Voice Crush

A man's voice has always been one of those things I find deeply attractive. Many people these days go for Benedict Cumberbatch, and I will say, I understand how he's become the thinking person's crumpet. But when he speaks, frankly, I just hear a smoker's voice. It's got more fry than a man his age perhaps ought to have, and is so dry there are times I wonder about the quality of his breath.

For my idea of a classic Englishman's voice: Tim Curry. Much more velvet there. And who ever had a finer sneer? American? Frank Langella, of course. He doesn't even bother sneering.

But the voice I love most is Peter Egan. Perhaps not so well known by many Americans, I first "met" this actor in the BBC historicals I grew up with (introduced by Alistair Cooke). The first one was "Lillie" - and his performance here still all but makes me cry (minute 41). Yes, it's a claustrophobic costume showcase, yes it's basically only the story of a popular girl getting by on her looks. (Francesca Annis, though, is splendid in it.) But Egan's turn as Oscar Wilde is THE best Wilde I have ever seen - and, indeed, I do include Stephen Fry's go at the role.

There is something about Peter Egan's use of his breath that creates some sort of sympathetic response, and I find myself squeezing at oxygen when he plays intense emotion, precisely because he does it so quietly ... but his breath is attenuated and silent and desperate, and it brings me to the place he is portraying. No bombast, no effort. He just has that Thing.

And that Thing, he emanates in his breath. His voice.

Watching him read aloud, I suddenly recognize something else - something itself pretty resonant with me.

Without resembling him, without sounding like him really at all - Peter Egan's cadence, even the way he moves, looking at the book and looking up, making some small gesture - reminds me powerfully of my dad.

Dad was a teacher. As much as any actor in the world, the great job of a teacher is to communicate. To build the sympathy of *understanding*.

Without, perhaps, admitting I have for decades been a bit in love with Peter Egan: I would say, at least, that he is a consummate builder of sympathy.

And seriously: that voice. You could NUZZLE with that voice.

Collection

A "well-healed" amputation and a prosthetic toe (no actual heel present) - on the most ancient prosthesis ever found in-situ. Or in-sitoe, if you like to draw out the punnery. So many chortles, so little time while reading this cool post from The History Blog.

An illustrated guide to writing PoC for the white author. Perspectives, and more perspectives! I think "cudnt spel to sieve her lyfe" is the perfect detail. Nicely done indeed, with a lot of Teh Funnay too. Fair warning, though: there are a LOT of tasty links here in addition to the observations and comics!

Just who gets to play in which cultural sandboxes?

"Columbusing." I guess this is what the kids are calling it now. Back in the 80s, all people said about this kind of thing was, "I remember my first beer." I remember when our year-younger-than-we-were friend discovered feminism for me and another friend. (I remember the phrase recency illusion as well.) ... and now I feel a little conflicted, because I was in the mood for Mexican for dinner, and my mom has a few "things" about PoC from south of the US border ...

I don't see what humanity has done over those 200 years that would make anyone have a softer view of humanity.

Need some more for your TBR? Well, I sure do. This revisitation of Frankenstein - now with a new revenant of a very different sort added to the old Monster - looks absolutely stunning, and maybe more terrifying than ever for some people. This may be my "I need 37 copies of this" release this year. Even just the interview is so beautiful and striking, linguistically. Voice, kids. Voice.

Collection

Donna Everhart celebrates making it halfway through a WIP. I very, very literally have no idea what that is like - because I don't know when it is.

"(B)limey, what's that?" Simultaneously cool and creepy, BBC shows us one of the creative innovations in security, as the global definition and even concept of privacy leeches away. "The ability to choose when and how to divulge information about ourselves is one of the things that make us human, argues graphic designer Leon Baauw"

Also at BBC online, this piece of art and science history took my breath away, but do be warned, for the squeamish there exists the possibility this could take your lunch away. Have you ever heard of dissectable "Venus" waxworks? The art is incredible - but, for a historical novelist like me, the look into the psychology of another age, the attitudes, is INVALUABLE. These sculptures are eerie and undeniably lovely.

More RULES for writers! Y'all know how I love those. Still, analyses like these do yield some intriguing data. Such as: the average published author relies on about 1/4th as many exclamation points as the average amateur writer. (I am not published, but if I had ten exclamation points in both my novels combined, I'd be surprised.)

Ever since learning what vocal fry is, I have become fascinated by the science of speech. Here is a GREAT piece on hating women's voices:





"[By] propagating ideologically inspired amoral theories, business schools have actively freed their students from any sense of moral responsibility." Depressing, but certainly true. Take a look at Newsweek's in-depth piece about the ascendancy of the shareholder - a pretty good history of Wall Street and business education over the past generation.

Have you ever been to a marketplace where haggling is common? Many Americans have not, but I have smiling memories of "special for you!" pricing on a vacation or two. The Atlantic analyses some of the history - and the future - of the way we shop. Hmmmmm.

Snobbery, Fashion, and Manners of Speaking

The vocal fry thing was only the beginning.

In recent months, verbal linguistics have been a constant obsession. I keep noticing how speedily pronunciations are evolving, and thinking about how they have changed in the past.

Watching films made in the 1930s, I get a sense of the vogue way to speak when my grandmothers were young - what "modern" used to me - and I wonder how their voices differed from one another in their primes, based on the way I remember them before they died. Both Virginian, but from different places, different backgrounds. I can still hear my mom's mother's voice fairly clearly in my head.

Listening to younger women now - and knowing that, though my generation's ears often find it annoying and even unintelligent-sounding, vocal fry and creak are now considered signifiers of education and success - I listen for different types of this evolved valspeak, and try to understand where the annoying affectations of my own youth became the worthy attainments of a new age ... and I wonder how quickly another mode of speaking will take over, what *is* taking over, and how these things will sound to those finding their own, new voices. How quickly fashion will change.

I wonder, too, how much of this occurred - how quickly speech changed - before media developed and burgeoned and kept us constantly aware of how we and others sound. Those thirties movies came at an era when image was literally projected for the first time, and sound became an emblematic part of fashion.

Clearly, language has always changed its sound. If new ways of speaking had not always superseded old ways - in coinage, but just as fundamentally in sound and emphasis - we'd still be speaking in what we now like to call proto Indo-European roots.

It's hard not to think recorded sound and image have not affected the speed with which these changes occur. It seems only yesterday I was complaining about the ubiquity of people emphatically growling HUJAPASSENT to indicate their certainty about something, and now I haven't heard it in months. Already out of vogue? I'm not even sure when I last heard curate; but artisinal has been fairly popular for a couple of years.


Getting out of coinage trends and looking at pronunciation, current fashion sounds to fogeys of (say) my Certain Age ... well, actually infantile. There is a trend for both overstatement and inaccuracy in diction, and some of the inflections and emphases echo those of a child just learning to speak.

A sampling of pronunciations which seem to be crossing regional lines, so do not appear to be related to particular accents:

Overdone ...

           diDINT (didn't)

           JOOLuhree (jewelry)

           feahMAlee (family)
           FOWurd (forward)

           MEEkup (makeup)

Underdone ...

           fill (feel)
           housiz (houses - first S sibilant)         
           uhMAYzeen (amazing)

           BEEdy (it took me some patience to understand this as a pronunciation of "beauty")
           BEDdur (better**)
 

The intensity of emphasis on consonants in middle of a word reminds old folks like me of a liddle kid's care in speaking words still new to their tongues - training the tongue to every part, every syllable of a word. It is adorable in a three year old, the way a toddler's emphatic way of walking is cute, as they learn refined balance.

In an adult - to more elderly adults - all this sounds considerably strange.



Here's where it gets REALLY interesting:

Considering how strange my slurring and curiously unsyncopated manner of speech must sound to those putting (let's face it) so much more effort into their speaking.

