November Writing and December Goals

[osprey_archer]

I limped to 25,000 words on Sleeping Beauty this month, which is only half the NaNo word count and probably only a quarter of what the book’s final word count will be. This book was only supposed to be a novella… And I’m going to need to do so much more research before I’m ready to write it…

In happier news, I’ve actually finished a draft of David & Robert, as opposed to last month when I tacked on a final chapter as a sort of holding action and yelled DONE. (David & Robert is the working title for the English boarding school friends book I’ve been nattering on about for months. Not sure why I did not just refer to it by working title rather than describing the book in slightly different terms every single time I posted about it.)

I still need to learn a lot more about World War I amputees before it’s ready for publication, but I have been merrily rollicking along on my reading for that. Also it needs a better title, which will probably come out of World War I poetry somewhere.

***

Despite my musings about a Christmas book, I was so inspired by Boy and Girl Tramps of America that I seem to have started writing the Depression-era tramps book that I’ve been nattering about since… God, is it really only November of last year? It feels like longer, but then 2020 has been about five years long, so. I have stolen the name Timothy from one of the other stories I mention in that entry.

In that entry I also commented that the story might be overshadowed by the Looming Specter of Sexual Assault, which I figured would be worse in an f/f version, and indeed it would be… but it remains pretty Looming in the m/m version, as all the sources mention that a certain subset of older tramps (“wolves,” in the parlance of the time) simply hounded the boy tramps.

There’s verification for this in, of all places, Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, where he comments “when you were a boy and moved in the company of men, you had to be prepared to kill a man, know how to do it and really know that you would do it in order not to be interfered with.” I’m sure readers will love this. (I am not sure readers will love this, but I also think it’s an inevitable feature of writing about a rough milieu if you do it honestly.)

I am… a little concerned that maybe I haven’t read enough about the tramp life… but on the other hand I feel I have conclusively proven with Gennady my “character dealt a shitty hand in life who just Gets On With It” bona fides, so maybe that will pull me through.

Comments

[kore]

Ooh what about Graves? Graves is great for WWI poetry:

http://mason.gmu.edu/~rnanian/Graves-GoliathandDavid.html

Altho that's even more depressing than I remembered it being. Whoops.

[osprey_archer]

*wails quietly* I think that poem is TOO sad to inflict on unsuspecting romance readers. (Apparently Siegfried Sassoon also wrote a poem about the death of the same David. Imagine being so amazing that two famous war poets write tragic poems about your untimely demise.)

[kore]

YEAH I did not remember it being THAT sad! Altho I should have!

[asakiyume]

Wow, yeah :( Very accurate though about what happens in most David-and-Goliath confrontations...

[kore]

Graves went off the deep end about many things but he was always very clear-eyed about war.

[asakiyume]

Isn't "interfered with" such a [adjective] euphemism? I first encountered it when my dad told me about a cousin who came to live with his family because "she was being interfered with" at home. He put it in verbal air quotes.

[osprey_archer]

It's so old-fashioned! I think it may have been old-fashioned even when Hemingway used it? But possibly still contemporary during the time period he's writing about, the 1920s.

[silverusagi]

It's at least used in A Streetcar Named Desire, set and written in 1947. Whether it was old fashioned or not then, I have no idea.

[kore]

Also ahahaha, oh Hemingway. ERNEST YOU NEVER KILLED ANYONE IN YOUR LIFE. He wasn't that great at boxing, either, one time it looked like he was losing so he spat a stream of blood in the other boxer's face. He never ran with the bulls, either.

[osprey_archer]

To be honest that quote made me feel kind of bad for him: it sounds like someone boasting in order to repair their self-respect after losing a fight. Did you manage to impress upon the tramps your willingness to kill so that they left you alone, Ernest Hemingway? Did you really?

At any rate, I think it explains something about his later attitude toward homosexuality and manly toughness generally that he spend a certain portion of his youth fending off the advances of tramps.

[kore]

it sounds like someone boasting in order to repair their self-respect after losing a fight

Aww, jeez.

That whole Scribners male literary circle was pretty messed-up about queerness -- Fitzgerald mainly cut it out of his novels, but Wolfe and Hemingway devote a lot of time to the magnetism of male friendship and the horror they felt at male homosexuals. Ernest wasn't great about Gertrude Stein, either, although that had more to do with his inevitably turning on patrons out of his almost pathological need to seem independent.

