regshoe

I haven't been writing very much lately, but I thought if I'm not going to write I may as well use the time for another fandom-adjacent activity, and so I've returned to ebook making and have been working on The Life and Adventures of Christian Davies.

It really is a fascinating book. I've tried to find out a little more about Christian Davies, and haven't found much; the broad outline of her life is attested, but this book appears to be the main source for most of the writing about her and its authenticity and accuracy are rather doubtful. Her entry in the Dictionary of National Biography makes interesting reading: it calls the attribution of the anonymously-published book to Daniel Defoe 'mistaken' and notes the difficulty of historical interpretation; the record of her admission to Chelsea Hospital apparently gives her name as Catherine, not Christian. I'm sure a thorough investigation of available historical sources could turn up more, but if anyone has done one I haven't found it yet.

And working on the book is interesting in light of that. Is it authentic at all, or a total fake? (Its publication the year after Christian's death does look a bit suspicious; OTOH, Hannah Snell's autobiography was written in the same way and is AFAIK well-attested as authentic, so it's not implausible.) Are the historical parts describing the war an interpolation by the writer, while the biographical parts are really by Christian? Is it authentic, but Christian herself was heavily embellishing and/or making stuff up?

It's a fun and fascinating read, anyway, even if parts of it sometimes feel a little bit like being stuck sat next to Tristram Shandy's Uncle Toby at a dinner party. I've just got to the part where Christian, having found her husband again only to learn that he's been cheating on her with a random Dutch woman, refuses to return to him and then goes off and starts flirting with a different random Dutch woman whom she meets while travelling. I do think the biographical parts ring true as a portrayal of a believable character, even if it's not actually an accurate narration of events, and I do like her very much.

The eighteenth-century style and formatting are proving a bit of a challenge to the automatic text-recognition, so I've got a lot of correcting to do and am going slowly. Long ſ is a frequent problem, though not always: sometimes it gets it right, sometimes it turns it into f or l or /, sometimes the unexpected weird-looking S causes a misinterpretation of the whole word (ſo becomes to, ſelf becomes felt, ſuch, amusingly, is often rendered as fuck). The book puts proper nouns in italics, which was standard at the time, and also uses italics for dialogue, which I've not seen elsewhere, and the resulting long mostly-italicised passages are another challenge for the text recognition.

Incidentally, I'm disappointed to see that Gutenberg have recently started adding AI-generated summaries to ebook pages (which are, from a brief skim of some of them, not always accurate and also rather disconcertingly point-missing in the way of AI-generated text). I think when I submit this one I'll write my own summary and see if I can request that they use that one instead, then if they say yes I might ask to replace the ones on the existing books I did.

New on the website: Jacobite songbook! Do say if you spot anything missing, or if there are any other Jacobite songs you'd especially like included. :D

Also on the website, I've been messing about with CSS and making some aesthetic updates (messing about with CSS is such an absorbingly fun thing to do), so the updates section on the home page is now in a sidebar, and some of the section front pages have a two-column layout to give a somewhat more equal status to FotH and Kidnapped. And I've figured out how to make responsive HTML work, so the site now looks a bit better on mobile (or otherwise very narrow) browsers.

And I've found a few extra things to add to the adaptations of Kidnapped page, and thus have inadvertently made a heartbreaking discovery. Steeleye Span, an English folk-rock group and my favourite band, have recorded several Scottish Jacobite songs, and these songs have been amongst my favourites of theirs for years, even before I got into Jacobite fandoms. Now I know where they came from: in the 1970s Steeleye performed in a stage adaptation of Kidnapped, playing a soundtrack of Jacobite music some of which later ended up on their next album. This was a one-off event and I will never get to watch it, which was tragic enough before I found out that the adaptation included both books. Thus a double tragedy: I can't watch my favourite band perform my favourite book, and I wouldn't have wanted to anyway. (Maddy Prior played the lass at the change-house! There's a finale song called 'Jacobite Rock'!) Woe, alas, cruel fate, etc. I will try to keep liking the songs.

