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The business is largely moved in (I lack the phones, at the moment, as my mother goldfished bringing the answering machine from the house and tha's a touch important, and we're quite short on user guides). It ate what would ordinarily be the dining room in the house*, which leaves us with a spare bedroom. Lo, the extravagence. :)
The amount of work to do is making me feel a touch guilty for paying myself as much as Dad and I have set me up for. >.> I'm trying to persuade myself into the thinking that I'm paying me for being available, not by what I get done. Definitely need to keep a routine established, as otherwise yesterday might become more than an exception and my roommate would have to smother me in my sleep**. Or fling me in the local lake or something.
I plan to go talk to the advising department for the master's degree I'm peering at this coming month. Figure start doing classes again Winter Quarter, get most of a year of 'oh, neat', 'that'll be useful' and 'if i poke you with a stick, will you make sense?' classes in to get my GPA up, and apply for fall of '09. Would get me a degree when I'm twenty-seven or so, which wasn't exactly what I would've expected for having hit college when I did. This makes me feel illogically guilty. On the other hand, the timing works out well for the roommate's tentative schedule--we'd be graduating around the same time.
One of the reasons yesterday was as . . interesting as it was was that in the comments on this entry, two people had shiny moments at the idea of a proper telling. I spent most of Monday and Tuesday banging my head on a version. Between brainskid and my hands, I'm hung about twenty-one hundred words in, and maybe a third of the way through the story.
To put this in perspective? The previous longest thing I'd written was two thousand words (admittedly, part of a sequence). And that was with a POV voice I was very familiar with, with non-pov voices I was also familiar with.
The Bone-Witch, on the other hand, is already an experimental piece. I'm attempting to strike a balance between the tale itself, and the sense that it really is being told beside a campfire, with physical movement on the part of the teller, and the spoken cadence of voice instead of read text. Secondary problems come with the natural variation built into the Bone-Witch story; the storyteller can choose what to emphasize or downplay, and more than half the specific details can change as long as the overarching thread stays. Also, I don't know the storyteller as yet, though considering the timing the piece is presenting me it's entirely likely she'll be a part of the first novel for Wild Roses. So I'm struggling to tease out what sort of story this unknown woman would tell, given 'bone-witch', 'power', and 'lost to the dark/someone not coming home' by her audience.
Fireside tale, easy-peasy, right? Suuuuuure. Microculture***, more like.
I know she's speaking to people who've been losing friends to manticores and dragons, and recently. People who know what broken bones feel like (and what mice taste like). People who know stories about mages, but the ones they're likely to actually kind of know in any sort of personal way are the man who rules their forest--Hernén--and perhaps Fintain, who's very, very scattered until the metaphoric chips are down. Fintain happens to be the younger child of a half-legendary historical figure to these people, so he's got a touch of the not-quite-real to him. Hernén's undeniably real, but he's the unnamed King.
There are stories, certainly, that feature mages both real (and recently alive if not actually currently so) and 'historical'. The farther out from where an event happened, inevitably, the more likely it is to take on aspects of myth or legend, and this particular group have almost certainly never been in one of the big cities (with large resident mage populations). They've heard stories about the Bard, they've sung his music, but he's still dead, as of this point in the timeline, and they've heard stories about the Sun Queen's Daughter (Fintain's elder sister Arianhrod), who left the home reality five-hundred-odd years before the present day. Enough about the latter to be a little afraid, and unsure of how to think about/interact with her, now that she's back in the world, in their forests even, and no longer a story.
None of the audience (that the storyteller knows of) is nobility, or a mage. She can easily emphasize the scary aspects of power without having to worry about hamhanded allusions to the current ruling class/members of the audience, can show how far a mage, broken, can go.
All of which makes this a much more complicated piece to write than I realised when I started typing it. I'm not entirely sure I'm up for this. O.o;
*: Neither of us are prone to sitting down and eating formally, and the dining room's got a lovely amount of light to soothe my seasonal-affective hindbrain.
**: Bad hand day + cramps => not actually becoming clothed yesterday.
***: which I'm sure isn't a word, but hell if I can spell 'cutural microcosim' and have it look right.
The amount of work to do is making me feel a touch guilty for paying myself as much as Dad and I have set me up for. >.> I'm trying to persuade myself into the thinking that I'm paying me for being available, not by what I get done. Definitely need to keep a routine established, as otherwise yesterday might become more than an exception and my roommate would have to smother me in my sleep**. Or fling me in the local lake or something.
