Juliet Waldron's Blog, page 3
April 5, 2013
Nanina Slips in the Window Again
The character who keeps coming back! Most writers have them. The book that can’t or won’t be finished--those too are on every writer’s hard drive. My particular dark horse always returns in the first warm weather, this year occurring in April.*
She’s here again, sucking up my waking hours. Needless to say, I’m reediting and reimagining scenes and conversations I’ve visited many, many times before. I’ve journeyed repeatedly to this world across a time which now spans thirty years.
Nanina's is the first story/book I ever wrote, although a satisfactory ending, I think, still eludes me. Like Constanze of "Mozart’s Wife," this young heroine insists on speaking in the first person, which both narrows and deepens her POV. It’s like writing while pinned inside her dress.
I’ve heard authors talk about “channeling” their characters. There are many accounts of automatic writing and spirit dictation, which sound as if they should be taken with entire handfuls of salt. However, after the experience I've had working on Nanina's story, I know it can happen.
Ordinarily it takes a period of study and focused concentration to make your "dolls" get up and show you where they want to go. In this case, however, it appears I was the vessel chosen by a voice from the past. She desperately wanted to tell me about her grand passion,about what happened to her after it ended, and about how she coped with the death of the man who was, to all intents and purposes, her only God.
So tulip-time April comes again, and her voice returns, calling for rewrites and editing. She insists I do my best work, despite the fact that the story is “romance.”
I hasten to add that it’s a “romance” in the broadest sense of the word, in the way "Romeo & Juliet" is a romance. I’m not using the modern commercial meaning. This is a tale of the old-fashioned bloody-insanity that a great passion can sometimes be, the kind which all too easily slides into tragedy. It’s the dark side of "Mighty Aphrodite," which makes completing this vulnerible young woman's story so difficult for me.
~~Juliet Waldron
*Finished at last, published in 2011 as
"My Mozart," Nanina's story now stands beside the story of "Mozart's Wife" as a kind of ecstatic flip side image.
She’s here again, sucking up my waking hours. Needless to say, I’m reediting and reimagining scenes and conversations I’ve visited many, many times before. I’ve journeyed repeatedly to this world across a time which now spans thirty years.
Nanina's is the first story/book I ever wrote, although a satisfactory ending, I think, still eludes me. Like Constanze of "Mozart’s Wife," this young heroine insists on speaking in the first person, which both narrows and deepens her POV. It’s like writing while pinned inside her dress.
I’ve heard authors talk about “channeling” their characters. There are many accounts of automatic writing and spirit dictation, which sound as if they should be taken with entire handfuls of salt. However, after the experience I've had working on Nanina's story, I know it can happen.
Ordinarily it takes a period of study and focused concentration to make your "dolls" get up and show you where they want to go. In this case, however, it appears I was the vessel chosen by a voice from the past. She desperately wanted to tell me about her grand passion,about what happened to her after it ended, and about how she coped with the death of the man who was, to all intents and purposes, her only God.
So tulip-time April comes again, and her voice returns, calling for rewrites and editing. She insists I do my best work, despite the fact that the story is “romance.”
I hasten to add that it’s a “romance” in the broadest sense of the word, in the way "Romeo & Juliet" is a romance. I’m not using the modern commercial meaning. This is a tale of the old-fashioned bloody-insanity that a great passion can sometimes be, the kind which all too easily slides into tragedy. It’s the dark side of "Mighty Aphrodite," which makes completing this vulnerible young woman's story so difficult for me.
~~Juliet Waldron
*Finished at last, published in 2011 as
"My Mozart," Nanina's story now stands beside the story of "Mozart's Wife" as a kind of ecstatic flip side image.
March 15, 2013
Time Trips
It’s 11:11 p.m. Sometimes it’s 12:12 a.m. And other times it’s 3:33 or, maybe, it’s 4:56. These are clock times which snag my imagination. They happen mostly during the dark hours, when I wake up, check the time, shake my head and stagger off to the bathroom, or to let the cat out, or to wander around the house for a bit until my old joints unkink a little so I can go back to sleep. I suppose I shouldn’t waste time thinking about whether it means anything, but the problem is that during the 60’s I dabbled in numerology, and that even earlier, sitting on the floor to the off-stage right of a Barbadian bar, I read books about ancient aliens visiting earth, prehistoric collisions with Venus, or African tribes who knew all about the invisible-to-the-naked-eye-dwarf companion of the blue giant star, Sirius. I’ve been soaking in this other-worldly, one-brick-shy-of-a-load content since I was a post war child, with predictable results.
Whenever I wake up I always look at the clock, and because there is usually some variation of what I take to be a “meaningful” configuration, I’ve begun to imagine these are messages—from somewhere, about something. Don’t ask me what, although I’ve wasted plenty of time wondering.
Are these omens, messages from a hitherto uncommunicative universe?
Will the TARDIS land in my bedroom? (If you prefer "Stargate," that'll work too.)
Is something with three long limp toes and a snaky snout from some hideous Lovecroftian dimension waiting just behind the bedroom door?
Or is it just my imagination running away with me over a series of unrelated, random events, aka Reality as usual?
Whenever I wake up I always look at the clock, and because there is usually some variation of what I take to be a “meaningful” configuration, I’ve begun to imagine these are messages—from somewhere, about something. Don’t ask me what, although I’ve wasted plenty of time wondering.
Are these omens, messages from a hitherto uncommunicative universe?
Will the TARDIS land in my bedroom? (If you prefer "Stargate," that'll work too.)
Is something with three long limp toes and a snaky snout from some hideous Lovecroftian dimension waiting just behind the bedroom door?