At Janet Reid's blog yesterday, we touched in the comments on the concept of dated voice, looking at slang and its changes since the 80s. But the actual mechanics of my tongue and lips, trained in a different generation, are themselves probably a giveaway of my age.

In the same way that, say Rosalind Russell's or Katherine Hepburn's youthful staccato and volume make people think that the acting in old movies was unnaturalistic, perhaps - my own seventies and eighties infused rhythms and inflections are distinct from the modes of speech in the under-thirty-five set right now, and probably sound artificial, if not downright lazy. It may be a more accurate signifier of my age than the old "check a woman's hands and elbows to see how old she really is" thing.

And oddly enough: Rosalind Russell was the absolute mistress of vocal creak ...

**Lest we think I'm talking only about female voices;

some of the most egregious infantile pronunciation currently available... 

On Vocal Fry, Bitterness, and Being a Woman

Oh squee, we have another recency illusion! On the evolution of the valspeak vocal fry: a LONG podcast, but a most interesting one, including as it does such an intensity of apparently unironic white male self-congratulation and feminine condemnation. For shorter, written pieces with a more interesting and scientifically useful bent, take a look at the debunking of the habits of vocal fry and uptalk as a privileged little American girl fashion (from the NYT – a really good look at the phenomenon and its *strategic* [defensive] utility), and here, the personal story of a woman who took a stab at rehabilitating her vocal creak – and then didn’t.

Full disclosure: I am EXTREMELY guilty of judging young women by their voices. I have ranted alone at my television and even talked with my mom about the buzzy, baby voices younger women use – the very picture of the judgmental old lady in my hatred of the sound. There will be a long and serious review of how much of my prejudice is born of self-hatred (my own tendency to valspeak as a kid, and many years of self-training to get over the noise) and how much of it is the bigotry born of age and the privilege that my own voice is so often *heard*. From the NYT link … "young women were generally interrupted more than men and so it’s a defense mechanism" …

In a mental review of the voices of the women and some of the men I love, there appears little creak among them, but uptalk (rising terminal inflection) is very common. My mom has a strong voice, and just on Christmas, I heard once again what I have heard since I was nine or so, that I sound just like her. I take this as a compliment; my mom has a jolly way of speaking. My oldest friend, TEO, has a soft way of speaking, but not lacking for authority; she is a mother and a teacher, and speaks smoothly and gently, but is not breathy. She uses lilt in the strategic ways noted in the New York Times article, and may not always assert dominance with her voice, but her confidence is complete.

Cute Shoes has a particularly beautiful voice. Low but never nasal and buzzing, she uses uptalk inflection with precision – again, a mother, and a professional manager, she nudges vocally with great effect.

My brother sometimes uptalks – he is a father of two girls, and guides them with a questioning voice, prompting them to display what they know, rather than telling them as if they don’t.

Mr. X, a man of six-feet-four and an impenetrably dour resting expression, can appear physically intimidating in a way, but has a manner of speech that focuses on his breath in a way that makes it more noticeable to me than I find it to be in other people. His speech most often is quiet, modulated. Modulated or even regulated. His breath is plosive, strong as Rowan Atkinson speaking the letter “B”, if he’s pressed to humor or surprise or passion. But most of the time, his voice is held back; he speaks with what I’d describe almost as another kind of “creak” – the softness of restrained pressure. I think of the way he says “Hello” on the phone, or the first time I really heard him speak, and am struck by the idea he often seems almost to be holding his breath. It’s not an unnatural sound – he doesn’t seem strained – only holding in reserve; typical of him psychologically too.

My dad had a warm and gravelly voice. No creak there, just the patina of a man of great experience, some years of smoking, even more of teaching, many of parenting, and all of loving. Like the satin-ing silver sheen of wood handled and handled again over long ages, it was strong and beautiful and deep and weathered. I can’t remember my dad’s voice at thirty; but, by sixty-five, he had a distinctive, soft growl.

Even dad used upspeak, though. He prompted his students, pulled his kids along on the upturned lilt of the inflection of his sentences, not all of them interrogative. His rising terminal was unlike that we think of when the term “uptalk” crops up – a promontory, not a steep rise. A place inviting you out to its tip, to take a look at the vista.



In 1981, still in middle school, I had left the small world of grade school behind, and came across people with the early-80s Eastern hippie inflected speech that seemed to me then and now to share a lot with what we soon were calling valspeak. Then high school, Zappa’s daughter, horizontal-striped shirts with puffed sleeves … and my own regrettable teenage speech.

Maybe I don’t really regret it.

But I did spend some years in remediating it.

I was never raised to be a woman out to form myself in the shape to please a man, but one or two points my dad made about the appeal of a woman did strike home (eventually). The major one was that a woman walks with grace, not a bounce. I feel like I saw Grace Kelly swiftly descending a long staircase, a long gown hiding all evidence she owned legs and feet, her head smooth as if on a gimbal, yet clearly RUNNING down, to catch a Cary Grant perhaps, in “To Catch a Thief” – but the image stays with me, real or imagined, transplanted from the wrong movie or not – that was grace the thing, in Grace, the woman.

Grace was one of the few things dad exhorted upon me as his girl child, and it’s not one I ever resented – and another measure of grace, aside from movement (which I cannot generally do so beautifully) is a womanly, beautiful voice.

I may not have attained any more beauty in my voice than in my physical comportment – but it is true I treasure the compliment once received, that my voice sounds like brownies baking.

It used to be I’d get joked at, “You should have your own 976-number.” This was a thing, kids, twenty years ago when porn was performed live by phone – and presumably I had a SENSUAL voice, which may or  may not have been typical of real sex-operators’ voices, but the general idea was meant to convey that I sounded good. (Or quite naughty …)

And, of course, the oldest comment of them all, “You sound like your mother.”

At work, in particular, I cultivate a variety of voices – for “my kids”, a warm and southern style – for new calls, professional and modulated, lapsing easily into laughter and friendliness where possible – or occasionally slipping toward interrogative-inflected passive (aggressive) voice, depending on how things need to be guided.

With my friends, mom, and brother, I like to think I am most often laughing or listening. We like to think a lot of positive things about ourselves, I suppose …

What about you?

The Dull Ache ... and Something Else ...

Of my readers who are also writers, a question: has any one of you who is going or has gone the querying route to publication ever received a request for pages or a full more than a week after an initial query? I never have.

It’s been a few weeks since my last query – and so, regardless of all those agents’ timelines now commonly stretching to three months for theoretical viability (“will try to respond within” or “if you don’t hear within twelve weeks, no means no”) – I essentially view EVERY submission I’ve put out there as a done and dead deal.

Which is why this contemplation that Ax is not a viable product right now is my ever-growing expectation.

It’s a good novel, The Ax and the Vase. Of that I have no question. But a novel and a product are two different things; and the publishing industry is a business in need of PRODUCTS. To sell. I can polish a piece of gold till it shines (and it does) but if the kind of bauble it is is out of style, it’s out of style no matter how gleaming.

So I have this precious thing *I* still find beautiful, and which can be appreciated by many – but not a *market* … and so, increasingly, I find myself pushing it less, and focusing on another piece, not even close to ready to polish yet. Still in the making.

It’s difficult not to think of the years I have invested in Ax. We all know, I’m a Thoughtkiller, not shy nor squeamish about “killing my darlings” and open to professional feedback to make my work the best it can be.

Even so. Abandoning something I’ve worked on so long, putting it away as a “maybe once I sell the next one, this one may follow another year” – or, heart-crunchingly, putting it away with the possibility it will never sell at all …

That is painful.



I once married a man I knew was A Good Man. I knew those were thin on the ground, and I recognized (and still do) so much that is fine and good and worthy and fun and loveable. Beloved Ex was, and is, a marvelous property, and the fact he’s not with someone even still kind of kills me. He’s a catch, and there are so many women who deserve the heart that beats in that man.

And I loved him. And I married him.

And love is no reason to marry someone. I love him still: and yet, my life is full enough, and fulfilling – even without Beloved Ex participating daily.

