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FanExpo, FanExposure, FanExposed!

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JULIETLANDAUI will be at FanExpo Vancouver this weekend, signing books and meeting fans. Including some of you, perhaps? I hope so.

Some of the other writers who will be in Authors Alley include my good friend DD Barant, author of the thoroughly awesome urban fantasy thrillers, The Bloodhound Files, Hiromi Goto, whose Half World won the Sunburst Award in the youth category in 2010, the same year Indigo Springs received the Sunburst for adult fiction–we’re like Sunburst Twins! Eileen Kerneghan and Silvia Moreno-Garcia will be there too.

And also there will be a few other people you might, possibly, have heard of: James Marsters, Juliet Landau, Amanda Tapping, and Sean Astin, for example, along with many others including what looks like the entire cast of Continuum.

Girlfriend Testing on the #BuffyRewatch on @tordotcom

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slayerWay back when I was watching BtVS the first time through, I thought “I was Made To Love You” was the saddest damned thing I’d ever seen. Then, of course, “The Body” aired the following week.

I’m hoping that as the show gets grimmer, the rewatches will get funnier. Because, really, it’s tougher to say silly things about the nigh-perfect episodes, and out-funnying the funny ones is tough too. But the actual watching–some of it is going to be very grim, especially as I hit S6.

In which I #amreading crime, Victorian style (by @TheLitDetective)

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keep readingAfter Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification I jumped into The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars. In addition to also being a book with a very long title, Paul Collins‘s Murder of the Century is a book with some overlaps, in terms of its subject matter, with the fingerprinting history. It’s one of a number of books I’ve read lately about this era in New York history: there was The Poisoner’s Handbook, last year and The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst (which I remembered as “The Hearst Thing.”)

The Murder of the Century is, in its way, also a Hearst thing: it’s about how two rival newspapers–one owned by Hearst and the other by the Joseph Pulitzer–got into a crazy ratings battle triggered by the discovery of a dismembered corpse.

It’s obvious to us all at this point that sensational murders (or, to a lesser extent, sensational deaths) garner audience in big numbers for whatever news outlets feature them. This book is about the genesis of that knowledge. What’s most intriguing about this specific case is how deeply the reporters of these rival papers were mucking about in the actual detecting: running down evidence, for example, and proposing their own ‘favorite’ candidates for the identity of the headless corpse. At one point Hearst essentially leased a crime scene so his reporters would have sole access to it. But wait, there’s more! He then had his guys sabotage all the phones for blocks around so that reporters staking out the perimeter would have to leave the vicinity just to call in.

That’s just the iceberg tip of some crazy reporter antics.

It’s a nicely-written true crime story and a nifty snapshot of both the history of journalism and of policing in New York in the 1880’s, well worth your time if any of that appeals to you. Here’s the cover:

Paul Collins, should you wish to know more about him, is TheLitDetective on Twitter.

And, since some of you have asked: no, there isn’t much of this that’s for a specific project, though the fingerprinting history has already proved itself extremely useful. Fiction will come of all this reading eventually–it always does–but I have no specific plans yet. I’m basically just mulching the Gilded Age for the joy of it.

And next up is more of the same, in a way: I’m about a third of the way through Matthew Goodman’s Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World.

Photography, the pinboard

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Back around the same time digital photography was beginning to dawn, my grandfather sent Kelly his old SLR 35-mm camera. It was in perfect condition and took beautiful pictures, and she spent a lot of time roaming around Vancouver making very cool black and white images.

A lot of them were of me, and this was entirely to my benefit. Before Grandpa’s Camera, I was awkward before the lens and hated almost every image taken of me. While K was learning to take better pictures, I invested some time and attention both in becoming a better subject and in appreciating a wider range of me-pictures. Here’s a random portrait:

Cruise portraits

Now, as more than one of you probably knows, I’m obnoxious on this topic–I did it, and I liked the result, so in the typical way of humans I can easily be led into preaching about how everyone else should do the same.

(But really! You should! Because people take more pictures than ever of you. And they put them on the Internet without asking. And this is the age of the selfie! And other reasons as well!)

I brought home books from the library. Hundreds and hundreds of books on photography for K to read. Ansel Adams and Henri Cartier-Bresson and history of this and collections of that. And while I didn’t absorb more than a minute fraction of the content, I looked at all the pictures. Knowledge soaked in: I can tell a good photo from a bad one now, even if I can’t always articulate why. And I loooove good pictures.

