Mortaine’s Blog

Baggage was rejected from Ploughshares yesterday.

Okay, I know this is going to sound like a strange post, coming from someone who’s been out of school for several years. But I know what I’m talking about, here. School books are expensive!

The 19th century was an exciting time around the world. It followed the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and covered the English Regency. It was the period of Wordsworth and the Romantics, Victorian England, Dickens, and pioneer America. It saw expansion in all ways, and the birth of the Industrial Revolution.

The 19th century is often called the “long 18th century” in literary studies because it spans the end of the French Revolution (1789) to the beginning of World War I in 1914. It was also sufficiently after the invention of the printing press and literacy was on the rise, so there are lots of books out there to be read, and most of them have survived to today.

The literature of this time is fairly exciting– there’s an almost equal weight between novels and poetry. Jane Austen wrote in the early 1800’s, so you have some romance novels if you’re looking for them. Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein in 1818– science fiction! Jules Verne was later in the century.

And so many authors felt the disaffection in the face of the political chaos of their times, they wrote volumes and volumes on the conflicts of political strife, evolution and science, expansionism, and imperialism.

The length of the time period and the depth of material available from the 19th century has led to large amounts of scholarship and literary inquiry. As a result, there is no shortage of books available on Project Gutenberg and other free ebook sites. Many of these are also being read and recorded on Librivox, a public domain audiobook project.

Most undergraduate and even graduate courses focus on reading the text and then reading a selection of articles and excerpts (often presented in a photocopied “reader”), most of which, if you can get the list of articles from the professor, are available in your library’s archives or online documents (try JStor and other academic databases). You may also find that WikiSource is a good place for primary historical sources, though I haven’t reviewed it for sources relevant to 19th century literary study.

In essence, you’ll be able to source your primary texts for free and mine a wealth of secondary sources within your library’s walls or Internet connection. If you’re a fast reader, you may even finish your degree early– unlike math, science, and engineering majors, you do not have to take literature courses in any particular sequence. If you’re a really fast reader and writer, you can probably take an extra course in your major every semester and finish up to a year early.

Tip for high school seniors: Take AP English now to save yourself a semester or even two of basic writing and composition.

I do not recommend thinking that studying earlier eras will be a cheaper route. Anything prior to Shakespeare will hit your bank account, because of the need for translations from Middle or Old English, textbooks to learn Middle or Old English (not as easy to come by online for free), and the fact that there is less primary literature available to study, so you will need to read more secondary sources, which means purchasing literary analysis books and articles in your course reader.

I make no guarantees on your ability to get a job after college. I’m just talking about getting through school without spending $150 for each textbook. But I will point out that English majors with relevant backgrounds are accepted into med school and law school more often than any other major, due to the flexibility of their developed communication skills.

This plan is not recommend for: people who don’t like to read, people who cannot write an essay (most literature courses use the essay for the final exam and have 2-5 additional essays due throughout the course), or people who are only comfortable with quantifiable test-taking.

If I were coming out of high school and wanted to get a degree as inexpensively as possible, I would go to a community college for 2 years and get all my GE’s out of the way, taking the maximum number of transferrable lower-division literature courses as I could. I would then transfer to a state college or university and major in 19th century literature. I would check the book lists of each course I signed up for as soon as they were available in the college bookstore, and spend summer and winter vacations buying them for a few bucks at used stores, or downloading them for free on Project Gutenberg.

This is, in fact, what I did for my undergraduate degree– in some cases, I was able to fulfill the book lists of 3 classes in a quarter for under $30– and that was in 1995, before Project Gutenberg had really taken off. Today, I bet I could get through the major requirements for under $150 in textbooks, total (not counting the general education courses).

Lots of change and upheaval lately:

Personal Changes

My sister and her kids came to visit last week. It was tons of fun, spent a lot of time at the pool and beach, and went to the Vermont Teddy Bear Factory with them. They’re great kids, and I’m soooooo glad they were able to come see us!

Unfortunately, our grandmother died on Wednesday while sis was here, so John and I left our campsite yesterday and drove to a campground outside Boston. Services are this week, and we plan to stay for an extra week, to visit friends and also so we’re not just pinballing all over the Northeast again. We’re also re-designing our travel plans for the rest of this year.

Alladin is doing well, still in recovery. We had to change his vet appointment to Friday because of the funeral, but his bloodwork looks good and he’s continuing to get better.

Blogging Changes

Meanwhile, I’ve started a new blog. You probably noticed some cross-posted travel-related posts (and for LJers, some cross-cross-posted; sorry, I really can’t make those any less ugly without completely removing them… which I could do, but I thought you all would enjoy reading those). I’ve joined the today.com blog network with http://ustravel.today.com, a new blog I’m writing about our travels and life on the road. I try to post daily, but the cross-posting hasn’t been automatic the way I want it to be, so it ends up cross-posting in batches whenever I remember to do it manually.

