Ecolog-ollection

Genealogies gleaned from ancient human DNA are set to transform archaeology.

For an historical fiction author (well ... I used to be), this one represents a tantalizing plot bunny. Who were the unrelated women on these prosperous farmsteads? Why are there no offspring present with their DNA? Graves and grave goods gave me a huge amount of the research information I used when I wrote The Ax and the Vase, and still featured significantly in my work on the second novel. This sort of thing seems to energize my creative juices. Maybe, juuuuust maybe ... someday I can talk about work on that second novel in the present tense again. *Sigh*

Mmmm, ancient brains. Jokes aside, either one of these stories that could be a plot bunny, or maybe they're interesting in their own right. Right now, I am not chasing bunnies, but I have found myself peeping out of my own burrow from time to time to sniff the air and *think* about them.

Urban ecologists who ignore the geography of race and income in a city do so at the peril of their science

Time to tell that one middle manager to lose the "survival of the fittest" poster. It is INSPIRING and very, very cool to take a closer look not only at the influence of community and cooperation in biology, but to once again review the very idea of individuality, as regards any body ... and anybody. This, for me, begins to look like a bunny I'd like to chase.

Bacteria, for instance, may make as much as 95 percent of the serotonin in our bloodstreams, meaning you have a diverse symbiont community to thank for your pleasant mood. ... (A)nimals, humans included, are really multispecies events, composite byproducts of collaboration.

... wait for it ...

... because, for my writing friends, this is a REALLY good column about writing.

It's also good for the advice-column that it actually is.

Layers. Mmmmm.

I have eaten the plums

The sun is back out. America's midterm elections are over. My friend V ... well. Losing her is awful, it's cruel. But she is not hurting now. Doctors can't use her body to experiment now. And those who love her - I am humbled they embrace me. Her husband, her family, her beloved friends: beautiful, beautiful, wonderful people.

This time has been hard. Like so many families, the remains of our nuclear unit - just me, mom, and my brother now - endure terrible political strain in these times. But, just for this morning, it's virtual hugs and three courses of "I love you." Because these strains have everyday, real consequences - this has, in some ways, been even harder than watching my lifelong friend die. Or, perhaps, it only got in the way of comprehending and mourning. I only know this has been the hardest thing to bear, over this past week.

We are all enduring a confluence. My brother is traveling to the memorial of a friend of his, and beautiful V's will be remembered on Saturday. As her kids do this, my mom is now watching her own oldest friend in town "giving back", as some say in the South. It may be we all suffer the loss of our dear Deebo, my stepfather - and each of our dear friends.

The light of inspiration peeked out not too long ago - unsurprisingly, after The Conference, but also very much under the influence of other friendships. Leila, especially, uniquely lights my creative way. She and I have so much in common, but we write such different works, and about the time I did a recent beta-read for her, I also happened to find the ENDING for a short work we began an embarrassing number of years ago in our writing group. It's been drafted two different ways, I let it settle in a certain direction, and for now it is sitting quietly, resting, rising, awaiting both her feedback and my final attentions.

Writing. Feels. So. Good.

There truly is nothing else like writing.

And so, with voting done and the sun out and my family whole ... I open up the WIP, the big dog, the "real" work. The novel. Just open it. I shall scroll about in it, find something to alight upon, and read a little bit.

Research feels like a good way to go. I fear it may have to be, at long last, the pogrom. (Yes, now, of all moments.)

Sometimes, the way writing feels "good" is different from other times. It's not always pleasure.

Sometimes, it's memorial.

I'm feelin' it!

2018 has not been a prolific year for me with writing. The blog has been a bit weirder, I know; and any activity I've indulged on Twitter's #AmWriting has been sporadic, if not an outright lie (in attempts to convince myself).

Lots of this owes to the facts of life - well, and death. But yesterday, there was some good news. This past weekend, there was The Conference - and, though I had hardly thought about it and wasn't even sure I was up for it, it was kind to me (even beyond seeing my WONDERFUL writing friends in the most glorious community you could ask for), and ... I feel like writing again. Maybe not the WIP, at least for a minute. Maybe time to take another look at that ghost story I've been trying to find the MDQ for for, literally, years. Maybe take a piece of The Ax and the Vase, and develop that ... Basina, or Lanthechilde (who was cut out of Ax entirely, actually). Maybe something altogether new.

It'll let me know.

In the meantime: we have spotted the sun a couple times of late, locally. It is not humid. The heat is finally letting go. Tomorrow is Friday (and pay day). One of my oldest friends, apparently is not dying. (This is was not a given, two weeks ago.) My mom's still in a bit of a state, but I am planning ways for the two of us to have a good time together. I've got some ideas.

Today is a blessing.

