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Posts Tagged ‘midnight never come’

MNC Book Report: English Court Life, Ralph Dutton

I grabbed this book because it was on the shelf next to The English Court, which I reported on a little while ago. Unfortunately, it turns out to be the first useless research book I’ve read.

Dutton describes his purpose as “to show the influence of the reigning monarch on the way of life carried on at his court, and also how and where he lived.” Unfortunately, because it goes from Henry VII to George II (three hundred years) in just over 200 pages, the result is unavoidably shallow. And also unbalanced: Mary I, who reigned for five years, gets fourteen pages of coverage, while Edward VI, who ruled for six, gets two.

I had hoped for this book to be a good complement to The English Court, giving me a better idea of daily life during the period. No dice. It contains a few anecdotes I wasn’t familiar with before, but it ends up reading like a half-baked history, failing to really cover the events of the period (which the author admits he isn’t trying to do) while failing to dig into the practicalities of life back then (which is what he was supposed to be doing). And while the chapter on Elizabeth isn’t completely idolatrous, Dutton appears to be firmly in the camp of Gloriana, extolling her virtues and achievements while mostly glossing over her flaws.

On the bright side, I only read the Tudor section, so I only wasted eighty-five pages of my life, instead of 220.

Oh well. I can’t hit a home run with every book, I suppose.

I WIN.

Okay, I know I said I wouldn’t be making daily posts about Midnight Never Come, but if yesterday was “I had inspiration for breakfast” day, today is “And Clio has decided she loves me” day.

When writing a historical novel, one rapidly discovers, history frustrates you to no end by not lining up the way you want it to. (Dammit, why hasn’t Walsingham’s daughter married Essex yet? Or if she has — which she may — why hasn’t it become public knowledge yet? This book may be over by October 1590. Etc.)

But then, every so often, history decides to hand you exactly what you need, with a red bow on top.

Without realizing I was doing it, I set this scene in the very month when Fitzwilliam accused Perrot of treason. And — if that wasn’t enough — Perrot is Walsingham’s client.

I do not expect this to mean anything to any of you, and I will be surprised if it does. It doesn’t have to mean anything. The point is, when I went looking for some reason to have Deven investigating the current status of Irish politics in the English court, I discovered the current Lord Lieutenant of Ireland leveling accusations of treason at the previous Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, whose patron happens to be the guy I wanted to be sending Deven off on that investigation.

All hail the Muse of History. She’s a bitch most of the time, but then she does something so nice that, for a little while, you forget about all the other frustration, and you remember why historical fiction can be awesome.

Authorial sadism: making Deven talk politics while his pants are trying to fall off.

LBR quota: I’d say accusations of treason count as blood and rhetoric both.

*blink*

Dude. I must have eaten inspiration for breakfast today.

While engaged in late-night stupidity at Kinko’s (involving photocopiers, a paper slicer, metric crap-tons of scotch tape, and the Agas woodcut of Elizabethan London), I had an epiphany about the plot point my brain insists on calling the Great Misunderstanding — even though it isn’t really a misunderstanding at all.

Yes, I just found a way to make my characters’ lives suck more. Aren’t you glad? I know they’re glad. (Hah.)

I would be writing those scenes right now, but the late-night stupidity has tired me out, so to bed. But I have more leftover ham and applesauce in the fridge, which is what I had for breakfast today; maybe I’ll have the rest of it tomorrow and see what else pops into my head . . . .

oh, hey.

I figured out something fascinating about Lune today. Sometimes it happens like this: the realization just fell into my lap, out of nowhere. I don’t even think I was thinking about Midnight Never Come at the time. It was just, blar, need a break, I think I’ll read the Tiptree antho I got at ICFA, do I want a Sprite to drink?, oh, that’s what’s going on with her.

Or rather, what should be going on with her. It isn’t really in the text yet. In fact, there’s stuff in the text that probably contradicts what I realized today. I’ll need to think about how I’m going to work this in. But I will do so, one way or another — even though it will require some revision — because boy howdy is it important.

I like important. Important means the book just got one step better. (Or will, once I’ve put this in there.)

LBR tally: it’s actually been love for the last few days. With a bit of rhetoric (i.e. politics) mixed in.

Authorial sadism: the love is the sadistic thing.

MNC Book Report: The English Court, ed. David Starkey

I think my brain is melting.

