in Life's name and for Life's sake

 So apparently I'm now writing a novel about a werewolf and his friends trapped inside by a hurricane during the full moon, when aforesaid werewolf has left his anti-wolf meds at home.

Well then. That makes things interesting.

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.

The more appropriate title for this entry would be "blah blah blah I DON'T WANT TO WRITE blah blah blah."

I'm realizing (again? still?) how difficult it is to write, and to re-write. I'm working my way slowly through The Printer's Tale (formerly The Printer's Daughter, NaNo 2007), and although I have a complete knowledge of what "happens" in the story -- the A to Z of the plot -- this does not make writing easy! I have a finished first draft of this novel to guide me, and I still feel like I'm floundering.

Sometimes, I appreciate the distance between what I intend to write and what I actually produce -- sometimes, the best interchanges between characters are those I did not plan. But other times I'm just frustrated because I feel like the outline is missing something, but I'm not sure what. Or I feel like I'm doing a write-by-numbers sort of thing, so even though I know that I NEED a particular scene in a particular place, I don't want to have to write it.

Part of the problem likely also lies in the fact that re-writing contains a lot less of the "fun stuff" -- the let's-just-write-this-down-and-see-how-it-goes bit that draws me to writing in the first place -- and a lot more attention to micro-level issues. How does scene A relate to scene B? What things do I need to set up for the reader in Chapter 1 vs. what can I leave for Chapter 2? What is this "pacing" thing of which you speak? What do you mean this fabulous conversation is not actually necessary to either plot OR exposition?

Of course, there is only one solution -- keep writing! -- but sometimes this is not comforting, and so I take a small break and complain.

My Professor: Wait -- would it be totally impossible for you to have a draft of this essay by 3pm Friday? (pause) Actually, never mind, obviously it's an unreasonable goal --

Me (thinking of NaNo): I thrive on unreasonable goals. Challenge accepted!

And thus, I'll be spending most of my free time between now and Friday at 3pm working on my 20-page senior-thesis-precursor essay about Pride and Prejudice instead of writing my novel, but that's okay, because 50k is not that much, I'm fully capable of pulling off a 12k day (and have done so for two days in a row once, and could possibly repeat the feat if necessary), and my paper idea is just about as awesome as my novel idea, so no hard feelings.

Also, this means the only time I'll be online between now and then is for work-related stuff, and communications of absolute necessity. (Yes, this counts as one of those.)

I don't think I have words to explain the kind of "busy" that I've been feeling for the last few weeks. I think part of it stems from the fact that school requires so much more structured, scheduled time out of me here than it did in London and I'm readjusting to that fact. I had 8 hours of class per week in London, and only spent maybe 30 mins per week in office hours. Here, I have 14 hours of class per week and spend at least an hour, usually more like an hour and a half, in office hours every week because it's the best way for me to really engage with the material (and because my professors are kickass).

Also, I'm taking three upper division Berkeley English classes at once -- which is apparently lots harder than taking four second-and-third-year Queen Mary English classes at once. And that's not even mentioning the fact that I'm also taking French here, which is just a constant time drain (though by the end of this all I know it'll be worth it).

I think the hardest part is that some people (not pointing fingers!) don't understand what I mean when I say I don't have free time. They expect me to be there to hang out with them, and honestly, I can't always. In addition to 14 hours of class time per week, I spend 8 hours tutoring or attending tutor-related meetings and 6 hours interning at the Office of Letters and Light (which, if you add in transportation time, probably is actually more like 7-8 hours). And this isn't even including my homework or my sleep! Or, god forbid, time for me to do reading independent of my schoolwork!

I always knew that this semester was going to be hard. I just didn't think that the hard part would be explaining to friends and family why I don't have the time to be with them. But although this semester is hard, it's also utterly necessary to my eventual goals -- and that isn't going to change. So I guess ultimately I just have to get better at saying, "Actually, sorry, I really am up to my ears in work between now and December 31, can we reschedule for next year?"

