Frankenstein

 I don't know how it happened, but somehow I began reading the 1818 text of Frankenstein and that is where I am at the moment. I'd like to reread Miranda Seymour's bio of Mary Shelley and maybe a couple of others, one about her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. I've been suffering from a mean little virus and could not do much else but lie in bed, sleep and read. Outside commentary and appendixes and all, Frankenstein is around 200 pages. It seemed like a good fit for this time of year. I have not read the 1818 text in over twenty years, I do believe. Maybe more, I don't know. I know what started it. I watched the film Mary Shelley! What a horrible mess that was. I suppose it would be all right for a teenager who wanted to get interested in Mary Shelley but it was really a terrible film. I was shocked. I loved all the actors, they were fine, but the script and the story was just silly in more ways than I can recount. Perhaps it was fine to boost Mary Shelley and her book, but at the expense of Percy and Claire, I think not. Not even Mary Shelley would have approved, well, the Mary Shelley that Percy loved. It's hard for me to talk about Mary Shelley, because I have the greatest sympathy for her, wish all her work read and all that, but I don't think we need to make her out to be something she was not. She had a hard time, no doubt, with her headaches, her nerves, her depressions and dealing with being the widow and all. 

Anyway, I have all her books, have read her, admire her but I love Percy Shelley and I love Claire and I don't know why so many scholars fall into separate camps. It's such a waste of brain work.

Dragon-Slayer by C.S. Lewis

I have come back with victory got -
But stand away - touch me not
Even with your clothes. I burn red-hot.

The worm was bitter. When she saw
My shield glitter beside the shaw
She spat flame from her golden jaw.

And then we closed. I do not know

How many hours we struck below

The hollow sky. The grass, also,

Was burnt to ashes where we fought;
But I have killed her as I ought,
And the great treasure-hoard have bought.

But now, I am so fierce and hot
With the beast’s blood, that touch me not!
Go, leave me. I have victory got.

           - C.S. Lewis, Dragon-Slayer

Love Pope, A Quote in my WIP

“All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good.
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, 'Whatever is, is right.”
― Alexander Pope🩶

Dracula

 

I finished. 

Wow, this is one of my favorite books of the 19th Century and I would always add it to list of Victorian fiction to read for everyone. There are many themes, the new woman, science vs superstition, good vs evil, and I suppose the changing world of technology vs the rural lands. I don't know how I could just pin it down. It's told in letters and etc. I loved that. I've read a couple books in letters this year and I'd like to see more books that do this. Dracula is also a history of sorts, of a man who became a demon in order to cheat death and to maintain power. A plus of this book is looking at this mythology which the author paid special attention to. The chase to save people and destroy this evil is one of the best things written in the 19th century. It's Gothic, dark, and has so much subtext. I wanted to read it slow, but I finished a couple of days early. Toward the end, I could not put the book down. I think everyone should read this book. Bram Stoker did a fantastic job. It's a stunning piece of fiction if you really think about it. READ!!!! Perfect for Autumn and Halloween. Dracula and vampires are forever!

More coming and why Dracula inspired me to make some changes on my own story. So much that I decided to read The Norton Edition of Jane Eyre. This probably makes no sense to anyone but me and maybe my BFF, but somehow reading Dracula led me to Jane Eyre and then to how I could solve a problem that has been haunting my manuscript since spring. And this goes to show, that reading does really help writers see new ways to work.

The Settled Version of The Ambitious Fairy Projects

 Just a note:

It's amazing how a novel evolves in our minds, especially if we have time. Some of the best stories I have written or worked on were products of having enough time, where others had little time. Time constraints can be both good and bad. When I do have constraints, I am a much better writer, but if the constraints are too tight, I end up shortchanging the work. That said, too much time gives a writer too much time to think. That is kind of what happened to me on this project. It began as one thing and now it's going to end as a completely new thing. However, I have no regrets because this project has been a heart book in many ways, it has been overly ambitious, and I've been making serious changes from the beginning. One reason I was able to do this is I had a team behind me who said, "Do what you want." I have never really had that. I was always writing with a contract and a due date and the constraints were so tight, I had to work long hours every day to finish. My first draft of this book was done long, long ago before my husband died. It was a very rough draft, the first time I had written a novel like that. By the seat of my pants. It was an experiment. At the end of that journal, I knew I had the wrong character as the MMC and the wrong setting. It was a contemporary set in USA. I think much of that story was just nostalgia. I sometimes just write something to get it out of my mind. I have done that a few times. And sadly, I had no interest in rewriting this story or even keeping anything but one big element. 

What did I do? Well, it took a few years, but I wrote another version the same way, by the seat of my pants and this time, I set in a new place but it was still contemporary. I printed it off. I did not keep a digital copy. I did not like it at all.

