In case you were wondering

[wayfaringwordhack]

Dans le village: Busy, busy, busy. We haven’t officially put the house on the market, but we’ve had two real estate agents come to give us estimates, and one agency is bringing potential buyers by this evening. This means that we have Julien has been doing a lot of cleaning. He has also started packing away our winter things to put in storage. I haven’t helped out much in the house, but I have been working on getting the courtyard in order. Last summer we planted a wall garden and the plants are just starting to show their potential. I really hope whoever buys the house will take care of it. All of my irises are in bloom, as well as some other purple flowers that I don’t know the name of. The lilac bush is divinely fragrant and the climbing rose is covered in buds. I just wish some of them were in flower now to add some more charm to the courtyard.

I know it is completely psychological but I’m going to bake some brownies today on my lunch break so that the house smells yummy and inviting. My house is charming except the ground floor, where the dining room and kitchen are. The dining room has brick red tiles, lavender-gray and rose paint and a dark red marble fireplace—-no, *we* are not responsible for that—-and it is a bit somber because the windows and door face east. The kitchen is miniscule.

Thursday, I told the boss that we are moving, and his response? Ca m’arrange pas du tout. Sorry, boss. He acted a bit like I’m betraying him because I’m leaving my part-time, minimum wage job to follow my husband. When I started this job, it was only supposed to be for a duration of 4 months (they asked if we had plans of leaving; since I didn’t have plans that would come into effect in the next four months, I said “no”). I’m now going on my eleventh month and I stuck with them when they were only giving me 14hrs/wk. My job is very cushy, hours and pay notwithstanding (I don’t have to do much; it gives me time to read and write; and it is 3 minutes by foot from my house), so it is not like I mean to complain, but they haven’t exactly done things to gain my undying loyalty. (Frex, last year, before the opening, they asked me to clean the gallery after the workmen left; it was a mess and took me sixteen hours—including working on a public holiday. They didn’t pay me for it. Not a cent. And of the ten paychecks I’ve received only TWO of them have been error free where they didn’t accidentally forget to pay me for a dozen or so hours.) Anyhow, didn’t mean to rant about all that. Just wanted to say how funny I found it that they feel they have the right to be angry with me and treat me like I’m leaving them in the lurch when I have a perfectly legitimate reason for quitting.

Last night I drove down to the river to gather some rocks for my wall garden, and I had the car windows down and the radio on. The air was perfumed with lilacs, wisteria, fruit trees, and all manner of flowers and flowering bushes, not to mention the lovely fragrance of freshly-cut grass. The sun was setting behind Sancerre and the sandy beaches of the Loire and the rocky hillsides of the vineyards were tinted dusky rose. Down by the river, I saw a male pheasant, just strutting through a field, proud as you please. He didn’t fly off so I stopped the car and got out to watch him. Horses in the pasture on the other side of the dirt track whickered and trotted over for a petting session.

I am going to miss this place. I won’t regret leaving; I’m not that kind of person. But I will always have that nostalgic twist of “remember when?”

Dans le pays des mots et des idées: I have not been writing. I don’t even know how long it has been since I last wrote fresh material. I feel disconnected and uninspired and have felt so for a long time. In order to get back into things, I’m rereading. Since I’ve been doing other things on the side, I’m only up to chapter twelve. I’ve found things that I really like, things that I forgot I wrote, things that need work. However, I’m not stopping. I did allow myself to open a doc where I can say “c12 pg3 smooth such and such,” but I’m not editing as I go.

Since this book is my first, I don’t know that I will ever be completely satisfied with it. I’ve learned so much in the course of writing it and realize that there is a lot more to learn that may be impossible to do in this book because of its set tone, structure, etc. Having other ideas and the desire to try something new makes me itch to just put this one aside and get started on something else. I don’t mean short stories. I mean another novel, with novel-sized ideas and themes. Nevertheless, I *need* to have something finished. I need to have that completion. And I’m not *that* far from the end (60-70K isn’t a big deal, right?).

Les livres: I’ve been doing a bit of reading these past two weeks. I’ve read Ann Hood’s Creating Character Emotions, which I most emphatically do NOT recommend. I also read Frey’s How to Write a Damn Good Novel II, and I feel so-so about it. I did find the part about premises to be interesting because it showed me another way to think. I did get to lining out the premise in TTD but only after the fourth draft. I would like to start my next project with the premise first. Fictionwise, I’ve reread all the Chronicles of Narnia (except The Silver Chair, which I read about six weeks ago). I also read McKillip’s In the Forest of Serre (ItFoS). I liked it, but it was an eye-opener to me concerning a rich style. I have (had?) trouble grasping people’s comments before when they said I was giving the reader too many gems, or as raecarson put it in a recent post, writing too frequently at a level ten. After reading ItFoS, I can understand why the reader appreciates direct prose and I would even go as far as to say needs direct prose and images in order to have time to prose and enter into the story. I’m still not decided on whether or not enjoying an intricate, imagery-heavy story is a matter of mood.... I’ve also read Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. I was amazed to note that, especially in the first part, she has almost zero setting. I wonder if I had not read so many other books of this period and seen so many movies, if the lack of detail would have bothered me. As it was, I had enough knowledge to draw my own fairly accurate picture of these places and people in this time period.

