Monday Mutterings, week 7 of 20

Week seven of the Twenty Weeks of Buzz finds a new puzzle, deciphering a burst of free verse!  And, if you send in your answers by the 14^th you’ll be entered for next week’s drawing of a “Venomous Death” mini-broadside OR a genuine LRK t-shirt.  Either will look fabulous on your wall.

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Something I’m really looking forward to this week is putting the final touches on the new broadside, “The Birth of a Green Man.”  The story itself ties in with The God of the Hive (oh, I am such a clever girl) and is going to look amazing.  I got the art from Jean Lukens last week, and it’s with the print shop now—she and I are going in to help decide on the final placement of text and art, and with luck it’ll be printed and ready to sign by the end of the week.  I’ll post an image of it when we have it, and let you know where and when you can get one.

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And at the end of the week—Saturday, to be precise—I get to have a conversation with the great Jedediah Barry about SF in SF: Science Fiction in San Francisco.  Come join us!

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I’ll have more to say about the Mary Russell Coloring Book project on Thursday, but meanwhile, I just have to show you one of the submissions to the Beekeeper’s Gallery page (to see the others, and learn how to submit one of your own, go here.)

Have fun!

A Case in Correspondence, Part 6

A series of communications (employing means as varied as re-used post cards and the agony columns of the Times) has come to light between Mary Russell and Other Important People, which will be revealed during the Twenty Weeks of Buzz. It follows the 1992 (not a typo!) tale published last year as MyStory (or, The Case of the Ravening Sherlockians.) The current saga posts in its legible version Wednesdays on Russell’s MySpace blog, then as the original documents Fridays (or occasionally Thursdays) here on Mutterings.

Many of the messages seem to have been delivered by messenger service or in envelopes since lost—unfortunate for the sake of our research, but perhaps understandable when one considers the momentous gravity of matters at stake.

(I should mention that the full significance of the story will not become clear until one has read The God of the Hive, available in April–although members of the Virtual Book Club are debating it nonetheless…)

(Click on the image below to enlarge.)

Thursday thrills

Two exciting new projects in the LRK e-universe, at pretty opposite ends of some kind of spectrum: an app and a coloring book. The app is for iPhones, and you can get yours here. It’s still in its infancy, but I am assured that it will be Terribly Useful and will contain All Kinds of Stuff. Clearly, I am only nominally in charge of this.

The coloring book (should that be colouring book?) was inspired by Kim’s contribution to the Beekeeper’s Gallery contest, “An Evening at the American Colony.” Such a great idea, and if you all want to sharpen your quills and give me your visions, if we get one or two pictures from each title we could make us a nice book. Her picture and the instructions can be seen here.

And this week’s winners are Rachel in Palo Alto, who won an Advanced Reader Copy of The God of the Hive that she’s going to gloat over and use to cast Knowing Looks at all her friends, and Judy in Shenandoah, IA, who has herself a copy of “A Venomous Death.” Congratulations, ladies!

And the Twenty Weeks of Buzz buzzes on!

A Case in Correspondence: Week Six

What’s this I see? Mary Russell has a new post over on her MySpace page? Episodes of “A Case in Correspondence” will appear there Wednesdays throughout our Twenty Weeks of Buzz, and on Fridays you can find them here at Mutterings.

What on earth are the world’s greatest detective and her husband, Sherlock Holmes, up to now?

A Letter of Mary

Tuesdays during the Twenty Weeks of Buzz are given over to a look at each of my twenty books, one each week, with some reflection or bit of information or background about it. This week, A Letter of Mary, published in 1997.

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My background is theology, with degrees in Comparative Religion and in Old Testament. It is also Mary Russell’s interest.

So what would happen if a young, Jewish Oxford theological student were handed a document that would shake the foundations of Christianity—and, along the way, change the future of her entire life?

The compilers of what we call the New Testament had an untold number of documents to choose from: epistles, sermons, letters, and gospels (or “Good News”) all of which the early Christians had written, shared, copied, annotated, and passed around (or not—many ancient fragments are discovered within the bindings of later books.) In the second century (that is, a hundred years after the death of Jesus of Nazareth) various groups of Christians began to wrestle with just which of these documents were acceptable—defining the norm of what Christianity was—and which were either questionable or downright heretical. Many of the writings found by a couple of young goatherds in the caves of Qumran were of these questionable sort, used by a small group, rejected by the larger Christian community.

(There is a document termed the “Gospel of Mary,” of which the earliest extant fragments, from the third century, were found at Oxyrhynchus in northern Egypt—in excavations of an ancient garbage dump.)

All four Canonical gospels mention a woman named Mary, who appears to have been from the town of Magdala on the Sea of Galilee. Only Luke’s Gospel mentions her by name before the Resurrection, but all agree that it was she who witnessed the risen Christ, and she who took the news to the other apostles: Mary of Magdala was the apostle to the apostles.

Among all those fragile scraps of writing at loose in a troubled land, how many were lost? It is not a great leap of the imagination to envision a letter, written by the hand of the woman of Magdala and concerning of the charismatic rabbi whom she chose to follow, which was revered, preserved, and then quietly hidden away from later authorities.

One letter, that, were it to come to light, would cause a shiver down the spine of a Christianity that had chosen, in the two millennia since then, to turn towards the male apostles and overlook the female.

One letter, of Mary.

Sea of Galilee.

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