Since Mother Eve in the Garden long ago

Work was pretty excellent today, and hopefully acknowledging that won't jinx it. The AM was cheerful and did say "chop chop!" like five times, but I solidly base iced and decorated for hours without really feeling like I was falling behind.

While I was working, I remembered that NaNo is coming up, and wondered whether I wanted to do it. I have a book I'm supposed to be writing, and the two times I "won" I hated what I'd written to the point where I didn't want to revise and publish it. (Also I technically never finished the second one - I hit 50k at what should have been a few pages from the end and never bothered to write the actual end.) And then I thought about the Doucet research I've been doing and how interesting it is, how few fashion encyclopedias distinguish between the father and son and how many act like the place was off the radar until Jacques took over. Then I thought about writing a novel set in the turn of the century Paris fashion world - what about the Paquins, could I research them enough to feel comfortable writing historical fiction about them? (No, because I find the idea of my writing historical RPF weird, plus I could never do enough research to feel comfortable that I was't making the kind of blunders people make fun of, although there are no Paquin fans like there are Marie Antoinette fans or Elizabeth I fans or whatever.) But what if I fictionalize it more and come up with my own business/design duo? It could be set in the 1890s, nobody writes about the 1890s. But I tend to use the same relationship dynamics, how can I change it up? And I ended up thinking about this semi-Pygmalion homage/pastiche-thing where this rich guy is like, omg, the fashion press is ridiculous and the way people go on and on about clothing is so stupid, I bet you (friend) that I can put a back-alley dressmaker in a fancy salon and everyone will go crazy over how innovative and fantastic she is! So he does so but she thinks he seriously means it, and everybody does go wild over her. And now I think I do have to do NaNo this year.

When I first heard about The Knick, I thought it was going to be an Americanization of Casualty 1906/07/09. It very much is not. When I started watching it my first impression was that it was an historicization of House, but it very much isn't that either. It's more like Mad Men, despite the heavy gore and dirt that Mad Men lacks. But like Mad Men, it's a) an ensemble show focusing on many characters who range from powerful to oppressed and effective to frustrated, b) which tackles serious issues of -ism without making them the focus of after-school-special-style storylines, c) while putting serious effort in to making the setting complete and perfect. The Knick is even more impressive than Mad Men in the last regard, because Mad Men mainly takes place inside, in offices and homes and restaurants, where The Knick is frequently out on the street - with yards of perfect turn-of-the-century signage and awnings and perfectly dressed extras. In that way, it's more like Boardwalk Empire - but while Boardwalk does focus on multiple storylines, it rarely feels like an ensemble show to me, rather than one that focuses on multiple storylines. Maybe because there's usually A Nucky Plot, A Margaret Plot, A Chalky Plot, etc. rather than all of the leads doing things together, as leads?

( slightly spoilery, but not for the latest episode because we haven't seen it yet )

I would like to see more ethnicities, though. It's a very Irish-heavy show, and I don't quite know what the neighborhood was like in 1900 so maybe it's just accurate ... I just want some Jewish and Italian immigrants.

DONE. (With words. Story still has a couple of pages to go, but I'm leaving that for tomorrow or Sunday. Watching a stupid Hilary Duff movie to celebrate.)

ETA: The love interest looks kind of like he could be Michael Swaim's brother.

I always want to post my blog stuff on FB but don't know how to get into it without seeming to be going LOOK LOOK LOOK AT ME DOING THINGS, so I just kind of allowed my response to the Wearing History post on Miroir des Modes, where I gave the link to my translation, to be crossposted to FB. So it's like ... I'm allowing people to notice but I don't have to feel like I'm going out of my way to be linking to myself.

I managed 2.7k words yesterday! That is excellent for me. I know some people can do many thousands but as long as I do over the minimum that's impressive to myself. I wonder what it's like to be able to write consistently on one project outside of NaNo. It must be amazing.

Cracked just taught me that Tiger & Bunny is apparently a mecha/superhero anime, which is interesting as I had been imagining that it was very shoujo-looking yaoi based on the way people talk about it.

I'm loving Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Shuttle like crazy. It has basically everything I want in a story. The main character is intelligent and gorgeous, and swoops in and just straight-up rescues her sister and nephew and starts fixing up not only her brother-in-law's estate but the local village as well. She is Sara Crewe if she'd gone to decent schools throughout Europe instead of Miss Minchin's, and if her father hadn't died but just kept working on his diamond mine. Her love interest is the earthy Earl of Mount Dunstan, whose estate is completely impoverished and who is unjustly shunned by all because his (deceased) father and older brother were profligates and degenerates and it's assumed he's like them. On the whole it's not quite as pull-you-in as ALP or TSG, as a result of the main character not really being under any trials or having many issues of her own to overcome, but

The one thing that does get to me, though, is that the basic theme is relations between England and America, and as a result of that there's a decent amount of talk about the historical ties and ancestral ties. There are a lot of statements about Americans recognizing England as home when they get there because ~that's where they came from~. And if it were just more specific about which Americans ... but it's not, and every time there's a sweeping statement about Americans all being English underneath I kind of want to shake the narrator. Especially because the main character's surname is VANDERPOEL, and the family is very obviously built on the VANDERBILTS, and these are not English names, ffs.

