Theodora Goss's Blog, page 65

Becoming Yourself

You'd think that being yourself would be the easiest thing in the world, wouldn't you?

But I think we lose ourselves somewhere along the way. I suspect it starts in sixth grade, meaning middle school, which is a sort of state-sponsored engine for the crushing of souls. In sixth grade we learn, if we haven't learned it already, that we're supposed to be a number of things we probably aren't naturally, such as cool. Sixth grade was when I first started to realize that there were fashionable clothes, and that I didn't have them.

And then there's high school, where the message becomes more complex and sophisticated. In my high school, there was tracking, which meant that certain kids were on the academic track and certain kids weren't. (I was on the honors track, which was a separate system, about fifteen of us taking classes all together, essentially separated from the rest of the school. Imagine how cool that made us! If you did not notice the sarcasm in that last sentence, you must have gone to school in another country.)

What were the expectations placed on me? I was supposed to be pretty and have boyfriends. That was what my peers expected. I was supposed to excel academically, that was what the school expected. I was supposed to go to a good college so I could eventually have a successful, meaning reasonably lucrative, career. That was what my family expected.

I had a vague idea though all this that I wanted to be a writer, that writing was somehow at my core. But I was also the captain of the debate team, because I was probably going to law school, and the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland because my boyfriend was in drama, and on the tennis team I have no idea why, because I'm naturally the sort of person who cannot hit balls.

And then I went to college at the University of Virginia, and I was supposed to be pretty and have boyfriends and excel academically and go to law school, but by then I think I had developed a subversive streak. I worked as an artist's model, I dated the boys who had to leave next semester, I stopped telling my family which classes I was taking because they were simply not going to understand how African and Caribbean Literature was going to advance my career.

But I still went to Harvard Law School. And that was it for me. I think at one point, on the forty-second floor of the MetLife building in Manhattan, I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and asked the Caterpillar's question: who are you?

It's very difficult, after you've spent twenty years and eighty thousand dollars becoming someone else, to become yourself again. It takes time. At that point you can't just be yourself anymore, because you have no idea who you are. You have to figure it out.

I'm sure there's a better and easier way than the way I tried, the way that more or less worked for me, over time. I first read about it in Oprah Magazine, make of that what you will. The way has two steps:

First, ask yourself what you like.

Second, try to go in that direction.

So for example, if you're standing in front of a display case full of cakes, as I was yesterday at Berdick's, look at all the cakes carefully and ask yourself, what do I actually like? Do not order the richest, most chocolaty thing because that's what you're supposed to order in a chocolate shop. Do not order whatever looks least caloric because you're supposed to be losing weight. Try to figure out what you actually want. And then get it, unless you're simply not sure. In that case, order something as an experiment, and see if you like it. Treat your journey through the world on any particular day as an experiment in what you like.

There are a number of things I thought I liked that I realized I didn't like after all. Dramatic, sweeping skirts. They were gorgeous, and I kept stepping on them. Waist-length hair. I had it for years, and it didn't actually suit me. (I grew up with short hair, which was my mother's idea, and that didn't suit me either. So I've been to both extremes.) I've been through three different pianos because I thought I really ought to have a piano, and they were free. (There are a lot of free upright pianos out there.) Each time, they took up space and were never played. And don't get me started on when I adopted two borzois because I had a secret thought that I might be a Russian countess under the skin. (I am not. I like pets that walk themselves and have no deep-seated desire to slay wolves on the steppes.) And no matter how beautiful I think hats are, I will never, ever wear them because I find them hot and itchy.  And they're always blowing off in the wind.

In other words, I've made some strange mistakes.

The surest way to become yourself again, I think, is to discover what you actually like, item by item, and fearlessly acknowledge it, not matter how uncool it makes you. I have a passion for murder mysteries, for example. I like Land's End cardigans, and buy them in various colors. I also like pearls, and brooches of various kinds (I know, what am I, sixty-two?). Also, The Secret of Roan Inish and banana splits (I know, what am I, twelve?). I will probably never wear a scarf, because I have a passion for murder mysteries and it would give someone a convenient way to murder me, thank you. Most modern dance bores me, but then so does most Russian ballet. I don't really see the point of modernist art. I love the pre-Raphaelites and Art Nouveau, and if that means I have bad taste, so be it.

I remember the days when I used to write with a fountain pen, until I realized I didn't really like it. I was just trying to fit an image I had of myself as a writer. Now I write with a cheap rolling ball ink pen.

Figure out what you like and move toward it, one item at a time. Each item individually may seem trivial. But in the end, you will start to figure out who you are, and to become it.

