November Writing and December Goals
Dec. 1st, 2020 08:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI 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.
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.
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Date: 2020-12-01 02:15 pm (UTC)http://mason.gmu.edu/~rnanian/Graves-GoliathandDavid.html
Altho that's even more depressing than I remembered it being. Whoops.
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Date: 2020-12-01 03:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-01 04:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-01 03:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-01 04:03 pm (UTC)