May yours be even moreso.

Collection

The hard-knockers won...

How about a good old history-of-fashion link again, for the first time in a while? Or would you prefer astronomical pursuits? Here we have science and style in one. "My seamless isn't space-less anymore!" Or is "My Barbaloot (space) suit's a convolute!" better? Hidden figure shapers? Choose your pun ... Either way, click away; worth the story, especially its ending. On the development of NASA's first space suits - by way of Racked.

You don't wick power from the powerless. Equilibrium is conductivity: the process of greater resource dissipating into areas with lesser resource - heat is drawn into chilled space, a concentration of density expands into less-dense space, etc. Where there is greater power, lesser power doesn't creep in, it absorbs whatever is released.

Okay, and SO. MANY. PLOT BUNNIES. I love so much of this, every paragraph seems to have a brilliant idea for another story or novel or play or movie or graphic art. I'm not even working on the WIP anymore, this is too cruel! Even The Atlantic's unconscious bias toward theoretical blue collar workers (who, "perhaps" might be a load of alcoholics) is interesting ... Hmmmm.

Empathetic Magic and Writing: Lose Yourself in the Cheetah

This essay on writing by Cutter Wood (and how great a name is that?) speaks to something I definitely understand.

The moves in the book that felt most freeing were not taking on the perspective of the victim or the murderer, but these brief dips into other points of view—a minor character, a bird sitting on a branch. Those moments where, in the space of a single adjective, the lens just shifts slightly. As a writer, that’s where I feel happiest, I guess.

All of this is a way of trying to move past our fundamental loneliness. ... we have these amazing computational organs in our heads, and seemingly the only thing they can’t do is connect to another one?

When I was a kid, I used to play by myself all the time, and much of what I played at was mental - empathetically occupying the body of our dog, or the neighbor's cat, imagining what it felt like to be "big", to use the counter without climbing anything ... to be a boy, or to be old, or to lack a limb or the use of them.

I envisioned my body in states other than the state I lived in, other than the species I lived in, and really tried to imagine what a tail must feel like, or limbs all one length, carrying me all at once, without free hands, with my head out front instead of on top. It was especially interesting to imagine inhabiting a snake or a worm - something ALL tail, or something without bones. To project myself into fish was difficult, but elephants, fascinating.

Really, it's the most concentration I can think of ever honestly applying to *anything* in my life. I'm not good at physical endurance, I never was an intellectual. But play? Solitary play, imagining myself out of my life, into something else's? Irresistible. Wonderful.

The connection, for me, to writing - what Wood describes in his experiences, the ineffable transfer out of self or transformation of nonself internalized ... his feeling is different, but I understand it.

Diana Gabaldon says something to the effect that "write what you know" is a drag, that the very point of storytelling is to evoke - to occupy - a world other than one's own. This is elemental, for me, as a writer. I could not be less interested in replicating myself, or my environs - for me, the entire point of reading and writing both is the escape from the everyday, the release from myself.

Irresistible. Wonderful. And who needs a story without wonder?



All this is not to say I dislike living in my own skin. It's good skin, and I've cultivated quite a nice life in it. But it is JUST too interesting to think about what others' lives, worlds, experiences must be. I know my own life pretty well, so reading about it or writing about it doesn't have the same draw as reading about altered landscapes, different eras, unknown people.

The point Wood makes about fundamental loneliness, too: I considered myself a bit friendless as a child. I wasn't - it's just that childhood is not a perpetually social experience, and (looking back) being alone might have been the only way to stretch my brain and get away from ordinary old family life. I used to sit in my closet alone, I'd appointed it with books and my beanbag chair. I would take Speedy, my gerbil, and read and let him scritch and tickle around my knees and arms. Sometimes, it was the front porch or back patio. Or even the loft in the shed my dad built.

I would read, or just throw myself into some imagined world - desiring to be grown up, glamorous, living in the 19th century, or the first ... surrounded by people, in my mind, but people I created, maybe controlled. Costume excited me, and history. And animals, of course.

My older niece went through a prolonged period as a puppy. She had a "tail" (a pink leash, clipped to whatever pants or skirt she was wearing), she was always in character. And the character was complete; she would not break it, not even for her granddaddy, sometimes only reluctantly for mealtimes. She wasn't even telling a story, she WAS the story.

That seems a long time ago, but I can remember that too - watching, and knowing I had once been the same, though without her levels of sustained concentration. I might make it an hour, building my consciousness inside an imagined body, but she sustained this for months, maybe a year. And, it happens, this was during a difficult time in our family, in her life. That puppy life probably, for her, provided the control I got out of living in another century with characters I got to conjure.

Each borrowed gesture—whether it’s an intentional homage or just something a writer adored and internalized‚ is a sign someone or something broke through.