A Day Off

No, of course I didn't actually take a day off. I spent a good portion of it writing, and will spend another portion of it writing later tonight. But I did take a couple of hours off to do some things that were restful and fun.

First, I decided to go to Sister Thrift, in Burlington. Here I am about to go thrift shopping, and the store itself.

I know this may seem silly, but I decided to take some pictures of items I did not buy. (So if you want them, hurry and get them!) Here, on the right, is an adorable purse with two lime green fish on it. I have no idea who made it, and if I were the sort of person who liked cute purses, I would buy it at once. But I have no use for cute purses. My purses are always functional, black or brown, unless they're evening purses. And then they're usually something like silver mesh from the 1930s.

Here, on the left, is an Eileen Fisher dress that was lovely, lime green under dress and a blue overlay. But so not my colors. What I bought instead is the skirt on the right, an Ann Taylor cotton summer skirt. I hate trying things on, and usually I don't bother because I know my size and I can tell visually whether something will fit. But this was a size 0P, and the P changes the sizing. (I don't usually wear petites.) So I tried it on, and it fit just fine, even over jeans.

I didn't even bother trying on this dress. It was loose enough that it was going to fit me no matter what. Here it is on the left on a hanger in the dressing room, and on the right on me, after being washed, at home. It's a cascade of burgundy silk velvet, incredibly soft and comfortable, and I'm seriously considering it for an ICFA banquet dress. It's in the final three. (I think it looks like something the pre-Raphaelites would paint.)

On my way out, I bought saw this silver leaf pin. It was pretty tarnished, but I knew it would clean up nicely. Here it is as I found it in the thrift store and after cleaning, with my other jewelry.

While I was gone, guess what had come in the mail! Virginia Lee's Moorland Melodies. It's absolutely gorgeous, and it's currently in a portfolio flattening out, because of course it was mailed rolled up. I'm very excited to have it framed. And then I wrote and wrote and wrote. And then, before dinner, there was a family trip to Burdick's in Harvard Square.

There were demi milk hot chocolates all around, which I think is the perfect drink and the perfect size. And shared pastries.

And that was it! Tonight I will be writing, writing, writing again. But it was nice to take at least some time off, to get out, see and taste new things. I need that, at least every once in a while.

Purity and Danger in Narnia

I know, it's Friday, so I should write a chapter of the Shadowlands serial. But I'm so tired tonight that I can't write fiction. I'm not sure why non-fiction is so much easier for me to write, but it is. (I used so three times in three sentences. That's not something I would ever do in fiction. But in non-fiction, at least in a non-fictional blog post, it doesn't seem to matter as much.)

What I want to do instead is start exploring an idea for my next Folkroots column. I'm thinking of write about the various creatures in Narnia, where they come from in myths and legends. For example, Mr. Tumnus is clearly a faun or satyr. Where do fauns and satyrs come from? (Greek myth, right? But I'll have to look that up and provide more information.)

There are two basic ideas I'm starting out with. In each column, I seem to have some sort of underlying argument. I certainly did in my column on "The Femme Fatale at the Fin-de-Siècle." I think I had one in my column on "Vampires in Folklore and Literature" as well, which is coming out in the next issue. (It will be online as well as in Realms of Fantasy.) Here are my ideas:

1. The first idea is that, despite C.S. Lewis' Christian message, the Narnia books show a deep love for the pagan mythological world on which Lewis was probably raised as a schoolboy. All boys of the upper classes were raised on the classics, back then, and you can see a love of that world in their works. I see the same impulse in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, in the chapter called "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn."

2. The second idea is that Lewis creates evil creatures in a particular way: they are creatures that break the boundary between the human and the non-human. Of course, he has all sorts of animals with human attributes, like Reepicheep, as well as half-humans, half-animals like Mr. Tumnus. But he tells us specifically, at one point, that you can't trust things that look human and aren't, or used to be human and are no longer. Humanity is a special attribute in the Narnia books, and anything that attempts to pass itself off as human is suspect. The most important example is Jadis, the White Witch. She would like you to think that she's human, but she's really from the line of Lilith, Adam's first wife. And we are told that giants and dwarves, who are also uncomfortably human-looking, cannot be trusted.

This second idea came to me years ago after I had read part of Mary Douglas' Purity and Danger. In that book, Douglas connects the prohibitions of Leviticus to the Genesis story. She says, if I remember correctly, that those prohibitions were about maintaining boundaries. Certain foods were prohibited because they fell outside the categories that had been established at the creation. For example, lobsters lived in the sea but did not have scales or fins. They did not fit into the category God had created for fish. Anything outside the categories that defined purity was taboo, unclean.

