girl genius gone weird

One of the reasons I know my brain is a little more enthusiastic about Memorial than any of the other options: it's accrued both a working title and an unfeasibly long soundtrack.

For those of you who like to know what you're getting into, tracklist under the cut:

( this cut right here )

Yeah, that's screamingly anachronistic for something that's set when this thing wants to be set. *shrugs* I don't have any early jazz on my computer. I could have resorted to Spotify, but that's possibly the only thing less user-friendly (in my experience) than 8tracks when it comes to sharing.

Also, I'm not sure what the Lewis Carroll is about; all I know is that I saw Xie Kitchin Asleep on Sofa at the MFA a couple of weeks ago and the resultant spine-crawly feeling seems to be connected in some subterranean way to this story.

(I was incredibly sleep-deprived at the time I saw it, and had brought The Drowning Girl with me to read on the train. That is not a combination of factors I'd necessarily recommend.)

At any rate; I'm not even sure what the story is about, other than a lingering discomfort with my own fascination with interwar Britain. I would like to say it's in dialogue with Gosford Park, but the truth is that I don't want to talk back to Gosford Park so much as sit and wallow in its craft; the recent and almost entirely gawdawful BBC reboot of Upstairs Downstairs, on the other hand -- well.

At this point, I would like to point out somewhat defensively that I have been trying to write both a haunted house book and a not!Mitfords book for -- I think about a decade, for the first one -- but that credit for galvanizing me into realizing that they ought to be the same book does go at least somewhat to Claire Foy's performance in the final episode of the benighted thing, which performance is the very definition of spinning straw into gold.

(Someday, I may post a full-length excoriation of exactly what is wrong with that series, on a craft front. This is the definition of "things no one cares about," but I can get very, very vocal about people doing my specialist subject WRONG.)

And now, of course, I have forfeited all my Cool for the rest of human existence, but the thing about embarrassing influences is that one might as well disclose them; if one doesn't, other people will, and then one just looks silly. Or that's the theory I'm operating under, anyway.