There is both danger and security, wearing the skin of another character, of an animal. And, like Richard Pryor's cheetahs ... just a WHOOSH of your own breath ... and the cheetahs disappear.

But they were there. They were real.

PROSSA-seez

Since my last post, there has been some indication of life in the WIP. I have the comments to thank, in part, but also mindfulness that baby steps really are the most important, sometimes.

After a week at work that was extremely difficult - not because the work was hard, but thanks to office politics which demand emotional and professional bandwidth I don't have these days - I've returned for a new week with my head down and my feet steady. You have to keep your ambitions small when things are overwhelming, and a week that ends with the advice to document difficulties is overwhelming.

So the WIP may be viewed as a saving grace - something for my brain and soul to resort to, which is "under my control" (cue the laugh track of every author I know enjoying the idea they "control" their writing). Well, perhaps it is just a refuge - a puzzle to work under stress, a world outside the one I have to occupy day-to-day. A promise to be winkled out.

A week ago, it was scary facing the dragon, but right now it is oddly satisfying to contemplate going at something so big. With work being just as daunting, the strange truth is that the butter knife is turning out to be an unexpectedly efficacious tool.

The thing is to see it as a TOOL, rather than a weapon.

I don't want to kill a dragon. I want to write a book. It does seem rather fighting-a-beast terrifying, given that I have been out of the world I want to build for so long, but thanks to perspective and a certain assist from Jeff Sypeck, I realize that not only is this not a fight ... the fact is, it's an enterprise I can take or leave, and that somehow makes me want to claim it, to get the best of it, to create something remarkable.

Or just create something.

Whatever the words, the point is *motivation* - something I have not had for six months, really.

As with the WIP, so goes the job. I'm off my game - even just cognitively, my mom and I both are up against forgetting things, being blankly unable to identify how to deal with things, the recurring embarrassment of displaying our sieve-brains. It's pretty giddy, but I have trust that it is temporary. You have to.

And you have to work for a living. And, if you're a writer, you have to write. You don't have to publish, but you have to *write*.



And so. I entered my credentials for the expense system at work. All I'll need to do to start that item on my to-do list is hit "enter" when that bubbles up to the top of said list.

I sorted piles. I knew which pile is the easily-dispatched stuff, and I knew which pile I had to defer for today. It left me with a nice proportion of stuff I knew could be managed. I managed it. Printed nameplates. Scanned uploads. Scanned several small things to email to specific people. Deferred the items I'll have to scan and share around looking for who should see it. Laid out two FedExes. I'll enter credentials for that in the morning.

It sounds, perhaps, unbearably elementary, but it's just conscious inrementals I usually implement every day without the consciousness part:

What is routine is now something I have to think about, but that doesn't mean it's not advancing.



Inevitably, this is where I get all writerly and point out that it's the same for the WIP. Ooh, meta.

But it's true. Opening the doc can be a step, but of late it's not enough. One window amongst others can be ignored, so - having realized that research is my entry point - I squared off with the manuscript and found a piece of research I could manage. It is so vanishingly small it may seem silly: but, it was an image, already followed by the character description it inspired. I deleted the image.

That is work on a manuscript. Tiny work? Undoubtedly. But it is "in there", and "in" is where I wanted to be. Right?

This led me on to a more substantial idea, which might get very exciting indeed. The WIP having been born out of research for The Ax and the Vase, there are relics of that novel in this one. I put them in place in the years when WIP was related to Ax, even if it never was a "sequel" in my mind. And ... the stunningly obvious fact has at last pierced my callused brain, which is: that work is not relevant to this work.

My next step may be some deletions. If I ever feel the need to refer back to anything in Ax, I always have that manuscript available. But that may be absurd conjecture.

In the meantime: deletion is work. It is "in." I want to be in. So some extensive surgery could feel really good.

Leila: remember the time you got me to cut 60 pages out of Ax? I will think of you with a bloodthirsty smile as I get to slicing again.

The butterknife is a tool. Which can do a great deal, in the right hands (and when you know where to apply it).

It's pretty exciting.



I'm coming back to life. Not from death. Just from a long detour.

Thanks to Jeff and Leila, especially, for helping me find the path - and maybe lighting fires under my posterior.

Saturation

One of the things about going through a dry spell as an author of historical fiction is that getting back to writing involves more than simply ass-in-chair hours. When you leave behind a work involving masses of research, world-building, and characters who possess entirely different mindsets than the modern American cube-farmer, you become desaturated.

Writing fantasy or histfic or sci fi (just a few examples, I know) means world building. And when you stop building - researching, occupying, *knowing* a place and its denizens - you become desaturated. It's extremely difficult to be in that world again on a dime, when you have neglected it for a long time.

