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Cyrano de Bergerac, Act II

I am just about reconciled to this readalong being an exercise in nostalgia for me. On reading Act II, I discovered passages that Young Me had all but committed to memory, because they rang so harmoniously with my own sentiments. I think I probably ignored the way that the arc of dramatic irony undercut these passages -- yet though I appreciate the irony now, Cyrano's words still chime with me:

-- To sing, to laugh, to dream, To walk in my own way and be alone, Free, with an eye to see things as they are -- A voice that means manhood -- to cock my hat Where I choose -- At a word, a Yes, a No, To fight -- or write. To travel any road Under the sun, under the stars, nor doubt If fame or fortune lie beyond the bourne -- Never to make a line I have not heard In my own heart; yet, with all modesty To say, "My soul, be satisfied with flowers, With fruit, with weeds even; but gather them In the one garden you may call your own."

Lines like this are a stiff breeze blowing through today's haze of computer-generated, monetized content -- and I love Cyrano for them.

And speaking of writing: why does nobody write anapests anymore? They weren't just made for limericks, you know. "The Cadets of Gascoyne, the defenders/Of Carbon de Castel-Jaloux!" I know the French original is not exactly the same meter, but in English anapests were used for exactly the same function: for songs to march to, to stomp your feet and clang your tankards to, to swag your shit like Reepicheep on a bender. I mean, at least we have hip-hop now; but will no one speak for the venerable anapest?

Speaking of Reepicheep, I do believe that my soul-recognition of Cyrano became so sedimented that even as I forgot about it, I wrote Ryswyck out of that same sandstone. Eructavit cor meum!

#cyrano de bergerac #cyrano readalong #the original project #ryswyck

Mother, factorial

I can’t blog at my home place just now because the server is in process of being replaced and so my WordPress site is tucked away in the cloud and inaccessible. So I’m just going to natter here for a little bit.

Today I amused myself by ficcing my own ‘verse, as I like to do sometimes when I need a little pick-me-up. The majority of my main characters live in a country that is matrilineal, for reasons which I had fun building out. (Matrilineal, I say, not matriarchal -- but even a matrilineal society is so far from the current landscape I live in that there seems little difference from this vantage, as I shall soon demonstrate.) One of them is the youngest of thirteen children, whose mother is a hard-working and locally influential farmer in a rural northern district. So today’s fun involved me making up stories for myself about his eldest sister and how she went about starting her own family with the help of a cousin from the next village over.

Now, I wanted to work out just how distant of a cousin I wanted her partner to be (I quite like him, he’s a nice fellow, very decent despite having grown up in a small and rather dysfunctional community), so I grabbed a sheet of paper and started to jot down a genealogical diagram...

And then had to stop, flummoxed. You know what a genealogical diagram looks like: a line is drawn between a man and a woman to signify they are married and/or had children, and then the next tier shows the children all depending from a single bar. But for Rosemary Douglas, mother of thirteen, head of her household, that doesn’t work. In her childbearing career she made contracts for children that double as local alliances with men who could afford to commit to sworn sponsorship. All of them planned -- except for her youngest. How the hell would I diagram that?

I decided -- I couldn’t. I’d just have to leave the fathers out. But neither did it make much sense to just have Rosemary, with a bar below her marked with all her children’s names in birth order from left to right, with no room for the kind of detail one would want for working out genetic relationships in matters like this. How would Ilonians diagram their genealogies, then?

I wound up drawing something like a factorial: Rosemary at the center, with her sons in a segmented line down the left, and her daughters in line down the right, the elder closer in and the youngest at ends of each line. Her daughters could be diagrammed the same way: a hinterland rather than a tree, very Ilonian. To work out genetic details at need, one could write the name of the father/sponsor on the line segment between Rosemary and each child, and work back to his mother from there. You could see then how often lines would cross and avoid overentanglements.

I have no idea how actual maternal lines are diagrammed in RL. But I was sort of shocked afresh at how spatially embedded in our minds patriarchy is. I was used to thinking of a Bowen genealogical diagram as a logical reflection of how humans are, how their generations pass, universally. But it isn’t, really. It’s like how “matrimony” doesn’t mean the same as “patrimony” except with mothers: matrimony means “I have acquired a womb!” and patrimony means “I have acquired a dynasty!”

