Dream a little dream...

Did I say I had bizarre dreams? Well, I dreamed an agent came to visit me. Said agent was a big man with a big blustering voice, traveling with a rather small assistant. He studied my bookshelves for some minutes, then asked my daughter to find a particular title for him. (my kids were young in the dream.) The other two were trying to watch tv, but couldn't hear it for his loud voice. I had expected him to talk to me about romance novels, but he kept harping upon some fantasy title I'm sure I didn't own.

Perhaps that blustering voice, or my frustration, snapped me out of the dream.

Which brings me to Fantasy novels. I was never an avid Elves-and-Faeries-type of reader. Tolkien doesn't work for me. I do read witches, the Anne Rice type, but not Rowling. And I've enjoyed vampire and werewolf tales--the old ones, not the modern-day ones.

But oh! I admire those who create entire worlds that are not quite our own. Whether lower, middle, or upper earth, or in a galaxy that's far, far away from our own ken, these places exist far beyond the pages of a book.

Which bring me to this observation: creating a plausible world, whether inhabited by sorcerers with powers or regular people who've lived any time in the last four and a half billion years can be a daunting but exciting task.

I guess that's why we write.

--Cat

Drama

My husband watches some "reality" shows. You know the type, Man Versus Nature, usually in winter, often in Alaska, or an isolated locale in forbidding mountains, or a desolate wilderness inhabited only by wild things.

The men on the shows struggle against enormous obstacles. Perhaps it's the weather: from 20 to 50 degrees below 0; predators: rampaging grizzlies, ferocious wolves, giant cougars, dinosaurs; or machinery breakdowns: snowmobiles or trucks stuck in the snow, or with dead batteries, or out of gas, planes, trains, and automobiles. How easily I digress.....

If the transport requires work to fix, daylight is always fading and the man must spend the night in this frozen inhospitable wilderness.  He relies on his wits and cunning to keep from freezing/starving/dehydrating/being mauled or eaten by predators.

Of course, the first thing he must do is start a fire. The wind may be howling and snuffs out match after  match until they're all gone. So there he huddles, rubbing two sticks together, or scraping his trusty flint, hoping against hope for that magic spark to begin the fire that will keep him alive.

At this point, I tend to interrupt the fictive dream and say, "Why doesn't he ask the cameraman or other film crew member if he could borrow a lighter?" To further annoy, I add, "If I was in that situation I'd hop into the motorhome. Which is probably what he'll do  as soon as he gets a small blaze going and the camera is turned off for the night. Jump in the heated motorhome, have hot coffee or cold beer with the group, watch some satellite TV ..."

We laugh about it, about the fabricated drama added to the story. Effective? Well, the shows do have an audience and run for season after season.

This reminds me that my stories need the element of drama to keep readers turning the page. I don't want obvious fabricated drama, or melodrama, but something that arises in a natural way among characters and situations I created.

Many have said there must be conflict or tension on every page to keep the reader hooked. To me, whichever way you look at it, it's drama.

––Cat

Research

The blessing and curse of writing a historical is, well, the history part.

Some romances are light on history, but this is fine when history does not play a big role in the story--the plot of which dictates the degree and depth of historical details necessary. When I read a romance I don't want to get bogged down in swarms of fine points meant to add ambiance/realism/richness to the story but could have been scaled back so that it doesn't plod. It's different if these are integral parts of the story. And of course a straight historical is different--the history is the story.

That said, I like enough history in a romance to firmly ground me in the time and place. I need to trust that the writer has given me a world that could have been real.

Now for my own tale of joy and woe: joy because I love doing research (but maybe too much at times); woe because my epic/saga requires lots of rummaging around to give me an overall view of the time as well as some pertinent details as they relate to the characters. I have a large cast, so do need a fair amount of these details, some which I will only mention in passing, some which will never make it to the page.

I'm writing about a place I don't live in, a time I may be familiar with from other work I've done, but not how it affects this particular place. This is a large undertaking, but I look forward to the task.

And it keeps me out of trouble.

-- Cat

Very Small Rant

A rhetorical question:

Do they no longer teach spelling and grammar in schools?

I came across the following comment made by a student who read a particular poem for his/her English Lit class:

(paraphrased)

i can truely relate to this poem....i'm sure it is what X would of said to me if he could of.

This is to me the visual equivalent of nails scraping on a chalkboard.
 
Well, how many present day students would know what that is?

--Cat (feeling less than hopeful about the future of books and reading)

The Madwoman....

Well, not me. Not yet.

I recently played a game of Wheel of Fortune on the computer.  The puzzle answer, category Title, was The Madwoman of Chaillot. Intrigued, and because it sounded familiar, I did the Google thing and discovered it was a play written by French novelist/playwright Jean Giraudoux in 1944.

Excerpts from a 2005 review by Russell Hunt, Professor of English at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick:


The Madwoman of Chaillot by Jean Giraudoux (adapted by Maurice Valency)

~There aren't many plays about serious issues that after over a half century retain the kind of frothy brio and sheer fun that Jean Giraudoux's final masterpiece, The Madwoman of Chaillot, offers. That's not entirely because, at the time it was written, during the Second World War, western civilization was caught up in the most brutal, devastating disasters humanity had ever known, but it surely adds to our feeling that there's something special about the Countess Aurelia in her subterranean apartment, defending a society where spending your time at a cafe in the sunshine is perfectly okay. And any play written in the midst of such a cataclysm whose most memorable line is "Nothing is ever so wrong in this world that a sensible woman can't set it right in the course of an afternoon" has staked a claim to an entirely new, and possibly refreshing, way of looking at human evil.

