Blog

The down side of deciding to blog all the articles in a collection like this is that sometimes there simply isn't anything useful to the project at all. Sorry. This is pretty much just a completist placeholder.

Last week I posted my "what have I published in 2017" list. This week is my "what else have I written" list. It's based pretty much entirely on my blog for logistical reasons. I'm writing this about the same time of year as I posted last year's version, so the survey is roughly comparable, except that in 2016 I looked at only the calendar year up to Dec 8, and this year I'm covering everything since that date. So the 2017 stats are, while more accurate for a year's work, are inflated relative to 2016. In 2016 I posted 333 separate blog entries; So far as of Dec 6 I’ve posted 245, so even with the rest of December I'm definitely achieving my New Year's Resolution to slack off a little.

This is, once again, an excercise in reminding myself how productive I've been overall, even when my fiction publications don't reflect it. I've clumped things slightly differently, but I'll give the comparables. In summary, here's what I've blogged:

Essays

• On the writing proceess (not including promotion or minor posts): 16 (compare 41 last year)
• Background information on Alpennia: 8 (not counted separately last year)
• Guest/Host Blogs: 4 (if you count my columns at the Queer Sci Fi website, 4 last year)
• Miscellaneous non-writing: 4 (17 last year)
• "Book Release Re-Book" posts promoting books from November 2016: 29 (n/a last year)

Misc.

• Event/Convention Reports: 2 events for a total of 25 posts (4 last year, but I think I wasn't counting individual posts)
• Historic Research (especially including the LaForge Diaries): 20 (3 last year)

Lesbian Historic Motif Project

• Publications covered: 27, for a total of 39 posts (27 last year)
• Podcasts: 26 (5 last year)

Reviews

• Books and Stories: 29 (23 last year)
• Graphic Novels: 0, that is, I read a bunch for the Hugo voting, but didn't blog them (5 last years)
• Audio Fiction: 1, but I'm now reviewing Podcastle stories at the Short SFF Reviews site (7 last year, including some multi-item posts)
• Movies: 6 (12 last years including 5 in my lesbian movies series)
• Live Performance: 2 since I failed to blog the Cal Shakes performances this year (6 last year)

So here's the long version with links, perhaps not organized exactly as above.

Fiction

• “Hyddwen” at Podcastle.org - The second short story in my queer Mabinogi (planned) tetralogy

Writing - This doesn’t include all entries, just substantial essays

• Bad Advice for Authors - I talk about why some of the advice aimed at authors at big publishers really isn't feasible for indie authors
• What am I Writing in 2017? - A brief survey of in-progress projects. It's always educational to compare it to what I actually did.
• Like Many Other Girls - In which I examine the trope of "not like the other girls" in the context of Alpennia and discuss who it does and doesn't fit.
• Orphans Don’t have All the Fun - Like many authors of adventures, I have an unfortunate tendency to orphan my protagonists. I'm working on that.
• Writing a Long Game - Some of the special concerns and frustrations of writing an extended series when you know that some of your readers' current frustrations will be answered later, but you can't really say so.
• Revealing and Concealing - There's one particular event in Mother of Souls that some readers wish I'd shown more directly Here's where I talk about why I didn't
• The Limits of Magic - If my characters can truly work miracles, where's the challenge?
• Challenging Expected Narratives - In Mother of Souls, Luzie and Serafina argued over Tanfrit's romantic arc in the opera. Their argument is part of a larger genre conversation.
• Every Flood Begins with a Trickle - Talking about starting seriously on the writing of Floodtide and some of the things I want to do in the story.
• Shall We Dance? Showing Attraction without Overt Erotics - Inspired by a reader question, what are some of the ways I show characters experiencing attraction to each other without framing it as erotic response?
• Shifting Writing Gears - The logistics of juggling multiple writing projects in different stages.
• A Questionable Phrase - I talk about why the phrase "does not disappoint" always makes me wince, and why I've tried to eliminate it from my vocabulary.
• Taking Dictation - A reader question about how dictation and transcription fit into my writing process.
• The Uncanny Valley of Fictional Representation - Sometimes I feel more included by a book that shows a diverse world than by one that comes closer to my own identities but feels more like it excludes me.
• Musings on New Promo Activity - One of my goals for the year was to add some automation to my online authorial presence. It had some benefits I hadn't anticipated.
• From a Certain Point of View - What are the strengths and advantages of different approaches to point of view? And how did that affect my POV choices in "The Language of Roses"?
• Podcast Interview: Creating Character (at The Lesbian Talkshow) - I talk with Sheena about how I go about creating distinctive characters, and especially how I develop and change those characters across the Alpennia series.