I still have seven other Austen books to read, John Gardner’s Grendel, A Handmaiden’s Tale, and on the HTW front, Swain’s Techniques of a Selling Writer. I think I’m finished with HTW books unless someone I trust can recommend a fabulous one that doesn’t rehash what all the others say.

Okay, lunch break time...

Comments

[kmkibble75.livejournal.com]

I thought the post in Africa was just for 6 months? I'm probably completely wrong about that, aren't I?

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

Yep, completely wrong. :P It is for two years, but we have the possibility to stay for a third year.

[kmkibble75.livejournal.com]

Okay, that makes much more sense in regard to selling the house :-)

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

Yeah, renting is out because the minimum duration for a rental contract in France is three years, so if we were to come back at the end of two years, we couldn't move back into our house.

The potential buyers just left. Nice young couple. It would be phenomenal if they took the house! But a sale to the first people to see it? That *would* be lucky.

[pjthompson]

Last night I drove down to the river to gather some rocks for my wall garden,

Sounds like a place I'd stay forever. But I'm that way. :-)

I am going to miss this place. I won’t regret leaving; I’m not that kind of person. But I will always have that nostalgic twist of “remember when?”

And I find this is the perfect attitude for writing projects, especially novels. You reach a point where it's necessary to move on to something else, and you don't regret the experience, and you still love some things about the old projects, but now it's time to try something different. It sounds like you're just about there with TTD, too. It's exciting moving on to the next novel. :-)

(And btw, your boss sounds like a jerk.)

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

...but now it's time to try something different. It sounds like you're just about there with TTD, too

Yes, I think you are right. New ideas are churning and my stomach is literally aching with the desire to get a new story down. I have one that wants to be born. I don't really know where it is going or what it wants to be, but that it wants to be cannot be denied.

(And btw, your boss sounds like a jerk.)

Yeah, I didn't expect him to take it too well, but still. His father came in today and said, C told me you are abandoning us. Then he proceeded to say, That's not good, in the tone that one would use to say, How dare you?

The father is special and I expected nothing less from him, and I can understand C's stress about having to find someone else, but the total selfishness of their response is a bit baffling.

[bkdunn.livejournal.com]

As an avowed work-mercenary, I hereby verify that your bosses reacted unprofessionally and unfairly. It doesn't matter if you accepted the job yesterday, told them you'd be there for the rest of your life, and they're paying you $100/second -- if it's no longer the right place for you to be, that's the way it is. Oh well.

(Said by someone who essentially quit his newish, decent-paying, career-type job so he could go to Michigan for six weeks next month.)

Enjoy the move.

bk

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

Hey, BK!

I didn't know you were on livejournal. :o) And I think you quit to go to Clarion, right? Good to hear--not the having to quit, of course (what does "essentially" mean in this context? *grin*), but that this summer you are going to get to go.

[bkdunn.livejournal.com]

Essentially = "if you're going to go to this stupid writing thing for six weeks, we're going to replace you while you're gone".

Not quite that much vitriol actually, and I did kind of tell them that once Clarion was over, there was no way I was going to come back to New York anyway. California, here I come! Unless I get a better offer in the meantime... :-)

bkD

[merebrillante.livejournal.com]

I want to talk to you about Dear Jane. I have had this topic on my mind for the past several weeks, and in you I find a suitable victim subject for my conversation.

Setting. No, now that you mention it, Jane was not much one for setting. Which may be why I never took that many pains over that aspect of writing myself. I tried reading a Tolkien novel once, in high school. I got through two and a half pages of setting and thought, 'To hell with this,' and went back to my hardboiled detective novels. I never noted, even in my current spate of re-reading Jane, that she gave short shrift to setting, but once you mentioned it, I noticed you were right. The look of Hartfield, Highbury, Enscombe, Delaford, Cleveland, Barton Cottage, and numerous other places blur, in my mind, to a uniform, clumpy emerald green. The color of the England of my imagining. I'm quite happy with my imaginary England, which is perhaps why I've never ventured there in real life.

