A Certain Slant of Light

My new book is out! Diary of a Cranky Bookworm has been in the works since 2011, undergoing a long and meandering composition process, and it's a bit of a shock to realize that it's actually out there in the world. Go little book go!



May 12, 2012

Dear Diary,

DISASTER. I thought college application essays were bad enough, but now I have to write a summary of my diary??? Horrifying. I’m just a high school senior in a small town in Minnesota, getting up to shenanigans with my friends, retreating to my Treehouse to daydream about slipping into a portal fantasy, and discovering to my horror that my long-time nemesis is maybe, possibly, actually a delight.

And I might be a little bit in love with her.

Which is an unwelcome Realization, as it is sure to cut disgracefully into my reading time. And that’s already in short supply, in between college applications and AP calc and my friend Arielle who always thinks she’s in crisis maybe actually being in crisis for real.

Is that enough of a summary? I sure hope so, because it’s time to meet Georgie for our weekly trip to the library!

Recently sholio review Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, and as I have long vaguely followed Newport’s career, and also am a choir who loves to be preached to about the problems of productivity culture, I picked it up.

Newport lays out a seeming contradiction I’ve vaguely noticed before but never formulated: the people who find productivity culture most enraging are often, in fact, very productive people, who yearn to achieve great things. But the contradiction is purely a matter of semantics: “productivity culture” enrages such people precisely because it often leads to a kind of distracted busy-ness that makes it hard to actually dig in and accomplish something meaningful.

The problem, Newport explains, is that current productivity culture privileges steady work, and moreover steady work that is pretty close to the outward edge of a worker’s capacity, whereas innovative artistic or academic work by its nature requires more slack. There are periods where you’ll work sixty hours a week (and be happy to do so! The ideas are flowing! Work is the thing you most want to do in the world!) but also periods where you’ll outwardly be doing nothing.

He illustrates the point with stories about artists and scientists from the past: Jane Austen, Isaac Newton, Marie Curie, New Yorker feature writer John McPhee. I love reading about people creating things, whether it be a novel or the theory of gravity, so very much enjoyed these interludes.

But my main takeaway from this book is that, although I enjoyed it, it’s not really the book I need right now. My problem in this moment is not “how to step away from meaningless busy-ness toward true accomplishment” but “how do I start writing fiction again?” (Obviously I’m still banging away at book reviews and letters to penpals etc. etc.)

The problem is twofold. One, I haven’t made time to write; and two, I don’t currently have a story I feel an urgent need to tell. I have written some short stories this year (eight currently in the caddy!), and when I’m excited about a story, suddenly it becomes easy to make time to write. But I think that if I were writing more regularly, I’d have more story ideas, perhaps even more long-form story ideas, which is really where my heart lies.

(Actually, the problem is not ideas per se, but ideas I’m so invested in that I’ll keep working through the frustrations inherent in writing a novel. You can scamper through a short story on inspiration alone, but a novel always has bits where you yell “This is the worst story ever written and I am the worst writer ever born!”)

However, if you make time to write and then sit down with nothing you want to write, you may just end up staring out the window at the Canada geese. There’s a bit of a chicken and an egg problem.

But the first step to fixing any problem is to define the problem, so at least I’ve done that?

Hadestown is on tour, and as so many of my friends have raved about it, of course I had to see it when it came to town last week.

Since it earned rave reviews on all sides, I went into it expecting to love it, and perhaps because this expectation had built it up so much, I was a little disappointed. But also, I’ve been thinking about it on and off all week, which is not true of some shows that I enjoyed more in the moment, so I may end up loving it in the end.

Some great songs for sure. I liked the Hades/Persephone duets best, especially the one where she's basically singing “Why did you go full Saruman and turn your kingdom into an industrial wasteland?” and he's like “Think of the fires as the heat of my desire for you, babe!” Although of course the lyrics are far richer and more poetic.

In comparison, Orpheus/Eurydice seemed underpowered, which I suppose is fair enough when you're going up against the gods. But since Orpheus's whole thing is that he's such an amazing singer that he nearly sings his wife out of Hades, surely he ought to have the powerhouse voice of the show? Whereas I thought that he was the least interesting singer, although of course this may reflect more on my weakness as a listener than any deficiency in him. I’d like to listen to the original Broadway cast recording to compare.