To the exclusion of much social life, and to no complaint of any kind (I would have been nowhere else), I have focused on my family for a good six months now. With my stepfather's decline stretching across eight years, my immersion has been NOTHING next to my mom's. (To say nothing of the man himself, which seems cruelly self-involved.) But, as family circulates through all our lives, so has his failty.

And, yeah, I saw that typo. But it fits. Let's make it a word: failty. (Perfectly cromulent.)

A loved one's failty is the job and the beloved duty of those who care for him - caring, in the emotional sense, inevitably comes with caring in the custodial sense, if we live long enough. And writers often are alive, and love other people (often - not always!), and so we get distracted.

Hell, writers get distracted easier'n magpies, we all know that. How else would writing blogs ever survive?



Coming out of distraction ... there are levels, for a world-building author. You can still write about the peculiarity of someone's gaze (har), or some contained scene that exists within the greater context, but doesn't require reference to the context, with all the researched or invented knowledge of the world within easy recall.

Still, sitting down to the manuscript as a whole is terrifying. "I don't remember the context for the earliest anti-semitic riots in Christendom" or "Oh geez, how OLD was this character at this point?" I'll be frank: I can even forget who was alive when, and continuity in historicals can get so detailed you can screw up some other part of the book even noodling with what you think of as a contained scene. Containers leak, and sooner or later you've piddled your continuity all over. And cleanup can be death-defying.

(Literally - see also, that bit about forgetting who's even alive when.)

It's been a LONG time since I was doing the "W" part of the WIP.


It's always been the case with me, that I can read something I wrote and, if enough time has gone by, it won't even feel like reading my own work. Even being able to recall constructing a scene, the product of the work put in still seems fresh to me, unfamiliar. There is much brain science here, underlying the way authors say "I am a conduit" - but basically, the stream of consciousness we navigate doesn't always seem like it runs through our brains as it does a greater dynamic in which our souls are mere passengers.

(Yeah, and WOW on that piece of work. I *told* you I haven't been writing! Be forgiving, please. I'm making up lame pun-words at this point; you knew the risks, reading this.)

This unfamiliarity can be freshness, but it's also symptomatic of losing the headspace. The fixtures of research and writing are important as you keep going, but are all too easily rewired incorrectly, or even lost.

As long as it's been since I was writing the WIP: it's even longer since I was researching it.



And there it is, perhaps ...

Perhaps my "in" is with research, rather than writing.

Sometimes the ass-in-the-chair isn't scripting out a scene ... sometimes, it's mapping what happens where. What to use, and what doesn't serve. Who needs to be where, rather than the dialogue they provide once they're in situ.

Maybe I need to get myself in place - remember the place - before I try saying what happens in it.


A thought. I'll think about that, then.

When I'm not reading, I'm not writing

There was a period of about two years, when I began seriously writing The Ax and the Vase, that I was not reading for leisure. Research absorbed me in a very special way, I read the work itself, I talked about it a great deal. And I've always read a great deal online. But sitting down with an unrelated novel in my hands, taking an evening or a whole DAY ... I didn't do that. My enthusiasm was all for my own work in progress. Maybe I feared reading other people's writing, even on different subjects, would influence - maybe even compromise - my own voice or story.

Some of this, I think, is new-writer superstition, or more charitably, maybe it was just a different process. There is this, either way: I can TELL you the day I read again for the first time just for myself. What the weather was, what time, where I was, what the novel was. (The Dogs of Babel, by Carolyn Parkhurst.)


My (counter)point is probably a matter of course for most writers: if we are not reading, we are not writing. Say it with me now: "Duuuhh!"


I have not been reading. "There was family visiting" ... "I've been occupied for months with two big meetings" ... "My stepfather's been failing" ... "Holidays" ... it's all the usual load of dingoes' kidneys. The more insidious truth is that I have not been ALLOWING myself to read. I think, ultimately - never knowing why, probably - that was why I didn't read for those two years, back when. I felt like reading was a luxury, or an adultery against my own work.

What we all know is, of course, to BE a writer, you have to be a reader - and suspending that is painful to the process.

So is viewing *writing* as a luxury, as an adultery to the life you're living.



Today, I stopped work and read at my desk. For a few months now, I've been avoiding this; working through, doing other things. Generally acting like That Guy, like what I do is so important it must never be paused - at work and in real life too. In my family, I'm behaving like my stopping to read on my own time may be disrespectful to the difficulty my mom is up against as a fulltime caregiver. At the office, I've had occasion for some guilt nobody has put on me, and I'm overcompensating for acts committed that I know perfectly well nobody holds as sins.

