Meet Me in the Woods - Lord Huron - Lyrics

This song is a new addition to my writing playlist. I don't choose songs because they are my favorites or what I normally like to listen to, but because the songs match the both the tone and meaning of a scene or multiple scenes happening in the book. I have written the ending of the book. This song is one of the last four songs on the writing playlist that support the ending of story and its tone and meaning. I really like Lord Huron, too, not just this particular song. It's been a great discovery. Taking a week off now to clean my house and rest. Before I tackle the middle of the book which is a mess.

The Fall of Rome by R.A. Lafferty

"Sometime in this period Alaric did penance for forty days in reparation for his murderous raids in Greece. He was subject to remorse, for which reason he cannot be ranked among the great military leaders of the world. And in this period also, the Goths became un-Gothed to a great extent. They caught the Greek fever and discovered sudden new talents in themselves. They borrowed stringed instruments from the Greeks--they had had only horns and bull-roarers before--and went music crazy. It has been mentioned that rhyme in verse and son appeared at the turn of that century for the first time ever in the world. Nobody knew where it came from, but all the peoples took it up at the same time. The Goths made ballads in rhyme, in their own language and in Low Latin; and these became almost the signature of that rural Goth springtime in Epirus that lasted four years.

When the impulse seized the Goths next, after martial interludes of more than five hundred years, they would be the troubadours of Languedoc in South France."

— The Fall of Rome by R.A. Lafferty

(How I love this book. Oh, what fun....)

(If only I could buy it. But no. Borrow.)

Working this morning.

 

When writing a book, one has to be many things besides just the creative writer. Creating is one aspect of writing a novel. At some point, one has to become a stern reader, an experienced editor, a capable book doctor, meaning rewrites if necessary. One has to be able to look at the work and know what its weaknesses are and if the book can sustain those weaknesses or not. For example The Night Circus, it's exquisite at many points, but it does have a weakness, drama and plot, especially toward the ending. However, that was a weakness the book in totality could carry, and the reader does not care. Atmosphere held it up, it's own enchantment. But certain readers do feel that weight, the ambiguity, especially when concerning Celia and Marco. How working writers learn how to examine this is: They simply take the magic away from The Night Circus and then look at it without the exquisite language and atmosphere. This is what editors do. This is what book doctors learn. This is what very stern readers can see. This is one of my favorite books and I can see this with no judgment as a beloved reader. But as a writer, I have to know it. I have to know it, because I love this book intensely and I admire the atmosphere, and I want to learn those skills, but I also want a plot. Can a book like this hold both? Is it necessary? If one chooses plot and drama, does one forfeit atmosphere? Hmm. Questions for this morning.

My favorite female writers who are influencers.

I was just thinking, after Angela Carter, Russian writer, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, has had the most influence on me. These two women. There are others. Isak Dinesen, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Mary Gaitskill, and of course, Shirley Jackson and A.S. Byatt.

Musing on Angela Carter this Saturday morning....

My sister and friends are always sending me Angela Carter articles and essays to hang on my wall. Perhaps this is because I do connect with Carter in many ways. For one, she was never likely to toe the party line or simply resign herself to the current political. She liked complicated. She was interested in contradictions. Questions were necessary. Agendas were small. Carter could never have been an academic in the traditional sense. Publish or perish, searching for new directions all the time, a head rolling with purposes and theories, riding the waves of trends. She saw right through those constructs and gimmicks. She was formidable. I admire all these aspects of her personality and basically over the years, turned similar.

            Jane, Notes. August 5, 2023

The Light in August

All my stories end up as family sagas, or towns decaying, even my upmarket fantasy is a southern phantasmagorical fairytale about the weight of history and how place is predicament. Most people never escape history or place.