In 2021, Feral Daughter, aka ShaChri Patel, made her first appearance as the heroine of the Spark Chronicles novels. Today, as I’m working to finish up the series, I’m getting shown a little love by the New York Times – at least the fans creating and editing their games.
Yesterday, if you play Wordle, you would have found Feral as the correct word. Today, in the Mini crossword, she was the answer to 6 Across.
My thanks to them and to all the fans who have reached out to tell me about this. I’m glad she’s getting some love!
Another episode of Ash went live on Vella yesterday.
On a completely different topic, I just finished Raymond Chandler’s first Phillip Marlowe novel – The Big Sleep. It was written in 1939 and is still an entertaining read. One thing that surprised me was the image of police officers carrying women across the street when the gutters flooded. The bigger surprise was the amount of slapping that went on – not the current slapping-as-a-sport type, but the “oh, she’s hysterical, I better slap her,” or “oh, she’s on drugs, a couple of slaps should help.”
I’ve never slapped a woman – hysterical or drugged – but remember it being commonplace in fiction, like quicksand and hot lava, two other things I’ve never encountered. All-in-all, I’m happy to have missed all three.
Spoiler alert:
Another sign of the times was the motivating crime in the novel. Bad guys were running a *gasp* pornographic bookstore. Prohibition had just ended and there were laws against the distribution of such items. No internet, no deep fakes, no sexting, no revenge porn, no Rule 34.
I’m not eager to turn back the clock to 1939, but it doesn’t seem that all social change has been for the better.
Okay, back to writing.