You marry someone not because he’s a treasure, nor beautiful, nor fun or sexy or any of the rest of it – but because life, without them, would be *less*.


The point is: I know a good thing when I see it. And I inherited a tendency from my mother: I sometimes grip things because I know they’re precious.

I married a man I truly did love, but a very big part of the marriage was acquisitive. It was nothing on which to build a lifetime, and the mistakes we both made drew blood. We may be friends now. But there were many years we were nothing to each other, and there resides even in our old bond not only the memories, but the damages. I wasn’t the only wounding party. But I know my part was, *in* part: a matter of greed.



Ax is another treasure I know for what it is. I know how good it is, I love it, I MADE it – and that didn’t draw blood exactly, but it occupied years of my life. I can admit, I have been greedy to see it succeed. Greedy.

As life tips past what we call Middle Age (yeah, I look fine and am healthy; yes, people like to think Middle Age lasts into their sixties; but I’m pushing fifty, and frankly don’t expect 100 years – I am decidedly getting past “middle aged”), the prospect of losing *years* of such work as the intimate, intense, and exultant craft as writing …

It’s really kind of heartbreaking.

Losing all that. Wasting it … ? No. Not waste. But not being able to share it.

The loss is giddy enough to make me somewhat sick.


My life is FILLED with good friends, good music, good food, and the two best pets any person could hope to be blessed with. I have a nice home, a spiff car. My mom is near – and, as far as they are, my brother and nieces and their mom are not truly *distant*. There are so many ways now to be with those we are not near to. My paying job is constantly fulfilling, and I honestly love it, and its people. There is so much to be grateful for.

Yet.

Writing Ax has, as I suspect any fool can see, has been a balm to me through the years Mr. X has lived half a world away. I’ve hated having no partner. But I’ve had this thing – this “second” job – this work I have poured my heart and mind int. This work which has returned the favor by expanding my life itself, by making even fuller a blessed existence which was more than I ever should have dared to ask in the first place, and by teaching me so much more than its business and process.

It’s also been, in some way – both a tribute to my grandma and my dad. Dad, because he missed my writing it. Because he never knew I would make such a thing as this great book. Because, honestly, I think he’d have really LIKED it. And my grandma because … I am her namesake.

If I’d not been The Louise of my generation – there would have been no Clovis. A reverse etymological progression.


The prospect of losing this almost-memorial effort, this thing I have done, which has sustained and enriched so much of my wee and paltry little life …

It’s really kind of heartbreaking.







And yet …



And yet.

There is the WIP.





The energy, and the transportive experience of writing – of experiencing creation first in the learning/exploration/discovery of research and then in experiencing *what it is* to CREATE something. To *make* something, and know it both for your own and for the inspiration that it is. To understand that it is possible to both bleed a thing, and still somehow see it as an object so nearly-miraculous that to claim it for your own is almost hubris.

To write.

The bouyant power of … making … of creativity – that elemental, ineffable thing that comes from within but is sparked with something so much more than we are in and  of ourselves.


It is … compensation.


There is no art without pain, they say.



But, Christ Lord. I have to believe: it’s worth it

Point of View

One of the things you learn in the sketching phase of writing a novel is what the novel is actually going to be. I’ve posted about the liberty I'm feeling, getting out of the first-person singular voice of The Ax and the Vase … and I’ve written much, recently, about #WeNeedDiverseBooks and the failure of Ax to live up to that as an ideal I personally support.

What I haven’t written about is the fact that two of my characters – one a main character, and one a main character at least for the duration of his stay in the pages – do happen to be People of Color.

This isn’t the case out of a desire to “write for the market” (that trap pre-published authors fall into, of picking a trend hoping to cash in on it) – but, frankly (har the franks), sheer boredom at the lack of diversity in Ax … much as I love it.

Perhaps as part of the process of figuring out whether it’s time to (*temporarily* …) shelve Ax in favor of the WIP … perhaps simply because of the first flush of energy in working on said WIP … very definitely owing to a lot of my social media and query-researching exposure to the awareness of the need for literary diversity and the obvious White Liberal Guilt attendant on a novel utterly lacking in anything but White Powerful Male voice (much as I love it …) …

It’s been very exciting to feel the POV of the WIP limbering up, and *opening* up.

I’m not trying to write about fascinating/objectified brown skin and exoticized eyes, but I’m getting to know my main character who is *not* the princess. With getting to know the world itself – the period perspective on everything from the sound and use of a human voice, to emotional relationships and protocol within a court unlike any milieu familiar to a modern mind – comes getting to know a woman living in this place, working in it, making sure she can hold her own and stay in it.

The character’s name is Plectrudis, and she is midwife to the queen in the very first scene (as of *now* … !), and becomes nurse to the child she brings forth, and eventually HER midwife as well. She has all the intimacy and remove of a servant in the most privileged of households, and even as I write about writing about her, I know some of my favorite sketches are already wrong, and I know I can’t see her completely just yet (so I am almost afraid to so much as tell you her name, because the WIP is at the point where EVERYTHING I’ve scribbled is liable to change, and probably should, both as I learn and as the story asserts itself).

But something of her character – and fleeting breaths in her voice – is formed, and these things will only grow.

More exciting still is the man.

I’m still in the precious, protective, deeply-skittish-woodland-creature phase of creation here, so I can say even less of him. But he tapped me on the shoulder this week, and … the resulting sketch was terribly exciting.

I think he may speak.

I think he may get to be more than the object of the feminine and royal gaze of our princess – who was only my original reason for writing the novel, but who can’t sustain being the only thing IN the novel, it seems – and who … perhaps … loved  him. At this point, we know only: they *liked*.


He is historical, and that too is kind of thrilling. One of those tantalizing creatures we know existed, but have no information about, but the barest of facts. Primary sources do give him a name, though – which, to me, is almost joyously intriguing. He has a name. We have his name. And he lived, and he breathed. And he is so much more than the mere footnote that moved the princess herself on to the shocking career that was her life.

He was her first shock.

And I think he may speak.


When I first tried to see his face, I didn’t know what color he was, nor any of the workings behind the skin. He did not speak. He was (there is a study in this, my being a female author) entirely the subject of the female gaze.



I saw through his eyes, this week. I have seen almost enough through Plectrudis’s gaze to learn to *look* at the world with hers.

Just cannot wait to hear his voice.

#WeNeedDiverseBooks

There is a movement in publishing which has gathered a great deal of momentum just in the past six months, and which is gratifying to see - and which I have DECIDEDLY failed (with The Ax and the Vase, that is) to participate in. Ax is not only about a royal white dude, but it's self-absorbedly told in first person POV, *and* includes a long and inextricable subplot about, essentially, hating and punishing homosexual behavior.

I've talked about it before, and don't defend these things in their essence. Ax is the story that made me tell it, and (failings and all) it still captivates me, and it's a great novel. I didn't think, when falling into the story, about its demographics, and have wrestled with my own culpability as an author since.

The WIP happens once again to be about a royal princess, but (a) this novel will be told, at least, from the point of view of a woman, and (b) takes place in world by far more cosmopolitan than an ancient Frankish stockade. At least two major characters are people of color, and the issue of how one of these must die is one I am dealing with at great mental length these days, because it echoes, for me, the insensitivity of a White Dude King killing off the gay man in his ranks, and there is concern not only for my ethical expectations, but also the genuineness of the world. I shy away from political correctness in dealing with any story, and yet there is a definite need to "redeem" myself from some of the constraints my original first-person novel brings with it, no matter how good it is.

There is also the concern of my being a white person of undoubted privilege and freedom, and the extent to which I exoticize diversity, as opposed to presenting it properly. I couldn't even bring myself to add to the community response at Janet Reid's recent post about diversity; they do too good a job there for me to improve on it. I just know I want to participate in #WeNeedDiverseBooks - in the right way for who I am and what we all want to accomplish.