And so, today ... sitting down with just a few pages of LeGuin's Orsinian Tales ...

Ahhhhh. Not merely a luxury, not merely the indulgence of cheating on my job or even my own writing. It was - of course it was - inspiration.

And I found a scene in my throat, urgent as pain, which at first I thought might be a letter to Mr. X, and then I found ... was a scene a certain character really needed. Two of them, in fact. And I learned a little something new about one of the most important events in my WIP. And I learned how to feel from inside a man's skin, for this particular moment. And I saw what it meant, ultimately and really *meant* for the woman he's feeling for, for years and years and long after he is gone from her.

The scene, oddly enough, is all about something incomplete, something un-built; a whole, sought.

It doesn't work out, in the novel. No building, no completion.

But it worked its way out of my brain. No small thanks (eternally, consistently, recurringly) to Ursula LeGuin.

“Incomplete. It’s like building something. Unfinished.

And sometimes, putting a brick against a brick, you end up with a building.

Sometimes.

Take the Con 17

Two weeks ago, I was in Savannah for work. On Thursday, the 12th, I was home before midnight with nearly a thousand miles on my car ... and Saturday the 14th kicked off the annual James River Writers conference.

In the past, I've often done postmorten posts about how inspired I was and re-energized as a writer, after the conference. Well, or just gushed in real time about how amazing the events are. In the fifteen years of JRW's excellence, I've attended for fourteen of the annual conferences. (Thanks again, Mojourner!) I've watched friends chair the event itself, and met countless others. It's always inspiring.

But this year, I was so focused for so long on the meeting immediately preceding the Conference, I spared no time to get excited about it. (I was actually excited about the meeting - there was toy shopping.) For a while there, I also wasn't sure I'd be able to go to the Conference this year at all, and studiously tamped down any thinking about it.

Not only did I coordinate the meeting in Savannah, but I presented there. Speaking up in class, as it were, has never scared me - but speaking before the class was nerve-wracking. And once my nerves got bored, I finished off okay, and it was okay. I handed out little dart boards with my picture on them to people to whom it is generally my job to give bad news. I got to know a lot of people I work with constantly, but rarely or never have seen before. Feedback has been that the meeting was good. Travel was too (no flying!). I spent Friday in a dim drizzle with my mom, coming down off the big event, and NOT really thinking about or getting ready for the next one.

Coming into the Conference without expectations can be a good thing. I've long since put The Ax and the Vase to bed, and the WIP isn't even advanced enough to have announced to me what its TITLE is, so meeting with agents was off my list (and, in any case, I'm ever more persuaded by Janet Reid's objection to conference pitches - and, in any case, it's rarely the case participating agents even "do my genre" as it were).

The rub is, it's also been a long time since I spent time writing.

So I attended the "so you think you're an impostor - no you're not" session ... and, of course, came away feeling all validated but still knowing for sure I am an impostor.

And I spent $72 at the JRW Bookstore before 8:30 a.m. on day one.

And I talked to my new friend Sarah a lot, a writer who is eighteen years old and better organized (and more motivated) than I am, at damn near fifty.

And I spend time with my good writing friends, and Leila Gaskin said she would read some scenes for me and look to the knotty problem of whether I need all my characters ... and, if so (oh, I so need my characters!!!!), how to balance them ...

... and I finished the weekend more excited about the fact that the Festival of India had coincided with our event than about the Conference.



It was when I began drafting my email to Leila, and my very first writing partner, The Elfin One, and choosing scenes to share toward that question of characters and balance ...

... that it finally happened.

My ass was in the chair, and I sent off the scenes dutifully - and, writing to TEO in particular about writing ... I wrote.



"Also, I'm a Writer."

Nothing Old is New Again

Some readers (and Reiders) are aware, I put away my first novel about two years ago. Not easy, at the time - and I am still grateful for those of you who were SO very supportive and sensitive and generous - but it has been the right thing to do. The possibility of a final revision and self publishing still exists, but my focus is decidedly fixed on the WIP, and that feels healthy and very good indeed.

Not long ago, someone online who is aware of The Ax and the Vase expressed interest in reading it. I sent it their way with thanks for the attention, and turned back to the WIP. It's not the first time this has happened, and the very first reader I ever had was very kind indeed.

This time, my reader began to offer questions and some feedback. It presented for me a terrible temptation, and I turned to my old first pages and found myself a rather cruel reader. The thing is dross, there are some pretty words, but I began to feel "OF COURSE THIS DRECK NEVER GOT PUBLISHED" and felt the urge, a rather strong urge, to tear into it again.



Happy endings: the moment was lust, passing and intemperate. I was drunk with self-critique and old dreams. But only drunk. I did hate what I read, enough to wish I hadn't sent it out to the second reader ... but his feedback has hushed, and my interest has quashed. Fortunately, without a hangover. I didn't drink deeply enough. (I didn't read deeply enough; it was that bad, really.)

