Spontaneous Musings

1. Reading Meme

* What I Just Finished Reading?

E-Books [because I read everything on the Kindle at the moment]

The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey

This was disappointing. It started out being this great story about a female attorney in Bombay, India who had managed to survive a nasty marriage and was solving legal mystery....to a rather boring murder mystery that meandered and felt a tad...boilerplate.
( Read more... )

E-Comics:

[By the way, comicxology unlimited -- gives you discounts and you can borrow up to 50 comics at a time. That's how I'm doing this.]

* UnCanny X-men #20 - 2018 by Matthew Rosenberg -- geeze, a lot of characters are getting killed off during this run. To date, they've killed off one or two characters per book. Granted they aren't exactly major characters -- and honestly most of the major characters they've already killed off at least twice already. (It's bloody hard to take character deaths all that seriously in comic books. If you do, you clearly haven't been reading them for very long -- just wait, whichever favorite character they killed off -- will most definitely return at a future date.)
( review )

Age of X-man - Marvelous X-men Issue 5 -- found this series to be rather slow and sort of boring. It's a bit too preachy -- and feels like AU fanfic. (Actually most comics do at various points, par for the course.) Will be happy when it's over.

BoomComics Buffy Reboot #5 -- I may have reviewed this already? Can't remember.

CJL: Did they turn Xander into a vampire?
ME: Well...sort of.
( Read more... )

What I'm reading now?

Outside of hammering away at my novel...which is writing not reading, so never mind.

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

This is the first fictional novel by the 70 year old woman living out in the wilderness of Idaho...who used to write naturalist books about Africa with her ex-husband.

So far? ( Read more... )

As an aside -- it's odd, all the fictional (non-comic) books I'm reading are by women, and all the comics seem to be by men. ( Read more... )

2. Struggling with restless legs at the moment, blame my mother for bringing it up -- that and dehydration.

Tired. Have not been sleeping well. Most likely weather related, the humidity fires up the arthritis which fires up the sciatica, which drives a needle of hot pain into my left knee.

Doctor suggested knee to ankle pillow -- been hunting on Amazon. Not sure, think I found something -- currently using a regular pillow. Doctor is actually pretty good for a change, even if she's a bit blood test happy.

On Boxing Day, Dec 26, we took a lovely trip to Charleston, SC. While there we visited The Karpeles Manuscript Museum is housed in a old Greek Revival structure of the Corinthian order after the Temple of Jupiter in Rome. It's seen better days, which alas is putting it mildly. When we finally found it, in a somewhat shoddy part of town, we wondered if it was even open. The paint was peeling. Weeds were growing around it, and the windows were stained with dirt.

The history of the building dates back to 1791 when William Hammet and a group of Methodist dissenters decided to form their own Methodist congregation. The new congregation grew over the period of 65 years until 1856 when a larger sanctuary was needed. Property was purchased and the cornerstone was laid on June 24, 1856. The church was called St. James Chapel, "as he was the great Apostle of practical piety".
During the Civil War the Confederate forces in Charleston used the building as a medical storehouse and hospital until the Union Army attacked and Charleston was evacuated. The building was one of the first attacked in an effort to capture the water supply held in the large cisterns on the ground floor.

The parking lot had all sorts of signs posted - "private parking, violators will be towed". So I was sent in by my aging parents to check it out. There was quite a few steps to get up to it. With some trepidation, I did, and was pleasantly surprised. The interior was the opposite of the exterior. Inside was a quaint little library exhibit of manuscripts encased in glass. I'd been expecting historical documents, such as reproductions of the emancpation proclamation, the confederacy, and possibly old Egyptian stone engravings, which were there of course, but not...original hand written manuscripts from Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ian Fleming. There was also a reproduction of Puccini's notes from the opening of Madam Butterfly. Thrilled, I told my parents, who joined me.

Apparently the current exhibit is The Detective, The Detective Story, and The Spy

We spent the next hour pursuing the original manuscripts, notes and letters of Doyle, Saylers, and Fleming.
I took pictures, which I may or may not post at a later date.

Here's a few things I learned from the original manuscripts that "I" was not personally aware of.

1. Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes or The Detective portion of the Exhibit:
* There was a letter from Dr. Joseph Bell to Arthur Conan Doyle stating that he was flattered Doyle had based Sherlock Holmes on him.
* There was a letter from Doyle to his publishers stating that no, after the final Holmes tale "The Last Stand", he had no intention of writing more Holmes tales. And indirectly referring to Holmes through a Watson centric tale, after stating he had no intention to write anything more regarding Holmes, simply would not do. He much prefered to continue work on his "Fairy Book" and his War History.
* Doyle intended to stop writing about Holmes years before, with the Rhenbach Falls tale, preferring to focus on his historical romances, which he thought were superior to the Holmes stories and more lasting.
But an American publishing company offered to pay him $5,000 for six more stories. So he relented.
*John Watson - a fictious character largely based on Doyle - was for a while listed as the author of the stories, and Doyle as his literary agent. The name Watson came from one of the seances that Doyle attended.
*Doyle's handwritting is tiny print, with slanted lines. Difficult to read.(My father pitied his typist).

2. Dorothy L. Sayers thoroughly studied the Detective Story before writing her own, and even taught courses on it and wrote on it.
*She split stories into two categories. Her notes listed Poe and Doyle as focusing on the shorter solution or problem solving tale or "the detective story", while Wilikie Collins, and others did longer novels or novel sensations - where the focus is on all the characters and less on solving a specific problem and all the characters have a hand in resolving it.
*She splits this down even further stating there are two types of stories - "The detective story" - a detective solves a riddle or case in logical fashion, and "The shocker" - a series of increasingly shocking events occurs until they are resolved in an emotionally carthatic and satisfying resolution.[Example of a modern day shocker is Jim Butcher's Cold Days and well most suspense thrillers. There's not as many detective stories, are there?]
* Included in the exhibit - was three versions of a detective story that she wrote teaching how to write such a story. One - the simple direct approach. Two - a bit more complicated, with a mislead. Third - series of clues placed throughout, including red herrings, misleads, etc.
* Also, there's a sample of Sayers' thought process regarding charaters. She writes down a back and forth discussion with her publisher - where Sayers tells him:
"No, I do not intend on introducing a female detective just to fall in love with lead that is just too silly, nor will I have a female victim, but we could have a mislead where the victim appears to be female, but in reality will be male." (Sayer's handwriting was a bit smoother and more standard.)

3. The Spy - Ian Fleming's James Bond
*included in the exhibit is the original music of the "Bond" theme created for "Dr. No". Next to it, an original pic of Scean Connery's MI6 security pass.
* Fleming wrote his books straight through, no editing, no stopping. Then he'd re-read them, think it was complete crap, that his lead character was a fool, the dialogue banal, and this was horrid. That's when he revised.
* There was a bunch of notes he jotted down for the novel "You Only Live Twice" which included information on Japan, and had a list of spy rules, some rather bizarre. Such as never enter a car with two women sitting in the front seat, or state all secrets in the open air. Avoid anyone calling you "old boy" and all politicians. Also never trust a woman who is wearing an ankle bracelet.
* A bit of the original comedy script for the original 1960s film Casino Royale starring David Niven, Woody Allen, and Peter Sellers.

We also went antiquing and toured the old Nathanel Russell House, which I found far less interesting. ;-)