How to do that ...

• Avoid exoticization - turning someone's entire culture into a Hallowe'en costume (or, even worse, a sexy Hallowe'en costume) to dress up my book.
• Avoid appropriation - imitation is not always the sincerest form of flattery; sometimes, it's just a reductive presumption, and can lead to a loss of perspective. Not good for writing about something.
• Don't impose myself on a character or a culture - researching a world to build it, without demolition in order to reface it. Storytelling is not a wasteful home design show out to impose a fresh new face on an old house, it's an exploration of structure and style which should be true to intent. I don't jam 21st-century feminists into my works, and I don't fetishize the worlds into which I want to bring my readers.
• Follow the story. If the characters are allowed "their own truth" so to speak, everything will work better. I love to be led, as an author.
• Keep #WeNeedDiverseBooks and the great diversity and voices *in tune* all the time. I find inspiration in Twitter all the time for this, connections and perspectives not only keeping me honest about my privilege, but affecting the way I live and write, and how I think about approaching everything.
• FIND THE HISTORY. There are more and more people every day seeking to illuminate sources beyond the powerful white men. Researchers are amazing people, and they share - it would be madness not to take advantage of that, as a writer.

The WIP is bringing with it, every day, more exciting opportunities in its story, its research - its *characters*.

Wish me luck ...

Effed

I emailed a voice mail message to myself at home today.

"Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. ... Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”
--Douglas Adams

One week before my dad died, we got cell phones. I recall him, mom, and me in their room, programming the little sneaker-shaped things, laughing at how amazing they were, playing with ring tones and so on, commenting about their appearance.

Dad was in bed that day, and we got the phones because his disease was terminal. Mom wanted to be able to reach out instantly in case of emergency.

We had no idea we had so little time left.

Long after he died, I read somewhere about the Columbia shuttle disaster, and was shocked and perplexed; I had no recollection of this event, and this is not the sort of event one easily misses. It had happened the day I was over at the house, playing with the phones. It’s entirely possible – even quite likely – that we were watching news of it that day. If I claimed to remember, I’d be convincing myself though.

An event I cannot erase, unfortunately, was the epochal broadcast of the Michael Jackson interview with Martin Bashir. This aired the night before he died – and after we did know.

Dad went to the hospital on a Friday afternoon, or perhaps it was morning. I went upstairs to my boss’s boss’s office, a still and stately area of our building, and interrupted a meeting between them. Anything my own boss said was blotted out by her boss, a man I still respect, admire, and am immensely grateful to to this day. He all but insisted upon getting me a car to the hospital. But I drove. I needed that time in the empty space of the cab of my beloved, first car. I needed to have it and the freedom of movement it brought with it, and I had the strangest fear of leaving it, like my purse, at my office – and then what, and then what, was all I could think, though I recognized how kind the offer was even as I refused. I needed the drive.

I needed somewhat less the turquoise Honda or Toyota with the Icthys and “GOT CHRIST” sticker on the back that cut me off on a steeply curved part of the freeway, where I spun out and ended at a standstill, facing east in the westbound lanes, and wondering (to this day, yes) whether that Christian ever knew what they’d done to me. Even just on the practical level.

The rest of the drive was safe, and the hospital was what hospitals are. Dad was in a grey cul-de-sac of the ER, it seems cluttered in my memory, but we were alone at least. Mom left us after a little while – ostensibly to eat or go get someone or talk to people or use that cell phone … but, I think, to leave us alone. Mom doesn’t always work that way, but that day, she did.

And that day, we still didn’t know.

Before she left, the three of us were talking about my boyfriend. We’d only been seeing each other a few weeks – our first date was on my parents’ anniversary, in fact – and he was coming to visit the next day. I was thirty-four, they could see I was smitten, everything was heightened with dad being in the hospital, and this was his first visit. Mr. X.

Mom wanted him to come to the hospital (we’d learned by that point they were admitting dad, they were just waiting for a room). Dad was flat against that. Not the right place. Not the right time. “Another time, Helen.” And he would not be brooked. I was to enjoy our first visit, and a little celebration which had nothing to do with hospitals.

I wasn’t anxious for any brooking myself, not least because – good gravy, what pressure to put on a new guy. I agreed to dad’s proclamation that I would follow through with celebration, and he and Mr. X would meet some other time.

The backstory here is that dad wasn’t a big one with the I Will Not Be Brooked thing. He tended to appreciate my mom’s motivations, and if he didn’t he indulged them. She wasn’t a bad planner, it worked out most of the time. But in a hospital gown and in a poor state of health – not the way he planned to meet the new boy. No. Period. Done. No anger, and no flexing of power. Just a blank absolute, baldly laid down, no more drama than that.

Then he had an attack.

When dad had an attack, he called it the dragon. Dad hated that goddamned dragon. Hated it – and, like the brooking thing: dad was not given to hatred.

He told mom to give him an Oxycodone, and she remonstrated, and he cursed that he didn’t care about prescription guidelines, he needed it and he was going to take the pill.

He took it. Mom left. And he and I sat alone, talking about Cicero and Rome and Sulla and Marius.

And then the room was ready. I seem to have left, perhaps to go home and change clothes, because I then recall coming back to the hospital, suddenly filled with family – and we knew. We knew. We knew.

I hate that goddamned dragon.

No memory of the Challenger, but memory of Martin Bashir and spitting, icy, snowy weather. Bitter stuff. Pretty only on the skylights outside dad’s window. Memory of that long-ago neighbor, of my cousin V, of getting dad into the bed. And a morphine shot.

That was the end, then – the prosaic fussings of a man transferring into a real hospital bed out of an ER one. His abject little cotton gown, socked feet. Orderly, nurse, someone giving him the morphine once he was settled. And gone. No more chance, ever again. No return. No more conversation. Breathing, still, as hideously awful as that process had become. But gone. Irretrievable.

His flesh purple and his muscles thin.

Gold wedding band *glowing* in that twilight.

And me and mom and Mojourner. Only us.

Phone calls on that silvery sneaker, at all hours, in the hallway. I must have called Mr. X, told him. He was still going to come. He was still going to come.

We talked about the plans. Nobody else was with us, it must have been so late. No television by then. Only snow, blackness and glaring hospital parking lot lights. And us. We knew – and could not imagine.

Great Xs of snow on those domed skylights. Falling, then slipping away, occluding the light in soft-edged X shapes.

Dad’s skin so soft.

Mom made us both leave. Get some sleep, she enjoined us. I think I did go to bed, because I have this memory that through much of the next day I was wearing the pants I wore to bed. Fortunately, not obviously pajamas. But yes. That exhaustion, that emotional fume, social oblivion. Living, that day, in the sacred space-time of mourning.

Glowing.

Talking with my best friend TEO at some bitter hour of the morning, knees up, pressed against the hallway wall, sitting on the gleaming floor.

Mom spooned him all night. He died where his heart lived; wrapped up in her.

She called us at 4:30 and we came back. It was like, and unlike, the time we spent alone with him sleeping. But he was there still.

Still.

Stilled.

I held his hand, and some residual electricity spasm’d, pulsed. It didn’t feel like magic. It didn’t mean anything. Even still warm. I knew this was a body. With a wedding band glowing on it.

I did not see him after that. Some did, but I held to his wish he not be … viewed. I treasure those who needed that. Some saw him after his eyes had been harvested, head bandaged, Teiresias destined for an oven, mute, and no longer my daddy. I know why they held his hand then.

I’d held his hand already. That was finished.

And then a blur, a rush, the longest day in the world. I cannot talk to you about that day. Must not, it feels like. Too many things.


***


Some time later, my mom handed me a Valentine’s Day card without telling me. It was from dad. Opening that almost killed me.

But there was one treasure.

Dad had left a voice mail, that day – that dark Columbia day – that day we’d all been at the family house, the day he’d been in his own bed, the day we were smiling over those nifty phones. He’d left me his voice.  “Hello (phone number)” that gruff, joyous voice of his.

