It's Still November

So we're dealing with NaNo guilt. Because it's not just your friends and family who are eager to over-obligate you . . .your imagination is would like to do so as well. Am I actually reading anything else in November? Not really.

Instead, I'm trying to work out what is becoming a four-part novel that bears little resemblance to anything that I've written and is instead covered with snake and dragon and fire imagery. It's like some other book bled copiously into my narrative. I've quit several times, only to have this feeling of guilt creep up on me. Who else is going to tell this story (who will care?!?)--it's almost like the main character is tugging at me to keep telling its story. This confirms my theory that guilt has a gravitational aspect, since the main character is a sentient planet who is learning to be an individual through first contact with a gaggle of spacefaring humans. Since this is a fantasy masquerading as science fiction, everything feels just a little off.

I start other stories but am drawn back to this one. Who will tell the story of this little corner of the universe and the struggle of a planet to transform itself from an insular paradise into a connected part of the universe without becoming deranged? In at least 50,000 words before the end of November? Anyone?

And Then There Was Silence...And Crickets

It's November, so I'm NaNoing in another universe and unable to pick up the blog right now. Actually, my novel and I are having a completely dysfunctional relationship and cordially resenting each other. I quit for a day, deleted my word count and my summary from the NaNoWriMo site and growled at everyone who came near. I'm picking that up from Varda, who is quite a talker when you get her going. She's also been sneaking my stress putty to use as gum, so there is a decreasing amount on my desk just when I need it most.

Since it's just a NaNo novel (I have several sitting around gathering dust), it probably shouldn't matter that I'm having such a hard time with it, or that I have several weeks of novel classes shouting in my head while I'm trying to write it, or that I'm hating exactly the things I would have otherwise liked in it. Disillusionment with "how to write" shibboleths is setting in. Aren't we all glad that I've found another medium within which to bitch? Why don't I just go read a good book?

Fortunately, there are lots of good ones lying around and I'm looking forward to working through them during my increasingly extended NaNo breaks. Stashed in various locations are The Mermaid's Madness (by Jim Hines), Ice (by Sarah Durst), and The Sun, The Moon, and The Stars (by Steven Brust). Yea!! Stuff to read!! On a side note, it's time to put romance novels back on the shelf with other romance novels. Yes, putting in the Fantasy section will sometimes fool me. Yes, I will sometimes buy one. No, I will not be happy. More than likely, I won't finish something that's about little more than how devastating it is to be away from the pretty wolf-boy demon elf thief while actually having to--gasp--live your life! Stuff it, cupcake, and get on with the story.

ooooooooo. No more posts while on NaNo. Cue the crickets! Here cricket, cricket, cricket. . .

Beaches

I'm still not quite ready for the synthesis of Surfside and fairy tales. I approach it, draft it, and leave the carcass on the beach. While casting it aside, I continue to march grimly through Cultural Amnesia. I can't stop reading this book. It feels like sitting in a library in an Ivy League college when you're not really there for the education, but you like the idea of the way it smells and looks for the few moments you're there. Worlds pass in the comings and goings of the books.

As you might imagine from the paragraph above, worlds that barely touch anything other than my imagination. It is unlikely that I will even do myself the favor of picking out some of the recommended German texts and try to recover my college German in words that are a beginner's way into the tongue. The idea startles me with the effort involved--learning a language for no reason other than the beauty of the thoughts contained therein. I couldn't learn one when I thought my grades and future employment depended on it. But then, so much of that education was posited as a financial investment that so far hasn't paid off in more than the momentary double-take of a temporary agency staffer in that degree being listed on the otherwise clerical resume.

I won't be picking up German again because I never had a good understanding of more than a few words in the first place. Even my mother retained enough of her French to be able to read in it decades after her last exam. She loved the language to the extent that she could sing in it and read it to us when we were little. While this is probably due to her own proclivities, one wonders if it was also that she learned enough of it to be able to do as the author of these essays that I'm reading suggests--she knew it well enough to pick up a book written in the language and puzzle her way through it.

Another question that occurs to me as I go through this book is why I was never introduced to the essay in school. We wrote them for grades for years, yet we never studied the ones that were written in the journals of our time or any previous ones. Why didn't we study a form that we were supposed to write? Why didn't we study criticism in addition to literature? Journalism in addition to fiction? Why was my English education limited to a poor selection of classical fiction? It gave me the idea that there was room for an extra book; that I might be able to contribute to a thin stream of literature that skipped from great book to great book like a frog traversing a pond?

Please don't take these remarks to be directed at teachers, who are looking for competence in state-directed areas (less so when I was in school, thank goodness). They are more directed at the areas chosen by the faceless nameless who decided that I should learn to write an essay without the benefit of ever learning to what uses they could be put. It's also directed at myself for never asking the questions until now.

And, of course, the forecast is for didactic reading to continue through the next several weeks. Per a chance comment encountered earlier, I'm also thinking about seeing if I can finish War and Peace in a week. Anyone out there a fan who'd like to offer encouragement? Favorite scenes? Favorite character?

Drowned.

Submerged in Clive James' Cultural Amnesia, I feel as if I'm walking on the bottom of the ocean on the ashes of civilization--remnants of good and evil alike rolled like a palate beneath the ceaseless muttering of a haunted sea. So far, this is a book an edifice, a beautiful tomb of an education that must have died before reaching the practical university from which I took my degree.

