So, after not hearing a peep out of an editor since mid-January, I came home today to not one, but two rejection letters in the mailbox. A nice little no thanks from Asimov's, and a note from Black Gate's John O'Neill saying that he almost bought the story, but they're really overstocked on contemporary fantasy. They need heroic/adventure fantasy.

I really ought to buckle down and get a sword and sorcery piece in shape to go to Black Gate. I've got a kind of odd S&S piece from Clarion West that needs a bit of an overhaul and an ending transplant (it doesn't really have an ending, just a place where I cut off the story and then hastily tied a tourniquet around the bleeding stump. Boy did I catch heck for that in crit.) I also have another idea for a more conventional S&S piece that I've begun a couple of times, but it keeps turning into a Fritz Leiber pastiche.

Mind you, in a field that's probably crowded with Moorcock pastiche, Howard pastiche, and even Xena Warrior Princess pastiche, a little Leiber pastiche might be refreshing.

I've been reading a biography of T.H. White by Sylvia Townsend Warner lately. As a biography, I have mixed feelings about it. Warner uses lots of extracts from primary sources, mainly White's letters and diaries, and stitches them together with a bare minimum of connecting narrative. It has a kind of disjointed feel - I think I might on the whole be happier with a volume of White's correspondence, preferably with notes and annotations.

[In fairness, I'm often dissatisfied with biographies. Unless they're very comprehensive, they always feel like incomplete portraits. To feel as though I have a three dimensional image of someone, I need biographical parallax - two or three or four biographies.

Unfortunately, not everyone has two or three or four good biographies written about them.]

But still, there's some great stuff in this biography. The best so far are some longish extracts from White's diaries in which he meditates on the personalities of Lancelot and Guinevere. (This is from the period when White was writing the third book of The Once and Future King.) White wrestles with the problem of Guinevere: she often seems like a nasty person, yet she must have had some remarkable qualities to be loved by both Arthur and Lancelot. And he writes a character sketch of Lancelot that is very convincing, and also alarmingly close to being a portrait of White himself.

One interesting bit from the Lancelot character sketch:

Homosexual? Can a person be ambi-sexual - bisexual or whatever? His treatment of young boys like Gareth and Cote Male Tale is very tender and his feeling for Arthur profound. Yet I do so want not to have to write a 'modern' novel about him.

Not sure which is more interesting here: that the homoeroticism of the Arthurian tales was perceptible even in the days before slash fiction, or that bisexuality was apparently such a novel concept to White.

Anyway, now I've got the itch to read The Once and Future King again. Just what I need: another big fat book on the 'to-read' pile.