landingtree | Entries tagged with writing

In the last while I've been doing very little long-form writing, but I have been doing a bunch of sitting down at the table and seeing what I can write before standing up again. This began as deliberate automatic writing. It's interesting for me to read back over as I lose my memory of the exact thought process that produced it, and what had been a vivid map of that thought process goes partly dry and inexplicable, like a dying leaf. I will not share any of this because it would be dry and inexplicable to anyone else from the beginning. However, it did sort of nudge me imperceptibly closer to normal writing until I suddenly went 'I think this is now just me writing fiction again in the usual way.' I will post here a few of the bits toward the story-er end of this process. They are still not guaranteed to make sense or to resolve like stories, and to prove this, I will start with one that doesn't.

~

Dragon didn’t know what he was getting when he ordered that leg from a human. It’s a huge crystal structure all chain-hung and shivered by light and wind. The guru who lived in it fed her followers on meat she got from somewhere - they said she cut off pieces of her own flesh and grew again whole. I don’t believe it but it’s not as though I ever caught the delivery vans. I never ate there, though they say it tasted fine – better than fine.

There was a little village nearby that predated her structure and hadn’t changed much in relation to it. The cultists needed no supplies and the villagers weren’t friendly, having other gods. There, they made clothes by growing lichen on statues. You could order a dress for your granddaughter, hoping you’d have one and she’d be about such-and-such a size. Or you could get lucky. They were expensive but not that expensive – the village had such fields of statues in all different body-forms that it wasn’t a luxury reserved for kings. How they treated the lichen and got it off the statues in strong, supple condition, with the beautiful, wild patterns hiding in the green and grey, was a secret you could only have learned by staying there ten years and learning every part of the process – and no one in the village, taken away from all that lived-in expertise, could have set the thing up again! Just one of the nutrient paints had its own maker with her own handed-down teachings. Not secret, but hidden in day-to-day life.

So this was how things stood before the dragon came: the new cult with its cathedral-sized beauty of glass, and the old village where doctors weren’t trusted. The dragon turned up at the structure to eat human meat because it had been told that there, it was encouraged. Having slept through an age of the world, it wasn’t sure how things stood, and it was more cautious than some of its brethren, having the idea that humans had become a lot more dangerous in the meantime (and in that it was correct). It was less large than the structure but certainly no single person could have done it much harm, for even its eyes dwelt behind a membrane like iron, and the throat – that tunnel proof against fire – was the very toughest part of it. Dragon throats last while all the rest of the insides have rotted away, hanging in the skeleton and the suit of scales.

After some surprise and a lot of running about, the guru’s followers called her out of trance, which displeased her but she agreed it had been the right move when she saw the dragon. She agreed to give the dragon what it wanted and withdrew to her holiest chamber, where, allegedly, she butchered her own leg on a chopping block without ever shedding a drop of blood and then grew back upon herself layer upon layer like the fastest of lichens. And she emerged with the meat, which was perfect and not quite like anything – I had seen it and imagined a Pegasus, or one of the great birds. The dragon ate. And then asked for more.

Now, the sacrament could not become a dragon-feeding factory, so the guru said no. And so the dragon – why, no one knows – abandoned its patience and advanced after the guru when she withdrew into the structure of chains and glass. The noise could be heard for miles.

Whatever contest followed had no victor. The cathedral’s remains lie strewn now, tarnishing and scratched, over all that field, along with a few pieces of the dragon – though not as many as you would expect. No worshippers gather there, though now and then some sad pilgrim passes. The locals still grow their lichen finery and to them, it seems, what happened was only as memorable as that time someone’s uncle got indiscreetly drunk and proposed marriage to three people in a single evening.

I keep tweaking this in the hopes that it will cohere into an essay, and one that is not based on experiences as un-generalisable as dreams, but I have a large proofreading job to do and also accidentally deleted part of a previous draft because of how Dreamwidth post-saving works, so to hell with it.

"I wonder whether it costs you a lot of thought or trouble, or springs ready-armed like Athene from the brow of Zeus?” wrote Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. Woolf made her famous reply:

"Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it. But no doubt I shall think differently next year."

Did she think differently next year? I don't know. Here's a related quote, this time from one of those Delany essays I was reading last year called Notes for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Student.

