Cyclopean dreams

Warning! The following blog post contains references to a dream that I had, though I attempt to avoid a full narration of it, because other people's dreams are boring.

I can tell that I've been away from steady writing for over a week, because my dreams are getting more complex and plotty and the sets are more elaborate. When I'm writing every day (as I should) my dreams are more fragmentary and disconnected. Or at least I remember them that way. The other night my dream segued from a jumble of recent events into something fairly plotty, with impressive matte-painting sets.
The setting was an archaeological dig along the ridges of sharp mountains, with dozens of small teams excavating particular areas. I was part of a three-person team, two dark and dour scholars (male and female) and one fair and lively one (female). All three were in their twenties and had been involved with each other in ways that caused underlying tension during the dig. They worked in a hollow of crumbling earth (presumably once fertile but now barren) set amidst sharp rocks that rose up like a spiked crown around them. They must have been close to the top of the ridge, because they could look across and down at the other teams scraping away.
The excavation was of a long-gone city, and it was becoming clear that the builders had not been human (size and shape of doorways, etc.). The life of the city had abruptly stopped; there was no evidence that the builders had migrated or resettled, and it was unclear what had caused the change.
Our team had unearthed a cache of small oval objects, about the size to fit in your hand, and had laid them on a tarp below their site. My dream-character then had her own dream, in which she understood that these objects were eyes, open eyes lying there helplessly, and it would be a terrible thing if dirt fell into them. She got up and moved the tarp to a safer place, and began cleaning the objects. This activated one to display a stored memory--like a film, but surrounding the viewer rather than in two dimensions.
The memory was of several non-human, vaguely octopodish creatures playing a game that was oddly similar in look to Oranges and Lemons. The two tallest picked up the smallest (which my character understood to be the youngest, although it looked much more like a fat starfish than an octopod) and held it up between them while the middle-sized ones processed under it, singing.
It all seemed very happy and homey, until they paused and 'looked' up. The song changed and was understandable as 'He is coming'. The octopod-people rolled up and shrank into the eye-objects, and my character understood that they stopped themselves to freeze the moment so that He never arrived.
Looking down across the excavation site, she realised that all the teams had stopped what they were doing, and were looking up as the octopod-people had. At her feet, the eyes were extruding little feelers from one end, like sea-anenomes tentatively opening, and 'He is coming' was singing across the mountains.

I woke up then, thinking how Lovecraftian that was, then fell asleep again and dreamed of a zombie outbreak at an airport.
Maybe my subconscious is reminding me that the 3-Day Novel Contest is almost here and I don't have a plot, characters, or opening scene yet?

Sunday wordcount

Finished near midnight with 11011.
Not my lowest, but not the 12-14k I aimed for.  Today will be a hard slog if I want to break the 20k ceiling for the first time. Saturday is easier usually because I'm following the characters around and exploring the world. Sunday the characters need to do something, and I start to second-guess myself about what they should do and how it will lead to a resolution. However, in the last couple of hours I decided to write from the child-goddess's pov, and that perked things up. (I should remember this! Alternating storylines are a Good and Helpful Thing.)

Last lines written last night:
    Only I wondered sometimes, as I was washed and painted for the day, why only the Little Girl aspect took a mortal vessel, and the Fierce One went unbodied?

mapping the coastline

I am learning that I am utter pants at estimating the wordage it will take to cover some chunk of plot. Pathetic is what. In April, when I was coming up on 105k, I thought I might be finished with another 10-15k. Now I'm nudging 140k, and losing hope that I'll be done at 150k. 160?

Griffin joining King Charles's ill-thought-out excursion of the second war against the Scots? I figured that would take up maybe 10k, a chapter and a half, maybe another 5k, tops, to get him back home.
What did it take? 30k, not counting the getting home part.