That was 1997ish. Dad was alive (we obliged him to build a darkroom in our bathroom and our cat Obi clawed the living crap out of his hand by way of thanks) and I had just started writing fulltime. In 2001 I was toting a Polaroid around, because by then I’d found that, occasionally, I wanted a picture of something for writing purposes. It suited me to have the picture that very second, dammit, so I could write down why I thought it was important.

This didn’t work out so well, so in 2003, I bought my first digital. I’ve taken well over 15,000 images since then, with four different cameras. The further back you go in time on my Flickr account, the less impressive they are.

So, with that long wind-up, I offer you my photo pinboard. This is for pictures by other photographers, images I think are wonderful, interspersed with the occasional infographic on technique.

Telewitterings – Loki vs. Cranford

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cranford memeSome time ago we acquired the sequel to BBC’s Cranford, which is as chickly a televisual enterprise as you would ever want to watch. Based on fiction by Elizabeth Gaskell, it was produced and created by Sue Birtwhistle and Susie Conklin, and stars Judi Dench, Julia McKenzie, Imelda Staunton, Barbara Flynn and Julia Sawalha.

Also, it has a cow in long underwear.

I’m not saying it’s all one big convent, or even L Word, 1840 Style. (Though that might be intriguing). There are men in the town of Cranford, you see. It’s just that few of them seem to be available for traditional heterosexual romantic pursuit. They’re either attached or bound for India, or just plain dim or somehow doomed.

So this wonderful bunch of middle-aged spinsters who pretty much own the town bevvies about, not being married, not having children and instead forming a delightful alternate family. They putter about gossiping and having adventures and renovating theaters and, now and then, experiencing heartbreak as they grapple with the clash between the era they grew up in and their radically changed present, with its railroads and progress and newfangled technology.

Part one was so wonderful and that we rewatched it before diving into Return to Cranford. The original series had neatly disposed of the only two single men by its final episode. One did, despite considerable deficits in the commonsense department, get himself married. The other, who was played by a delightfully surly Philip Glenister, did not. They shuffled him off the stage nonetheless.

Even a chickly chickly costume drama’s nothing without at least one romantic entanglement, am I right? So one new male character now was required. So, to my surprise, the new available boy turned out to be the man otherwise known as Loki McWhinepants, brother of Thor–in other words, Tom Hiddleston.

Now many of my fannish friends have the idea that Tom Hiddleston and his Avengery alter ego are as yummy a bag of chips as the salt gods could ever bestow upon a screen, big or small. And I could, intellectually, rationalize his appeal. But film Loki just didn’t do it for me. If there was a test whose question was Rate the Film Avengers in order of sexy yum potential, my list would probably go something like this:

1. Joss Whedon’s Brain
2. The Assassins.
3. Tony.
4. Bruce.
4.5. Tony and Bruce, together, in that car. Or that lab.
5. Team Shield: Fury, Agent Coulson, Agent Hill and their very cool ship.
6. Captain America.
7. Unnamed but suitably grateful Waitress.
8. Team Asgard
9. Pepper

What I’m saying is that while I’ve understood and (I hope) supported my friends in their pursuit of Tony/Loki fanfic and ever cuter Hiddleston gifs, I’d also thought, you know, yawn.

What’s this got to do with our topic (Return to Cranford, remember? It’s okay. I almost forgot, too.) Well, Tom Hiddleston! In period Pants! Being earnest and put upon and in pure true love with a young woman and being put upon by his father. In the face of parental opposition to his life choices, he does something that’s spoilery spoilery never you mind but thoroughly wonderful and romantic.

And just like that, Whoo! I’m on board.

In my house, silly new telecrushes inevitably lead first to the imdb. . .

. . . and then to embarrassment, in this case because I then realized that TH was also the totally annnoying Magnus in Wallander. I love Wallander! How did I miss that?

(Answer: I was too busy laughing as little Kenny Branaugh cried his eyes out. Apparently I am a sick sick person).

. . . and then, after the Wallander discovery and subsequent facepalms had sunk in, all I could do was text the aforementioned Tony/Loki shipper to say guess what, I heart what you heart now. You are right, I am wrong, mea culpa.

So I’ve learned a valuable lesson about tolerance, or perhaps about how Mister Hiddleston is far more attractive when clothed in old timey garb, virtue, and clean hair. But what I really hope you’ll take away from this is that Cranford and sequel are all about the women. If you like costume dramas at all and someone missed this one, I recommend it bigtime. Especially as Judi Dench is so warm and lovely and thoughtful and thoroughly marvelous that you just want to reach through the fourth wall and give her a great big hug. Plus, also, tea.