"The first side [of literary talent] is the absorption of a series of complex models—models for the sentence, models for narrative scenes, and models for various larger literary structures. This is entirely a matter of reading and criticism... Nothing else effects it... Generally speaking... the sign that the writer has internalized a model deeply enough to use it in writing is when he or she has encountered it enough times so that she or he no longer remembers it in terms of a specific example or a particular text, but experiences it, rather, as a force in the body, a pull on the back of the tongue, an urge in the fingers to shape language in one particular way and avoid another. To effect this one must encounter that model or structure again and again in other texts and experience it. . . well, through the body. Clumsy, inadequate, and not quite accurate, that's the only way I can say it."

Though Delany is talking about learning writing always and only from other writing, while Woolf is talking about learning style from whatever you perceive, they agree that writing is a matter of setting working in yourself, or submitting to, a pattern you've already absorbed. In this view, is writing beyond the bounds of what can be learned consciously? That was my initial disheartening impression of Delany's essay, and what a creative writing teacher friend of mine thought of it too; even if that were true, it wouldn't be much use. But I no longer think that's the implication. In any class that's about learning to reproduce a method, I find that I'm searching for the experiences a teacher’s language corresponds to. I only really notice this when it's difficult. At aikido, when I was a child, we used to be told ‘find your centre;’ more than a year after we stopped going to aikido classes, I was doing the stretches in the back garden and went, “Oh, that’s what they meant.” And then for two days I walked different. Although it consists of using words, I don't know that the act of writing is necessarily more describable in words than physical movement is – and I don't think it's less describable, either. The bottom-up and the top-down are interlaced like fingers.

( Cut for length and for wandering around through my psychology of writing in a way that doesn't come to a conclusion )

The problem with my novel is that it's too many things.

I once decided to write a book whose first half would be the mirror-image of its second. Everything the protagonist was told in the first half would be false, everything he was told in the second half would be true, and all the locations of the scenes would repeat in mirrored order. I think this structure would be cool, and I began failing to write it almost at once, theoretical scaffold turned practical cage. This taught me that I am better at describing things than doing them, and that, having set six months aside to work on a single book, I couldn't.

So this year is, "What if I did that again, only now with institutional support in a class of ten?" It is going somewhat better. But I'm learning that what I write with is enthusiastic vision. I sit down and go "Ooh! I just realised what could happen next! Neat! I'll write the next bit!" This is why I always used to wheel from project to project, repeatedly re-acquiring my own surprise. Whether this lead to anything being finished depended on ambient enthusiasm levels, and in any event, it lead to my finishing only about ten percent of the things I started.

This also explains why, when I focus on a single project, I find myself always elaborating, complexifying. I spend weeks and months having forgotten why I started the project, until I find an old note from myself which makes the spirit of it come alive in my mind again. I write gleefully odd worldbuilding sentences, because I like gleefully odd worldbuilding, but also because those are the sentences that re-excite me, rather than sentences which just, you know, advance established events. The course I'm doing is full of good writing-craft discussions and details, but if it teaches me only one thing so that it sticks, it may be, 'continue to write the thing you decided to write, even if you are not currently gleeful about it,' a piece of advice I've already met approximately everywhere, but which seems to need to be drummed into me practically.

( In the meantime, I shall now explain why there were psychic pigs: )

I came to study in Wellington with no intention of taking any creative writing courses there - though various relatives assumed I'd chosen Victoria University specifically for its Institute of Modern Letters - because writing was the thing I did spontaneously, and the thing I was most motivated to improve at. Then Elizabeth Knox did a course called Worldbuilding and I said oh, alright then, my degree has room for one of my favourite New Zealand writers on Worldbuilding, and that was a great experience - though not particularly useful, I don't think, or at any rate of unconscious use. Elizabeth said a bunch of insightful things during the course, but the central thing it taught me seems to have been how to write a novel in collaboration with eleven other people, and also that one probably shouldn't. (We were the guinea pig year; I think in every year since she's run it with two groups of six to eliminate some of the problems of overstuffedness we ran into). Then I finished study and there was pandemic and the tap on my intrinsic tendency to write closed almost all the way. Early last year I said 'Clearly I need an over-arching structure, and if I haven't got a full-time job by October I will apply for the Masters program at the Institute of Modern Letters.' I did not get a full-time job - or a narration mentorship - and I did get into the course.

