my heart is a glorious machine;

Bah. Have come to least favourite part of writing: when the gaps in the plot catch up with me. I've been writing wonderfully over the last week! Three pages two days in a row! Some of what came out was a bit awful, but it got the story where it needed to go and can always be helped later. And I've got three chapters written now, which is lovely. But alack alack, after five or six pages of Chapter IV, I no longer know what I am doing. Evy's dealt with post-traumatic stress, avoided the press, talked to the Ministry, had Mr Caruthers over for dinner, furtively admired his coat, bantered, had weird dreams, helped to repair things at the library, and now... I need MOAR PLOT. I need 1. Mr Caruthers to do something rather startlingly badass and hastily pass it off as, er, good reflexes? (um, can you kill a vampire with an umbrella? especially if that umbrella is tipped with oak or iron?), and 2. for the Ministry to come back and say, by the way, we want you now. Trouble is, so far she's only accidentally killed a lot of vampires with some sunlight, and while sunlight isn't exactly commonly conjured, I'm also not seeing anything that would scream to the Ministry "LOOK LOOK HERE IS A TOOL YOU CAN SHAPE". Also cos I don't really know what the vampires are up to and maybe it's not even the government that pulls Evy into all of this, it's the vampires themselves, because Something Is Going On, and all I know is that it probably involves the Germans?

WRITING A NOVEL IS HARD.

I'm also not exactly sure how the pre-WWI vampires-and-politics plotline ties in with the Tam-Lin plotline, except that Mr Caruthers is somehow in the middle of both of them. And has a coat. Of awesomeness.

Autumn is coming; I can smell it and taste it. Today is fey and wet and windy, and the tree I can see from my window is half orange already. The apple tree is heavy with fruit (and occasionally with cats, as Willow loves to settle on one of the top branches and smirk down at the world), the geese are flying, and I am lighting more candles than is usual even for me, enjoying the urge to pull my gothiest clothes out of the closet (to church yesterday I wore an ankle-length black lace skirt, and a very Edwardian black-with-cream-pattern blouse with black pearl buttons and lace edges, and my black and white stockings, of course), and craving even more psych folk than usual, which is pretty startling, but, you know. Last year the band that defined my autumn was Dark Dark Dark (also Nancy Elizabeth!); this year I suspect The Magickal Folk of the Faraway Tree might be important, rather. (Don't let the name fool you -- while they are very odd-sounding psych folk, they are also quite straightforward and gloriously listenable and accessible; no rambling lyrics that even T.S. Eliot would have trouble figuring out, weird droning melodies that take a lot of getting used to, or anything of that sort. Also, even their record label doesn't seem to know anything about them. I'm posting them on musicyardsale tomorrow.)

And with autumn, my folklore loving self roars to full strength; I am listening to Tam-Lin on repeat and realising tenfold how and why I love it so very much. It's got one of the best narratives of any ballad, I think -- the story is weird, but clear, and the characters are awfully well-defined for only occupying a few verses. (Okay, a lot of verses. It's a pretty long ballad.) And Janet. I love Janet so much. I love Janet so much that I think I've got to write a full Tam-Lin retelling someday, about Janet, and not Evangeline-in-the-Janet-role. Janet is the precedent for centuries of Awesome Women In Literature. She's like the godmother to girls like Robin McKinley's Harry Crewe and Sherwood Smith's Meliara and Emma Bull's Eddi McCandry -- fierce girls who fight for the people they love without losing their lovingness. One of my favourite things is that Janet saves Tam-Lin, not by grabbing a sword of iron and driving it through the Faerie Queen's heart, but by loving, by not letting the Faerie Queen's illusions fool her, by stubbornly loving Tam-Lin and holding onto him until he's become himself again. Considering that he turned into a snake and a lion and, in some versions, red-hot iron, that takes some hardcore fierceness. (Huh. When I'm doing the Novel climax, I wonder if I could attempt to represent the various aspects of Mr Caruthers' present and former personality as the traditional things Tam-Lin was transformed into in the ballad.) And I love that it takes place on Halloween, and I love the faeries, and the atmosphere of it, no matter the version.