The creatures that torment Aslan before he is killed in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe are all unclean, minions of the White Witch who break that boundary between the human and not-human. And the human is important, because only sons of Adam and daughters of Eve are allowed to rule Narnia. Humanity equals purity, the ability to function as king or queen. In a way, that rule stands as a sort of bulwark against what is otherwise a jumble of contradictory mythological material. I mean, Lewis drew from all sorts of mythological systems without worrying too much about consistency. Greek centaurs and Norse dwarves? Santa Claus? I believe Tolkien criticized him for that.

So I have a basic idea for the Folkroots column (the mythological basis of the Narnia books), and two basic hypotheses about what Lewis was doing. That should be enough to start with, right?

Small Pleasures

I think a significant amount of one's happiness depends on small pleasures. I was at home today, working on a story, and I thought I would document some of the small pleasures I gave myself throughout the day. Because I do rather insist on the small pleasures.

The first one was breakfast: oatmeal with raisins, and orange juice mixed with sparkling water. Eaten while I was reading my email and checking on blogs in the morning. I usually run out of the house, grabbing two slices of toast and two Baby Bell cheeses, so having a warm, slow breakfast feels luxurious.

Yes, this picture is of a shower curtain.  It represents the pleasure of a hot shower. Is there a more luxurious pleasure than hot water? I think I've lamented, in the past, the claw-foot bathtub that we had in our Boston apartment. I will lament that bathtub until I get my next one, or until the day I die – whichever comes first.

The third is perfume. These are Origins Ginger Essence, which is my everyday perfume, Chanel No. 5, which is my perfume for evenings at the opera or other gala events, and Ralph Lauren's Romance, which I have to admit I'm not actually that fond of anymore. It's rather strong, and I have to be in the mood for it.

And then of course there's the pleasure of a made bed. There's something irritating about seeing an unmade bed. I have a hard time leaving beds unmade even in hotel rooms. Yes, that's the pillow I bought at a thrift store. You can get a lot of small pleasures at thrift stores. (Let me just add that I never understood the importance of flannel sheets before I moved to Boston. Now, I so understand.)

And here is the pleasure of a deeply ridiculous cat. But the cat has to be truly, deeply ridiculous. Cordelia fits the bill nicely. She makes such interesting shapes as she rolls around, and she shreds the paper on my desk so efficiently. And climbs on the printer. And throws up mice. (I'm starting to reconsider including her as a pleasure . . . And if she is a pleasure, I'm not sure she's a small one!)

I took those pictures this morning. For lunch I had a cheese sandwich and an apple, but I didn't take a picture of those, because how many pictures of food can I take, really? And I sat around in yoga pants and socks, writing a story, which qualifies as a great rather than a small pleasure. I don't get to do that enough, nowadays.

I spent most of the day writing and listened to Loreena McKennitt, because I can listen to her with only half my brain. The other half of my brain can continue working. I don't know if that's kind to Loreena McKennitt, who actually writes wonderful and not particularly ignorable music. But it is the perfect music to write to, at least for this story.

And finally, after I was done working on my story for the day, while I was writing this post, I had pomegranate chip coconut milk ice cream. Which is my new favorite.  No, I don't eat every single meal sitting in front of my computer.  Ophelia and I had quite a nice dinner together (although while watching Pokémon).  But afterward, I did need to write today's blog post.

This is a silly post, isn't it? But I can't write about what I'm working on, and I didn't do anything else today, just write. So I thought I would at least write about the small pleasures that got me through a long day of work – through the great pleasure, but also the great effort, of writing.

And in general I recommend small pleasures, sprinkled judiciously throughout the day.  Just on principle, you know?

The Romantic Underground

Once upon a time, by which I mean in 2005, Jeff VanderMeer wrote an essay called "The Romantic Underground."

It's about an imaginary literary movement, or rather non-movement, because the defining characteristic of the Romantic Underground is that all of its supposed members denied both the existence of the movement and their own membership. I'm going to give you a few excerpts from the essay, although you'll certainly want to read it for yourself. Jeff writes, "The first text identified with the Romantic Underground was Gustave Flaubert's The Temptation of St. Anthony (1874), since claimed by the Symbolists." However,

"Flaubert vehemently denied that his book was a Romantic Underground text; in fact, he denied the existence of the movement altogether. This has been a recurring refrain in the development of the Romantic Underground: every author identified as an adherent of the movement has denied this fact. No text has long remained part of the Romantic Underground because no living author has allowed it to for very long. (In some cases, another movement has made a better case in claiming a particular text, as well.)"

