Doing my best to waste the rest of this day

My sister called this afternoon to tell me about the Spike: Love is Hell DVD, or at least to apprise me of its existence. I know I should be doing something much more productive with my time, but instead I'm online trying to find out if anyone other than Power Star Collectibles ($19.95 plus s&h) or Best Buy ($14.99 thru July 16, plus exorbitant local sales tax) has this DVD on offer, and what exactly it contains.

I suspect that the special featurette it boasts, in which James Marsters talks about the evolution of Spike, is probably the same as that on the BtVS season 4 DVD's, but I'm almost tempted to get it anyway, since I only have Seasons 1, 2, and 3 of BtVS on tape (mostly taped off of FX, which means cuts), and it might be nice to have "School Hard," "Lie to Me" and "Lover's Walk" in uncut form on DVD (the fourth episode on this DVD is "Fool for Love," of course, which I have with commentaries on the season 5 DVD's). I'm surprised that they didn't include "Something Blue", but that may just be my own quirk, since technically Spike's love in that episode, for Buffy, wasn't "real."

Meanwhile, I enjoyed my Sunday off by finishing re-reading my favorite Elsie Lee Regency Romance The Nabob's Widow (almost as good as Georgette Heyer, but with cats, which I quite enjoy) for the umpteenth time, and then sleeping until 10:30 AM and getting dressed and driving to church in under 30 minutes (I try not to cut it that fine when I have to preach, and usually I have to drive a good bit farther to get to the church, rather than just driving a couple of blocks).

And THAT was on top of having enjoyed a rare Scrabble evening last night, instead of having to polish up an old sermon or write a new one. ( Read more... )

Another Guilty Pleasure: Elsie Lee

I've been having so much fun discussing Georgette Heyer novels (and being reminded that I have more "favorites" among her books than can be listed at one sitting), that I thought I'd send up a test balloon and see if there might be anyone else among my LJ friends who harbors a secret fondness for the romance novels of Elsie Lee.

If you've never heard of her, she wrote mostly "modern" gothics (with the twist that her 1960's-era heroines kicked butt and took names and outsmarted all the villains and tended to save themselves before the heroes got a chance to), as well as some 'straight' romance and historical gothics, and a few delightfully Heyer-ish Regencies in the 1960's and 70's. Her modern romances and gothics are somewhat dated, of course, but that's part of the fun -- realizing that somebody had the good sense and chutzpah to write such capable and indomitable heroines in a genre and period that specialized in "plucky" heroines who were terrorized and in need of rescuing. Her heroines often had a wicked sense of humor and a talent for mayhem that made them the "Emma Peel"'s of the Gothic genre. ( Read more... )

So, just in case there are others out there who share this guilty passion, the Elsie Lee Regencies I have are An Eligible Connection, A Prior Betrothal, Second Season, The Wicked Guardian (which has a few more 'gothic' elements, but no more than you'd find in Heyer's These Old Shades or many other Georgian or Regency romances), and of course The Nabob's Widow.

The Gothics of hers that I own include (in no particular order) Barrow Sinister, Silence is Golden, The Curse of Carranca, Sinister Abbey, The Spy at the Villa Miranda, Wingarden (that's the one in which the heroine gets to foil the local KKK, as I recall), The Governess (though the ancient paperback copy I have of that one has her writing under the name "Elsie Cromwell" -- but the novel itself is notable for depicting a Lebanon that was still the Riviera of the Near East, where I had grown up thinking of Beirut as a bombed-out war zone), Mistress of Mount Fair, Ivorstone Manor, Satan's Coast, Clouds Over Vellanti, The Drifting Sands, Mansion of Golden Windows and Dark Moon, Lost Lady (in which it's a neo-Nazi plan to build a new Reich that the heroine has to throw a monkeywrench into).

Anyone else read any of these and willing to admit to it?

And a pleasure I'm not even remotely guilty about : James H. Schmitz

As soon as I started thinking about what made Elsie Lee stand out for me in the Gothic genre (capable heroines who are smarter and often more dangerous -- when they need to be -- than the b**tards who try to grind them down: illegitimii non carborundum, or however it's spelled!), I had to give credit to a male science fiction author who did the same thing, only more so, against all expectations in the 1950's and 60's: James H. Schmitz.

Like most of his more recent readers, I suspect, I first encountered Schmitz through a library copy of his best-known novel, The Witches of Karres (in which the protagonist is, most unusually for Schmitz, a male, but quickly gets paired up with a young female hero who's even more ready, willing, and able to save the day than he is, for most of the novel). Then I encountered the first of his Telzey Amberden stories in an anthology (long before there was Buffy, Telzey Amberden was the adolescent girl who got to save the world or worlds with surprising regularity), and I was hopelessly hooked and desperate for more (which, until the New England Science Fiction Society re-issued a fairly complete collection of his short stories in the 1990's and several collections of his stories and novels set in the same universe were re-issued within the last few years, was pretty hard to find).

It's late and I haven't eaten since breakfast (albeit a breakfast that was delayed into early afternoon, since I slept too late to eat before church and had errands to run thereafter), so I won't bother to run through the whole list of James H. Schmitz titles. But let me just say this: if you've never read his Demon Breed, you have a treat in store for you. I've re-read that novel at least every few years since I first encountered it, and I continue to get a major kick out of watching a lone, unarmed woman (albeit with the help of a couple of mutant sea otters) turn back an alien invasion through her intelligence and talent for psychological warfare.