Now, of course, I am no longer terribly irritated with my subconscious for insisting upon turning the Novel into a Tam-Lin retelling, among other things of course. It puts the pieces together ever so much more neatly. It helps to form the circumstances of Mr Caruthers' captivity amongst the vampires, and also leads me to understand that his in-thrall-ness isn't really finished just because the government got him away from the vampires and he's a librarian now. There's something that's keeping him in thrall until he or Evangeline figures out how to break it. That also explains how and why he's the tithe, whatever that means. The vampire woman who originally led him into this mess must be the Faerie Queen role, and maybe she isn't dead (in a manner of speaking... you know what I mean), I don't know. (Related note: what would you lot think of Reynardine as a taken-name by a female vampire?) I am also pursuing the idea that after his several years of dealing with the vampires and messing in dark things far beyond his ken, Mr Caruthers, like Sunshine* -- like Tam-Lin -- is no longer quite human. Maybe he gained some extra senses when he was learning magics from the vampires. He's probably a little harder to kill, anyway. I'm not giving him Sunshine's night-vision because it always made me sad when she has trouble reading and stuff, like Giles' nightmare-come-to-life when he can't read anymore that makes me really, really sad (and unleashes a flood of OMG GILES YOU ARE SO ADORABLE AND I LOVE YOU), but maybe some vampire-like ability similar to that? Not the urge to eat incredibly raw steaks though, ew. I suppose he could have a little of that ability to appear and disappear suddenly and quietly, cos I've always loved that. Maybe some enhanced hearing/smelling/seeing? ("Didn't anybody ever tell you the whole smelling people thing's a little gross?") I don't know, but that explains why the government really wants him on hand.

* Blimey, every time I read that top blurb I shake my head in consternation. If they described Con as "Dracula's hunky Byronic cousin" they clearly did not actually read the book. What part of "skin the colour of rotting mushrooms" and the bit where his laugh is still spine-unhinging terrifying even when he and Sunshine are friends do you not understand? And Sunshine's narration is bloody well not in "the idiom of Britney, J.Lo, and the Spice Girls", for heaven's sake. (Actually, after having read Robin McKinley's blog, I'd say Sunshine sounds an awful lot like a younger, less British McKinley -- biting and clever and well-read and not just intelligent but interested.) Sorry, I get awfully defensive on the subject of one of my favourite novels.

I don't know; looks like I've got to keep writing. Blah, this is hard. But... I've never got so deep into a novel before. I understand the story far better than I have any of my previous tries, and I have fifty pages of in-order story, and an actual half-idea of where it's going to end up. And the research, oh joy, what I swore would never happen to me.

Reading sarahtales' fantastic essay Ladies Please (Carry On Being Awesome) and writing the Novel at nearly the same time has birthed a lot of swarming thinky thoughts. For one thing, yesyesyesyesyes, and a large side helping of "huh?" because, you know, I read these fictional girls who apparently have friends only so they can complain about them and compete with them and/or talk about Boys with them, and I guess those people exist (I started running into them a lot more in later youth groups) but that is so not the world I grew up in. Okay, the world I grew up in also didn't have schmaltzy Christmas music, kids embarrassed by their parents for no reason other than that they are Grown-Ups, people who don't like books, or public school, so non-fantasy YA fiction frequently depresses, irritates, or confuses me. But still. If I could exist, at least temporarily, in a world where being female is not some kind of contest, fictional characters can do this, too!

