It's actually "It'll grieve me / cause I love you so...."

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Death is His Gift

The lab is cool and smells of antiseptic. We file in one by one, like altar boys being herded into line for a procession, scuffing our feet along the worn linoleum tile. A silver colored container the size of a coffin sits there with its lid off.

He stares up at us, the lack of eyelids lending him a surprised air. We stand there, momentarily, in apparent supplication and silently beg his forgiveness for treating him like a piece of meat behind the butcher’s counter. Then, we touch him, carefully, reverently, as this gift deserves while we learn from him.

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Huh.

No idea. I probably meant "grieves for," but it didn't ping me when I reread, so maybe I do use it that way. I dunno.

It woulda helped, 'cause I ended up at 99 and had to stick in the "so" in the last line. I think, anyway, 'cause I hand-counted this one.

I also noticed that I inadvertently rhymed again in the closing sentence. Whoops. Heh.

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I seem to be having a writerly identity crisis.

I'm not sure I'm a romance novelist after all, at least not in any way that'll fit the current direction of the genre. So I'm staring in befuddlement at my work, and at the market, and wondering if there's any home for a writer who writes historical fiction, or maybe call it historical women's fiction, wherein the love story is the A plot or occasionally a very strong B plot, but breaks too many romance rules to be a romance.

I know, I know, write the book, then worry about the market, you have to be true to your art, yadda yadda yadda. I know and believe all that. But I'm just so damn sick of being a publishing virgin. I'm like one of those implausible Regency heroines out to lose her virginity in One Night of Passion, convention be damned and consequences go hang, but unlike the implausible heroines, my conscience won't shut up: "Self, you'll gut the story if you force it down to 400 pages/100K words because that's the longest the romance market allows. And you know it's lame to give short shrift to the Badajoz sequence just because Jack and Anna aren't together in that part of the story. Same goes for Anna's pregnancy, birth, and early experiences of motherhood. Life-changing experiences, both, and important to who they are when they meet again a few months later. And do you really want to trim down the conversations and obliterate or minimize the secondary characters? You hate books where the hero and heroine seem to fall in love and into bed without actually getting to know each other, and you are annoyed by ones where everything and everyone but the hero and heroine are cardboard cutouts. Which would you rather have, a mediocre book that fits the conventions or something as brilliant as your gifts allow you to make it that doesn't?"

Stupid conscience. As long-winded and big-mouthed as the rest of me. But it's right.

So. Huh. Is there are market for romancey pseudo-epic historical fiction? I think so, but it's probably harder to break into. But OTOH, the potential rewards might be greater.

Stupid market. Stupid muse, to refuse to give me anything with an obvious niche.

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I know that many aren't fans, but would Diana Gabaldon's books maybe fall under that sort of category, Susan?

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I was thinking of Diana Gabaldon. There's also Sara Donati and probably a few others. And while his books aren't by any stretch of the imagination romancey and woman-oriented, insofar as I want to be compared to anyone, I'd be over the moon if anyone called me a female American Patrick O'Brian.

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Well, I feel like you'd definitely have an audience out there.

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Susan, I have nothing to offer on this one. I don't write genre fiction - I just write fiction. But then, I don't write epics, either - I'm into minimal language that's as powerful and that carries as much as I can make it. Which isn't a knock at the longer, fuller form - see Chabon, Michael, Kavalier and Klay. But even there, in my favourite book on earth, I'd have edited a good twenty pages (that's book pages, so way more inmanuscript terms) out of the Antarctica sequence. Personal taste. And as to the market, I'm clueless.

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Susan, I feel like the question is, which is more imporatant to you? To make a living from your writing, or to write exactly the stories in your heart or whatever. If getting published is #1, you should probably focus on writing the kinds of things you know people want to buy.

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I've heard it "it grieves me" all my life. What I've never heard before is "I grieve you."

Me too deb, that's why I looked it up. I have also said and heard "They are grieving" (in lieu of 'mourning')--just never the way Liese used it.

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