Masculine/Feminine

The Ax and the Vase is a book of men, focused on masculinity, monarchy, and the Church.  The work in progress (still obstinately untitled) moves into another world - and, while the focus remains similar, the characters do affect the particulars.  We're in a more southern clime now, and moving less among the men.

This gives me the opportunity to indulge the scholarly side of what appear to be my more "traditionally feminine" interests.  I can study the history of perfume, and revel in the details of costume and cosmetics.

This comes not in service of tarting up an empty story, but in adding depth to aspects of storytelling I consciously did not give full rein in A&V.  Clovis tells his story himself - and, because of that, I felt that certain specifics (touching the detail regarding the appearance of the characters - including himself - and more fanciful descriptions of feeling, or omnipotent observations) would be a bit precious.  His character is not introspective, and it can hardly be expected of a "Barbarian" prince that he would expend consideration on fine points of this type.  So they are less in evidence in that novel.

The shift is not merely from the focus on masculine characters, but also a transition from first person point of view to an omnipotent voice.  Telling the story from the point of view of a single character is not limiting as such, but does prevent an author from poking around in other minds, or contemplating the corners of rooms in which he is not actually standing.

And so my new researches will spoil the theater major in me with the opportunity to look at textiles and kohl pots, coiffure and headdress, etiquette and protocol.

I call this a shift into the feminine, but let it hardly be thought that I am devolving into characters obsessed with pink and ruffles.  For one, even the most cursory education in the history of costume will teach anyone that pink, in its association with modern, facile notions of vacuous femininity.  For two, my joy in this work is that I will be able to present full-bodied women in my work, authentically constrained within the world women occupied for all the millennia before my own privileged life was given to me - and yet exerting the remarkable nature of human autonomy, in all the ways we find to express it between and beneath the limits we impose on each other.

Femininity may indeed allow me to focus on "girlie" things.  I promise, though:  it won't prevent my writing actual characters ...