And awesomeness comes in many different flavours! Female characters do not have to have big weapons and fight everything to be awesome. Though they totally can. (C.f. Zoe Washburne, Kara Thrace, Sarah Walker, Buffy bleeding Summers.) I love that Fred Burkle gets to fight evil with Science, and Willow Rosenberg gets to fight evil with computers and magic, and Kaylee Frye gets to fight evil by being a mechanic (and with optimism!), and Hermione Granger gets to fight evil by being clever and a know-it-all, and Martha Jones gets to fight evil by telling stories*. I love that Lydia Asher gets to be a medical scientist at the turn of the century, but she's vain about her glasses and she likes pretty clothes and she's happily married, and she bloody travels across the world with a vampire and plunges into complicated spy politics to save her husband. I love that Meg Murry gets to fight evil by loving her brother. I love that Emily Starr and Anna Grazinsky and Cassandra Mortmain and Anne Steele and Molly Weasley and Jo March and Joyce Summers and Arwen don't even have to save the world to be awesome.

* Note: I still don't like that episode, or Tenkerbelle, but Martha walking the world and telling stories? Completely fantastic anyway.

Thinking about my own story in this context pleases me, because while I didn't set out to write Awesome Mutli-Faceted Female Characters, I am pleasantly surprised at how everyone turned out, and it's fun to play with them in that respect. Evangeline, the contentedly introverted but friendly older sister, is the one who gets to fight vampires; Camilla, the bossy, loyal, loving mother-of-the-family middle sister is, personality-wise, the more stereotypically ass-kicking one, but she gets to be awesome by being supportive and keeping the family together and making everyone food and knocking sense into them. Briony mostly gets to be awesome by growing up and being loving and optimistic at this point, but I really want her to do some amazing stuff in the second book that I am pretty much resigned to writing now. Lottie gets to be, well, crazy, alas, and I don't actually know how that's going to play out at all, so I can't really comment on that. I am, however, increasingly bothered by the fact that the girls' mother is completely non-existent, not only in the present but in the past. I've dropped mentions to her a couple of times, but I still have no idea who she was or why and why she isn't here anymore. And then that bothers me because what this novel and quite a lot of other stories in the universe at large are really lacking are Awesome Women Over Thirty. (Immortals do not count.) I mean, okay, at the moment I don't even know who many of the characters are besides the occupants of Evangeline's two homes -- her family flat and the library -- because the story hasn't ventured out into the wider world yet. Maybe women's roles are a little different in this 1912. Maybe there are some other awesome women in the Ministry of the Paranormal, or at the Noxes' church, or at Briony's school, or all of the other places I haven't explored yet.

I also had the brief weird thought of gender-switching Evangeline's father and having her mother be the reclusive, eccentric, but intensely loving dealer in rare books and magical miscellany, except that kind of turns a lot of things on their heads -- like, the colleague relationship between Evangeline's Parent and Mr Caruthers would be entirely different, and the Nox family would be entirely female, and I'm not really sure I want to do that, and then I'm still stuck on the question of Where Did The Other Parent Go Anyway. Not to mention the fact that Edwin Nox is, you know, in my head of his own right, even if he never seems to do anything. (You're all saying, It's obvious! BOTH PARENTS COULD BE ALIVE AND WELL and I say, Absolutely! Except I keep trying it and the story soundly rejects it, which annoys me a lot! Especially because stories really need more awesome married couples who love each other. Maybe the girls' mother is just Off Being Plot Pointy Somewhere? Only I cannot think of anything for her to do. But I also hate the Importantly Dead Mother stereotype...)

And now, dear f-list, an excellent example of How I Suck At Essays. Note the lack of coherence, the digressions, the change in topic, the total lack of cogent point... and now I have to go do the dishes write about Briony crushing on Mr Caruthers' coat, just for lady_moriel.

Reading Robert K. Massie's 900+ page Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War (which totally has an Oxford comma: win!), which is omghuge and terrifying and daunting, and this is me we're talking about. I eat giant books for afternoon tea. BUT ARGH SO HUGE and so very full of exactly the information I need. And it's really interesting and everything, and I love Massie -- he wrote Nicholas and Alexandra, which I have read three times. But it is MADE OF HUGENESS and so much politics and argh. I am quite busy just trying to keep everything straight. However, I am incredibly thrilled to have found exactly the sort of book I needed, although I am a little bitter at the library, and publishing in general, because while the World War II section takes up an entire bookcase, World War I gets a little less than two shelves. And far too much of the WWI literature is centred on America's role in the war, which... come on, we were in it for eleven months. The rest of the world fought for four years.