Look at these beautiful illustrations from a 1948 edition of Kidnapped, kindly uploaded and shared by chiropteracupola on Tumblr! Besides getting the height difference approximately right (it's not quite a foot, but Davie is significantly taller), I think this is the only 'official' (i.e. non-fanart) visual representation of Alan I've seen that actually includes his smallpox scars. (Even the 2016 radio adaptation conspicuously cuts that bit from an otherwise almost verbatim use of David's initial description of him.) Actually my first thought was that Alan looks disconcertingly like the gentleman with the thistle-down hair (in the Portia Rosenberg illustrations from the book, not the TV series; it's that nose, I think); I was mildly alarmed by this until, on consideration, I decided that Alan looking just a little bit like an evil fairy is actually very appropriate. Anyway, I love these pictures very much; I must get myself a copy of the relevant edition. —ETA that I have found this edition on the Internet Archive, where more illustrations can be seen, albeit not in quite such good quality.

The Flight of the Heron ebook is getting close to being done! I don't think I've got a proofreader yet, so would anyone like to volunteer? (How this works: I will send you an ebook in format of your choice; you read it keeping a sharp eye out for any typos or formatting errors and report back on what you find.)

I have reached 40,000 words on my FotH/Kidnapped crossover longfic! And I think I have got to the point of needing a break from it—the last couple of weeks of writing have been a bit tough, and various things are not working out quite how I want. But I am going to be pleased with this achievement, and put it aside and work on Yuletide stuff for a little while—and then go back and decide what to do next. One possibility is that I start to re-draft the earlier chapters before writing more; at the moment it's feeling a bit weighed down by plot and characterisation that I know I haven't got right yet and want to change. We shall see!

Chantemerle is making slow but steady progress. It's the longest ebook I've done so far at 158,000 words, about a third as long again as Sir Isumbras. I'm working my way through rewrapping the text file (making all the lines the right length and organising them nicely); after that will come the slightly daunting task of formatting the (many, varied) chapter epigraphs in both text and HTML.

...But in the course of (unsuccessfully) trying to look up one of those chapter epigraphs today, I have found another Jacobite novel from 1905 which looks like it might be about an intense loyal friendship between female characters! One of them is the famous Lady Nithsdale who memorably and ingeniously helped her husband escape from the Tower of London after the '15. I will read it immediately and report back.

I learnt yesterday that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote an alternative set of lyrics to the Skye Boat Song—number XLII in this collection. I think I like this version better than the more well-known original! The images are less hackneyed and more evocative, and there's a lovely wistfulness to it.

I've been continuing my D. K. Broster researches by looking her up in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, to which I have access through the public library. The entry has some interesting details that I hadn't heard before, including that she thought The Yellow Poppy was her best book, but her favourite was The Wounded Name (I think that shows excellent and hilarious judgement; although the DNB doesn't say, and I'd like to know, when she said it—how many, if any, of her later books were not written yet to compare to those two?), and a little bit about her personality: she was known as a worrier, obsessed by the difficulties of daily living, the need to be ready for any and every emergency. I probably shouldn't quote the whole entry here, but I'm happy to send a copy to anyone who would like one! I'd like to continue these biographical researches properly; I think I'll make another delve into the Ancestry records (now only accessible actually in libraries, so I'll have to make a visit to one), and then see if I can work up the courage to ask the people at St Hilda's College Archive if I can go and have a look at these papers, which sound terribly interesting.

Here it is!

The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby, published in 1924, is about the society of suburban Hull in the early twentieth century and its treatment of a young woman who fails in what it sees as the ultimate purpose of a young woman's life—getting married. It is a very good book, taking a slow run-up to a resounding conclusion in minute and brilliant detail of setting and character, and it has one of the most satisfying endings of any book I've ever read.

