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This bitter pill I swallow is the silence that I keep
I forgot my livejournal's birthday: as of yesterday, I have kept it for two full years. Totally skipped my mind. I didn't even buy it a card. I suck.
December is a lovely lady
With pearls and diamonds in her hair
Silks and satins are her dress
And never was there one more rare
As still and cold her heart is
As is my mistress fair
December is a cruel lady
With white gems in her hair
While clearing out a closet, my mother recently unearthed a mass of half-finished stories from when I was in late middle and early high school, printed out and packed away in a file cabinet and I can't remember if I meant to come back for them later, or if instead I hoped quietly that no one would ever find them again. I had initially decided to throw the pages out sight unseen, but then morbid curiosity got the better of me and tonight I read through the whole pile. And my reactions are mixed.
On the one hand, ouch. The style is unrecognizable, either flatly descriptive or uncomfortably baroque. None of the stories are complete; I can project an arc out of the jumbled scenes of some, while others are clearly place-holders that never got filled in. I plainly wanted to write renaissance-ish cities with labyrinthine politics and unremarked corners of weirdness and tangled characters—and could in no way handle any of the requisite complexities, which is why I suspect all the stories were abandoned. (I also suspect I was reading a lot of P.C. Hodgell and Patricia McKillip at the time.) But that left their characters in curious places, and I find that I would want to know what happened to at least some of them, if someone else had written them: a half-faerie man permitted to live in the human world on the condition that he literally leaves his heart behind; the killer-protégé of a nobleman who has determined to have himself assassinated to discredit a political rival; a sheltered musician fallen in with a gang of feral children on the streets of a besieged city in winter; a woman who has made her own shadow into her lover, but her sister has fallen in love with him; a princess with an aptitude for alchemy learning from a man who has been condemned for its unsuccessful practice; a clay-shaped simulacrum that consciously provokes violence from whomever it encounters, because it derives its humanity from physical contact and finds antagonism easier to engender than fondness; a servant who pickpockets a guest at a masquerade ball and discovers only later that he has stolen a peppercorn from Death . . .
I don't remember how most of these were supposed to end, and I'm not even sure I knew at the time. I could think up these scenarios; I couldn't carry them through. One is almost ten thousand words about a father-daughter relationship so operatically fucked in the head that even now I can't think what I meant to do with it that would have left either of them as believable characters. Another of equal length concerns a failed revolutionary who kidnaps what she thinks is a low-level courtier and halfway out of the palace finds she has picked up instead the despised heir to the throne. (Why, yes, I did discover Robert Graves in tenth grade, why do you ask?) And I don't plan to finish any of these stories, because frankly none of them are worth the effort: they didn't even make it to the level of trunk stories, let alone unfinished masterpieces. But I still wonder how they would have turned out.
And I still like the eight lines cited in this entry, from the fragment with the musician and the feral children: I believe it's a popular song in the city that winter, with mandolin accompaniment while the palaces burn around them. Ah, well.
December is a lovely lady
With pearls and diamonds in her hair
Silks and satins are her dress
And never was there one more rare
As still and cold her heart is
As is my mistress fair
December is a cruel lady
With white gems in her hair
While clearing out a closet, my mother recently unearthed a mass of half-finished stories from when I was in late middle and early high school, printed out and packed away in a file cabinet and I can't remember if I meant to come back for them later, or if instead I hoped quietly that no one would ever find them again. I had initially decided to throw the pages out sight unseen, but then morbid curiosity got the better of me and tonight I read through the whole pile. And my reactions are mixed.
On the one hand, ouch. The style is unrecognizable, either flatly descriptive or uncomfortably baroque. None of the stories are complete; I can project an arc out of the jumbled scenes of some, while others are clearly place-holders that never got filled in. I plainly wanted to write renaissance-ish cities with labyrinthine politics and unremarked corners of weirdness and tangled characters—and could in no way handle any of the requisite complexities, which is why I suspect all the stories were abandoned. (I also suspect I was reading a lot of P.C. Hodgell and Patricia McKillip at the time.) But that left their characters in curious places, and I find that I would want to know what happened to at least some of them, if someone else had written them: a half-faerie man permitted to live in the human world on the condition that he literally leaves his heart behind; the killer-protégé of a nobleman who has determined to have himself assassinated to discredit a political rival; a sheltered musician fallen in with a gang of feral children on the streets of a besieged city in winter; a woman who has made her own shadow into her lover, but her sister has fallen in love with him; a princess with an aptitude for alchemy learning from a man who has been condemned for its unsuccessful practice; a clay-shaped simulacrum that consciously provokes violence from whomever it encounters, because it derives its humanity from physical contact and finds antagonism easier to engender than fondness; a servant who pickpockets a guest at a masquerade ball and discovers only later that he has stolen a peppercorn from Death . . .
I don't remember how most of these were supposed to end, and I'm not even sure I knew at the time. I could think up these scenarios; I couldn't carry them through. One is almost ten thousand words about a father-daughter relationship so operatically fucked in the head that even now I can't think what I meant to do with it that would have left either of them as believable characters. Another of equal length concerns a failed revolutionary who kidnaps what she thinks is a low-level courtier and halfway out of the palace finds she has picked up instead the despised heir to the throne. (Why, yes, I did discover Robert Graves in tenth grade, why do you ask?) And I don't plan to finish any of these stories, because frankly none of them are worth the effort: they didn't even make it to the level of trunk stories, let alone unfinished masterpieces. But I still wonder how they would have turned out.
And I still like the eight lines cited in this entry, from the fragment with the musician and the feral children: I believe it's a popular song in the city that winter, with mandolin accompaniment while the palaces burn around them. Ah, well.
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Thank you . . . I think some of these are not bad ideas; I just couldn't write them. Maybe I'll go back and cannibalize bits and pieces out of the better ones someday . . .
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Since you aren't going to finish them, I feel my stance should be 'grimly supportive'.
Speaking of grim, are you sure you want the opium thing finished? It reads like Regency tragedy.
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Heh. You are a true friend.
Speaking of grim, are you sure you want the opium thing finished? It reads like Regency tragedy.
I'm sure.
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I'm just thankful my sixth-grade poems have never been discovered. There was a reason I didn't write poetry again until college.
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Since I made this post, a three-scene fragment with two characters has begun to claim my attention. I'm not quite sure what would happen with it—as I've mentioned, the style isn't even remotely mine anymore, and probably never was—but their conversation feels real, and I may at least have to find out how they got from the second scene to the third. I will keep you posted.
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Read her first novel, God Stalk (1982). Its sequels are Dark of the Moon (1985), Seeker's Mask (1994), Blood and Ivory (1994; reprinted with additional stories, 2002), and now To Ride a Rathorn (2006), and I would recommend all of them—though the first two are in my opinion still the best—but if you want labyrinthine cities, God Stalk is for you. Enjoy.
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If it speaks to you, write them . . .
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I look forward to it!