I arrived in week one feeling no enthusiasm despite assuming I was going to have a lot of fun soon, much the same attitude I bring to multi-day hikes. 'You have no novel to write,' muttered my depression, 'you will have used this year frivolously and there will not even be a novel.' I told my depression that I didn't even need to work against it particularly hard, because soon I would be doing an intensive course in one of my favourite things and it would blow away. This seems to have been the case! As with the hikes, I was correct about the lots of fun. I have in fact begun writing the novel on which I shall be assessed, not that it's shaped much like one - 'just write a novel that begins, moves forward along one or two plot threads for a while, then ends' would have been a very useful goal to set myself but no, I had to make it all wibbly. I like (nearly all of) my nine classmates and also like (much of) their writing and I am very curious how that changes over the course of the year. I'm the most fantasy-ass fantasy writer in the group, but not the only one, we also have someone doing ghosts, as well as someone doing a realist novel with a strong underpinning of myths about food and sex and someone doing Victorian serial killers, both of whom seem of our party. Most of us have our convenor, Kate Duignan, as supervisors - but on account of the fantasy-assness I have Elizabeth Knox again, which is exciting.

The format is two long class sessions a week. For one of the two we attend seminars. Initially these are from visiting writers, but by next month we'll be doing the seminars ourselves for each other. The other sessions are workshops: we initially do writing exercises and give and receive feedback on them, but after seven exercises we'll switch to talking about each other's folio projects, which in most cases are novels. I expected that to be chapter-by-chapter, but no, it's pretty much two big chunks, midway through the year and then late in it, which I think I'll like as a format.

Parallel to all this we keep reading diaries, which I'll probably keep posting bits of here. Ostensibly we're reading things associated with our projects, but in my case there has been mission creep, and my to-read shelf contains some things associated with my project plus everything else I caught sight of that was interesting. I have a very small backpack currently, so I have twice got out far too many books from the library and then had to wedge more than half of them into my cubby-hole in the IML postgrad library, leaving just space at the top for my classmates to leave copies of their exercises and our convenor to leave reading packets, which is the cubby's actual purpose.

I've never done a writing workshop, as such. Elizabeth's course had a few exercises, and one long workshoppy-session, but what it mainly consisted of was shared plot discussion. (Tangent: it was quite interesting, what we did was write a viewpoint character each, and then do three rounds of chapters, so the book was thirty-six chapters in three parts. Despite minimal back-and-forth during the rounds of writing, it was always possible to put the twelve draft chapters in an order that made sense, and we got a lot of narrative energy out of some of the unexpected consequences of that, although then spilled quite a lot of it down the side of the boat. I think. I have never re-read it, should do that sometime).

It's interesting to notice what I notice in a story, given a fairly short time to think about it and nine other people to point out what they notice in it too. With me it seems to be images - I might comment on a character or on a joke or voice, but repeat a motif of objects partially obscured by other objects, or steal one thing from a church literally and then one metaphorically, and it seems you have my attention.

Last year my flat was doing a Mills and Boon book club, one of whose activities was generating random titles using flash cards and then writing stories to match. I never knew why it was called the Nub Club, possibly it was going off a particular quote. The club only had two meetings, because fate ensured that after each meeting, someone in the club would have a sad breakup and not want to joke about romance for months, but I've just rediscovered this mildly NSFW parody in my drafts folder.

cw: billionaire.

*

( THE GENEROUS TYCOON'S DISOBEDIENT PRINCESS BRIDE )

Spring: the person who weedeats our lawn came today, and the smell of grass is all around our deck. I've cleared around the herb patch, and prevented the neighbors from entirely destroying our grape vine in their compost-heap-building zeal; the potatoes my sister

seahearth planted are still alive amid the weeds, the guava she bought but didn't plant (on account of starting to dig a hole for it and finding a whacking great concrete post there) survived complete neglect from the rest of us and I've now planted it: apparently three weeks of living in lockdown is the length of time it takes for me to start caring for the garden. (Of course the day I planted the guava the weather turned freezing and a wind came up; we'll see how it does).