He hadn’t known.



I lost that recording, long long ago.

I don’t need it. Any more than I needed to hold or see his body after it became the domain of orderlies and donations and morgues.

But I miss it.


***


So, today, when my mom left me a recording my email dutifully saved to a file. I sent it home.

Passive VOICE

For those who think in these terms at all, “passive aggressive” is one of those ways of dismissing someone for whining, but the truth is, “aggressive” is truly a key point in the term. Passive aggression is far more than the martyred reverse psychology of a sitcom, it’s a strong social weapon so effective it can even be devastating.

I sat in a meeting one time with someone who used to bug the bejeezus out of me; not someone in my group, not someone I really had to deal with to speak of, but someone whose very name set my teeth on edge. The prospect of talking to them would enact anxieties that had nothing to do with anything, except that they upset me (and, I am convinced by the experiences of others) *meant to*.

As a woman, I have used passive aggression to head off difficult situations at times – when passing someone, looking down (which is not always a submissive posture, by a long shot*) – ostentatiously demonstrating deafness to certain approaches – gazing in blank, expressionless incomprehension at other approaches. Passive aggression can absolutely wither someone who thinks that any social entre’ will necessarily get some response, any response. *And refusing to see someone trying to catch your eye is as strong a rejection as overt ostracision. That person I once worked with would open a floor to response, but continue talking without pause, looking pointedly away from any eye contact, and thereby shut down all but the most intrepid colleagues … or actually make others appear rude, when they had to interrupt to contribute.

It can be a devastating strategy. It can get people so jumpy about another person that interpersonal undercurrents become rivers, and carry others away emotionally when they “KNOW” there is no reason to get so uptight. It can keep a strong woman safe if she feels alone and doesn’t want to feel *weak* - and it can alienate completely.

The Silent Treatment is an especially bitter weapon humans are able to use against one another, and one of the threats that can lead to conformity, direct aggression, submission, and unexpected rage or destruction. To shut a person out, as a group or just one individual to another, is perhaps the ultimate expression of power and control. “You have fallen short” becomes an insupportable exile, denied fire and water for eight hundred miles.

I’ve shut people out of my life; indeed, one of the more bewildering things about FaceBook, for me – apart from extreme security issues that give me the IT nerd willies – is its potential (nay, likelihood) to make it possible for any of the less useful friends from my foolish youth to crop up at any time. It takes work, this kind of passive aggression – ask any man who ever ignored calls from the date or conquest he had no further use for, or any homeowner importuned by a homeless abandoned cat. Emotionally, as effective as ostracision can be, for the non-sadistic, it’s not particularly a pleasure. But sometimes, relationships must end – and they don’t always end easily.

Sometimes, of course, the aggressor is just swinging their privates, to prove how big they are, and people who serially just cut people out of their lives, one by one, may just be avoiding what’s actually wrong with their lives rather than curing anything. And they end up ostracized, themselves, because their concern for control has crowded out life itself – which, though messy, is undeniably a more worthwhile business than solitary confinement in the ever-narrower concerns of a life, in the end, really left un-lived.


When I was younger and prettier, I took great pride in the ability to be an Ice Queen; in the fact that I didn’t get bothered much by strangers, and was able to prevent uncomfortable situations from becoming outright dangerous, with the strategies mentioned above.

Usually.

I came through young-and-pretty largely unscathed, but hit that link for a look at what “unscathed” means in the culture we live in, which I’m persuaded is not getting easier. Insofar as passive aggression is the “feminine” weapon so often pejoratively portrayed in poor writing, I used it as well as could be expected.

The older I get, though, the less I want to render those around me invisible by these methods. It is fortunate that there is nobody like this wandering around my lifescape these days, and that I can speak and act in other ways than silent cutting.

And the older I get, the more bewildering it becomes when I encounter those who do still employ/enjoy/indulge such plausibly-deniable cruelty and control. Those who cut deep, yet who would leap up – shocked, SHOCKED I TELL YOU – at the idea they ever intended to wound.



If you have a sound voice, you don’t need to remove others’ ability to speak.

Linguis...Tics

My lunchtime reading recently has been an author I’m revisiting, who gained huge popularity in the 80s and 90s, but whose career began in the 70s and continues today.  This is someone who could frustrate with “get ready for the sequel” novels, but who also has an undeniable gift with language.

The problem with a certain level of publishing success is that, so often, it leads to a certain level of creative control that ends up meaning an author can eschew editing.  Colleen McCullough is an example of this, and her works for some years sank deeper and deeper into the “if a fact or anecdote can be told once, it can be told SEVENTY times” and the corollary, “if it can be told in twenty words, it can also be told in seven pages.”

The books I’m revisiting of late suffer a lack of editorial presence, too, and have me looking at my linguistic habits pretty coldly.  I have a thing for adverbs, and “just” and “actually” are, for reasons I can’t explain, constantly present in my writing.  And, of course, the overlocutive, unnecessarily complex sentence issues.  Reading this author’s work, though, has me finding previously-unnoticed habits in my writing as well.  “Almost”, for some reason pulls a lot of punches throughout my own work.  Given the first-person voice in The Ax and the Vase, this requires some review – Clovis is not the most likely punch-puller in the world.

It’s “and” and serial commas that seem to be a problem for this author.  She puts no comma where a new clause begins, and creates paragraph-long sentences with both lists and multiple clauses, with “and” between every element and commas following no apparent logic.  It feels like none of this writing was ever read out loud, and it also muddies the voice.

This author writes from the perspectives of very large casts of characters in many novels, and even from vantage points in time spanning literally hundreds of years.  And every character sounds the same.  And every second sentence begins with “and”, too.

Now, obviously – I’m not one of those purists who shudders and pearl-clutches at the very idea of beginning a sentence with the word “and” or “but”.  However (hah!), I don’t want to see it fifteen times in a single page.  AND this author does that.  It’s so painfully obtrusive (and punch-pulling, at that – it sucks drama out of moments and statements time and again) it’s impossible to ignore.

SO (hah), it becomes impossible to lose yourself in the novel – or in a single character’s story – because not only does every character in every individual novel sound alike, but every character in ALL this author’s MANY novels sound exactly the same.


This is why writers must read so much.

The good news is, this has me looking pretty mercilessly at my own writing.  I’m aware that parenthesis, hyphens, difficult constructions, and “pretty” are recurrent with me.  The words and patterns that seem to hover throughout my work, I try to at least SEE – even when I don’t necessarily choose to “correct” them.

To a degree, it is my own voice that makes me a writer.  The degree MUST be limited and regulated, I know that.  But it’s also true that some part of the charm of reading some particular author is *their* way of expressing things – even through the filter of POV and characters’ voices and so on.  It feels like it’s okay to infuse ourselves into the way a story gets told.

But (hah) it’s important, too, that the author’s presence should be a support, not part of the story in an obtrusive way.  In a way, this is like research – you have to do enough to know your period, but you can only put into the work what really needs to be there.  You have to know your story and be involved (even “passionate”!) about it, but most of the time – the author doesn’t need to “be there” …


Ever read a novel where the author felt like an uninvited guest at the party?  Or do you know works where the author’s palpable presence helped rather than hindered … ??

Collection

Darwin's Barnacles and Dr. Livingston's beetles - the History Blog is on an interesting roll indeed!  All this and Tolkien references - who could ask for more?  Also, "Darwin's Barnacles" is a great title for ... well, pretty much anything at all. Get on that!

Nyki Blatchley on tribe-versus-nation - a worthwhile look at cultural attitudes toward:  other cultures.

Two Nerdy History Girls have a nice post about corsets in the 19th century - the good, the bad, and the mythical.  Be sure to check the comments for a point about the dress movement, which condemned corsets even at their peak.  The thing people often forget when shuddering in horror, or lusting to wear, corsets is this:  they were only very rarely tight-laced, and the sort of corsets people get frothy about in the 21st century were *not* sexy, nor even intended really to modify women's bodies sexually.  Just as today we wear fashions which have nothing to do with fornicating or procreating, FASHION, even in past centuries, had little to do with mating practices.

