osprey_archer: (writing)
[personal profile] 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.

Date: 2020-12-01 02:15 pm (UTC)
kore: (Default)
From: [personal profile] 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.

Date: 2020-12-01 04:02 pm (UTC)
kore: (Default)
From: [personal profile] kore
YEAH I did not remember it being THAT sad! Altho I should have!

Date: 2020-12-01 03:54 pm (UTC)
asakiyume: (Aquaman is sad)
From: [personal profile] asakiyume
Wow, yeah :( Very accurate though about what happens in most David-and-Goliath confrontations...

Date: 2020-12-01 04:03 pm (UTC)
kore: (Default)
From: [personal profile] kore
Graves went off the deep end about many things but he was always very clear-eyed about war.

Date: 2020-12-01 03:53 pm (UTC)
asakiyume: created by the ninja girl (Default)
From: [personal profile] 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.

Date: 2020-12-02 12:32 am (UTC)
silverusagi: (Default)
From: [personal profile] 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.

Date: 2020-12-01 04:06 pm (UTC)
kore: (Default)
From: [personal profile] 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.

Date: 2020-12-01 04:52 pm (UTC)
kore: (Default)
From: [personal profile] 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?

Date: 2020-12-01 05:24 pm (UTC)
kore: (Default)
From: [personal profile] 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.

Date: 2020-12-02 12:34 am (UTC)
kore: (Default)
From: [personal profile] 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!

Date: 2020-12-02 12:56 am (UTC)
kore: (Default)
From: [personal profile] 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:

Date: 2020-12-02 02:33 pm (UTC)
calandrahunter: (Default)
From: [personal profile] calandrahunter
"This book was only supposed to be a novella…"

We all know that feel.

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