When I submit the files for a new ebook, there are two steps that have to happen before it's available for download: first, the lovely processing volunteers at Project Gutenberg check the files, fix any mistakes they find and upload them, at which point they email me to let me know it's up; then the files actually have to finish uploading and appear on the website itself. Usually the first stage takes a day or two and the second a few hours, but this time it was the other way round: the processing team worked very fast and I got their email only a couple of hours after sending the files, but for mysterious reasons it's taken another day and a half for the book to materialise. Thus I have been impatiently bouncing up and down waiting to post this since Wednesday evening, but it's here now!

I've been making slow progress on ebooking lately—trying to juggle it with too many other projects—but, finally, here it is!

Thanks very much to theseatheseatheopensea for help, proofreading and general Edward Prime-Stevenson fannishness and promotion :D

White Cockades: An Incident of the "Forty-Five" by Edward Prime-Stevenson is a thrilling adventure novel set during the 1745 Jacobite Rising, following the adventures of a fugitive Jacobite after the battle of Culloden and the courageous Highland lad who decides to help him; featuring a great deal of romantic bravery, slashiness and dubious historical accuracy. It's very good fun, highly recommended for fans of Edward Prime-Stevenson and/or Flight of the Heron and anyone else who thinks this sounds like a good time. One of these days I will get round to writing crossover fic...

I'm working on turning Imre: A Memorandum into an ebook. Unlike my previous two ebooks, Imre was not published in the typical way (because of the subject matter, it couldn't have been); it was privately printed at an English press in Naples. This unusual history seems to have led to a bit of irregularity in the formatting, which I'm having an interesting time dealing with.

To begin with, there are a lot of the typical sorts of straightforward printing errors, which I generally correct as I go, although the actual missing words can be slightly tricky to figure out. More entertaining is the dialogue formatting: some of the dialogue is "like this" and some is «like this», sometimes switching back and forth within a scene. I think this comes from the Italian printing, because «angled quotes» are standard in Italian (Hungarian does dialogue „like this“—which format has, oddly, turned up in the book as well, but only once). Ellipses are another one—they contain anything from two to eight dots, apparently at random, and the spacing is very irregular. The book is in long sections rather than chapters, and these are broken up occasionally by blank lines between the paragraphs—but there also seem to be some random extra blank lines which, as far as I can tell, aren't intended to mark breaks, and it's a bit of headache trying to decide which ones are deliberate and which ones to remove.

I have to decide how to represent this in the ebook, which is an interesting question. Project Gutenberg's guidelines allow for some freedom with this sort of thing, and copying the original exactly usually seems to be allowed even if the original is non-standard. I quite like getting to see these idiosyncrasies, as part of the history of the original book as a physical object and process of publication, and I'm inclined to try to preserve some of the weirdness rather than standardising everything—but I think the switching quote styles may be a bit too confusing.

The actual quality of the printing is also not the best (though that may be partly the scans). Words are occasionally obscured, and it's very difficult to tell the difference between different accents on letters—which appear fairly often in Hungarian, German, a bit of French, etc. words, which I keep having to look up to make sure I'm getting them right. Happily—as I have learnt from trying to figure this out—Hungarian at least only uses acute accents, not grave or circumflex, so I know that fake-Budapest is correctly Szent-Istvánhely.

Anyway, in the midst of all this I'm very much enjoying the book itself. I think paying so much attention to the text is getting me to appreciate it more—the emotions in the first part are so quietly lovely, and I absolutely love how it sounds so exactly like how merely subtexual/slashy books from the same period often sound, using such similar phrases and details... but this time it stops being subtextual.

( A couple of favourite quotes, idiosyncratic formatting included )

I've had so much fun working on Sir Isumbras at the Ford that I'm seriously considering making a proper hobby of this book digitisation. It's not all that seldom that I come across a public-domain book that I'd like to read and that isn't on Project Gutenberg, and I'd like to contribute to expanding the collections.