Plans: I'd flown back from staying with friends in Dunedin the morning New Zealand's second lockdown started, which was very lucky timing; lucky, also, that I went into the lockdown feeling remade by good conversations, very ready to be contained at home with a new writing schedule and audio recording plans. Exactly the kind of plans I make every fortnight or so, except these ones have pretty much been working for a month and a half. Contributing factor: my flatmates R and N dislike their jobs and seemed generally less stressed and happier while they were working from home - in fact, during lockdown both of them decided to quit those jobs, though neither of them have reached the point where that actually happens yet - and the flat was more social than it's been in ages. (I keep wanting to use the word 'sintered' for things, because it's a good word, 'form fragments into a solid by heat or pressure without causing them to melt'. Faience is sintered vitreous frit. Our flat has been somewhat sintered).

Today has been a partial failure in terms of writing productivity - which is to say it would've been an above average writing day three months ago. (My imagination turns up a fantasy monster, and then half a paragraph later my recent reading/listening* says, "What do you mean by 'monster', Jack, is it anything coherent, what kind of being is this?" and I wander off down google rabbit holes until I'm reading about the use of gendered language to describe cats, which is all useful in its way, but not as useful as I planned. On the other hand I've been inclined to wander about the house singing and dancing, which is always nice. That mood when I sing something wrong and find myself thinking not, "That was wrong, sigh," but, "That felt wrong, which must let me tell me what would feel right, aha, yes it does."

(I should inquire of the downstairs neighbors whether they dislike loud overhead singing. We're not even really at the 'borrow a cup of sugar' level so much as 'nod amiably when we meet in the garden, occasionally discuss grape vine', and the fact that my flatmate R's ex has serendipitously moved in down there means that we're unlikely to arrange any shared meals or similar - but as someone who's so far lived upstairs from three households and downstairs from none, it would be worth my checking in about daytime volume levels).

and Books: for the last couple of months I've been reading only books I already own, specifically only books from the three shelves at the end of my bed -- that bookcase turned out to divide neatly, when I set about sorting it, into three read shelves and three unread shelves. This is an answer to a sense of mismatch between my eternal desire to acquire more books and my actual rate of reading books. Also, I've been carrying most of these around for three houses now, and gone through so many winnowings that the ones which survive I'm really consistently interested in or excited by. (Or, in some cases, feel a vague sense of duty towards: all the better to be pushed to actually read those or else choose to get rid of them).

Favorite so far: Maureen F. McHugh's China Mountain Zhang, it's been one of those books that I've been assuming I'd like when I got around to it for at least five years, and not doing so, because all I knew about it was 'near-future sf mosaic novel' and those are apparently not my 'read this book soon' keywords. 'Maureen F. McHugh' is now one of my 'read this book soon' keywords.

Other favourite: Tanith Lee's Forests of the Night. Retellings of fairy tales that never quite were; retellings of fairy tales that were, but didn't have so many vampires before. The author's note to one story, 'The Tenebris Malgraph,' says it was inspired by a dream, and it's remarkable how much it has that feel: it hangs together as a narrative, but also, wait, fishing mutated fossils out of an irradiated lake as a pastime for the rich owners of private yachts? Yes, that makes total sense, surely the story doesn't need to go into any explanations. With those moments when you look at something in a dream and know something about it which a straight description wouldn't explain. Also bits of strikingly effective poetic language (and some other bits which don't hit that mark for me at all; I do see why I read one story from this book two years ago and stopped). Reading this story caused me to stay up three hours writing an entire first draft of a story myself, which has no relation to the content of this one but some, perhaps, to its atmosphere. Also, Lee tends to throw in an unusually wide range of plausible human reactions to things, as exemplified by the story where a demon turns up outside a house full of servants who are having a dull, bad day, and they all cheer up immensely because now they have something to do, and run around busily sprinkling holy herbs and chanting exorcisms for the rest of the morning. I've had that sort of day, where a sudden minor crisis turns out to be more fun than whatever I was going to do instead - though the story is no comedy, and the demon not, in the end, minor. People don't tend to come out of the stories in this book uncomplicatedly happy.

I was disappointed, but then realised I shouldn't have been, to not especially like Delaney's Babel-17 or his Empire Star. The problem is, I started with the books he was writing twenty years later. Interesting things are going on in both of these,** and I'd probably have done better picking either of them up before reading Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, a book I like so much it's easy for me to forget what hard, dull going I initially found it. At first, Delaney's descriptions didn't make me imagine anything. But then I got myself on board that book, and liked it so very much... I will probably like both of these more if I read them again.

And I feel relatedly but less so about The Lathe of Heaven, a book I really like, more than either of those two Delaneys, but also it's odd to come back around to an early non-favourite Le Guin book.