//has read way too much about these guys

I forget whether Orwell writes about sexual assault in Down and Out -- altho of course he was older, wasn't he? Didn't he start tramping in his mid-twenties?

[osprey_archer]

Yeah, I do wonder if in a different milieu Hemingway might have realized he was gay... or at least bi... or at least really intensely into other guys. But his main model for male-male attraction seems to have been "the guys who keep trying to sexually assault me," which... I can see why that would put him off!

Re: Hemingway turning on his mentors, I've never gotten over the fact that he wrote a brutal parody novel of one of Sherwood Anderson's books, and published it, after Anderson had been so helpful in Hemingway's early career. JFC Hemingway.

Yes, there's at least one scene with sexual assault in Down and Out. Orwell's in a shelter where the guys are locked up for the night two to a cell - WHAT were the shelter designers thinking, honestly, it's a situation ripe for abuse - and his cellmate attempts to assault him. Orwell fends him off and then they sit up the whole night talking because obviously Orwell's not going to sleep after THAT, and the guy ends up telling Orwell his whole life story.

[kore]

OMFG Torrents of Spring is so awful! And he was nasty to Fitzgerald in it, too, and he wrote it to get OUT of his contract with Boni & Liveright who had taken a chance on him when nobody else would, and they correctly thought his first full-length novel would be a smash. Foreshadowings of a Moveable Feast. Which is beautifully written, but so vindictive and bitter.

(And the whole Hemingway/Fitzgerald size check thing....lordy.)

I did not remember that from D&O, but that sounds SO Orwell. I get the feeling he really did like talking (and listening) to people.

[osprey_archer]

Hemingway had a crush on Fitzgerald THE SIZE OF SATURN, oh my God, and it makes him veer wildly between generosity (for Hemingway) and brutality. I'll never get over the bit in A Moveable Feast where he describes F. Scott Fitzgerald's whole entire face, in detail, ending with "The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more."

Is there... IS there a heterosexual explanation for that sentence? IS THERE, MR. HEMINGWAY?

And of course he writes about offering Fitzgerald sex tips, after comparing dick sizes, because of course. I envision this scene actually happening as, like, a drunken hookup in a seedy hotel room, and Hemingway REALLY wants to include it in A Moveable Feast, but obviously he has to remove the parts that seem GAY, and he ends up with... that.

[kore]

Is there... IS there a heterosexual explanation for that sentence? IS THERE, MR. HEMINGWAY?

//cackles

I remember reading that in AMF when I was about thirteen and thinking "....but what? Why would it worry him? Unless....what?" And of course Ernest also HATED Zelda and was the source of a lot of the pronouncements (fanon? Can it be fanon if it's IRL?) that she hated Scott working and tried her best to wreck his life &c &c. And she was one of the very few contemporaries he had who saw through him, too: she said he was a phony and Sun Also Rises was about "bullfighting and bullshit." (I kind of love Zelda.)

And of course he writes about offering Fitzgerald sex tips, after comparing dick sizes, because of course

SOMEHOW I really really don't think Hemingway's tips on sex with women would have been that great!

[osprey_archer]

Of COURSE Hemingway hated Zelda, his biggest fear is being seen through and there she is! Seeing right through him! Accusing him of being in love with her husband!

I suspect that Hemingway's tips on sex with men would ALSO have been terrible, for a whole panoply of reasons, not least of which is that he never would have shared them, but even if he HAD...

To be fair the advice he offers Scott is "Just do what the girl wants," which is... better than I would expect from Hemingway sex advice?

[kore]

I suspect that Hemingway's tips on sex with men would ALSO have been terrible, for a whole panoply of reasons, not least of which is that he never would have shared them, but even if he HAD...

I had not even thought of that but OMFG DDD:

[calandrahunter]

"This book was only supposed to be a novella…"

We all know that feel.

[osprey_archer]

In the past I have usually been pretty good about keeping my novellas to novella size, but as I have grown more confident writing, my books seem to be getting longer and longer. Which in one way is good! But it also means they take more time to write.