"The Tree is My Hat" & Christmas

Gwern Branwen · 27 Nov 2010, 02:22 · from 2010-November.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: gwern0 at gmail.com (Gwern Branwen)
Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2010 21:22:19 -0500
Subject: (urth) "The Tree is My Hat" & Christmas
Message-ID: <AANLkTimxpC274_L=5G5AOp0Cx9eRcSDEfEqZQysfwJgx at mail.gmail.com>

http://www.blackgate.com/2010/11/23/and-it-goes-on-from-there-an-interview-with-gene-wolfe/

>    Pete Crowther in England (with P S Publishing) wanted to put in ?Christmas Inn,? so he called the British edition The Very Best of Gene Wolfe, rather than the American edition, which is The Best of Gene Wolfe.

>    What happened with ?Christmas Inn? was that Pete had promised his Post Scripts subscribers that he would send them a Christmas story gratis in the mail.

>    As Christmas drew near, the author who?d originally agreed to write this ten thousand word story was at thirty thousand words. He was still banging ahead, writing more, and would not be finished in time. So Pete asked if I could quickly write a ten thousand word story for him.

>    In my short story, ?The Tree is My Hat,? the ex-wife who shows up on the tropical island is named Mary Christmas. I never say that ? you find out by deduction ? but I asked myself, what?s her family like? Who is her father, Julius Christmas, and what?s going on back at home?

>    Well, back at home, they check in four time-travelers to the Christmas Inn. Two men, two women. The story goes on from there.

I don't seem to recall any discussion of this before or during the AEG
threads. It doesn't clarify anything for me about TTiMH, but maybe it
does for someone else.

Another nice quote:

> As per Soldier of Sidon, which continues the story of Latro, are there any characters from your previous works that you have considered revisiting in new novels?

> Gene Wolfe: Cassie Casey from An Evil Guest. Cassie particularly ? because I hated writing the end of that book and saying goodbye to her. I have always thought of it as a novel, what happens to her when she gets to the alien planet Woldercan.

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net