About Alpennia - Essays that are more specifically about the worldbuilding in the Alpennia series

• How Many Lesbians are there in Alpennia? - It may sometimes feel like Alpennia is jam-packed with queer women. I do a breakdown of how that's not particularly true. 
• The Geography of Alpennia - A response to a reader request that I talk more about the internal and external geography of the Alpennia series.
• Speaking in Alpennian - Given that I'm a linguist and have done some deep thinking about the Alpennian language, I don't use much actual Alpennian vocabulary in the books. Here I talk about why, but also talk about how I show my characters existing in a different linguistic environment from the readers.
• Addressing the Class Divide - I've talked previously about how class and intimacy relationships are reflected in how Alpennians talk to and about each other. Here I ponder the complications that ensue when my first-person protagonist is in the lowest ranks of society.
• Class and Sexuality in Rotenek - It may sometimes feel that my Alpennian protagonsts get too much of a pass from society on their sexuality. But things aren't always as they seem. Here I discuss how class intersects with sexuality in terms of social reception.
• Floodtide: Stepping into the Unknown - A brief discussion of the point in the writing of Floodtide when the story moves past the timeline of Mother of Souls and strikes out into new territory.
• Can Devout Alpennians Enjoy the Pleasures of the Flesh? - A reader question about how my characters reconcile their sexuality with the moral tenor of the times.

Guest Blogs - both as host and guest

• I appear on the Skiffy and Fanty podcast “Signal Boost” series
• Water’s Edge in Context – Genevieve Fortin
• Fairy Tale Choices by Maya Chhabra

Miscellaneous Content - In any classification system, there's always an "everything else" category.

• 2016: A Poem
• Herding Invisible Cats - My adventures in renewed cat ownership.
• Standardization of LHMP content tags and addition of brief descriptions to the tags [multiple blogs, so I'm not linking individually, just noting it as a major writing project]
• The 2017 Tomato Blog - I never did a taste test and review this year. It was a meh year for the tomatoes and I think some of the varieties I planted never did produce. I've diagnosed part of the problem as under-watering and need to revise my automated irrigation system next year.

LaForge Civil War Diaries and Correspondence - An ongoing project to put my great-great grandfather's Civil War diaries and correspondence on the web, with annotations and commentary. Never fear, I will get back to working on this.

• December 1861 to March 1862
• April-December 1862
• January-March 1863
• April-June 1863
• July-September 1863
• December 1863

Note: the preceding are revisions and annotations of transcripts I had posted on the web prior to starting this blog series. The content between January-April 1864 was blogged in 2016. The rest here was put on the web for the first time as part of this blogging project.

• May 1864
• June 1864
• July 1864 Part 1
• July 1864 Part 2
• August 1864
• September 1864 Part 1
• September 1864 Part 2
• October 1864
• November 1864
• December 1864
• January 1865 Part 1
• January 1865 Part 2
• February 1865
• March 1865

Lesbian Historic Motif Project - I took a slight hiatus from posting new publications during the period when the content was being moved to alpennia.com. That was when I worked on all the tag annotations and standardization. It cut down a little on the total number of publications I would otherwise have covered. You may notice that I've done several thematic groupings: encyclopedias and who's-whos, Sappho, Spain.