Also, Germany and Britain were on pretty tense terms for decades before the war. And Austria-Hungary was allied with Germany. And everybody was preparing for war, for when it inevitably broke out. So. Having some thinky thoughts, storywise; namely that Germany or Austria-Hungary or both are looking into how they could use vampires; maybe they get an ambitious vampire who wants them to do something for him, and they bargain with him for, like, vampire soldiers or something, I don't know. (That sounds incredibly lame now that I've typed it out.) Or they're trying to work out how to control the vampires. Plus, Austria-Hungary was in control of Transylvania until the end of the war, and I have to wonder -- sure, vampires are real in my storyworld, but Transylvania and Romania in general are so tied into the vampire mythos that maybe in this world there's something to it -- larger population, concentration of magic, something? 

And all of this is causing unrest in the vampire community, blah blah we've heard all of this already, so this is in part what Evangeline is supposed to prevent? How does that tie into the vampires trying to Tam-Linify Mr Caruthers at the end? And while she has to succeed at some level for the story not to be completely depressing and pointless, seeing as I can't escape the sequel that takes place during the war, there still needs to be tension and... stuff. I become increasingly eloquent as the night wears on, as you see.

Asdojhghg. That's enough of that. I need to actually write a few paragraphs before bed.

I've been thinking about this for several days, especially since I've been digging through colleges again and trying to understand how I can fit the things I want so badly to study into one interconnected whole. So, here it is:

I want to major in Story.

Watching this beautiful, beautiful video from Ukraine's Got Talent clinched it for me -- because this is a kind of storytelling that I have never seen before and don't really know how to describe. But I know that it's powerful. I know that it hurts and sings like steel and banners in the wind. And I love that. I love that there are so many ways to tell stories to one another, so many different ways to communicate our experiences, our ideas, or hopes, our imaginations. I've thought a lot about Story lately, because when you take all of the things that I love and set them together, that is what they are. Film, mythology, music, dance, novels, graphic novels, folklore, television, poetry, fanfiction, journalism, history, psychology, philosophy, urban legends, photography, drawing with brushes and pencils and chalk and sand, sociology, education. Everything. Story. Whether it's how you tell a story, how you listen to someone else's story, or how you learn to understand a story -- that's what they are. This is why I love public radio -- because they tell me stories, which is better and more real and more human than any of CNN's or Fox News' scandal-mongering. (I remember, after the earthquakes in China, an NPR journalist trying to describe the things she was seeing, and finally sobbing so hard she couldn't even speak. That was empathy and love, and it hurt. It got to the heart of things far better than the endless barrage of cold photographs on television, spoken over by comfortable, coiffed newscasters. This journalist cared about the story, about the people. And she cried. So I did, too.) 

So this is what I want to study. I want to study different kinds of storytelling, and I want to study different kinds of stories, and how to understand them and transform them and combine them. I want to study how to work with people and teach them to tell their stories, and how to listen to their stories when they tell them, and how to help them understand their own stories. I want to study how different kinds of stories affect each other. How mythology affects history. How poetry makes us brave. How stories and truth get all tangled up. How sometimes Story goes deeper than truth, illuminates it, is it. I want to understand how stories give us -- everybody us -- a voice. I want to study how different kinds of stories can bridge each other, how to find the best format for the kind of story you want to tell and who you want to tell it to and why. How to use stories to facillitate change, to show love, to further understanding. This is why I want to be a librarian (and a writer and a filmmaker and a musician and an artist and a scholar) -- because it's all about every kind of story and leading people to the stories they need and teaching them how to tell their own, both to other people and to themselves.

And there it is. Dear Emerson/Harvard/Hampshire (my current triumvirate of Schools I Want To Be A Part Of), this is why I want to be in university. I may have sucky math scores, but maybe this helps? (...can you send cover-letters to colleges? do they do much of anything?)

