in Life's name and for Life's sake

Finally did the full read-through of 2011's NaNo-novel, Chasing Ghosts, and ugh. I am actually a little too in love with it. I have this overwhelming feeling that there are tons of things wrong with it (the plot structure totally rips off large chunks of Possession, I have not read enough eighteenth-century private correspondence to know what personal letters really looked like, it does not have anything like an ending and I still don't know how it will end) but I can't help being so excited with every bit of it. It is perhaps a story that only its mother could love, but for once I feel like I'm actually following through on a lot of the smarter versions of the "write what you know" dictate: namely, "write the story only you can write" and "write the story you always wanted to read but no one else has written for you." This novel has everything that I want in a novel...or it will, at least, when I am finished working with it. It will take a lot of work -- a lot of hard work -- but it's work that feels worthwhile. Not since my first re-read of The Printer's Tale have I felt this way about a NaNo-novel. I mean, I've really liked the ones I've written in the past four years, but none of them have been as necessary as this one.

I think I have a summer writing project now...

All things willing, I will be done with this by this time tomorrow! But in order to power through these last 5,000 words, I need to figure out how one of my characters discovers that another character has been crossdressing as a man throughout their entire acquaintance when she is, in fact, a woman. (I know, I just write the coolest stuff!)

Basic story: Francis Connors is a couple of years older than Dorothea "Dorian" Bell. They've known each other since "Dorian" came to London at the age of sixteen and got a job working for a printer/bookseller in Paternoster Square (did I mention this was happening in the 1770s and 80s?). Francis has lived all his life in London and basically works across the street from "Dorian" as a bookseller. The two of them are pretty chummy and all is well until, a couple of years into their friendship, Dorothea realizes that forswearing men entirely is harder than it sounds...and she may just be in love with her best friend, who may also happen not to know that she is really a girl! Although she wants to be "more than just friends" with Francis, Dorothea is absolutely in love with her job as a printer and bookseller and a writer, and she would never do anything to let slip the secret of her crossdressing, which is the only thing that got her the job and the respect in the first place.

But of course this means that, eventually, perhaps even years after Dorothea realizes that she likes Francis, he is going to find out that she's a girl at a very inopportune moment! I just haven't figured out what that moment is quite yet. I'm leaning toward something Francis entering "Dorian's" rooms unannounced and getting an eyefull of Dorothea en deshabille, but this just seems crass. And Dorothea is very good at keeping her secret, so I don't think Francis would even suspect that his best mate isn't a dude, and even if he did, he'd have to do a lot of backtracking to discover that "Dorian Bell" is a fiction.

So, suggestions! Come at me!

Every year I'm hesitant on the brink of November, the first few sentences coming with painstaking care, but then I sink down into the flow of a new character, a new mind, a new set of problems and a new way of thinking about writing, and everything gets back to being right.

I'm incredibly impressed with the actual quality of the prose I wrote last night between midnight and 2am to begin my novel. It's probably problematic, because now I'll want the whole thing to be this well-written. But I also wonder if this just means I'm becoming a better writer--or at least that this is a story that, somehow, I know how to write. I'm less thank 2,000 words in but I feel like the style of the writing itself has helped me get inside my protagonist's head, get to know her in a nuanced sort of way that I've rarely known other protagonists. Maybe, I think, it's because she's sort of grown-up, already living an independent life, unlike so many of my FMCs whose stories are about growing up and becoming independent--but maybe there's just something about her that works, for me, with me. Either way, I'm not going to complain. I don't remember the last time I felt this happy with the quality of anything written in November.

(Of course, the scene I've written couldn't possibly be more quotidian--a woman walking down the street on her way to a meeting with her dissertation adivsor--but I don't care. Something about it is so perfectly hers.)

I could go on with the rhapsodizing, but sadly, writing a novel isn't all that I'm doing this month, so it's back to homework...so that I can attend my first New York write-in later tonight!

Maybe I'm an idiot for thinking that my first semester in one of the world's most competitive English PhD programs is not the time to be trying to write 50,000 words...but then I guess I'm an idiot because I have done this for SIX YEARS STRAIGHT now, and I'm not going to let this be the year that gets in the way.

I am also really, REALLY excited about the story I want to write. Even though I know basically nothing about how it's going to play out...! In my head, it is sort of like A. S. Byatt's Possession but with 18th-century writers, meets Neverwhere but with ghosts, meets Leviathan but substitute "being a part of London's radical literary culture" for "flying."

The story is set primarily in London, but oscillates between present-day and the mid- to late-18th century (that's 1770s-90s to those of you who don't think in centuries). In the modern day storyline, the main character is a female scholar working on her PhD dissertation about a second-tier 18th-century writer who's more notable for the breadth of his literary endeavors than for his impact or success in any of them. He was a poet, an essayist, a novelist, a reviewer, and a small-scale publisher -- and while his own work isn't respected particularly highly, he was certainly part of radical London literary-political circles in the 1780s and 90s (he knew William Blake, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, etc.).

The twist is that in this scholar's modern London, technologies have been developed that allow researchers to actually see (albeit briefly and indistinctly) into the past. These technologies only work in places like London, that have a "deep history" of human habitation, though no one's quite sure why this is. Theorists suspect that history -- the pressure of so many humans in one space -- somehow deforms spacetime in a way that makes it more susceptible to further deformation, so that impressions are tied to a specific place and stratified by the time when they were deposited. But this is not important to our scholarly main character. In fact, it's something of a nuisance -- because the English department is beginning to catch on to the potential "real world relevance" that this kind of "ghost research" could lend the academy, and our main character is forced to go looking for any information she might be able to find out about the literary figure she's chosen to study, when really she's not a fan of new historicism and would like to be left to her close-readings, thank you very much.

Thus, she runs into a secondary main character -- a man around her age (mid-twenties) who's lived in London all his life, which (for reasons that theorists still aren't clear about) makes him particularly susceptible to the impressions left by the past in the present. More importantly, our lady scholar can actually afford his rates on her miserable grant money (because people who can use the technology to sense out these "ghosts" have quickly turned the whole thing into a business). He's something of an armchair historian, and she resents his sense that he "gets" history just as much as she resents the fact that she's having to pay him for his services. But she stops hating him entirely as the two of them work together to unravel the history of this 18th-century figure, who as it turns out, has more secrets than either of them had bargained for...last but not least being that "he" was actually a woman, living as a man so that she could live by her pen without bringing disgrace upon her family, who she ran away from when she was sixteen. (This last bit will be very slowly teased out over the course of the novel; the reader won't discover that "he" is a "she" until at least two thirds of the way through.)

Now, it would sound like I totally know what I'm talking about, but really I made most of that up in the last ten minutes. And while I have the big-picture outlines of the story, there are lots of smaller details that I need to figure out...not the least of which being names for all of these people...and you know maybe a title or something. (I just had a thought that it would be cool if the title of MC's dissertation were also the title of this book, but what she would call the dissertation, I have no idea.) So, comments and suggestions more than welcome! I kind of want it to have some variation on/synonym for "ghost" in the title but at present this is all I know.