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25th March 2003: Wittering about writing

Posted on by Jo Walton

Oh, and incidentally, because this is going to sound demented. You know how there are some characters you keep writing? Who keep coming back in different forms, and want to be written about, like Bottom auditioning for all the parts…

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Posted in Lifelode, Writing

22nd February 2003: As you wish

Posted on by Jo Walton

When I was a child, I could run. I haven’t been able to run since I was fourteen or fifteen, because of a trapped nerve in my pelvis after it had been broken, which affected me when I grew. The…

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Posted in Among Others, Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face, My Books

11th February 2003: Thoughts on Fantasy

Posted on by Jo Walton

Probably the worst piece of writing advice I have ever heard in my entire life, including time spent on rec.arts.sf.composition, was a professional writer advising people wishing to write fantasy to watch people roleplaying to get an idea of how…

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Posted in Lifelode, My Books, Writing

9th February 2003

Posted on by Jo Walton

My grandparents got married in 1938. I wasn’t born until 1964, but nevertheless as they brought me up I absorbed this story from them, of the summer before the war. 1939, of course. The war began in September. Everyone had…

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

24th January 2002: My Ranking of Heyer

Posted on by Jo Walton

Dionywas asking about which Heyer were good ones to try. I think this depends a lot on who you ask and what you like. When I was asking about this I found that ones some people loved were ones others…

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Posted in Books

7th January 2002: Genre conventions

Posted on by Jo Walton

Sarah Monette was writing in her journal about Bujold and Sayers, and what A Civil Campaign doesn’t do that Gaudy Night does, and a conversation following on from that. There are genre conventions, there are subversions of genre conventions, and…

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Posted in Books, Lifelode, Writing

6th January 2003: Time and the bell have buried the day

Posted on by Jo Walton

You can define a culture by cultural referents the members of the culture have in common. Quick, if someone mentions Cordelia’s attitude towards death, are they talking about Shakespeare, Bujold, or Buffy? History is so vast, so multi-layered, so complex.…

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Posted in Human culture

5th January 2003: What a Bildungsroman isn’t

Posted on by Jo Walton

A bildungsroman is, of course, no more than a coming of age novel, but I didn’t know that. When I was fifteen or sixteen, I read Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest series, which begins in Zimbabwe immediately before WWII and continues…

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Posted in Books, Writing

17th December 2002: Human Civilization

Posted on by Jo Walton

There’s an exhibition in the Pointe Calliere Museum of History and Archaeology in the Old Port in Montreal, called “Varna”. It’s on tour from a museum in Varna, Bulgaria, and covers the history of Varna back to about eight thousand…

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

16th December 2002: Just Like a Fairytale

Posted on by Jo Walton

A few years ago there was an ad for a credit card, in which someone struggles through various difficulties which were ennumerated financially (flight from Heathrow to Inverness, $500, Taxi to wherever, $70) to get home, where, when he was…

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