Locke Lamora Read-Along Bonus #1: It Came From Burger King
The Little Red Reviewer, Dark Cargo, SF Signal, Scruffy Fiction, and My Awful Reviews (among others), dear people that they are, are engaging in a group read-along of The Lies of Locke Lamora all month. Major discussion should happen on the weekends, starting next weekend, and I'm going to try to do my bit for the process by coughing up some history of the novel and my own thoughts on it. So, every Saturday in March, I'll offer up some previously-unpublished fragments and my own criticism of my firstborn book.
The Lies of Locke Lamora was born during my Shaggy Period. Before I became a firefighter and had to restrain myself, I experimented with assorted forms of sasquatchery-- goatee, beard, and hair down to my ass. Here's a charming sample:
In early adulthood, I apparently slept sitting up.
The only heartening thing I can see is that my hairline does not appear to have receded any since then... if anything, it's crept forward, like some alien parasite trying to eat my eyes.
I honestly wish that I recalled more about the specifics of Lies' gestation, from 2000 to early 2004. I have a lot of notes, scraps, maps, and assorted paper detritus from half-assed attempts to start the book, but I wasn't keeping a diary at the time and I wasn't chatting with anyone else very rigorously about it via e-mail, so the electronic notion trail that has clung to every work since was never created.
I do have a few surviving documents, however, and some tolerably reliable memories I might be able to taffy-pull into coherence.
The first part of Locke's world to be created was the Kingdom of the Seven Marrows, home of the Vadrans, in the winter of 2000. While sitting at a Burger King on Robert Street South in St. Paul, Minnesota, no less. I sketched out a map of the Marrows on hexagonal chart paper and then scrawled a little note to myself on a napkin (I won the bronze in the 2000 Wannabe Author Cliche Olympics for that): "Why does it have to be set in another typical medieval dirt town?" With that self-flagellation rattling around in my brain, I advanced the timeline of my baby book from a pseudo-thirteenth century level of European development to a pseudo-sixteenth, give or take. That gave me a more populous, cosmopolitan, economically developed setting to play with, and was probably the major decision that eventually allowed me to produce complete chapters rather than infuriating two-page novel fragments.
Once I had a not-stultifying setting to play with, it slowly dawned on me that my work could probably use something resembling a theme. This whole notion that my work could have some sort of "meaning" was freshly sprung in my brain-meat; it's one of the many epiphanies baby writers have ("Oh my god! I can write... an unreliable narrator! Holy smackballs... I can make allusions to annoying but highly respected works I hated in high school and make myself look really smart!"). Eventually you find yourself nestled snugly into the context of five thousand years of recorded human art, and you realize that you're not actually the first person to kindle these concepts.* You're more like the seventeen billionth. But when you're twenty, you think you're fucking Mozart just for managing to get your underwear facing the proper direction every morning.
Anyhow, my original theme wasn't such a bad one, and I may play with it in future works (not Gentleman Bastard related)-- I thought I'd write something about the difference between accepted history and actual history, about the secret lives and struggles of critically important people who would eventually be forgotten, ignored, or derided when their times were chronicled. The moles in the gardens of history, as it were.
Locke was conceived in this framework as a criminal-turned-spymaster who would, in objective reality, be directly responsible for preventing great disasters and saving the entire nation of Emberlain from invasion, only to be utterly paved over in all the formal histories. My framing device was going to be a series of snotty articles in scholarly journals from several centuries after he lived. I give you the text of the only surviving fragment of these things left in my papers, from late 2000:
It is now difficult to credit that there was (or, indeed, could have been) such a person as Locke Lamora. The great weight of the historical record yields rumor, hearsay, and folk tales but scant evidence that a real man ever bore such a name. Indeed, the word "lamora" in the Loreni** tongue of the time, meant "shadow." It seems clear that Locke, like the Ten Honest Turncoats and the Rose of Parlay, is a colorful fragment of the historical imagination. To suggest that the Republic of Emberlain was, for any time at all, totally dependent upon the wits of a single man is a grave disservice to
Emberlain Historical Journal
Parthis, 1668
Embermarrow Press
I never actually finished the quote.
As I said, I don't think this is a bad framing device at all. With the right idea and the right author, it might be quite a lively and insightful one. But too much about it was wrong for the story I wanted to tell. Of paramount importance is the fact that offering scholarly treatises from the centuries after Locke's life would indicate that Locke's society actually survived and that he was remembered in any fashion. I can't give you any more specifics, of course, but let's just say that this is not a tension that I am interested in settling. I tossed the historical journal framework in the early days, along with my half-assed plans to give Locke hypnotic eyes and a supernatural voice.