Finally ... Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.  Just 'accoz.



"Oh, G-d.  I can smell his face."  Hee.

Actually, Marcel represents an EXTREMELY good example of great writing - memorable, clear, and engaging voice.  (By which, though his portrayer does an extremely cute job, I mean writing voice, not actual actor's reading.)  Give it a shot, it's actually highly incisive writing; capturing the tone of a Liddel Kid, and the production includes a wealth of enjoyable peripheral detail.  Marcel is kinda OSUM, y'all.

Voices

Writers of nearly every sort have a fondness for what we call “voice” – the tone and unique patois of a character, the way one speaks as opposed to the next – the very feel of a novel, a screenplay, a poem, a story.  Setting can have, and contribute, to voice.  Age and education, native intelligence, expectations, fears, and desires.

Many authors, too, read our work out loud.  It’d be impossible not to write, to some degree, in our own voices, and as important as reading a work out loud is to making sure its weight and rhythm and the feel are all right, even this imposes us upon the work.  Public readings, if we’re fortunate enough to publish, reinforce the imposition of our own voice on a work, and audio books can bring new voices, in performance, to a piece.

And through all this, we have to maintain the integrity of the characters themselves.  Characters mustn’t break under the weight of interpretations and expectations – and, the more I read, the more I know how very difficult it is for a character to remain itself.  Right now, I’m reading a novel told in omniscient 3rd person, but incorporating literally hundreds of years of voices – rendered in spoken word, chronicle, correspondence, and secondhand reportage.  It’s a piece with remarkable scope, and quite well put together – yet there are times I can see the author too clearly.  A habit of beginning sentences with the word “and” … certain unique phrases appearing generations apart, recalling some other character’s voice … the reiterations of descriptions of setting, from points of view which should be more distinct.  It’s an author’s job to notice detail.  It is not their job to put the same detail in the perspective of EVERY character, unfortunately.  Lush as certain points of interest may be, not all voices should desribe them the same – indeed, not all characters should even care.  Once seven different scenes from markedly different periods and focusing on wildly different players – scenes concerned with very different action and motivation – have pointed at the same beautiful plant in the same way, I not only lose patience with vicariously gazing at the plant, but I lose my place in the world itself.

Ahm – so plants don’t need to have voices in a novel.

Back to my point.

The problem with an author’s voice overcoming their characters’ is that, of course, the book stops being about what it is about, and begins to be about the author’s preoccupations.

Now,of course, none of us would ever write, if we didn’t have preoccupations.  It’s in some way entirely the point.

This is why we have editing.

I have a problem with “just” and “actually” – fortunately, writing historical fiction set in Late Antiquity, I am somewhat freed from this foible:  the likelihood of an ancient Frankish throwing around quantities of qualifiers is blessedly remote, and so I hope Clovis suffers little from this predilection.

My other problems, which anyone here knows all too well already, are loquacity and a confidence in my own intelligence, which are most likely the issue I have to watch the hardest.  I’ve edited and polished and worked, but have little doubt that the characters in The Ax and the Vase are perhaps more culturally and educationally homogenous than they should be.  Personalities set them apart, but I could not bear to make any of them less than truly clever (see also:  my overarching defensiveness about “Barbarians” and The Stupid, Stupid Past …).  We have one boyish colt, and one oafish drunk, but as a whole, the population of The Ax and the Vase are a canny lot.  One hopes this does not constitute too much of a problem.

I like to hope that the key is *listening*.  Listening to the characters, and the story itself.  Each scene tells me what its participants need out of it, and that helps.  Each man and woman has a past, and a future.

I can discern the actual VOICE of Clovis – the breath, the timbre, the power and the volume – in everything he has said through the novel.  I know his youthful tone and the creaking changes of his voice with age.  I know the speed at which words came from his mouth, with every line he speaks, and can tell you where he breathes, where he doesn’t.  When he pauses.  When he silences others with his own silence.

I know the sound of his kinsman, Pharamond – and the rumble and grind of his other supporting player, the profligate, the comes, the older idol, Ragnachar.

It’s not enough to see their faces – to know the very quality of their skin, their hair, the color or the brightness and clarity of their eyes.  It’s not enough to know that one character has a club foot, and another is leathery and scarred, almost blue he is so tanned and aged and hard.  I have to know that that latter man has a voice reedy and thin with age, incongruously small in his warrior’s frame.  I have to hear not only the lilt and laughter of the crippled woman, but to hear how the slide of her walk syncopates with her words as she walks.  I have to know that she has hands and feet and a belly and clothes, how she moves, how her breath moves with her, how the words will be affected by that.

I have to remember Clovis is fifteen in this scene when I edit it, and almost forty-five the next day, when I’m looking at the other end of the novel.


***


The most beautiful speaking voice I have ever heard, live and in person, was that of Mikhail Gorbachev.  It was over twenty years ago, when he was still one of the most famous men on Earth, and realized – I had never heard him before:  only interpreters.  His voice was magnificent, not at all blustering nor loud, mellow, mellifluous, simple, and beautiful.  I found myself ignoring the translator, and lost only in the sound of this unassuming, astoundingly powerful figure, quite overjoyed to forget his speech and simply revel in the sound of beautifully spoken Russian.

I have never been a fan of French, and as much love as I have for the German language – for sheer loveliness of sound, for its curve and sharpness and audible precision, the most gorgeous language in the world, for me, has always been Russian.  I find the curved shapes of its verbal Ls  entrancing, the glottal bounce of its coupled vowels delightful.  Spoken with an honestly attractive voice, Russian is an incredible pleasure for the ear.  Its edges, sharp and pure, never cut to bleed, and its lightness and speed are exciting.  Women who swoon for the congested sound of French have never quite made sense to me.  But give me a few phrases thrown away in rapid-fire, carelessly crystal-clear Russian, and the wonder of language lights up my brain.

The deliberate and convicted sound of a man who literally changed the world, speaking with a mellow voice no less powerful for its lack of volume, was an experience I frankly treasure in a sacred way apart from politics or seeing-a-famous-person or romance or anything else.  Beauty IS, sometimes, its own reward, and Gorbachev’s speech is one of those unexpected moments in memory, which illustrated something about beauty well beyond the perfectly arched brow or a total babe everyone wants to get to know.  That I understood not a word without the translator only enhanced this.


Clovis spoke a language I would never recognize, even if I spoke all the living tongues in the world today.

But I know his voice.

Rougher and sharper than a Russian statesman.

Never quite so guttural as a brute of a “Barbarian”.

Not quite a low voice, not for a long time – he came to the throne in the barest flush of his youth.

But balanced.  Measured.  Strong, if not beautiful.

And … I hope … compelling enough to echo through fifteen centuries …

ACTIVE Voice(s)

The first moments of my day this morning were spent in the usual way, but with a soundtrack that nagged me almost from the moment I turned on the TV.  I tend to listen to old movies in the morning rather than watching any news; a holdover from a schedule that had me out of the house before any news even began airing, I've learned it is a far nicer way to start the day than with the important boxes ticked off - what will the weather be, what terrible thing has happened or is about to, what pontificating on the economy can we do at this hour?  NPR always tells me exactly what the "news" does, so first thing out of bed, a gaggle of people long since dead and gone acting out stories I don't even have to look at on the screen turns out to be a peaceable starting point.

Today, though, my peace was niggled.  One of the actors in the day's pre-code romantic comedy (Oh the scandal!  A wife trying to wile her husband back into her own arms!) had a voice it took me only syllables to know I had heard before, but which I could not quite identify for a few minutes.  That sort of thing can drive you to distraction at the best of moments; at six-thirty a.m. when you've hardly washed your face, it can topple you outright.

