Thoughts on this First Draft, Thoughts in General, All the Thoughts...
Excuse me, I can't write anything after this first sentence until I untangle the necklace from my hair.
Ah.
The problem with this necklace is that I love it too much. Whenever I put it on, I leave it on for weeks. I sleep in it. It gets caught. On everything.
My friend Stephanie Shaw brought it back to my from London. From a particular part of London, some shopping part, maybe with the word "Bridge" in the title, something mysterious anyway. I think of it as my "London Amber."
London Amber is a very beautiful set of words, I think. The name of a famous courtesan in Regency England. The name of a great British actress in the late 18th Century. The name of a strange breed of cat. I don't know. London Amber.
The word "amber" reminds me of three things. Somewhere, in some description of the jewel, possibly a catalogue from the Pyramid Collection that used to float around my childhood bathrooms (my mother is an inveterate catalogue reader, though rarely a buyer), I saw that amber was called "The gold of the sea." That unlike other jewels, it was "warm to the touch."
And it reminds me that I want to write a mermaid's revenge story, called "Anundine the Amber-Eyed, the Dark One of the Sea."
It will start out by this quote by writer and poet Caitlyn Paxson:
“There’s a lot of fish girls in these seas:
You took the one that belonged to me.”
- Caitlyn Paxson
I Know She Thinks On the Folks Back Home
And it reminds me of a line from my story (I know, I know, how very Oscar Wildean of me, to quote myself) "Three Fancies from the Infernal Garden," which I wrote so many years ago that the ornateness of the prose and the inexorable inner rhyme is mildly embarrassing, but still the FUNNESS of writing it, and the sheer Gillianness and Samness of it (I wrote it as a present for my roommate Gillian at the time, whom I called "Lumina," and my comrade the Ineffable Samu) makes me smile to think on it. The Firebird is making sure Scarecrow has everything he needs for his journey:
“If you do go -” she asked, “when you go - do you have what you need? A magic ring? A mortar? Pestle? Piece of amber? Copper pot? The North Wind tucked up in a knot? A falcon skin? The speech of eagles? A talking reed? A dried green pea? A handkerchief that becomes the sea?”
I don't know if I added the line about the amber because Stephanie Shaw had just brought me back this necklace, or because I read in a book that amber was lucky, or what. The reason is lost. But that's what this necklace makes me think about.
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But I wasn't going to talk about necklaces this morning.
***
I was going to talk about how I finished my story "The Twice-Drowned Saint, or, The Ghost Who Bled Coins, Being a Tale of Gelethel: The Angelic City" yesterday, after a marathon writing day the like of which I hadn't seen for months. (Talk about ornate. That title. Ugh. I could just call it "Leaving Gelethel," which is the alternate title. But Sita says no.)
And, sob, how HARD it was.
(The violins begin to play.)
(Speaking of which, the word "violins" will now always conjure up this song, which my friend dev_chieftain put on a mixed CD for me, called - ha! - "Saucy Adventures of the Mermaid Queen" - the mix, I mean, not the song. Here's the song, it's haunting, I want to listen to EVERYTHING by this artist, Conjure One, but, yes, the song, with guest vocals by Poe, it's called "Center of the Sun.")
(Actually, I am just going to embed this fan video, because it's pretty. But I would recommend listening FIRST without watching, because it's a whole different story in your head then.)
("You say the most beautiful things - just like my violins...")
Click to viewOh, dear, now I'm completely distracted.
***
So the story, sigh, is almost 15,000 words long.
Again.
And there is SO MUCH GOOD IN IT. The characters, the world, the dialogue.
I could make a mantra of that. The characters, the world, the dialogue.
And there is SO MUCH WRONG ABOUT IT.
Mainly, a thin plot (what happens with dream stories), a front-loaded beginning, a rushed ending. Sometimes it seemed I couldn't write fast enough, that the story kept PRESSING IN. I'd be in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a scene, and a whole other scene blossomed in my head, and I had to write it immediately, in a little box at the bottom of the notebook page, or a separate paragraph at the bottom of my Word document, or on the "Silver Ghost" notes page. It was all over the place. Scattershot. But mainly that sensation of being PRESSED upon from all angles.
And then yesterday, it was this big effort. To push through. To end it. To wrap it up.
And I'm terribly afraid too many frikkin things are going on in the story.
There are too many characters. There is no dialogue until, what, like 2838 words into it, unless you count little interruptions. And is that okay, when the first person voice is so strong? Or, no, I should really start the story several pages from where I actually started it, and if so, HOW DO I FOLD IN ALL THE ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY information that I front-loaded the bastard with?
And I think the story is about growing older, and leaving your ruts, and finding a new dream even if you happen to be middle aged, and walking out into the wasteland to pursue a miracle. The story's more about the protagonist (thankfully) than the title indicates (the title is not about the protagonist, oddly enough.) The protagonist was barely a part of the dream story, if she was in it at all. She was the best gift, and the TRICKIEST.
And what if that OTHER part of the story, that part that came unbidden, which I think was enormously influenced by Julia Rios's (AMAZING, made me CRY) angel story, what if all that needs to be gutted due to mishandling, or lack of sensitivity, or plagiarism? I'd dedicate this whole story to her if the story's good enough - otherwise it'd be a total insult, don't you think?
I'M FREAKING OUT, MAN!
But it's done anyway. The first draft anyway. So there. Huh.
***