Tuesday Morning Update
Jan. 17th, 2012 09:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdust1,500+ words into the re-write on “Cat-in-Skirts”, which will probably be the supplemental piece in the A Tree of Bones hardback (if I can keep it from running away with itself, but then again, maybe even if I can't). It's an interesting challenge for a couple of reasons: First, I haven't looked at it for years—I wrote the original short story back in high school—and second, I'm re-framing it as a Hexslinger-'verse narrative while trying to seed in ways that the characters can turn up in The Heart's Filthy Lesson. (What was it framed as originally? Just a historical crime story, with no magic. I think it works better this way.) Sovay asked me to explain what it was about, so here's the short pitch:
She's an eleven-year-old London street rat who dresses as a boy to avoid trouble, and has a “glimmer” that implies she may express as a hex at puberty! She's a former maths tutor turned pickpocket/safecracker, already a full-blown hex since trying to cut her own throat, who uses much of her magic to keep herself a tall lady with inconvenient genitals! They commit crime!
A lot of the smaller fixes have to do with re-gendering Cat, who originally dressed as a woman as some sort of disguise, but who I now see as genuinely trans. The larger fixes all have to do with working magic into the story on both a utilitarian and overreaching plot level—ie, as both a tool and a theme. I want this tale to show what the “fallout” of Pinkerton's Hex War is for hexes elsewhere in the world, especially as news of the Hex City Oath crosses over to Europe (something that was really easily done by 1866, by which time there were two working transatlantic telegraph lines).
Anyhow: Should keep me busy while waiting for the fix memo, which still hasn't come in. And I need to send “Nanny Grey” off, too, as well as call a bunch of people about a bunch of different stuff. Mom is up my ass about arranging something for Cal over the March Break and also summer; I never heard back from the dude who's supposed to fix our washer; etc.
Meanwhile, I remembered yet another Bossy Little Nutter with (blue-tinted) glasses: Jonathan L. Howard's Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, who's a bit like a German—or maybe Swiss—version of Herbert West who's given up on science, mad or otherwise. In Howard's first novel, Johannes has thought better about having sold his soul to the Devil for mastery of necromancy and decides to get it back, leading to a wager which involves him using a demon-run travelling carnival to trap 100 new souls he can swap for his. Along for the ride on that particular adventure is his brother, Horst Cabal, who slight trust issues stemming from the fact that the last time he tried to help Johannes out with something, he ended up being transformed into a vampire and locked in a crypt for at least a decade. Horst, naturally, is the charming one in the family.
What I like most about Johannes Cabal is that although he's monomaniacal and Aspergian (natch), he's also both hilariously easy to annoy and very, very practical, as indicated by the fact that in his little black bag he carries not only the accoutrements of his grave-robbing trade but also the largest-caliber handgun known to humanity. He also has a stealthy streak of human feeling buried extremely far down under a shell of cold calculation, which is always fun; though he claims to avoid relationships like the plague, he just keeps stumbling into them, ending up with a network of people who mistakenly consider themselves his allies, if not actually his “friends”. The fact that there's a new book coming out sometime this year (Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute makes me very happy.
And hey, the tiny, tiny fandom attached to Howard's work apparently made it into Yuletide last year, too (http://archiveofourown.org/tags/Johannes%20Cabal%20-%20Jonathan%20L*d*%20Howard/works). Funny how I missed that.
Alright: Coffee, food, then a bath.
She's an eleven-year-old London street rat who dresses as a boy to avoid trouble, and has a “glimmer” that implies she may express as a hex at puberty! She's a former maths tutor turned pickpocket/safecracker, already a full-blown hex since trying to cut her own throat, who uses much of her magic to keep herself a tall lady with inconvenient genitals! They commit crime!
A lot of the smaller fixes have to do with re-gendering Cat, who originally dressed as a woman as some sort of disguise, but who I now see as genuinely trans. The larger fixes all have to do with working magic into the story on both a utilitarian and overreaching plot level—ie, as both a tool and a theme. I want this tale to show what the “fallout” of Pinkerton's Hex War is for hexes elsewhere in the world, especially as news of the Hex City Oath crosses over to Europe (something that was really easily done by 1866, by which time there were two working transatlantic telegraph lines).
Anyhow: Should keep me busy while waiting for the fix memo, which still hasn't come in. And I need to send “Nanny Grey” off, too, as well as call a bunch of people about a bunch of different stuff. Mom is up my ass about arranging something for Cal over the March Break and also summer; I never heard back from the dude who's supposed to fix our washer; etc.
Meanwhile, I remembered yet another Bossy Little Nutter with (blue-tinted) glasses: Jonathan L. Howard's Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, who's a bit like a German—or maybe Swiss—version of Herbert West who's given up on science, mad or otherwise. In Howard's first novel, Johannes has thought better about having sold his soul to the Devil for mastery of necromancy and decides to get it back, leading to a wager which involves him using a demon-run travelling carnival to trap 100 new souls he can swap for his. Along for the ride on that particular adventure is his brother, Horst Cabal, who slight trust issues stemming from the fact that the last time he tried to help Johannes out with something, he ended up being transformed into a vampire and locked in a crypt for at least a decade. Horst, naturally, is the charming one in the family.
What I like most about Johannes Cabal is that although he's monomaniacal and Aspergian (natch), he's also both hilariously easy to annoy and very, very practical, as indicated by the fact that in his little black bag he carries not only the accoutrements of his grave-robbing trade but also the largest-caliber handgun known to humanity. He also has a stealthy streak of human feeling buried extremely far down under a shell of cold calculation, which is always fun; though he claims to avoid relationships like the plague, he just keeps stumbling into them, ending up with a network of people who mistakenly consider themselves his allies, if not actually his “friends”. The fact that there's a new book coming out sometime this year (Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute makes me very happy.
And hey, the tiny, tiny fandom attached to Howard's work apparently made it into Yuletide last year, too (http://archiveofourown.org/tags/Johannes%20Cabal%20-%20Jonathan%20L*d*%20Howard/works). Funny how I missed that.
Alright: Coffee, food, then a bath.
