Writing research thoughts

Here, clearly, is the difference between being someone with an undergrad degree in politics and a grad degree in library science who just likes to mess around with reading history books (that I mostly find at thrift stores and on the deep sale table at new book stores), and a person with a grad degree actually related to a specific period of historic literature:
The lovely author Delia Sherman is talking about the books she is getting rid of in re: 18th c. France and Elizabethan Theater.  And I've never even heard of most of them.
This despite the fact that, in my admittedly rare free time, I've been reading about both subjects on and off for the last three years.  I was feeling all cool last month when I was reading a general book on Restoration theater and I went "hey, I know who Kynaston is, neat."
I guess to be fair to myself, I should note that mostly I've just been reading social history, and there isn't time to squeeze a whole lot of research reading in between working full time, going to grad school half time, and job hunting.  If I manage one smart-person type book a month, I feel all cool.  I felt terribly cool when I found a copy of this book on smells in France in the 1700s (The Foul and the Fragrant), and then I found out from a friend that they teach it in undergrad cultural studies classes.  At that rate I'll never ever catch up with someone with a grad degree in the stuff.  Plus I never keep focus like a proper researcher should - I'm all "well, this is 150 years later than the period I should be researching, but it's neat - maybe I can just steal this guy and stick him into my story". 

( Novel casting wankage )

And she notes that Elizabethan theater novels are way overdone, which makes me sad, but I shall carry on with my odd little, not-a-historical novel, not quite a Restoration-theater novel, fantasy mish-mash anyway, because at the very least, the poor thing has worked hard enough that it should be finished before I decide if it needs to go live under my bed in a plastic box, never to see the light of day.  Perhaps the fever is making me maudlin.  Wait, I cried buckets over a silly series Regency romance novel this afternoon - I know the fever is making me maudlin.  Ah well, time to work.

In Memoriam

I have heard from lots of posts on my friends list that Lloyd Alexander is dead.  This is....

very sucky.

This is the guy who wrote the best political fantasy series for kids I ever read when I was little (Westmark, The Kestrel, The Beggar Queen - so good and I have to re-read them about every two years or I get irked - sly and funny and very realistic political stuff full of people who are not who they think they are or who they appear to be, but also managing to have lots of good Prisoner of Zenda style action sequences).  Also he wrote The First Two Lives of Lukas-Kasha, which I loved inordinately, and he wrote a great sort of juvenile Girl-Indiana-Jones type action series about a girl named Holly Vesper.  And of course, the Prydain chronicles, which are the books you're going to find by him at your local library no matter how tiny.  They're sort of a bit Mabinogion based, I think, and have a great female character, Eilonwy.

Anyway, his books were smart and morally complex and very human, and the new ones were good and touching too (which isn't always the case with authors who you loved when you were a kid, so it's worth noting).  Any of my college friends who haven't read him should definitely try them - I recommend Westmark, but that's just because it's my personal favorite.  See they didn't have those at my library as a kid, but then I went to this library that was in this old gray stone castle-like building where the upstairs and backroom were a strange natural history museum composed mostly of the private collection of one of those guys who collects all sort of stuff (Vermont is full of these places).  And there they were, the Westmark books.  And then I had to keep nagging my mother to drive me there again and again so I could check them out again...