The most glorious mess of a thunderstorm just roared over the hills -- all blinding rain and howls of thunder and the thick scent of sweat and dust rising, expelled, from the earth. The sky's been green. I had to light all the candles I could and shrug into my white lace skirt (to go with, you know, my folkloretastic Vampires Beware t-shirt...), and now I feel rather compelled to share with you the music I was listening to when the brunt of the storm hit, which happens to be this crazy raucous Victorian street punkfolk, with lots of group shouting and singing saw and accordion and stuff. ♫ "Honey in the Hair" by Blackbird Raum. This is totally research for my novel. Totally. In, um, a frame-of-mind sort of way? I have to get into young Rue Caruthers*' mind somehow, yes? And this is exactly what he would have listened to. No really. (Also wondering, really, how close might street music have got to this back then? Research topic three hundred and nine: London musical culture, high and low, at the turn of the century.) Also, er, apparently Stuff Mr Caruthers Would Have Listened To As A Young Victorian Punk is my new musical kink (see also: Arcade Fire, Rose Kemp, Pale Young Gentlemen, Patrick Wolf, Dark Dark Dark... are you kidding, of course I'm making a mix).

On the subject of the ever-present Novel, I wrote this bit late last night, and upon waking it seemed awfully anachronistic. Thoughts?


Er, on the subject of music and also vampires... this is the first song that's properly mine that I've properly recorded. ♫ Black is the Colour of My True Love's Heart, in which, as usual, I hear a traditional ballad and just know there's an alternate version out there in which he's a vampire and she has to kill him what is wrong with me. Anyway, there's a flaily first attempt at music production in here, too, consisting of me making weird noises with my mother's African thumb piano and then manipulating and repeating them in two different ways. I don't even know if it works, I've been messing with this song for so long.

I have come to the conclusion that writing is really only an excellent excuse to learn about things I am fascinated by, and my subconscious takes advantage of this by subtly sneaking in especially interesting things into my story. (That, and I have a tendency to think, "THAT IS AWESOME AND I NEED TO PUT IT IN MY STORY NOW.") So, things I have to pursue knowledge of: 19th century drugs and their affect on human psychology; underground cities and the catacombs of London; the worldwide political situation that led to the Great War (sociology ftw!); mental illness and the human mind; the Industrial Revolution; libraries in the modern and ancient world; any and all arcane bookmaking; linguistics; how cultures develop (the vampires, separated from their formerly human state); poker; early twentieth century insults in British; race and culture in 1912 England; why colonialism sucks and leads to Bad Things; literature in 1912; vintage clothing and hairstyles; turn-of-the-century music; cultural understanding of vampire lore (VAMPIRE PUMPKINS FTW!); the three sisters archetype in literature and folklore; Tam-Lin and related ballads; turn-of-the-century food; British Christmas traditions; street-fighting techniques; sword-canes; whether or not they had fish and chips back then and if they were wrapped in newspaper... And I keep digging up more as I write, dear me.

Also, this guy needs to make it into my story somehow. Somehow. Possibly as one of the bureaucratic Department of the Supernatural types. (One primary thing I aim to work on in Draft the Second: making the Department blokes less flat, stock Stupidly Evil Bureaucrats, because... that's senseless and boring. There is no reason for them all to be out of touch and too enamoured of their own power, and I hated it while I was writing it. Bah. That does not mean they can't have silly moustaches, however.) 

Well, bugger.

Remember how I said some months ago that this story was not going to be a retelling of Tam-Lin with vampires, although it totally works? Because there are so many other things going on already and I was concerned the impact of a ballad retelling would be swallowed up in it? 

Clearly my subconscious was lying to me. And is now having a good laugh at my expense.


(Also I may have started up an icon journal, because I have been making them rather a lot lately. Er... do join?)

