primeideal

Dante readalong got to Paradiso 27 and:

-even Dante believed in the adolescent rupture, like, "kids are great, they'll faithfully honor the fasts when they're baby-talking, but when they grow up, they think they're too cool for that religious stuff and will eat whatever, whenever they want."

-Dante and his contemporaries knew about the problems in the Julian calendar that would eventually give rise to the Gregorian calendar (~260 years later). It's kind of amazing how much Western European computational/mathematical/astronomical power went towards calculating Easter. But, like, the Julian calendar was around for 1600 years, even discrepancies of .0075 days add up!

Through keeping an eye on short story markets I ran across "Silence and Starsong," a new market that publishes SF/F with Christian worldviews and themes. In some ways it's similar to Mysterion, although Mysterion is more deliberate/transparent about paying (formerly) SFWA rates, and makes their stories free. One of the drawbacks to the current short fiction world is that it's unlikely people are earning a living through short fiction, and to some extent, people in fortunate socioeconomic situations like myself don't really need to be paid for their work--but, pay rates serve as an unofficial proxy for market prestige within the genre, and there doesn't seem to be a good alternative metric for that. Does that lead to ambitious/hopeful authors self-selecting towards better-paying markets, leaving markets (like S&S) that don't specify a concrete payrate to be like "sure, we'll take whatever"? I don't think that's entirely fair, but it was definitely a cognitive bias framing my reading experience.

Obligatory disclaimer that I'm not going to agree entirely with all the editors'/authors' beliefs, nor am I going to disavow all of them, if you're looking for ideological purity you should probably go elsewhere.

Some of the shorter stories didn't really rise above their premises, and required a lot of tropiness/genre-savviness to make work. "Have Ye Offered Unto Me" by Zachary Grafman is about a tired grad student whose advisor is an evil Indiana Jones/Lovecraft villain, and when the hero realizes he needs to defeat this evil (if only for the sake of saving the cute secretary), his mindset is "okay, better get my gun and a rosary." Results are predictable. "Free Lunch" by S. Kirk Pierzchala features a well-read girl who has to save her family from being trapped in the realms of the fae; she mentions "oh yeah, you can't eat someone else's food that was left over in our vacation rental, it might be cursed!" Surprise, she's right, but I didn't really feel that payoff was earned--for someone who previously had no "real" experience with fantasy realms, it felt like a leap to say "oh this must be an uncanny, supernatural experience." This might be a case of "longer would have been better," but on the other hand, there were a few scenes from her brother's POV trapped with the demonic forces that didn't really add much and could have been cut.

On the other hand, some of the longer stories were able to worldbuild at their own pace. Two stories worked well paired together as reflections on the Cold War in an era of weapons of mass destruction: "Archangel" by Frederick Gero Heimbach was a very imaginative alternate history in which the Czardom survived, and Russian Orthodoxy coexists with modern submarines. Here's the opening:
Like, how many blue-skinned archimandrites have you read about recently? Bold. Captain Ivanov's tragic childhood backstory felt like a distraction/plot device, but overall I really liked the imagination of this one.

In contrast, "Hidden Empire" by T.R. Alexander requires very few changes in history--at least, the history of the public record. The story's conceit for how the Pax Americana came to be is cynical, but all-too-believable.
Huge federal bureaucracies: they do be like that sometimes! The first-person "I'm writing this all down so there's some copy of the truth even if I go insane or sell out" is kind of cheesy, but again, as a "why the state of the world is so messed up" story it works.

"The Two Godly Fishmongers: A Tale of Strange Providences" by Kevin White has a droll sense of humor. The characters are 1600s Puritans, so we get to see great names like "Preserved Fisher" and his son-in-law, "Trout Roundtree." Fisher and his BFF Dudley have fallen out, only to  be terrified by forces beyond their knowing. They know Scripture well, and quote Psalm 131 and Jonah's prayer for deliverance. To some extent, I wasn't sure this would work as a pay-by-the-word story--did we really need to quote Jonah twice? But the twist at the end is clever, and partially justifies the setup.

"The Gamer" by Nathan Karnes doesn't engage a lot with traditional Christianity, but its fourth-wall self-awareness is also very clever. It's not as over-the-top as "The Adventures of Ledo and Ix," but it has a similar take on video game logic.
Overall, the collection leaned strongly towards historical fiction and/or horror, which is one reason that "Gamer"'s lighter fantasy tropes stood out and provided some nice variety. While not all of the stories were to my taste, I hope the market succeeds, in part for selfish reasons--maybe it's the kind of place I'd submit someday!

Bingo: Again, this is a little bit of a stretch, but the Kindle edition is estimated at 193 pages, and I think that probably counts as novel-length. I also think it's a good fit for "self/indie published," as well as "published in 2023" and "5+ short stories." (Would the horror stories taken on their own count as novel-length for the horror square? Mayyyyybe but that's really a stretch.)

I recently saw a theater performance of "A Christmas Carol," which was performed as a one-person show. A lot of it was quoting Dickens' narrator in the book, so it was third-persony at times, but still had different voices for various characters.

This isn't specific to this production, and maybe is just a fluke of how my brain works, but it's interesting to me how the different chapters sort of build on each other, with Scrooge at first skeptical/freaked out when Marley appears, and by the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come really terrified and determined to change his ways. Some of his "I will be a better person" starts before that, of course, but I think we're supposed to take away that the climax/biggest element in getting him to repent is the Future chapter, and in particular, the gravestone.

My question is...why? In particular, why that compared to, say, the Marley scene?

The future section tells us that, if things continue as they are, Scrooge will die alone and unloved, nobody will mourn him, people will steal his bed curtains, etc. Would Scrooge as portrayed at the beginning of the story actually...care about any of that? He's gonna be dead. Marley's death was similar, and Scrooge didn't seem to mind.

We also see the Cratchit family mourning Tiny Tim. This affects Scrooge, and that makes sense! Tiny Tim's fate is something that he can easily (in narrative) change by stepping in and supporting Bob. But in fact, Scrooge is so concerned about Tim that when he first meets him in the Ghost of Christmas Present section, he asks "what will happen" and the Spirit says "if things continue the way they are, Tim will die." Do we gain anything by seeing that "confirmed" in the bad future?

If I remember correctly, in the book Scrooge pleads with the spirit to say "whose name is that upon the stone, tell me this is just one possibility and not guaranteed to happen." The first part isn't exactly the same in the play, I think, but I'm guessing we're still supposed to infer "Scrooge is concerned that he was that dead guy he saw." (I.E. without context, his fear could be that the year on the stone is too close to the present, but I don't really think that's the point, and it's not like changing his behavior to be more moral is likely to make him any longer-lived.)

In contrast, Marley straight-up tells Scrooge, "I was neglectful to my fellow humans, and as a result, I'm cursed to bear this terrible chain and drag it around forever. If you don't shape up, you're gonna end up like me if not worse." This feels a lot more scary than "you will die and nobody will give a bleep." Like...everyone dies. And Scrooge doesn't seem the type to be concerned if people go about their business without him. Is he just too shocked at Marley's arrival to really process it? Is this just me projecting my thoughts/beliefs about afterlife/the infinite onto a cranky old businessman?