Other supposed members of the Romantic Underground include "Remy de Gourmont, Oscar Wilde, August Strindberg, Emile Zola, Alfred Kubin, Andre Breton, and Ronald Firbank."

"Regardless, the enduring properties of the Romantic Underground remain a lack of membership by those authors cited and a general lack of identifying characteristics. At first, reading between the lines of critical texts from the period – some from the infamous Yellow Book – the Romantic Underground apparently formed a "loose umbrella" around certain authors, attempting to provide a critical and imaginative landscape in which creativity could have free, albeit vague, reign. Authors being skittish at best, most apparently saw the umbrella as more of a trap and escaped without their names ever being connected to rumors of a vast but secret literary organization dedicated to the antithesis of anything popular, tidy, or, indeed, logical."

By this point in the essay, we're getting a sense of what this movement might have looked like, if it had indeed existed. It would have included particular writers, ones I usually think of as turning away from nineteenth-century realism. It would have been "dedicated to the antithesis of anything popular, tidy, or, indeed, logical." (I think I can detect, in Jeff's essay, the influence of Jorge Luis Borges' "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," although the imaginary creation is a literary movement rather than a world.)  Jeff continues,

"Chroniclers of the Romantic Underground lost track of it during the 1920s and most of the 1930s, when the group may have decided to form 'literary guerrilla cells of single individuals, with no communication between any two cells.' It is supposed that Jorge Luis Borges joined the movement in the 1940s, but only a reference to 'the underground romantic with his hopeless beret' in his short story 'The Immortal' (1962) suggests any active participation. Fellow South Americans Pablo Neruda and Gabriel Garcia Marquez may have joined the movement in the 1960s and 1970s, but, again, both deny the existence of the movement and any participation in it – thus seeming to substantiate the rumors, since this behavior is all too indicative of Romantic Underground members."

I find this, "literary guerrilla cells of single individuals, with no communication between any two cells," incredibly funny. But again we're getting a sense of who this non-movement might have included: Borges, Neruda, Marquez.

"In the 1980s, writers such as Rikki Ducornet, Angela Carter, Edward Whittemore, and Alasdair Gray all denied being part of the Romantic Underground movement. At this point, noted critic John Clute, in a footnote to a review of Iain M. Banks' Culture novel Consider Phlebas (Interzone, 1987), wrote 'The sole criteria of the so-called Romantic Underground movement? The conscription of idiosyncratic writers dragged without their consent to the renunciation block, where they proceed to deny entrapment in anything as clandestine and formless.'"

Which does rather sound like something John Clute might have written. Jeff goes on to consider whether the Interstitial Arts Foundation might have anything to do with the Romantic Underground, or whether New Weird might have. He strongly refutes both possibilities and concludes,

"Therefore, I reluctantly tip my hat to the cleverness of the Romantic Underground movement. It appears once again to have relegated itself to single-author cells, none of which are in communication with any other, similar cells. Although writers such as Angela Carter, Edward Whittemore, and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as such contemporary authors as Edward Carey, Peter Carey, A.S. Byatt, Thomas Pynchon, Martin Amis, Ursula K. LeGuin, Jack Dann, M. John Harrison (a double-agent), Kelly Link (another double-agent, working for both the Interstitial and RU), Paul Di Filippo, Zoran Zivkovic, Gene Wolfe, Jeffrey Ford, K.J. Bishop, Liz Williams, Nalo Hopkinson, Michael Cisco, Stepan Chapman, Rhys Hughes, Ian R. MacLeod, and myself have at one time or another been associated with the Romantic Underground movement – depending on the tone or theme or style of a particular book – none of us has ever admitted belonging to such a movement (either while living or after death). The Romantic Underground, it would appear, retains its crafty self-denying ability even one hundred years after its non-formation and the non-creation of its non-rules. In short, dear reader, the Romantic Underground, like many so-called movements, does not exist."

Which is funny, right? I think it's incredibly funny. But.

The term Jeff uses to describe these writers is in fact a useful term. It does describe something, a tendency in literature. It's useful and interesting, at least for me, to look at Oscar Wilde and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Rikki Ducornet and see an underlying – certainly not similarity in terms of themes or styles, but similar resistance to a realistic mode of representation. I've argued before on panels that fantasy is not a genre, but a pull in a particular direction, toward representing the world in a particular way. Jeff is largely describing writers who feel and respond to that pull.

James Owen has taken the Romantic Underground seriously. He has subtitled his blog, The Wonder Cabinet, "Words from the Romantic Underground." And you know, I think he has a point. I think there is a way in which the writers and artists I know who are currently working in fantasy, and who are working in what we often call the literary and artistic mainstream but who incorporate elements of the fantastic into their writing and art, form a romantic underground. As Jeff describes it, "literary guerrilla cells of single individuals, with no communication between any two cells," but nevertheless with some commonalities that we can point to, and that may be important.

