We Can't Rewind, We've Gone Too Far

I’ve been almost completely absent from commenting on DW for the last…month? more? I was swamped with work and then I was sick (just a bad cold, now gone) and traveling internationally (still abroad for the rest of the summer, sigh) and just not there mentally, although I think I’ve read everything posted on my f-list. Right now I’m in that state where I can either have a vicious circle of do nothing, have no energy to do it, or a delicious circle of do something, have more energy, so I’m trying to select the latter. (tinny reminded me of Ogden Nash’s wonderful poem about velleity, and while looking up Icelandic things for reasons described below, I found their similar word nenna, as here. (Interesting to me that all three of the words cited in this particular article translate perfectly well for me, although not into English: nenna as やる気 (Japanese), glatað as 完了 and vesen as 麻烦 (both Chinese).)) Oh dear, I think I really did just stack up three parentheses. Sorry.

I finished the silly iddy thing I’ve been writing since… March or April 2025, maybe? and now I’m very homesick for it. I’ve always said I wouldn’t write RPF (no shade on those who do, God knows; it’s just a line I drew for myself), and this is only not-RPF in the most technical of senses (different names, different setting). I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t not write it. I’m not going to post it anywhere, but if anyone has a long plane ride or something coming up and would like to read 177K of farmboys in space (including much gratuitous Chinese, a modest amount of worldbuilding/sociopolitics, six cats, three concerts, one (1) sex scene, and a lot of handwaved technical issues), let me know and I’ll send you a copy (I am most grateful to the two people who have been kind enough to read along).
So what to write next? My proper original thing is still in the middle of Book 3, and I still want to finish it. I’ve been rereading it all from Book 1 to remind myself what’s going on; some of it is very good but I’m sorry to say the first third of Book 1 is really boring. On the other hand, if I leap right into the interesting parts, I’m not going to find them interesting either, because they depend in part on established characterization and context (I don’t want to read a slow burn between people whose only purpose is being there to have a slow burn, for instance, and if you start off by breaking various practical, ethical, and creative rules it’s not going to have an impact if you haven’t emphasized why they matter…). Oh dear. But I owe the characters a proper ending to Book Three (which is about halfway through a rough draft), and I want to find out exactly how the ending is going to happen, so I do want to write at least some version of all of it (even if so far no agents are at all interested).
Plus I might want to write something else set in the worldbuilding of the aforementioned silly iddy thing, which I kind of like and want to play with more… oh dear.

I went to see Turandot, because I can never resist a chance to do so; I had a seat waaaaay up and over on one side, so I could only see half the stage, but didn’t really care; I just like to listen. The singers were fine, no one whose voice really blew me away but all, as the theater reviewers say, adequate for the role; I liked that the conductor was an Ukrainian woman, Oksana Lyniv. Turandot has a fantastic orchestra part and they did justice to it (the riddle scene!). Ping, Pang, and Pong really have some of the most beautiful music in the whole thing in their trio (although I spent much of it wondering about Henan dialect lol). For me “Nessun dorma” is the most boring part of the whole opera and Liu's first-act aria comes second to it, but Turandot’s Louling aria and the subsequent riddle game are riveting, not to mention its sequel in which Turandot pleads not to have to get married, and I love the very end, Calaf’s introduction of himself and Turandot’s introduction of him to her father. I was tickled that the opera ended in classic C-pop concert style with a rain of 彩带|confetti (one element of Chinese culture they got right!); also, the one Turandot fic I’ve written got a new kudos the following morning, making me wonder if the reader had been in the audience along with me.

Lots of new (to me) books! I’ll order them by my reactions to them.

NO: Just one, fortunately: a mystery by Katy Watson whose books I saw recommended somewhere and was curious about, but nope. Maybe my fault for starting with the second book in the series—the only one the store had—but the characters were flat, the prose was flat, I got bored about a third in and just skipped to the end to find out who got murdered and why, and didn’t care when I did find out. Oh well.

