oh wait, I can!
I hereby declare a Christmas hiatus. Till Jan or something. I feel the need to write in my journal a bit, which I don’t do when I blog.
All I want for Christmas is some self-knowledge.
Dear Diary,
Why can’t I manage to do my dishes regularly? Any insight appreciated.
Sincerely,
the accidental housewife.
bizarrely, the Melbourne City Library only has books 2 and 3 of Juliet Marillier’s trilogy The Bridei Chronicles. I went ahead and borrowed them anyway.
Book 2, The Blade of Fortriu, made for some odd reading for 2 reasons.
1. The central romance is a love triangle, but the romantic hero of the book as a whole was definitely Faolon, the guy who doesn’t get the girl.
He’s the kings spy/assassin/right-hand man who has no past and no emotions. Then he has to transport a “spoilt princess” up north to marry a barbarian, and he falls in love; his careful, unfeeling shell is broken open.
The feeling that he was the romantic hero worked in that I liked him best, so I wanted more of his pain and angst. But it made the romance element of the book quite unusual – and also a bit difficult to read, because I naturally wanted to invest in the guy who got the girl, but was always held back by my preference for Faolan. It made the romance a frustration at times, rather than a pleasure.
It all pays off in book 3, but more of that in another post.
2. The characters from the first book have quite a major plotline, but because I wasn’t at all invested in them (and found them quite boring, to be honest) I just skim-read those parts of the book.
That’s a first for me, and equal parts liberating and terrifying. Liberating, because I didn’t spend hours of my time tied into something I wasn’t enjoying, and terrifying because if you can just skip over parts, why read anything at all?
I’m not doing very well writing at the moment. Doing slightly better with my dishes – I put my mum on speaker phone tonight, and some family gossip made the process much easier to bear.
I can’t exactly employ the same tactic with writing, but I have been making at least two writing dates a week, and it’s kinda working.
Today, me and Cat had a mega-writing day with ice cream in it. It would have been morning-till-night mega, except that I had to go to choir.
I love choir.
Some really good things from the day:
Going right into Cat’s world-building for a couple of hours, just spinning ideas out, chucking them, building on them, reversing them, is an amazing creative exercise. It put me right back into what’s at the heart of writing – the excitement that a story, and the world of a story, generates.
I don’t tend to do this kind of rigorous thinking, though I’m getting much better at it, now that my characters are getting complicated enough to warrant it. I highly recommend trying it out some time: it’s the kind of creative magic that can only happen between two or more brains. That makes it a bit scary, because the ideas aren’t only in your head anymore, they’re out there for disagreement and transformation.
Cat pointed out that my hero has actually declared his intention to seduce my heroine. I had written that without realising it. It changes everything. Then we also realised that, given the Machiavel he is, he would probably actually be planning to put some other man up to doing it for him.
Which led to the thought that my hero, having had his loneliness taken advantage of by a servant as a kid, has probably never had adult/consensual sex…GASP! (Including the kind when you forget to use a condom.)
Then there was ice cream.
tonight was a night of random tv. One of the shows that came on was Lennon Naked, a kind of biopic of John Lennon around the time the Beatles went bust.
It made quite a strong thread out of his relationship with his dad, his abandonment issues and subsequent abandonment of his own son (kind of angered me the way Into the Wild angered me – the damage done by a man-boy who will do anything rather than be in relationship with people. I know not all people interpret it that way. I do.).
It’s quite good, if very depressing. I had no idea he was such an arse!
But really, what I wanted to talk about was just this one line that Cynthia Lennon says. She has gathered her mother and her lawyers and she is there to hand John an ultimatum: Yoko Ono or me and your son.
John’s feeding the lawyers his usual rubbish and being entirely uncooperative, and the lawyer is exacerbating the situation by insisting on calling him Mr Lennon. John’s about to leave the room, with nothing solved, when Cynthia stands and says to her lawyer: “For God’s sake, just call him John!”
I don’t know if I can attribute the whole of this moment to the writing, because it was also in the delivery – but that one line encapsulated a whole character, for me.
Here’s this woman whose life is falling apart, because she doesn’t understand and has no control over the man she married. But she has compassion and understanding, and perhaps even love enough to treat him as a human, when her lawyer would rather they speak through him. Even though they’re in a room together.
And John responds to it, turning to her and actually listening for the first time since he entered the room.
A very simple, but very good piece of writing/directing/acting.
I remember when the film version of this came out, and I was intrigued by it, but ultimately put off by how many people told me it was full on. The other day I saw the book in the library, and needing something to go into my brain that wasn’t romance, I borrowed it.
Actually, first I read the beginning, to see whether my brain was into it. I read: “The summer I was eight years old, five hours disappeared from my life. I can’t explain.”
I wanted to keep reading.
And reading. And reading.
“I’ve never seen you so absorbed by a book!” special k told me last night. Which is really saying something.
At first I was a little unsure. The writing feels like a first novel – a little unsophisticated, a little obvious what he’s trying to pull off. And I couldn’t decide whether the very confronting content was gratuitous or not.
But the more I read – and the more the narrative travelled from the awful thing that happened to the effect of that awful thing on two very different boys – the more absorbed I became.
Inherent in the premise is the need to read to the end: Those two very different boys can only come to terms with their experience when they meet each other – something they spend the whole novel travelling towards.
The ways they each live their lives create beautiful counterpoints to each other, full of apparently disparate images that work towards a subconscious resolution.
These damaged, god-like boys became curiously dear to me, and I cared very much what happened to them.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you, though – this is definitely not a read for the faint-hearted. I watched the film this morning, and didn’t find it nearly so disturbing as the book. Partly I suppose because I knew what was coming, and I was already invested in the characters. But the film didn’t make me understand, the way the book did, how obscene and awful things were experienced and integrated into an overall life experience.
I mention Cat in here quite often (mostly when she’s made some insightful comment on some grand, sweeping theory of mine), and after another great morning coffee with her, I thought: she needs a shout out!
Cat is my critique partner whether she likes it or not, because I don’t actually function as a writer without her anymore.
She’s the one person I can have a weekly three-hour coffee with, and not have to pretend that anything other than writing (ours, writing in books, writing of tv shows…any and all writing) is of interest.
She knows my characters as well as I do – possibly better, in the way that you can sometimes know other people’s siblings better than they do, because they’re not emotionally obscured.
So thank you Cat for your never-ending generosity and genuine interest. You are a gem!
Instead of writing much tonight, I’m going to post this video that I’m sure many of you have seen, but some mayn’t have.
It is an expression of grief. The brother of the tall boy in white died in a car accident on this corner the night before.