• LHMP 138 Mills, Robert. 2015. Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. ISBN 978-0-226-16912-5 (7 installments)
• LHMP 139 Foster, Jeannette. 1985. Sex Variant Women in Literature. The Naiad Press. ISBN 0-930044-65-7 Third edition of the original 1956 publication.
• LHMP 140 Aldrich, Robert & Garry Wotherspoon eds. 2001. Who's Who in Gay & Lesbian History: From Antiquity to World War II. Routledge, London. ISBN 0-415-15982-2
• LHMP 141 Conner, Randy P., David Hatfield Sparks, & Mariya Sparks. 1997. Cassell’s Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol, and Spirit: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Lore. Cassell, London. ISBN 0-304-33760-9
• LHMP 142 Zimmerman, Bonnie (ed). 2000. Lesbian Histories and Cultures. Garland, New York. ISBN 0-8153-1920-7
• LHMP 143 Snyder, Jane McIntosh. 1997. Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-09994-0
• LHMP 144 DeJean, Joan. 1989. Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-14136-5
• LHMP 145 Andreadis, Harriette. 2001. Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics, 1550-1714. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226020099
• LHMP 146 Vanita, Ruth. 1996. Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination. Columbia University Press, New York. ISBN 0-231-10551-7
• LHMP 147 Stepto, Michele & Gabriel Stepto (translators). Catalina de Erauso. Lieutenant Nun -- Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996. ISBN 0-8070-7073-4
• LHMP 148 Velasco, Sherry. 2000. The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire and Catalina de Erauso. University of Texas Press. ISBN 0-292-78746-4
• LHMP 149 Velasco, Sherry. 2011. Lesbians in Early Modern Spain. Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville. ISBN 978-0-8265-1750-0 (7 entries)
• LHMP 150 Rothblum, Esther D. & Kathleen A. Brehony (eds). 1993. Boston Marriages: Romantic but Asexual Relationships Among Contemporary Lesbians. The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst. ISBN 0-8723-876-0
• LHMP 151 History Project, The. 1998. Improper Bostonians. Beacon Press, Boston. ISBN 0-8070-7948-0
• LHMP 152 McNeill, John T. & Helena M. Gamer. 1990. Medieval Handbooks of Penance: A Translation of the Principal Libri Poenitentiales.Columbia University Press, New York. ISBN 0-231-09629-1 (reprint of 1938 edition)
• LHMP 153 Karras, Ruth Mazo. 2005. Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others. Routledge, New York. ISBN 978-0-415-28963-4
• LHMP 154 Linkinen, Tom. 2015. Same-sex Sexuality in Later Medieval English Culture. Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam. ISBN 978-90-8964-629-3
• LHMP 155 Karras, Ruth Mazo & David Lorenzo Boyd. 1996. “’Ut cum Muliere’ - A Male Transvestite Prostitute in Fourteenth-Century London” in Premodern Sexualities ed. by Louise Fradenburg & Carla Freccero. Routledge, New York. ISBN 0-415-91258-X
• LHMP 156 Daston, Lorraine & Katharine Park. 1996. “The Hermaphrodite and the Orders of Nature: Sexual Ambiguity in Early Modern France” in Premodern Sexualities ed. by Louise Fradenburg & Carla Freccero. Routledge, New York. ISBN 0-415-91258-X
• LHMP 159 Gaunt, Simon. 1996. “Straight Minds/’Queer’ Wishes in Old French Hagiography: La Vie de Sainte Euprosine” in Premodern Sexualities ed. by Louise Fradenburg & Carla Freccero. Routledge, New York. ISBN 0-415-91258-X
• LHMP 158 Lavezzo, Kathy. 1996. “Sobs and Sighs Between Women: The Homoerotics of Compassion in The Book of Margery Kempe” in Premodern Sexualities ed. by Louise Fradenburg & Carla Freccero. Routledge, New York. ISBN 0-415-91258-X
• LHMP 159 Knighton, Henry. 1995. Knighton’s Chronicle 1337-1396. Edited and translated by G.H. Martin. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-820-503-1
• LHMP 160 Bennett, Judith. 2008. “Two Women and their Monumental Brass, c. 1480” in Journal of the British Archaeological Association vol. 161:163-184.
• LHMP 161 Traub, Valerie. 2016. Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0812223897
• LHMP 162 Lochrie, Karma. 2011. “Preface” in The Lesbian Premodern ed. by Noreen Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer & Diane Watt. Palgrave, New York. ISBN 978-0-230-61676-9
• LHMP 163 Giffney, Noreen, Michelle M. Sauer & Diane Watt. 2011. “Introduction: The Lesbian Premodern” in The Lesbian Premodern ed. by Noreen Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer & Diane Watt. Palgrave, New York. ISBN 978-0-230-61676-9
• LHMP 164 Traub, Valerie. 2011. “The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography” in The Lesbian Premodern ed. by Noreen Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer & Diane Watt. Palgrave, New York. ISBN 978-0-230-61676-9

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Last year, this was a brand new category of "things I do." This year, on the 1-year anniversary of the show, I expanded from monthly to weekly. In 2018, I'll be expanding the type of content by adding the publication of original fiction. I'm almost afraid of what will come in 2019!