I would have to think about what I mean when I say romantic underground, because my academic training is not in that era. But I think part of what I mean is a valuing of imaginative and fantastic, rather than realistic, representation. I think what we're seeing in some parts of the artistic and literary world (and have been seeing for some time) is a response to modernism that is not necessarily post-modern, but something else. The New Weird was part of it, but it's a larger and more general phenomenon. It's a new romanticism, a new kind of romanticism. At least, I connect it with the romanticism of Coleridge and Shelley and Keats. And with whatever was happening at the fin-de-siècle, with Stevenson and Wilde.

And I'll leave it there, because I can't go much beyond that, at least not at the moment. I'm too tired, because I spent the day teaching and commenting on papers. The latter of which looked like this (in my office, of course):

And I still have a lot to do tonight. Mostly writing, because as I mentioned, I have a deadline before I go to ICFA next week. I'm looking forward to ICFA, and of course I'll keep you updated while I'm there. I'll even post pictures. But there are people I wish were coming this year who can't make it, which is sad. (Hopefully next year.)

The Forest of Deadlines

I'm in the forest of deadlines. Not lost in it, because I have specific markers, specific tasks I need to accomplish that will lead me out of the forest. But I will be in the forest at least until the academic year ends. Here's what that forest has looked like this month, and will look like for the rest of the year:

March 1: Revised second chapter of my dissertation due. This was the central, most important chapter, and I turned it in on time.

March 1: Folkroots column due. I had to ask for an extension on this, but with the extension and some revisions after that, I think the column turned out very well. It's called "Fairies and Fairylands," and it's going to be in the April issue.

March 15: Story due. I'm not going to talk about this yet, but I'm really enjoying working on it.

April 1: Revised third chapter of my dissertation due. Once this chapter is revised, I will have a revised version of the entire dissertation.

April 15: Story due. Again, I'm not going to talk about this yet, except to say that it's a companion piece to the story due on March 15th.

May 1: Revised first chapter of my dissertation due. Actually, I've already revised the first chapter, so I think this is when I'll turn in the entire dissertation, revised. The whole thing all together. Right around this time, a few days before I believe, I have another Folkroots deadline. I think I know what I'm going to write about – and I think you're going to like it! But I'm not telling just yet.

And that's as far as I'm thinking, right now. But you can see, can't you, what a forest it is? Although I love everything I'm doing – even the dissertation, mostly.

I'm writing all this to let you know how busy the rest of the academic year is going to be for me, because times like this make me curl into my shell somewhat, snail-like. It's my natural introversion. What it means, practically, is that my posts here will probably be less general, more personal, reflecting the fact that I'm looking inward. Although honestly, I'm not sure how much of a difference you'll see, since my idea of personal is to write about the sort of prose I love, that sort of thing.

It's been such a strange year, and by year I always mean academic year, since for an academic a year is always September to August. Probably one of the most complicated and intense years of my life. But it's taught me so much about who I am and what I want in that life (beach houses in North Carolina, for instance – and writing novels). It's not over yet, and I think at the end of it, I will be a different person than I was at the beginning. But that's a good thing. That means I'm living and changing, finding what I want to do in the world – as I ought to be.

But the introverted stage won't last forever, only as long as the work is so intense. And after it's done, there are all sorts of things I want to do that don't involve sitting and going inside myself, which is what I'm doing now. I'll give you an example. This is a trailer for Catherynne M. Valente's new novel Deathless. I think it's gorgeously done.

There are so many tools available to us now as writers. I want to make audio and video, perhaps in collaboration with others, related to my writing but also in addition to and complementing it. Modern technology allows me, simply sitting at my computer, to do so much. Why not take advantage of it? My first idea is a YouTube version of The Mad Scientist's Daughter.

But that will come later. Right now, I'm in the forest of deadlines and I have to get through this year – or at least get through to the summer, when things will be easier. But I'll make it. I always have before.

Writers and Readers

I've had a feeling today that I sometimes get when I'm tired, as though part of me were missing. It's a Herbert the Alligator feeling, I suppose. As though I were incomplete.

What it makes me think of, since my mind tends in this direction, is the relationship between writers and readers. Writers sometimes think that the story is what they write, what's on the page. But of course it's not. The story is a collaboration between the writer and reader. It exists in the reader's head, but is created by both: the words of the writer and the imagination of the reader.

