my heart is a glorious machine;

Of all the things I thought research might accomplish, forcing me to write a sequel to the ever-present Novel that isn't even half-finished yet was not really something that crossed my mind.

Ah well, I'm a young writer yet. Eventually I'll learn there are Things To Watch Out For.

So: I've been reading as much about the Edwardians and the Great War as I can manage to find in the house -- I'll start to go spare if I can't pay off my library fines before much longer -- and the deeper I go, the more the blasted sequel talks to me. Okay, so "in the house" means "my siblings' history books" and "the internet", because for some reason I don't seem to have anything much on the First World War myself. Or the Edwardian era. A brief glance through the Book Closet brings me... uh... well, Barbara Hambly's duo of awesome and political-situation-foreshadowing Edwardian vampire novels (starring James Asher, motorbiking philologist ex-spy professor! and Lydia, his doctor wife of much win), and... Nicholas and Alexandra, okay, and the Emily of New Moon trilogy (Emily's diary entries are always dated 19--, which leads me to a bit of private fanon in which Emily's Quest ends just before the war begins, and there's all this stuff about Dean Priest in, like, Cairo or Japan or somewhere doing espionage, I don't know), and Peter Pan, a couple of my Ibbotsons -- A Countess Below Stairs is, rather plot-pointedly, right after both the Great War and the Russian Revolution, and A Company of Swans is London and the Amazon in, oh hey, 1912! -- um, is that it? Seriously? Argh.

Novels are excellent for research, too, especially novels written either during the era, or afterwards by people who were alive then -- one reason I love Eva Ibbotson's historicals so much: she has this really fresh perspective on the World Wars and writes about them so naturally, because she was there, and she sees them from both an English and an Austrian perspective, which is also neat -- because that gives you a better idea of how and what people were thinking and reacting to everything around them, instead of being told by a history book what was on everyone's minds. History books are well-meaning, and immensely live-in-able and helpful in most areas, but understanding how people thought and felt and reacted... you need to be in there. I'd like to write a historical novel that feels more like Eva Ibbotson's, in which she's just writing about what happened in her childhood, knowledge that comes naturally to her, so she's not shoehorning in Historical Perspectives or This Event or painstakingly describing everything you might not be quite familiar with (hint: people pick up on stuff fast, writers). I want to understand what it was like to wear those clothes and eat that food and read those newspapers. And then I can put in the vampires...

Anyway, I'm just reading a pretty basic World Wars history book -- I don't want to say textbook, cos the curriculumn my mother used for me and is now teaching my siblings with doesn't tend to hurl textbooks at you unless it's maths and there's nothing else for it. It's a book about history, and it's got a lot of pictures and things, but it's really well-done and readable and interesting. I mean, readable until something hits you straight in the stomach and you kind of have to put the book down for a while. Today I read about the Christmas Truce of 1914, and I kept thinking, blimey, these men didn't even want to be killing each other. Ugh. Screw this war.

Which is probably what Mr Caruthers would be saying, honestly, only with some rather choicer words learnt on the streets of London... Which brings me back to the bleeding sequel for a novel that's only three-quarters plotted and doesn't even have a real name yet, but here I am, thinking about Briony growing up in the war and bobbing her hair, and Camilla as a battlefield nurse, and how Mr Caruthers would be a staunch conscientious objector, but as the war got more and more desperate and the government got more and more pushy, he'd get dragged into espionage or something, given his Special Areas of Knowledge, and some other Exciting Novelly Stuff I should talk about soon. (I bet if I were a professional novelist I'd have a Do Not Talk About Your Blasted Novel So Much On Your LiveJournal Clause, because there are noooo secrets here, are there? Only I need someone to bounce all of this off. Actually, there is one secret. Just a little one. And I don't want to tell you about it because it's just a little weird brainquirk that is much, much more powerful in inference and in context.) And how Evangeline's Special Skills might get her pulled into the War, and how much things would be different with the addition of vampires and magic...

I was just trying to understand the political situation before the war, you know? Curses.

Remember in Emily Climbs when Aunt Elizabeth makes a deal with Emily that she will allow her to go to school in Shrewsbury if Emily gives up writing fiction until she has graduated there from? And how the untold stories festered in Emily for years? And then when Aunt Elizabeth lifted the ban on fiction, she was bubbling full of stories like a brook and giddy with her new freedom?

Now that NaNo is finished, I find that I rather feel this way myself.

I think the best thing about NaNo, besides giving me the first fourth or so of a manuscript I cannot just yet bear to look at (really. it's bad. ohhh, it's bad.), was that it showed me that I can force words out of myself, and sometimes when the words are forced out important ideas that I have been trying to find crop up amongst them, and suddenly I am over that lump of indecision or un-knowing and can go where I want. So I will attempt, in the next month, to apply this principal to various and sundry unfinished projects, some of which have been sitting dusty and forlorn waiting to be taken off the shelf for more than a year.

End of NaNo party this afternoon with Victoria and Jonathan, a good twenty minutes or so of which was occupied by watching a candle burn. No, really, it was fascinating! Due to some wax-covered paper towel, there were seizure-inducing flare effects, and then all of the wax from the candle turned into some kind of bizarre condensation and floated down the bottom of the bottle and the whole effect looked very much like something Snape might have in his classroom.

And The Mix is being Worked On. I promise. It is half done, anyway.

Also I am tired and dourly depressed and there isn't a half good reason for it. The most arbitrary things keep sending my stomach hurtling down some pit. Bah. And today was my only day off this week. I was so utterly exhausted and cross last night, getting out of a nearly pointless workday, and having so much more work to do when I got home, that I got all messed up in the car and got to sniffling. But I couldn't go and medicate myself with soothing music and a book and cookies: I had to go home and write. And I think I would be more excited about having won NaNo, my first year, even, if I had something to show for it besides a quarter-written shambles of a manuscript and still half the plot points missing. And maybe I'm just all kinds of pessimistic and broody lately. Sigh.

HELP ME I JUST READ TRAUMATISING EMILY OF NEW MOON FIC. SOMEONE GIVE ME A COOKIE AND TELL ME THAT THERE IS STILL GOOD IN HUMANITY.

*whimpers*