Rotten Row: the origin story
Jul. 23rd, 2013 05:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceI know I've told this story before; I may have told it here, or hereabouts. If so, bear with me. Or just scroll on. I am at that time of life; I am in my anecdotage.
So a few years back, I was staying with m'friend Juliet McKenna in Oxon, and there was a one-day SF con in London; and furthermore m'other friend Liz Williams was signing in an SF bookshop on t'other side of the Smoke. So two birds, one stone: I hopped on a train and spent the morning at the con, and then at lunchtime set off to walk across town to find Liz.
First thing that happened, I discovered that I was walking along Rotten Row. [For those not bothering to click through: this is a parade through Hyde Park, a broad avenue where high society used to disport itself on horseback and in carriages. For more information, read Georgette Heyer.] I'd known about it since I was a kid, but never been before. I was quite pleased to find that even in the absence of horses, people do still gather there to display; lots of rollerbladers and the like, showing off their skills and their physiques, their slick garb, their desirable selves. Just as people always have, really.
So I was kind of thinking about that, and science fiction, and so forth; and I debouched onto the streets of London again, and suddenly there was my first-ever bicycle rickshaw; and the one thing melded with the other, and both into a different context, and lo. That, children, is where I get my ideas from.
And by the time I came to the bookshop Liz was gone - to the convention, as it happens, in search of me - so we missed each other utterly. But I went back to Jules' with a whole lot of thinky in my head, and some little time later there was a novella, and this is it in its new incarnation:
It's about paranoia, and identity, and art. But what isn't?
Oh, and betrayal. Ditto ditto.
So a few years back, I was staying with m'friend Juliet McKenna in Oxon, and there was a one-day SF con in London; and furthermore m'other friend Liz Williams was signing in an SF bookshop on t'other side of the Smoke. So two birds, one stone: I hopped on a train and spent the morning at the con, and then at lunchtime set off to walk across town to find Liz.
First thing that happened, I discovered that I was walking along Rotten Row. [For those not bothering to click through: this is a parade through Hyde Park, a broad avenue where high society used to disport itself on horseback and in carriages. For more information, read Georgette Heyer.] I'd known about it since I was a kid, but never been before. I was quite pleased to find that even in the absence of horses, people do still gather there to display; lots of rollerbladers and the like, showing off their skills and their physiques, their slick garb, their desirable selves. Just as people always have, really.
So I was kind of thinking about that, and science fiction, and so forth; and I debouched onto the streets of London again, and suddenly there was my first-ever bicycle rickshaw; and the one thing melded with the other, and both into a different context, and lo. That, children, is where I get my ideas from.
And by the time I came to the bookshop Liz was gone - to the convention, as it happens, in search of me - so we missed each other utterly. But I went back to Jules' with a whole lot of thinky in my head, and some little time later there was a novella, and this is it in its new incarnation:
It's about paranoia, and identity, and art. But what isn't?
Oh, and betrayal. Ditto ditto.