Suit Squeeze

Woke up with that bad case of impostor syndrome that makes writing impossible. Watched videos about diving accidents all morning (and read more about the atmosphere of Venus) until that went away.

Besides feeling generally incompetent to write a story, I also feel I am totally outside even a pretense of expertise for writing about and from the point of view of a young woman in today's world. I'm barely in this world of ours; my ignorance about real lives is nearly total.

And then I realized where I am on the MICE. 

Every book opens with an Athena Fox video. Which while it may be introducing elements and themes, always touches on the core conflict of her character. And this is an internal conflict as well as an external one. These stories are, in short, all about this character and her evolution. They start with a character conflict, and that is the last thing touched on in the epilogue. For all the history and location and action in them, these are Character stories.

Unfortunately, the current story has a lot of external text and non-chronological time. I'm tempted to dump all that and go with something that's going to be easier to understand. If I don't do that, I need to find some way of making the pieces clearer.

This isn't epistolary (for some reason, I've been answering a lot of questions about epistolary texts over at Quora recently.) Not quite, anyhow; there are excerpts from a book published in the early '20s, as well as of course the doggerel clues:

Follow the path of a ribbon of steel, 

south to cool waters and Elysian Fields. 

Around the feet of Ozymandias, 

nothing remains but a Tiny Palace.

Two other elements are told out of strictly chronological sequence. Three, if you count the prologue (the pattern of all the Athena Fox stories is to have a prologue that is an excerpt from her show. In A Fox's Wedding, the show was recorded at the Asian Arts Museum of San Francisco and ended with her tackling a would-be robber -- an incident that kicks off the story to come. In the current story, she is opening gifts for her "Cabinet of Curiosities" that forms set-dressing for her history lectures, and this presents the book at the center of the plot.

In any case, through the story she is remembering a conversation (or several conversations) she had with the friend who manages her show; these are exploring a growing conflict she is having between the fictionalization of history and her desire to be an honest academic.

The other is all flashback to her first night in Paris, a night which went sideways when she got locked out of her hotel. Both of these are revisited to reveal new information and look at them from new angles.

(I did manage to resist having a story-within a story out of the steampunk comic book one of the artists they are hanging out with is writing. Although I won't say there might not be some character role-play going on during the garden party in the third part of the book.)

Anyhow, if I keep all of these, I need to do something to make them less confusing.

I sort of like the idea of having everything that isn't in the narrative present have the same appearance on the page. Like the prologue; it is clearly labeled as a prologue, it is in third person (third-person camera, in fact) and in italics as well.

I've decided the best way to treat the clues is to move them to the top of each chapter as an epigraph. Probably in italics, too. When I have to repeat the material within the body text (that is, if someone is describing, explaining, or otherwise repeating it in the process of solving it) I will always have it being spoken, or paraphrased, or both. This should make the dialogue and narration feel more natural and conversational and not have the stumbling-block of big chunks of italicized text -- in stanzas, too -- in the middle of everything.

My best idea for the excerpts from Huxley's memoir are to set those out with white space and, again, italics. Since I am electronically publishing I don't think I can count on having control of font or typesetting; Kindle is going to reflow text.

That leaves the "long night" and the Drea conversations. On the former, I am split. I really, really want to be able to do this as full scenes. But that runs counter to the conceit I've tried so hard to establish of these stories taking place in the "nearly now"; with narrator sharing the surprise of the character and neither knowing whether they are going to make it through okay.

White space might work. But without the italics to take them distinctly out of sequence, I'm still depending on the subtle change from past to past-perfect to orient the reader. And the other thing I'm trying to do is to get into the moment within these scenes; telling them in past-perfect with the "framing story" of the surrounding narrative makes them emotionally distant.

And white space without scene markers seems weird. So make them scenes. And whatever works for the first night won't, I think, work for the Drea conversations.

Sigh. An unproductive weekend, and this is the kind of stuff I can't do on the iPhone over coffee break at work. At least I finally came up with a version of Huxley's first clue that I actually like...