This is another one of those books that you don’t pick up unless you have specific need for the concrete facts it contains. If you aren’t already familiar with Tudor politics, you’ll be lost within a few pages; hell, even I gave up on the first article after the introduction, which concerns the politics of the fifteenth century royal household, and is therefore way out of my period. But, like with the Hampton Court book, I started out by reading the chapter on Elizabeth, then had to backtrack to earlier pieces in order to understand what the hell I’d just read.

Having gone through the sections on Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary, though, I now understand a lot better just what the Privy Chamber was, and what the various titles in it meant. (I also have seven pages of notes on who was in what post when.) I can tell you the differences between the Ladies of the Bedchamber, the Gentlewomen of the Privy Chamber, the Chamberers, the Maids of Honour, and the Ladies Extraordinary of the Privy Chamber; I can tell you what happened to the Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, the Grooms of the Privy Chamber, and the Gentlemen Ushers when a female monarch took over. It’s a palimpsest, again; one cannot understand these things without reference to previous reigns.

Also? I may never again be able to play in a LARP focusing on noble politics; now that I have a better sense of how they really work, the vague attempts we make in those games will probably frustrate me more than they already did. (I’m not sure it’s possible to play such a game without putting in seventeen times more effort than anybody wants to, because ultimately those things don’t hinge on the big decisions. It’s all about the accretion of little favors and offices and insults and rewards and rivalries and family relations and other things that, like Rome, cannot be built in a day. Also, anything really important in politics takes weeks, months, or years to play out.)

Anyway, taking notes on the Elizabethan chapter as I went through it for the second time melted my brain, so now I’m going to go do something that doesn’t require me to think.

putting things in order

Every so often, I enter a very visual mode of operation.

So far, I’ve been writing Midnight Never Come along three separate tracks. The two primary ones are Deven and Lune, each of whom I’ve been writing as a continuous block of scenes; the secondary one consists of flashbacks, kept in a separate file. Last night I realized I was at the point where I needed to interleave the Deven and Lune scenes and decide how this opening chunk is going to flow, which also meant inserting flashbacks where appropriate.

I used index cards for this when I did it to the first half of Doppelganger (originally it was structured as three-chapter blocks of each character; my editor asked me to change it, and was right), but I knew that book like the back of my hand, so a couple of notes on a card were sufficient to guide my thinking. MNC is much newer, so this time I printed the actual manuscript out, shrinking fonts and margins so as not to waste more paper than necessary, and putting a page break at the end of each scene.

Then it was time to use that high-tech tool known as my living room floor . . . .

MNC Book Report: Hampton Court, Simon Thurley

I slacked off on the research reading while moving, and then ended up halfway through several books at once, but I’ve finished the relevant portion of this one, so back we go to the book reports.

I picked it up on the recommendation of Alden Gregory, who gave me a tour of Hampton Court Palace; he called it the definitive book on the place, and I believe it. Which means that it really isn’t the sort of thing you want to read unless you have a specific need; the detail is fabulous, but only when there’s a specific application for it. (Even I ignored some of the information, like how much was spent on renovations and upkeep in a given year, except insofar as it helps give me a better sense of what a pound was worth back then.)

Alden photocopied for me the chapters that covered Elizabeth’s time, but I ended up checking the entire book out so I could read the preceding chapters. Hampton Court is one of those buildings that has been added to and remodeled and restored over a period of hundreds of years; my notes from my tour are a confusing jumble of details I couldn’t build into a coherent picture. (Frex, though I remembered where Alden said Elizabeth had most likely stayed when using the palace, I didn’t know why she was there, or what it meant when the photocopied chapters said she probably used the same quarters her father did, but that they don’t know what she did with the queen’s side; which bits of the building were that?) So I started more or less at the beginning, with Daubeney’s small manor house, and followed it through Cardinal Wolsey’s modifications, then the extended building spree of Henry VIII, and then finally the few changes made in Elizabeth’s time.

This took quite a while, because I was constantly flipping back and forth between the architectural plans of the different stages, making sure I was oriented, keeping track of where the new stuff went in and where things were rebuilt. But the end result is that now I can look at the Elizabethan floorplan and know what everything is, more or less, which I couldn’t do when it was presented to me as a finished product. The building is a palimpsest of earlier periods; I had to go through it chronologically to understand.

