit is due, Willis, has created some good secondary characters in her work - Father Roche in Doomsday Book and TJ in TSNotD are good examples - but she often runs into problems here as well. My first bullet point was originally going to be "Running jokes that continue to be beaten to death long after they stop being funny, and a specific subcategory of this: one-dimensional joke characters who have one or two character traits and exist solely to be annoying," so I'll just put that here (not to be parasocial, but every time I read a Connie Willis book, I have to wonder if perhaps she has a mother-in-law she hates, because there's always at least one older woman character whose entire personality is "shrill and unreasonably demanding." And often there's more than one). And then some secondary characters, e.g. Mr. Dunworthy, just have the same issue as the protagonists of being more or less blank slates, or they're just archetypes of a certain concept of a person Willis wants to represent, like the everyday heroes of the Blitz.
Politics?
I wasn't really sure what to name this section, and it'll probably be where I tie in a bunch of miscellaneous points that didn't fit anywhere else, but the political perspective in Willis' books fascinates and compels me, in a mildly frustrating sort of way. I'll probably put some subheadings in here too.
I don't know anything about Willis' personal political beliefs, and those matter less than what's actually in the text anyway, but one thing we DO know about her is that she's a Christian, and when you read her work, you can tell. I'm not just referring to stuff like the vicar's wife in TSNotD sniffily sniffing about the decreasing importance of religion in everyday life, though that too, I mean the fact that you could replace "the timeline" with "God" at the end of TSNotD and it would read almost exactly the same. And that's fine, there's nothing wrong with being a Christian, and a Christian perspective isn't automatically a conservative one, but in the case of Willis' work... I feel like it kind of is? Conservative-leaning, at the very least. "Let's not change society it's fine the way it is."
The next subheading is more minor, but I'm putting it first because it'll lead into the one that follows:
Heterosexuality
This definitely falls more into the "minor annoyance" category and I'm being very petty in bringing it up, but oh my GOD, once you notice it you will never stop noticing it (I'm sorry if you hadn't already noticed it before now).
Listen, I have no problem with straight characters in my media. I am not among those who think heterosexuality is automatically boring; straight characters and relationships can be written in a way that's interesting to me. But Connie Willis shoves heterosexuality down her readers' throats the way homophobes think gay media shoves gayness down their throats, to a degree I've never seen before, and it's at its very Most in B/AC. And it is SO fucking boring.
It seems like every single time a female protagonist meets a male contemp or a male protagonist meets a female contemp, the contemp either has to show a romantic interest in the protagonist (which the protagonist will have to find a way to tactfully reject on account of being a time traveler) or assume that the protagonist has a romantic interest in them and tell them that they're not available (and the protagonist will have to pretend to be disappointed to spare their ego). It feels like men and women are never allowed to just interact with each other, they ALWAYS have to romantically size each other up first. And everyone has to be paired up with their opposite-sex soulmate at the end regardless of things like "relationship-building" or "chemistry" (this is also more or less why I didn't really care for the Pbyva cybg I'm sorry) or at the very least be heterosexually in love with someone.
The existence of any orientation other than straight is also almost entirely absent from these books; one could almost think it doesn't exist. There are exactly two mentions of a gay person in B/AC: one is a man in a musical theater troupe who has exactly one line and then disappears from the book forever. The other is Alan Turing, and this is where the heterosexuality thing is no longer a petty complaint and actually becomes a genuine problem for me.
If you've read TSNotD, I don't think it'll be a spoiler to say that Alan Turing is a somewhat important plot point in B/AC; you already know how fascinated Willis is with Ultra and how important it was to the course of WWII that the Germans never found out about it. Naturally, in the WWII book, that element is even more front-and-center. One of the protagonists at some point goes to Bletchley Park to do something or other, I forget what, and Alan Turing almost runs them over on his bicycle. This is the one (1) time Turing actually appears, and to my recollection, he doesn't even say a single line. Characters talk about him and how important it is that nothing interferes with his work, but Turing as a person doesn't actually matter, and the book never mentions his sexual orientation OR what the British government did to him after he helped them win the war.