In any event, in reference to quotations I’ve seen round here about sci-fi and fantasy as the kind of imaginative activism necessary to envision a better world for ourselves, I have been doing exactly that: telling myself stories of people living complicated, imperfect, not-always-easy lives in a world I want to see emulated, for the sake of my own sanity in these times. And I’m telling you about it, in case it helps.

#the original project #ryswyck #writing #worldbuilding #about my characters

You know, when I just kick back and let my characters argue with each other in my head about some thing or other, I learn the most astonishingly useful things, with practically no effort. Except for the effort to scribble enough notes to remember it later. La la.

#writing #the original project #the lantern tower #how I spent my holiday weekend

This week in Very Small Comforting Things:

My hand was halfway to deleting a blog comment when I realized it wasn’t actually from a spambot. It was from someone evidently in NYC who said that he was taking comfort from rereading Ryswyck.

I didn’t even know that anyone had read the book who doesn’t know me. So first of all, that’s awesome. Second of all, telling a story that becomes someone else’s companion in a hard time is Ultimate Author Goals.

Guys, this might actually have been a worthwhile endeavor!

#author goals #ryswyck #the original project #pandemic life

Original project: state of the state

Well, that’s out of the way, then.

I entered the Pitch Wars contest this year, more or less as a practice exercise -- practice deploying a query, writing a synopsis, prepping a sample, &c. And though I didn’t take much advantage of the various fora in which entrants swapped critique partners and encouragement, I did enjoy reading the tweets of folks who were preparing their manuscript to put out there -- and found out a lot about industry trends, agents’ wish lists, and a whole lot of things I wouldn’t have without going on this particular venture.

Anyway, the list of this year’s chosen mentees came out last night, and as expected I am not on it; I didn’t get any responses asking for more pages or anything like that during the selection period, so it’s not much of a surprise. I’m free now to get on to the next phase of my plans for this project.

I think I’m going to stop checking out the hashtag from now, though. Because right now it’s chock full not only of congrats for the chosen and thanks to the contest runners, but also of people trying to console the other 95% who didn’t get in -- assurances that there are many paths, and not to give up, and stories of those who found their agent the next day, and so on ad nauseam. I find those far more annoying than watching people be genuinely happy about their good fortune.

During this process I queried a freelance editor about tailoring my query letter to pitch a Very Long Book, and got back a frank and therefore much less annoying answer: that the chance of an agent or publisher taking on the risk of a debut novel longer than 110k words is slim to none. You could fit two of that maximum in my book. So if Becoming a Published Author were the grail I was after, my choices would be: a) rewrite the book to be something completely other than what it is, or b) put it away and write something else.

But from my point of view, being a Published Author is just a means of access to the thing I actually want: putting this particular book out there without having to undertake the project management myself. So as soon as I heard that it was all but guaranteed that querying my book would be a waste of time, I switched tracks to independent publishing with relatively little pain. I hate project management but I love control, so now that Pitch Wars is officially out of the way, I’m picking brains and making lists to try and get the best possible version of my book out by spring.

Would I have liked to see my book find its audience via traditional publication? Of course I would. Am I unhappily aware that producing it by any other means would rob it of the cachet of being a Real Book? Well, yes. Am I annoyed that the venn diagram between “books that are good” and “books that are commercially attractive” happens to leave mine in the cold after all? Tooth-grindingly so. But am I crushed? Hardly. Wanting to give up? I’ve already tried giving up on this project -- might as well tell my hair to stop growing. Discouraged about my own skill and talent? Um...no more than usual, really.

So, take it all around -- I’m working, and pretty much fine. But if you wanted to buy me a drink and murmur sweet writerly nothings in my ear, I wouldn’t exactly say no.

#writing #the original project #writers are neurotic go fig

Many years ago my friend @hedda62 described the editing of original work as like “being nibbled to death by ducks.” My response to this, of course, was to heist a picture of a duck duct-taped to the wall and make an LJ icon out of it captioned “Editing Ducks.” Ah, those were the days.

Anyway, she’s right. I am working on Draft 3 of the Original Project and the massive continuity of Editing Ducks has got me in the throes of vague hostility. One hopes, of course, that at the end of this process is a salable product; but at the moment it’s difficult to tell. Feh.

