1. Because some days all you can do is to keep yourself entertained. I have an important meeting on Friday and have been preparing my input for said meeting. Slide #2 (the first one after the title page), summarizing my proposals, is now currently titled “tl:dr summary” and has clip art of a running teal deer.
2. I was already thinking about this, after yesterday’s post, and a comment from Jaime reinforced my suspicions. I suspect that alternate-history fantasy may be the hardest sort of world to build, because you can’t leave anything out. I mean, if you write stuff set in our world, people fill in the blanks based on their experience. If you write a completely different world, people fill in the blansk based on what they expect to see, again based on their experience and on what else they’ve read.. But in alternate history the reader knows she can’t do that, because the author’s initial assumptions have by definition changed what we can expect to see. So the author needs to show us a lot more of the ramifications of those initial assumptions, while still keeping the story moving and not getting all infodumpy. Can’t be easy.
I exempt from this books that insert magic into what is still recognizably our world (anything from Mary Poppins and Half Magic on up to, oh, Harry Potter, or Elizabeth Bear’s Promethean Age books or Charlie Finlay’s Revolutionary War books or Seanan McGuire’s October Daye books). Those aren’t saying that what you know is different, just that there’s more going on than what you know.
Not saying that kind of world is easy to build either, just not subject to one particular problem.
3. We need to begin inviting people over for dinner. We ‘owe’ a few who have invited us – more accurately, I like hosting people and want to feed the ones who have been so nice to us. But Ted pointed out, accurately, that we need to test some of our recipes to make sure they work with ingredients here. (What he actually said, in re jambalaya, was “make sure there is not some dutch flever in the sausage that ruins the intent”.) I know chili works. We haven’t yet been able to make a decent steak with the cuts of meat we can get here, and haven’t figured out roast beef either (actually, something Elizabeth said in a post yesterday may hold the answer to that). So I think it’s tester jambalaya for us this weekend.