I’m also writing articles for Suite101, and if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook (I’m mortaine at both places– add me!), or if you visit my blog directly, you’ll have seen an update in the sidebar when I write a new article. I mainly write about technical writing, so if you’re a tech writer, or want to be one, you should definitely read the articles (RSS).

Writing Business Changes

More changes: I’m starting a corporation, Mortaine Publications, Inc. It’s an umbrella corp to handle my writing businesses. I’ve now fractured into enough directions– web/blog writing, technical writing, training development, comic book development, etc., that it made sense to create a corporation for the taxes and billing, the professional image, and streamlining business-to-business arrangements.

Why am I suddenly fracturing my writing? Well, I still don’t want to put a bunch of annoying ads in my blog. BUT, I’m getting to the point where I want to get paid for blogging. Today.com pays $1 per post plus ad impressions for the first month, which is pretty sweet. Suite101 pays for pageviews, but gets a lot of traffic, which is also pretty cool.

Look forward to more changes to the blog and website layout coming up as the corporation gets going and as I streamline my content propagation and feeds and whatnot. Remember you can always subscribe to a specific category feed. Just visit the home page, select the category, and put “/feed” at the end of the category URL to subscribe to it. The USTravel.today.com posts get posted into the RV category– a little help and extra content for those who’ve subscribed to that feed already.

New Projects

The novels are on hiatus for a bit. I’m pursuing some new creative projects. You may have seen “comic book development” in my list of reasons i started the corporation. I can’t really discuss it, but I’m working with an artist to put out a comic book early next year. It’s very exciting, and I think people who read this blog will be pleasantly surprised by the quality of the comic.

I’m not really starting any new knitting projects lately (this week, anyway). Still have to take photos of the blue sweater and post them, and I’m just working on TKGA, the stormy shawl, and a knitted kitten for a swap that I’m really far behind on finishing. I have 2 pairs of socks on promise that I haven’t even designed yet, but at least I have the measurements waiting to go for them.

My to-do list is currently 60 items long.

Hey, folks!

I’m speaking today at the STC’s 55th annual Summit in Philadelphia, on the topic of the Paperless Office for contractors and independent consultants. The progression runs from 9 to 11:30, and I give my talk 4 times, so if you’re here at the conference and want to check it out, you don’t have to give up 2 of your sessions– just one half of one.

That’s the quick update. Later, I’ll blog about my impressions of the conference. Perhaps some of the folks who have steadfastly read my blog all year and are wondering “does she ever work?” will be happy to have something more “technical writing” oriented for a change. Just remember, you can filter out the knitting stuff by selecting a category (left-hand side of the frame) and then subscribing to the RSS feed for the category’s page, rather than the whole blog. It’s never been my intention for you all to read everything I post– knitterly folks should subscribe to the crafting feed, writerly folks to the writing feed, personal friends to the personal feed (yeah, LiveJournal folks get the short straw, but I even filter what gets cross-posted to LJ, too).

Also, since I never write about my clients or jobs, anything work-related is usually a more general thing, and not “OMG, my company just did the coolest thing!” Except in rare cases where the company explicitly says they’re OK with me evangelizing.

My Adesso keyboard is an ergonomic split-keys keyboard with a trackpad in the middle of the board.

I like it, and find it usable, but it’s the only splitty ergo keyboard with a trackpad in the middle of the board available, so I’m a bit locked in for keyboards to like.

As of today, it’s dead. The right shift key gets interpreted as a capital “D.” The left shift key is read as “find.” I am now on the prowl for a replacement keyboard.

There is a spare one in my storage locker in Scotts Valley.

Where John was, less than a week ago.

And didn’t go into the storage locker to get my keyboard (I did ask him to before he left, but he never made it there).

*cries*

In unrelated news: We are in Connecticut this week for a wedding. Arrived yesterday. We’re staying in the smallest campground ever– it’s 13 sites in a small parking lot. But it’s fine, and inexpensive for the location.

There’s a wildfire burning in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It is not near our (soon to be former, I hope) house. It is, however, close to my mother-in-law’s home. John is checking in with the sisters to make sure she’s fine. It’s 5 miles away from her. Last time it got that close, we thought about evacuating her, but it turned out to be unnecessary.

I’m now a writer over at Suite101.com as of yesterday.

And about 2 weeks ago I quietly launched/started Vagabond Writer, to showcase my travel and freelance writing efforts. Check it out, let me know what you think!