• Announcement of Call for Fiction Submissions - The announcement of the fiction project.
• LHMPodcast 5 Laudomia Loves Margaret - The real-life biography that inspired my story "Where My Heart Goes."
• LHMPodcast 6 Catharina Vizzani - The sort of real-life story that would seem implausible as fiction.
• LHMPodcast 7 Aphra Behn - Spy, poet, playwright, and bisexual.
• LHMPodcast 8 Medieval Love Poetry - A selection of love poems from one woman to another.
• LHMPodcast 9 The Travels and Adventures of Mademoiselle de Richelieu – A plot summary and excerpts from a rather unclassifiable 18th century novel.
• LHMPodcast 10 Sappho of Lesbos, The Woman and the Legend - For Pride Month, I did a two-part special on Sappho. This episode talks about her historic context and how she was understood in later centuries.
• LHMPodcast 11 Sappho, the Translations - The second part of the Sappho Special talks about the translation and re-imagining of Sappho's poetry across the centuries.
• LHMPodcast 12 Catalina de Erauso - It sometimes seems like my biographical episodes focus on extraordinary lives. That's one reason that the original kick-off episode of the podcast was specifically about "ordinary women."
• LHMPodcast 13a On the Shelf August 2017 - I announce the expanded schedule for the podast. The week 1 episodes will be a roundup of the blog, announcement of the month's topics and guests, and a random "ask Sappho" feature where I answer listener questions in a more informal context.
• LHMPodcast 13b Interview with Catherine Lundoff - In the new schedule, the week 2 episodes will be an interview with an author who writes about lesiban and bisexual women in historic settings (including historic fantasy, as long as it's grounded in actual history).
• LHMPodcast 13c Book Appreciation with Catherine Lundoff - The week 3 episodes will have our author guest recommendig books by other authors that they've enjoyed.
• LHMPodcast 13d Beguines, Boston Marriage, and Bed Death: Historic Archetypes of Asexual Lesbianism - With all the emphasis in lesbian history on "were they, you know, doing it?" I wanted to do a show that explicitly embraced women's same-sex relationships that were not defined by sexual activity.
• LHMPodcast 14a On the Shelf September 2017
• LHMPodcast 14b Interview with Genevieve Fortin
• LHMPodcast 14c Book Appreciation with Genevieve Fortin
• LHMPodcast 14d What did Medieval Lesbians do in Bed? - We sometimes assume that sexual techniques are something of a universal across eras and cultures. But is that true? What historic evidence do we have for the details of women's sexual activity? Or at least for what the people writing the records thought they were doing.
• LHMPodcast 14e The Highwaywoman Special - When I set up the rotating topics for the expanded schedule, I realized that I'd have to come up with something for the occasional 5th Saturday. Although I ended up going in a different direction for the long term (see: fiction project), I really enjoyed doing this multi-media presentation on female highwaymen in history, literature, song, and in lesbian novels.
• LHMPodcast 15a On the Shelf October 2017           
• LHMPodcast 15b Interview with Caren Werlinger
• LHMPodcast 15c Book Appreciation with Caren Werlinger
• LHMPodcast 15d Female Knights in Shining Armor - The motif of the female knight--and especially the gender-disguised female knight--has often been a context for same-sex desire in literature.
• LHMPodcast 16a On the Shelf November 2017
• LHMPodcast 16b Interview with Farah Mendleshn
• LHMPodcast 16c Book Appreciation with Farah Mendlesohn
• LHMPodcast 16d When did we become Lesbians? - If something has to have a name to truly exist, what are the names we've had for women who love women? When did different names come into use? And how have their meanings changed?
• LHMPodcast 17a On the Shelf Dec 2017

Reviews: Books/Fiction - SFF - I swear it's utter coincidence that all the author surnames are in the first half of the alphabet!

• Bernobich, Beth - Nocturnal
• Bradley, Mary E. - Mizora: A Mss. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch
• Burgis, Stephanie - Congress of Secrets
• Burgis, Stephanie - Shadow Duet
• De Bodard, Aliette - Children of Thorns, Children of Water
• Goss, Theodora - The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter
• Hopkinson, Nalo - The Salt Roads
• Kingfisher, T. - Jackalope Wives and Other Stories
• Leckie, Ann - Ancillary Justice
• Leckie, Ann - Ancillary Sword
• Leckie, Ann - Ancillary Mercy

Reviews: Books/Fiction - Lesbian (generally I've classified a book here if I read it specifically for the lesbian characters, even if it also fits under SFF).

• The Locket and the Flintlock by Rebecca S. Buck
• Walking on Knives by Maya Chhabra
• The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue
• The Second Mango by Shira Glassman
• Mini-Reviews of Historical Gay Flash Fiction by Elin Gregory (Ok, this is actually gay male fiction, but I don't want to make up a specific category just for that.)
• Daring and Decorum by Lawrence Hogue
• Passing Strange by Ellen Klages
• Silver Moon by Catherine Lundoff
• Out of this World: Queer Speculative Fiction Stories by Catherine Lundoff
• Spring Flowering by Farah Mendlesohn
• Mask of the Highwaywoman by Niamh Murphy
• Magic and Romance: A Collection of Lesbian Short Stories by Niamh Murphy
• Serpentine by Cindy Pon
• Musketeer Space by Tansy Rayner Roberts
• Minotaur by J.A. Rock
• Barbary Station by R.E. Stearns
• A Certain Persuasion: Modern LGBTQ+ Fiction Inspired by Jane Austen’s Novels
• Tremontaine (Season 2)

Reviews: Live Performance

• The Band’s Visit (Broadway)
• Phantom of the Opera (Broadway)

Reviews: Movies - I watched a lot more movies than this. This isn't even the ones I liked, necessarily. Just the ones where I got inspired to review before the moment passed.

• Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
• Moana
• Rogue One
• The Great Wall
• A Quiet Passion
• Thor: Ragnarok

Review-Like-Objects: Misc

• 20 Favorite Things of 2016
• Non-Fiction Book Intake Post Jan-Feb 2017 - I don't do this for every book I buy. Only when I have a stack to log in and I think of it.
• Kalamazoo Book Intake Post - ...except of course for the annual Kalamazoo book intake post, which I never skip!
• Frakentastic by Tansey Reynor Roberts - Not a review, but using the podcast to think about homoeroticism in 19th century literature.