I did get to it, though.  The voice was attached to cartoons.  I knew that almost right off - a voice I had HEARD, but knew that was the end of it.  It wasn't a familiar "actor" I was hearing, but a voice-over.  I let it percolate as I brushed my teeth, coming in and out of the room, and once I was getting dressed for work I knew it wasn't just voice promotions or narration, but cartoon work.  And yet - not character work, not per se.  This wasn't Mickey Mouse talking to  me.  It was the voice, in a cartoon, that comments upon action otherwise scripted and drawn as pantomime comedy.  It was the very particular voice of the man who had explained to me what was up onscreen in enough cartoons to stick in my head, and I sensed it wasn't Looney Toons, but couldn't put my finger on it.  Thank goodness for TCM's movie schedule and this little career summary.  As coolness goes, he couldn't have much outdone this cultural contribution.

When I got into my car to go to work, the necessity to appear as if I am not entirely ignorant generally prompts me to listen to NPR rather than music in the morning, and I was rewarded once again with a voice from my past - but not one I had heard before, this time.  Athol Fugard was a playwright during a little-known (now) period in my life, when I believed I was going to go into theater.  *Master Harold and the Boys* and Zakes Mokai were the chords through which his voice played in my life, so I knew the structure and shape of his voice without knowing its sound.  Zakes' voice was quite fine enough, and I remember it to this day - but the words and the shapes were written by Fugard.

It got me to thinking (I'm nothing if not self-absorbed) about how many people will know the shape, the structure of my voice, who may never *hear* it either.  Less and less, perhaps, as the age of information progresses - yet I have always found some charm in not "knowing" the authors of the works I love best, and suspect that the sacred-space of reading may not drive all readers into personal relationships with authors.  One may hope, anyway.

It doesn't even take the publication of the novel to create this strange, intimate remoteness either.  I think of the friends I have made online - some, over the years, have become the dearest "real" friends I have; but most are people I will never meet in life -and am struck by the realization, not that we'll never see each other in this world, but that we will never hear each other.  There is a power in a voice, which brings to immediacy people we may never meet otherwise.  I had team members at my last job - the resume phrase was "highly virtualized team" - I never met at all, but we did talk, and many of us regularly.  The number of "my kids" I never met in person was remarkable, really - and that's far from my first at-bat on vocal relationships I'll never realize face-to-face.  Back when I was the assistant to the president of the largest of four nationwide divisions, I trained the other ADMINS without ever meeting them - and still think fondly of "my guys" whom I took such care of, but who never had occasion to come to our little satellite office to visit.  I've had countless encounters and acquaintanceships which took place through work and/or strictly by phone.

The girl from a finance company who own the loan on the windows I had installed  years ago is familiar to me by name and by speaking with her "Thanks, I don't need a new loan today, but you have a good one!"  The guy who's been calling, trying to sell my boss some service or other, who keeps his follow-ups regularly enough he feels "bad" for "bothering" me "all the time" is fine by me; we're both doing what we get paid to, and he doesn't treat me like a menial, so he gets the polite treatment.  The person who once called a job I had, to report a crime relevant to my employers, who was scared ... and whose fate I will never know, but which matters to me to this day ...


I have to imagine I'm not unique in this curiously modern development; that there are more voices in all our lives than we realize from day to day.  Then one voice pops up, saying something we don't recognize, but with tones so particularly familiar we're taken back into childhood ... and another voice reveals itself, thirty years after his words spoke to us first, through others ... and a day is filled with echoes of voices, and that is a good and interesting thing.  How many people do you speak with in a day, develop lightweight rapport with, perhaps even "get to know" over time, through repeated transactions ... whom you will never meet in the way we used to think of that word signifying?

How much does it matter, if you meet them - or hear them - or never do at all?  I can say I still care about my friends on Twitter, though there are few I expect ever to know outside of the internet.  I want the best for 'em, we find encouragement together, we're cheerleaders and shoulders and wisecrackers and pals.  It may not be friendship like I have with Cute Shoes, nor engender the compassion I have for my family - but it cannot be said I'm indifferent to the fate of those I know online, either.

Are you indifferent enough not to need to comment ... ?  Or does this happen to you, too?


Edited to add:  Smart Woman is apparently the movie I was watching, with the extraordinarily familiar voice of  Mr. Edward Everett Horton.  Remarkably:  his voice did not age from 1931 to 1964 - the latter of which was the period of his career from which I came to know it ...  (Hear here.)

How to Read

I didn't want to steal a vid from Day without credit, and so this appears in the Collection post below.  However, this lesson is extremely useful for those of us still learning our way - and hoping, someday, to have readings of our own.  This deserved a *post* of its own.

So l...i...s...t...e...n...



Good material, well taught.

Part 2:





Be audible.  Do it from your diaphragm (Steve Martin jokes may be leaping to mind - and that is okay ...).

Read slowly - pacing is important in the writing; why wouldn't your rhythm as a reader matter?

Choose your passage carefully - watch the number of characters in a scene; is it self-contained? (dramatic content/is your stopping point a cliffhanger?); listen to the language (onomatopoeia); control your own interpretation (read the meanings) ...

One of her pieces of advice is to read from the POV of your own gender ... a trick I won't be able to accomplish with Clovis, written as it is in first person from his POV ...  But even so, it can be done.  I suspect my abilities do run so far; I've read this MSS so many times, out loud, just in its very writing.

The voice is a muscle.  She comments near the beginning of video #2 on resonating and what a sinus infection can do to you.  True too of bronchial issues:  this past couple of weeks?  I could not have used mine properly!

Pitch, placement, pacing, accent, attitude.  (And not all attitude is 'tude, yo.)

GKDTBP.

Also, I agree with Day.  The attitude section is great.

PROCESS: Version Three

With some help from Leila, we have now come to this:

Clovis I came to the throne at fifteen, yearning for more from his accession, and erupted to fame vanquishing Rome's power in Gaul.  From a childhood under the shadow of a scandalous mother and profligate father, he launched his own reputation--his legend--with an act of revenge so spectacular the tale is told to this day.  At last, he forged a dynasty by deceiving his allies and killing his own kin.  Yet Clovis' power was balance on his faith in God ... and his religion was inspired by the love of the magnificent Queen Clotilde.

His parents' sins instilled in him a discipline which became ambition so wide he built from it the very foundation of the Frankish empire.  His abiding love of the Catholic Clotilde led him to conversion, which set the course of politics and faith in Europe for a thousand years.  With four sons and indomitable will, Clovis befan a dynasty and set forth the law.  He was famed for piety and a bloodthirsty nature ... yet few can say who he truly was ...

The Ax and the Vase creates and recreates Clovis' story, his world, his fame--and his infamy.  It is the product of fascination, years of research, and the urgent need to understand and to tell this great, gripping story.

Yes:  please leave feedback if you would like to!

PROCESS: Version Two

Mojourner saw a structure in the first raw brain-dump, and said it could be refined with a repeated within-without tension.  Small, expositive verb - big, muscular action.  This is where that observation has taken me so far:

Clovis I came to the throne at fifteen, and erupted to fame vanquishing Rome's power in Gaul.  He lived in childhood under the shadows of the reputation of a scandalous mother and profligate father; and launched his reputation - his legend - with an act of revenge so spectacular, the tale is told to this day.  At last, he forged a dynasty by deceiving his allies and killing his own kin.  Yet Clovis’ power was balanced on his faith in God ... and his religion was inspired by the love of the magnificent Queen Clotilde.

Clovis yearned, from his accession, for more than his father’s small kingdom.  His parents’ sins instilled in him a discipline which became an ambition so wide he built from it the very foundation of the Frankish empire.  His abiding love of the Catholic Clotilde led him to conversion, which set the course of politics and faith in Europe for a thousand years.  With four sons and indomitable will, Clovis began a dynasty and set forth the law.  He was famed for his piety and a bloodthirsty nature ... yet few can say who he truly was ...