Whatever my quibbles, the musical struck me enough that I finally wrote down my own Orpheus retelling. This is in fact a retelling of a story I wrote in high school, which has been lost to digital rot, probably for the best as I think having to rewrite it from scratch with my adult powers made it a stronger story attempting to polish up a high school tale. So I’ll be looking for a home for that!

’Tis the season for writing round-ups! Mine is very short this year: I published a short m/m Christmas romance, Deck the Halls with Secret Agents, about an American and a Soviet spy whose twenty year rivalry culminates in 1991 when they get snowed in at a chateau for Christmas.

There are a number of reasons for this, not least my aforementioned very busy year. But in 2025, I’d like to reprioritize my writing. Still working on the logistics thereof. When I first took this new job, my plan was to get up early before work to have some writing time, which works well when I have an exciting project in hand, but not so well when I don’t.

Other possibilities: I could write over my lunch hour, but currently I almost always take a walk, and the walk is a great solace to me. And of course there’s after work, but I do often have plans which makes it a bit difficult…

(There is of course the always popular writing during work option, which is eminently possible during the slow seasons but not, perhaps, ideal.)

In any case! Here’s a list of I am working on in 2025.

1. I would like to publish Diary of a Cranky Bookworm. This is literally all ready to go except for the cover. Would like to get this out sometime in spring.

2. I’ve procrastinated too much to complete Valentine Spies in time for Valentine’s Day, but I’ve come up with an idea I like even better! What if I write THREE Christmas spy romances, all set at the same chateau over the same snowed-in Christmas 1991??? Two and three to be released Christmas 2025 and 2026, then released as an omnibus paperback called Christmas Spies.

3. The original Valentine Spies plot adapts super well to this. Now that the Cold War is winding down, the Circus (is the Circus copywrited? Do I need to call it the Carnival?) reassigns Stephens the butler, who is of course semi-secretly a British spy. (Biffy his “employer” knows, but the staff and guests generally don’t.) But Stephens insists he must see out one last Christmas party, and after the Christmas party Biffy confesses his love by means of Bing Crosby’s “You’re All I Want for Christmas,” which he plays in Stephens room which he has filled with lighted candles and mistletoe.

4. Have not decided on the pairing yet for Christmas Spies #3, but I believe one of the star players will be Anatole the cranky French pastry chef (currently employed making a gingerbread carousel with reindeer instead of horses) who was a member of the Resistance in his early teens.

5. skygiants and genarti have suggested Carol of the Spies and God Rest You Spying Gentlemen as possible titles. (Also Spylent Night, which I like best of all, but littlerhymes thinks it’s visually juuuust a bit too close to Soylent Green so alas, I must let it go.)

6. This would free up Halloween for an unrelated story, so I might still do a short Halloween book? We’ll see if inspiration strikes.

7. I’m also working in a low-key kind of way on a book about artists in Paris in the 1920s (working title Water Lilies), but I’m not quite sure where that’s going, so right now I’m just tinkering away at it in odd moments.

8. AND FINALLY I have been contemplating maybe revising the Coffee Shop Romances as f/f novellas. I think this would be fun, but I’m not sure about the logistics of it. Would I need to take down the original Coffee Shop Romances so Amazon doesn’t mark the new versions as plagiarism?

A new month! Time for updates about various writing projects!

1. I am putting the finishing touches on Deck the Halls with Secret Agents, the story about two rival spies, a Soviet and American, whose twenty-year rivalry culminates at a Christmas party thrown by an upper-class English doofus at a French chateau in 1991. Copy-edits must be completed! The blurb written! The cover finished! But soon it will be published.

2. There will indeed be a Valentine’s Day follow-up, Valentine Spies, in which the upper-class English doofus confesses his love to his butler, who is actually a spy who has been reassigned now that the Cold War is over. (The upper-class English doofus’s parties were somehow spy adjacent and allowed for the gathering of intelligence, hence the butler-spy. We will not dwell on the logistics of this.)

In fact, the butler was supposed to leave BEFORE the Valentine’s Day party, but insisted on staying because (a) it is against professional butler etiquette to abandon one’s employer right before the big Valentine bash!, and (2) he’s secretly in love with the upper-class English doofus, who of course would never look at him that way etc. etc., but even so the butler doesn’t want to let Biffy down on a personal level.