And this is relevant because, even when I’m writing scenes not at Hampton Court, my understanding of the architecture there affects my understanding of the period in general. I now grok the pattern of watching chamber, presence chamber, chamber of estate, privy chamber, bedchamber, and so on, and what those meant for how court life functioned; I know the function of galleries, and the processional route to the chapel; I have an idea of how much living space would be granted to courtiers high-ranking enough to be in residence. Even if I don’t know the precise details of how these things were laid out at Greenwich or Richmond or Whitehall, the important thing is that I understand how that stuff worked.

Which means that I’m less likely to write the Elizabethan period as if it were the modern era in ruffs. And that, ultimately, is the goal.

another milestone

I don’t want to subject you all to daily progress reports on Midnight Never Come, because let’s face it, that would be three months of numbers posts, and I can’t find a way to make them all witty. But I’ll post every so often, because public accountability is good for my productivity, and it helps me feel less like I’m writing in a total vacuum.

So this post is prompted by a milestone: the twenty thousand-word mark. A fifth of a book, that is, should I be so lucky as to have this cap out at 100K. (I’m not holding my breath.) 20353, to be precise, not counting the flashbacks that I will probably be inserting into it; in addition to the Leicester scene I mentioned before, there’s also a brief account of the Armada that I’m quite pleased with.

I’m very nearly done with the 1588 segment of the story. The shape of this is weird; I’m going to have about 20-25K in 1588, and then jump ahead a year and a half to 1590, when the rest of the book will take place. It’s weird enough for me to bear in mind the non-trivial possibility that I will have to do some Very Ugly Revision down the road, wherein I will rip out this entire opening chunk and replace it with something in 1590. I can’t just change the dates; the reason this is happening in 1588 is so the characters have time to plausibly reach the positions at Court they will be occupying in 1590, since one does not earn that kind of trust in a few weeks. If I decide to make the novel more unified in time, I’ll have to come up with a new opening entirely, that shows Deven and Lune already in place. But that’s the kind of judgment call I can’t make without writing more of the book, and I can’t do that without having written this beginning (even if it turns out to be the wrong beginning), so there’s no way to get around the possibility of twenty thousand words down the drain.

Sigh.

But that sounds overly angsty. Things are going decently at present, and I’m looking forward to some upcoming scenes. So I am not having book-angst on a grand scale. I am instead, I think, having pragmatic book evaluation, so I don’t get taken by surprise if I have to make some major changes.

There is a difference, I promise.

Authorial sadism: just describing what happened to the Armada would have been sadistic enough. But then I went and added stuff to the history. ^_^

LBR tally: mostly rhetoric, and a bit of political blood. Love is definitely going to be the underdog in this novel.

research goldmines

Once again, I am reminded to be grateful of my position at a large university, with all the informational resources that provides. Not only do I have electronic access to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (no more reliance on Wikipedia, and far more detail than I’d ever get there!), but I have the libraries.

And a list of nine more books I want to/need to go check out and read for Midnight Never Come. Doing a lot of research doesn’t mean you reach a point where you know what you need to; it means you become steadily more aware of how much you don’t know and should. (Nor am I yet to the point where I just have to tell myself to let it go, though sometimes I really wish I were.)

Ah well. Here we go again.

getting back on my feet

I came home from London Wednesday, and spent Thursday mostly being a useless lump of uselessness. But the last two days have been solidly productive: good progress on unpacking (or really, organization after unpacking), to the point that the kitchen is finally all put away, and of course writing.

I’m liking my current plan for approaching this novel. For the month of June, I need to produce thirty thousand words (an average of 1K a day), but this number will only count things written in chronological sequence. That is, neither flashback scenes nor things I let myself skip ahead to write will qualify for the day’s total, because I might not end up using those.

So I got about 2K or so while gone, and another 2K the last two days, for a current total of about 14.5K. Plus two future scenes while I was out to town, and today, some special bonus earl of Leicester flashback action. (He’s dead by the beginning of the novel, so the only way I can include him is in flashbacks.)

Authorial sadism: getting advice you don’t understand, and being held over a barrel by your political rival.

LBR quota: we’ve had all three, lately. Though the love is looking a bit bloodstained.

Day Four: In which I cave in

The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. I take the Tube to St. Pancras instead of walking. It’s cold outside, and I can’t be certain how long the walk would take, nor do I have a map that shows the area. So I head for Blackfriars.