The Great November Book Release Re-Boot - This was a project I used as an excuse to re-promote Mother of Souls. Every day in May, I blogged about a book released 6 months previously that I thought my readers might be interested in. Note: I've read very few of these books, so while I was picky about what I included, inclusion is not necessarily advocacy.

• Numbers Geekery - After the project was done, I poked around at review and sales numbers for Mother of Souls to see if the re-boot had had any effect.
• Mother of Souls by Heather Rose Jones
• One in the Hand by Caitlin Drake
• Congress of Secrets by Stephaie Burgis
• The Weaver by Emmi Itäranta
• Walk-In by T.L. Hart
• Merrow by Ananda Braxton-Smith
• After Atlas by Emma Newman
• Of Fire and Stars by Audrey Coulthurst
• Timekeeper by Tara Sim
• Christmas at Winterbourne by Jen Silver
• Marian by Ella Lyons
• A Certain Persuasion: Modern LGBTQ+ Fiction Inspired by Jane Austen’s Novels
• The Hidden People by Alison Littlewood
• League of Dragons by Naomi Novik
• Take Me Home by Lorelie Brown
• Indomitable: The Life of Barbara Grier by Joanne Passet
• Learning to Want by Tami Veldura
• Slipping: Stories, Essays, and Other Writing by Lauren Beukes
• Two Souls by Kathleen Knowles
• Joyeux by Tansy Rayner Roberts
• Viral Airwaves by Claudie Arseneault
• The Winterlings by Cristina Sanchez-Andrade
• Romancing the Inventor by Gail Carriger
• Illicit by Cathy Clamp
• Tempered Sttele: Hard Edges by M.E. Logan
• Vortex of Crimson by Lise MacTague
• A Woman of Strong Purpose by S.M. Harding
• The Mountain of Kept Memory by Rachel Neumeier
• New Worlds, Old Ways edited by Karen Lord
• Archangel’s Heart by Nalini Singh

Travel Posts - Not quite "con reports" in this case. The Helsinki/Worldcon posts are a combination of con report and travelogue. The Kalamazoo posts are my usual live-blogging of the sessions I attended.

Helsinki/Worldcon

• Helsinki/Worldcon: Arrivals
• Helsinki/Worldcon: Reception
• Helsinki/Worldcon: Gathering
• Helsinki/Worldcon: Empanelment
• Helsinki/Worldcon: Engagement
• Helsinki to Deventer: Downwinding
• Deventer: (no catchy title, alas)
• Deventer: Passages
• Deventer to Durham: Crossings
• Durham: Visions
• Durham to Dublin: In Training
• Dublin: Bookings
• Dublin: Reflections

Kalamazoo Posts

• Thusday 13:30 – When Medievalists Fictionalize the Middle Ages
• Thursday 15:30 – Would You Write More, or What? The Quest to Publish Historically-Based Creative Writing in the Contemporary Literary Marketplace
• Thusday 19:30 – Reflecting on Gender and Medieval Studies
• Friday 10:00 – Dress and Textiles I: Details from Documents
• Friday 13:30 – Dress and Textiles II: Real and Unreal
• Friday 15:30 – Medieval Arabic Scholarship II: Medieval Arab(ic) Feminisms
• Friday 18:30 - Practical Magic: Making Magical Artifacts and Using Them
• Saturday 10:00 – Reading Magic West to East
• Saturday 1:30 – Occult Capitals of Islam
• Sunday 8:30 – Islamic Magic: Texts and/as Objects
• Sunday 10:30 – Female Friendship in Medieval Literature II

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 31 (previously 17b) - Interview with T. T. Thomas - transcript

(Originally aired 2017/12/09 - listen here)

Back around a year ago, there was a discussion on a facebook group about what authors could do to raise the profile of lesbian historical fiction and to encourage more people to try the genre. That discussion was part of what inspired me to add author interviews to the podcast. And T.T. Thomas was one of the brainstormers, so naturally I asked her if she'd be interested in participating. This month she tells us about her historic passions, her interests. and her projects.

* * *

(Transcript commissioned from Jen Zink @Loopdilou who is available for professional podcast transcription work. I am working on adding transcripts of the existing interview shows.)

Heather Rose Jones: Hello, this is Heather Rose Jones with the Lesbian Historic Motif Project. Today, we’re interviewing author T.T. Thomas, who also goes by Tara.

T.T. Thomas: Hi there!

H: And we’re going to talk a little bit about your historic fiction. I’ve been browsing through your catalog and I notice you’ve got a favorite era right around the turn of the… You know, I don’t know if we call it the turn of the 19th century or the turn of the 20th century. I guess it’s the turn of the 20th.