3. Will there be a Halloween follow-up, you ask? Yes there will! Of course Biffy and Stephens have to throw a Halloween party. The chateau is no longer technically a spy rendezvous, but news hasn’t trickled out to all the spies yet, and at least one is going to show up bleeding, wounded, and wearing a carnival mask…

4. Stepping away from spies for a moment. I would also like to write a spin-off novel about Michael, Caleb’s friend from The Sleeping Soldier, but I’ve been struggling, and I’ve realized that this is in part because The Sleeping Soldier is not so much a fairytale retelling as a thought experiment with some fairies ex machina.

This means that any plot that involves, say, Michael turning his investigative journalist talents on the fairies will inevitably blow away the worldbuilding coherence like a puff of air on a dandelion clock. The fairies must remain inexplicable troublemakers. Is it possible to do this in a sequel? Poor Michael may be doomed to remain the forever single supportive friend.

Since I started a new job in January, I've been so busy that I've really posted about nothing but books. In this post, I thought I would catch you up on a few other things in my life.

The scrapbookening continues! I had vague visions of doing this in some sort of systematic way, but in fact I've been hopping around in time from event to event. Right now I'm on a wedding kick, having realized that wedding invitations are an excellent "scrap", as are the thank-you notes if the bride and groom happened to send them. (When you are trying to scrapbook events that happened years ago, which you were not at the time planning to scrapbook, often it's difficult to rustle up anything but photographs for the pages.)

I was similarly inspired by the idea of using birthday cards from my 30th birthday bash in my scrapbook. I'd just finished laying out ten beautiful pages when my cat Baby Boy leaped on the table. "Baby Boy!" I wailed, and Baby Boy fled to the far end of the table top, at which point the table tipped under his weight and all my beautiful pages went flying as the table fell over.

Baby Boy is alive, but he was for about ten seconds in serious danger of being made into cat stew.

I've put the 30th birthday pages back together. (Baby Boy fortunately didn't damage anything except one of the cardstock sheets, which is of course now part of my Adventures in Scrapbooking scrapbook page, with a photograph of the destruction that he wrought, with Baby Boy crouched in the background gazing dazed at the fallen table.) But I haven't had the heart to start in on the captions; hence working on weddings instead.

I've also been on a Quest for the perfect three-ring binder. After some experimentation I have concluded that the path of wisdom is a series of one-inch O-rings, as the scrapbook pages turn much more easily than in either O-ring or D-ring two-inchers.

Other things! I'm signed up for an intro to watercolor class tomorrow. As a child I really enjoyed watercolors, but it's been years since I've used them, so a class seemed like a good way to ease back in. Over the summer I acquired a book about nature journaling (a castaway from a retiring professor's office), which enchanted me, and watercolor seems like the perfect medium for a nature journal, since so much of what I find enchanting in nature is the color.

I haven't done much writing - aside from book reviews for DW, and letters, and scrapbooking... Okay, I haven't done much fiction writing this year, but I am ever so slowly dragging myself through the copy-edits on Diary of a Cranky Bookworm. My goal is to get it out in October! (Sage starts her diary in October. Maybe I should make her diary start date my deadline.)

Oh, and I've started going on an evening Cat Walk, as I call it, which consists of walking around the neighborhood to meet the local cats. Porch Cat is an orange tabby who lies reliably in the sun on his porch; Trinket is a one-eyed black cat with a white bib who sometimes prowls around my house. He likes to be petted if he's in the mood, but his two-eyed lookalike runs away whenever people approach. There is a house with a set of associated kittens, half-wild, including a cream one with dark rings round the eyes whom I call Goggles; and around the corner, a fluffy black kitten all tail and eyes named Umi.

Every year at about this time, I begin to sigh that I ought to write a Christmas book. The whole world has become a Christmas mood board! Christmas songs on the radio, Christmas lights on the houses, Christmas Christmas Christmas in every store! "I could write the rough draft now, and then it could rest nine months before I polish it up to release next year," I sigh. "Think of the money! Think of the years that it could go on sale every single Christmas!"

Alas, my muse scorns this mercenary motive, which has hitherto hindered my Christmas book dreams. I can come up with ideas, but can I come up with an idea that I wish to commit to for 30,000 words? Difficult.

1. An Advent calendar. Twenty-five chapters, one for each day of December leading up to Christmas. Either each day involves opening a literal advent calendar, and the object behind the door inspires a story ("Oh, this charm bracelet belonged to Great-Aunt Sophie, who was jilted at the altar..." This sounds very L. M. Montgomery, doesn't it), or each chapter furthers a story that becomes more and more Christmassy, like Jostein Gaarder's The Christmas Mystery.

