Richard Edgar's Blog
December 1, 2020
New review of Ravynscroft
There's a new review of my novel Ravynscroft in the December 2020 issue of the online literary journal Toasted Cheese:
https://tclj.toasted-cheese.com/2020/...
Check it out!
https://tclj.toasted-cheese.com/2020/...
Check it out!
August 21, 2020
Author's review of Ravynscroft
Ravynscroft is the tale of a middle-aged woman who has defined herself by her relationships. When her wife moves out, ending the one longest-term relationship she's had in her adult life, she finds it difficult to keep on keeping on. The cat who gets her up for breakfast every morning is not a suitable life partner, and he has the teeth and claws to prove it.
But she does keep on keeping on, going to work, teaching a class, torturing atoms in her lab and writing papers about the results. She tries some dating, with little success. All too often she finds herself in the coffeeshop where she met Rachael all those years ago, looking across the table into her eyes, and being unable to resist going home with her, if only for a little social and physical contact with another warm body. Never mind that this particular warm body always makes her feel worse about the fact that she promised to love and cherish and now can't. Rachael thought she wanted the guy she had drooled over in school.
In time, Ravyn comes to think of herself as a homeowner, living alone in a house that's way too big for just her (even counting the one cat). So when a colleague leaves her relationship for an apartment with no heat in the New England winter, she acquires a housemate. There aren't enough blankets for two beds on the coldest night of the year, but that was just an excuse and both of them knew it. Ravyn finds it odd, having a live-in lover whose Chinese name she can't parse and doesn't remember for more than a minute or two. But JJ is fine being called that; it's what she's called at work in the physics department, and on the papers she submits to the journals.
While she may think she's subtle about her mutual feelings for JJ, people do notice. The only other woman faculty member in the physics department needs help taming her narcissistic lover, and after a tear-filled girls' night out, Andi comes home with JJ. In due course the household expands to six, plus occasional visitors.
This arrangement warps everyone's sense of herself, her relationships, and what being in a relationship is all about. While it may look like six lesbians living and loving together, each one is her own person, with different desires, likes and dislikes. Several attempts are made to come up with a way of thinking about their situation, but none of them actually fit everyone in the household.
This is a book about relationships. Some of it is serious stuff, but a lot of it is just fun: wordplay, finishing each others' sentences, running with unintentional double entendres. Being too generous by half gets them into sticky situations.
It may seem peculiar that an author with a name like the present one should write a book like this one. Writer Michael Cunningham, at a reading with Q&A, remarked that every character is at least somewhat autobiographical. "Obviously," he said, "I'm not a three-foot-tall woman from the planet Venus. And yet, she represents some aspects of my personality." Ravyn is certainly such a character: feisty, opinionated, utterly flattened by her circumstances, doing whatever she can think of to prop herself up. It's a bit of a stretch, to be sure, even for a writer who has issues around their gender identity. Oh, and the house is real, if possibly stretched a little in some dimensions. All the best fictional houses are.
Richard Edgar is a retired scientist, living in the Denver area, writing speculative, character-driven queer fiction, science fiction, and sometimes fiction about queer scientists. Ravynscroft is a second novel set in the same world as Necessary Lies, and the two intersect in incidental ways. They can be read in either order.
But she does keep on keeping on, going to work, teaching a class, torturing atoms in her lab and writing papers about the results. She tries some dating, with little success. All too often she finds herself in the coffeeshop where she met Rachael all those years ago, looking across the table into her eyes, and being unable to resist going home with her, if only for a little social and physical contact with another warm body. Never mind that this particular warm body always makes her feel worse about the fact that she promised to love and cherish and now can't. Rachael thought she wanted the guy she had drooled over in school.
In time, Ravyn comes to think of herself as a homeowner, living alone in a house that's way too big for just her (even counting the one cat). So when a colleague leaves her relationship for an apartment with no heat in the New England winter, she acquires a housemate. There aren't enough blankets for two beds on the coldest night of the year, but that was just an excuse and both of them knew it. Ravyn finds it odd, having a live-in lover whose Chinese name she can't parse and doesn't remember for more than a minute or two. But JJ is fine being called that; it's what she's called at work in the physics department, and on the papers she submits to the journals.
While she may think she's subtle about her mutual feelings for JJ, people do notice. The only other woman faculty member in the physics department needs help taming her narcissistic lover, and after a tear-filled girls' night out, Andi comes home with JJ. In due course the household expands to six, plus occasional visitors.
This arrangement warps everyone's sense of herself, her relationships, and what being in a relationship is all about. While it may look like six lesbians living and loving together, each one is her own person, with different desires, likes and dislikes. Several attempts are made to come up with a way of thinking about their situation, but none of them actually fit everyone in the household.
This is a book about relationships. Some of it is serious stuff, but a lot of it is just fun: wordplay, finishing each others' sentences, running with unintentional double entendres. Being too generous by half gets them into sticky situations.
It may seem peculiar that an author with a name like the present one should write a book like this one. Writer Michael Cunningham, at a reading with Q&A, remarked that every character is at least somewhat autobiographical. "Obviously," he said, "I'm not a three-foot-tall woman from the planet Venus. And yet, she represents some aspects of my personality." Ravyn is certainly such a character: feisty, opinionated, utterly flattened by her circumstances, doing whatever she can think of to prop herself up. It's a bit of a stretch, to be sure, even for a writer who has issues around their gender identity. Oh, and the house is real, if possibly stretched a little in some dimensions. All the best fictional houses are.
Richard Edgar is a retired scientist, living in the Denver area, writing speculative, character-driven queer fiction, science fiction, and sometimes fiction about queer scientists. Ravynscroft is a second novel set in the same world as Necessary Lies, and the two intersect in incidental ways. They can be read in either order.