The Ax and the Vase creates and recreates Clovis’ story, his world, his fame - and his infamy.  It is the product of fascination, years of research, and the urgent need to understand and to tell this great, gripping story.

Yes:  please leave feedback if you would like to!

PROCESS: Version One

Clovis I came to the throne at fifteen, and came to fame vanquishing Rome’s power in Gaul.  He created his reputation - perhaps his legend - with an act of revenge so spectacular, the tale is told to this day.  At last, he built a dynasty by conquering even allies and killing his own kin.  Yet Clovis’ power was balanced on his faith in God ... and his religion was inspired by the love of the magnificent Queen Clotilde.

Clovis yearned, from his accession, for more than his father’s small kingdom.  His parents’ scandalous reputations had instilled in him both discipline and a deep desire for power, which became an ambition so great he would through battle, diplomacy, and deceit build what we now know as the nation of France.  His love of the Catholic Clotilde led him to conversion, which set the course of Europe for a thousand years.  With four sons and indomitable will, Clovis began a dynasty, he set forth the law; he was famed for his piety and a bloodthirsty nature ... yet few can say who he truly was ...

The Ax and the Vase creates and recreates Clovis’ story, his world, his fame - and his infamy.  It is the product of fascination, years of research, and the urgent need to understand, and to tell this great and gripping story.

Yes:  please leave feedback if you would like to!

Me Talk History One Day

Voice, in histfic, is an OFT-discussed point of style, and it's amazing just how hard it can be to find the right mode of expression for a period.  Here is a very good, very amusing post on the subject, rich in yummy details too.  Courtesy of The History Girls - A. L. Berridge.

(Unexpectedly) In Defense of Mary

I've posted about Mary Sue before, and feminist anachronism in historical fiction, but this morning I was cruising one of my fora and ran into a thread about what tropes would you throw in the bin, as a histfic reader?  Apart from the "Dark Ages = Land of the Stupids" dirty Barbarian foolishness, a clear winner in this discussion was the presence, in so much historical fiction, of the modern, BEAUTIFUL, feminist heroine main character.  Ugh/sigh.

One poster said,

But . . . it seems like every young woman in every historical novel doesn't want to get married and just wants to be "free" (to do [I]what [/I]for the rest of her life?). I would like to see a real examination of the other young women who made the best of things.

I responded:
In my first novel, there are two significant marriages, and two scenes involving the prospective brides' acceptance of their arrangements.  In the first case, I wrote the character as seeing her marriage as a sort of dynastic opportunity - a role to which she not only had been raised, but had aspired personally.  She is eager to fulfill a certain type of feminine glory, queen to a great husband, and she sees a clear potential to become mother of a dynasty.  The second case is a more prominent character, who comes to her marriage out of faith, a sense of fate, and a certain amount of attraction to both the role and the husband.  The relationship is developed pretty deeply, and is loving, difficult, committed in a way modern people don't always understand, and fruitful (also in a way modern people don't always understand).

In the WIP, the main character is a princess who is ... physically uncompelling.  She cultivates her intellect and personality, and she also uses her position to make up for the idea that those around her find her ugly.  She marries very young and against all the rules, and watches her husband pay for this sin.  She seeks power through the channels available to her, and eventually herself pays for her heterodoxy, pride, and ambition.  (Her story, by the way, is not fictional.)


***


In one of those moments which can be a bit too on-the-nose "meta" to tolerate (but which I hope I handled well), I wrote this:

Cholwig gave me back a smile as we slowed near the threshold of the hall.  “I think a woman submits to her lord, and power is in the eye of the beholder.  It is possible marrying a king is more servitude than success.  Do you remember the old way a tribe might attack the Empire, when Rome was strong?  A small king would say, ‘we’ll attack Rome, and surrender, to be absorbed into its protection and wealth, and that way, the people will prosper’.”  He regarded me for a moment.  “A woman can do the same.  Make a sally at a formidable man, a king.  And, in surrender, wage peace of a comfortable nature.”

The military strategy is a historically documented one - and, in fact, not exclusive to the Empire in Rome.  Just recently, I ran across a film from I believe the 1960s or thereabouts, in which a fictional, tiny European nation was going to pick a war to lose, either with the US or perhaps the British Empire, for precisely the same reason.

It seems to me extremely likely the strategy, with women, was a real one as well - shoot, though we hate to admit it, there are *today* still plenty of women and girls raised on the idea of men-as-providers, who look to relationships this way.  Not necessarily gold-digging, but certainly a tendency to mercenary gender relations is not a thing of the past completely.  I know plenty of women who have never lived on their own financial terms, and have never intended to.  My autonomy may not be the anomaly it once was, but it's still not standard for women either.

The thing about Mary Sue is this:  once upon a time and not so long ago (cue Bon Jovi, for those who are hating me right now), she was an innovation.  I have to forgive the temptation to write her.  Women authors may use her as an avatar to be glamorous, rich, and sexy to everyone on feet - but it hasn't been long since Mary actually had something to say.  When you think about how many centuries literature endured under the yoke of systematized oppressions for us ALL (not just women), it's hardly surprising that writers in the 20th century began breaking out magical characteristics - and, given the 20th century in much of Western, and particularly American, culture, it's less surprising still all the main characters had to be supernaturally endowed with superior characteristics, and not least of these was sex appeal.

It's tiresome now, but when you look at the reasons Mary Sues sprang up, the bumper crop she became is easy to understand.

It's also easy to understand why people are so judgmental now.  It's been JUST long enough in literary time, and perhaps eons worth of time in millenial insta-news-cycle/short attention span terms, the backlash is just as obvious as the initial popularity was.  When "Mists of Avalon" came out, the character of Morgaine was groundbreaking.  She spawned copies, and a more general trend, and looking backward maybe she looks like a Mary Sue too - modern humanist/liberal morality, femininity, beauty, the whole package.  But like many early iterations of what become larger phenomena, Morgaine had more depth than perhaps later, more watered-down examples would carry.  And Morgaine was a teaching tool.

Cry about Mary Sue as we will, she apparently has taught a lot of readers ... *something* ...

So my resistance isn't to the forces and the motivations that gave us Mary Sue in the first place.  It's to the weak tool she has become - it's to the subversion of a feminist point-making into a plethora of pneumatic, gorgeous, goddesses (though I'll never stop blessing Michelle Brower for coming up with the genuinely insightful analysis of urban fantasy heroines' changing roles, in her comment, "the boobs are getting smaller").  It's to the easy-way-out insertion of modern feminism and attitudes onto characters who, in all fairness, could never have even developed some of "our" ways of thinking - never mind enacted them.  It's to the injustice, of ignoring the real obstacles and opportunities ANYone (again, not just women - but, yeah, particularly women) had, the real context of history, whatever a given period.

Sure, we're all fascinated by those who fought against a given system - there are reasons books about feisty medieval women do sell, and we can hardly pretend Aliaenor of Aquitaine (kids, that's Eleanor to your modern spellin'-style) was a dainty little thing.  It's perhaps unjust to pretend all women were shrinking violets, in a similar way it's dangerous to pretend none of them were.

But that is just what chafes me as an author.  Characters don't exist outside their time - but they also don't exist in the prejudicially-defined prisons modern judgment presumes "the past" had to offer, depending on era.  The Middle Ages (ugh, what a nicely imprecise term - you should see the wildly erratic definitions people have for it) wasn't all about wimples and tiny rosebud mouths, any more than the 19th century was all about consumptive milquetoasts nor hookers-with-hearts-of-gold, any more than the Dark Ages were summed up in Boudicca, nor Rome by Valeria Messalina ... OR Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi.

Characters need to be about more than just their context, whether we choose to manipulate the context or not.  Write to them - not to a didactic point, nor to a stifling set of assumptions or required set of actions.  If they're honest, they should fit.  Wherever we end up putting them.