How do you make this a romance novel, you ask. How do you make this into any novel at all? Well, that is a problem I have not been able to solve.

2. The enemies-to-lovers story of two competing mall Santas. One is a Santa with a real beard, who looks down on the other Santa who has a fake beard (this is a real controversy in the world of mall Santas), showing that he is not dedicated to the true spirit of Santa...

3. littlehymes innocently suggested a Tin Soldier retelling. (Tin Soldier/Tin Soldier obvs.) "Ah yes," I said, "romance readers love it when the main characters melt into a giant blob of tin at the end. Well, they ARE together... ever after... And is there TRULY any ever after except in death!"

4. Generally speaking I feel that retellings that change a sad ending to a happy ending are missing the point. I would also love to write a Snegurochka retelling, but (1) is it really a Snegurochka retelling if she doesn't melt into a puddle of spring water after her first kiss; (2) does Snegurochka actually have much English-language name recognition? the point is to sell like hotcakes, and a retelling based on a story most people don't know won't sell like hotcakes; and (3) it would be f/f, which ALSO wouldn't sell like hotcakes.

5. I have also considered a story in which the human MC is in love with spirit of Winter, but this is also undeniably a bittersweet story, as Winter is only around for a few months of the year and the human would otherwise be alone... The point of this exercise is CHRISTMAS CHEER, dammit.

6. What if one of the MCs is, like, a holly dryad. Or a spruce dryad. Or something of that ilk.

7. I have found that in writing novellas, it's often best to start with the obstacle to the relationship, as you need a single not-too-large obstacle or else the book will cruelly balloon to full novel length. A couple of the coffee shop romances had "one of these people is only in this place for a limited time" as the obstacle, which might be a good place to start here too? "Noel will ONLY be in Snowyvale for the month of December, working at Snowyvale's Christmas Emporium. But now that he's met Claus, he's afraid that he'll be leaving his heart behind when he goes..."

8. When an Arctic explorer gets lost in a snowstorm, he is rescued be a Christmas elf. Forced to shelter together in a snow cave, their huddling for warmth soon turns sizzling hot--

9. I've written a lot of books with college-age MCs and I think it would be nice to write older characters this time. Also leaning toward something with a bit of a magical twist, although that twist doesn't HAVE to be "one of the MCs is an elf/dryad/gingerbread cookie."

One last chapter in The Sleeping Soldier! The book releases in two days, so it's coming right up.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Preorder link

***

A cold wind whipped across the porch as they left the house. Russell closed the front door and locked it carefully, tossing the cheerful comment over his shoulder, “Now that ought to keep out intruders!”

Caleb laughed, his face flushing hot in the cold.

“Though it’s lucky I didn’t lock it before; or I shouldn’t have met you, and that’s the first bit of luck I’ve had in the future,” Russell said, flashing a grin, and Caleb’s flush deepened. Russell locked the gate too, then turned to Caleb. “Here, Freckles, let me take your arm.”

Instinctively Caleb jerked his arm out of reach. “Men don’t walk arm in arm these days.”

“Don’t they?” Russell looked startled. But then the smile was back. “Well, all right then, Virgil. I s’pose I know enough not to run into the street in front of the cars. That’s what you call ‘em, right?”

“Yes.”

They walked slowly down Hill Road, Russell’s head turning from side to side as he took it all in: the street lamps, the shining Christmas lights, the parked cars. Russell stared as a Cadillac backed down a driveway. “I can’t get used to these cars,” he said. “Mr. Huber drove me to his house even, so I’ve been inside one and everything, but still and all every time I see them, they are so much bigger than I expect… As the bride said on her wedding night.”

( Read more )

Onward in The Sleeping Soldier! The book is set to release on August 7 (preorder here), so we'll get through chapter 4 before then.

***

Caleb O’Connor first discovered the Schloss in October of his freshman year at Hawkins. His girlfriend Carol found a book in the library called Victorian Mourning Art, packed with photographs of dead babies (“Sleeping Beauties,” the caption intoned) and sunbursts woven of human hair.

There was also a photograph of a life-size waxwork: the Union soldier Russell Krause, so perfectly sculpted that he looked, at least in that black-and-white photograph, like a man asleep. His Civil War kepi perched on his curly dark hair. Thick dark eyebrows, round boyish cheeks, sweet soft lips that might easily part under the impress of a kiss.