Lately I've been filling in Alice's storyline, and needed to set up the fellow she eventually marries, a thatcher. So I went back to the fenland riots and gave him the task of getting the sedge-loaded barge up to the sluice gates and burning them down. A couple of paragraphs should have done that, right?
But when I'm there with him, hearing the sedge burn, smelling the smoke and the wet wood of the gates, I realise that it couldn't have been that easy, and that the barge has to (magically) move to block his escape. He has to make it out of course, to marry Alice, but it couldn't have been that simple.
Ah, it's the coastline paradox in action. Beforehand, the distance to be traversed looks fairly smooth and simple. But when I'm on the ground, looking around, that wiggly-but-mostly-straight line turns out to be deep-cut zig-zags of little coves and beaches and ravines and inlets. How far inland should I follow an inlet before I decide that I've lost the coast? How far out should I follow a promontory before I risk getting cut off by the tide?
How closely should I follow the coast?

I imagine it as the coast one gets here in the Pacific Northwest, trees to the land's edge, crumbling rocks, crunching barnacles and slippery kelp, skimpy little beaches reachable only from the water. And somehow I have to traverse it before the end of the month, because in August I'm off to Pennsylvania for 3 weeks.
I wonder if there's a Search & Rescue operation for writers?

still here

The twenty-fourth of May
Is the Queen's birthday.
If you don't give us a holiday
We'll all run away.

As you may have noticed, the world didn't end, and the Rapture didn't occur this weekend. Which I'm quite pleased about, as here in Canada we have a long weekend, and I'd hate for it to be interrupted by the Tribulations. (The caterpillars are a problem, but not--thankfully--a plague).

It may be that prophecies are in the air, but I was moved to rant over on Evil Editor when the umpty-umpteenth query involving a prophecy and a chosen one who was the only one who could deliver the land from the evil. The chosen one, by the way, was an adolescent girl.
Which is not to assume that the book (or any of the other books fitting those criteria) is necessarily a bad book. Just a book with a plot that made me bang my head on the nearest available flat surface.

In the invaluable Tough Guide to Fantasyland by the wonderful and much-missed Diana Wynne Jones, the entry on Prophecy begins :

is used by the Management to make sure that no Tourist is unduly surprised by events, and by GODDESSES AND GODS to make sure that people do as the deity wants. All Prophecies come true. This is a Rule.

Less succinctly, if you are a writer (the Management), you include a prophecy in your book (the Tour) so that your reader (the Tourist) will know ahead of time how the story will end.
You include a prophecy so that your characters (the Tour Companions) will have no freedom of choice and thus no character development, because no matter what they do, how they squirm, they will fulfill that prophecy line by line, no skipping ahead.
Why would anyone do that?

It can't be just lazy plotting (though that's probably a factor), because usually the reluctant heroes are coerced into action not only by the Prophecy but by some personal incentives as well (known in movie trailers as This time it's personal) such as loved ones being taken prisoner or killed, whole villages being slaughtered, the world is going to end and that means him and his little dog too, .... So if your plot is already poking your character with pointy sticks in the direction you want, what's the prophecy for?
I suppose there's some fun in reading on to find out what twisty language and hidden meanings the prophecy will turn out to be using, but that's kind of a thin, distant pleasure, isn't it? Like doing a really old crossword puzzle.

Where does this expectation of prophecy come from? Tolkien didn't make a big deal of prophecies in Lord of the Rings, as best I recall. There was the business of the sword that is broken, but that was more of a sad song than a directive. David Eddings used a prophecy extensively, but in a rather more unusual way, by making the prophecy a character of sorts.
Maybe if I had read lots of Big Fat Fantasy aka Extruded Fantasy Product I'd have a better idea of the origins and requirements of prophecy in fantasy. Maybe I'd even see the point of it.
But the next time I see a query that uses the word 'prophecy', I'd be thrilled beyond words if it turned out that the prophecy was false or mistaken, or referred to something else entirely. Or was a trap set up by the Evil Overlord.
Or, heck, was just misinterpreted several times, so that everyone thought it had already been fulfilled. How many different historic events have Nostradamus's prophecies been refitted to?
After all, if Mr. Camping can get his doomsday prophecy wrong, why should Seers, Dreams, Runes and Omens always get it right?

