Jennifer Freitag's Blog, page 27

A Literary Enlightenment

the shadow things
First of all, sale alert!  For all your Kindle owners, if you haven't bought The Shadow Things ebook already, check out the Amazon ebook sale.  The Shadow Things is a meager $0.99!  The sale ends tomorrow, so get right on that.  Abigail has a nice neat write-up on the sale and its other participants here on the Scribbles and Inkstains.  We're getting into the long dog-days of summer and you'll need plenty of reading material, so do a pack of authors a favour and snatch up our books while you can!

gingerune
Secondly, you may dimly remember that at the beginning of Plenilune I threw out a plea to all my followers to send in any and all questions they could think of so that I could answer them.  I got gobs of questions and greatly enjoyed answering them.  Now, 104,000 words into Gingerune, I would like to do the same for my current novel-in-progress.  I have already done a few snippets posts and given you fleeting glimpses of what I have been studying, but that is all pretty one-sided and I like interaction.  So hurl those questions at me.  The world is the world of Gingerune.  The characters, yet to be fathomed.  The plot, for you to wait agonizing for until an undetermined date.

go get 'em, tiger!

The Stone Giants

"What dost thou in this living tomb?"Matthew Arnold
This is really the sort of thing you expect from Abigail, I fancy.  Trying to pin my brain down to any sort of really serious research is like a cat trying to pin down the reflection off your watch-face.  Abigail is much more diligent and, in general, much more concrete-minded than I am, which means I have to work against my nature to store up treasures of fact in my memory.  She loves biographies, and I don't really.  She loves heavy, many-paged histories and slogs through them much the same way I slog through thirty minutes of exercises on a Monday morning. 

But there is one "biography" type that I do like, and that is archaeology.  I don't know why, and to this day the bizarre truth of the matter still baffles me.  The sport is full of crinkled tomes with black-and-white snapshots: not the sort of thing that would naturally lend itself a fitting helpmeet to my colourful imagination.  And yet the science, born in an era full of romanticism, still retains an ineluctable magic among its sun-bleached columns that enchants me - and that, most likely, is why I am perfectly willing to snatch up a copy of Paul MacKendrick's works and snuggle in tight for 500+ pages' worth of black-and-white snapshots and text.  I love the alchemical magic of coaxing potsherds out of the earth and building a civilization on them.  And archaeology is just that: not just the tedious, perhaps sometimes dull, work of moving mind-boggling tonnages of earth off God alone knows how many superimposed cities that have struggled upward, been crushed in the course of a few days, risen again only to be crushed into oblivion, but the steady piecing together of physical artefact, legend, and the nature of man which has not changed much in two fistfuls or so of millennia.  It is a kind of resurrection, and, ergo, makes for a thrilling read. 

I mentioned on The Penslayer near the beginning of my work on Gingerune that the transition from Plenilune to Gingerune was proving to be difficult because the social spheres were so diametrically different.  I was in danger of giving myself whiplash and it is only very recently (about 99,000 words in) that I am beginning to feel I have enough of a mental image of Gingerune's world that I can finally begin to bring it across adequately to the reader.  I spoke of having to "fall in love" with Gingerune's world.  I am beginning to do that.

The architectonic aim is not grandiosity, as in Egypt, or subordination to a central megaron, as at Mycenae or Tiryns, but variety of line and color, achieved by facades with setbacks, terraces and flat roofs of various heights, the play of light and shadow on white gypsum stucco, blue-gray local stone, red cypress beams and columns; the alteration of light and darkness in propylons, light wells, peristyles, porticoes, and open courts of various shapes and sizes. (MacKendrick, The Greek Stones Speak)

Compared to its topic and size, I veritably tore through Christos G. Doumas' work Thera: Pompeii of the Ancient Aegean; I am now about a third of the way through The Greek Stones Speak, having begun it a week ago.  Maps, charts, black-and-white snapshots, dates, names, myths, stone-types, building styles, pottery genres, languages, are crowded together in my head.  My dreams are becoming painted with the flamboyant reds and blues that the Minoan civilization adored; the buildings I blink through disjointedly in my sleep are full of light wells and sudden dog-legs, lavishly frescoed with naturalistic imagery.  Like Sir Arthur Evans, my imagination is tumbling heels over head through a civilization that outpaced the rest of the world during its day.  As is the case with people, it has taken me time to get to know the time and place of Gingerune and to fashion a relationship with it, but now I love it - which is the first step toward teaching you to love it too.

if thou hast cross'd the sea to-ward the east;if thou hast set thy prow into the dawn;if thou hast reached as far as man hast reachedand, onward, gone as far as man hast gone;beneath the far-flung rays of Greekish sunsthere lies, upon a wind-swept foaming sea,a land from which the ancient legends runto tell a sight that, like tides, shall draw thee - a shining place, shaped as the crescent moonand in the dawn-light white with gypsum-stone,whose fig and olive trees dance to the tuneof sea and wind and lonesome seabird's moan.if thou hast cross'd the sea to Thera's shorehast seen a land of ages gone before.a.j.h.

Thou Art Past The Tyrant's Stroke

Fear no more the frown o' the great,Thou art past the tyrant's stroke; Care no more to clothe and to eat;To thee the reed is as the oak:The sceptre, learning, physic, mustAll follow this and come to dust.shakespeare, "cymbeline"
Write A Break-Out Novel.  Write the Next Best-Seller.  Improve Your Marketing Platform.  How To Be a Successful Writer.  Drive, drive, drive.  Success.  Fame.  (Money!)  It seems as though, if you are not the cat's meow, you are no one.  If you aren't the one at the very top, you've failed.  In our high-powered, high-definition, global world, full of beautiful faces and pristine marketing images, full of the news of success (and the infamy of bankruptcy and failure), the race is on to be the One and Only, the world's darling, the best of the best.  Anything less is complete, shameful failure.

In a sense this mindset is a byproduct of capitalism and the American Dream, a mixture of spun clouds and false dreams, but I don't think I will go into all that right now.  Suffice it to say that, in our relatively free world, we believe we have the right to be the best.  And we do, but so many latch onto that right and blow it wildly out of proportion, losing sight of the fact that, firstly, we have to the right to do our best.  Providence will determine whether we taste fame or not.  It is still incumbent upon us to do the best we can with whatever skills we have in whatever spheres we are placed.  This is your proverbial sine qua non.

In my case, that skill and sphere is writing.  What I am about to say may come across as pessimistic, perhaps even bitter and jaded.  I assure you that is quite the opposite of my sentiments.  I adore what I do and I am so glad I have the freedom to pursue a "writing career."  However.  However, looking critically at my writing compared with popular writing, I do not see much reconciliation between the two and I don't really anticipate ever becoming really famous.  Not in my lifetime, at least.  This is not to say that the possibility is not to be entertained, but judging from my own style and incorrigible allusions to the arcane and obscure, I don't reasonably expect my books to become famous.  This is also not to say that I believe my writing will not be enjoyed.  With the exception of one reader (whose review puzzled me, but one has freedom of speech and opinion) everyone I have run across who has read The Shadow Things has enjoyed it to varying degrees, but certainly enjoyed it.  Everyone who has had glimpses, or full on reads of, Adamantine and Plenilune has enjoyed the stories and their execution.  Personally, I think I'm a decent writer with a fair imagination and a doggish tenacity that will carry me far.  But I don't think I'm popular. 

This doesn't exclude me from pushing my manuscripts and marketing.  Nothing will come to anything if it isn't helped along.  But my expectations for my novels remain realistic.  I don't want to ravage the walls of my stomach trying to push my novels into a limelight they were not meant for.  If they do become famous, I will be pleasantly surprised and rather abashed, but I don't expect it, so I'm not going to worry about it.  There are laws at work in the universe, and while the public does not appear, at first glance, to operate by any order, they really do and one has to respect that.  You might throw in examples like C.S. Lewis and say that some sound-minded, deeply intelligent people do become famous world-wide.  I would have to say that I don't consider myself to be on the intellectual level Lewis attained - my training and natural thought-processes do not yet allow it - and looking at the Lewis fanbase, I wonder if the really good jewels in his writing have been extracted by as many people as like his writing.  I doubt it. 

That's the closest I will come to pessimism.  An artist has to go into his art knowing that a few people will "get" him, many people may "like" him, and lots of people will misinterpret him altogether.  But there is a time and a place for everything, and that's fact.  I don't think it reasonable to expect that my novels' place is the limelight of the American book market; if it somehow is, I don't have any notion as to when that time might be.  Until then, I'm content to quietly rip decent fiction from the bowels of my imagination, put it in some kind of order, and offer it to whatever reading public is silly enough to fall prey to the alluring music of my writing. 

The Devil In Me

"I was born with the devil in me.  I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than a poet can help the inspiration to sing."Dr. H.H. Holmes, serial killer, 1896
It would appear that the shadow of my last novel, coming after me, is yet long indeed.
 * * * * *If I stretched I would be rewarded with a beautiful muscular pain which must be what all cats feel when they arch and curl their toes, but I was too lazy even to do that.  Even through the glass I could hear the bees under full sail in the clover; the summer sun pressed warmly on my cheek as I shifted my head a fraction into the embrace of my arm.  It was a rich, lazy summer day, a day of low, slow blood and limbs sprawling across a couch.  For the better part of a half hour I had hovered in a doze, moon-facedly happy with life, and too lazy even to stretch a limb.  Save for the bees, it was very quiet.  Badger was laid up in bed pretending to be an invalid after the extraction of a tooth.  Mother and Father had gone off alone on horseback.  It was only Bruin and myself this afternoon, silent and companionable, enthralled by the mellowing power of the summer warmth in the solarium.I do not know why we chose the solarium.  At high summer, with the room all windows and the bulk of it facing south, it was liable to be smothering hot.  But thank God there was a wind that day which kept the worst edge off the warmth; and anyway, Bruin was writing and liked the best light possible.  Like a cat I preferred to be near quiet people while I napped, and the couch in the solarium with its siren’s croon had been welcoming.  I had succumbed to its embraces without resistance.  There was a soft rustle of paper.  “Goddgofang,” said Bruin quietly: “are you awake?”Too lazy to stretch, I was almost too lazy to speak.  For a few moments I stared up the curve of my arm, up the back of the sofa into the white image of the sky out the window.  “No,” I said at last.There was a chitter of a chair’s legs on the stone floor.  (The stones, too, helped keep the room from being unbearably warm.)  “Yes, I thought so…  I have been thinking,” he went on, “and would like, perhaps, another mind to help me.”I roused myself to turn my head toward him.  He sat in one of those rather uncomfortable straight-backed chairs—though, I admit, I have always been a bit free with my posture—poised lightly with one hand spread on his papers and the other crooked, holding a pen; his head, too, was turned at me, and there was a little thoughtful, patient smile on his face for he seemed to anticipate my sluggish blood and was ready to fight against my desire to go back to my cat-nap.  Realizing he meant business, I blinked, cleared my sun-dazzled eyes, and gave him my attention.“I am listening.”He held my eye and did not look away.  “I was speaking with Avery the other day about my books.  He mentioned that he had just finished Scandalonand marked to me his own surprise in the apparent disparate natures of myself and my book.  ‘One wouldn’t think it, to look at you,’ he said—I think he meant it kindly—‘that you had such a raw imagination.’  It puzzled me.”  The puzzlement formed a darkness between his brows—Mother’s brows, I thought of a sudden.  Odd how I had never noted that before.  “It puzzled you that there should seem to be such a difference between yourself and your works?” I prompted.But he shook his head, smiling a little shyly.  “Nay, not that.  I am aware of that, and that, I think, is only natural in the writer…  Nay, it was his underlying meaning.  Perhaps it is best displayed in his non-verbal speech.  He seemed abashed.  I had one of those awful moments in which my mind ran back over all the uncomfortable scenes in the book and I had to stand there and act as sleek and cool as a cat knowing that we were both thinking the same thing.  Yea,” Bruin suddenly laughed a little at his own expense, “if he was abashed, I was nigh embarrassed!  But most of all I wondered why he did not understand me.”My mind, too, travelled back across the pages of that book.  A raw, unsettling novel: the story of a man on his merry way to heaven only to find, when he got there, that he was in hell.  Avery was the sort of fellow who saw things in black and white—which was not bad, but the intricate patterns which black and white could make in life sometimes went overlooked by him and, when he found them, often mistook them for grey.  Scandalon was not the sort of book he would have really liked.  I was a bit sorry for that, and even found myself sore on Bruin’s account.  Bruin had turned away, back toward his manuscript, and was going on quietly as if to himself.  “I become worried by this turn of events.  Afterward I was able to think back over my novels, each at a time, and found each subsequent story a little harsher than the one before.”I put out my leg on the arm of the sofa, bending my foot until the long lean muscles in my calf groaned with delight.  “Hast only three,” I pointed out placidly.He looked at me askance, and it was Mother’s face I saw.  “A’come,” he said with the closest he came to roughness, “I am trying to explain myself.”“I follow you.  I just do not want you to outweigh yourself with plumage and feathering of importance.  The book is a good book,” I added definitely.  “So what is the trouble?”“I am,” he replied with emphasis.  “I am.  I looked at him and he looked at me, and it was not that he thought there was such an apparent difference between myself and my novels, but that he feared there was nodifference.  I was of a sudden all the evil and villainy of my novel—none of the goodness of it,” he marked out: “people will forget that.”A harsh, involuntary smile gripped my mouth.  “They like to be mean-spirited.”But he shrugged.  “I do not know that Avery himself meant to be mean-spirited.  It is perhaps that age-old disconnect between the writer and the reader.”  Suddenly he waved one hand.  “But that is not what I am talking of.”  With both hands and an angry splatter of ink he gestured forcefully at the paper in front of him.  “When I write, I write for people to see things—ordinary things which have always been there, but which people overlook—or do not see through overuse.  I don’t believe it was so much the shock of Reynard winding up in hell instead of heaven that got to Avery.  I think it was Reynard himself.  I think it was the upending of his virtues.  For some time Reynard comes across as an admirable gentleman.  I found myself at turns watching him display virtues that I wish to possess.  Then when we get to heaven—hell, that is, in this instance—it is like that ending passage of The Inferno in which the world is suddenly thrown over on its ear—quand’ io mi volsi, tu passasti ‘l punto al qual si traggon d’ogne parte i pesi—and everything you thought turns out to be quite the opposite of what it was.  I think that shocks people: to see their virtues turned into vices.  And I think it shocks people who know me to know I think about these things.”I shifted my head so that I could watch my foot idly moving, stirred by thought.  In the long silence I heard the bees and, presently, the scrape of a hoe in a garden.  I reflected again that, unlike Badger, who was like me in forthrightness—and so, for that matter, rather like Mother—Bruin had inherited Father’s knack of saying many things and nothing at all, and hiding what he really meant behind his words.  Over fifteen years of practice I had learned to pick apart my brother’s words and uproot what he meant.  Sleepily stretching, I gently cursed his lack of glibness.“You mean that you have to play the blackguard, and they do not like it.”There was a momentary silence.  “Yes.  I suppose that is what I mean.”I turned my head on my arm.  “But, by the stars, man,” I said roughishly, “that is what makes you so fine a writer!  ‘One would not think it to look at you’—by which he means, you’re a delicate-looking whelp and you smile like butter.  But you have fangs in your mouth and you’re not afraid of biting down on the black-tasting aspects of life.  How else could you write our enemies so well—which are ourselves—if you did not think like a villain?  I ask you!” I finished, thrusting a hand out at him.“Nay, then—I, too, hear you,” he said patiently, not looking at me.  I sighed.  “Then may I go back to sleep?”“That sleep which you were not in?”“Yes.  That sleep.”He put his elbow upon the tabletop and laid his jaw in his palm, looking away from me toward the southern meads.  The swimming light made a crown of gold around his young head.  The little fiend! I thought tenderly—and was not sure why I thought it.“None so easy,” he said at length.  “I know that, to craft a good villain, one must ‘play the blackguard,’ as you put it.  At times it is…wildly pleasant.  Exultant, in a way.  Whether that is the thrill of making something well or the latent evil in one’s blood, I do not know.  Perhaps that is why the question nags at me.  I know I do well what I do.  I just wish people would not look from my books to me in that manner.  Truly,” he added, coming round with a suddenness unlike him, snatching, in the act, a book from the table and flinging it at me, “villainy runs in our veins!”I caught the book and stumbled to a sitting position.  It was an old book, yellowed and unruled, and full of Mother’s hand.  I read a few passages and looked up, suspicious.“This is Mother’s diary.”“Yes, I know.  She let me borrow it for research.”I shut it again with as little quickness as I could for I did not want Bruin to know that I would rather not read those old accounts.  I had lost my comfortable position and began rooting around in the cushions trying to find it, all the while taking the time to think.  He pre-empted me.  “Do not think,” he said, “that I have some enormous psychosis which, Cervantes-like, drives me to imagine unreasonable and untenable suppositions.  I am sound.  It is only that I wish they knew that.”  He laughed a little, softly.  “I do not want a leper’s bells…”“Tush, sirrah!” I said.  He was really beginning to frighten me.  I abandoned my attempts to be comfortable.  “The proof is in the pudding.  Yea, Scandalon itself is the best test of your mettle.  How could you, being mad, write such a clear distinction between goodness and villainy?  That is your strength,” I pushed, “that is your keenness.  You see perhaps more clearly than others and are you to blame that your natural instinct prompts you to write the dichotomy?  Did God, in his infinite wisdom, look into the thoughts of his own mind and see the beautiful starkness that lies between himself and all that is evil—and did he not subsequently write as such?  How great the villainy—how great the conqueror!  That is what you do, Bruin.  That is what you write.”  I dropped back off the lip of the sofa, breathing a little heavily.  “And that is why books like Scandalon are perhaps so dismal: you know how to dream the nightmares that the wicked ones endure.”He seemed unwilling to be overwon by me.  For some time he sat quietly, moving only his left foot a little, turning it on the point of his boot as a dancer might, his unseeing eye roving over the lines of his manuscript.  I could see that I had not adequately addressed his concerns, but how could I account for the peevish insinuations of a handful of readers when it was plain from the text that the author was standing on both feet?  “It is not our fault,” I pointed out flatly, “that people are stupid.”This produced a momentary flash of laughter from him and set his mood in a better temper.  “You are right.”“Of course I am right,” I said, snapping up four fingers.  “Now put your face into a better shape before I knock the horse out of it and get back to your villainizing.  Nay—”  I heard a door crash shut in the wind and twisted toward the peristyle.  “Speak of the devil, the reprobates have returned.”In a flurry of sunlight and wind, jerking a little forward, for the solarium door always caught a bit on a lip of stone, Mother pushed in, flushed and disreputable-looking.  It seemed the only cool thing about her was her faintly supercilious brow and the press of her mouth which always gave one the impression that she was trying not to laugh.  “There you are,” she said in her warm, husky voice.I emerged from the couch—the stone flags were deliciously cool underfoot—and stepped around an avalanche of ornamental pillows, bending down as she turned her cheek to accept my kiss.  “Your hair is a mess, Mama.  Did you have a good time?”The sharp laughter stabbed at me from the corner-glance of her eyes.  “You’re impertinent.  How is Badger?”I turned back on Bruin, at a sudden loss, and likewise his gaze met mine.The poor beggar had not occurred to us.

In The Kink of Every Vein

I will hold your hand, loveAs long as I can, loveThough the powers rise against usThough your fears assail youAnd your body may fail youThere's a fire that burns within usandrew peterson, "carry the fire"
I said I would do another snippets post when I reached 100,000 words; I'm not quite there yet: I'm at roughly 92,000 words.  That number will have changed by the time you read this.  I've noticed that, unlike Mirriam, who can write good stories and make her stories action-packed and snappy, I take longer to unpack my plots.  Whether or not I can hold your attention remains to be seen...  I confessed to Joy that I do have another post in the making, one to be tacked on after "A Common Provenance In Pain," but that I have been busy - busy with writing Gingerune, busy dividing up Plenilune into chapters and coming up with good titles for those chapters, kicking idly at the opening scene of Adamantine which needs to be born again or else it will never see the kingdom of heaven...  Is now a bad time to bombshell that I'm also gearing up to spend this coming autumn semester in Scotland?

"these wretched eminent things"
“Why doesn’t he look like a monster? He always looked like one to me. He looks—I could have broken his skull. I could have killed him. Why didn’t I kill him?”gingerune
Mazelin smiled encouragingly. “Eating: the answer to all the heart’s problems. Ah, how I’ve missed Thera…”gingerune
She turned over her hand and saw the lines defined by the charcoal. Some people claimed to read fates in the lines that crisscrossed a person’s palm: if that were possible, her fate looked like a spider’s web. gingerune
The bench was cold, the night air was chilly, but a fierce and shining glory was burning at the kink of every vein in Ginger for she was acutely glad for Roxane’s company, for birth and life and warm fellowship: not even Philon could sour that. gingerune
Faces came back to her out of the unwelcome sense of loneliness and fate: Melitta’s, Philon’s, haughty Anehawk's, immobile Akmennades’—the bull’s. It seemed everywhere she turned save in this hollow of earth that was like a grave were faces that despised her, mocked her, counted her as nothing. If she crawled down off her bench and leaned out over the pool—and if the light were good enough—she would see yet another face which looked back at her with quiet, desperate loathing. I roar in defiance and strive to be great, yet I will never conquer my blood. O Elohim—impulsively she flung an arm over her eyes to shut out the sight of the dark—what am I, and what wretched thing is man?gingerune
Their eyes met, warning and instantly serious where before Ginger thought they had been sharing a violent kind of joke. In the dark, colourless ring of Mazelin’s eye she saw the predetermined, cold-blooded desire to kill.gingerune
Between the broken pillars that marked the beginning of the lane Ginger looked up and around, dumbstruck: the massive structure lifted itself like a man hefting himself out of a pool, its great shoulders rising over the edge of the cliff, its shattered walls and leaning, roofless pillars gleaming in the hot, unadulterated Middle Sea sun. Everything was built on a huge scale. The doorways—what were left of them—rose like gateways to the sky. Stairways would have been uncomfortable to climb for people of an average height. The weight of a single vertebrae of one of the columns took Ginger’s breath away to estimate. gingerune
“The Argolime,” whispered Roxane—it was the time and place to whisper. “It fits it better for a name: like a wreath of laurel.”gingerune
The blacksmith watched dispassionately, his bottom lip a little thrust out in the expression of a man who is longsuffering, but would rather be elsewhere.gingerune
In the space of quiet Akmennades seemed to have found his temper again. With his voice muffled a little by the crook of his elbow, he remarked, “The light-well catches sound admirably. I have been listening to your talk below. I have learned two things: that the man Mazelin grows almost careless when he is excited, and that, when she is not angry, the girl has a very pleasant voice. It is like yours,” he added, lifting his head a little as a bird soared upward on a bank of wind, “but nicer.”gingerune
Beneath the ugliness of it all there was a beautiful irony in that, but she still hated that he had betrayed them again, lied to them all, and dumped them all back into Anehawk’s palm like so many pieces of silver. Well, his debt was paid. She hoped he liked his reward.gingerune
She could not help swallowing: he had one of his thumbs under her jaw and had pressed just when he said ‘swallow,’ and the horrid liquid went down against her will. It burned on the way down. Like a horse caught in the mire her mind kept lunging, catching, falling backward, white-eyed with terror. gingerune
“A house in town,” [he said], tearing up the loaf of bread. “A respectable business, neighbours shuffling in and out without scraping their sandals on the threshold. Something to look forward to.” gingerune
He moved and, in moving, moved other things, built them up or tore them down, never lying still. It would be an all or nothing matter for him, she realized: either he must grasp the rudder of Thera and put his shoulder to her, or he must fade into obscurity. He could never survive being mediocre. gingerune
"We come from fighting stock. We may be the last of an old breed, but that is what makes us so damn beautiful." gingerune
"Yet you are stubborn,” he concluded, biting off the words with a sudden anger which baffled Ginger. “You might have been great, yet you are only pathetic: a tiny, fragile thing bloated with pride, a thing born of sweat and screams. I have given you great grace and you have only resisted me. You are but a man. If you will turn in my hand like an unbalanced tool, what shall I do with you? You are worth a woman’s blood to me.” gingerune
On a little marble table close beside the door she spotted a little masculine figurine done to perfection in obsidian, an arm uplifted, first two fingers spread in triumph. It seemed as if it should be familiar, but she could not place it. gingerune
“I see that, like your mother,” he said lightly, “you do not have the knack of respect. That, too, I will teach you." gingerune
With a feeling of sickened ecstasy she felt her body whirling and breaking free. Her foot hurt but she made herself put her weight on it, bounding, hands coming down to meet the floor. And then for a second she was a catapulting, weaponized thing before she crashed headlong into Mazelin’s rough and ready embrace. gingerune
“You poked the bees’ nest and you have no idea what to do about it.”gingerune

A Common Provenance in Pain

"All things of grace and beauty have a common provenance in pain: 
their birth in grief and ashes."
I am going to address a paradigm among the writers that I know, and because it is among writers that I know (those I don't know may benefit from this also) I feel I must proceed with delicacy.  Unfortunately I am not very good at delicacy, and when I address anything I feel I tend to lay about me rather hard...  It is not so much that I think the writers are wrong as I feel there needs to be a paradigm shift away from what is potentially a very wrong view to a view which more accurately reflects how our own Creator chooses to craft us.

The problem is pain.  To clarify still further, the subject is that of inflicting pain on characters, and the author's mental state, emotional drive, and rational motive for doing so.

First of all, writing books and nurturing characters is not mechanical.  If you are stuck, you cannot simply "throw a curve-ball at your character" to see what he does.  Don't simply knock his legs from under him for the sake of making something happen.  Tearing something down has no effect if you do not already have a plan to built it up again.  There are plenty of reasons for being stuck, most of them are self-inflicted, most of them are due to laziness or poor planning (the author is generally considered to be at fault when the writing goes bad), and there are lots of ways of getting through writer's block.  Random acts of violence is not one of them, and is as much a crime in literature as it is among live human beings.

Secondly, and this is the really difficult aspect of writers and pain that I have to address, people make their characters hurt because they think it's fun.  I have heard a lot of writers express pleasure about "the next big thing" they're going to put their characters through.  I've heard them begin cooking up new methods of torture because they like to invent new ways of hurting their "poor charries."  Now, outside of literature, here in the real world, we have names for people who find inflicting pain on other people to be enjoyable.  The most jarring, and the most all-encompassing, is sadist.  I think really amateur writers who enjoy hurting their characters are actually masochists, as they don't quite have the skill to detach themselves from their characters.  Whatever the relationship between the writer and the character, the uncomfortable truth remains: enjoying making people hurt is messed up.

We are all enjoined to be charitable and wise.  I'm not asking you to resist pushing your characters to the limit, tearing loved ones from them, and making them hurt emotionally and physically in many ways.  A good plot, a good story, will often take the salt out of a character before he gets to the end.  But we do that to our characters (if we are, not only good writers, but good thinkers about why we write) not to sit back like Zeus and watch the little human worms flail, but to see their mettle harden, to see their resolve become compounded.  We collapse them in the crucible of pain and suffering to make them into something better.  Pain is never its own end.  It is sometimes a means, as the smith's hammer is a means.  I may take a character and strip him of every comfort, every joy, every light, and I'll do it to see whether or not, when all else has gone dark and cold, he can still see enough to cling to his hope.

I think you can all see why this approach to handling character growth is a better one than just flogging your characters because, to them, you are their god and you can do it if you want to.  Our God does not simply flog us because he can.  He may push us to the limit (but never beyond what we are able to bear), he may take our loved ones from us (but the living will receive back their dead), and our bodies and our minds do suffer an almost constant battering by disease and depression.  We carry about in our bodies the dying of Jesus, not to be morbid, but so that the life of Jesus may be manifest in us.

I tell my four-year-old nephew: "Let's think about what we're about to do."  I usually have to say this after he has unthinkingly stumbled into trouble.  But he's four years old.  He has plenty of time to grow.  We are now adults, intelligent, thinking adults, and here is another aspect of our art that needs attention: what do we believe about pain, why do we inflict it, what is its purpose?  We have a great example to look to.  "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus." 

Like the Voice of a Snake Charming

Million stars up in the skyFormed a tiger's eyeThat looked down on my faceOut of time and out of placeof monsters and men, "your bones"
Gingerune is now approximately a little larger than a NaNo novel and, if my divisions are correct and I keep them in the end, I am working on the eighth chapter of I do not know how many chapters in toto.  I at last feel as if I know the my core of characters and a rough outline of the plot has finally sketched itself in my head.  As I have said before, my approach to writing is very organic and I will start off a story with a vague idea of what I want to incorporate, but it is through the actual writing process that I discover how characters will react and how things will really unfold.  And so, a little over 50,000 words in, I finally feel as if I have a handle on the characters and can see far enough in front of me to know where to go.  An analogy can be drawn between this method and terrain exposition in a computer game, but that would be a lame analogy to draw...

I did say I would write up a snippets post eventually.  I kicked off Gingerune with one - more for my own comfort than for anyone else's education, probably, since there wasn't much of Gingerune to talk about at that point.  But now that Gingerune has enough weight to throw around, here is a bit more.  I hope you enjoy!

snippets
“They had mighty sons and beautiful daughters, and they built a city for themselves. I have been to the place where, legend says, they raised their citadel. It is…only a desert now. But in the scripts the legends tell me of a glorious paradise, full of water and streets of shining metals. When the sun would rise up out of the Mountains at the End of the World it would strike the topmost tower and it would shine."Gingerune
Ginger turned on the ball of one foot to glance back behind them through the open doorway into the garden. The gate was still ajar, framing in blue a shaded picture of the sloping lane and a far-off glimpse of the acacia tree.Gingerune
His voice had gone suddenly like the voice of a snake charming its meal into its jaws.Gingerune
He was caught and he knew it—Ginger could see it in his eyes—drawn inexorably into Mazelin’s orbit even as she was, curious and knowing better at the same time. Yet the big sun-tanned man with his staff in his left hand, imperious, angry and half-laughing in the eyes, was like a lodestone to them.Gingerune
“Thera is a great island, but not a very large one. Why should I lie to you, when I have nowhere to hide?”Gingerune
The poor honey-coloured thing clutched the pet dog close and stared unblinkingly at a horror in the middle distance which would be a long time dissipating from her view.Gingerune
Ginger found herself...bending a little in stiff deference—the gesture was unfamiliar to her—and feeling as though her life were little worth the energy it took to pluck a saffron flower bare and throw away the petals.Gingerune
“Are there armies?” asked the Queen exultantly. “Are there war-ships on the horizon? Is there an embargo or is trade diminished? The great kingdom of Crete looks favourably on us. The isles in the midst of the sea look to us with awe. Thera is great, and the House of the Red Cyclamen has ruled her fairly and smoothly—in all the years you were away!”Gingerune
[He] drew in his chin like a horse about to wrench against the bit.Gingerune
"You do not know the hand at your own rudder! Ask of me all you will. Cry, plead, threaten, strip me of food and clothing and skin and marrow: I will not give you the Rammerowt."Gingerune
In a vague way she remembered Mazelin singing a song about Elohim in the dark—to her memory the song had seemed like a lamp. Perhaps he had been hard with Mazelin, but it seemed in his way he had been kind. She supposed that was enough to ask of a god. Gingerune
"I would get a horrible taste in my mouth at the sight of him—a big welling blackness, as though I were trying to swallow death.”Gingerune
“Some days I think I must needs only put out a saucer of cream for you,” Ginger remarked, “and, wherever you are, you will come and purr against my legs.” Gingerune

Illimitably Earth

I who have died am alive again today,and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth-day of life and love and wings: and of the gaygreat happening illimitably earth.e.e. cummings
Same old, same old: still working away at Gingerune.  I am now 43,908 words in, but for all that I don't feel as if I quite have enough to give you a proper snippets post.  I probably do and I'll do it eventually, but for now I'm going to play it by feel and for now I feel as if the snippets ought to wait. But to tide you over, or to appease you, or whatever, here is this.  All of the usual warnings apply: it is probably subject to change and is part of the first draft, etc., but it is some thing for you, at any rate.  A whole several paragraphs of something!  I suppose I should add that it may be a little - not graphic, per se, but disturbing.  But then, it was meant to be. And so, without further ado, a very small piece of Gingerune.

* * * * *Every moment the force of the wind was trying to rip her away and hurtle her into the shadow. It was cold—bitterly cold—where the wind struck her, and all over her washed continually, visibly, the tangible light into which she was plunging at breakneck speed. The light was very hot; beneath the singing of the wind in her ears she could hear it crackling and sizzling and at the back of her mind she wondered if she was going to survive it.

Where was the sun? She switched her eyes back and forth across the chasm of light. Everything was moving so quickly, and the light was so bright—her pupils shrank into slits, shutting off much of the blinding glare, and finally the disk of the sun sprang out from the featureless sky. There—to her left! She pivoted toward it, feeling the cold wind and the burning light sear along her flanks. She plummeted on against the sun-storm and wondered if Icarus had ever witnessed such madness of hope and terror at once.

She had just shifted toward the holy aurora when a pain gripped her, clawing her back into the abyss. Her knees cramped. If she screamed, the scream was lost in the roar of wind. Drops of sweat peeled away like rain. Another cramp—another scream. Another—she could hear the Earth-Master’s voice from somewhere close by; the pressure on her knee was his hand.

“Another one! Once more! Give it all you’ve got!”

She had no more left to give. What was she giving birth to—Thera itself? She gulped in the roaring airlessness to brace again, but despair filled the hollow place in her chest. She had no more left to give. Through her thinned eyes she could just barely make out a long, thick anchor-cable stretching out in front of her, up and up into the light to where the sun hung far away and motionless. It must have been attached to her. She felt intuitively that it was her only hope of keeping herself from being lost in the continual downward rush of light and the black pit that lay below.

The cramps began again.

A hand came out of nowhere and wrenched her head back. In a singing disk of light she caught sight of two beautiful blue eyes, mesmerizing eyes. They were laughing at her.

This is not a dream, darling.

She was losing her position. The constant pounding of the light was hammering at her side, driving her closer and closer toward the edge. She fought desperately to keep in line. She hung on the cable, gritted her teeth against the next clench of pain—water was coming brightly, softly, off the corners of her eyes: each drop shone a little as it flew away on the wind.

The other hand, long and beautiful and dressed in a glove, slid cleanly through the watershed of light. There was a blade on the edge of it sharp enough to cut through soul. It touched the hemp braid of her anchor-cable.

“No!” she screamed—the wind whipped her words out of her throat: “no, don’t! Don’t let me go!”

The screaming went on. The blade touched the hemp and it snapped, once—the hemp unravelled and the rope squealed in protest as all her weight and the power of the light and the wind strained against it. From behind her she felt the cold fingers of the shadow reach out and touch her skin. A horror of it gripped her brain: it had got the taste of her now.

“Stop! Stop! Don’t let me go!”

The last strand broke.

Tea On My Keyboard, Ink On My Hands

I feel as if I owe my readers an update because I haven't posted in awhile, but the truth is that nothing has changed from the last update.  I am still quietly working on Gingerune; I'm not really at a place where I can talk about it a great deal, nor show much of it to anyone.  You all know how that goes.  So I must be content to prevaricate about it in the hopes that you and I will learn a little more about it as I do so.  So here I am, quietly typing away at it and learning my characters and my way.  Nothing new.

What about Plenilune?  The manuscript is making the rounds of my family and being proofed.  So far my initial feelings have been justified for no one, so far, has found much fault with the manuscript and very little other than typos needs correcting.  Other than the usual hiccups and difficulties which come with every self-respecting manuscript, Plenilune was an easy baby.  Writing, I think, must be a little like labour in that afterward you forget the struggle and agony and think it was pretty easy and wouldn't you like to do it again?  But I do remember the difficulties I had with Adamantine and I do know I fought Plenilune on occasion.  But compared to Adamantine and Gingerune, Plenilune came out of my head like Athena.

Speaking of Adamantine, I know people talk about the dangers of over-editing, but I really do have to continue editing Adamantine has I forge deeper into Plenilune and Gingerune.  Because they are all companion novels and have bearing on each other, after a fashion, I must be sure they are consistent on all accounts.  As things become subsequently clearer with my writing, I must, perforce, go back and edit to update.  So that is where Adamantine stands at present.

(I appear to be having a tea accident.  Please excuse me...)  One other piece of update is that I will be out of town for a few days.  Not that you will be able to tell, with my relative quiet on Blogger these days, but there you have it.  I'll purchase plane tickets for all my characters and take them with me, I'm sure, but I'll probably be too busy and too out of my comfortable writing zone to do anything productive.  So if you don't hear from me, this time don't assume I'm nose deep in writing - I'll actually be flying halfway across the continent.

happy writing!

My Mind Was Called Across the Years

My mind was called across the yearsOf rages and of strifeOf all the human miseryAnd all the waste of life"Beneath a Phrygian Sky," Loreena McKennitt
In the chill of March (albeit the March of the fickle, balmy piedmont of South Carolina), with a grey sky overhead, it is sometimes hard to feel the scorching spring sun of the Middle Sea, to see the cloudlessness of a merciless sky, to hear the endless pulse of that sea which is the heart of the whole world.  And so I look to the arts (that sea was the cradle of them, was it not?) to inspire me.  It is not much to offer you, but here are some of the things which are making the world of Gingerune a home to me.

a few books
There is the big curious creature of The Flowers of Adonis, by Rosemary Sutcliff, written in the first person but from the view of many people so that, from many angles and through many years, the reader may get a picture of the person of Alkibiades, the great general of Athens.  Like all Sutcliff novels, this one throws you head over heels into the world and you must pick yourself up very quickly or be lost.  It is, of course, a very war-like book, though not all the characters are students of war; but the laughter of it which is like the laughter of a knife that is going to kill you is a splendid inspiration for me.

I have begun Ben-Hur, after many, many years.  I don't remember when I last read it, I only know that I loved it.  But the intervening years had made me forget just how spectacular a book it really is.  The narration is superb, the scenes crystal-clear, and everything is alive.  Knowing more now than I did then, I trust this second reading of Ben-Hur will prove even more fruitful, even more enjoyable.  There is far more enjoyment to be got out of it than just the chariot race, let me assure you.

There is also A Crown of Wild Olive, a smaller story by Rosemary Sutcliff (the poor thing is dwarfed by the hugeness of Alkibiades), and I am reading it not for the similarity between her story and mine (none of these really bear any resemblance to Gingerune) but for the sheer familiar comfort of the thing, and the world in which I need to walk and look and see so that, when I have written, you can too.

a few songs
Loreena McKennitt's album "An Ancient Muse" has been most helpful in this way.  She knows how to find the musical spirit of a place and string it with complimentary words like a jeweler stringing jewellery.  There is Beneath a Phrygian Sky (which is north and very east of where I am) and The Gates of Istanbul (which is more north than east, but a little east too, of where I am).  There is Penelope's Song, which is just about perfect and tastes of wine and a sorrow which knows no bitterness; I like Kecharitomene for the music of it, and Caravanserai likewise - they are not quite spot-on, but they land me in the general area so I listen to them anyway.  And then there are odd songs out, like The Burning Bush from The Prince of Egypt soundtrack, and Now We Are Free from "Gladiator" (which is one of my favourite songs anyway); as regards lyrics (not the tune) Andrew Peterson's song Carry the Fire is applicable.  I have not decided if both the lyrics and the tune of Leaves From the Vine are applicable, but the song seems to go with Gingerune all the same.  (In a way they, too, remind me of the flowers of Adonis...)

leaves from the vine // falling so slowlike fragile, tiny shells // drifting on the foamlittle soldier boy // come marching homebrave soldier boy // comes marching home"leaves from the vine"