PEG II: It Lives

 

Today has been the first day in . . . probably two months when I positively wanted to get to my desk and Find Out What Happens Next.  It has been a very very crummy couple of months in terms of writing and all that comes with that—my self identification as A Writer*, the need to earn a living, sheer morale or lack thereof**, and the morbid imaginings of what you all will do to me if I don't get PEG II turned in on time.***  But about a week ago I had what I frelling well hope is the last delivery of major plot business—and yes I've been having several well-populated hells of a time trying to write around this lack:  making apple pie without apples, your top crust keeps falling in, never mind that the smell and the taste are all wrong—and I'm very much afraid that when I go back (again) for rewrites there is going to be a lot of stuff I can't use any more.  Arrrrgh.†  HOWEVER.  Whatever the system is, it's now working.††  Don't make any sudden moves or loud noises and scare it.   

So let's celebrate with an Ask Robin.

I'm wondering, were you at all inspired and/or influenced by Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast film in writing either of your Beauty and the Beast retellings?

Short form:  No.  Slightly longer form:  Not quite no, but almost.  I didn't like the film.†††  I didn't find it stylized and dreamlike, I found it awkward and tiresome.  Of course I don't know what I would have thought of it in 1946 when it came out and broke cinematic rules right and left (so the critics say) but I don't think context would change my basic problems with it.  I am resistant to beauty presented as beauty-and-therefore-it-doesn't-have-to-be-anything else, which Cocteau does (I feel) with both Josette Day and Jean Marais.  All right.  They're pretty.  And your point would be?  I also hated the doubling of the Jean Marais character, and felt it undermined both Beauty‡ and the story.  I didn't like the Beast being so manifestly a lion.  This is one of my lifelong bugbears.  He's not called the Lion, or the Wolverine, or the Walrus.  He's called the Beast.  He should not be caged and constrained by one beast and the myths and folk wisdom we have about that one creature.

            The single thing I took away with me—the shiny thing that the magpie-storyteller stole and put in her hidden cache—is the liveness of the Beast's house.  The image that has stayed with me is those arms holding the candelabra—and swinging them toward Beauty as she walks past them.  It ought to be a grotesque image—disembodied arms sticking out of a wall, ewwwww—but it isn't.  And there are various eyes and at least one statue's head that follow Beauty as well.  I liked this a lot.  I tend to think of things generally counted as inert as alive‡‡ and this appealed to me.  And while the Beast's palace in ROSE DAUGHTER was alive from a lot of different sources,  those images from LA BELLE ET LE BETE were one of the shiny things I took out of my magpie hoard. 

            Postscript:  I can pretty much guarantee that BELLE didn't affect the writing of BEAUTY because I hadn't seen it yet.  I saw it for the first time during the several months between the time I sent my manuscript to Harper & Row, as it then was, and when I received the little white envelope containing a letter saying they wanted to publish it.  I may have not been in the best frame of mind for it, therefore, but I saw it again a few years later and didn't like it any better.  Mooooo.

 * * *

* Although the bottom line under the bottom line is storyteller, how I tell my stories is in words on a page.

** And December-January-February is the pit of the year weatherwise in the Northern Hemisphere—cold, sunless, bleak, and in southern England, wet.  Or occasionally when it's a skating rink. 

*** Killing me outright would be counterproductive, however tempting.  But there is plenty of opportunity on this side of the final solution.  Small dark rooms and chains have featured prominently.  But you should also know that the flow of inspiration, such as it is, feeds on things like sunlight, roses, hellhounds and chocolate^ so really you're probably best off just letting me crush myself with guilt.

^ Not to mention music and other people's stories

† Only faint silver lining is the possibility of some bloggable outtakes.  All nights off the blog are good nights off.

†† Thank the wicked gods that I have not tried, or rather had to try, to write a sequel/second half of the story book before now.  There have been two things I have been holding in front of myself like a sword and shield, the last two months:  One:  the story is there.  I may be totally failing to hear it accurately—hear it accurately enough to write it down—write it down in a way that isn't immediately obviously wrong.  I may have spent far too much time playing with the king's hellhounds—er—hounds—because I haven't been given anything better to do.  But the story is there.  I can hear it rustling and muttering to itself in the next room.^  Which meant I'd get my hands on it some day.  Two:  I've always been like this.  I've always written in manic bursts followed by falling into the silent void^^ for some unguessable span.  I don't like it—I will not abuse you with how much I don't like it—but that's the way it is.  I know this by now.  I haven't lost everything^^^.  I'm just having another of these spells.  But if I'd been trying to do this two-book thing a couple of decades ago when I still thought that my writing and my career as a writer were a kind of transitory joke that were likely to be over with at any moment^^^^, I would be bunged up in the padded room by now.

           I was hoping I was going to finish PEG II before I fell into the void again—I've been worrying about this since I first realised that PEGASUS was two books.  DRAGONHAVEN-CHALICE-FIRE-PEGASUS came out four years in a row, and I've never had four books out in four years before, even when one of them is half my husband's.  Surely I'll get through the second half of PEGASUS before . . .

            Given that the gaps between my novels have been more often longer than two years than less, don't stop lighting those candles.  But we're okay at the moment.

^ Talk louder.

^^ Except it's not silent, so it's not the void, because voids don't have noise either, they're void.  But the void-like place is full of nasty little chittering noises:  some of them are demons of long acquaintance.  Some of them are new. 

^^^ I hope.  I find it hard to believe that any professionally creative person—anyone who makes stuff up for a living in any medium—doesn't have hours or days or middle-of-the-nights when they're afraid they have.

^^^^ Possibly mid-sentence

††† You can't kill me, remember?  I have to finish PEG II.  And then there's ALBION and TAM LIN and the FORTY SIX NEXT DAMAR NOVELS and the rest.

 ‡ I have a snarly, having-grown-up-reading-books-about-boys-because-there-were-no-books-about-girls-doing-things reaction to this:  'Right, of course, they're going to undermine the GIRL'. Mustn't let those uppity women be strong or brave or clear-sighted or self-aware or anything.  Grrrrr.

 ‡‡ A basic tenet of shamanism is 'Everything that is, is alive'.  Yes.  And, speaking of stealing, I stole this for A Pool in the Desert, when Zasharan says 'Everything that is, is real'.