hitherto-ignored Nanowrimo

I've hit the stage where the intarwebz are seriously interfering with my nanocount, so I'll go all meta and write about writing (write about not-writing?) instead of writing.
Started by dipping back into some source material, picking up Evelina (by Fanny Burney), and on the Richardson side, Pamela and a (severely trimmed so that it fits into one volume) Clarissa Harlowe. I've read a severely-trimmed Sir Charles Grandison, with lovely Chris Hammond illustrations, but this is my first acquaintance with Clarissa Harlowe. That for the novel of sentiment/manners, trusting that I had Jane Austen's works reasonably well absorbed into the hindbrain, having read them all twice (okay, except for Mansfield Park, that only once) as well as most of the juvenilia and several continuations-by-other-hands.
For the Gothick, I had Clermont, Castle of Wolfenbach, Manfrone or the One-handed Monk, and The Passions by Rosa Matilda, having read the first two previously, and dipping into the second two. There's a beautiful passage from Manfrone that I will try to quote later.
For scholarly material, I had The Epistolary Novel in the Late Eighteenth Century, by Frank Gee Black and The Gothic Novel 1790-1830, by Ann B. Tracy, which is a collection of plot summaries (all hail Ann Tracy!) and index of motifs that makes for somewhat hilarious reading--one of the reasons synopses are so difficult is that summary piles on what narrative portions out, and the effect can be, um, bathos instead of pathos--as Tracy admits.

Back when I'd come up with the original concept, I'd thought of the two correspondents as being cousins, and each writing from her own coign or eyrie (look, it's already affected my vocabulary) of genre and convention. When I came to the point of needing a plot, what swam up from the depths was the old twins switching places plot (because the idea is not to be original), allowing for more explanation and observation and complication all around.
Which meant not starting in media res with an existing correspondance, but bringing the two to the same place so that they could become acquainted (because obviously they had been parted and kept in ignorance of each other, I mean, obviously!) and the switch could be effected.
Which meant they had to start out with other correspondents to whom to confide their situations, hopes and fears, and thus I had more characters all at once. As to be expected with twins, there was immediate mirroring of their circumstances. Each had an older woman companion or mentor (with her own secrets), and each had an older man who stood in as grandfather. Each was about to be removed from her home and sent to the place (London) where she could meet her long-lost twin.
Ethelinda is the good twin. As you might guess from the name, she and her circs are a hommage (as they say in high-toned literary circles, rather than copy or rip-off) of Evelina, including her fluttery old hen of a clergyman guardian (I heartily disliked Evelina's guardian, so I'm taking some resentment out on his double), but for female mentor I've given her a more redoubtable sort, Lady Fortuna Beldam (I'm so in love with that name you wouldn't believe) based on early women travellers like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Lady Hester Stanhope.

Poking through my background reading, I realised that the divide between the Novel of Sentiment/Manners and the Novel of Gothick Horror (they weren't called Gothics in the day, any more than Gothic architecture was called that in the 14th c.) was much less a chasm than a ditch. The highly-coloured and unlikely events of the Gothick, the abductions, the imprisonments, the forced marriages and secret marriages, the concealed births and disinherited heirs ... pretty well all happened in novels of sentiment as well. Richardson built his reputation on Pamela, a long series of abductions and attempted seductions, but of a servant girl instead of a heiress (Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison are about gentryfolk abducting each other). Evelina, because of a secret marriage and concealed documents, is really the heir to two fortunes, but she has been raised in rustic seclusion, just as Ann Radcliffe's heroine was in Mysteries of Udolpho.
Evidently I would need to distinguish the two storylines by something more than choice of events.

after sleeping

Finished, at about 11:20, surprisingly early, because that included reformatting to double-spaced and so on. It came out to 98 pages, close to the desired average of 100 pages, but that may change in the printing, since I set it to double-spaced, not to 25 lines per page exactly.
Totals, then:
14067 at lunch
15849 at supper (there's a 20 minute nap in the sunshine in between)
18588 at finish.
Very close to my last year's wordcount. I didn't hit the 1k per hour speed anywhere, as far as I could tell, though I may have come close at the end.

Plot. Well, a couple-three things that I'd meant as throwaway background touches or worldbuilding came back as important plot elements--the warehouse full of superfluous children (image of Romanian orphanages), the haunted green chamber (worse than the red chamber), and the mpd ghost-carrier kids who formed a levitating homo-gestalt and blew the roof off the haunted chamber.
On reflection, that seems rather stranger by day than it did in the story, where it looked like an entirely reasonable development. In fact, I was worrying that the storyline was becoming altogether too conventional for a literary contest.