To be honest, I do find that pretty offensive. This book is So. Freaking. Long. And Willis takes so much pride in her research and attention to accuracy. She could have spared ONE sentence to be less glowingly positive about British society as a whole and consider the possibility that Britain might have done a bad thing at least once in its existence. Which brings me to my next point:
British jingoisim
This one is weird because Connie Willis isn't even British, she's American. And as far as I can tell she's never lived in Britain and her husband isn't British, so. Huh. But, weird American anglophiles do exist.
B/AC is about the everyday heroes of WWII in Britain: the ordinary people who got up every day and kept society running even while bombs fell, or who risked their lives to save others by doing things like driving ambulances. This is a good premise for a book! It's pretty uncommon for WWII stories to not focus primarily on just the most important players, or on the soldiers on the battlefront. The everyday citizens WERE incredibly important for the war effort, and portraying the mundane, everyday lives of historical people is Willis' bread and butter and something she does incredibly well, so this book was a natural fit for her.
The flat portrayal of British society as an unmitigated force for good and overall "Rah Rah Go Britain, Rule Britannia, God Save The King" feel of it all leaves kind of a weird taste in my mouth, though. To hear Willis tell it, the Good, Upstanding citizens of Britain bravely rose up as one to hold their upper lips stiff and Keep Calm and Carry On no matter what, and it was heroic and inspiring and they won the war, The End. Nobody opposed Britain's involvement, nobody took advantage of the chaos and desperation to line their own pockets, nobody was a far-right nationalist or antisemite whose only problem with Nazi Germany was that it posed a threat to Britain. At worst, maybe some individuals were unpleasant or annoying to deal with on an interpersonal level. It's very feel-good BBC documentary in a way that verges on feeling like I'm being propagandized to.
Again, in a book that's so long, you'd think there'd be room for a little complexity! But unless I'm forgetting something, Willis doesn't have anything to say about Britain that isn't uncomplicated praise. And by Britain I mean England, here, not the rest of the empire, as far as I remember the book doesn't even mention the imperial fronts (a quick text search tells me that the word "empire" is never used), just the Great and Heroic Home Front.
This is part of a pattern for Willis, where she just... doesn't seem like a person who's interested at all in critiquing existing power structures or hegemonic narratives. Take the end of TSNotD, for example. After the historians find out that they can rescue things from the past that were destroyed in their own time, Mr. Dunworthy lists some examples of things he wants to go back and save. After the obvious "library of Alexandria" and other lost books, these are the other things he names: St. Paul's cathedral, the painting of The Light of the World, Nelson’s tomb, and the statue of John Donne. All either important religious sites/artifacts or monuments to venerated British national heroes.
This is fascinating to me as someone with an interest in how people engage with and reinforce historical narratives, but I can't say it's a list of priorities I agree with. And one can't argue that these are just Mr. Dunworthy's priorities and not Connie Willis speaking through him! Mr. Dunworthy is not a character with thoughts or interiority! As already discussed!
Time Travel
Last point, I think. And it'll be a short one to avoid spoilers. I said that this book builds on Willis' concept of time travel, and it does, and that I was wrong to say that the ending of the last book made the driving conflict of this one redundant, which I was. But also, to keep it vague, there's a Thing that they think is happening. There's some sort of problem with the time travel, which has resulted in an Emergency for our three protagonists and potentially the whole timeline, and they believe that to protect itself, the timeline is going to do a Thing. This Thing that they think is going to happen makes no damn sense if you think about it even a little bit because it would immediately make the problem SO much worse. If anybody has a Watsonian explanation that would make it make sense, or there's something I'm just not considering, I'd actually really appreciate you letting me know, because this is the sort of thing that burrows into my brain and drives me insane.