Or is it just my imagination running away with me over a series of unrelated, random events, aka Reality as usual?
March 4, 2013
Old Dead Friends
I’ve spent a lot of my life fixating upon dead heroes, which means, as we turn into October, I’m entering my favorite other-worldly season. (Maybe “hero” isn’t quite the word, but “famous historical personalities” is unwieldy.) Richard III came into my life early, just pre-teen, via a discarded paperback, “The Daughter of Time” by Josephine Tey, fished from a wastebasket in the lounge of a 1950’s Barbados hotel. For some reason, this mystery story about a man whose chosen motto was “Loyalty Binds Me” and whose reputation had been unjustly blackened, started an obsessive fire in my brain which is, even 50 some years later, burning hotter than ever.
Richard started life in 1452, which is a long time ago—560 years at Fotheringhay Castle, now nothing more than a heap of earth where the original motte and bailey stood. As you can see from the picture, 500+ years doesn’t leave much behind! He was born on October 2, which makes him a Libra. If the Tudor spin doctors are to be believed, he was a seriously out of balance child of this supremely balanced heavenly sign. If the skeleton just recovered proves to be the King, it appears that he had a deformity at birth, a severe scoliosis, which would have caused his right shoulder to be carried high. He only lived for thirty-two years, but he (or his distorted shadow) has left a large mark on World consciousness via Shakespeare’s blood-and-thunder melodrama.
This blog is not about Richard, though. It’s about time, of which we humans don’t get a large slice. I’ve been flailing around more than twice as long as this particular dead hero, but have made not a jot of difference to the greater world. Still, King Richard, his fair wife, Anne Neville, and others of the bloody Plantagenet cousinage have been wandering about, talking, loving and fighting in my head since childhood. When the excavation in that Leicester car park came up with those bones--scoliosis, battle wounds, and all—it started the whole royal parade, complete with banners and drums, echoing inside my mind. The images come seeping out, a moving picture of antique glory superimposed over the ordinariness of daily life. I feel closer to these semi-imaginary long dead than I do to my neighbors. After all, these royal shadows have been with me from tropical beaches to Cornish cliffs and all the way to this present slough of suburban senior citizenship.
Richard started life in 1452, which is a long time ago—560 years at Fotheringhay Castle, now nothing more than a heap of earth where the original motte and bailey stood. As you can see from the picture, 500+ years doesn’t leave much behind! He was born on October 2, which makes him a Libra. If the Tudor spin doctors are to be believed, he was a seriously out of balance child of this supremely balanced heavenly sign. If the skeleton just recovered proves to be the King, it appears that he had a deformity at birth, a severe scoliosis, which would have caused his right shoulder to be carried high. He only lived for thirty-two years, but he (or his distorted shadow) has left a large mark on World consciousness via Shakespeare’s blood-and-thunder melodrama.
This blog is not about Richard, though. It’s about time, of which we humans don’t get a large slice. I’ve been flailing around more than twice as long as this particular dead hero, but have made not a jot of difference to the greater world. Still, King Richard, his fair wife, Anne Neville, and others of the bloody Plantagenet cousinage have been wandering about, talking, loving and fighting in my head since childhood. When the excavation in that Leicester car park came up with those bones--scoliosis, battle wounds, and all—it started the whole royal parade, complete with banners and drums, echoing inside my mind. The images come seeping out, a moving picture of antique glory superimposed over the ordinariness of daily life. I feel closer to these semi-imaginary long dead than I do to my neighbors. After all, these royal shadows have been with me from tropical beaches to Cornish cliffs and all the way to this present slough of suburban senior citizenship.
January 23, 2013
Possum Tracks
Why Possum Tracks? Because in the authorial world, that's the creature with which I identify, a small despised creature that scuttles quietly through the night, seeking a few crumbs with which to sustain my ability to create. I mind my business and gather what the others who are more fortunate have discarded, or what they will not consume, the grubs, worms, bugs, of this writing life. I'm not ashamed of what I am. It is necessary for some of us to clean up after the riotous dinners of the much-lauded others.
With sharp claws, I dig after the grubs of truth buried in the dirt of history. I persist; my lineage is ancient. My family lived in Gondowanaland ever so long ago, and my descendants--rare, strange and endangered--still remain in far off Australia, which drifted away from neighboring continents and became lost.
I will speak of the past, of the meaning of writing about history and occasionally about writing, but the last is mostly immaterial since we've all become scribblers in this electronic (and probably short-lived) all-consuming age. I will talk about men and women and about their tangled relations, about love, power, character,good and evil, night and day, and about the small creatures of the earth and the flight of birds, moonrise and set, and about the signs of nature which exist to illuminate and delight even the most dreary life.
http://cronehenge.blogspot.com
http://www.julietwaldron.com
~~Juliet Waldron
With sharp claws, I dig after the grubs of truth buried in the dirt of history. I persist; my lineage is ancient. My family lived in Gondowanaland ever so long ago, and my descendants--rare, strange and endangered--still remain in far off Australia, which drifted away from neighboring continents and became lost.
I will speak of the past, of the meaning of writing about history and occasionally about writing, but the last is mostly immaterial since we've all become scribblers in this electronic (and probably short-lived) all-consuming age. I will talk about men and women and about their tangled relations, about love, power, character,good and evil, night and day, and about the small creatures of the earth and the flight of birds, moonrise and set, and about the signs of nature which exist to illuminate and delight even the most dreary life.
http://cronehenge.blogspot.com
http://www.julietwaldron.com
~~Juliet Waldron