~Now, as sixty years ago, those who will sacrifice anything for the miracle of oil and the money it generates seem to have us all in thrall, and perhaps more than ever we need a madwoman to set things right. In the words of the ragpicker, "Countess, little by little, the pimps have taken over the world."

~Giraudoux's play is often characterized as one "offering hope" during the occupation of France by the Nazis. It's a strange kind of hope: in the first act, set entirely in the sidewalk cafe, we (and Aurelia, the area's resident madwoman, the -- perhaps self-styled -- Countess) discover that a phalanx of soulless, profit-driven madmen (The Prospector, The President, and The Baron) are about to demolish the district -- the entire city of Paris -- in search of the oil they've discovered underlies it. We also see the texture of the life centered on the cafe, a kind of carefree, colorful bohemian life that one thinks Puccini's characters would have liked to live, had winter never come and food been unnecessary and tuberculosis a myth. A life much to the liking of the flower children of the late sixties and seventies (indeed, of the time when I last saw a production of the play).

~In the second act, which takes place in the cellar apartment of the "Countess" Aurelia, a plan is developed. It involves a miraculous door in her floor, leading down into an endless maze of sewers (ah, we all know about the sewers of Paris) and the help of the neighbouring madwomen (each hailing from her own district), who have to be convinced of the seriousness of the matter. It becomes clear, if it hadn't been before, that the play is prescient not only in its skepticism about capitalist money-grubbing, but also in its feminism. "But I don't understand, Aurelia," protests Gabrielle, the Madwoman of the neighbouring district of St. Sulpice, "Why should men want to destroy the city? It was they themselves who put it up." Sure enough, the plan works like a charm; not only the oil-seeking capitalists, but the phalanx of press agents following them, are lured down into the endless maze of the sewers in pursuit of the oil, never to be heard from again, leaving the Countess to tend to her cats. "My poor cats must be starved. What a bore for them if humanity had to be saved every afternoon. They don't think much of it, as it is."

~Clearly, if we're to wait for the madwomen or the flower children to rescue us from Enron and Exxon and their ilk, we'll wait a long time. If this is hope it's pretty thin stuff. In fact, though, I think what Giraudoux wanted to offer us was not hope, so much, but something to hope for: a world in which it makes sense to sit at a cafe in the sunshine and listen to the talk and the music and care for our imaginary dog.

~The Madwoman of Chaillot has been attacked as a bit of fluff, and one imagines that it may have seemed especially so in postwar Paris -- but its vitality gives the fluff a bit of life, and reminds us that there's rather more to existence than technology, energy and politics. There's a glass of wine in the sunshine and a feather boa, too.

******************

The play was made into a movie in 1969 with a wonderful cast including Katharine Hepburn, Paul Henreid, Yul Brynner, Richard Chamberlain, Donald Pleasence, Danny Kaye, Charles Boyer. The political observer in me wants to see this. As does the nostalgist.

---Cat

Another Character Bites the Dust

Another Character Bites the Dust

Ever wonder were that saying came from?

According to The Phrase Finder:

Bite the dust

Meaning

Fall to the ground, wounded or dead.

Origin

The same notion is expressed in the earlier phrase 'lick the dust', from the Bible, where there are several uses of it, including Psalms 72:

"They that dwell in the wilderness shall bow before him and his enemies shall lick the dust."

The earliest citation of the 'bite the dust' version is from 1750 in Tobias Smollett's 'Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane':

"We made two of them bite the dust, and the others betake themselves to flight."



So, it's safe to use in my ca 1860s novel. Except I don't. But I could. And I might.

Anyway...


 
The midpoint of FORTUNE 2 appeared to me, not so much in a sudden flash as in a slow evolution. I had the ongoing story plotted, but wasn't happy with it. It was, well, bland.

You see, I need to get the main character from Point A to Point B, and she could have walked, strolled, ambled... But now she will have to run (or die).

This involves sacrificing a character, the second minor character in this book to meet his end, but I'm not so mean that neither gets to have a "final speech." One will give a deathbed confession, the other dies off-stage, but has his chance to speak his mind before biting the dust. They won't dwell too long on their final thoughts -- I want drama, not melodrama.

And this part will have tension, terror, heartache, tears, (some blood and gore, too, but not too much) all that good stuff. And of course a promise that the second half  will bring more of the same, along with, of course, a happy ending.

The characters have to work hard to earn their happy ending. Boy, do they ever!

Cat

More Editing

I've reached the three-quarter mark in my final editing phase. The end is in sight!

I've been able to eliminate a lot of words [more than 1000 so far] – many of which were due to my tendency to overexplain. It's called, variously, TMI – too much information, an info dump, tell not show,

Now I've discovered another tendency, much like over-explaining. It's like telegraphing what the character feels or thinks, and then showing just that.

For example: "questions surged/rushed/flooded her mind. Why did...? What would? Who...?"

In deep POV, the sentence about questions isn't necessary. Readers know they are in her head, therefore they don't need that filter that explains, and move directly to the actual questions.


The strange thing is, at night before I fall asleep, I mull over the edits of the day and pounce on something that needs further work or deletion. I call it "night editing."

– Cat