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Posts Tagged ‘novels’

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.

Eh-heh-heh-heh.

I know what I’m doing with Lune, at least to start with. (Though I don’t actually know how she got herself disgraced, and should probably figure that out.)

Authorial sadism of the day: the country mice don’t realize the city mice are cannibals.

LBR tally: today it’s been blood, though not of the physical sort.

I may write some more. I mean, I don’t have anything to do until the game tonight, except clean up my office or unpack more stuff or get myself together for the trip or finish the book I’m reading or —

I still may write some more, anyway.

Break’s over; back on your heads.

I should mention, I suppose, that I have begun tiptoeing my way delicately through the beginnings of Midnight Never Come.

I’m tiptoeing for a lot of reasons. Frex, I know where the plot is going, but not how it’s getting there, which is a weird situation for me. (Normally I know where I’m starting, and I follow the plot to see where it goes.) Also, I’m only just now getting to know the protagonists; Invidiana’s been in my head for a good year and a half, but Deven and Lune are new to me. I had to rewrite the beginning of Chapter One twice, proceeding a little further into the scene each time, before I started hitting the right version of Deven. (And I still don’t think I have his first name right, though he seems okay with that surname.)

Also? Historical fiction is slow. There’s a bit of Received Wisdom that says something like, do your research, and then use twenty percent of it. I disagree. Use a hundred percent of it, and then go do more and use that, too — but only make a point of telling your reader about, oh, maybe three percent. If that. The rest of it should be used in a pervasive, background kind of way, but it should most definitely be used. I should be thinking, as I write, about how old Walsingham is in 1588, and what he looked like, and how he dressed, and what his family background is, and what he would be doing on an average day at Hampton Court, and that he and Burghley both studied at Gray’s Inn, and oh is this in the period when he and Burghley had fallen out with one another? And also about gentleman ushers, and the protocols of the presence chamber, and how one played tennis in the sixteenth century, and the recurrent problem at Court of how the kitchens ended up feeding more people than they were supposed to (because people would bring their families and servants and third cousins’ friends’ roommates, which they weren’t supposed to) and so regularly went over budget as a result.

I shouldn’t make a point of telling you about any of that unless it’s important to the plot. But I should mention in the natural course of things, if it’s relevant, and I should be keeping it in the back of my mind all the time, so that the shape of the story I’m telling flows through and around it.

. . . which is hard.

My hope is that it will get easier as I go.

Anyway, I can’t remember who I ganked this icon from, but lots of people have it. Seems a pretty appropriate work-in-progress icon, especially since I think this novel will have all three, concurrent and consecutive.

Today’s work: rhetoric, I suppose. The love and blood will come later.

color palettes

kitsune_zen made a comment last night, about different settings/story sets of hers having different colors in her head. Which added another item to my list of Weird Metaphors Through Which I Perceive Stories.

Midnight Never Come is, in my head, strongly influenced by Shekar Kapur’s Elizabeth (the one with Cate Blanchett). It’s shadowy and dark, with dark rich jewel tones. Invidiana’s black and silver and cold glittering gems.

The Waking of Angantyr, to pick an unpublished novel, is a palette of blues (midnight and pale ice blue) and grey-browns that have no real warmth to them. Welcome to the bleak Viking revenge epic, eh?

The Vengeance of Trees has jewel tones again, but they’re brighter than MNC’s, and warmed up with copper and gold.

Sunlight and Storm is the brightest of the lot: sunshine gold, the blue of a midwestern sky, the grey-blue of a thunderstorm, the yellow-green of plains grass. With a cameo appearance by the variegated earth tones of badlands.

Not everything has colors in my head (notice the absence of Doppelganger, for example), but somet things do. How about you all? Stories/novels you’ve written or read, what color palette do they evoke in your mind?

helpful people

Moving has been eating very nearly my every waking minute for over a week now (packing, transporting, unpacking, organizing), but I thought I’d take a moment to post about my upcoming trip, and how incredibly helpful people are being. Once I’m home again and have a complete list, I’m going to post something on my website naming off every individual who has assisted me in planning the research aspects of my trip: both the ones who will be giving me personal tours of sites I’m visiting, and the ones who have helped coordinate those tours. At this point, I’ve got assistance lined up for when I go to the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, Hardwick Hall, and the New Globe Theatre’s archives. These people have very busy work schedules, I know, and so I’m deeply grateful for the time they’re taking on my behalf.

Regular service of novel-related posts will resume in the not-too-distant future. After I get myself entirely out of the old house, and remember that oh yeah, I have a novel to write.