The WIP is my One True Love, and I will not stray. Indeed, I didn't actually edit anything while I was under the influence, strong as the influence seemed in the moment.

It's a funny thing, a book's corpse - or its ghost. Very much like a bitter ex: there may be some allure, but in the end, most often, you look at the face of once-beloved, and think ... "What did I see in them?" Or a lost love: you remember, but the feeling is distant, like novocaine. Not quite real.

The Ax and the Vase is no longer entirely real for me, and that is both bizarre and necessary. As a writer, there's only so much energy, only so much focus - and monogamy is important for the way many of us need to work. Even pantsers (still not my favorite term, but it does  have its utility) probably tend more often than not to concentrate on one project, even if not in one area.


It occurs to me how often I referred to the WIP, after I discovered the subject and knew it would be my second novel - but before I had finished with Ax - as the thing I had on the backburner.

Ax isn't even on the backburner now. I know, too, what I want my third novel to be; but I am not contemplating it, and the research will be entirely new and separate; no cross-pollination anymore. There is nothing going on in my writing world right now but the WIP. Two long-comatose shorts exist, and now and then I peer at them momentarily. But neither one pulls focus, and neither has really grown in the period I've been working on the WIP.


It is, in its quiet way, gratifying to know how cleanly I've let go of Ax. Not killed it, nor forgotten it. Only the expedient: put it away. Self-publish? Or even some new route? Maybe someday.

But the interest, the intent, and the intensity: are all on the WIP. Invigorating!

Murder, I Wrote

I used the tag GREAT writing on this post, because sometimes writing *feels* great ... and you can just about believe your own work might be so, when that happens. Last week's momentum reached a bit of an apex in The Murder Scene ... wherein one of the main characters finds herself about to be burned alive, without touching the fires slowly cooking her life away. And it's as harrowing as it sounds.

Most writers know, reading our work out loud is important, and as I am ruled by rhythms (and a former theater major), I like doing this. It's hard to stifle the desire to read to anyone who makes the mistake of speaking with me on the phone, or coming over, and sometimes I fail. Such as Friday night, when I read the murder scene to my brother.

We both came away kind of shaking our heads. I realized that one key descriptor calls up the very birth scene which opens the novel (and the life of the woman about to meet her end). I wrote that birth scene maybe a decade ago; it was one of those backburner moments during research and side work on this WIP, while I was writing The Ax and the Vase, and I've never wanted to change it (yeah, you're not supposed to edit before you've even finished writing - for me, that "rule" is like typing; I self-correct as I go, you can't ask me not to do that, it is my way of doing things). My brother even approved of that callout; and I trust him as a critic. He's never been shy to criticize me! Heh.

But, yeah. Right now, it is all I can do not to post this scene here, and on my cube wall, maybe a couple billboards, and everywhere in the world.

This is what writing can feel like. It's been a long time since I attained this sense of accomplishment, and the way it followed on (Heaven help me) a THEME showing up uninvited - a theme which will work to create tension ... I mean, wow.

Yes, exquisite phrasing, is it not? "I mean, wow." Me writer. Me college gradual. Look, this is a blog, I'm allowed to save some of my best for the work meant for sale, right?

Few of us are at our most eloquent when things get truly exciting, but the excitement is real.

Picking and Choosing

Scenes come to me when they will. The term "pantser" doesn't appeal to me, but I am not an outlining writer, and the idea of composing a novel in order confounds me. I follow the research first, and the inspiration second. Usually because the latter doesn't precede the former, and I have a harder time capturing it.

Not long ago, I was working on that quiet moment, knowing what has got to come after it. The scene stands alone (though I do still need to get rid of that research-y bit about natron), but really there's no novel if anything does that. And so I must proceed.

Eventually.



I don't want to write the pogrom. And that is what follows, there.

Writing one of the first riotous, violent religious purges in the storied history of Christendom all but makes me long for a battle scene. And I hate writing battle scenes.

But even to contemplate this is so much worse. The only redemption before me is that I will not write from within the perspective of the murderers, the looters, the rapists, the cruel. But it is little consolation; knowing one is only surrounded by looting, rape, and killing doesn't take away the looting, rape, and killing.



So, today, I got back to the murder scene.

It's strange how preferable this is to writing the pogrom. It is smaller in scale, of course, and so I have more control, more ability to move through the mechanics of each moment - realization, sensation, progression.

It also takes place with a character who has come to a philosophical place of relinquishment. She's lost enough to eschew the rest, and life appears all but pointless by this moment. Losing everyone else was hard; losing herself, even painfully, may be a relief.