T: The turn of the century anyway.

H: Yes, yes. Right around 1900, plus/minus.

T: Right, late 1900.

H: How did you get interested in that particular period?

T: Well, several things. I got interested in, well, things were changing in a very big way in the world during that period of time with the results of the industrial revolution were being felt in the areas of technology, transportation, education, just about every subject… We were moving from the Victorian era into the Edwardian era, so I actually start usually around 1890, particularly 1895 to the end of that decade.

H: Uh huh.

T: Queen Victoria died, I think, what was it 1902? Everything changed. Warfare changed, beginning with the Boer war, which was an English conflict in South Africa, or one that they got into. Then, with the beginning of WWI, it changed again. Basically, I write anything from 1890-1950, but specializing in the end of the 1900s through WWI and WWII.

H: Yeah. Times when everything is changing like that are really fun to set stories in, I know.

T: They are, I mean, even the time between the two wars, particularly in Germany, is a fascinating time, prior to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis and the whole ‘How WWII came about.’ Anyway, that period of time there’s a lot of activity taking place in the world. In particular, the world of women is changing at this time. That fascinated me. I originally became very interested in the person of Anne Lister. She actually lived a century earlier, late 1700s. I think she died in 1840.

H: Yeah, thereabouts.

T: Right, but there was a woman who lived life her own way. We wouldn’t know a thing about it, because she kept diaries in a code. A distant relative found the diaries, was encouraged to burn them after he broke the code and realized what the books were about. She loved women, she was very explicit in her diaries about her romances with women and there were numerous women. Then he didn’t burn those diaries, what he did was he hid them behind a panel of the family estate. Flash forward to the 1980s and a woman comes along named Helena Whitbread, who decides that her project is going to be to decode these diaries. She wrote a book about it called I Know My Own Heart. A modest review of what she had decoded.

H: There’s a second volume that she did as well, titled No Priest But Love.

T: Exactly.

H: Yeah, those diaries are so inspiring in terms of sources for historic research.

T: They really are, they really are. I would say that that single, well both women, Anne Lister and Helena Whitbread, were incredibly inspiring to me.

H: Although, I have to say Anne Lister was not necessarily a nice person.

T: No, no she wasn’t. She was a crotchety old bitch, but she was very…

H: Very human.

T: Yeah, very intelligent, very familiar with the classics, and would often entice a woman that she had met with some somewhat vague reference to a line in one of the Greek or Roman classics that revealed where she was coming from. I mean, she found a way. That has always intrigued me, but until I heard about Anne Lister, the only other women I had heard of were, I’m going to say this wrong, the Ladies of Llangollen.

H: [demonstrates the Welsh pronunciation of Llangollen]

T: Anyway…

H: It’s tricky.

T: Eleanor Butler and Ponsonby. I love what Jeanette Winterson says, that those two ladies, they lived in a haze of female virtue and deep friendship. As opposed to Anne, who pulled on her trousers each morning and went out into the world, because she had money and she had an independent mind as she lived her life. Those two sets of people were specifically very inspiring. Thirdly, I would say that I’ve done a great deal of research on Queen Victoria. I wanted to know where everything came from.

H: Uh huh. What other sources of historic research have you enjoyed using? I mean, the lives of the women are very inspiring, but for looking up setting and details of the history…

T: Yeah. A lot of it, Heather, I get from journals of professional societies, like the historians or the geographers or the sociologists. A lot of what I do turns around language, so, believe it or not, the OED is a really great source of research to me.

H: I noticed that letters and correspondence are a major theme carrying across several of your books. Have you studied historic correspondences to get inspiration for that?

T: Yes, I have. I’ve studied in the sense of fiction, but also in real life correspondence. When first started thinking about publishing, I got to know another author named Ann Herendeen. She wrote a book called Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander. She made reference to a site online in her forward about the man who has done a great deal of research on the old bailey transcripts, the courts in London.

H: Oh, I love court records.

T: Yeah, yeah, and I just got so involved reading these court cases. Including several cases of women who posed as man and wife, the discovery of it, the outrage, and the… whatever the response was. It often wasn’t the apparent lesbianism that got such people intro trouble, it was because they had some kind of domestic disagreement.

H: Yeah, yeah. I promise that we’re going to come around to the specifics of your novels.

T: Okay.

H: But I was also interested in the settings that you’ve used. You know, you’ve got stories set in America and in England and the one that’s coming out soon in Morocco.

T: Right, England and Morocco.

H: I was wondering what your own background is, I don’t like to make guesses based on people’s accents, but you sound solidly American.

T: I am; however, I was born in England, outside London in a small little village called Tadley in Hampshire. My mother was Irish, and my father was an American officer, flight officer, in WWII. Then I was born, but because of my father’s citizenship, of course, I was American, and I was educated here in the United States, in Illinois in fact.