What's now on the to-be-read shelves? A bunch of Penguin classics, probably old family copies, which fall victim to the way I tend to judge books by their covers: these are small and worn and hard to read the titles of from across the room. (But so was China Mountain Zhang). Books I expect to like but haven't gotten around to yet, an Anthony Price mystery, Deeplight, some Margaret Mahy - including the essay collection of hers which set this reading project off, because I found it in a second hand shop having not known it existed, and suddenly thought, "Right! I now have so many good books in my house that I'm bringing the shutters down, no more, this is sufficient." And one history of China and one of Wales, which I've had since I was a teenager, and the Popol Vuh, the Mayan book of the dawn of life and the glory of gods and kings, ditto, and some books I bounced off once (like The Covert Captain, a good-seeming queer historical romance which I should definitely read in a state of not having broken up with anyone two days ago) and some books I expect to enjoy most if I read them aloud, but I don't actually have that many moments of, "Hey, I feel like reading aloud to myself," which is the mood in which I mainly read poetry and also, apparently, Hobbes' Leviathan, which I picked up in a bookshelf for the Terra Ignota connection expecting to put it right back down again, and then bought when I discovered how magnificently cranky Hobbes is.

...also I keep buying new books. I am not reading them, I am only buying them. The original theory was that I'd keep a running book rec list and not get any of them till whenever I finish these three shelves, but then lockdown happened, I discovered how many books are cheap on TradeMe and, well, I haven't been counting but the replacement rate of unread books is still at least 1.

*Friends at the Table Friends at the Table Friends at the Table

**I've noticed myself using 'interesting' in a slightly weaselly way to say 'I'm not going to think about or articulate anything just here, but I think I probably could have.' Here, 'interesting' is shorthand for 'I started to write a paragraph about a cool idea that gets referenced on a slightly ungainly number of Empire Star's pages, and then wondered if that ungainliness hadn't been deliberate, realised I'd have to reread it to tell, and stopped.'

Two days ago we performed the age-old rain-summoning ritual: rearranging the garden irrigation system. Now Wellington is drenched. And the days are shortening again, although I feel this more than usual on account of getting up at six thirty in the morning to get to my ecology lecture. At the rate of twice a week, I find I enjoy this very much. I feel both tireder and more full of life (it feels odd and pleasant that it's now only one thirty), and it means I'm getting up at the same time as Charlotte, which is nice. We'll see if that goes on. Ecology began drably, (a first lecture full of things I might have taken a while to articulate myself, but nothing actually new, nothing surprising -- definition of ecology etc.) but is looking up. The novel refused to develop anything worthwhile all week and then I came up with the right thing to write during this morning's lecture. I am only taking one course! This should not be how it works! Sigh. But the lecture was about advantages and disadvantages of different sampling procedures, which is interesting, and we are actually going across the harbour to Eastbourne beach next week to use some of them on one weed and two desirable natives, after which our lecturer will write up a meta-analysis of the whole class's findings and send it to Wellington City Council for the sixth year in a row. Which is neat. (I need to retrieve my knowledge of what a chi-square test is. There was a lab session for that, but I can absorb statistics in small clear doses and then the rest of the time -- especially in a loud babbling room -- it just doesn't go in).

...

Wellington Film Society screened David Lynch's Mulholland Drive last Monday. Somehow I both had David Lynch confused with David Fincher and the film itself associated in my head with Revolutionary Road, I think because of a reference to oppressive suburbia. These were not accurate expectations! I'm glad they weren't.

(This all... Sort of has spoilers? Sort of. Stop reading if you'd rather know nothing; I was glad to know nothing myself, but I may be unusual in having had no hints whatsoever to begin with other than, 'It is strange').

Mulholland Drive is glorious, but hollow, but too glorious to be hollow: it has a highly-crafted unpredictability which delighted me, full of scenes which start as one thing and become something completely different, or take up something which happened ten minutes ago and make that something completely different, or in some cases, terrifyingly, fulfil exactly the promise they started with. (There was a while when I was sitting there almost flinching away from the screen because I was afraid a character's face was about to change into a corpse's; it didn't, but it perfectly well could have, and the fear was relevant). So I'd be glad to have watched it even if it was a series of completely disconnected scenes -- and it's not, although for a while there I wasn't sure.