I've watched this relinquishment, of course. I've been witness to plaintive, righteous begging for death. It's hard, but great Christ do I understand it.

And so the crux of this murder is that it becomes manumission; the killers will free this woman, and she will accept escape at last, if only when she sees there is no other choice.


Thematically, of course, this links to my post from yesterday. So I had to go to this scene. (That is my excuse, and I'm sticking with it.) I had to find the sensations of the ground under her toes, the air down her throat, the sweat of her skin.

It's got me thinking of another death scene too. A character I can scarcely bear to see die, but who eventually must. A person can only live so long, and in the sixth century CE, even less than we tend to expect now.



When I emailed the manuscript to myself last night, as I do periodically as a kind of backup - the chronicle of my "versioning" (and progress) - I put a subject line on the email: "What good is this life edition" ...

There is an ancient religious philosophy - not only in Western schools of faith, but certainly predominant in Europe for centuries - that this life is a vale of tears, and the only existence worth contemplating is the eternal destination of the soul.

Think of Heaven. For kings and peasants alike, this was the mindset encouraged by so many aspects of so many ways of life.

Even as kings needs must strategize every single day.

Even as peasants must tend and bring in the harvest, the flock, the catch. Must learn how best this is done. Must feed the body, for letting it die - no matter how useless this life may be - was still a sin.



All these contradictions.

I'd rather write death than massacre.

Writing. Like everything else, it comes down to choices.

So. How's YOUR writing going?

Frisson

Something happened with the WIP today. Well, I should say, something happened with me - with my philosophy, my spirit, my self. And I turned to the WIP, and put several plug-ins to prompt myself to the theme, in different places.

Something happened with my writing.

How was your Thursday?

Writerly

The WIP, currently being called Generations of Sunset, though this perhaps doesn't even qualify as a "working" title since it doesn't (*), is in fact still a thing.

I haven't had much to say about it of late, being distracted by such epochal life changes as a haircut, getting some cabinets for my kitchen, a sick puppy (who is fine now, she just gets an upset stomach now and then), a tiny travel plan or two, and the joy of watching someone I care about a lot falling for someone new. But I do still play around with WRITING.

For my writer pals who stop in here sometimes, I have a question. Have any of you ever given a character some trait that suits your purposes, more than necessarily follows reality?

I'm writing in a period when life expectancies were not what they are today. In The Ax and the Vase, the historical character Bishop Remigius of Rheims was extremely long-lived indeed, but this was true of the actual man, and indeed I used that longevity to speak to his charisma; that he was so venerable marked his holiness for the other characters. In GoS, though, I have a serving woman living a very long life.

It was perhaps easier for anyone, servitor or queen, to get in an extra decade or three, living at a royal court, as opposed to squalor or slavery outside of a palace.

Some people did of course live past thirty-five, even in the "Dark Ages" (well, or just before them). What I am doing, stretching this character across generations, isn't exactly fantasy. But the character's life is directly tied to my need of her presence in every place, at every birth, even through the deaths, through her time.

I don't ask other authors whether they've done this in order to get approval, but out of curiosity. Zeniv has to live a very long time because she is not merely important, but she views the coming of new generations, and is part of the setting, the changing world. She is one pair of eyes witnessing what may be a death (the dynasty of Theodoric the Great) or a birth (a new age, what we came to call the Dark Ages), or may just be the world as it is.

This doesn't quite rise - or sink - to the question of ethics in writerly choices, but I am curious about choices like this that other writers make.

Has any of you ever stretched the parameters of your setting, of history, or usual expectations to accommodate your needs for the story? How?


* As with so many things I think to be clever, the title is a bit of a pun. For many of us, sunset marks an ending - it is the end of the day. But we forget, that is only one way to look at things. Sunset is the beginning of the next day; your dreams are not a closing out of the day past, but the first thing in your mind before you wake to a new day.

Collection

At NPR online, Margaret Atwood discusses the next big form. I know from the moment the election was decided, MANY writers were vocal online and everywhere else about how they were already inspired to new dystopian work. To look at the form those works may take is a great exercise; and I think she may be right. The pace of traditional fiction cannot do justice to the creative juices flowing right now.

The evidence from Pech IV and Roc de Marsal clearly shows that the Neanderthals at these sites lived without fire not only for long periods but also during the coldest periods.

The Atlantic has a cool look at fire (hah). I've always been fascinated by the concept of the human hearth; hearth rights, the earliest human domesticity, the social contracts born of our control of and sharing of flame for warmth, protection, and cooking.

When a question is asked perfectly, it doesn’t need a tidy answer.