H: I was looking at, specifically, there’s a pair of stories that you have, the first one, The Blondness of Honey, which, I think, starts out, or its set, in the San Francisco area?

T: Yes, it is, uh huh.

H: And that’s in the 1890s, so before the big quake, but during the big boom of the San Francisco era.

T: Right, that’s right. The women in this story attend Mills college.

H: Oh, that’s so cool.

T: Right, which is in Oakland, my wife is from the Bay Area, so I had lot of… I had a beta, I had a guide. I had a guide for a lot of that. Some of it takes place on Point Reyes peninsula. Some of in the city, meaning San Francisco…

H: Can you give us a sort of a plot synopsis of what happens in that story?

T: We have our main protagonist and she has a childhood friend and they are attracted to one another. This is, as you say, 1895 or whatever. It’s really an Odyssey. It’s a great big book that takes everybody all the way across the country to Boston and back to Chicago and there is another woman involved. It’s about how the women dealt with the phenomenon of same-sex attraction against the backdrop of what was going on historically in this country. This was also a period of time where we had the Columbia Exposition in Chicago, the World’s Fair, and I wanted to make it a saga. You know, first book, I had to write war and peace, right? (laughter)

H: (laughter) It looked to me, based on the description, and I apologize that I haven’t read your entire oeuvre.

T: I apologize that I can’t remember the plot! (laughter) Kidding.

H: (laughter) There’s a story, Vivian and Rose, that it says the framing of that story is that it is being written by one of the characters from The Blondness of Honey.

T: Exactly. This was a novella that I actually wrote before The Blondness of Honey, but I didn’t publish before. It’s in the first-person, which is tricky, a lot of it, again: letters, notes, the kind of thing I like to do, that kind of correspondence.

H: Reading the description of it, it talks about mistaken identities, and abductions to Barbados, and it sounded to me like it was one of those over-the-top gothic novels like Jane Austen juvenilia. That the idea of it being written by your character gave you the freedom to make it really over-the-top.

T: And it was, it was over the top. It’s very dramatic and, I mean, heart-on-sleeve, yah, abduction, Barbados, New York… I packed a lot into a small book. Yes, and it was because it was being written by someone who was a writer at the turn of the century, that century.

H: Yeah, it really had that echo to it.

T: Yeah, and it has that feel when you read it. At least, I hope it does.

H: So, the book that I think I was first aware of your name in connection with is A Delicate Refusal…

T: Yeah, uh huh, that’s one of my favorites.

H: That’s the WWI, England, and two women who have a somewhat unusual type of relationship in the context of the book.

T: Yes. I introduce, without calling it this, the concept of a demisexual. Back in the days prior to WWI, after and during WWII, the worst thing that could be said about a woman is that she was frigid. It took us until now, I guess, to understand, or in the last twenty years, that is not the case. That it’s not some kind of an ailment.

H: Let’s define that for our listeners. A demisexual is someone who feels desire only after they’ve fallen in love, to put kind of in a short-hand.

T: That works. What I did is that I created this completely over-sexed [character] and had her falling in love with someone who is basically a demisexual. They are so flummoxed by this attraction. Oh and, by the way, the second woman is married.

H: As one was.

T: Yeah, ha! They’re neighbors. What happens, basically, is that they both almost have a nervous breakdown in response to their own relationship. The one who is completely sexually typical is suddenly going blind, sort of.

H: That sounds an awful like the old wives’ tale about what makes you go blind. Was it meant to be symbolic that way?

H: Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yes, it was. Yes, it was. Thank you, you’re the first person who seems to have noticed that. Anyway, the other one becomes partially and intermittently paralyzed. Has trouble walking, standing, it would be what certain psychologists from certain areas would have called sexual hysteria. Socially it was called frigid, frigidity. The women who had the bear the brunt of these diagnoses suffered quite a bit. It would take someone like the other neighbor to break her out of it. This is their story. Again, against the backdrop of the eve of WWI. Well, I had to get rid of the husband, for one thing.

H: So, you send him off to war, huh?

T: (laughter) I had to get rid of a couple of people.

H: Reading the descriptions of your books, I get that sense that your books are kind of on the sexy side, is that fair to say?

T: Yeah, but it’s like no body parts, I mean, I am the queen of the metaphor when it comes to the actual sexual encounter. I don’t do fade-to-black, but I don’t name body parts either, for the most part. That was a conscious decision because of the era in which I am placing these people.

H: That’s always tricky, you know. What would a 19th century woman have called what she was doing?

T: Right. I mean, the Victorians were far more adventuresome than they were given credit for being, but the language of their liaisons was very metaphoric. To bring this full-circle, I start out with someone like Anne Lister, you know, who writes in code, and I end up with people who speak in metaphors.