I've just been out on the lawn, basking in the sun like some sort of cat or reptile or what have you; I have never been so ravenous for sunlight. My skin grows impatient when the sun ducks behind a cloud for a few moments. (I am wearing this, which is very apt for daydreaming in the sun on a day full of breezes, not to mention listening to acres of New Weird America and freak folk. Speaking of which, Daddy got me Steeleye Span for my birthday, "for old times' sake". ♥) Lying in the sun gets the brain to wandering over all sorts of odd paths, and I have just realised several things about my poor messy Evangeline story, which I shall set down because a) for some reason some of you lot seem to miss hearing about it, and b) someone might even have an idea which I will gladly take for a test run.

Let me see -- when I was discussing the story with Kyra last month, she helped me to realise that the library is protected -- I've been running with the vampires-can't-cross-threshold-unless-invited myth and working out how the magics would work mechanically, so to speak, and you can't make them, they have to be -- a psychic barrier of lived-inness protects a house from undead intruders; a house that's just been moved into would be less protected, the older a house is the more difficult it is for vampires to get in, temporary lodgings might be susceptible; it is entirely possible that vampires could get into Mr Caruthers' rooms without much trouble as he is hardly ever there and has no attachment to the place, nor has he really lived there. Anyway, the library is loved and lived-in by so many people -- especially Evangeline and Mr Caruthers -- that it does have that threshold protection, but it becomes significantly weaker when Mr Caruthers is absent. I'm not quite certain why he is so strongly tied to the building; perhaps it has something to do with the reservoir-of-magic/ley lines/something important that is built into/under/around/something the library, and probably Mr Caruthers having mucked about with unpleasant and too-powerful magics in his youth. Because the library is so tied to Mr Caruthers, at this point Evangeline's strong attachment to it does not affect the barrier much. He goes off on some Mysterious Plot-Important Errand at the beginning of the story, vampires break in, plot happens, people die, yay.

And then! While lying in the sun I realised that the vampires were looking for Evangeline when they broke into the library: and they got Lottie instead, because of some sort of misinformation, I don't know. I don't want to make this obvious on the outset, either. (They may have been interested in Mr Caruthers as well, I don't know, but understood they couldn't breach the library if he was there -- and Evangeline has something that they Need.) I think what they want Evy for is her story-sensing -- there's some kind of unrest, quite possibly related to the slow-building unrest which will only need the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in less than two years to ignite the tinder for war, which may or may not involve governments trying to figure out how they can use vampires for things. (Rubbish, this is getting too complicated! I want a smaller story! Stoppit!) I am beginning to think that there is no useful future-seeing amongst the vampires because their unlife puts them out of time in a way -- so while some of them may get glimpses of the future it's not necessarily distinguishable from past or present or hallucination and is usually very random and unlikely to be at all connected to anything that the vampire could find useful -- since they absorb memories from the people they drink, they may be getting a glimpse of one of those lives, or perhaps the future of someone known by those people, and memories may tangle together as there is so much mixed blood. (There's a running idea of memory existing in the blood, and I must commend cherise for setting me on that path. ♥) Anyway, Evy has the ability to see storylines, or something like that, and the vampires either want to turn her or consume her with the idea that by one of them drawing all of her blood into themselves they will acquire her ability. I don't know, this is the first stage of that idea.

But then Mr Caruthers is also very very important and in some way key, and I'm beginning to understand that part of the end everything is leading to is the vampires wanting him or Mr Caruthers offering himself up as a tithe for some ritual/ceremony/use of magics -- a la Tam Lin. It is entirely possible that he would offer himself up out of sheer guilt -- he has this dangerous more-than-a-residue of the black magics that he toyed with irresponsibly as a youth and they could very well explode and do terrible things and he can't really control it, but willingly sacrficing himself in a situation in which a great explosion of magic would actually be a solution, well... And self-sacrifice would also cleanse the magics of their destructiveness. However, I have no plans nor desire to kill him, so that end will have to be worked through somehow.

There's also something about the trees of London coming to the aid of the city, in a way -- shadowempress suggested something having to with the essence of London that led to this idea. That fits with my idea that trees, as representations of life, are why stakes of wood can kill vampires, though I'd like a better understanding of why certain plants ward better than others (holly, for example, and, hey, garlic?). if wood is dangerous, imagine how well the trees could overcome the vampires. That's the germ of the germ of an idea, though.