I plan to go talk to the advising department for the master's degree I'm peering at this coming month. Figure start doing classes again Winter Quarter, get most of a year of 'oh, neat', 'that'll be useful' and 'if i poke you with a stick, will you make sense?' classes in to get my GPA up, and apply for fall of '09. Would get me a degree when I'm twenty-seven or so, which wasn't exactly what I would've expected for having hit college when I did. This makes me feel illogically guilty. On the other hand, the timing works out well for the roommate's tentative schedule--we'd be graduating around the same time.
One of the reasons yesterday was as . . interesting as it was was that in the comments on this entry, two people had shiny moments at the idea of a proper telling. I spent most of Monday and Tuesday banging my head on a version. Between brainskid and my hands, I'm hung about twenty-one hundred words in, and maybe a third of the way through the story.
To put this in perspective? The previous longest thing I'd written was two thousand words (admittedly, part of a sequence). And that was with a POV voice I was very familiar with, with non-pov voices I was also familiar with.
The Bone-Witch, on the other hand, is already an experimental piece. I'm attempting to strike a balance between the tale itself, and the sense that it really is being told beside a campfire, with physical movement on the part of the teller, and the spoken cadence of voice instead of read text. Secondary problems come with the natural variation built into the Bone-Witch story; the storyteller can choose what to emphasize or downplay, and more than half the specific details can change as long as the overarching thread stays. Also, I don't know the storyteller as yet, though considering the timing the piece is presenting me it's entirely likely she'll be a part of the first novel for Wild Roses. So I'm struggling to tease out what sort of story this unknown woman would tell, given 'bone-witch', 'power', and 'lost to the dark/someone not coming home' by her audience.
Fireside tale, easy-peasy, right? Suuuuuure. Microculture***, more like.
I know she's speaking to people who've been losing friends to manticores and dragons, and recently. People who know what broken bones feel like (and what mice taste like). People who know stories about mages, but the ones they're likely to actually kind of know in any sort of personal way are the man who rules their forest--Hernén--and perhaps Fintain, who's very, very scattered until the metaphoric chips are down. Fintain happens to be the younger child of a half-legendary historical figure to these people, so he's got a touch of the not-quite-real to him. Hernén's undeniably real, but he's the unnamed King.
There are stories, certainly, that feature mages both real (and recently alive if not actually currently so) and 'historical'. The farther out from where an event happened, inevitably, the more likely it is to take on aspects of myth or legend, and this particular group have almost certainly never been in one of the big cities (with large resident mage populations). They've heard stories about the Bard, they've sung his music, but he's still dead, as of this point in the timeline, and they've heard stories about the Sun Queen's Daughter (Fintain's elder sister Arianhrod), who left the home reality five-hundred-odd years before the present day. Enough about the latter to be a little afraid, and unsure of how to think about/interact with her, now that she's back in the world, in their forests even, and no longer a story.
None of the audience (that the storyteller knows of) is nobility, or a mage. She can easily emphasize the scary aspects of power without having to worry about hamhanded allusions to the current ruling class/members of the audience, can show how far a mage, broken, can go.
All of which makes this a much more complicated piece to write than I realised when I started typing it. I'm not entirely sure I'm up for this. O.o;
*: Neither of us are prone to sitting down and eating formally, and the dining room's got a lovely amount of light to soothe my seasonal-affective hindbrain.
**: Bad hand day + cramps => not actually becoming clothed yesterday.
***: which I'm sure isn't a word, but hell if I can spell 'cutural microcosim' and have it look right.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-09-28 06:08 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-09-28 06:10 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-09-28 06:55 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-09-28 06:57 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-09-28 07:05 pm (UTC)From:Aaaand opposition: within the context of 'From the Shadows', Vayethan plays a role, and if all the other novels are focused on Castalin and Nulundres, they'd be a bit out-of-nowhere deus-ex-machina, even though they're not a great calvary charge to make Everything Better, Omg.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-28 07:11 pm (UTC)From:. . . . although mayyyybe it could be a longish short story?
Maybe?
Or he could just GO AWAY. Him and his friend. Argh. *stabs side of head*
no subject
Date: 2007-09-28 06:56 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-09-28 06:57 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-09-28 07:01 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-09-28 07:02 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-09-28 07:07 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-09-28 07:10 pm (UTC)From:Or possibly introduce you to my entire flist as a very shiny human being, whom they should encourage all their friends to get to know as fast as possible.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-28 07:15 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-09-28 07:27 pm (UTC)From:*solemn* Now, all you have to do is not scream and throw it away, so it's not that hard a fate to avoid. <3