I then tried to make Emberlain (a tiny but financially powerful city-state loosely based on the Dutch republic, now canonized in the actual novels with that conception more or less intact) the entry point to the novel. In the first coherent scene I ever wrote, Locke and Jean ran a confidence game against a village full of Vadran farmers freshly in funds from selling off their harvest. Locke allowed himself to get caught for flagrant cheating at cards. When the villagers dragged him outside to beat and/or kill him, Jean appeared in disguise as some sort of lord or constable, and confiscated all the game's winnings as the price of his silence for ignoring the attempted murder. He then rode off into the sunset with his "prisoner."
A basic, classic con game, to be sure. But again it felt all wrong. I didn't want Locke and Jean sweeping crusts of bread out of the mouths of people who'd count every copper to get through the winter; I wanted them to victimize ordinary folks when their ethics and vision failed them, not as a matter of habit. I also felt there was too much being left in the backstory... Locke and Jean were Camorri, but I'd never spent a paragraph describing Camorr, figuring out where they came from, or why the audience should really care. In medias res is a great place to start any story, but this was much, much too far into the middle of things. I decided I had to go all the way back to Camorr and childhood.
The next year or so was spent churning out a lot of those worthless two-page novel fragments I mentioned; I knew at last where to set the story and what it should actually be about, but how the hell to get in past two pages was a tedious mystery. A couple of these fragments survive and they are among the most florid, deplorable, and over-wrought things I ever shat/typed (shyped?). You or your great-grandchildren can read them in my papers when I have kicked the oxygen habit. Eventually, however, I wrote one that was marginally less bullshit than its predecessors-- a languid, directionless opening in which Locke and Jean drift on a raft past the palace of a noblewoman they plan to rob. The description of this palace came straight out of a dream I had; I visualized a complex glass structure like an unfolding rose blossoming over the landscape. When I started trying to describe that place I realized that I couldn't stop. The mysterious glass was the key to Camorr. My exhortation to not create another stodgy medieval dirt town had at last come home to roost! All it took was a few years and dozens of false, unreadable starts for it to finally sink in.
To be continued...
*****
* Or you don't. Some people never do, and persist in telling themselves, their friends, their pets, and all the internet about it. Forever. Some extremely successful writers are surprisingly incapable of just rolling with that success, and end up screaming at the universe from behind the gleaming walls of their comfortably-furnished persecution complexes. Look for variations on the following two statements as telltale symptoms of this condition:
1. "I transcend and defy all genre but you idiots are too stupid to realize this."
2. "My ideas are revolutionary but you idiots are too stupid to realize this."
** Originally, Camorr was called "Lorem" and the Therin people were called "Loreni." Then I discovered that "lorem ipsum" is the universal standard in placeholder text and anyone who knew that would either be distracted or think I was trying to make a really lame joke.
The Lies of Locke Lamora was born during my Shaggy Period. Before I became a firefighter and had to restrain myself, I experimented with assorted forms of sasquatchery-- goatee, beard, and hair down to my ass. Here's a charming sample:
In early adulthood, I apparently slept sitting up.
The only heartening thing I can see is that my hairline does not appear to have receded any since then... if anything, it's crept forward, like some alien parasite trying to eat my eyes.
I honestly wish that I recalled more about the specifics of Lies' gestation, from 2000 to early 2004. I have a lot of notes, scraps, maps, and assorted paper detritus from half-assed attempts to start the book, but I wasn't keeping a diary at the time and I wasn't chatting with anyone else very rigorously about it via e-mail, so the electronic notion trail that has clung to every work since was never created.
I do have a few surviving documents, however, and some tolerably reliable memories I might be able to taffy-pull into coherence.
The first part of Locke's world to be created was the Kingdom of the Seven Marrows, home of the Vadrans, in the winter of 2000. While sitting at a Burger King on Robert Street South in St. Paul, Minnesota, no less. I sketched out a map of the Marrows on hexagonal chart paper and then scrawled a little note to myself on a napkin (I won the bronze in the 2000 Wannabe Author Cliche Olympics for that): "Why does it have to be set in another typical medieval dirt town?" With that self-flagellation rattling around in my brain, I advanced the timeline of my baby book from a pseudo-thirteenth century level of European development to a pseudo-sixteenth, give or take. That gave me a more populous, cosmopolitan, economically developed setting to play with, and was probably the major decision that eventually allowed me to produce complete chapters rather than infuriating two-page novel fragments.
Once I had a not-stultifying setting to play with, it slowly dawned on me that my work could probably use something resembling a theme. This whole notion that my work could have some sort of "meaning" was freshly sprung in my brain-meat; it's one of the many epiphanies baby writers have ("Oh my god! I can write... an unreliable narrator! Holy smackballs... I can make allusions to annoying but highly respected works I hated in high school and make myself look really smart!"). Eventually you find yourself nestled snugly into the context of five thousand years of recorded human art, and you realize that you're not actually the first person to kindle these concepts.* You're more like the seventeen billionth. But when you're twenty, you think you're fucking Mozart just for managing to get your underwear facing the proper direction every morning.