I suppose the last thing to mention is that, despite how hectic this all sounds, I really do enjoy what I'm doing! My classes are amazing and challenging and nonsensical (that's what happens when you study too much literary theory) and brilliant and I love every minute of (some of) them. Likewise, I'm really excited about the work I do as a tutor and as an OLL intern, and I'm looking forward to once again being an East Bay Municipal Liaison. And I'm also looking forward to reinstating/renovating what was once the Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Story Workshop class and is now a club that will still workshop sci-fi and fantasy stories but can be far more flexible than a class since I don't have to determine a syllabus in advance.

How mean am I being if I tell people that I'm only really going to have time for them if I see them through school/work/interning already? (Probably pretty mean. But I'm an English major. I won't say it in those words...at least, not until mid-November when I'm starting to get really fed up.)

In the meantime, tea will solve all my problems. That is all.

I don't have enough time to provide a full update -- November has started and with it, my frantic novel-writing; by this time next week, I will be in Barcelona, about to depart for Marrakesh, and very little of that is planned yet, aside from plane tickets and a place to sleep -- but I find it necessary to relate that I spent a long weekend in Paris and fell in love.

It's a different kind of love from the one I feel for London. Queen Mary is another "home" now, and this city feels contentedly mine in a way that only Berkeley really rivals. I still remember the first time I ever went to London, with my hopes all up, and I got this giddy feeling the instant I stepped off the plane, like being there had turned on some kind of switch and lit up something new.

Paris wasn't like that -- I landed at Charles de Gaulle airport at about ten in the morning Paris time, after having been awake since four in the morning London time in order to get to the airport, etc. I don't know when it hit me that I was actually there. But once it did? The beginning of a beautiful friendship.

I've always loved French history. It's part of the reason why I like romanticism so much -- it's a literary and artistic movement inspired in large part by the actions of the revolutionaries in France in 1789. I spent the summer reading and re-reading A Tale of Two Cities and thus getting to know Dickens's Paris like the back of my hand. When I was walking the streets, everything came back to me, and even if I didn't have a map in my head, I could tell you who the streets were named after. I love London for its history, as well, but the history in Paris has a different flavor to it, something I can't quite pin down.

In four days, I saw so much that I had wanted to see -- everything, in fact, that was on my list, and more besides. And yet I still know that there is plenty that will pull me back. It's hard to say that I like it better than other places I've been, because all European cities are different, and admirable for different reasons. But still, I think it wouldn't be entirely incorrect to state that, after London, Paris is the second most amazing city I've seen in Europe, and that I know I'll be returning.

Usually I go into November knowing everything (or at least feeling like I know everything) about the story that I’m about to write. Not so this year! I do know that it’s told in the first person by a female narrator who has been suffering all her life from a ‘mental illness’ (or so they’ve told her) that causes her to believe that she is physically transported to different locations while she sleeps, wearing whatever she has on when she falls asleep. She is in her mid-twenties, out of college, with an entry-level job and has mostly decided to treat this as a mental issue that she has more-or-less in check. But then, in one of her dreams, she has an intense encounter with a man (literally of her dreams!) and this leads her on a quest to see whether there is any method to what she has previously considered only as madness.

But I don’t know where she lives or what her name is or what she looks like, etc. etc. Spurred on by the brilliant idea of a friend, I have decided to figure these out via that favorite game of pre-teen schoolgirls: MASH. For those of you unfamiliar, essentially in MASH you list out five possibilities for a number of different categories (ex. future husband’s name, number of children, location of honeymoon, etc.) and then follow a pattern to determine your future more or less at random. I’ve decided to do this with character features, jobs, etc.! I can come up with some of the possibilities on my own, but one of the best parts of MASH is that, frequently, friends who you play the game with are asked to provide possibilities for categories — and if they’re anything like my elementary school friends, they’ll suggest that you should end up with 14 children, married to that boy in the back row who smells funny, driving a cardboard box with wheels.

So what this all boils down to is, I’d love to have some offered suggestions in the following categories!

Female names

Male names

Jobs

Cars

Locations (can be cities, countries, geographical spaces, etc.)

Pets

These will then be distributed between my MC and her parents, siblings, friends, and love interest(s) in the order that they are offered up. On October 28 (earlier if I get enough input), I will go through the list and discover the details of my main character and the world she lives in. And then, I’ll write!

(Seriously, this is the most excited I've been about my novel in ages. I'm excited!)