Dear Muse/Beast/Santa Claus,
If you would just teach me how to write beginnings, I'll be your best friend.
Sadly, I have nothing else to offer.
Mer
What happened? I totally forgot about this place. Well, sort of: I've been duking it out with spambots, determined that I don't have to implement blacklisting and that I can just close all my comments in a timely fashion. Yes, yes. Stubbornness is not quite the trait-o-wonder that I pretend it is. Anyway, my trips here frequently don't result in updating, then. Strange...
So, yeah. Finished my third draft of Brook I. Only about 8 days late. I'm actually feeling pretty good about only 8 days late.
Bounce on "Souls on a String" today; bounce on "Subletter of my Subletter" yesterday. I had wanted something to come back that was appropriate to Fortean Bureau and now I have two. Hm. Decisions, decisions...
Whilst editing this thing (the novel), I ran into myself using bedcovers--and then switching to eiderdown a paragraph later.
Now... "bedcovers" is weak. There's really no question of its weakness. It is a catch-all word, and it works well enough to describe the fact that there's stuff on the bed, stuff that may even be flat and comfy, and it even gets around a lot of issues of cultural assumption...
I've spent ghastly amounts of effort trying to nail words to the wall in this book--effort that is quite possibly unnecessary, but functions at least as a sort of on-topic form of cat-waxing. I'm trying to use the most primary, basic words for certain concepts, to get to the linguistic knee-jerk reaction of my readers, to achieve a feeling of almost organic language. This is most important to me in names: the names of nearly everyone in the culture I'm writing about are that of concrete objects, ordinary items in many cases--plants, animals, metals. (There's a whole thing about naming conventions in my world, and it's important. This is not the cat-waxing part.)
I've done this with varying degrees of success. (I'm definitely at the point in this whole thing where I'm almost positive that a) this novel will never draw anyone in past the first page, and b) even if anyone ever reads this besides my faithful chica Julie, no one will get what I'm doing, or, as with so many things I've overdone in my life, certainly think I've spent too much time on an unimportant thing.
Oh, dear. That sounded like whining. I'm not fraught with misery, I'm not!
(cough)
Anyway. Concrete names. Main characters: Brook and Kestrel, for example. Secondary characters including Thistle, Ivy, Silver, Tansy, etc. Distinctive lack of smeerping names in this culture. Yadda, yadda. I can explain why, but maybe that's another entry for another time.
Concrete names, and concrete concepts. I formed the governmental structure for this world out of an Anglo-Saxon cloth, because I felt that, culturally, for Americans, a simple structure of a King and some retainers holding courts that relied on a common law system might evoke some feeling of distant, organic recognition. We learn about kings and kingdoms in kindergarten--granted, we learn that they somehow have something to do with religious persecution and make Pilgrims land on rocks and then there's a Yankee Doodle War (yep, that's my diatribe about our educational system)--and it's hard to avoid the fact that our government was built on making sense out of a legacy of monarchy. So much of our law being based on English common law makes the society that gave birth to English common law feel organic. Old English feels organic, too, and I'm hardly the first person to have noted that. For the past four hundred years, English speakers have been bemoaning high-falutin', fanciful, scholarly, Latinate words entering the English language... ok, maybe not so much in our lifetimes... but the sense that the first words are rougher, simpler, more basic remains.
Part of it could be leftover resentment from the Norman Conquest, for all I know, sent over in a cultural packet on the Mayflower to distribute to everyone who is descended linguistically from the English at the very least. Part of it could be that Anglo-Saxon words, on the whole, feel short--the ones we have left, anyway. Part of it could be that the left-over Anglo-Saxon words in our language salad are the earthier ones, the ones not appropriate for chivalric French conquerers... I don't know. I could go on all night. I practically have. Time to get back to quilt.
Entry: quilt
Function: noun
Definition: bed covering
Synonyms: batt, bedspread, blanket, comforter, counterpane, cover, coverlet, down, duvet, eiderdown, pad, patchwork, pouf, puff
Roget's New Millennium™ Thesaurus, First Edition (v 1.0.5)
Since I'd been striving for Anglo-Saxon roots in this book, I was fairly attracted to eiderdown. It has the flavor of the North to it. Well, no kidding--it's originally from the Icelandic (so the OED tells me) (sidenote about Icelandic: this one time, at bandcamp... I mean, this one time, I went to see what I thought was a play, and it turned out to be an edda. In the original Icelandic. Only some of it was supertitled, not all of it. While, in theory, this would be great fun, I had recently broken my talebone, and the staging was very strange, and I was in an altered state somewhere between pain and agitation and just zoning out because the whole thing was so weird. (Are there really multi-breasted blue men in Icelandic legend? Anyone? With giant rhino horns on their heads and long, dagger-like fingernails? I think I've mentioned this before, actually... Regardless, Icelandic apparently has enough in common with English that you can pick a few words out, here and there, hither and yon... thank you, Vikings. Thank you, Danelaw.)
So, superficially, eiderdown seemed like a winner. But it's not common enough, actually. I don't think I knew that word while growing up, or if I did, I associated it strictly with my grandparents, who also called the couch a davenport. And Icelandic words not used in the Ultra-Common Lexicon of Nowadays (can I trademark that? It acronyzes neatly: UCLoN) reek of Northness. And while I enjoy Northness, I am not writing a book about Northness right now. That's a different book, for me. This book is non-directional, unless the direction is up: it's a book about mountains.
Back to my bedcovers. Quilt strikes the biggest, most concrete chord on the synonym list, to me. Even though the OED insists that it's Old French in origin... But even if it is OF in origin, it's in the UCLoN (well, it's in mine), and serves my purposes best.
And that, yer honor, is how I managed to not start working on the book again until 9PM (though I did put in an hour already, earlier).
Microsoft Word does not like this sentence:
"Kestrel touched the King's arm, hoping to wake him, but he lay motionless, eyes wide and staring."
And it's a bad sentence, because my pronouns are quite muddled. But what does Word object to? My use of "lay."
Just to make sure I'm not crazy (aboutthisonething), I typed below that:
"He lay. He lay still. He lay motionless. He laid motionless. He laid. He laid down. He laid down the pen."
Just to prove that it could, it caught only the errors this time. And left me scratching my head.
Now I'm so confused that I have a giant case of jamais vu (like when you say your name over and over again and it no longer seems like a word that comes from human speech) and I have to go get my copy of Elements of Style.
I hate you, Microsoft.