The bright and dark faces of Hollywood. Two women with different kinds of apparent innocence, naive newcomer and mysterious amnesiac, and the treatment of women and sexuality in movies (as

leaflemming, who I saw it with, pointed out). The same mood of constrictive unease used to produce horror and comedy by turns. The most startling jump-scare I can remember, occurring directly after a character has described the coming jump-scare accurately. One of the few really hilarious brutally violent assassinations. A shot where the camera watches a doorway across an empty lot where pieces of trash are being blown hither and thither, and then swoops toward the doorway, so that after a moment I saw that the camera had itself been caught by the wind...

And there was a scene I spent thinking, "Are you seriously telling me that the solution to the mystery you've set up is 'You are watching a movie?' Aaargh!"

(t5rrhnjjjjjjjjjjj, agrees the cat. Honestly, the amount of time this cat now spends in her actual owners' house must be approaching the subliminal).

I recovered from the aargh reaction, because that wasn't the whole of what was going on (though it's where my impression of hollowness came from, and it was a good warning to get). I don't think the film is coherent -- though some of it consists of dreams, and it isn't linear, I don't even think it's trying to be coherent on those terms -- but I don't think that's a problem; I also don't know how much coherence is in there, because bits of it have been falling into place in my head for days, and bits of it haven't, many of which must by now fallen out of my head entirely. I want to watch more David Lynch, and if the Film Society were screening Mulholland Drive again next week I'd definitely go.

Edited for footnote: When watching The Prestige I became convinced early on that the two rival conjurers in it were the same man, played by the same actor with different accents and hair, and that his entire life was an elaborate and costly magic trick complete with body doubles. (No comment on most of that, but they are definitely two actors). And before that, I've spent the first quarter of a boxing movie not realising that it had two main characters: brothers gearing up for a major competition who would inevitably both make it to the final round having both won our sympathies. I thought it was one guy with a really convoluted backstory and training regime. And in this movie I spent a long time looking at the characters Betty and Rita going "...you are not the same actress. You have different noses. Do you have different noses? I think you have different noses." I think the evidence is sufficient to conclude that I'm somewhat face-blind.

Essay on the Peirene Fountainhouse is in. I would definitely rather not have finished the essay late enough to see light coming into the eastern sky, but, well, it's preferable to finishing the essay that late and not getting to see light coming into the eastern sky. Our house does have a good outlook.

This is the first time I've actually stayed up all night working, though I've gotten to three and four. I don't plan on it because of the way my mind turns to soup -- the last three hours of work should have taken one and a half. (Well, the very last hour should have taken five minutes. First note to self: spend some time when it is not immediately essential learning to format and convert images). I am now very tired, but this wonderful space in my mind is opening up labelled 'Things which are not essay writing but are not procrastination either'; it's been a few days since anything except minimal household tasks went in that category.

And that's my Classics degree done. Unless I do come back in a future year to take Honours, which I thought hard about for this year and decided against, (or unless the essay I just submitted is far worse than I believe it is), I have no further structural reason to engage with anything to do with the Classical world at all. Second note to self: I'd like to anyway. I abandoned history class in the first year of high school (due to a teacher who was a dab hand with a personal anecdote, an even dabber hand at spreading minimal information as widely as possible across a plan of study, and a JFK conspiracy theorist) on the basis that I'd keep reading a range of history books in my own time. This plan wilted completely three chapters into a very Freudian biography of Napoleon. (It wasn't until the year before last that I got a fairly well-anchored sense of where Napoleon fit into world history. Thank you again, Mike Duncan and your history podcasts). So I will set myself a reading goal that matches my actual present non-fiction/self-assigned books reading rate: before July, I will read one secondary and one primary Classics text. Possibly I will read more, but I will at least read those two, I will have started one of them before April, and I will write about them here.