Conclusion
Despite all this, I DID enjoy Blackout/All Clear. I think I even rated it five stars on my long-abandoned Goodreads account, though I think that was very much influenced by the feelings of goodwill generated by Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog being so good, and thinking back on it, I definitely wouldn't give it five stars now lol. Maybe three, three and a half? If you enjoy the historical worldbuilding in Willis' work, there's lots and lots of that for you here. It really does give you a really good look into what everyday life was like for millions of ordinary UK citizens during WWII, even if it does tend to, ah, accentuate the positive. It can be somewhat repetitive and the plot could have been streamlined a bit, but I mostly don't mind the length because so much of what people call "padding" is just the worldbuilding, which is the thing I like.
It is not a nuanced portrayal of different British attitudes toward the war, there are no interesting moral ambiguities or explorations of systemic issues, and most of the characters are pretty cardboard. If that bothers you, you might not like this book so much, but honestly, these are flaws that I find fun to analyze even if they're frustrating to read in the moment, so if you're like me you might still get value out it even if you dislike parts of it. But also, maybe the things that bother me won't bother you! Everyone is different! Also, again, it's been seven years since I read this book, so it's also possible that I've built its flaws up in my mind as more prominent than they actually were.
And there you have it! I hope this helps, or is interesting, and if you want to read the book, which you seem to be leaning toward, I think that would be a worthwhile thing to do, and I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts!
hello! i'm a big fan of your sherlock holmes works, from your fanfic all the way to beekeeper's picnic, and something that always fascinates me is how much historical detail you pack in! i can tell that lots of thought and research is put into your work, it really does show.
so, as someone who's a complete beginner and has been trying to get into writing fanfic set in historical periods as well, i wonder if you could give me a general direction on how to do research for this end?
what are the best practices for finding and researching resources that can tell me more about how life was back in a certain period, from the big picture all the way to the most specific of details?
i'm sure this isn't an easy question to answer, so if you could give me any advice really, i'd much appreciate it! thank you for your time, and i wish you a very good day. <3
Ooh this is such a good question, thank you!
I think when I get into something I always want to gobble up all the information I can about it, so a lot of what I do doesn't specifically start out as research, it's just me getting interested in a topic and reading around it.
I think for anything set in the past few hundred years, reading things written in those periods is really useful for picking up lots of the little nuances and cultural details. I've also found biographies and memoirs of people from those time periods interesting, because they can give you ideas of (for example) what kind of childhood or education a character from a particular social background might have had, their social life and connections, etc.
For specific details, I've been really lucky to have resources like The Victorian Web which are just so incredibly comprehensive:
And resources like Google's Ngram viewer can be really useful for looking up words if you think "Wait, would this character say this?" For example, should your character in 1900 be saying "hello"?
(Although looking up context is good too! Words change their meaning over time constantly)
I'm kind of assuming here that you're thinking of historical periods with a fair number of touchstones to the modern day, I think I'd probably have different answers for earlier periods!
It's so good to be doing well mental health-wise?
This week I felt really miserable. My day job was stressful and it was tiring me out, and keeping me from doing my creative work.
But today I attended a community consultation about plans to use a local building, I donated some books to my favourite charity bookshop, I popped into a new art exhibition at a museum, and I ate a pastry. Oh and I cuddled my cat.
And now I feel happy?!!!?!
Absolute sourcery.
But seriously I've been thinking about how about ten years ago I was probably at my worst RE: mental health, and I could have done all those things and still felt numb and empty and a bit lost. It's so nice to be doing so much better and to experience the normal ups and downs of emotions in life.
Drew cherry in his little twink outfit
💬 0 🔁 19 ❤️ 32 · Lot 201 - Apsley George Benet Cherry-Garrard · Lot 201 - Apsley George Benet Cherry-Garrard who bought his clothes
the importance of being earnest gdrive link for anyone who missed it or wants to watch it again ✨