Four of my magazines arrived today, and I don't care as much about how much I spent! They're worth it. The Delineator is really thick. Haven't checked all of them, but one or two pictures are cut out of a couple - usually not fashion plates, oddly. But they're really excellent and I'm looking forward to just sitting down and getting to read them straight through.

Had the brilliant idea this morning of creating Galerie des Modes pages with all the images, so that I can load them on the laptop at work and do some translation in my breaks. There are a few online resources I use while I'm working on them that I can't get at, but I can at least get most of the text and mark whatever it is that I need to look up.

NaNo is ... sticking. Part of the problem is that I find pacing very difficult to check on while writing; I won't know until afterward if I'm moving at a decent clip or if this book actually needs to be 100k words or what. But a larger problem, I think, is that I want to do translations and read 1920s magazines and not so much write. IDK, maybe it's just been a while since I last did NaNo and I don't remember how difficult it was for me other years.

I really really need to sew, or at least get things lined up so I can sew after NaNo's done. I need to make concrete plans, pick out patterns to use/alter, and buy fabric. I can do this! I might not even make a corselet, just get a sports bra or maybe a bandeau bra. If I go earlier 1920s I can get away with having more of a shape and making something that will actually look decent on me.

But it's funny, the difference between this year and the times I did it in undergrad. The main thing that's extremely apparent is the fact that grad school taught me the ability to sit down and force myself to spew text from my fingertips. I remember having a few papers in undergrad that were like pulling teeth (I'm pretty sure I cried over one), but I didn't really figure out the "just get the words out, no matter how stupid they are" for a couple more years.

Is it just me, or are fewer people doing NaNo this year? Or is it just that maybe my flisters who generally do it are in the (large) subsection of my flist that is no longer posting?

I'm worried that I'm being too romancey because I can't come up with things to happen to the heroine without the guy. It's just ... she's so focused! She's too much like me! And nothing happens to me! Maybe in a couple of chapters. I'm not really outlining with this one, there are a few things that need to happen, but overall I'm trying to go with the whole NaNo idea of "I'm stuck - let's make an unexpected problem for the characters!"

Non-NaNo news: I finished hemming the demi-polonaise! It's not exactly even and I still need a bouffante to bulk it out, but the actual garment itself is done (minus trim, which I should do, probably) and that is a big deal for me.

Okay, so I wrote down a bare-bones outline of the story, what the conflict is, what the characters look like and their basic backgrounds. NaNo, NaNo, you flighty temptress. I know I shouldn't and yet I still do.

I finally finished my mom's book and reviewed it on Amazon. I had been getting caught up in pepper-jack-cheesey things like the protagonist's interest in/knowledge of architecture and her preoccupation with plucking eyebrows (okay, she mentioned it twice), but I'm pretty sure that nobody else would be distracted by them. Overall, it was a fun read.

My own short story's made me $14 so far, which is nice considering that it was never going to be traditionally published. I'm pretty sure nothing I write except maybe academic things someday (hopefully) is ever going to appear in bound book form, and I don't really mind anymore. I used to be in a very Emily-of-New-Moon mindset, wanting to be Accepted by Editors, a writer before anything else, but when I wasn't paying attention my priorities changed. I'd like to write more than I do these days, but the trouble is that I can't sew one day and write the next and then switch back, I have to devote myself to a single type of creative energy. This is why I still haven't finished a cardigan I started ... gosh, over a year and a half ago, I think. I started sewing those blue stays when I was nearly done with it and have been sewing pretty much ever since. The couple of weeks when I wrote A Worthy Attachment I don't think I was able to do any sewing.

Anyway, I haven't got anything else finished or near-finished, unfortunately. Well, I do have the last NaNo I did, 2008 - it's fantasy Regency and fairly silly. I need to reread it to see whether or not it hangs together, but I'm slightly nervous that it's going to be so incredibly terrible I won't be able to deal with the excruciating embarrassment.

For NaNo this year, I want to go back to an earlier one, either 2005 or 2006, and rewrite it. 2005 only got to 2,869 words; it was (going to be) an Edwardian Mairelon-the-Magician-ish thing with a vaudeville soprano heroine and a love interest/hero who is a real magician and from a very wealthy family but who's pretending to be a stage magician/comedian while searching for some MacGuffin. I had a dense outline written in a notebook somewhere that I don't remember. I'd like to move it into the 1910s and keep it vaudeville, or change it to burlesque. Then on the other hand there's my 2006 story, which completely captured me and I'm still somewhat obsessed with; it managed to get to 31,057 words, and I have a whole trilogy planned out. The first book was set in the early 1910s, the second was WWI, and the third was the early 1920s (and you see now why I love Downtown Abbey so very, very much). The main trouble with it was that I didn't have enough planned, I think - there was an overarching potential plot about (the heroine) Ophelia's uncles trying to do some huge nefarious magic thing, but I'm really really bad at that sort of thing and wasn't sure what to do with it. Even then, I was tired of "doing it all to overthrow the king just because" plots. I was really far more interested in Ophelia's relationships with Dickon the kind and understanding stableboy and Colin the whiny rich boy being magic-study fostered, finding out about her scandalous birth, and the sudden change in her circumstances when her power is discovered.