The 35th Precinct

Np, the Nevillefic didn't get posted; I was a lazy cretin and didn't finish it. For me, the hardest part of a fic is the last 1000 words. It begins to dawn on me then that the end is near, and while I rejoice at the prospect of putting the last period in place, I'm always afraid that I'm missing something, or that I've buggered up the central idea with pretty but useless trappings. In short, I'm convinced I'm about to perpetrate a literary horror on the unsuspecting Internet. This conviction usually persists until the first feedback arrives, and so long as the readers aren't crying for my head on a pike, I'm happy.

I finished the CSI: New York novel the day before yesterday. It was no great shakes from a technical standpoint. In fact, the writer, a Mr. Stuart M. Kaminsky, could do with a few remedial lessons in compositional proficiency. His most egregious sin was to switch tenses during forensic exposition. The story proper was written in third-person past tense, but whenever it was necessary to explain procedure, he would lapse inexplicably into present tense. It was clunky and jarring, and any writer worth his IBM Selectric knows such gratuitous tense shifting is verboten, not to mention troglodytic hackery. Were such a tactic on view at FictionAlley or Skyehawke, it would be roundly pounded into the ground by the literate members of the community, and yet it's being sold at Borders for eight dollars a copy. I can only gnash my teeth and weep. I would foreswear the next novel in the series, but Max Allan Collins will be writing it, and while his prose belongs just below the nutritional panel on a cereal box in terms of narrative pizzazz, he can keep his tenses straight. Huzzah!

How low my standards have fallen.

After the CSI: NY book, I started Dracula. I've read it before, but I thought a re-read wouldn't go amiss. The first time I read it, I was thirteen and curled up on the couch in my grandpa's library. I found it on the shelf, an ancient, crumbling hardback that dated from the thirties. The pages were yellow and fragile and smelled of dust, and I spent three nights worrying that I'd tear them and get a hiding for my troubles, but mercifully, both the pages and my bottom remained intact.

I liked the story well enough back then. The Count was creepy, and Renfield gave me a few uneasy dreams, but I was certainly not horrified. In fact, living forever and having guys think you were delicious didn't seem all that bad a gig. It still doesn't, come to think of it.

Fifteen years later, of course, I can see the moral ambiguities and underlying Victorian sexual and societal mores that I missed, and they are fascinating, particularly with regard to the ways in which Mina and Lucy view themselves. Mina frets about learning shorthand so that she will "be useful to her husband", and Lucy worries because she is twenty and has yet to receive a marriage proposal. They have no worth save that which their husbands or suitors assign to them, and they never question what, if anything, the man can or should offer them beyond a penis and salvation from the title of spinster. Indeed, through the correspondence between Mina and Lucy, the book implies that, far from making demands upon their husbands, women should simply be grateful that a man has chosen them at all.

Gag me with a stake and some garlic. Bleagh. It's a dry-boxed old virgin's life for me, thanks.

Farewell, silverchan, from the flist.