Anyhow, my original theme wasn't such a bad one, and I may play with it in future works (not Gentleman Bastard related)-- I thought I'd write something about the difference between accepted history and actual history, about the secret lives and struggles of critically important people who would eventually be forgotten, ignored, or derided when their times were chronicled. The moles in the gardens of history, as it were.
Locke was conceived in this framework as a criminal-turned-spymaster who would, in objective reality, be directly responsible for preventing great disasters and saving the entire nation of Emberlain from invasion, only to be utterly paved over in all the formal histories. My framing device was going to be a series of snotty articles in scholarly journals from several centuries after he lived. I give you the text of the only surviving fragment of these things left in my papers, from late 2000:
It is now difficult to credit that there was (or, indeed, could have been) such a person as Locke Lamora. The great weight of the historical record yields rumor, hearsay, and folk tales but scant evidence that a real man ever bore such a name. Indeed, the word "lamora" in the Loreni** tongue of the time, meant "shadow." It seems clear that Locke, like the Ten Honest Turncoats and the Rose of Parlay, is a colorful fragment of the historical imagination. To suggest that the Republic of Emberlain was, for any time at all, totally dependent upon the wits of a single man is a grave disservice to
Emberlain Historical Journal
Parthis, 1668
Embermarrow Press
I never actually finished the quote.
As I said, I don't think this is a bad framing device at all. With the right idea and the right author, it might be quite a lively and insightful one. But too much about it was wrong for the story I wanted to tell. Of paramount importance is the fact that offering scholarly treatises from the centuries after Locke's life would indicate that Locke's society actually survived and that he was remembered in any fashion. I can't give you any more specifics, of course, but let's just say that this is not a tension that I am interested in settling. I tossed the historical journal framework in the early days, along with my half-assed plans to give Locke hypnotic eyes and a supernatural voice.
I then tried to make Emberlain (a tiny but financially powerful city-state loosely based on the Dutch republic, now canonized in the actual novels with that conception more or less intact) the entry point to the novel. In the first coherent scene I ever wrote, Locke and Jean ran a confidence game against a village full of Vadran farmers freshly in funds from selling off their harvest. Locke allowed himself to get caught for flagrant cheating at cards. When the villagers dragged him outside to beat and/or kill him, Jean appeared in disguise as some sort of lord or constable, and confiscated all the game's winnings as the price of his silence for ignoring the attempted murder. He then rode off into the sunset with his "prisoner."
A basic, classic con game, to be sure. But again it felt all wrong. I didn't want Locke and Jean sweeping crusts of bread out of the mouths of people who'd count every copper to get through the winter; I wanted them to victimize ordinary folks when their ethics and vision failed them, not as a matter of habit. I also felt there was too much being left in the backstory... Locke and Jean were Camorri, but I'd never spent a paragraph describing Camorr, figuring out where they came from, or why the audience should really care. In medias res is a great place to start any story, but this was much, much too far into the middle of things. I decided I had to go all the way back to Camorr and childhood.
The next year or so was spent churning out a lot of those worthless two-page novel fragments I mentioned; I knew at last where to set the story and what it should actually be about, but how the hell to get in past two pages was a tedious mystery. A couple of these fragments survive and they are among the most florid, deplorable, and over-wrought things I ever shat/typed (shyped?). You or your great-grandchildren can read them in my papers when I have kicked the oxygen habit. Eventually, however, I wrote one that was marginally less bullshit than its predecessors-- a languid, directionless opening in which Locke and Jean drift on a raft past the palace of a noblewoman they plan to rob. The description of this palace came straight out of a dream I had; I visualized a complex glass structure like an unfolding rose blossoming over the landscape. When I started trying to describe that place I realized that I couldn't stop. The mysterious glass was the key to Camorr. My exhortation to not create another stodgy medieval dirt town had at last come home to roost! All it took was a few years and dozens of false, unreadable starts for it to finally sink in.
To be continued...
*****
* Or you don't. Some people never do, and persist in telling themselves, their friends, their pets, and all the internet about it. Forever. Some extremely successful writers are surprisingly incapable of just rolling with that success, and end up screaming at the universe from behind the gleaming walls of their comfortably-furnished persecution complexes. Look for variations on the following two statements as telltale symptoms of this condition:
1. "I transcend and defy all genre but you idiots are too stupid to realize this."
2. "My ideas are revolutionary but you idiots are too stupid to realize this."
** Originally, Camorr was called "Lorem" and the Therin people were called "Loreni." Then I discovered that "lorem ipsum" is the universal standard in placeholder text and anyone who knew that would either be distracted or think I was trying to make a really lame joke.