In which I blame the parent.
Nov. 14th, 2015 06:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceIt's probably ironic that now, right now is the first time I've ever written a book that my mother would have thoroughly enjoyed.
She used to collect my books with pride, and insist that I signed them for her, and keep them on a special separate shelf where visitors could see - but no, she never read them. Not her sort of thing; she had no taste for speculative fiction, and couldn't stand violence or gore.
But what I'm doing now, the Crater School books - oh, yes. I think she'd have loved these.
It may actually be her fault that I'm writing them. I fell in love with the Chalet School books in my single-digit childhood, because my sisters brought them home from the library and it was a house rule that I read everything, their books as well as my own. I don't know if Mum had nudged either one of them into choosing those books rather than something else - but I do know that fifteen years later, when I had rediscovered the series (I was a young man writing for children, and took a couple home from the library as a pure shot at a venture, "I used to love those when I was a kid; I wonder if they're actually any good?") and was enthusing about them to her, she knew whereof I spoke because she had read and loved them all in her own girlhood. She had a deep and abiding fondness for English girls' boarding-school stories of all sorts, and these in particular (as do I, aye, obviously). And okay, the Crater School is set on Mars, and old Mars too, with canals and air and Martians and all sorts - but she would have shrugged at that, I think, and enjoyed the stories regardless.
Which, aye, gives a bitter twist to my cocktail of pleasure, but hey. I never did like sweet cocktails. And I finished Chapter Six last night. And I might be slightly anxious that we're a quarter of the way into my projected two dozen chapters and term hasn't even started yet; but that wretched naiad did insist on rising from the lake, and what can you do...?
She used to collect my books with pride, and insist that I signed them for her, and keep them on a special separate shelf where visitors could see - but no, she never read them. Not her sort of thing; she had no taste for speculative fiction, and couldn't stand violence or gore.
But what I'm doing now, the Crater School books - oh, yes. I think she'd have loved these.
It may actually be her fault that I'm writing them. I fell in love with the Chalet School books in my single-digit childhood, because my sisters brought them home from the library and it was a house rule that I read everything, their books as well as my own. I don't know if Mum had nudged either one of them into choosing those books rather than something else - but I do know that fifteen years later, when I had rediscovered the series (I was a young man writing for children, and took a couple home from the library as a pure shot at a venture, "I used to love those when I was a kid; I wonder if they're actually any good?") and was enthusing about them to her, she knew whereof I spoke because she had read and loved them all in her own girlhood. She had a deep and abiding fondness for English girls' boarding-school stories of all sorts, and these in particular (as do I, aye, obviously). And okay, the Crater School is set on Mars, and old Mars too, with canals and air and Martians and all sorts - but she would have shrugged at that, I think, and enjoyed the stories regardless.
Which, aye, gives a bitter twist to my cocktail of pleasure, but hey. I never did like sweet cocktails. And I finished Chapter Six last night. And I might be slightly anxious that we're a quarter of the way into my projected two dozen chapters and term hasn't even started yet; but that wretched naiad did insist on rising from the lake, and what can you do...?