What does trip me up from time to time in Jane's novels is the abrupt shift from Emma's (or Elizabeth's or Elinor's or whoever's) thoughts to those of another character. It never continues for more than a paragraph or two, but to my modern sensibilities, it is something of a jar.

On the other hand, what I appreciate more and more in re-reading these old friends is how character drives the novel, and not plot. I always know there's an end towards which the author is working, and who couldn't? Jane Austen loved a happy ending. But she got there by the natural development and, in the case of Emma, the honing of character. That whole novel depended on Emma's development and maturation. If she had not changed internally, nothing external could have changed either.

Which is why I think I'm so often dissatisfied with modern novels. They depend so much on "plot points." I distrust plot points. They are mechanical. Worse, they are, in Shakespeare's words, "rude mechanicals" who

"never labor'd in their minds till now;
And now have toiled their unbreathed memories
With this same play, against your nuptial.

From whence did this insistence on "plot points" arise? This question is only partly rhetorical. I do understand the importance of making your characters want something, for it is only in the wanting and the striving for their goals that the reader is caught and engaged with your characters in that pursuit. But why does there have to be this mechanical insistence on one-two-three-thrust, one-two-three-thrust? That I do not understand, and when I come across it in a book I am purporting to read for pleasure, I toss the book aside and go on to the next one. I have already consumed 42 years, and I well understand that my remainder is limited. I don't want to waste what little time I have left on bad novels.

So, that is what comes of me spending two whole days pondering one post. Yes, you are quite right. My time might have been more profitably spent.

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

I'm going to reply to this, but I don't have time at the moment. It may be a few days.

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

I admit that I have not previously read Jane Austen and so my comments regarding her and her work must be contained to Pride and Prejudice and Emma, the two novels I’ve recently completed.

First on setting: As with P&P, there is almost no setting in Emma, and again, the lack did not bother me. When she does mention setting, it is usually in a nonspecific way: the shrubbery, stood around the fire, the painting hung over the fireplace, the modern round table, the situation of the house (two drawing rooms, etc.). I think that she did not worry over fabric and cut of clothes (except when showing vanity à la Mrs. Elton) because she was writing about her society for her society, not to mention that such obsession with fashion did not seem important to her as a person or as a defining characteristic in those she was writing about. People reading historical fantasy or even sci-fiction need (according to the writer?) more clues of what to picture in order to be anchored in different time periods/cultures/worlds.

This comment from a letter to her niece Anna about novel writing sums up her views on setting I think—-less is more:

"You describe a sweet place, but your descriptions are often more minute than will be liked. You give too many particulars of right hand & left."

From the same type of correspondence: "You are now collecting your People delightfully, getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life; -- 3 or 4 Families in a Country village is the very thing to work on -- & I hope you will write a great deal more, & make full use of them while they are so very favourably arranged."

This clearly shows that her focus is People and their interaction with one another. From what I gather, her interest was people and slice-of-life was exactly what she was contented to write about. No plot points per se as you pointed out. Emma-as-a-matchmaker is not exactly a firework plot but the human interaction, the foibles, the pride (which I think she had plenty of pride at the end of the novel in regards to her changed views of Harriet, which is rather satiric(?)/ honest[intended?]), those things make for interesting reading. Emma’s self-revelation at the ending and her acceptance and contrition for her faults are very interesting to me, and yes, from the very first mention of Mr. Knightly, the reader knows that he is intended for Emma, so that could be said to be the driving point: getting the two of them together.

However, if that was her only point, the novel could be considered much too long and too rambling. Yes, Miss Bates is the picture of a silly, voluble woman, but were all of her long speeches necessary? Yes, Mrs Elton was vulgar and proud, but did the reader *need* all those instances of her shallowness and positive ill-breeding? Did the reader really need to read ALL of Frank Churchill’s apology letter? If the one-two-three-thrust of plot must be followed, the book went on much too long and explored too many things for the reader uninterested in character and human interaction to have patience with.

But she got there by the natural development and, in the case of Emma, the honing of character. That whole novel depended on Emma's development and maturation. If she had not changed internally, nothing external could have changed either.

Natural development. That is it exactly and it is something that I find missing in many novels. I enjoy reading about the development--the journey, if you will--and that is why I don't enjoy books that cut out all the "story" so that they can get to the highlights. I'm not a fan of action for action's sake and books that are "thrilling" in that way are very forgettable and sometimes unfinishable.

On a closing note, unlike you, the POV shifts didn't bother me. I know many people who find them objectionable, but since I have never been bothered by a narrator or "old-fashioned" headhopping, and indeed enjoy books in omni and am probably more influenced by such a style than the now-fashionable tight, tight third.