girl genius gone weird

I think I just found Laura's husband hiding inside "We Prick You." That bodes, erm, something. (I have no idea why this book insists on being written to the music it insists on being written to, but I'm not complaining as such.)

Still needs a name, though. I'm sorely tempted to call him Evelyn, but seeing as how everyone else with a speaking role in this story seems to be female, that would just get confusing. And he doesn't come into focus when I try applying it, which is the important thing.

I hate naming men. I need something period-appropriate and distinctive that doesn't tip over into Wodehouse territory, which is harder than it bloody looks, and I'm having a hard time getting traction on it. He might be an Alec, but I don't even know. I don't know why he's being so stubborn; the other narratively important men showed up with names intact, blast and damn them. (I also have a full complement of names and nicknames for Laura and Esme's sisters -- Octavia, Elizabeth, Laura, Barbara, Esme, and Amelia, nicknames redacted for being too twee and awful to share out of context. As Carolyn says in Cabin Pressure: "sounds like you're brainstorming names for a Laborador puppy." Fortunately, the other four are walk-ons.)

But that's the lot of the main cast identified, anyway, barring surprises. Hurrah.

ETA: Oh, I should say, I'm using Family.Show to keep my family trees straight, and I'm quite satisfied with it.

I'm doing something right. When I was washing the Windex smell out of my hair last night, Laura gave me an inciting incident and one of the manifestations of the Thing in the House. Of course, it's not her manifestation, it's Esme's. I wish Esme would come and narrate this book instead, because I know what her damage is; I think Laura is one of those narrators who wants you to think she was just standing there minding her own business when all of a sudden... And she's so busily not noticing what's wrong with everyone else that this entire book is going to be descriptions of wallpaper with someone quietly having a nervous breakdown at the edge of the frame. Which, fortunately, is the kind of tone I like for a ghost story. I just hope I can pull it off.

(On the basis of that last paragraph, it's also looking like it might be one of those books where the narrator and the protagonist are entirely different characters. Which, questionably fortunately, is something I have really mixed feelings about; but of course if I'm riffing off the Radlett books it has to be. Bah. I really wonder why I lock into the things I lock into, you know. Mysteries of the ASD brain!)

And I'm making "not sure if want" faces at the biography I just started (The Sisters, Mary S. Lovell), sad to say. It may be one of those biographies where the writer is a little too charmed by her subjects, and I have a nasty suspicion it's the kind of charmed that may tip over into apologism once I get a few chapters further in. (Well, no. It's already doing that, but currently it's dealing with the parents.) I'm going to keep pushing on, but I've started mentally picking it up at arm's length.

ceebee_eebee is fully entitled to mock me for this, but I maintain that... you need to be able to empathize with someone to understand them in their context, or you get lousy flat two-dimensional mental images. Which is dangerous. But letting that empathy drag you into accepting someone's stories about themselves at face value? Not much less dangerous. And I'm not sure this book isn't on the verge of going that way.

Basically, I would trust it a hell of a lot more if the introduction had talked about meeting the ninety-year-old Diana Mitford Mosley and being freaked out at being charmed by her, put it that way.

And now I finish a Fucking Essay and decide what I want to watch and report back on tonight. La. (I'm feeling sort of weirdly drawn towards Cracker, but I can't think of an actual episode to watch that won't make me either embarrassment-squicked or angry.)

ETA: Despite a remark made last entry about a certain someone's insistence about being played by Stephen Campbell Moore, I don't invariably cast my books. Even if you resort to British actors, the facial pool is pretty small. (He may end up looking less like S.C.M. in the end, too; what I had in mind with the casting is the kind of self-effacing surface charm plastered together over a deep pit of inadequacy and creepiness that he played beautifully in Ashes to Ashes. And the voice.)

That said, this is Esme. Even the hair's pretty close.

I seem to be wanting to rewatch Profit.

I am definitely okay with this.

It's one of my favorite little television oddities, really; one of those things that next to no one saw when it was aired, but has refused to quite go away. According to various DVD featurettes, iirc, it's never been out of favor with people who write for TV, which I entirely believe. (I would very much like to know if Matt Weiner was ever a fan, because if Don Draper and Peggy Olsen don't share a few narrative DNA codons with Jim Profit and Gail Koner, it's a very big coincidence. Although Mad Men is actually far more optimistic about human nature.)

I mean, on the surface level, Profit is obviously the product of a televisual culture than which we are a little more advanced these days (I'm sorry, that's an awful sentence). The pacing runs a bit sluggish by 2012 standards; the plot contrivances are occasionally -- uh -- well, nothing we're watching these days is going to look any more plausible in sixteen years; and, with the exception of the titular character (and I might be biased, because Adrian Pasdar could look both sexass and dignified in a potato sack), everyone looks like they got dressed in a bad second-hand shop in the dark.

We'll say nothing about the computer graphics. I find them charming, anyway.

But at the same time it's probably one of the smarter pieces of television I've ever seen, and the single most pitch-black satire I've ever encountered in any media. I do not think anyone has ever been more vicious about ripping shreds off the concept of the American Family (The Manchurian Candidate wants to be -- and I mean the book; the first movie waters it down and the second is going after different targets -- but it bogs down in 1950s gender ideals) and as for the American Corporation, and Profit's glorious skewering of the tendency of the two to be conflated...

So yes, I think I'm going to watch it again. I have thoughts. And it'll be a nice warm-up for reducing the Upstairs Downstairs reboot to lawn mulch*.


* Lawn mulch, furthermore, which I have sworn will not contain a single instance of "this isn't how I would have done this" thinking; it won't need to. There's material for a dissertation in the way that no one, possibly excepting the cast, had a damned clue about how they were doing it; I'm going to be mulching it primarily for the purpose of giving myself a way to articulate my thoughts about knowing what goddamned story you're telling. Because it's a textbook example of what happens when you don't; also, it's obscure in this country and not sf/f/h, so no one reading this is likely to have any serious emotional attachment to it. But I digress.

Epigraph-mining for Memorial (largely for personal reference, move along):

( and expect additions )

There might not end up being any Nazis in this one at all; I think the whole point might be that no one in it is capable of connecting to anything outside their own heads. On the other hand, I've just had a sufficiently-sized flash of the bleeding obvious to realize what everyone's trauma actually is.

(No, I don't plan on being this spammy as a rule, I don't think. I'm just getting my higher brain function back, and I'm kind of rolling around in it.)

I hate introductions. Have I mentioned?

At any rate: for professional purposes, I'm Kat. (For unprofessional purposes, I am whatever I introduced myself by, but that looks so much better on a cover.) I am an extremely unpublished, and mostly unfinished, novelist, attempting to drag myself by main force into productivity. I write sf/f/h and am currently torn between two embryonic projects: Memorial, which is best described as "what happens when you throw Upstairs Downstairs and The Haunting of Hill House into a blender and hit frappe," and an untitled far-future SF novel about a contract soldier with voices in her head. I am leaning heavily towards the former, despite the fact that it requires enough research to make me tear my hair out and weep.

My eventual dayjob, I hope, is going to involve editing movie trailers. At the moment, I clean things.

Depending on which platform you're reading on, I'm drownbynumbers on Dreamwidth (which I prefer) and, for the moment, katburton on Livejournal. (I hope to be drownbynumbers over there as well, as soon as I can get the renaming business sorted out.)