(more…)

Day Three: In which I giggle over a question mark, and flirt with hypothermia

Dinner update from last night: OMG I love Wasabi. Not the green stuff; the restaurant. Not only were they open at the dinner hour (which most of the eating establishments in the vicinity aren’t), but they gave me a giant container of yakisoba and a Coke for four pounds forty, which is the cheapest actual meal I’ve had here, barring the complimentary breakfast from the hostel.

Anyway, Friday. An excellent day that ended with an excellent demonstration of my stupidity.

(more…)

Day Two: In which I get led around by nice people

Last night I got the arch of my left foot to pop, which cured the shooting pains. Unfortunately, though today contained about half as much walking as yesterday, that was still about 40% more than my feet wanted to do. If I can survive Westminster tomorrow morning, though, I think I’ll live. After that, there will be more sitting, less walking.

So let’s continue with my perambulations, as taken (mostly) from my journal, whose formerly sleek black exterior is rapidly becoming war-torn indeed.

(more…)

Day One: In which there is much walking

Woken up at 6:30 this morning by a fire alarm. Good morning, London.

The rest of my shared room decided they might as well get up, so after a failed attempt to go back to sleep (and mind you, I didn’t get to sleep until after 1 a.m.), I get up, too. We might as well get started.

I have many things scheduled for upcoming days, but nothing for today. This is deliberate. Today is just for the City.

For those not familiar with its history, a brief primer: London the city is a sprawling monstrosity, but the City of London is a tiny thing, approximately one square mile, and back in the Elizabethan era, it was all there was. The City; some suburbs beginning to burst out of its walls; Westminster upriver, connected by a thin thread of development; Southwark across the Thames, connected by the one and only London Bridge. I’m staying in a hostel near St. Paul’s because I wanted to be in a place that existed back then, and where I could walk the City.

There’s almost nothing here that dates back to the sixteenth century, though. The Great Fire saw to that in 1666, and what it missed, the Victorians got. I have to scrounge to find Tudor-era buildings; that’s what the next few days are for. But the City is still here, and that’s what today is for. Many of the streets are still right where they used to be, even if now they’re lined with Starbucks and Pret. Sir Christopher Wren had grand ideas after the fire for how to redesign the city into a more harmonious pattern, but while he was busy planning, Londoners were busy rebuilding — right where everything had been before. I walk different road surfaces than my historical characters did, but the roads themselves are often the same.

So today was a wandering day, and what you get is a wandering journal.

(more…)

a benchmark

Ladies and gentlemen, we have ten thousand words of book.

(Actually, we have 10172. Not counting the 2124 of Gifford flashback, that isn’t really in the book yet.)

This is the point at which I start believing I’m writing a book. Ten thousand is a nice round number; it convinces me I have something of substance on my hands, rather than flimsy shreds. Unfortunately, soon after this we hit the stretch where adding a thousand words doesn’t seem to make much difference in the total, where I run and run and get no closer to the end. We call this the “hamster on a treadmill” stretch.

But let’s not race to meet future miseries.

Authorial sadism: making Lune be wrong, wrong, wrongitty wrong. But it’ll be fun for her later.

LBR tally: love. The Goodemeades are so sweet.

I may or may not write one more scene this weekend; we’ll see. But then it’s off to London, and then I’ll be trip-blogging. It’s all Midnight Never Come, all the time, here at Swan Tower! (I promise I’ll try to have some other content, really I will.)

okay, that’s enough.

I think I’ll call it quits for the day, at 2683 words. I kept going because I really really want to write a certain upcoming scene, but this story calls for a richness of detail beyond what I tend to default to, and that means after 2683 words Lune’s only just now gotten to the Angel Inn. (With a lengthy break in there to try and determine just when that thing got built. Best I could find was that it was around by Jacobean times; I’m going to assume it was there a little earlier, and if anybody can dig up the evidence to prove me wrong, more power to them.)

So no encounters yet with our favorite batshit-crazy seer. He’ll have to wait for another day. But some turns of phrase I’m rather proud of.

If I can get in another solid day of work tomorrow, I think I’ll call it quits for a while. I know better than to think I’ll write steadily while in London, but I wanted to get the beginnings of Lune’s and Deven’s plots on the page, and let that compost in my head while I’m gone. Then, come June, we’ll really get to work.

Authorial sadism of the second part of the day: poor little mortal pets.

LBR tally: a bit of metaphorical blood, a bit of rhetoric. We’ll have some love tomorrow.