Why I Want to Hit Alfred, Lord Tennyson, by Marie Brennan, Age 29

Because the man keeps having bits of poetry that are allllllllllllmost what I want for the Victorian book, but not quite -- either because they don't contain any phrase I could use for a title, or because they go astray in some fashion that doesn't make them work. Take these two lines:

To change our dark Queen-city, all her realm
Of sound and smoke

It's got grit! And a city! And a Queen! Surely this will work, right?

Except that here's the full passage:

Take, read! and be the faults your Poet makes
Or many or few,
He rests content, if his young music wakes
A wish in you
To change our dark Queen-city, all her realm
Of sound and smoke,
For his clear heaven, and these few lanes of elm
And whispering oak.

In other words, yay nature. Which, no. There's what this book is about, and there's that passage, and the two are pretty much at opposite poles to one another.

The problem, I've decided, is that the Victorians are insufficiently angry. My impression is that they wrote about nature's beauty as a means of hiding from industrialization; what I want is poetry that is mad as hell about industrialization and not going to take it anymore. The few things I've found that come close to fitting that bill have failed to provide me with a good title quote.

So I keep searching. And I glare at Tennyson, because I just speed-read HIS COMPLETE POETIC WORKS and still don't have a title. <fume>

necessary sacrifices

I've started over on "And Blow Them at the Moon." As much as I like the opening scene I'd written, it just doesn't fit the story; it introduces an additional pov (a bad decision, if I want to keep this thing short) and the tone is too light-hearted. This is not, I fear, going to be a light-hearted story. Not given what happened to Father Garnet, and to the conspirators, in the end.

(Man, reading about the Gunpowder Plot is depressing. Especially Sir Everard Digby. Talk about a waste.)

So that's 614 words of a new start, and already I think it's better. Father Garnet praying in Thames Street, and Magrat confronting the fact that she is displaying conduct unbecoming to a church grim. I need to find a way to say more about him, but maybe that will fit into a later scene.

should have posted this before

If you make money from your writing, take a look at the petition that Ursula Le Guin will be sending to Judge Chin re: the Google Book Settlement. I'm not positive if there will be a revision of the section where it complains about the "opt in to object" thing -- which is a feature of class-action law, not really alterable in this case -- but anyway, this is at least one channel by which to say "the Authors Guild representatives do not speak for me."