H: I would like to move on to your newest book, because by the time this interview goes live, it looks like Mistress of Mogador will be out in print.

T: Yes, it will be.

H: That looks like quite an adventure story.

T: It is an adventure story. It’s basically the story of a woman who trades inheritances with her brother. He gets the estate, she gets the shipping company. He’s driven it into the ground and it’s almost bankrupt and she has to salvage it. It’s fine with her. It’s her adventure. She goes to Morocco.

H: And gets involved with a Berber woman…

T: Yes, a Berber woman, who works for a Jewish man who works for the sultan. She has these three ratty old ships and she meets this Berber woman who seems to know, before she does, that there is a chemistry going on.

H: What’s the challenge of writing a character for a setting that’s so very different from your own? When you were writing about Morocco and Moroccan culture, what are the difficulties…?

T: Huge. Huge! I don’t speak Arabic, I had to… It’s taken me almost three years to do the whole thing. The Berbers have always tried to maintain their own culture against the backdrop of having been the conquered. I had to do a lot, a lot of research. Again, there are quite a few Moroccan researchers who write in English, Arabic, and French, so I was using Google translate quite a bit. I can sort of stumble through French. It was fascinating. I had a fabulous time writing this book.

H: If people want to learn more about you or follow you in social media, where should they go?

T: For my website, it’s www.ttthomas.com.

H: And I’ll put all this in the show-notes so people can find it easily.

T: On Facebook, I have TT Thomas-Author. I don’t use that much because I actually interact with a lot of people, so I just have my TT Thomas. I’m very available on that.

H: Twitter? Blogging? Any other platforms?

T: I do twitter, but it’s mainly political and I’m not blogging right now.

H: Okay, well thank you very much for coming on and letting me interview you for the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast. I hope you’ve enjoyed the experience.

T: I have, Heather. Thank you so much for inviting me, and it’s been fun. Thank you.

Show Notes

A series of interviews with authors of historically-based fiction featuring queer women.

In this episode we talk about:

• What T.T. finds so interesting about the decades around 1900
• Her fascination with the Regency-era figure of Anne Lister, whose diaries discuss her affairs with women in code
• Using professional journals, dictionaries, and court records for historic research
• Correspondence as a medium of storytelling
• How T.T.’s international family history inspired her settings
• The cross-country romantic odyssey of The Blondness of Honey from San Francisco to Chicago
• The story-within-a story of Vivien and Rose: when your characters start writing their own gothic romantic adventures
• Writing less common takes on sexuality
• Speaking of sex in code and metaphor, both in historic documents and fiction
• Mistress of Mogador and researching cultures very different from your own
• Books mentioned
  • Whitbread, Helena ed. 1992. I Know My Own Heart: The Diaries of Anne Lister 1791-1840. New York University Press, New York. ISBN 0-8147-9249-9
  • Whitbread, Helena ed. 1992. No Priest But Love. New York University Press, New York. ISBN 0-8147-5077-X
  • Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander by Ann Herendeen (m/m/f historical romance)
  • The Blondness of Honey by T.T. Thomas
  • Vivien and Rose by T.T. Thomas
  • A Delicate Refusal by T.T. Thomas
  • Mistress of Mogador by T.T. Thomas

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

• Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
• Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
• RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
• Twitter: @LesbianMotif
• Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
• The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon

Links to Heather Online

• Website: http://alpennia.com
• Email: Heather Rose Jones
• Twitter: @heatherosejones
• Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)

Links to T.T. Thomas Online

• Facebook: T.T. Thomas

While reviewing and proof-reading the write-up for this article just prior to posting, the following phrase--though not the main point--struck me. "...premodern lesbians were part of the audience for culture and responded to that culture on an individual as well as a collective basis." When I brainstorm lesbian historic fiction, this is one of the concepts I keep constantly in mind. Whether or not my characters had access to an in-person familiarity with other women in same-sex relationships, what did they experience in the culture around them that could help them understand their feelings and desires? If they saw an allegorical painting of Jupiter-as-Diana making love to Callisto, if they watched a play where a character they knew to be female received the romantic advances of another woman while in male disguise, if they listened to a poem about Sappho enjoying the love of "Lesbian lasses", could those things shape their construction of their own sexuality every bit as much as real-life examples could?

The concept of queer identity as socially constructed (or at least the concept that the specific forms it takes is socially constructed) is something of a contentious point for those who feel their own desires to be innate and inherent (to say nothing of the potential political implications). But when looking at historic cultures where we find it difficult to find evidence for in-person lesbian subcultures, we shouldn't neglect the importance of how cultural expressions can create a meta-subculture every bit as important in grounding a person's understanding of sexuality as in-person interactions can be. (After all, consider how many women in recent decades first twigged to their interest in other women from watching Xena: Warrior Princess!)