It shocks me how these tiny vignettes can render a day pointless and yet remind one that remaining engaged may be the only meaning one can hope to find in it. I need to slow down, to restrict myself to just a few names a week.

Despite the negativity it engenders, it forms part of the bulwhark against the nattering of the story-formation lecturers; the ideas present both argue against allowing authority to assume to itself knowledge that is absolute-beyond-question and of forgetting that writing is a conversation and not a string of sensational events dragged from the eyes through the nervous system at speed.

There are better things to gain from the book. So far, I've carefully packed away regrets: I speak only one language; I have such a tenuous understanding of world history that famous names float on nothing but fame on a foam of diffidence; I would be one of those people turning away from hard things, I turn away now; and I find only stasis in the terrible stories.

I look forward to going back to the shallows with the next book on the agenda (which I won't name, since I'm bad about picking up yet other books) and exploring the possibility that our world is the safe one, it's the other that is dangerous.

Seals

From the first time I came down into the little carpeted viewing cave to watch them, years ago on my honeymoon in Galveston, sitting in the dimness looking up into the lower section of the seal tank in Moody Gardens and watching the seals twisting in the water act upon my imagination like a gas jet upon a hot air balloon. Heaviness spreads open in a gasp and grace replaces all the foot-pounds of atmosphere standing on my skin.

To see the seals is to remember a time when focus reached outward. Water does more than forgive a shape that land makes awkward, it blesses it with agile speed. The seals spinning and diving remind me of summers going from pool to pool with a desire to be in the middle of the water so that I could imagine myself once more free of each anchor. Leaning against the glass, I let the anchors rest and watch the seals flash by. Do we seem ghosts to the seals? Movement somehow beyond the reflections of themselves? Do they feel the heat of the bodies standing just on the other side of the glass or are we so well masked that we are invisible?

I've set myself a task as a writer, one that displaces the game of literary conformity. This task is to find a way to perform the seals' transformation in prose, to give a reader the chance to be just such an agile component of my language pool that they flash and dive with the characters. This is what I hope for in a good story and what I would strive for (if I could separate the ego-gratification of status or money from my drives) in terms of success. Because they give me a better goal than I would have come up with on my own, the seals get this entry in the blog.

Once upon a title...

Some times we take a blow to that squishy entity known as one's ego. Such a blow fell recently just as I was preparing a new post for this blog. I had thought that I was well-read, particularly in fantasy. Then, I picked up a compilation that I thought was about fantasy art (book covers, magazine covers) through the years. Instead, I found myself being introduced to or reminded of authors that I had a passing familiarity with but whom I had never read or even seen to sneak out of the drawer in the laundry room under the dust rags where dad kept his fiction stash.

So why should this present a blow to my ego? It's a little like comparing what I've read in school to what others have read--generally, people who went to school somewhere north of me have read more than I have. And, since I live close to the Texas coast...there's plenty of north. What this has sometimes led to, oddly enough, is vanity. I think that there are only a few variations on a story so I should never stoop to plot recycling. And yet, a wider reading would have let me know that stories are new in so many ways other than plot. It also means that my understanding of fantasy and an enjoyable read is heavily inflected toward a particular literary style. My reading (and writing) is missing some of the excitement and wonder purveyed by authors working in other styles.

I have a treasure hunt before me. Many of the books I'll be looking for will be out of print or uncommon in current bookstores, so I will have an instant excuse to investigate all kinds of used bookstores and antique stores to hunt for classics. Avast, and keep an eye out for the flag of the tattered pages!

But, dear reader, what does this mean for this blog? Why the title change? There never seemed to be much fantastic fiction that took place in or around water, at least in my limited reading. Drowned cities, giant creatures beneath the waves, and mermaids have fascinated me for a long time. An expanded reading list will hopefully allow me to concentrate on those stories and perhaps on some natural history (guest bloggers?) that explore the mysterious marine.

What will come up from these pools?

Reminders

Although it's not presented as a fictional story, I'm going to mention that I've been re-reading Susan Faludi's Backlash lately. I was on a high school memorabilia kick and decided to snap myself out of it by raiding my college bookshelf. As I'm silently cheering to myself as Faludi dismantles certain "trends" and misuse of statistics, I realize that this is a interesting delineation of opposing needs and the misunderstandings that can arise from them--something that I can use when designing manipulative characters and institutions in my own writing and something I should be carefully observing in the stories that I read.

For example, let's consider magazine ad revenue. Magazine stories that portray trends that support their own advertisers are supporting their bottom line. However, the average reader glancing through probably doesn't analyze (except for the really glaring examples) each story for the relevance to keeping advertisers happy versus accurate reporting and in some cases ('in' colors for paining this fall?) it probably doesn't matter as much. What matters is the accepted basis for these trends, such as "a few people think," or "it seems that in the future." Needless to say, these are gentle but accurate ways to say "we just made this up" or "the guy making mohair booties in Poughkeepsie would like it if..."

The pressure of the idea that "everyone is doing it" or "forward-thinking people are doing it" is internalized, becomes a motivation that seems to arise internally but was carefully and subtly (or not so subtly if you're more sceptically inclined that I am--working on it, not there yet) planted. This seems like a good lesson for looking for the more delicate pressure points of characters and for ways to manipulate characters in my own writing. I'm sure forward-thinking writers are doing this already. ;)