I started university with no goal but to learn things. I have learned things, and I'm going to keep learning things, and I'm happy about that. On the other hand, these last few months I've found myself largely at sea in terms of thinking about the future, because of the complete lack of ultimate aim I went into study with. I have an ultimate aim: it is to write fiction. I have no feasible paying job jumping up and down saying, 'Vocation! Over here!' so my hopes for finding a job, when I do, is that it be something that doesn't use the same mental muscles as fiction-writing, leaves some space for fiction writing, does good in the world, and is interesting. No university subject has pulled me back again and again the way fiction does; whatever I'm studying lights up from within with very bright flashes from time to time and then goes dark, and I feel like I've only just begun to learn the sort of discipline with which I can pour energy and enthusiasm most usefully into the dark parts. That's if I'm learning it at all. This essay I just wrote about Peirene is not particularly good -- I mean, it is coherent and presents a fairly large amount of information in English sentences, but I didn't learn much while writing it. I had Corinth available to me and I chose Peirene, partly because Peirene is wonderful, but mostly, in practice, because that was the topic I could see my way into with least effort, least new thinking. New thinking is the entire point of an essay. It bothers me that I noticed this so close to the end of writing one, when I bumped into someone else from the trip and we re-enthused each other -- at that point there was still time to read and learn and think, but not enough. The essay is mostly a sign saying, "Go and read the first book which answers to the search terms 'Peirene Spring scholarship'." (An essay doing that should at the very least include better fine print, i.e. "and then discard some of its more speculative claims").

This year I am studying part-time on the other half of my conjoint degree, Ecology, which I had decided last year I would not do. I was going to finish with Classics alone. I am also, this year, going to write a book, or some of one. I had settled on wanting to write the book; the decision was, pair it with Ecology, or look for the most substantial job which would still leave a book-shaped space around it. This is an amazing choice have, a lucky choice. Choosing Ecology only makes sense if I do not use the kind of thinking I used on the Peirene essay. Third note to self (well, this is all note to self really): at any point when I am bored with a research process or a writing process, ask why. If that produces no result, walk around a block and up a hill, drink coffee depending on the time of day, and ask why again. Then talk to someone else about it. If the answer is still "because this topic is bloody boring", then well and good, but it is likely not to be.

I don't think I've written a single thing at university while feeling that I fully understood what I was writing about (except possibly the propaganda campaigns of Antony and Octavian, because the fact that Octavian won, became Augustus, and cut off the textual transmission of pro-Antonian material dead, makes for a nice manageable little research topic -- though I'm sure even that has several levels of higher resolution). But I've developed better instincts for the point at which I understand enough. And it's nice to look back through my folders and see the little things that most excited me when I got to them, which for the most part I still think are exciting. The meta-mythology of British intellectual explanations of myth, laid out in a delightful lucid textbook. (That book has given me my only experience of putting down a book, leaving the library in which it is contained, walking two blocks, thinking, "No! Cannot stop now!" and going back again). The wonderful simple efficiency of sponge structure. I first really understood the possibilities of coffee when I sat down to read Porphyry's 'On the Cave of the Nymphs', which, sans caffeine, had struck me as impenetrable, and, with caffeine, buzzed through my head in a wild excess of coherently over-reading the hell out of Homer. (The email I wrote to

seahearth immediately afterwards had the subject line 'Coffee symbols death life bees!!')

In February I am going to finish two stories currently going by 'The Kept Forest' and 'Hearth-ash Child'. After February, I am going to work on only one story, for an only mildly flexible value of 'only'. It's another manifestation of 'bright flashes of light and then darkness' that I tend to jump wildly from story to story as the enthusiasm or the new solution takes me, and though that has seemed like a good method for quite a long time, I'm beginning to find that even story-beginnings I'm happy with are fading into the zone of 'This was written by someone other than me. I could honestly have finished it then, and now I can't'. Not that that's wholly a bad thing -- I once wrote something I think is evil, and I'm very glad I didn't submit it anywhere before I had time to work out why it was. But it will be useful to try to finish an actual novel draft. Of course, I'm vacillating over which novel it will be... I thought I'd settled on 'Novel with far too many worlds to deal with which may actually be about the fact that it can't possibly have a plot', but (probably because those are the terms in which I'm inclined to think about it at the moment) 'Novel which is not The Lives of Christopher Chant and hopefully can be prevented from wanting to be, with mirror magic' is currently ascendant. Whatever I choose by the start of March, this shall it be.

A can't stand B and finds C a maddening roommate despite evident heart of gold, my judgement of A becomes partly dependent on my observations of B and C who I rather like but am beginning to understand the irritating qualities of, the question of how unreasonable the parents of A and C really are becomes relevant and is probably unanswerable in this context, nobody likes E, and I have given the benefit of the doubt to one man of his particularly-male type of obnoxiousness already and consequently won't do it this time because the benefit of the doubt is one of the things it thrives on... Meanwhile F is low-key, charismatic, generous, easy to live with, and my roommate, everybody thinks G is lovely except presumably Q, for an unknown value of Q... And the in-jokes proliferate, such that I am widely known to have faerie powers. So goes the soap opera of a group of twenty-three twenty-somethings, and I look forward to seeing what's become of us in twenty days.