Good writers realize that they're collaborators, and they write out of that knowledge. Beginning writers will often describe everything. But that leaves nothing for the imagination of the reader to do. Good writers are aware of the reader. They know the reader is there to complete the story, will imagine the characters from pieces of information. So they work on providing the right pieces.

Here I was, trying to provide the right pieces yesterday, writing:

And writing:

And writing:

I think writing is partly a way to deal with that feeling of being incomplete. At least it is for me, right now. When I feel that way, I write. But honestly, I don't think I can write today. I don't know what it is. Nothing is coming out right.  I can't seem to make the connection.

Maybe it's just tiredness, I don't know. Maybe it's working on a writing project that's taking up a great deal of my time. Maybe it's that tonight, I feel as though a part of me were missing, and I don't have whatever it takes to write through that, despite that.

This is a short blog post, isn't it? Well, so be it.

A Thousand Words

I've written before about writing a thousand words a day, every day. (Yes, any sort of writing will do. A thousand words of anything, as long as it really is writing. Do tweets count? I'm not sure tweets count.)

Someone, I'm not sure whom, commented that if I wrote every day, and writing was a pleasure, then I was doing something that gave me pleasure every day, and I thought – more than that. And my thoughts went back to some passages in Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.

I've had an interesting and difficult relationship with that book. I love what Frankl has to say about life in general, about how our central driving force is the search for meaning. The difficulty is that I can't seem to get through the first part of the book, where he describes being in a concentration camp. It's not that the section is horrific – quite the opposite. It's so ordinary, and I have a difficult time with the idea that one person can treat another person that way, or one group of people can treat another group of people that way, and it can become ordinary. I find that a profoundly painful, although very important, realization.

The second part of the book, which is theoretical, is much easier to read, and I think that's a sort of failure on my part, that I can take the theory but not the practical experience on which it was founded.

But there are parts of the theory that are important to me. Frankl essentially states that the search for meaning is our most important drive, and that we can endure almost anything if we can find a meaning in it. But also that meaning, searching for it and finding it, is what leads to fulfillment, to joy.

More specifically, he writes,

"For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment."

And,

"One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is as unique as his specific opportunity to implement it."

And,

"Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In other words, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible."

What I get from this is that I have to find the meaning of my life, and that the process of finding it will be something I continue to do (there is no endpoint), and that the meaning will alter depending on where I am in my life and my circumstances. And I am the one who is asked to find that particular meaning. It is my meaning, not necessarily anyone else's.

And this comes from elsewhere in Frankl, I think, but it's important for me to realize that I am called to find that meaning, whether that call emanates from within me or comes from outside. Either way, it's a call and I need to answer it, to respond. To be responsible is to be the one who responds – not by fulfilling anyone else's meaning, not by doing what anyone else tells me to do, but by doing what I am called to do.

Frankl also writes, and this I find to be very important,

"We can discover this meaning in life three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering."

I'm not going to talk about (3) because that's the territory of concentration camps and chronic diseases, and I have no right to talk about that. I have never experienced unavoidable suffering. Frankl does say, and this is important to me, that suffering is not itself ennobling, and should be avoided whenever possible. There is no point to seeking out suffering. But if it truly is unavoidable, one can experience it in such a way that one retains meaning, and therefore a reason to continue on, to live. And one can even die with meaning.

Writing falls, fairly obviously I think, under (1), which Frankl calls "the way of achievement or accomplishment." I think I would rather call it the way of work. Because for me, the meaning of writing is not in achieving or accomplishing something, which implies that meaning arises when the work is done, but in the activity itself. I find meaning in the act of writing, in the creation.

So, by writing a thousand words a day, I'm not just giving myself pleasure. I'm also creating meaning in my life. And that's even more important, I think. If meaning is the aim of life, our fundamental drive, then every day I'm working toward that aim. I'm responding to that call.

Frankl says, "The second way of finding a meaning in life," meaning (2) above, "is by experiencing something – such as goodness, truth and beauty – by experiencing nature and culture or, last but not least, by experiencing another human being in his very uniqueness – by loving him."

I know I'm not doing the experiencing enough. I'm not getting out into the natural world enough (well, it's winter, and I hate the cold), or the museum enough, which would give me my dose of beauty. And that last bit, I wrote about in my blog post "Thoughts on Love," which was about experiencing another human being in his or her uniqueness. I'm not sure you can experience another human being in any other way. If you want to change another human being, to make him or her into something different, you lose the uniqueness, you lose the human being. I suppose what Frankl means, in a sense, is that the other human being will have his or her own meaning, his or her own response. And you have to respect that.

But what I wanted to do, here, was talk about writing a thousand words a day. If I do that, I give myself pleasure, but more than that, I provide myself with a way to both generate and discover the meaning of my life, at this particular moment. One blog post at a time.

A Writerly Day

Today, I had a particularly writerly day.

As you probably remember, I had turned in my Folkroots column earlier in the week. It's a column called "Fairies and Fairylands," and it should appear in the June issue of Realms of Fantasy. Yesterday, Doug had emailed me about the column, asking whether it was accurate to identify J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan stories as Victorian, since they had been published in the early twentieth century. He was right, of course. I should have identified them as Edwardian, or perhaps early Modern. That's what a great editor does: alert you to your mistakes, so you can make your column as accurate and informative as it can possibly be. I'm always grateful for good editing. As I was reading through the manuscript, I found some other changes I wanted to make. One paragraph was too long, so I deleted a description of Lord Dunsany's "Kith of the Elf-Folk." It hadn't really fit into the paragraph. And I was missing a general paragraph on what to do when you encounter fairies, how to behave. I thought that was necessary. Because what do you do? It's important to know, isn't it? So I spent the morning revising.

Before I could send off the revised manuscript, I had to rush to Harvard Square to have lunch with Niall Harrison, the Editor-in-Chief of Strange Horizons, and Matt Denault, who is one of the Strange Horizons reviewers. Niall lives in Oxford, and was in Boston for a week. Today was his last day here, so I'm glad I was able to meet him. We went to a Thai restaurant, where I had shumai and tom yum, and then to Bob Slate's. I'm so sad that Bob Slate's is closing. It's been in Harvard Square for so long, and as far as I'm concerned, it's the best stationary store in the world. I write in notebooks from Bob Slate's. I bought seven of them, narrow ruled, with heavy paper. I hope they last me several years. Here are Niall and Matt in front of Bob Slate's:

Then we went to Burdick's, the chocolate shop. We had their hot chocolate, and although I only had a small cup, I have to admit that I'm still feeling its effects. I'm not sure how well I'll sleep tonight. (I know, it's silly, but I respond to both coffee and chocolate that way. They keep me up.) Here is the chocolate shop:

Niall and Matt went off to Pandemonium. I needed to return home, because I still had a column to send out. But I had half an hour before I needed to get on the T to meet my ride home, so I went to some of the old places I remember from when I was a law student at Harvard. The first was the Brattle Square Florist, where I used to buy myself flowers:

The second was Colonial Drug, where I used to buy my favorite perfume, Balenciaga's Prelude. It's such an unprepossessing entrance, but it carries all the great perfumes, from the couture houses. That perfume was discontinued years go, but as I looked at the perfumes in the glass case, I saw a bottle! I asked the price. Of course, it was incredibly expensive: $130. Prelude is now a cult classic, a collector's item. I'm so sad it was discontinued. And to think I used to scent letters with it! Here is Colonial Drug:

I returned home, finished my column, and sent it to Doug. It was late, I was tired, so I looked at some friends' blogs, and on one of them I found this:

Can you see what this is? It's a video of the Mythpunk panel from Boskone! I'm on YouTube! Of course I had to watch the whole thing, the whole hour. And you know what? It was fun to watch! I thought I did pretty well, considering that I was on a panel with brilliant writers and speakers. I noticed that I use my hands a lot when I talk, and you know, I rather like that. It's me, what I do.

If you've never seen me on a panel, this is a good example of what I do, how I speak.

I'm rather proud of being on YouTube.

And I thought, if this is what a writerly day looks like, I'm in. The writing, the revising, the meeting and interacting with editors and reviewers. The watching and evaluating your own performance on a panel. There's a whole lot more that goes into being a writer, of course. A whole lot more writing than I did today, in particular. But that's also a pleasure.

So it's been a good day, and I'm feeling all writerly myself. Which feels good.

Herbert's Story

I've been worried about Herbert.

You see, I left him hanging from the ceiling in Professor Mandragora's laboratory, looking sad. Herbert was originally not going to be a character at all. He was just a literary reference. But as soon as he reacted to something, as soon as he showed that he was responding to the world around him, I had to go back and write his story.

I can make characters wicked, or selfish, all sorts of awful things. And that's all right, as long as they still have agency. But I can't trap a character.

So I decided that Herbert had to have a story of his own.

First, I had to look up where alligators come from, because I'd forgotten. The answer is Florida. (Obvious, I know, but I always mix them up with crocodiles. I should remember: crocodile, Nile.)

Herbert originally came from Florida. But by the time Professor Mandragora bought him, from her usual taxidermy shop, he had been taxidermed for more than fifty years. He was an old specimen that the taxidermist had bought on sale, somewhat the worse for wear. Professor Mandragora bought him for only twenty-five dollars.

She always went to the taxidermy shop on Thursdays, to see what the taxidermist had in stock. She brought birds and squirrels and foxes back to her laboratory. There, she took the bodies apart, added mechanical elements, and created something that was part animal, part machine. Then she added magic, to make them go. They were toys, really. Mechanical toys that allowed her to experiment, to practice her skills.

That's what she did to Herbert. But with Herbert, something happened.

What is a soul? You probably haven't thought about that question lately. And I can't give you a firm, solid answer. (Any more than the soul is something firm and solid.) The soul is the self. Everything living has one, and when it dies, that soul goes back where it came from, to become part of the soul of creation itself. The soul is part of that great soul, but also separate from it. That is a paradox, but the soul is also a paradox, infinitely small but larger than a universe. And not even witches understand it fully.

What happened was this. When Herbert had died, his soul had merged back into the soul of creation. Professor Mandragora's mechanical creations were not alive, and had no souls. But when she reanimated Herbert, a part of his soul must somehow have sensed that his old body was available again, was animate, not alive but capable of motion. And it came back.

She had given him a clockwork heart, and eyes that moved mechanically. She had inserted an entire mechanical apparatus, a metal spine that allowed him to move. She had patched parts of him with thin copper plates. And then, since she did not actually have room for an alligator in her laboratory, she had hung him from the ceiling, where he occasionally swung his head or swished his tail.

The expression of sadness on his alligator face, on the day Thea, Matilda, Emma, and Mouse visited, was the first sign that a part of his soul had returned. That afternoon, when Professor Mandragora returned to the laboratory, she immediately knew that something had happened. She took Herbert down, inserted a box made of metal plates and thin metal wires into his throat, and said, "All right, Herbert. What's wrong?"

It took him a moment. Remember, he had never spoken before. But he had always been a particularly bright alligator.

"I – don't know," he said. He swished his tail, startled by the sound of his own voice, and almost brought down a large stack of books.

"I diagnose an existential crisis," said Professor Mandragora. "It will pass, you know. As soon as you find the rest of your soul. It's probably still in Florida, in the swamp where you were shot."

"Florida?" said Herbert. His voice had an odd, but not unpleasant, whirring sound.

"How are we going to get you to Florida?" asked Professor Mandragora. "It's the middle of the semester, and I can't leave my students or my research. You'll need to get yourself down there. But how?"

For Professor Mandragora, this was a rhetorical question, a way of focusing her energy rather than actually asking. She knew how.

She gave him wings. They were made of copper, and would weather but not rust. They were large but light, and she hammered the magic right into them. (She had majored in Magical Physics at MIT.)

On a cold but sunny day (all days in Boston are cold, but not all days are sunny), she said goodbye to Herbert, and told him to take good care of himself. Then he rose into the air with more grace than you might expect from a taxidermed alligator (he had been practicing for several weeks). And he flew south. She saw him silhouetted against the sky, looking like an awkward dragon, and very much hoped that she had done the right thing. But even a taxidermed alligator deserves to find his soul, she thought. And I agree.

What happened to Herbert? There were storms, and high winds, and once he was almost lost at sea. But at last he came to the Everglades, and there he found his soul, among the roots of a cypress. It was pleased to have a body again, and for the first time in his brief afterlife, Herbert felt a sense of peace, a sense as though he was no longer missing a part of himself.

Soon after, he met a girl named Alice. She was sixteen, and she had never owned a pair of shoes. Despite what seemed like unprepossessing circumstances, Alice wanted to go to college and study ecology. But she had no money, had never had any money, and they don't let you into college for a faded dress and an old baseball cap.

I think it was Alice's idea. At least, she wrote the sign: See the Flying Alligator! Only $5!

And you know, if you put up a sign that like, people will actually want to see the flying alligator, sometimes twice in a row. Especially after a feature on the local PBS station, which was broadcast to other PBS stations so that all the way up in Boston, Professor Mandragora saw it and said, "Good work, Herbert!"

It was the Herbert stuffed alligators that allowed Alice to go to college, and then to graduate school. Herbert went with her, and eventually her roommates got used to him. Today, Alice is an ecologist (Dr. Alice, the locals call her), and Herbert lives with her in a house at the edge of the Everglades. The house is filled with plants, tanks of fish, birds undergoing rehabilitation.

And the last time I visited, they were very happy.

I've decided that every Friday, I'm going to write part of the Shadowlands serial. If you want to read parts that I've already written, go to Serial. There, you can read all about Thea Graves, Matilda Tillinghast, Emma Gaunt, and Mouse, from the beginning.