Stuff and Moonshine

 Talked to handful_ofdust about my fear that Meadowville might fall between the stools of fantasy and historical realism, especially since it takes a while for things to get weird. She suggested taking some of the weird and moving it to the front; but I had trouble figuring out how to do this without spoilers, so I wrote a prologue set decades before the main action. Which is probably just confusing.
( Read more... )

I have now broken 40,000 words. My ambition is to have a complete first draft by Sunday; I think it might be doable— at this point it’s largely a matter of pulling all the threads together to make an ending.

WHY IS THIS STORY BECOMING ALL ABOUT EYES NOT THAT I'M COMPLAINING

I’ve been working on a new thing the last few weeks, with the working title of Meadowville. It’s to be a period drama with supernatural/weird elements — not sure what to do with it yet, as there’s not yet enough of it for me to feel comfortable pitching it anywhere, but I feel the urge to show bits of it so I’ll want to keep going, so I’ve put the opening chapter below the cut (the weird stuff doesn’t start until Chapter Three or so, this is still the mucking about introducing characters and trying to make you care about them):

 

( Read more... )

Yesterday, handful_ofdust's posts on Tumblr of Odilon Redon led me to look up and read the 1926 translation of A Rebours (I read the first couple of chapters in the original before deciding my French wasn't up to a, 1880s novel on deliberately arcane topics), AKA The Novel That Corrupted Dorian Gray, AKA How to be a Jaded Hipster (1880s edition). The protagonist, des Esseintes, is annoyed that his pleasure in Goya's prints has been ruined by the artist's work having, in recent years, become popular:

This diffusion of appreciation among the common herd was in fact one of the sorest trials of his life; unaccountable triumphs had for ever spoilt his enjoyment in pictures and books he had once held dear; the approbation of the general voice always ended by making him discover some hitherto imperceptible blemish, and he would repudiate them, asking himself if his taste was not getting blunted and untrustworthy.

In addition to being a proto-hipster, des Esseintes is a proto-MRA/PUA, and the kind of atheist who had a religious upbringing and therefore spends all his time obsessively arguing theology, and worrying that he might some day believe it, because then his teachers will have won. I'm not sure how much of this was intended as satire by the author -- I think the passages on decor are serious, as well as the lengthy descriptions of des Esseintes' library (part of the point of this novel seems to be to collect and summarize all the books the author likes, for the benefit of readers who can't get their hands on them), but I'm not sure des Esseintes himself is -- he has too many failures. His exotic plants all die of neglect, and his attempt to turn a working-class teenager to crime does not result in the lad's name showing up in the newspaper for having murdered anybody. His only happy chapter is when he decides to see England and gets as far as an English restaurant catering to travelers. To his delight, they all remind him of Dickens characters. Eventually he decides the real England would only disappoint him -- after all, the Netherlands turned to not be anything like a Bruegel painting in real life -- so he turns around and goes home satisfied until the following chapter when he has another nervous collapse. I think he probably gets laid more often than his modern-day successors, but that's because, as a wealthy 19th-century aristocrat, he can pretty much just pay for sex; one of the many things that annoy him about modern life is that brothels are gradually being replaced with taverns, where one has to flirt with the waitresses rather than just buy them:

Des Esseintes could not help exclaiming, what simpletons these fools must be who flutter round beer-halls, for, to say nothing of their ridiculous self-deception, they have positively brought themselves to ignore the danger they run from the low-class, highly suspicious quality of the goods supplied, to think nothing of the money spent in drinks, all priced beforehand by the landlady, to forget the time wasted in waiting for delivery of the commodity, — a delivery put off and put off continually in order to raise the price, frittered away in delays and postponements endlessly repeated, all to quicken and stimulate the liberality of the client.

In any case, based on his flashbacks, des Esseintes still ended up disappointed with his mistresses' non-resemblance to his fantasies; the big muscular circus acrobat turned out to not be kinky or dominant, and the ventriloquist dumped him when she got fed up with his insistence that she throw her voice when they were in bed together. So, yeah, basically, he's the That Guy of 19th-century French literature.

I followed a link to to what turned out to be a review of The Quiet Ones with the headline Aren't You Sick of Possession Movies That Always Look Like This? While it seemed an even-handed review of the movie, so far as I can tell without having seen it, I'm more interested in thinking about how possession movies might be done differently; but find myself mostly recalling ghost stories.

Fullcircle, by John Buchan, and A Wicked Voice, by Vernon Lee -- do treat possession in a more subtle way -- perhaps because ghosts are different from demons. Both have stories in which someone's personal tastes are insidiously manipulated from what they were; both have the problem that the change does not necessarily seem all that bad -- in Fullcircle, the people who move into the old house first become more sociable and less hippy-granola-ish, and then, o horror, they convert to Catholicism. In A Wicked Voice, the narrator is compelled the spirit of a castrato to compose Italianate neo-Baroque operas instead of the grim Wagnerian-inspired stuff that he wants to do; and is even more appalled that audiences are fool enough to like them (if he were living in our century, he'd probably use the term "sheeple.") Subtle possession is a good trope that can easily be done in by values dissonance.

Lately I've come across the reverse -- a cache of transformation-themed fetish stories that can mostly be summed up as "in which I become the man of my dreams." I call these the reverse because they're clearly meant as wish-fulfillment even though the situations would be horror to anyone who didn't have that specific kink (admittedly, that's pretty much the definition of kink). The one that I rather liked, The Top Hat, was also the closest to the type of possession stories described above: a man buys a pre-WWI hat and finds himself, over the following weeks and months, physically coming to resemble the Teddy-Roosevelt-esque gent who originally owned it (imagine The Case of Charles Dexter Ward if it were gay bear kink with a happy time-paradox ending).

The thought crossed my mind that this had to be some kind of elaborate parody – but mailing out a beautifully-produced catalogue to random people seemed a lot of trouble to go to just to get a laugh. I picked up the Plein-air Entertainments catalogue again and studied the blasted heath beyond an artful grouping of whitewashed folding deck chairs. It didn’t look like a photoshop job. Someone had scouted this location and photographed the composition in deep focus.
( Read more... )

So, yesterday I finished reworking and polishing Nine, and sent it to Innsmouth Free Press with a caveat that it’s Weird, but not Lovecraftian per se (their guidelines page says they take both).

I think they pay one cent a word, which adjusted for inflation is much less than what Weird Tales paid its writers during the Depression. Oh well.

Aaaand we're back on track: ( Read more... )