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rushthatspeaksSignificant amount of pre-writing on the New Thing today. Given that said pre-writing involves mad research of the sort that makes one desire a trained research monkey or a personalized graduate student, and that I have a nasty cold for the second time this month, I'm pretty happy.
I tend to sit there chortling to myself over the New Thing anyhow, because it's on my mental list as 'just too crazy a project to ever possibly go anywhere so I can do whatever the hell I want with it'.
Because honestly, can you see a story based on a detailed exegesis of Dylan Thomas's 'Altarwise by Owl-light' sonnet sequence as turning out to be anything other than ravingly incomprehensible? Me neither, but I've managed to drag in both Machiavelli and pelicans, and am bracing for the inevitable advent of the neo-Platonists (who seriously turn up in everything I write, so it's only a matter of time). So far the best method of figuring out what the hell might be going on in these poems is to look up every single word in the OED, find the single most obscure definition, and free-associate like whoa. Occasionally I actually stumble across what I think he may have actually meant, and large stretches of the sequence are starting to read to me as though they were written in English or something, which is a little disturbing, but I'm having a lot of fun.
Word-count today: 3 single-spaced pages of research notes and plot-scribbling = got through one sonnet's octave.
Fun Fact of the Day: An heraldic depiction of a pelican tearing at her breast with her beak in order to draw blood to feed her children in time of famine is known as a 'pelican vulning'; if the young are shown the term is 'a pelican in her piety'. A pelican in her piety appears in the official seal of the State of Louisiana. There's a variant story in which the mother pelican, having killed her own chicks for attacking her, resurrects them with her own blood after three days, but the version with dead chicks doesn't seem to have made it into heraldry, more's the pity.
Plot-pondering of the day: Is it possible for me to have a character who is killed and then resurrected after three days via the use of blood *without* having the segment become either a Christ allegory or something involving vampires? And if so, can I sneak it in such that people don't notice it really could be either of those? Hmm.
I tend to sit there chortling to myself over the New Thing anyhow, because it's on my mental list as 'just too crazy a project to ever possibly go anywhere so I can do whatever the hell I want with it'.
Because honestly, can you see a story based on a detailed exegesis of Dylan Thomas's 'Altarwise by Owl-light' sonnet sequence as turning out to be anything other than ravingly incomprehensible? Me neither, but I've managed to drag in both Machiavelli and pelicans, and am bracing for the inevitable advent of the neo-Platonists (who seriously turn up in everything I write, so it's only a matter of time). So far the best method of figuring out what the hell might be going on in these poems is to look up every single word in the OED, find the single most obscure definition, and free-associate like whoa. Occasionally I actually stumble across what I think he may have actually meant, and large stretches of the sequence are starting to read to me as though they were written in English or something, which is a little disturbing, but I'm having a lot of fun.
Word-count today: 3 single-spaced pages of research notes and plot-scribbling = got through one sonnet's octave.
Fun Fact of the Day: An heraldic depiction of a pelican tearing at her breast with her beak in order to draw blood to feed her children in time of famine is known as a 'pelican vulning'; if the young are shown the term is 'a pelican in her piety'. A pelican in her piety appears in the official seal of the State of Louisiana. There's a variant story in which the mother pelican, having killed her own chicks for attacking her, resurrects them with her own blood after three days, but the version with dead chicks doesn't seem to have made it into heraldry, more's the pity.
Plot-pondering of the day: Is it possible for me to have a character who is killed and then resurrected after three days via the use of blood *without* having the segment become either a Christ allegory or something involving vampires? And if so, can I sneak it in such that people don't notice it really could be either of those? Hmm.