Oh dear. 

Foremost on the list of Things Which Would Be Nice About Now is: a fire. Possibly in the middle of my bedroom floor, so long as it is safely contained and not likely to burn anything it isn't supposed to (thereby rendering us unable to get our deposit back), and, primarily, warm and cosy. I could roast marshmallows. Or tasty sausages. Or, more importantly, my hands, which keep having to be reminded that, yes, they do have nerves in them. (I got a pair of fingerless gloves WITH FINGERS yesterday however; we will see where this takes us. Why do they still call them fingerless when they've got half-fingers? Or do those not count as fingers? Anyway, they let less air in and are quite rocking.) 

I've been having difficulty motivating myself to post, not because there is Some Great Dire Thing or because I have a ridiculously complicated thing to write out, but... because I have been. Well, I've had difficulty motivating myself to do much of anything lately (moreso than usual, I mean, which is to say BAD). Ugh. I seem to be rather more depressed than I am actually noticing.

So, Rabbit Hole Day! That was fun; I'm glad you all liked it; it was fun to write. I was feeling a bit sad, because I had jumped on the bandwagon really late at night, so I thought that nobody I knew would be able to do it, but three of you did! and it was marvellous! 

Here is sartorias' entry, from which I learned of this holiday (and gorblimey, is it gorgeous). And here are other people's entries that she gathered. (She is, by the way, the fantastic author Sherwood Smith, and her blog is a delicious repository of stimulating discussion and thought.) And, on my own f-list: lady_moriel's elevator takes her to unexpected places; aohdwyn learns a new way to make cupcakes; and cails runs into a mysterious stranger. I think this is the best holiday ever, and I should absolutely do it again next year, even if everyone will know by then. (It's a really fascinating exercise, too, especially trying to make it believeable in the beginning, drawing on elements of your actual life and seeing how you can develop them into something fantastical or surreal. I loved that I already had this practically mythological Mysterious Boy, too. It was great. Also, I have learned decided, he is almost certainly Tam Lin, but Janet is not, alas, me; Janet is the pretty red-headed girl at the bakery he was so often conversing with.) 

Stuff Which Has Happened: acquired warm fingerless gloves, had a grand time with Jonathan and then Jonathan + gang having stimulating discussions, making peppermint patties (messy beyond all reason, but delicious), and watching The Dark Knight, which... I somehow forgot how excellent a film it is. I really, really love Christopher Nolan's directing (someday I ought to see Memento, too), although it's difficult for his films to be personal favourites because they're sort of -- distant? I don't love Nolan the filmmaker in nearly the same way that I love Joe Wright and Mira Nair. It's difficult to quantify, because they do get very intimate -- I like that Dark Knight gets involved enough in characters and motivations that it doesn't lose itself in a sea of Epicness, and The Prestige (magic! science! Victoriana! NON-LINEAR TIME!) is full of the small human moments that I love, but they're still -- cold? I love them, but at the same time we both hold each other at arm's length. Hmm. But blimey, I think my favourite thing of all of my favourite things about his films is the way they're cut together. He juxtaposes scenes and cuts away from scenes in ways that are gorgeous and right and sometimes very unsettling -- often he cuts away in the middle of some kind of explosive action, so that you find yourself holding your breath.

Have not been writing much. Should look to this, yes. I am trying to at least get one complete and reasonably organised chapter of the Evangeline story written -- and am also attempting to apply Occam's razor to plot theories (in its most simplified and condensed form: the simplest solution is probably the answer), which may even get me somewhere (! -- ?). Perhaps perhaps. Only there seems to be no simplest answer to 'why are vampires suddenly specifically a threat?', does there? Why do all of my favourite storygerms come with such convoluted plots? My muse ought to know that I am very bad at this.

And! Vienna Teng has got a music video at last, for 'Gravity', and it is lovely and fascinating and good heavens what a completely marvellous dress she has got. My favourite thing, though, is the joy in her face when she sings. Oh Vienna.