May 29 2007
Many changes on the site. I have rearranged the order of my chapters so that Michael starts the novel in Tahoe. All the excerpts, the old posts, and the text of the first two chapters on the site reflect the new ordering.
The change makes things flow better in the novel's chronology. The timing had drifted apart, and Michael was in danger of meeting Elisabeth in Scotland before flying there. It also tries out the likely theory that Michael's brutal awakening is a better hook than Elisabeth's rescue from creeping tedium. People have told me for some time that Elisabeth's job bummer and tarot reading dragged things down at the start. I didn't want to admit that because I think in the book she's the more entertaining character. Also, early drafts of Michael were much sketchier and more awkward. Now I think I can trust him with the start.
I have done several quick passes on chapter 01 and it is getting lean. The latter half of chapter 02 still requires a little red pen but I am leaving it for now. I am studying at the Writer's Center under Leslie Pietrzyk. She starts each class with a lecture on an aspect of craft: characterization, point of view, foreshadowing. In her lecture on revising she suggested writing to the end before spending lots of time editing the beginning, since so much can change. Certainly that did not happen with me - I bogged down in the middle and started over. I am not sure I will be able to kick the habit entirely but even my girlfriend is getting sick of reading a chapter a season.
I was inspired to try to write something new for my next workshop in Aspen, instead of a portion of what will be reviewed tonight in Bethesda. I alas was inspired only a week before the deadline. Compared to my usual glacial pace banging out 12 pages in six days (while at the same time polishing 25 pages for Pietrzyk's class) was a scary rush that has left me tired and fat. But the pages seem leaner than my usual first drafts and perhaps I will have less to cut out later. I hope to find a balance.
It's also due to Pietrzyk that there is now a chapter by chapter synopsis on the site. She suggested that my chapter 08 was too far into the story to really understand cold. I have edited it since but most of this was written in about half an hour. If nothing it makes it clear to me just what a loopy picaresque I have created. I think ten years ago when I had the first ideas for this book I saw it as something like Romeo and Juliet when really it's turning into a pair of Tom Jones. I will be curious if the other students find it interesting or impossible.
from 07.06
(In Michael's dream) the great superhero, muscular and regal, crisp in his red and blue outfit. He floats miles above day-lit Siberia, high enough that a third of the globe fills his view, from the North Pole down to the southern edge of the Taiga Forest. Only his prehensile and alert cape, flapping here without air, hinted at the vasty arrogant power under the superhero's command. Imagine your entire life one of noblesse oblige, the eternal kowtowing to the needs of goodness great and small. No wonder the cape is bored.
Next to the superhero, to his obvious irritation, stood an ancient demon with pewter skin. He stood, so to speak, slightly taller than the superhero but lean like famine. He had huge phlegm-yellow eyes and thick rough teeth but his voice was melodious and soft like a young tenor. "Would you like to learn how I decided to rebel?" the demon asked.
The superhero disliked the question but considered it seriously. "All right."
"We must go to space."
The demon put the faintest hand on the superhero's belt. They flew together at great speed toward the moon. The moon was hardly larger when an immense red and silver space station came into view. It had interlinked boxy arms where shuttles docked, radiating out from a central tunnel.
"What is this place?" asked the superhero.
"A teleporter. Where we go is far away. Even you could not reach it for centuries."
"It's a damnable trap," the superhero said. But they entered the tunnel.
Lights came on, white then blue. The blue light rose from the walls and encircled them, creating a spinning sphere around them. "Wait," the demon said.
A sense of explosion. The sphere cracked in fine parallel lines. Silently it flew apart and dissolved, ever smaller and more distant shards of ash black against the bright vastness below them.
They were above a gas giant planet the cool blue of a robin's egg.
"The atmosphere is liquid gas," said the demon. "Very cold. Just dip your hand in, we only need drops." Blue liquid dripped off the superhero's hand, freezing into sharp blue icicles. "Do you see any shards of the sphere that transported us?"
The superhero looked. Like threads now, almost too small for hands to grab. "Yes."
"Take a shard and cut it with an icicle."
With his powerful burrowing vision the superhero looked at the hair-thin shard of the sphere. At this scale it was as large as a tree trunk, gnarled and mottled, boiling into space. The clean cut edge bled identical black drops. Each had millipede feet around the edges, the puffy triangle of the Mandlebrot function embossed on top. They scurried like scarab beetles. "I call them memory eggs," said the demon. "They are the holographic bits of existence but only through this strange method can they be made tangible."
"What do you do with them?" the superhero asked.
"You must consume them. Only a few. Eight were enough. Of course it takes time to learn how much you know. Perhaps all of time. Every moment I realize I know something else. Just now I realized I know how to make human men into compliant alien females. A few lines of DNA." He paused. "Now I know a lie that inspires unwavering belief."
"I don't need to know these things."
"The first thing I learned was how to leave this place. That, you do need to know." The demon receded. It was a trap. "It only takes a few. One deep breath."
Michael woke. He was stiff and sweating. He could see well enough by the green light of the digital clock to find the bathroom. After he peed he stood in front of the vanity. In the dim amber nightlight his reflection looked insubstantial, brittle and sepia like an old photograph. The local water smelled chemical but he drank three glassfuls.
The dream remained fresh in his mind. It was just like Russia, melodramatic dreams of power and betrayal. Here there wasn't systemic corruption, however, no ravenous hunger for something more than Soviet subsistence. This was small but relentlessly gluttonous, as unrestrained as cancer, deeply rooted in this spiritually fertile soil.