On the technical side, I've downloaded some OCR software which seems to be working well, so I can now do the scans-to-text bit myself. And I suspect the process will be much easier and simpler for having done it once already—besides just not having to take the time to learn as I go, there were several places working on Sir Isumbras where I could have saved myself effort if I'd had more idea, at an earlier stage of the process, of what I was going to need to do later.

So the immediate question is, what next?

I have a few ideas, but I think the first book I'm going to tackle is Jill by E. A. Dillwyn—a fun, femslashy Victorian adventure story which is comfortably out of copyright in both the UK and the US, not currently on PG and doesn't appear to be being worked on. And I like it a great deal, which is important for two reasons—first, I think it both deserves and might appeal to a wider readership; and second, I'm going to have to spend a lot of time and detail on the text of this book, so it ought to be one I enjoy reading! And there are PDF scans of the text available on archive.org, so I can make my text from those rather than having to scan the book myself, which will save work.

Other possibilities that have occurred to me:

• Chantemerle, to complete the D. K. Broster collection. There is a scan of this on archive.org but it's not very good quality, and some words are illegible—good enough when you're reading it and can fill in the sense of the gaps, not so good when you need a complete text. Also, as I learnt with Sir Isumbras, the large amount of French text would be a bit of a pain to format. However, it's Broster! I might come back to this one.
• The novels of Winifred Holtby, two of which (Anderby Wold and The Crowded Street) are currently old enough to be eligible for PG. Unfortunately I can't find scans of these anywhere, so I'd have to obtain a first edition and scan it myself—a cursory check suggests first editions of these are neither easy to find nor cheap, but I may see what I can do, because Holtby certainly deserves more appreciation.
• Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy. PG already has The Romance of a Shop, Miss Meredith and two books of poetry, but is missing this one. Again, there's a scan on archive.org, so it wouldn't be too difficult to do.

...but I shall leave these ambitious speculations to the future and concentrate on one thing at a time, for now. :)

I've been practising the Fair Isle pattern that I'll be using for my next jumper. I've wanted to be able to do Fair Isle patterns ever since I started knitting, so I'm very pleased that this is going well. And I've got some really lovely wool colours to work it in! Here is a poorly-lit photo of it:



It's a fairly simple pattern with only six colours, and basically it just seems to be a matter of keeping track of where you are in the pattern and stopping all the different bits of yarn from getting tangled up, which is a bit fiddly but not actually very difficult. Now I've practised the pattern enough to be comfortable with it, worked out the tension and everything, I'm going to make a start on the real thing.

Sir Isumbras at the Ford is very nearly ready to submit to Project Gutenberg! All the important html is done—there's a widget on their site that converts an html file into an ebook the same way they actually make the ebook files, and I tried using it today and it's looking very nice. I'm going to do one more proper proofread to catch any lurking typos and errors in the invisible bits of html (the fiddliest thing so far has been languages—Sir Isumbras has a lot of bits in French, Scots, Latin, Middle English etc. that all need to be marked in the code, and I've probably missed some of them), and then it should be ready to go.

I've finished a first draft of my Once Upon a Fic assignment. It's definitely wobbly, but I reckon there's a decent fic in there somewhere, and it's very good to be writing again and to know I can still string a sentence together.

Meanwhile, the book club over on the Raffles discord is sending me spinning back into fannishness about Raffles. We're doing 'The Gift of the Emperor' today, and I've been re-reading it—my goodness, I knew there was a lot in that story, but there really is a lot in that story, isn't there. Wow. Anyway, as a result of all this I've got another moderately ambitious fic idea working itself out in my brain. We shall see what happens to that...

I'm getting out for walks again! Argh, today was such a lovely day and I really wanted to go out and walk for miles and miles, but half an hour first thing in the morning will have to do for now. At least the birds are beginning to sing—they're very keen, so even though it's still dark I'm getting to hear a lot of them at the moment. Little things, I suppose. :)