This morning I have a visual acuity test, to which I am not (ha ha) looking forward. On the bright side (lord, I can't stop myself) swapping over to the methtrexate means no more hydroxychloroquin, and no more eye tests for macular problems, yay! Just monthly blood tests.

Accomplishments and the alternative, writing.

The Willow Knot hit 65k yesterday, which means I'm within 10-15k of finishing the first draft. Bearing in mind that experience has shown that I'm not very good at estimating the wordage needed for specific plot events. Both the Elfland story and "Fluke" were meant to be regular-length short stories and ended up at 11k each (Elfland later flensed to 9k, and yes, better for it).

Things I'm happy about:
I got to use a classic fairytale motif, and bonus, one that most modern readers will neither be familiar with nor find easy to accept--motif T(2) 1962.2 'sleep by lousing'. Those fairy tales where the ogre or the dragon or the hero puts his head into the maiden's lap and she 'combs his hair' to put him to sleep? Lousing him.
This is the second rescue, which Myl accomplishes by guile, where Tyl accomplished the first rescue by unexpected and resolute action. Myl louses the old woman who keeps house for the robbers (as well as fixing her a restful posset and filling her straw mattress-tick with soothing herbs as well as straw) causing her to fall asleep, so Myl can get at the barred door.
In another part of the forest, whoops, the story, I'm building the threat to Alard. The background needs working out yet, so many details may change, but it looks as if Alard will be aided three times by actions Myl took in the past, each triggered by Tyl.
First he escapes his pursuers by Tyl leading him to the track Myl built in the marsh.
Second, some attackers are done in by being driven into the osier field, linked to Myl through the willow and her use of the osiers, and by Tyl (this is quite pencilly) scratching Alard and flicking his blood into the marsh to pay for its alliance.
Last, the rescued princess, now grown to warrior-queen and hunting outlaws, with her guard does in the remaining attackers, then realises that she has Alard in her power (and her counsellors have been advocating invasion), but as she and Alard discuss this, Tyl comes forward and she recognises him as the deer-companion of the wild girl who rescued her, and who refused reward, asking only for one favour in some time to come.
The really fun part of this is the princess/queen, who is very odd indeed. Jim Macdonald did say to cherish your secondary characters, and certainly Sefina and the princess are blossoming. Or night-blooming, in the latter instance.

Less happy:
The braiding / knotting / basketwork motif arose unexpectedly while I was writing the opening chapters. It's turned out to be quite important. While I don't aim for the Dick Francis ideal of learning a new skill for each book (it was his wife who got her pilot's licence, I think, for one book) I do like to have some slight acquaintance with how it feels to do something.
I can braid my hair, but otherwise I have very little manual dexterity with the fibre arts. My mum tried to teach me how to knit, and I couldn't do it. A couple of accomplished spinners have tried to teach me how to spin, and it didn't take. I can sew on buttons and that sort of thing, but tying a weaver's knot to join two pieces of thread is beyond me.
Working with thread seems to provoke a sort of allergic reaction, where my hands, although they do not change in outward seeming, function with the equivalent grace and skill of cartoon hands, the kind with three fat fingers and fewer joints.
But I must learn. So I took out The Ashley Book of Knots, by Clifford Ashley, chockfull of information and helpful diagrams. Here's an illustrative anecdote:
"Several years ago, from my printed directions in the Sportsman Magazine, and with no other assistance, my cousin, Hope Knowles, tied without error Knot #2217, which has forty-nine crossings, making therewith a covering for the knob of her father's automobile gear-shift lever. She was barely eleven years old at the time."
Can I follow in young Hope Knowles's footsteps (fingermarks?)? No, apparently I can't. I've managed to follow Ashley's diagrams for precisely one (1) knot thus far, and that's the granny knot. Besides the lack of manual dexterity, I seem to lack the ability to make any sense at all of his diagrams. I can do one step, but how the cords get from that one step to the next is a complete mystery to me. In fact, I've done better looking at the diagrams of completed knots and working it out from those.