I don't...

From Take Ten for Writers


I don't eat beans.
I don't ride a bike.
I don't flirt with men.
I don't like to clean
I don't like messy spaces.
I don't like to pay other people to clean (because I feel like a slacker)
I don't know how to play chess very well.
I don't play Scrabble well because I get too hung up on the words and insufficiently concerned about the points.
I don't want to live in California anymore.
I don't like suspense and I'm iffy about surprises.
I don't have the ability to stay up past midnight anymore.
I don't remember what my favorite color was when I was nine.
I don't remember something, but I can't remember what it is.
I don't know if I like to write for ten minutes without stopping.
I don't like the way long nails make me have to change the way I type.
I don't like to handwrite when the writing is good and I don't like to type when the writing is tough.
I don't want to write a story without an outline because I fear the unknown.
I don't want to drive a minivan anymore.  I don't want to pay for a new car either.
I don't like ANY PART of doing the laundry, except the part where I have clean clothes available to be worn.
I don't like sitting too low for my desk, but I do like that I just adjusted my chair to be more comfortable.
I don't know if I'm ready... sorry, lost my train of thought.
I don't know why I dream of an old crush declaring his undying love for me in different ways several times a year.  Those dreams are so vivid.
I don't like blue very much.  Unless it's turquoise.
I don't know why I'm so sleepy when I drink so much coffee.
I don't wear overalls.
I don't play an instrument anymore. I used to play oboe and clarinet a lot, but I actually never learned very much about music and once I got to a certain level of proficiency I lost interest in getting any better.
I don't know why I just had so much trouble spelling proficiency.
I don't own a winter coat anymore, but I do have several hats, gloves, and scarves.  I don't own winter boots, either, just fashion boots, which barely count.
I don't ski.  I don't want to ski.  Skiing scares me and I did not especially enjoy skiing the one time I went.
I don't run, either, but that's basically laziness.
I don't know why this blog has 41 pageviews when I have never promoted it except the one time in how not to write a novel
I don't have a hero.  I think I have people I admire but I don't have a hero in the way that I understand a hero.  A hero is a person who you really admire and would like to emulate, a person who has special qualities that one can try to foster in oneself, a person who is superior in every meaningful way.  I don't have a hero.  I have ordinary friends and acquaintances I admire, but no one who overwhelms me with their greatness.  Even Queen Elizabeth I is not really a hero to me, although she was great in many ways and I have tremendous respect and admiration for her.  But I wouldn't want to be her.

And that concludes my ten minutes.  Interesting exercise, this book might be worth keeping out.

Don't Give the Elephant the Reins

Why is low-carb is harder the second time around, part II

Great post by Dr. Michael Eades, author of Protein Power.  Goes along with The Power of Habit -- it's basically a strategy for disrupting the routine portion of the habit loop.

Writerly Meditation

From The Daily Writer
Spend a few moments thinking about a specific facet of the story or essayyou're currently working on... Write down some of the thoughts that occur to you.

My greatest challenge in writing the Ivan/Rasputin story is in pulling together a really vivid sense of place.  Diana Gabaldon did this for Outlander just by researching; her descriptions were INCREDIBLY vivid but she never went there till after all the profits from the novel made it possible for her to go.  For the London of 1916, who would Ivan and Rasputin have encountered as they walked around; what smells would they have smelled?  What was the traffic like?  I know parts of Piccadilly are subject to lots of crashes and accidents, but how long is the street and what part of it is 107 Piccadilly (the location of the Savile Club in 1916) located on?  What would the foot traffic have been like during different times of day?

And how much does the accuracy of all this detail matter?

Victoria Glendinning did a beautiful job of making the neighborhood and household at the opening of Electricity really really vivid, but she is British and had better access to this stuff than I have, on top of being a very good biographer.

And then there are the specifics of my story.  What they do and who they encounter determines what happens to Rasputin and what happens, ultimately, to Ivan.  I need to do a little better about pulling them together.  I'm worried about it now.

Reading the biography of Daphne DuMaurier by Margaret Forster.  It's good.  But it strikes me that Daphne was incredibly business-like about her writing because she was motivated to make money to support her family.  That's what I want to be like.  Businesslike and determined to finish things that can get published.  Selling my work.  Of course I expect it to be good and I intend it to be good, but I don't know how to be experimental and I don't intend to try.  With the challenges of doing these ordinary stories I think I have enough on my plate just trying to make people see what it's like to be somewhere else rather than trying to invent a literary form that I like just fine how it is.