#I aten't dead #much #editing #the original project #writing

So, my book club read some Marilynne Robinson this month, which I’m glad of because I’ve always enjoyed it when I have run across snippets of meta that she’s written. And a topic came up which is perennially interesting to me, and even more now that I’m in the throes of editing: the use of tight third perspective.

Robinson’s one of those writers who is just so damn good at tight third, and really good tight third is what has made that mode so popular in the past generation -- both in fanfiction and in published fiction. About ten years ago I was saying fretfully that tight third seemed to have become synonymous with Good Writing, and I’m not sure how much that’s changed. It’s possible first-person mode is making a comeback, but I think it’s still true that a writer who has the facility of inhabiting a character’s thoughts and experiences so as to exclude all (or nearly all) the reader’s awareness of the authorial voice, is seen as The Most Skilled. So much so that any appearance of authorial voice in a story is seen as intrusive, arch, quaint, or clumsy.

Or too genre-bound.

The problem is, books written in tight third were not the ones I carried around day after day in middle school. I carried around Watership Down. You know what Watership Down is written in? Omni. Richard Adams doesn’t wait for a scene break to change points of view. Sometimes he doesn’t even wait for a paragraph break. He’s so securely assured of his position as the Storyteller that he feels perfectly comfortable leading off the rabbits’ first ascent of Watership with an extended meditation on human physical viewpoint complete with a tossed-off reference to Stubbs “envisioning the skeleton inside the horse” (who the hell is Stubbs? said my 8th-grade self).

There’s no such thing as a Fourth Wall, with omni point of view.

The other book I carried around about that time was To Kill a Mockingbird. That’s written in first person perspective, framed in the narrator’s distant past. Like tight third, first person subsumes the story universe all the way to the margins, and the writer can play with the reliability of its character’s narrative. Unlike tight third, however, it presumes a storytelling situation; it singles out the reader as an interlocutor; it makes a conscious demand for attention that requires a decision on the reader’s part to deny.

It took me years of rereading Watership Down to realize -- to actually say to myself -- “Hey, this is written in omniscient point of view!” Because I took it for granted that Adams’s presence in the story as the Storyteller was natural and right. Yes, sometimes: arch. Sometimes tedious. But he belonged there.

Likewise it was probably on my twentieth read of Gaudy Night that I realized that despite the presence of scene changes to signal shifts in POV, Sayers uses a lot of omni embroidery within scenes. Murder Must Advertise is firmly framed from the Storyteller’s POV: Mr. Hankin has an opinion about Mr. Copley’s self-regard, and the Storyteller informs us that Mr. Hankin is correct. The Storyteller also has opinions about the characters, about how advertising copy is written, about the capitalist society in which the characters slog away. In fact, the passages most akin to tight third are scenes from the POV of tertiary characters like Hector Puncheon or Dian de Momerie -- scenes in which DLS wants to evoke haplessness or disorientation or dis-integration of personality.

There was a year when I carried The King of Attolia around everywhere: also a seeming-tight third story with omni embroidery. The series starts with first person; moves to omni; takes up first again as a frame narrative for the quasi-omni diplomacy section in the middle of the story; then first person again. This is a series that asks: Are these struggles being recorded properly? Can they be made sense of from the perspective of the gods? This is not a meta-narrative that can be handily addressed by tight third perspective.

Right now I’m wrestling with edits to the Original Project, and I’ve realized that my commitment to what I generally call wide-angle third brings me into conflict with tight-third conventions. It’s expected that with an ensemble of POVs you should have one POV per scene. Okay, that’s not difficult. The authorial voice should not be intrusive. Well, that’s doable -- just find an opportune moment to subsume the Storyteller’s voice in a character that’s amenable to it. I should pare away everything that is not charged with immediacy. Whoa, hang on a minute. I’m not sure I actually want to do that. Maybe I do want to talk about Stubbs envisioning the skeleton inside the horse. I’m telling myself this story; what do I want to get done here?

Probably I am justifying my own recalcitrance at this point, but while I admire enviously the jewel-like evocative language of a Marilynne Robinson, I also envy a Richard Adams’s ability to walk right into his own scene, plonk himself down, and proceed to point out the chirring flight of insects in the westering sun. It’s the anxiety of authorship catching me coming and going. And so it goes.