TA also has a wonderful link for writers (and readers!), just with its opener (well, or Faulkner's) on this article about asking the right questions. I have talked about the problems I have with creating tension on the page; as a writer of historicals set in known events and amongst characters who actually lived, it's too easy for me to think the (hi)story itself is enough. But it's necessary to know both WHY anyone else would find that enough, and to entice them to want to know. What gifts do we as authors bring to our characters ... ?

Which gets me thinking about my WIP's first line ...

The heat had begun to feed upon the red tile roofs of Ravenna, as if with a hostile will, when Amalasuntha was born more than eight days late.

Now, the CLOSING sentence (currently) is a literary in-joke. I love it, though it may not survive. It's worth reading the whole to get to it. Let's hope I'm getting the hang of this tension thing ...

(Confidential to my nerd readers: anyone else watch Caprica?)

Yeah, and it's a lot from The Atlantic today, but bear with me; they have some excellent writing!

Who else recalls Mike Mulligan and The Little House? Staples of my own childhood, I was thinking of the beautiful art for The Little House just a couple of days ago; the way it depicted time, especially; the way the house had a face, filled with emotion. This essay picks up those memories, and finds the relevance right now, with a powerful punch at the whole idea that innovation was invented recently. Y'all know how I love a good recency illusion and a The Dirty, Stupid Past refutation! (Want to get away from The Atlantic? Worth a click is the New Yorker story about Virginia Lee Burton.)

(S)uccessful in eliminating hair, and also in causing muscular atrophy, blindness, limb damage, and death.
Hoo baby!

Okay, back to The Atlantic, for another of my obsessions, hygeine! On the industry, social and cultural implications, and pain of feminine hair removal. Evolutionary racism, and Darwin's culpability. Ow.

Collection

I haven't linked American Duchess's blog in a long time, but this week there is a DELICIOUS, detailed post about researching historical costume with a view both from the costume point of view and someone with an artistic education. Many pictures to study, and some interesting aspects of design and portraiture to consider.

"What happened during my transition from one language to another did not become memory."
"It is hard to feel in an adopted language, yet it is impossible in my native language." Yiyun Li at The New Yorker takes a keen and poignant, eloquent look at the way language works in our brains … and in our hearts … Absolutely beautiful writing and thinking, and an incredibly generous expression of personal experience that is meaningful to all of us. Please read this!

The marginalia of Marlene – Dietrich’s books and notes, again at The New Yorker. Being an inveterate marginaliist myself, this appeals to me *so* much ... and some of her commentary brings her right into the room with you as you read. Evocative!

Writing Music

Over the years, I've had periods when I've paid attention to the music I often have on VERY quietly while writing, and periods when I have not. There was a nice time long ago, when I had Fiona Apple and Bowie's Hours on random mix, that worked curiously well.

Of late, it's been seventies easy/funky rock - Gerry Rafferty, Atlanta Rhythm Section, that sort of thing. This is among the many kinds of music I grew up on, but not exactly because it was anyone's "thing" particularly. It's good stuff, often really good stuff (not quite the white bread same thing, but another groove I really love - Bill Withers' Ain't No Sunshine, or just about any track of his).

Something about the buzzing funk but the soft rock goes-down-easy-ness of this music really works for me creatively. It reverts me out of the present time, almost firmly taking me out of my own head and sitting me down with a rhythm that can be dramatic, but also comes to the calling. It's easy and crunchy at once - the echoing rasp of "Driver's Seat" opening up a space for my creativity to work - or the infectious but gentle "Couldn't Get it Right" bouncing my brain along.

For the writers amongst my readers - or just for those who like to work with music propelling their time along, especially the work days - what is the soundtrack of your productivity?

This ...

... is what got me to log back onto Twitter for the first time in a week and a half ...

Glorious.

Collection

My spine just tingled a bit, and my heart contracted. I hadn't thought of this, but Stephen Parks may be right. The death that may have changed history.

Question about the post-electoral protests which involve shutting down freeways. Is there any irony in protesters' doing is what Chris Christie's compatriots just got convicted for? Just wondering.

Okay, enough politics-adjacent thoughts for now.

There is a fungus among us! (Yes, this is NOT politics.) Funky (fungi?!) furniture - now there's a design concept. What's next? Welp: "bricks without kilns, leather without cows and silk without spiders" ...

Here's hoping that Gwen Ifill and Leonard Cohen will rest in peace. I was stunned, in particular, to hear of Ms. Ifill's death today, and late to hear of Cohen's passing. He was eighty-two, she only sixty-one.

With thanks and condolences to their friends and loved ones ...

It seems right and good to close with a reminder - tonight is the supermoon's brightest night! Beautiful photos from around the nation's capitol, with a couple stops in Maryland and Virginia. Does your moon hang low ... ?