Today we caugt the bus to Thessaloniki, which is why we were all hungry and tired and jittery this evening, which advanced some of the soap opera's subplots. Filler, I say! I'm watching it for the scenery, apparently they're shooting on location but it's so underutilised...

On a plain with hills and mountains all around. We've been driving for an hour, out of Athens. Crop fields now; before that suburban industrial, before that conifers. Reading about Corinth, but my mind is off in the Farer worlds, and the great grey plain on which a hill-sized stone bowl is endlessly turning, grinding out the words of the treaty by which humans may come to that place and leave again unpursued by its inhabitants...

Earlier there was snow on mountaintops to the left. These low hills are scrub textured by stone, or stone spotted by scrub. Still windmills on the skyline. The road rises past a cliff on the left incised with vertical lines. While I wrote that (I'm copying from my journal now) a lake opened to our right, and the cliffs became orange - weathered white - and craggy. Lake shores below are fans of stone, knobbled - I want to say cracked, but not leaving any pattern of fissures, no gaps.

Another cutting.

What I'm used to identifying as swamp grass grows on limestone, on the big cliffs now to the right. Dark big shrubs here and there, something low and pale green and sprawling, and the grasses, are what grow on the whole hill-face.

Now to my left, mist at their bases making them pale as an empty horizon, are snowy mountains again. Snow broken by black stone. And now again we come into expanses of worked land hedged by water-channels head-high with dead-looking grass. Some fields bright green, others dry.

Green direction signs. A deer warning. And frozen turbines at awkward angles on nearer and much further hills: the flat opens in a curve on the right.

Not entirely unlike the falling angel statue from Athens, but standing watch here - only the hubs which make the turbines' heads grow too small at distance, so the ones furthest, on hills whose dark skylines stand on mist, I can't see as living.

A hill closes in on the right, blocking that vista. Thick scrub, limestone only here and there, but I can see it's beneath everything. Why you could besiege Athens from as far off as the Black Sea: grain supply.

The sun blazes in a faint cloud, and tall trees stand here and there in the scrub now. This sun seems more overwhelming than the Dogsbody Sol I say hello to sometimes. He's in a blaze of work, maybe. Our road turns, and the shadows of my head and the bus' windows slide left to right out of existence.

High face of stone to the left, orange brown mark - like muddy water, or the stain on a bandage.

In all this, what took me longest to write was positional. On the left. On the right. Where things are is trickier than what they are. Interesting too the difference between a simile that I created because I liked it and which grew stronger with thinking on it - the angels - and one I felt on the tip of my tongue, that colour on those stones reminds me of something, what? In fiction I naturally write the former, 'words can do this, therefore let it be done', creating from the language backwards. I have the sense from what I've read of him that this is what Peter S. Beagle does, much better than I do, which is both what I like about him and what I get tired of after a while in him. Sometimes I want a sentence that sounds less as though it has been crafted for sound. On my long plane flight home from the states I read a bit of a Delaney essay where he talks about his suspicion with talking about writing plot and writing character. Those are things he finds to be emergent properties of the kind of writing he does, which is to imagine a scene in as much detail as possible and then see what happens. I tried that. The snippet I wrote in precise physical terms (does she glance at the six woman in the bar as she stands swinging on the door in the crampt space at the bottom of the narrow stairwell waiting for her friends to descend? No, she can't, they're in the wrong corner, not visible unless she enters the room) and in similarly precise mental terms (which she doesn't because...) is vivid to me like memory, now, and I have much more detailed writing-process information about it than I normally would. I can answer more questions about why it is the way it is. And it has also become much less optional to me. t can usefully anchor whatever comes next.

And then, if that sort of detail will just let itself be yoked perfectly to the second level, where I already know I want the pylons to be angels... Emergent book!

But before I got distracted I was talking scenery. Truck stop by a lake in a wide circle of blue hills. Silence. A silence very welcome after hours of bus and days of Athens. When I start thinking about it there's a lot of foreground sound in a silence like that, but the backgroud is bigger. And fresh cold air.

Kindle is siezing up. Will post beforeit reb