He becomes the Riddler!

He uses the powers within his magic diary to edit Ms. Rowling?

Loving the Potter speculation.

Also, from a while back:

In other news, Haruki Murakami's After the Quake, a collection of stories about the aftermath of the 1995 Kobe earthquake which killed 4,000 people, is just marvelous ... The stories are really hard to describe--not slow but very careful, lucid, all these details and moments building up to something extraordinary at the end. Quiet moments of connection or disconnection, hope or despair, discovery, humor or joy or sorrow.

I freaking love Murakami. Love love love love love. After the Quake is a wonderful collection, and I think you describe the feel of the stories really well. The insanity behind the ordinary. Have you read any of his other work? The Elephant Vanishes is another collection of short stories, although they don't have a unifying element like those in After the Quake. And his novels are exquisite, he absorbs you into a parallel universe of perfect sentences.

He uses the powers within his magic diary to edit Ms. Rowling?

BWAH!

I've read some of the stories in The Elephant Vanishes (I discovered him via the reprinting of "The Second Bakery Attack" in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, which is a story that just fills me with giddy joy whenever I reread it), but none of his novels.

For Susan, especially, interesting article on historical novels in the Globe and Mail.

From the article:

Nonetheless, historical novels are often dismissed as low-grade formula writing, the guy's equivalent of a romance novel. It doesn't help that the Romance Writers' Association includes historical novels in its self-definition -- as long as they have a love interest and a happy ending.

t sputters with fury

Well, the author's not wrong that serial war-historicals probably fill the same gap in men that serial romance-historicals tend to fill in women *; and he's not wrong that a number of these historicals of both types are crap. As for the assumption joining these two ideas, well, it's the same foolishness that calls all fanfic slash, isn't it?

* Actually it's interesting -- I think women "cross over" and read war-historicals, but I do think their primary intended audience is usually male. (Based not least on marketing, prose style, etc.) I know very few men cross over and read romance-historicals.

I was sent the article because Marlene was curious as to whether I saw myself as being even remotely a historical writer. By those definitions, no: while my stuff is permeated with history, very little of it actually has a historical setting. Even in the new series, where the historical events that led to the songs and hauntings is vital, the only actual historically set bits are the epilogues, at the end of each book.

Eyes in the Fire jumped back and forth between two eras, modern and pre-Roman occupation of Southwestern England. I researched trhe history, but the book is not a love story, has no romantic angle at all, and very definitely does not have a happy ending.

So she was curious as to where I thought my own stuff fits into the definitions posited in the article. And I'm thinking, no, by those definitions I write neither historicals nor romances.

Magic realism. That's the ticket. Ghosts and Magritte. Or something.

Well, I still think they're more than implying that all romances are crap, and possibly that any novel that follows a formula is crap. And even though I know I can do nothing about that particular brand of snobbery, it still pisses me off. I mean, who the hell gets to dictate you can't have excellent, intelligent storytelling within the bounds of a genre?