the things in my head

[ontology]

You know you are losing your touch when:

You write approximately half of a fic you have been trying to write without any success for about a month. You go to bed, and by the next morning have no memory of having done this.

Yeah.

Also? I have been procrastinating about this for quite a while, because I'm sort of worried that if I talk about it too much, I will have to write it, and if I write it, it will EAT MY BRAIN, and tuesday_skyline will disappear into The Black Hole of Banui Where Stories Go To Die. However, Skyline seems to be going strong (too strong! ack! despite the fact that it is still missing a plot), and I really can't procrastinate much longer, or one of these days I'm going to make a reference to the bloody thing and no-one will understand what I mean and think I've gone mental(er).

So, the Story That Ate My Brain. I suppose you've all gathered by now that this is a work of fiction. What you do not know is as follows: Once upon a time there was a copper-haired librarian named Evangeline. In her spare time, and mostly by accident, she hunted vampires. Then there's this whole theorising on the actual nature of vampires, because I can't buy the idea of anything that used to be human being soulless and utterly irredeemable. (Neither can Evangeline. This leads to Interesting Things. I have no idea what they are, though.) This sort of stemmed, in a way, from my frustration with gothic novels and how they're either mocking the cliches and, while being utterly delightful, just don't have enough of that dark-cathedral asethetic I'm craving, or they are stupid and contrived and have teenagers in them and I want to throw things at them. (I haven't read the actual content of most of these, just the summaries and, occasionally, Amazon reviews.) Then the rest of this happened because Evangeline hopped into my brain and attempted mutiny. Apparently, she lives in 1913 or so. She's been rabbiting on about odd things like the dark and...I seem to remember something about brooches or something equally mundane recently. I don't write it down (it's too weird), i.e., I don't remember it. We're going to have a nasty row about this eventually, I'm sure: she'll tell me in biting tones that something tangled up in a long spiel about winter or organising books was Very Important and I ought to have paid attention.

Getting headache. Must go read. (I am aware that the one does not necessarily cure the other.)



P.S.: I could do this for hours. Yes, really.

Comments

[wanderlight.livejournal.com]

I haven't read many vampire stories besides Anne Rice's Interview With A Vampire, precisely because I know they would be the sort of tripe that you cite up there in the Big Paragraph Of Doom. ;) If you were to write yours, though? I would be there encouraging and demanding you to hurry up every step of the way, and fangirl the finished product. I mean, a vapire-hunting librarian -- how much cooler can you GET? :DD

That has happened to me with fic before, also! I always make sure I leave the document open or the paper lying in plain sight once I finish & before I go to bed, or I'll completely forget the next morning.

[faeriemaiden.livejournal.com]

Yeah, other than Robin McKinley's brilliant and delicious Sunshine and some YA tripe which will not be named (it was all about HIGH SCHOOL and DATING and the plot was pastede on yay at the end and there wasn't any pretty gothicness at all, really, and the writing was bland, and the main characters Just Happened to have really gothic names which nothing appropriately gothic ever came of, and by the end of the book I wanted to impale the main character with something pointy and metal because, despite her claim of having her mother as a best friend, the only person she 'lived for' was her vampire boyfriend, and no-one else mattered, which was made very clear by the end--what is this stupid author teaching teenagers, anyway?), I haven't read a whole lot of vampire lit. either; I've just been intruiged by it, because, hey, well-done gothicness is gorgeous, and there's always potential for symbolism.

One of the problems with the gothic novel is that, for me, to be successful it has to have a certain fluidity of prose. Other works of gothic art--photography, digital art, painting, film, song--have that otherworldly ethereality which a story can generally only attain through beautiful prose. The problem is, of course, that half the people who write it can't and don't, and the forty percent or so can't and do anyway.

I read The Thirteenth Tale recently, which hasn't got vampires or anything in, but it's a Victorian gothic tale of intruige, I suppose, and while the plot was interesting, and most of the characters at least decently drawn (although the whole twin-connection thing and 'twin language' was...odd), but the author was trying to write soaring prose and mostly sounding awkward and occasionally pretentious. Someitmes she managed to actually write something beautiful, but mostly it just felt...rather the way I do on the edge of a crowd of people I don't know. It didn't ring true. (Well, and then--the story sort of centres on a fictional author, and we get little, occasional excerpts from her writings. So far, so good, but the thing that nettled me was that Vera Winter's writing style was exactly like the real author's, complete with its odd irregularities such as weird sentence pacing and fragments and grasping for lyrical profundity. Maybe I'm just more--able--because I have different sorts of styles depending on what sort of thing I'm writing, but I think that if you're going to write about the writer, you've got to make sure that you give them their own voice, otherwise they don't ring true.)

AGH, PARAGRAPH BLOCKS OF DOOM. :D

If you were to write yours, though? I would be there encouraging and demanding you to hurry up every step of the way, and fangirl the finished product. I mean, a vapire-hunting librarian -- how much cooler can you GET? :DD
Well, good, thankee; I'm a horrifically lazy writer. :D I've only survived so far because I have very loud and persistent friends. ;)

[wanderlight.livejournal.com]

Banui, that was the longest bracket I have EVER SEEN. You should win an award, or something. *hands award* :DD

I think I know what you mean about gothic novels. In order for a book to really work, all parts of it need to be working together to create the whole, and writing voice contributes a lot to that. Eg. Stephen Chbosky's stripped-down prose works really well in The Perks of Being A Wallflower; Montgomery's spelling mistakes make Emily of New Moon that much more authentic.

And gothic novels really do need that "otherworldly" atmosphere to them -- I mean, they're about in-between places and transience; the way they're written should reflect that. I would love to find a novelist who's got that tone dead-on; tell me if you ever do, because I haven't, yet.

I suppose that means that I should stay away from The Thirteenth Tale, then? ;) Far, far away? The idea of a book-within-a-book is an interesting one, but it'd be terrible to see butchered. Ouch.

Actually, in that Neil Gaiman short story anthology which you can't get ahold of, eep! :( there's a story about a Gothic novelist... writing a gothic novel... and it's a parody and very Gaiman and very awesome. One more thing to look forward to, once you get the book.

I've only survived so far because I have very loud and persistent friends. ;)

Well then. *is loud and persistent, with trumpets!*