So Ivan is going to leap out that window across that great intersection and he and Rasputin are going to take a walk.  And on that walk Rasputin is going to tell Ivan about all the things he's been missing, and Ivan is going to tell him how little he understands his new world, and share maybe a little bit about his early years as a vampire (or think them, and then words will fail him; this information could have saved Rasputin but won't).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jean-paul-margnac/366276689/

https://maps.google.com/maps?num=10&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=park+lane+hotel+london&fb=1&gl=us&hq=park+lane+hotel&hnear=0x47d8a00baf21de75:0x52963a5addd52a99,London,+UK&cid=0,0,15648347873338012588&ei=6V0GUMKOCOHI2gWyibjEBQ&ved=0CLcBEPwSMAA

Ah, better, better, better.  OK, Tomorrow I think I can start writing again.

Good night!!

Treadmill Journal July 15, 2012

1.  Date and Time
2.  How Long You Will Work
3.  What you plan to work on
4.  Figured out why I was panicking when I sat down to deal with Ivan; problem sort of solved, hurray
5.  Tomorrow morning I will work while Q is at school and let CJ & D watch a little TV or something; I will work on Ivan & Rasputin and I will get at least 1500 words written.

Treadmill Journal Format

http://www.unm.edu/~gmartin/Essays/Treadmill%20Journal%20pdf.pdf

1.  Date and Time
2.  How Long You Will Work
3.  What you plan to work on
4.  How it went
5.  When you work tomorrow and for how long.

Write about what disturbs you

From Writing Down the Bones


Write about what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about.

Vampires have become something bloodless and glamorous.  I just watched Being Human and was reminded that they aren't bloodless at all, and that they are very brutal.  Somehow Elizabeth and Thoby need to have their brutal sides, too, and Nell (though I think I know how Nell will fall).  It's fine for them to have retractable teeth and daytime existences and to be able to sip rather than kill, but they are still going to have to get intimately close to the people from whom they feed; they're still going to have to pierce the skin and hold them still and take without permission.  In Elizabeth's case, the taking will also involve knowing intimately, since she will have the ability to discern what she is tasting and relate it to the character of the person from whom she is feeding.  I haven't decided about Thoby yet.

What that basically means is that I'm going to have to get very good at writing very intimate physical encounters, and I'm going to have to give each one meaning.  They're going to be sort of promiscuous, in that there's a new partner for Elizabeth each time she feeds, and yet each one will have to be differentiated.  She'll be sensitive enough to discern the difference between each one, and to experiment with creating her system, as Nell has done, but she's also going to have to be brutal and demanding enough to push through whatever empathy she might have for these people and do what she's going to do.  There will be no hesitating for her; she is going to feed on human blood without apology.  What she'll be uncertain about is how that impacts her own character.  Then the question of soul, etc., if she's working towards redemption some then there has to be a determination about whether that's a worthwhile pursuit. And am I a good enough writer to write these sorts of scenes seriously, so they come out well and not laughable, or meaningless and trite, or melodramatic?

Guess I can only wait and see.

And then Rasputin.  What am I going to do with him?  Of course Ivan is going to leap out the window, and somehow Rasputin will teach him to renounce what is left of his human life and quit treating that as such a big deal (so that's why I've been reluctant to finish that story -- I wasn't sure how I was going to do it)...  So what is going to happen to Ivan?  Of course he's going to have to feed off a woman, since he already denied he was going to do it.  But which woman? How? And what does Rasputin do with Ivan once he gets him to fly through the window?

Duh, no wonder I sat down and didn't know what to write.  I haven't planned this at all.

OK, so I'll take the Hero's Journey with Ivan and figure him out.  Remembering to keep all the brutality and selfishness of the vampires of Being Human and of Vampire Tapestry while also retaining Ivan's unfulfilled human desires (like a ghost).  He's power mad and paranoid; he sees chaos and fears it, and so he desires to bring it into order.  He lost his mother to a poisoner and his wife he thinks he may have lost that way as well.  He killed his son by accident as a result of an argument about his daughter-in-law; he married five other women and was worse to them than Henry VIII was to his wives.  He's not above the odd torture, and he relishes dramatic gestures. And now, on top of all those problems he had as a human, he's a three hundred year old vampire with rather the appearance of the bobcat Julianna Cleaveland saw, that has never missed a meal in its life and thinks very highly of its territory.  But he also is required to be discreet, because of the whole villagers with pitchforks problem (although really, if vampires are so all powerful, what do they fear from humans? we really could just be cows to them, as what's-his-name says in the Charnas book) -- no, not because of the pitchforks, but because he misses things he remembers about being human.  Because he misses the thrill of a great horseback ride, the charge against an enemy, the thrill of unexpected victory.  Because he misses feeling all the way to his fingertips and his toes, and he misses the thump of his heart, and there is a certain unacknowledged compassion that restrains him without his appreciating it.

