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1st August 2003: Sex, yes, gender, no.

Posted on by Jo Walton

I’m a woman. Furthermore, I’m about as heterosexual as people get, and I’m a mother. Also, I have long hair, like cooking, I’m married and I don’t earn as much as my husband. I sometimes wear jewelry and I like…

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Posted in Lifelode, Sulien World

18th July 2003: I don’t know much about Art…

Posted on by Jo Walton

…but you have to think sometimes. Names are weird things. There’s a shoe store in the mall that contains Atwater metro, called Alibi. (I hesitated over whether to say “shop” or “store” there. That there are two different words for…

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Posted in Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face, Whimsy

13th June 2003: On Re-reading Trollope

Posted on by Jo Walton

There are still sixteen Trollope novels I haven’t read yet, which is a very cheering thought. They aren’t in the library and they aren’t in print, but they exist and are out there and will turn up one day, along…

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Posted in Books, Tooth and Claw

3rd June 2003: Structure

Posted on by Jo Walton

Structure, for me, is something very delicate that emerges either before or as I am writing. It’s not something I add later, and the very thought of adding it later fills me with horror. I’ve frequently found that it’s easier…

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Posted in Sulien World, Writing

5th May 2003: Thoughts on The Friendly Young Ladies, women and class

Posted on by Jo Walton

Thinking about the lack of options for respectable women and the way giving up respectability and slipping in class so totally wasn’t an option in any circumstances, it makes a great deal more sense of Elsie in Mary Renault’s The…

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Posted in Books

25th April 2003: Time and history and how things fit together

Posted on by Jo Walton

I was once helping out on a dig in Greece. We’d start work early in the morning, knock off for the hot part of the day, then start up again when it got cooler. In the hot part, we’d generally…

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Posted in Human culture, Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face

13th April 2003: A truly horrible thought

Posted on by Jo Walton

It’s possible to write an 850 page novel, well constructed, symphonic, and to feel, with the typical overharsh judgement people make about their own writing, that you’ve failed at making one of the characters sufficiently sympathetic. Then, a hundred and…

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Posted in Books

4th April 2003: Mode

Posted on by Jo Walton

When I was a teenager and started to write seriously, I discovered that I was allergic to how-to-write books. I was also too secretive (and also traumatised by the times I tried it) to show my writing to anyone so…

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Posted in Writing

10th March 2003: Up on the white verandah

Posted on by Jo Walton

Darkhawk asked me why the religions in my novel would be always not quite coping. There’s a Bob Dylan song on the album Desire called “Black Diamond Bay” which begins: Up on the white verandah, she wears a necktie and a…

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Posted in Lifelode

27th March 2003: Lurid as some of them were…

Posted on by Jo Walton

“The events of my childhood, lurid as some of them were, contributed more to my sense of independence and my sense of responsibility toward others.” C.J. Cherryh, Cyteen 1988, III, p.24. (Scary Cyteen obsessive fact, I wanted to find the…

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Posted in Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face