It was then that I realized, after four books (one was a completely different book that I loved and may finish one day but it would be a lot of work, how I can see it as a companion to this book I am working on) ... after four books, and hundreds of thousands of words, I realized that writing by the seat of my pants, not writing as an iterative drafter was just a waste time for me and I would never finish a novel. That is my process. And because my story does evolve and it changes a lot as I go I have to rework a book while drafting from the beginning. If I write an entire draft on a single form, it is nothing but a waste, like those four books I drafted by the seat of my pants. I did not revise, refine, or work as I went along. Four versions of a story that went nowhere.

So I stopped and said, I cannot do this anymore.  I am going to trust my instincts and make a plot, pay attention to structure and if I have changes along the way, I go back from the beginning and write it all in. I revise and revise and inch forward as the novel grows and develops into the story I feel best represents that vision in my head.

DOING this, I have learned my weaknesses as a writer, too. And so along the way, I have made changes to enhance my gifts and to mitigate my weaknesses. I have also applied this to the story itself. What can I change to make it better, which basically means smaller, tighter, more focused, to be able to make it propulsive without losing interiority. The latter was a hard lesson. I am still working on that. But really, no one wants big giant books with heavy prose. If authors are getting that, they have a reputation, a backlist, and a good agent.

That brings me to why I wrote all this mess. I knew my book was still too big and I was trying all the time to make it smaller by changing things. Deleting things.

The BIG THING was setting. I keep changing not the place, but the time. I had to ask myself this very week if I could make the story leaner and more mythic by moving time again and the answer was yes, but I did not want to move it to an era I did not love or know, just for the sake of fitting in with so many novels in the genre I write. It was a friend who said, I know what period you know best because you studied it for two decades when you were young. I about fell out of my chair at that comment. And then I knew how I could write the exact same story smaller, just by moving the time. My plot wouldn't change a bit, just descriptions would and even some of those would not. I just started laughing because that is what happens to all writers when they envision their story just one way. I was stuck on one decade and I moved the time back and forth in that decade until I had to decide. Then I realized since it was Alternative Fantasy, I could borrow from other decades within reason. So I finally settled and feel so free.

One reason I am doing this is I want to write a CHARACTER DRIVEN story, with a big theme. It's not a trail ride, it does not reply on gimmicks or shocks. It's a character driven story with lots of surprises created out of character motivations and basic human needs.

It did not start out that way, but that is how it will end. And everything I do serves that purpose.

Comparative reading

 

It's no secret that I love nonfiction more than fiction, but I read a lot of both. But nonfiction is addictive. I also like to pair books at times, because I think better about both books if I have something to compare and contrast. In school, from a very young age all the way through college, when I wrote compare and contrast papers, I was must happier, more productive, and highly creative. Even the short essays got remarks. Often this leads me down rabbit holes and I can stay there, what my friends call, "Janie is gone deep diving." Sometimes it is not pretty and I might stay gone a long time. I can't say that aging has helped this. But it hurts my writing and also my fiction reading. I have learned how to break up these obsessions but when I was going through my personal papers this last week, the ones on writing, I saw the highlights of my deepest loves in literature and history and had to admit, I do have have favorites. It must be noted that when I was very young, in my early years of college, I knew I would never be what I call, an "academic bee." While we need them in our lives, I do not have that kind of personality and avoided the idea of specializing, which meant I would be a teacher of some kind but not a tenured one and not one who specialized in one subject. Basically that is what happened. I also began writing around age thirty, encouraged that I could pay bills with it and then just tutor so I could stay home. Laughing. There I could garden and paint while doing all the other things I HAD to do. Oh well. I like reading a lot. I like learning. It may be a "the great escape" but who really knows. And certainly it's too late to care. So back to Eliot.

For example, with this book on George Eliot, I am pairing White Heat, which is about Emily Dickinson. But they are related and they have a deep connection in how women chose to live their lives, via their own times and geography. And I am going to compare and contrast them as I read, while noting every issue I can on women prior to 1973, when women got Roe vs Wade. Something like this is fun for me. I find it just as entertaining other people do long TV shows like Game of Thrones, etc. Eliot and Dickinson had a lot more in common than I ever really understood before I went looking.

Other things. Still reading Dracula. I love it.

I am working on The Ambitious Fairy Project, writing on the story at a slow pace while I type in my long, long timeline and do the calendars. I finally chose the year 1876. I like to ground my fantasy in some kind of reality. But it's alternative history really. I have definitely cheated on some things. Mostly bathrooms and barbwire. Laughing. Two things essential to this story. It's strange to create a story like this and somehow make it related to issues today. I hope I can pull it off.

TRYING TO HAVE SOME FUN.

Crazy Janie is writing a big novel.