All this Rasputin gets.  To a certain extent, Rasputin was a kind of vampire in human life and the gift that Ivan has given him is basically just to liberate him from one set of rules and shackling him to a set rather more to his liking.  He sees Ivan shackling himself to an imagined throne and thinks he has never seen anything more asinine ever.  He... ah... he is newborn, so he doesn't understand the importance of there being Others out there, he thinks it's just him and Ivan.  He sees the world as his playground and dining room (larder, John Mitchell called it in Being Human -- love British English), and he sees the women in it as all potentially his, because that was how he saw the world before.  He has gifts of healing and foreknowledge that he doesn't appreciate (vampires do have souls, in my universe, but they have to figure things out for themselves and act in a state of uncertainty, just as humans do)

(man I hate how noisy this street and the house are, they make me so anxious)

and they have to risk, though how they risk is different; their gifts are greater and therefore the path is more difficult to find.  Anyway, Rasputin can make use of these gifts but he does so irresponsibly and without appreciation for the source, and this eventually will lead to his downfall.

In terms of the Hero's Journey, Rasputin is both Mentor and also Antagonist.

http://www.thewritersjourney.com/hero's_journey.htm

1.  Ordinary world: Is kind of skipped in my story, glossed over real quick and told to Rasputin by Ivan
2.  Call to adventure: Ivan makes Rasputin
3.  Refusal of the call: Ivan walks down the stairs and interrupts Rasputin, tries to bring him to heel
4.  Meeting with the mentor: Rasputin turns the tables
5.  Crossing the threshold: Ivan leaps from the window after Rasputin
6.  Tests, Allies, and Enemies:  The saggy middle that I have to figure out
7.  Approach: Ivan prepares for the major challenge in the new world -- by finding a woman from whom he's willing to feed
8.  The Ordeal: Ivan feeds from people Rasputin chooses for him
9.  The Reward: Ivan realizes there is no point in returning to his former ambitions as tsar; there is no one left to conquer, and no one who cares enough about him to want to poison him.  All his former importance is gone.  Moreover, he has experienced the sort of people who make Rasputin feel alive, and it makes him miss his humanity even more.
10.  The Road Back: Ivan must invent a life as an ordinary vampire.  But he finds he can't, there is no blueprint for that kind of life; he was a tsar from the time he was three years old, he has no concept of how one maps out a life when nothign particular is demanded of it.
11.  The Resurrection: Having separated from Rasputin somehow, Ivan goes to make his first self-selected feed, but finds that he can't, his new-found understanding of what is appealing about humanity prevents him.
12.  Return with the elixir: Ivan doesn't; he finds himself a starving zombie vampire who ultimately is exterminated by his own kind (possibly led by Rasputin).

Inception

The original idea for my protagonist.  Pleased at how much of it stands up:

How was I transformed?  I do not remember.  I remember before: the house, my parents, the suitors, and Thoby.  And I remember after: hiding, and the slow realization that the shackles and rules of the old life no longer applied.  And Thoby.  But the in-between time I do not remember.  And Thoby will not tell.

You want to know what kind of vampire I am, how I feel about how I feed.  You are fascinated with how I choose my prey, with the remorse I may or may not feel, so I will tell you.  I feel no more nor less remorse than you do.  Certainly I put more thought into my meals than you, and I suspect that every meal I make (though, sadly, far fewer than you) improves the quality of the earth, for you merely denude the earth of resources sought or created for your own use, whereas I relieve the earth of a consumer, and survive on a resource that renews and regenerates all on its own without any husbandry from me.

But I should not lecture; it took me a hundred years to come to this realization, with agony and soul-searching (supposing I still have one), and too many moments of seeing the mirror that Thoby always insists on holding before me.  And before that, I had to stop using instinct and self-interest and blank opportunity to satisfy my desires.  And before that I had to be released from a way of life that prevented me from considering – indeed, which censored anyone who moved beyond our choreographed round of rise, dress, call, dress, dine, tea, ball.

I had a few shocks along the way.

So no, I am not the chupacabra-like creature feeding on animals and yearning for goodness that you might have encountered elsewhere.

I am not tormented by self-loathing into starvation, as one interviewee recounted, nor am I so drunk on my powers that I flaunt them to all whose attention I can claim.

Nor am I a mindless killing machine with no bounds or moral consideration, as the oldest stories of my kind portray.

No, I am none of these.  I am just a young girl of moderate intelligence liberated from the society into which I was born, and existing in a continuum far longer than a humans’s, with my senses heightened and my sensibilities enlightened by my companion and former neighbor, the astounding Thoby Stephen.  Like all of you, sometimes I do good, sometimes evil.  I make mistakes.  I exist in a society with its own rules and I don’t always know what to do with my own dissent.  I am just like you.  Except that I drink human blood to survive.  And for that, I do not apologize.

Kick Off Goals

1.  Daily Writing practice (fiction stuff)
2.  Rewrite and finish "Rasputin Wakes Up"; self-publish that bad boy.
3.  Work on Elizabeth daily.