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

[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: