Jennifer Freitag's Blog, page 28

The Agony and the Ecstasy

My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you...Galatians 4:19
 This is not really a manifesto.  I suppose if you want a manifesto, you might do worse than to look here.  If anything, this will be a talk (hopefully brief, but who is to say?) on being a writer.  This will be a delving into my reading of other authors on the subject and also into my own experience.  It will, hopefully, not over-gild the lily, but equally I hope it will not diminish the exultancy of art.

I am quietly making my way through Mystery and Manners, a collection of essays by Flannery O'Connor.  While I have not yet read any of her fiction, her thoughts on the subject of writing (excluding Southern fiction, of which I confess to know nothing) have continued to ring true with my own experience - and it is an experience of great passion immediately juxtaposed to the absurdly awkward.  Take, for instance, the author's own reply to the question, "Miss O'Connor, why do you write?"  She said, simply, "Because I'm good at it."  She went on to mention that this reply was instantly disapproved of - possibly because the remnants of both Catholic and Protestant sentiment argue that if we enjoy something, it must be bad, and to succeed is to commit a sin.  (That is a subject I have touched on elsewhere, and is too long to tackle again here, but I trust you all recognize the absurdity in such a repugnance toward being remarkably good at one's craft.)  But in my own experience, I have been met at every turn by these unavoidable and at the same time irritating questions, and I can think of a no more succinct answer than Flannery O'Connor's:  "Because I'm good at it."  There are other reasons, but no inquirer will give me the time to indulge them: the simple fact that I'm not a bad hand at the art and that I enjoy my own work - because I'm good at it - seems a pretty sturdy answer, even though I know, as with O'Connor, my answer will be received with disapproval.

There is another question which I think every author abhors and which every author cannot really blame the inquirer for posing.  That is, "What is your book about?"  Being of a very shy turn of nature and my efforts to overcome my inability to communicate adequately verbally being, as yet, ineffective, I loath this question.  It highlights all my natural weaknesses as regards social interaction, it embarrasses me, and as a result I do no justice to my writing while I am trying to explain myself.  But even before reading Flannery O'Connor's essay "Writing Short Stories," I had begun to formulate a more militant reply to the awful question, so the perspicacity of her essay was not lost on me.

You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.  When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story.

Which is also something no one likes to hear.  People like to get the gist of the book's subject (which is why authors are made to write those little blurbs on the backs of their books), and they like to know right off whether or not the book is something they would be interested in.  They do not realize that the last person on earth they should ask is the author himself, who has just spent years and thousands of words, blood, sweat, and tea discovering and fashioning and living in a world, bringing characters to life with the thrill and agony of a mother.  Such a person is least able to condense the story into a few words or so.  Such a person is more inclined to take the question "What is your book about?" as an insult rather than hope it exhibits any interest in the story.  Very truly, if I could tell you what Adamantine and Plenilune and The Shadow Things are about, I would not have spent these past nine years building and shaping and agonizing and putting words together to make a sort of living, breathing creation.  I would not have subjected myself to making life out of law, I would have kept the commandments scrawled in cold, impersonal stone.  I would not have strained and hurt and cried and laughed and soared.  I would not have written novels, I would have written essays.

The life of the author is one of joyous suffering.   I almost said quiet joyous suffering, but I would only mean quiet in the sense that the suffering is largely unseen - I have only to look at my own tempestuous worries and listen to the large, loud words in the prophets to know that a creator strives, and strives mightily, and that the suffering can be keen indeed.  And yet we persist for the sake of achieving the perfect, and in the long quiet death we endure doing this terrible thing called art, we are imbued with life.  It is a very personal experience, one which we cannot share, an incommunicable attribute of the writing process which, unless the reader is also a writer, the reader will not understand.  This is not an elitist comment, just a fact, and the experiential difference between the author and the reader continue to clash over literature as the two minds try to meet.  I do not know if they ever could (unless, again, the reader were also a writer), and in Flannery O'Connor's statements I find a refreshing, if jarring, return to a recognition of the limitations and expectations placed on the writer and the reader.  Art is not a superfluity (don't ask me why I do it), nor am I really capable of saying in a few cold words what it took me many lives to communicate.

After all, even God did not do that.

The Cry of the Lonesome Gull

I am the cry of the lonesome gull ringing in your earsAnd the smell of the sea on your freckled skin
I haven't said much of worth for awhile because...there hasn't been anything of worth to say.  I've been quietly working on edits for Plenilune, which has taken up most of my creative juice, and, like a sponge, have been desperately sucking in all inspiration for Gingerune which I can find.  Gingerune has endured several major overhauls from its original state: it has moved from the first person to the third (for no real reason, save that it works this way), and two characters have had name changes to varying degrees of severity. Surely you know how this sort of thing goes.  The upshot of it is, Plenilune is still too stark and loud and is demanding too much of my attention for me to submerse myself entirely in Gingerune, so that, other than edits, I have done very little writing in the past month or so.  Gingerune's manuscript is only 27,488 words and gestures at me empty-handed and askance, making no move to save me from a flogging by Plenilune.  On the plus side, I have got some reading done.  I finished Harry Blamires' On Christian Truth on the first of the month: very good book.  Well, anyway, here is a very little of what I have been up to when I have managed to write something.


snip-whippets of some hour, I know not which
Another ill omen upon a hill of ill omens, thought Ginger. Today is like the mounding of the dead. Gingerune
Then it was her turn, bracing against the wall as Roxane braced against her; her panels never quite formed the perfect triangle—almost, but never quite—and had never done so since she was sixteen.Eighteen years ago. Ginger lifted her head and winced as the girl, taking as deep a breath as she could manage, hauled on the laces. Eighteen years is a long time.Gingerune
Roxane’s hand dropped companionably on Ginger’s shoulder. She felt it, warm and familiar, like a touch, not to her skin, but to her soul.Gingerune
Spring had come back to Thera, flown on the wings of the swallows. A good omen indeed.Gingerune
...turning aside, they followed the gate through to a narrow, winding stair which they took under the wind-swept heads of the tamarisk trees, each in full red bloom; they sent soft dove-winged shadows skittering underfoot, and the high white walls of the buildings rising around them cut off the noise of the street above. Taking sudden turns, now and then, Ginger could sometimes catch glimpses of the sea between the buildings, far below.Gingerune
...the imagery of them had stuck with her: the boldness of them, the way the light played a harsh song on their bronze breastplates and iron buckles, the drumming of so many feet, the thumping of so many shields. She remembered the easy tramping march, the little sea-sort of swing in their step as if the world lay uneasily beneath their feet and with each stride they met it at some different angle. She remembered their faces, grim and half-laughing with the exultancy of war, and she had wished very strongly that she could have been one of them.Gingerune
"To be curious is to ask the gods for a speedy death."Gingerune
But the flatterer and the rogue twisted his words into a kind of green peace-offering, and laid the thing gently on Ginger’s knees.Gingerune
She fingered the cold, perfect stones. That had been a good day, a day of swallows and a laurel crown. If only…if only the crowns would last…Gingerune
He did not answer, but continued to watch the way the sunlight played silver on the whitecaps and in the rushy silence they listened to a honeyeater calling from Phrygia: its laughter came down from a place high up on the cliffs, caught and lost and caught again on the sweeping waves of wind.Gingerune
As if they were one, both she and Roxane craned their heads at him. He smiled, knowing he had got their attention—he was like a woman in that way, thought Ginger: very jealous in his quiet way that he should have their attention. In the light she could see the thousands of darker flecks that covered his sun-darkened face, and they all seemed to mock. Gingerune
Roxane looked up at her then with her face framed in her darkened hair, her dark brows clinched on a small, old pain that Ginger knew well, for she shared it herself. “Mauna,” she said just as quietly, “I grow old of hating.”Gingerune

The History They Knew

"Remember the law of Moses."Malachi
I talked in It Was Not History Then about avoiding the unconscious mistake of making the historical period you are writing about seem too novel to the characters.  Now I am going to talk about what was history for them, and how to incorporate that into your novel.

First of all, you have to know your history.  A character can't know what the author doesn't know.  I don't think I have to engage in the whole "history is fun, really it is" spiel.  I think just about everyone following The Penslayer already has a deeply abiding love of history and is willing to go out of the way to learn it as a matter of enjoyment, not just a matter of research.  To write a novel in a time period, one does often have to do research; to incorporate history into that time period, one has to know a lot more: one has to have, essentially, the entire range of human history to draw from.  Moral of the story: don't confine yourself to a single period of history in which to study.  Learn everything you can!

Note: as a caveat, keep in mind that while you may have that vast range of knowledge to draw on, your character might or might not depending on his education.  An illiterate man may reference Aesop's Fables, but he will probably not draw conclusions from Plato's Republic. 

Pertinence.  You would be surprised the pertinence of historical happenstances on the circumstances in a novel.  I found a few quiet ones cropping up in Adamantine; in Plenilune I had to practically sit on a character to keep him from snapping off names and places, old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago.  Many got through, and I left them (which also returns to a point I raised in It Was Not History Then), but they arose because the character's brain was awash with histories and peoples - as well as philosophies and theologies, fables and riddles and whathaveyou.  If the shoe fit, he put it on.  If the moment corresponded to something that had happened in the past or former generations, or a comment linked with a thought of a great man who had come before, he made the connection. 

Note: my brain is also awash with histories, people, philosophers, theologies, fables, riddles, and whathaveyou, which gives people the confused impression, as everything is thrown into my mind and out again in a hapless jumble, that I am more intelligent than is really the case.

For those of you writing historical fiction, please don't despair!  It is a true saying that history repeats itself.  The more history you learn, the more you will find things happening in your stories that resemble, however unintentionally, problems and solutions that man has faced in the past.  If you keep your eyes open, you'll see them.

Note: for those of you who may be thinking this is an exercise good only for writing, let me disillusion you.  A steady and wide study of history is also a study of God's work with man, and I have continually found it helpful in life to be able to hold up history to God's self-revelation in the scriptures and discover what the two can tell me together. 

It Was Not History Then

...it was Aristotle, long before Kipling, who taught us the formula, 'That is another story.' Out of the Silent Planet, C.S. Lewis
I know a lot of you tend to write fantasy (there is so much scope there for the imagination) I also know that many of you have tried or are trying your hands at historical fiction as well.  In light of that, I thought I would share a little trick I learned and also point out an obvious but often overlooked fact.

The fact first, and that is that, to the people in the time you are writing, their time was not "historical" yet.  It was as plain, unlovely, and dull as every day of your life can be to you.  Obviously, you will be writing an engaging story in which things happen, things are at stake, and the reader will be invested in the lives of your characters and their time period.  But a really accurate historical fiction novel will make the time as real and as common as the shirt you are wearing.  The well at the corner of this road and that in ancient Rome is not a novelty to them.  It's their way of life.  The drafts in the castle, the pigs in the yard, the papyrus stands and Lord Crocodile and a gentleman's horse are all common, everyday sort of things.  Don't make much of them with the eyes of someone writing from the twenty-first century looking back on the past.

This was something I was taught subliminally through the novels I read growing up.  The ones I liked most were the ones that felt real, and looking back on them critically I see they were real because they did just this: they treated the time with a casual nonchalance, taking for granted that it was Now and would always be Now.  Oh, there was always the future to be provided for and a vague, glorious past to replicate, but the way of life would go on and the things of life would endure forever, familiar, unnoticed, and strangely precious.  If you want to know how to write like this, it is very simple: you have only to study the time so thoroughly that you become fluent in it, like a language - so that, essentially, you think in that time.

The trick I learned was a kind of sleight of hand, a sort of trick of magic that was worked on me by the author.  A really good author who so well knew his or her time period could drop at appropriate times a reference to something - a line from a Roman poet I had not read, or an object from far-off orients that was hitherto unknown to me - and the author, far from telling me the poet's name or telling me where the object came from, would leave me otherwise ignorant.  To the people in the story it was obvious.  To me, I was left in the dark, suddenly a stranger looking in from the outside.  I never minded.  Even the entire conversation in French in one of Sayers' short stories (my French was never good, and has almost degenerated away), while it left me clueless, was at the same time so off-handedly accurate to the time and the characters that the very act that jarred me away from communion with the story made the story all the more real in its own right.

I know a lot of people will tell you, "Don't talk about things the reader won't understand or associate with.  He won't like ignorance or being left in the dark."  That is, of course, often true, if the topic is handled badly.  But it can be handled well, and if we all pander to the ignorance of each other no one will learn anything.  It's a bad sort that takes natural ignorance as an insult.  We're all ignorant until we're taught, and we might as well own that cheerily now.  The fact is that I let the poet's line go, hidden in my memory, and I accepted the oriental treasure as a matter of course, and as I continued reading in other books from now and then and here and there, I stumbled (almost always inadvertently) over the answer, over the poet, over the place.  And my sudden joy was indescribable!  I felt like someone who had learned the trick of magic.  Suddenly that novel was not a stand-alone - it was linked with this book wherein I found the answer to the riddle.  Suddenly Sutcliff and Uncle Aquila were linked with Everyday Life in Roman and Anglo-Saxon Times.  Suddenly two seemingly disconnected pieces of the infinite dialogue of writers were put together, question and answer.  And I would not give up that moment of discovery for anything.

They say, "Show, don't tell."  But I say, "Don't show everything.  Let the reader, if he's really worth his salt, discover for himself."

Beautiful People - Mazelin

"It is an equation.""An equation of what?""Of the way things ought to be."gingerune
I said I would do more character fractalling, and I have.  The more I write, I swear, the less rules I find can apply across the board.  I've never really had to do character fractalling for a book before.  Gingerune sticks out its bottom lip at me until I've done so, and then - and only then - can we move on happily with the story.  Though, I don't know about happily...  ("She doesn't look happy."  "She's the protagonist," I explained.  "Protagonists are never happy.")

mazelin, of the house of the white cyclamen
Who is your character as described in one sentence?
Mazelin is part of the White Cyclamen branch of the royal family, far from the throne yet near to the queen, so that he has had a chance to watch the events of the queen’s life unfold and, spurred by a sense of pending danger and a curiosity sparked by the old legends, he has spent his life trying the thwart the doom the queen’s actions are bringing down on Thera and trying to unearth the riddles of the past and a civilization that has been buried in the dust.

Who is your character as described by several key words?
Quiet, curious, elemental.

Who is your character as described in a paragraph?
While he comes from a lower branch of the royal family, Mazelin has always exhibited an aura of being in command—ever since he was about six years old and had begun to read. He is “incurably curious,” and comes across—whether he means to or not—as impertinent and sometimes judgmental. He is endlessly intrigued by puzzles, riddles, history, and human interaction, all of which are often the same thing. He had a quick, inscrutable mind, and once he has begun to ply his questions it is often very hard to hide things from him.

Who is your character as described by several key phrases?
The wandering prophet. The Lion of Libya. “Just a man.”

Who is your character as described by several paragraphs?
Mazelin is a very quiet, patient, nondescript sort of person. He took his education into his own hands at an early age—in the scheme of ranks he would not have amounted to much anyway, so he was quietly left alone and unhindered in his quest for knowledge. He learned early on the knack of watching people and places, and soon began to unearth secrets that the royal family had forgotten for generations.

But even in Mazelin there is a streak of the impetuous and the strong-willed, and the hard-headedness that comes with being an idealist and the only person, seemingly, who can see what the future is unfolding into. No one takes this sort of behaviour well from an adult, and it is even less agreeable when coming from someone on the nether side of manhood. He and the queen—who is old enough to be his mother—clashed continually for several years until, getting nowhere with her, Mazelin picked up his bag, bought a ticket on a merchant ship, and left to find the answers to a handful of riddles, promising, once he had got them, to return.

What is your character’s extroversion or introversion preference?
Mazelin is very introverted. He has learned to interact with people when necessary and he can be very genuinely friendly, but he has also learned to hold his cards close to his chest, as it were, and that habit of being both wary and deeply thoughtful has turned him irreparably into an introvert.

What is your character’s sensing or intuitive preference?
He is accidentally intuitive—intuition is often like that—with occasional odd feelings and even dreams, but more often he is keenly deductive and can extrapolate reasonably down a line of facts to arrive at an accurate conclusion. He knows the nature of things, and furthermore he knows the nature of people. It is very hard, once you have started talking, to hide things from him.

What are the weaknesses and strengths of your character?
He can speak and write in the language of the Earth-Masters, all things considered he is patient and long-suffering, he is both kind and just, and he is unafraid to act on his deductions. Unfortunately he does occasionally overreach himself. He is not infallible and he does not always take that fact into account. This has already cost him three lives.

What is your character’s love language?
Mazelin would fall into the “words of affirmation” category of the love languages. He is not a man of possession and therefore has very little to give. He is a man of learning and mental abstraction, and so does not have much occasion for “acts of service” in a more material way. If he likes you he may be happy to be quiet in your company, but being introverted and keenly psychic he is not drawn toward—and can sometimes be adverse to—physical touch. But as a naturally quiet person who makes as a matter of course value judgments (which are often harsh, if accurate), he best expresses his admiration through a simple spoken phrase.

What is the story of how your character’s personality changes?
He grows into a man, and he grows far away from family and friends where he must learn to shift for himself and where life must be anticipated quickly before it can catch him unawares. His naturally pleasant, quiet disposition does not leave him; the harshness of life abroad does not make him cynical: if anything, it makes him more merciful. He knows what people are and what people might have been, he knows what the world is like and what it might have been like, and he has always tried to be a force of anonymous good wherever he goes, so that, inasmuch as possible, the place he leaves is better than it was before he came.

What axioms and definitions influence your character’s decisions?
Life is a war, and inasmuch as possible a man ought not to go out into it unprepared to fight to the last breath, to win back a ground stolen and surrendered.

What does your character believe about origins and how does that effect his decisions?
Mazelin believes in Elohim, the single God and progenitor of man. He believes in the conquest of the gods, in the Fable of Falling, and the promise that someday, out of obscurity, a man will rise up to reverse the decay of man and arrest the kingdom of the gods. Until then, he can only emulate the promise as best he can.

What does your character believe about the afterlife and how does that influence his decisions?
He believes in a place of waiting—whether of wakefulness or sleep he does not know and cannot say—where the souls of the dead go to await the man of Elohim. He believes that place is divided between those who believe in the man of Elohim and those who follow the gods, and that those who live and die in the faith of the promise will enjoy the rejuvenation of the kingdom of Elohim, those who adhered to the gods will be imprisoned forever with their gods in a state of judgment.

How does your character’s family influence his decisions?
The only influence they have over him is in the sense that he wants the best for them but is equally aware of the fact that they will get in his way, disbelieve him, and have already gone a fair way to surrendering much of their power to forces which do not want their good. Unfortunately, a prophet is not without honour except in his own country…

How do your character’s friends influence his decisions?
In some ways they are more of a complication than an aid. No one is quite Mazelin’s equal and he is reticent to delegate to people he does not trust are up to the task. Additionally, in the midst of plotting the next step, trying to anticipate the next twist of fate and sentient interference, he must always have one eye on his friends lest something happen to them.

When someone first meets your character, what does he notice about him?
That he is a man apart, a man whom death follows, and there is some doubt if he is a man or a demigod or something altogether other.

When someone is an enemy of your character, how does he perceive him?
Impertinent, inscrutable, a nuisance, possibly even a danger.

How does your character display his various moods?
He is of a thoughtful, half-amiable disposition at most times: he comes across as a pleasant, self-satisfied sort of person who will demand nothing from you (probably because he assumes you have nothing to give him) and will impose none of himself on you. Unless he is angry to the point of physical violence, it is hard to tell his anger and his determination apart: they are both dark, hard auras, electric and powerful. He is obviously a man who gets what he wants.

What is your character’s frame?
Well over six feet tall and built like an ox. He is very lightly-footed and can be very graceful and precise, but his frame is almost breath-taking in its sheer size.

How does your character fight?
Against another man or an animal, Mazelin prefers his fists—couched in iron knuckles. Against anything worse, he has a few other tricks up his tunic sleeves.

What are your character’s features?
Olive-skinned with dark, curly hair kept short. He is not a good hand at growing a beard so he keeps his chin clean-shaven. He has a harsh brow, the final word in aquiline noses, and brown eyes.

How does your character speak?
In general, quietly, imperiously—he is, after all, of a royal family, and after a fashion burdened with glorious purpose… He also speaks abstrusely as regards the content of his conversation, and is careful not to give much away as he takes from you everything he needs to know.

What does your character wear or carry with him?
In his travels he wears a pair of breeches, a tunic, and a robe; on Thera, as is the fashion, he wears a tunic and his indomitable pair of nail-shod boots. He carries a staff and wears a leather satchel in which he carries all of his few worldly possessions.

To Call Me An Egghead Is To Insult Eggheads

It's a cloudy, chilly February afternoon, on the brink of the weekend, and I'm sitting here eating a cucumber and drinking a cup of coffee.  (My tastes have never been discerning when it comes to knowing what to put together to make a meal.)  As I said, it's nearly the weekend, and the really busy part of life, for me, is about to start.  I mentioned around the beginning of 2011's holidays that it seemed to me that the quiet part of my life was about to be packed up and what most people call "holidays" was, for me, the really hectic time.  An enjoyable, but definitely a high-paced, hectic time.  My life is somewhat backward from most other people's.

Joy asked me on Facebook if I had any advice about finding time to read when life (for her, at least, and probably many others) is taken up with schoolwork.  I have a few ideas, but the problem is that they are not actually mine.  To put it simply, reading is my work.  When I gave my father-in-law Signs Amid the Rubble for Christmas and added that I had already read it and loved it, my brother noted how few books he had read in the year (he legitimately has little time to do anything but work), and I had to explain, somewhat abashed, that reading is my work, and that is why I do so much of it.  Again, at a gathering I flung out a piece of knowledge (which was not very trivial and I do not actually remember what the conversation was all about) and when I was asked how I knew my little tidbit of fact I replied, also abashed, that it was my business to know such things.  It's simply what I do.  I don't know if it does anyone else any good (except to clarify that Vercingetorix was a Gaul, not a German), but I like to think it does my own writing some good.  It wouldn't do for me to be mistaken in my facts or lacking in knowledge while at the same time trying to be a novelist.  And I have no idea what I might need to know, so I simply take in everything I can.

And here I sit, on the brink of what is the end of the workweek for most people, and what is about to be for me the beginning of two days of not having enough time or energy to do what I like: reading.  Reading is my business and my life is open with acres of time in which to do it.  So much of the advice I have for you (any of you) has to be gleaned from Abigail.  She has schoolwork, and office work, and house work, as well as her reading and writing, all nagging at her to be done.  And yet she gets it all done.

Make a point of reading before bed.  This is something I'm trying to institute myself.  Don't look at the computer, stay away from television screens.  Bundle up in your pajamas, crawl into bed, and read some from your book.

Read in the morning before you "start your day."  Once you get into the flow of the day, it's sometimes hard to break off and pick up a book.  Go to bed early and get up early - and read a bit before you get going!

Have "book stations."  If you're like me and you're reading more than one book at a time, find places you tend to be in the house for any length of time and assign books to those places: your bed, a chair in the living room, a place at the kitchen table.  When you're there, pick up the book and read.

Multitask.  Unless you tend to have sit-down meals other than supper, in which case it would be rude to ignore your family, read while you eat!  This can grow awkward when your food requires a fork and a knife and your book requires at least one hand, but necessity is the mother of invention.  You'll find a way around such problems.

"Never trust anyone who hasn't brought a book with him."  Got a bag or a purse?  Stuff a book in it.  I have designated reading areas at my local grocery stores.  While I'm waiting for the rest of my crew to finish, I plunk down and read for a spell.  Even if you get carsick while reading (which I do) take a book with you anyway.  You never known when an opportunity to read may arise. 

Break it down.  I'm reading three books at present (The Flowers of Adonis by Rosemary Sutcliff, On Christian Truth by Harry Blamires, and 1215: The Year of the Magna Carta by Danny Danziger and John Gillingham) and two of them have short to manageable chapters, the sort I can easy read in a day.  If you have a lot you want to read, take it in bite-size pieces (I did this with Thera, whose chapters are few and huge) and put the book down and move on once you have accomplished your goal for the day.  Slow but steady wins the race.

Beautiful People - Akmennades

I began Gingerune with a bare handful of characters.  Truly, I had only five.  As you may have picked up on my sojourn through Plenilune (I was not really about when I was writing Adamantine) I have a knack for stumbling upon new characters at the merest turn of the road.  Well, a few thousand words in to Gingerune I had at least two new "primary" characters and a few secondary ones.  Unlike many of my Plenilune characters, the characters of Gingerune have to be cracked open and don't come dashing, prancing, leaping and bounding with open-faced smiles at me.  So I decided to do an in-depth "beautiful people" post - really a character fractalling.  I have only done one so far.  They take some doing, but I will probably do several other characters quite soon.  So here is my second new primary character.

akmennades, prince of thera
Who is your character as described in one sentence?
Akmennades is twenty-nine years old and heir-apparent of the island kingdom of Thera, lieutenant priest of the Rammerowt, Theran ambassador to neighbouring islands, and Lord High Admiral of the Theran fleet.

Who is your character as described by a few key words?
Silent, dangerous, tyrannical.

 Who is your character as described by one paragraph?
Akmennades is by nature a quiet person, and because of his position in the Theran government, very close to the queen and a very important person himself, he has learned the knack of silence and also how powerful a weapon it can be. Upon power he places a great price, having experienced helplessness at a young age. He holds all things tightly in his grasp and makes people feel, intuitively, that he has the power of life and death over them.

Who is your character as described by several key phrases?
A ship without a shore. A riptide on a moonless night. A man, curiously, such as men are wont to follow.

Who is your character as described by several paragraphs?
Akmennades is a man born to privilege and responsibility and he feels that weight keenly. He was also a man nearly not born, and that, too, he feels keenly as an omen of inevitable failure, a fate against which he fights desperately every day of his life. He lives in an iron dread and commands with an iron will. Perfection, the unswerving loyalty of his men, the glory of his dynasty, seem to lie always just beyond his fingertips. This turns his disposition tyrannical, his heart unwilling to kindness, and while he believes he has the capacity to be a great man, he feels the gods draw it, tauntingly, just out of his reach.

 He is a brilliant young man. He drives himself to greatness. His men, though they do not understand him, would follow him willingly into Hades. In his harsh way he loves Thera, much as a wolf loves its cubs. But he is also a man to hate, long and hard and unwaveringly, and he carries a great storm of hatred with him every day of his life.

What is your character’s extroversion or introversion preference?
While Akmennades is naturally cold and withdrawn and does not usually share his thoughts, he is always watching the interactions and listening to the discussions of his generals and the lords of Thera. Not much escapes his eye.

What is your character’s sensing or intuitive preference?
He is a well-balanced individual. He is as willing to weigh cold facts favourably as he is willing to listen to guts and instinct.

What are the weaknesses and strengths of your character?
He is an ambitious, driven character with a just if unmerciful mind, but the fear of failure, which pushes him to excel, also makes him vulnerable to doubt and despair.

What is your character’s love language?
Akmennades possesses the rough love of a god. He is a man of strength, high sentiment, and iron purpose which the will of no other man can sway, which are all traits that do not lend themselves to the normal human expressions of love.

What is the story of the changes of your character’s personality?
Not many people remember clearly their very early years—mostly before the age of five—but Akmennades remembers a strange, terrible man and his mother’s screams, a sense of abject terror fuelled by helplessness, fire, and a long blinding time of pain and darkness, oblivious to all but a sense of raging confusion. All other memories of happiness before that time were truncated by this single memory. As the years went by and he recovered to the best physical ability from his experience, the memory (and the confusion) has haunted him, his physical inabilities have always quietly mocked him, and the growing responsibilities to which he was born have aged him faster than is the case with many other boys. He knows, also, that he is a man who has death for a close friend.

What axioms and definitions influence your character’s decisions?
The only truly powerful people are the ones who understand pain.

What does your character believe about origins?
He believes in the gods, though he does not love them; he believes in the Rammerowt, though—unlike his mother—he is continually perplexed by their lying out of his reach. If legends are true—and there are not many left—and if he is of the royal house and a priest of the Rammerowt, the power of the Rammerowt, he feels, ought to lie within his control. Stubbornly, silently, the four powers remain dead.

What does your character believe about the afterlife?
He believes it is a raw, pure state of pain in which the spirit, torn forcibly by wills against its own from the body, cannot grow numb nor flinch nor flee, no more than a lidless eye can blink and shut out the sight of the world.

What does your character believe about law?
Personal preference, wealth, and comfort are weaknesses that cloud the perfect execution of justice. Great nations are ones with rigid morals, safe sea-ways, a simple home life, frugality, and strong work ethic among its people. The vices, in any level of society, exhibited in any crime, are marks of weakness to be thrown out at once as a bad fruit is thrown from the basket lest it soil the rest of the vintage.

How does your character’s family life influence his decisions?
He is as yet only heir-apparent; though he has many responsibilities and is a great mover and shaker of the state and navy, he is still in the shadow of his mother whom he feels, intuitively, that he should feel affection for, and yet whom he quietly despises. She is in many ways as hard and unbending as he, and like iron they are continually clashing. She is, in his eyes, too subjective in her rule and far too driven by her own desires—not seeing, even in his rigid adherence to justice, that he, too, is no less influenced by his fears and passions.

When a person first meets your character, what does he know about him?
That he might have the potential to be good, but that he is implacable, bitter, and omen of ill things, and that he is strangely—almost alarmingly—the kind of man to throw one’s lot in with.

When someone is an enemy of your character, how does he see him?
Stubborn, fighting like a hunting bird with clipped wings against the horror of an inevitable cage, whose strength is at the same time his weakness, and in whose eyes one can see the long dark road of a despair that leads to death.

When someone has been a friend of your character for years, what does he know about him?
He does not trust himself and trusts others still less. He is a man convinced of power and yet fears he will never attain it. He is a man to be followed unquestioningly, proudly, and loved unconditionally, though he himself shows no betraying glimpse of love. He can be kind, but not loving.

What is something about your character which no one else knows, which no one will ever know?
The nightmares.

He wore [the mask] now, and behind it streamed the blue-grey feathers of the storm petrel so that he seemed, for all he was too small and too ornately dressed for his size, a thing of prancing beauty, a thing scornful of the earth. In every line of him, in the motionless human features carved into his mask, Ginger saw an implacable soul, bitter as a falcon, inhuman as a god. 
gingerune

In Little Room Confining Mighty Men

I said to someone once somewhere that writing novels does not get easier the more you do it.  Oh, you grow more dextrous with the craft as you work at it, that's certain.  I am losing my hack-job quality of going about it, much to my relief.  They say practice makes perfect (they are lying, of course, but it's a nice sentiment) but what they don't tell you is that, if you really love your art, it is only going to get harder.  You will get better at facing the challenge, but the wave beyond the next one is always going to be higher, colder, more blood-curdling - and if you've got an ounce of self-dignity in you, you're going to suck in your breath and plunge into that wave all the same.

I knew Gingerune was going to be a difficult wave.  What I did not expect was the speed with which it overtook me.  Only a few days ago I was bobbing merrily in the mellow seas of Plenilune, a year and a half of familiar waters, content with characters I had come to know, places I had come to love, a plot I had already well hashed out and was just fitting into form.  I look back on it and think, "Well.  That wasn't so bad."  And then I turn and look into the shadows at the shapeless form of Gingerune, as yet mercurial and mysterious, unwilling to give up its secrets to me, and I know I'm going to have to play the old going-down-the-rabbit-hole game with it: chasing after it word by word, taking sudden turns of thought after characters whose habits of mind I do not yet know, following where they lead, exploring a world beyond my cozy realm of tongue-in-cheek Shakespearean quotations and bizarre biblical references.  With Gingerune I feel as if I am going out alone into the dark, my imagination a bare, faint spark, my fingers stringing words together like beads, and I'm waiting for that magical moment when the formlessness of the idea in my mind suddenly clicks with the hesitant pictures my hand is making. 

My walls are changing.  Many of the old sticky-notes for Plenilune have been taken down, used up and ruthlessly discarded.  New notes are going up.  New pieces of paper, like the Standards of legionary companies, staggered in pink on a green background.  A drawing of my main character stares accusingly at me from beside Jefferies' monitor screen.  A new world is piecing itself together in my head.

A new novel has begun.

The Next Big Thing...Or So

I was asked by Anne Elisabeth Stengl if I wanted to participate in a blog hop featuring authors' "next big things."  Hmm...yes, please!  (Be sure to read her post on her soon-to-release novel Dragonwitch here!) Unfortunately, I've been reduced to dragging my heels about it trying to figure out which of my three novels I'm going to feature.  Adamantine is written, Plenilune's first draft has been completed (!!), and Gingerune I haven't even started yet, but I am actively working on each of them almost at once and none of them has an agent or publisher yet.  Except for the small differences of "finished," "nearly finished," and "unbegun," they are all fairly equal.

Which is why I'm going to feature all of them!

What are the working titles of your novels?
My "finished" novel is Adamantine, my current work-in-progress is Plenilune, and the novel to come is Gingerune.  With the exception of Gingerune, the titles are real words.  I don't remember making Gingerune up - it sort of made up itself.  Self-generation and all that.  Very Egyptian mythos.

Where did the ideas for your books come from?
The idea for Adamantine, as many of you know, came from my reading of Beowulf in highschool.  Where on earth the fairy element came from I confess I do not recall.  I seem to have a knack for throwing a bunch of otherwise incongruous articles together into the alchemical pot of literature and making something work.  I don't know how I do it.  We all seem to be gullible enough to let me continue.

As for Plenilune, that was a combination of necessity and, again, a number of books that I read.  Adamant's cousin Margaret, who makes a few minor appearances in Adamantine, wound up mysteriously needing a story and so I had to make one up.  I had read J.R.R. Tolkien's Roverandom not long before that, and I had recently completed the enjoyable yet exhausting sojourn through E.R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros.  Having always wanted to write a novel in such a vein, it was not a difficult step from there to the plot of Plenilune. 

Gingerune.  That's a tricky one.  It began, I think, as a one-shot that no longer resembles what it has been rapidly growing into over the past few months.  It was a bit more medieval then; it has since launched itself some 3,500 years into the past to an island that Plato has since made eternally famous.  I am not sure what influenced the story - it is not yet done percolating - but I know that several elements that came to light briefly in Adamantine and Plenilune rose to the forefront in Gingerune and will not only heavily influence the plot, but probably be the pivotal elements of the plot.  Concepts such as the abolition of man, the everlasting man, "magic," redemption, religion, several kinds of an abyss...  Oh, it'll be such a lot of fun, and I'll tear my hair out over it because each subsequent novel I write is harder than the one before it because I always get the notion that concepts and elements just a little beyond me are the sorts I want to deal with.  But it helps me grow.

What genres do your books fall under?
Fantasy, hands down.  This is not to say they're all lies and moonshine - the best fantasy, I find, is often some of the truest sort of fiction.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in movie renditions of your novels?
Well, since you asked...

Adamantine: The time I saw my first Top Gear UK episode I saw Richard Hammond (with his hair cut) and I thought, "Rhodri?  What the devil are you doing on the BBC!"  But of course he's not strictly an actor, he's a television presenter - which is kind of the same thing, but not quite.  Second choice, and actual actor, would probably be Blake Ritson.  Carey Mulligan is a current choice for Adamant - she's got that cute smile and childish face which can easily pass for naivete.  With some of the super-duper CGI methods (courtesy, possibly, of James Cameron's Avatar), I'll bet Chris Hemsworth would make a pretty decent Eikin Thrasirson. Tom Hiddleston (support popular actors!) for the voice of the pooka - that sly, handsome, compelling voice that you like and half-suspect you oughtn't. 

Plenilune: For the fox - easy choice - David Tennant; Rupert de la Mare - also an easy choice - is Richard Armitage.  Abigail supports the role of Skander Rime going to Jonny Lee Miller.  The closest I have found for Margaret is Anne Hathaway, but I don't know if she could play the role.  Oh well, this is about looks, I suppose.  Anne Hathaway would probably do, provided she can be coached to imitate an English accent of a Manchester bent. 

Gingerune:  Give him that curious British style of extremely pale blond hair, and Michael Fassbender would play a good Dream.  I haven't seen her act, but give her ginger hair and Michelle Dockery would make a good imitation of Ginger herself; her daughter Rowena would be well played by Emma Watson.  Not to be cliche (or run the risk of confusing Dream and Maslin, though I hope they look significantly unlike), but I dare say Maslin looks enough like Hugh Jackman to let the Australian stand in for him.  Though, I think Abigail might have taken him for someone.  Oh dear.  We're going to have to shoot our hypothetical films simultaneously if we continue to share actors.  Yay, box-office money.

Give a one-sentence synopsis of each book.
Adamantine: A young Victorian lady must find the heir of Beowulf and restore him to power before the enchantments that hold him seal his death.
Plenilune: When she is shipped off to Naples to catch a foreign suitor, Margaret Coventry was not expecting a very foreign suitor to catch her - and use her to win or lose a world.
Gingerune: Once there were the Earth Masters, then there came the gods, but the old legends are not as musty and dead as Ginger once thought them to be.

Will your books be self-published or represented by an agency?
I am pursuing the route of agency and I would rather not try self-publication.

How long did it take you to write the first drafts of your manuscripts?
Adamantine took me about five years because I was young and foolish and still learning how to be diligent writing an otherwise good plot.  Plenilune I started in September of 2011, so a first draft took me about a year and a half to complete.  I have not yet begun to write Gingerune.  When it comes to the time it will take, your guess is as good as mine and will probably count for just as much in the grand scheme of things.  Which is to say, not much at all.

What other books would you compare these stories to in your genre?
Are we speaking of current novels or novels in existence from any old time period?  I suppose you could say any respectable let's-go-to-another-world fantasy novel (I don't seem to have many outside of Narnia in my library), and The Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis, and probably Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea books, now that I have read one or two of them and look ahead into the prospective future of Gingerune.

Who or what inspired you to write these novels?
I just had a conversation with my father about a single, simple phrase gleaned from Scripture which, when spoken in my hearing, is like a match struck and raised in the vault of a palace that time has buried and mankind has thought was lost.  That phrase is The Zeal of Thy House.  So much is encased in those five words: family, purpose, belonging, passion, a fight to fight, a race to be won, the honour of a name to be upheld.  No matter what books - Beowulf, The Worm Ouroboros - may prompt me to write a novel, that one phrase lies at the root of all my inspiration.

The Zeal of Thy House

I also tagged Rachel the Inkpen AuthoressAnd Abigail of Scribbles and Inkstains will also be joining in The Next Big Thing Keep your eyes peeled!

K - Kirke

What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.Leo Tolstoy
Yes, I know I'm cheating - technically it is "Circe," but it can also be "Kirke," and we're on the letter K. Perhaps you know the story of Kirke?  Beautiful enchantress whose island is violated by the wayward bands of Odysseus.  Odysseus being elsewhere, Kirke spreads a magnificent feast for the men, in the course of which she magics them into swine.  I have no real idea (not particularly enjoying the blunders of Odysseus myself) if this is a display of some kind of chauvinism in one direction or another, but as C.S. Lewis pointed out in his poem Vitrea Circe, one wonders if one can really blame her.

She watched those drunken 
And tarry sailors 
Eat nectar-junket 
And Phoenix-nests; 
Each moment paler 
With pride, she shrunk at 
Their leering, railing, 
Salt-water jests. 
They thought to pluck there 
Her rosial splendour? 
They though their luck there 
Was near divine? 
When the meal ended 
She rose and struck them 
With wand extended 
And made them swine. 

All the same, regardless of Lewis' reasonable exposition of the passage, the meaning of Circe has stuck: a woman of beguiling, irresistible beauty.  Usually she wants to be enchantingly alluring, but I have found that isn't always the case and sometimes the poor woman can't help it.  Sometimes it is the response of the male character.  I have found it to be a true statement that, in Greek literature at least, often in the literature of other countries, to be a beautiful woman is usually a curse.  You are often cursed by the gods (they don't like being outdone), kidnapped, fought over, and frankly unhappy.

So you see there are two sides to this shapely, beautiful coin, and it's a currency I use in Adamantine.   Infatuation and enchantment by beguiling are perhaps harder vices to write about that torture or abuse, because torture and abuse are easily recognizable as brutal, ugly, cruel, inhuman things.  Beauty, on the other hand, is very easily mistaken as a virtue.  The taste of it is at once delightful and galling: once the character tries it, it grows on him (or her), until he finds himself in over his head with no way - and no want - to get out.  For the reader it is probably harder to read because cruelty can be shored up against; however, the more insidious vices can be seen coming by "dramatic irony" in the sense that you know the woman is only trying to wrap the fellow around her finger and then drop him at the end of a rope, but he can't see it.  He's a complete cad without a single scruple, but she thinks he's charming and she can't see to what things are tending - and how do you know what horror of the mind is about to ensue, what soiling of the soul?  The agony can be intense. Will everything be lost forever?

If you've read The Shadow Things, you know I'm perfectly capable of - and willing to - rip your hearts out and stamp them in the dirt.