“That’s right here in town,” Carol said, and Caleb jumped. He had forgotten that she was there, that there was anything in the world except the photograph of that beautiful boy. “See,” she said, and read aloud the caption: “This exquisite waxwork gave rise to the pretty legend that it was not a waxwork at all, but the boy himself, cursed to lie in an enchanted sleep that would last for a hundred years, unless he was awakened by a kiss of true love. It lies in state in Russell Krause’s childhood bedroom in the Schloss, high on a hill overlooking the Wabash in Aurora, Indiana.”

And there, on the facing page, was a photograph of the Schloss, with the street address underneath. “That house must be just up the hill behind Riley,” Caleb said, and then, with an effort, he grinned at Carol. “We ought to break in for Halloween. You could kiss him and see if he wakes up.”

“Oooh!” she said, and shuddered deliciously, and kissed Caleb. And he tried not to worry why her kiss didn’t thrill him like the photograph.

Of course they didn’t break in. But they stood a long time at the wrought iron fence gazing in at the Schloss: an enchanted palace, with the last few climbing roses peeping out among ivy turned scarlet with autumn.

They went back often. They both loved old things, old books, old houses, and this Gothic brick pile with its black fence and hexagonal tower fired their imaginations. It was ghostly in the moonlight at Halloween; soft in the first snowfall after they returned from Thanksgiving break. As the snow grew old and tired, the Schloss grew grim and brooding; and then the snow melted, and the ivy turned green, and the house looked almost friendly when the windows gleamed gold in the reflected sunset.

( Read More )

As with so many of my books, The Sleeping Soldier grew from an observation in George Chauncey’s Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. Chauncey notes that when historians discuss passionate male friendship in 19th century America, they often “mistake the fact that men who passionately and physically expressed their love for other men were considered normal for their having been considered heterosexual, as if it were not the very inconsistency of their emotional lives with contemporary models of heterosexuality that made them seem curious to historians in the first place.”

What would happen, I wondered, if a normal nineteenth century man found himself in the twentieth century, and discovered that behavior that had been acceptable and even celebrated in his own time had come to be seen as homosexual, and therefore aberrant?

E. Anthony Rotundo’s “Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern United States, 1800-1900” provided an invaluable description of nineteenth-century romantic friendship, with its kissing and cuddling and passionate declarations of love. Jonathan Ned Katz’s Love Stories: Sex Between Men before Homosexuality defined the outer boundaries of acceptable romantic friendship (basically, you’re fine as long as there are no genitals involved), and shows how those boundaries contracted as the concept of homosexuality began to spread in America in the 1880s and 1890s.

John Ibson’s Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography provides a pictorial account of the same process. In the 1860s, Civil War soldiers cheerfully got their photographs taken holding hands or snuggling with their friends. By the 1960s, snapshots show straight men standing rigidly upright, with a carefully defined margin of space between them. The popularization of the idea of homosexuality had not, as many sexologists hoped, led to increased tolerance. Instead, it made many previously acceptable practices morally suspect, resulting in far more stringent boundaries on appropriate male behavior.

Exploring this century of changes required a massive research job. For Russell’s boyhood in the 1840s and 50s, I relied heavily on William Dean Howells’s childhood memoir A Boy’s Town. His novels offer invaluable (and often quite funny) explorations of nineteenth century life and mores. The Shadow of a Dream and Mrs. Farrell both include fascinating depictions of passionate male friendships, one begun during college and the other during the Civil War. (The titular Mrs. Farrell even observes of the friendship, “It’s quite like a love-affair.”)

One could spend a lifetime reading Civil War histories without beginning to read all that has been published about the war. John D. Billing’s memoir Hardtack and Coffee and
Bell Irvin Wiley’s history The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union are stuffed with fascinating information about the everyday life of Union soldiers. Bruce Catton’s Centennial History of the Civil War was the premier Civil War history in the 1960s, an immensely readable political and military history that tends toward the then-prevailing view that hotheaded abolitionists and secessionists were equally culpable in bringing about a tragic and unnecessary war.

Caleb’s Civil War professor is ahead of his time in his view that the Civil War was a just war against slavery - or else very much behind it: this was the view of many Northern abolitionists during and after the war. Many of the Civil Rights measures passed in the 1960s were reiterations or elaborations of laws first passed during Reconstruction, which recalcitrant white Southerners rolled back through a combination of politics and violence after Union troops left the South in 1877. (Charles W. Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition provides a harrowing local view of how this process played out on the ground.)

Frederic W. Loring’s 1871 Two College Friends shows less literary skill than Chesnutt’s or Howells’ work, but makes up for it in sheer enthusiasm. Loring’s two college friends join the Union Army, repeatedly save each other from death, and address to each other panegyrics like “O my darling, my darling, my darling! please hear me. The only one I have ever loved at all, the only one who has ever loved me.”

These contemporary sources were also invaluable in helping me capture the cadences of Russell’s voice, as was Louisa May Alcott’s work, especially Little Women. Many grammatical rules that were codified later in the nineteenth century were still not set as of the 1860s, like the prohibitions on saying “ain’t” or “he don’t.” (“She don’t deserve to be forgiven,” cries Jo, after Amy burns Jo’s irreplaceable manuscript.) Russell’s attitude toward women’s changing roles in society echoes Alcott’s, while his stance toward Dan and Lacy’s romance was suggested by the characters’ easy acceptance of Annabel and Fun See’s engagement in Rose in Bloom.

(Lacy’s family history was inspired by Buwei Yang Chao’s delightful Autobiography of a Chinese Woman, which was translated into English by Chao’s husband Yuen Ren Chao (who also translated Alice in Wonderland into Chinese). Sometimes husband and wife bicker affectionately in the footnotes.)

Caroll Smith-Rosenberg’s Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America is an excellent resource about women’s nineteenth romantic friendships, and the changing social roles of women from the nineteenth into the twentieth centuries. Laura Shapiro’s Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America continues that story into the mid-twentieth century, while also offering tantalizing tidbits about mid-century food.

Hazel’s opinion column parodying anti-suffrage arguments is drawn largely from Marie Jenney Howe's satirical An Anti-Suffrage Monologue, as quoted in Judith Schwartz’s Radical Feminists in Heterodoxy: Greenwich Village 1912-1940. And yes, I did saddle Caleb with a research project about early twentieth-century college girls partly just to get in a little information about girls’ romantic friendships, which remained socially acceptable a few decades longer than romantic friendships between boys. See, for instance, Annie Fellows Johnston’s 1918 book for girls Georgina’s Service Stars, a book for girls in which Georgina mentions matter-of-factly that a younger girl has a crush on her, and gets a pretty severe case herself on an older girl named Esther: “She is so wonderful that it is a privilege just to be in the same town with her. Merely to feel when I wake in the morning that I may see her some time during the day makes life so rich, so full, so beautiful! How I long to be like her in every way!”

Like Russell, I’ve never cared for Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a literary production, but it is undeniably an excellent source of information about 19th century understandings of passionate male relationships. In the mid-nineteenth century he published lines like my dear friend my lover was on his way coming, O then I was happy, and the general reading public accepted this without demure until the 1890s.

In the nineteenth century, “lover” had a platonic as well as a romantic meaning. It was most often used to describe a young man who was in love with a girl, whether or not she returned the feeling, but it was also perfectly acceptable for a lonely Jo March in Little Women to sigh to her mother, “Mothers are the best lovers in the world; but I don’t mind whispering to Marmee that I’d like to try all kinds.”

Or, as Florence Morse Kingsley wrote in 1907 in Those Queer Browns (and I cannot emphasize enough that these Browns are queer because they’re socialists): “As for William, he could never have been so wise, so tender, so lovable, so altogether delightful and worshipful, had it not been for his long guardianship of [his sister] Agatha. He has been father, mother, brother and lover to her.”

Conversely, the word "friend" conveyed fervent emotional intensity. Louisa May Alcott, among many others, used it to describe Jesus, “the Friend who welcomes every child with a love stronger than that of any father, tenderer than that of any mother." And it was by no means exclusively attached to platonic relationships: during the Civil War, soldiers often began letters to their wives with the salutation “Esteemed Friend.”

The past is another country; they speak a different language there. Their words may look the same as ours, but they are full of different meanings, and the feelings of the heart are as difficult to translate as poetry. Therefore, let them speak for themselves. Listen to Alfred Dodd’s apostrophe to Anthony Halsey: “Dear, dearest Anthony! Thou art mine own friend. My most beloved of all! To see thee again! What rapture it would be, thou sweet, lovely, dear, beloved, beautiful, adored Anthony!”