Yes, but…: Mahmud El Sayed’s The Republic of Memory, which was in some ways right up my street and some ways not; it’s a very open, except probably not happy, ending and that makes it hard for me to expect to enjoy rereading—I don’t want to read a book where I don’t care about the characters, but I don’t want to care about the characters knowing they’re destined for unhappiness or worse! That said, it’s supposed to have a sequel coming out next year some time, so I will look for that and put my final judgment on hold. It's a very smart, thoughtful book with a lot of good worldbuilding, that’s for sure. Predictably I loved the language stuff, the way it works and the way it’s thought out, including the way the character voices are differentiated; the underground argot, which is basically Polari (“everycove had vadad his eek”) crossed with Russian-heavy Esperanto (“abra your slooshers, veck”), was a lot of fun and cleverly written to be followed by the reader (also it made me think of Antonia Forest’s Thuggery-speak in the self-conscious way it’s used by the rebellious young).
It was disconcerting to read that one immediately before Fonda Lee’s The Last Contract of Isako, since the former is about a generation ship on its way to a new planet and the latter is about life on a new planet long after the generation ship has arrived, both books involving fraught issues around relations to Earth (or the lack of them), class stratification based on positions within the ship, terraforming, etc. I liked Isako herself and I found her…what’s the word…deuteragonist Martim very interesting, but most of the other characters didn’t quite stand up to their importance in the narrative, and there were SO MANY action scenes. I mean, it’s kind of a Kurosawa & Mifune movie in space with an older woman in the Mifune role, which is neat in itself, but as always I kept wanting more slice of life and less fighting.
Also To Ride a Rising Storm, the second book in Moniquill Blackgoose’s alternate-world fantasy ?trilogy, which I enjoyed more than the first one; I like established-situations more than fish-out-of-water, I guess. They’re a little bit frustrating as bildungsromans (what’s the proper plural?) because Anequs is already right about everything, the problem is that the society of colonizers hasn’t caught up with her; there’s kind of a sense that there are Right and Wrong ideas about everything and everyone around Anequs can be measured by where they fall on the spectrum from Right to Wrong, but the worldbuilding is very fun, including a lot of Chemistry 101 if all the terminology came from Norse instead of Greek/Latin.
As always I can’t help being fussy about writers’ uses of languages I know something about—in the Anequs books, while it tickles me that half of China should be Cantonese-dominated, it’s not going to be called Shiang-Gang (at least, not internally; the outside world might know it that way) on account of Xianggang|Hong Kong includes the element of “-port” which is not going to be applied to a whole country. In The Republic of Memory, Taki’s not going to call Hilal “sosen” (at least not as a form of address to her face), although she might call her go-senzo-sama, and An Miaozong should be called Miss An, not Miss Miaozong. A good lesson to research anything I write myself even if I think I know what I’m doing.

YES: Two Nordic mysteries, a new-ish Helene Tursten; her younger cop protagonist, Embla, tends to have gloomier books than the previous Irene (who makes the occasional pleasant cameo in Embla’s books), but still has smarts and a sense of humor, interesting colleagues, and a taste for good food and good sex. Also one of Quentin Bates’ Icelandic mysteries, which also have a woman cop as a protagonist, the pragmatic middle-aged Gunnhildur. Also dark in places here and there, but without that kind of “see how unflinchingly grim I can be” that turns up in a lot of Scandinavian mysteries for some reason. And the Icelandic setting is fun (I love reading about the names and contemplating the use of patronyms/matronyms; apparently along with -son and -dóttir it’s now legal to use -bur if you are nonbinary in Iceland).
The new Murderbot book, which I enjoyed, although I think the bits around the edges with Three were the best; still, I will like going back to reread it without the oh-dear-what’s-going-to-happen tension; also it was very funny. One of the characters has not-quite-my-name, which was disconcerting.
Emma Törzs’ Ink Blood Sister Scribe, fantasy which I really liked—interesting, likeable, entertaining characters and a happy ending, although once again there were more action scenes than I wanted. I found the magic system, mm…okay? it’s well worked out and it makes the plot work, but it doesn’t feel especially interesting on its own; the book succeeds because of Esther and Joanna and their allies, who are great (I think Esther in particular carries the book, and I was delighted that she got the ending she did). Because of the Abe-and-Joanna coincidence of names, I kept picturing Abe as the protagonist of Peter S. Beagle’s Summerlong, oh dear.
Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory, which I picked up belatedly because I liked The Incandescent so much: happy to report that, although it’s not as much designed-specifically-to-my-interests, it is also a fantastic read and left me very satisfied; the setting feels real and the ending feels earned. Why are there never sequels to the books one wants sequels for? I would like more Ursa, whom we only get in glimpses. I would DEFINITELY like more Yiso (I keep misreading his name as Yibo and picturing him as an alien version of my farmboy!Yibo, which is entertaining and seems surprisingly in character). Avi is fun but more interesting in people’s fics than in the actual book (there aren’t many fics but most of them are very good, still working my way through). I love the Sparrows and would like more of them interacting; for some reason I think my very favorite scene was the one in the middle timeline when Cleo finds out about what’s happening and the way she reacts to it and to Kyr|Val, just tone-perfect.

Photos: Pretty self-explanatory except for the last two, which are respectively “accidental abstract composition with live cat in background” and “new name for the NYCB?” (that one’s for chestnut and maybe qian).

Be safe and well.