 

Last night, as I finished organizing the last of my papers so I can finally keep up with all my writings, notebooks, poems, sbort stories, letters, and so forth, I realized, with this terrible sinking feeling, because I am no longer in my teens, 20s, 30s, even 40s, etc. that I cannot do it all. One of my sons asked me to write out what I still needed to do while writing forward on the novel. I made a list. And then we all laughed. So, let me be very clear, the novel I am writing now, this version is settled.

I don't want to rehash the medical and mental side of why this novel is so challenging but I do have a vision challenge and this novel is beyond my skill set, so to speak. My doctor even used AI to specifically choose a page background color (custom greenish gray) in Word to use where I would have less eye strain. The fact that I wrote all my notes and novel in cursive has not helped. We are all laughing again. It hurts to write here. My eye is very light sensitive.

I cannot do it all.

I know I cannot do it all.

I need help.

I need to read less. I need to be on social media less.

I chose the image of Crazy Jane by Richard Dadd for several reasons. I am a big fan of Dadd, 19th century mental health is part of my novel's geography, and I feel a bit crazy at the moment. It may be crazy to a degree in writing this novel. I often feel it is. It is all outside my normal skill set. I have had to educate myself to attempt it. I've been failing at many things my entire life. I will always have more failures than successes. But I could just retire completely and do nothing. 

I can quit gardening. I can give up painting. I can read less, a lot less. I don't need TV or films. But I don't believe I can give up walking or writing. I will die doing both, even facing going blind.

P.S. Edited on the 6th. I am still reading, but I have absolutely no schedule anymore. I can put a book down and not even come back to it. The same goes for social media. I just let myself off the mental, self-imposed ritual of both. I do believe I was ready for this, that this disdain for having something to say online is about what I know as reality. I never was a content provider. I just played, and play is what I want to do. I want to play at everything really. Time is running out.

Pinning down the Plot and Threads

 One of the things I do before I get into the final work of the novel is "going through my plot and making sure all my plot points are right, that I have unity, that I have characters properly placed in the narrative, that the threads are in the right places to cross and meet, that I have the right amount of tension vs the amount of interiority and character building."

 I really write character driven novels since I came out of the romance genre. I was one of the first historical romance writers to use a lot of fantasy and paranormal elements in my fiction. I love the fantasy genre but I tend to like writers like Patricia McKillip, Naomi Novik, Alix Harrow, Robin McKinley, Susanna Clarke, and Erin Morgenstern. Angela Carter is an influence. I really don't write trail rides anymore.

The challenge I faced with this story was how to write a big story, with characters that had huge backstories, and do it small. Why? Because this is a character driven story and I am not an epic fantasy writer. Plus I hate flashbacks. Just writing versions of this book and throwing them away taught me what I could not do. And maybe how to write the closest version to what I imagined in my mind. I had to let go of a lot of things and yes, people. I had to learn how to write differently than any other previous book I had written or worked on. 

It's been a wonderful challenge for me. When I start working really hard on it in a few weeks, I am going to be updating a little here and for the most part, disappearing. I don't know right now how to write this novel and the next one while doing social media. I just don't.

I've had to think about writing in ways I never thought about it throughout the years. I've had to read many novels and other books. I've had to do lots of research for this novel, too, because the heart of it is true to the setting, the legal laws, and much of the folklore and magic systems that make the foundation of my own mythology. It's full of literary allusions and that sort of thing, too.

Well, I finished the song list, which is also a plot list, but nobody knows how that works but me. But you can see how I manipulated Syd Fields. Laughing. Everything is really balanced out. I am sure to change things as I build the new parts but hey, it's got a strong set of bones to work with and I'm settled.

I am reading both Dracula and The Sound and the Fury now. I am going to try to do some Dracula and reading updates soon. I am still going through writing papers. I need to type in timelines, too, as well as finish my calendars. I have changed the year 3 times, and some of the things are historical. Time is an important element of this novel, so is memory. I can honestly say this is the best heroine I have ever written. I write boys and men well, but I have had weaker heroines. I believe this is due to my personal life. My best friend in high school was a bisexual boy. I gave birth to boys, I tutored mostly boys. And when I studied history, it was mostly about war and warriors and soldiers. It's crazy to think I was a feminist all my life and what some of my friends called radical. But I grew up in a very conservative place and I was very progressive so I did not really meet a lot of girls I liked or could identify with growing up. Only my mother. Laughing. Most of my research books and reading for the last ten years has been making up time with women. I read mostly women now. And have spent a lot of time on the law concerning women and then other gender studies. It has made me a better writer. I do have two sisters, but their world view and mine are not the same at all. My older sister is terribly sweet but we don't see the big picture the same or even read the same books anymore. Once upon a time we did. But I outgrew those authors long ago.

Time is real. You cannot stop time. You cannot defeat time. But you can step away and live with hope.

“...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”

        — William Faulkner

             The Sound and the Fury