Monthly Archives: January 2021

Musings about character building and dynamics on the current work in progress.

I knew that writing Gabe’s book was going to be a challenge. One of the dynamics is the degree to which Gabe has to balance his love for Ruby with the growing number of lies he has to tell because he’s operating under a false identity. That was an issue even when I was writing the main part of The Martiniere Legacy. Why didn’t Gabe come clean to Ruby about who he really was and why he was on the run before the mounting weight of all the lies forced their divorce when he reached a crisis point? Full disclosure to the woman he loved would have been the simplest solution.

And yet he didn’t do that.

Maintaining those lies without disclosing them to Ruby is Gabe’s biggest flaw. His secrecy and paranoia, in the guise of protection. By the time of The Heritage of Michael Martiniere, Gabe’s learned his lesson. He imparts it to his father’s clone, Mike, as hard as he can.

And yet Gabe took a HUGE secret to his grave which ends up having a major impact on his son Brandon, Mike, Ruby, and others (and is a significant driver of the climax of The Heritage of Michael Martiniere). In the end that part of him that sought to protect those he loves by being paranoid and secretive not only destroys him, but it hurts those dear to him. He tries to recover before he dies by means of leaving videos triggered by search algorithms, and the groundwork for him to be able to eventually manifest himself as a digital clone, but none of those measures would have been necessary if he had Just. Told. Someone. Preferably Ruby.

So part of Broken Angel: The Lost Years of Gabriel Martiniere has to deal with that flaw in Gabe’s reasoning and build it so that Gabe’s reactions make sense. Gabe is spooked and scared, plus he still carries the weight of being beaten and mentally abused by Philip, the man he thought was his uncle (but was really his father) as well as some rather freaky mind control conditioning. Think of the Martinieres as modern-day Borgias, and perhaps that gives you a picture of what’s going on. Gabe is paranoid about eating and drinking in public because the Martinieres can and sometimes do slip nasty things into consumables to either reinforce mind control programming or kill someone. Or they do the same thing on clothing (I lifted Alexsander Navalny’s Novichok poisoning via underwear only using a psychotropic as one experience Gabe underwent). Gabe’s granddaughter Lily turns out to be particularly deft at doing this, which causes problems for Mike in Heritage.

The other piece is that Gabe is fundamentally a very decent man, in spite of lying his head off to keep his identity secret. He really is a woman’s dream partner in so many ways. Sometimes I think I’m writing him to be too nice, and then I remember. He’s lying to Ruby. When Gabe panics and decides that it’s best to force a divorce, he does some very ugly things to her as a cheating spouse. Some of that is under the influence of the Family’s mind control, because Philip wants to shred Gabe and make him suffer before pushing him into suicide. Gabe manages to fight off the suicide triggers (with the unknown assistance of the woman assigned to bring him down), but at the cost of completely destroying his relationship with Ruby, the woman he deeply loves. It takes twenty-one years and another crisis before Gabe and Ruby reunite.

And that’s basically the result of flawed choices that Gabe made.

It’s not easy to write. I find myself dodging some difficult sequences, just like I did when drafting Heritage. There are just some parts I can’t write, and others that I have to work my way toward carefully.

That said, Gabe’s book is not as big as Michael’s book. I’m about halfway through it right now, at something like 29,000 words, and on the brink of writing the toughest part. I have no problems with hitting the deadline to put it out in late April.

It’s not all grim, either.

But when it gets dark…hoo boy.

I’m a fairly broad reader in that my reading often covers a range of genres and purposes. I like reading a variety of works, though graphic details and too dark a setting and story usually ends up putting me off and not finishing what I’m reading.

Most of the time I tend to be a pure reader–that is, I’m reading for enjoyment. But there are times when my reading enjoyment extends to savoring a rather deft piece of writerly craft. I’ll end up rereading those sections and enjoying them because I appreciate the effect that the other writer is trying to achieve. Sometimes I’ll even study it deeper, thinking about how best to apply that to my own work.

I had one of those moments recently, while reading Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark. The protagonist, Thea Kronberg, is on the brink of breaking through as a top opera singer. She’s visiting with her long-term lover Fred Ottenburg and a life-long backer, Dr. Archie, when The Call occurs–essentially, the climax of the book. And the way that Cather handles it is just–marvelous. See below. Note: omniscient point of view. And Sieglinde is the part; Walküre the opera. Different formatting conventions from a different era.

******

Fred caught up the telephone and stopped the buzz while Thea went on talking to Dr. Archie about Landry. Telling some one to hold the line, he presently put down the instrument and approached Thea with a startled expression on his face.

“It’s the management,” he said quietly. “Gloeckler has broken down: fainting fits. Madame Rheineckler is in Atlantic City and Schramm is singing in Philadelphia tonight. They want to know whether you can come down and finish Sieglinde.”

“What time is it?”

“Eight fifty-five. The first act is just over. They can hold the curtain twenty-five minutes.”

Thea did not move. “Twenty-five and thirty-five makes sixty,” she muttered. “Tell them I’ll come if they hold the curtain until I am in the dressing-room. Say I’ll have to wear her costumes, and the dresser must have everything ready. Then call a taxi, please.”

Thea had not changed her position since he first interrupted her, but she had grown pale and was opening and shutting her hands rapidly. She looked, Fred thought, terrified. He half turned toward the telephone, but hung on one foot.

“Have you ever sung the part?” he asked.

“No, but I’ve rehearsed it. That’s all right. Get the cab.” Still she made no move. She merely turned perfectly blank eyes to Dr. Archie and said absently, “It’s curious, but just at this minute I can’t remember a bar of Walküre after the first act. And I let my maid go out.” She sprang up and beckoned Archie without so much, he felt sure, as knowing who he was. “Come with me.” She went quickly into her sleeping-chamber and threw open a door into a trunk-room. “See that white trunk? It’s not locked. It’s full of wigs, in boxes. Look until you find one marked ‘Ring 2.’ Bring it quick!” While she directed him, she threw open a square trunk and began tossing out shoes of every shape and color.

Ottenburg appeared at the door. “Can I help you?”

She threw him some white sandals with long laces and silk stockings pinned to them. “Put those in something and then go to the piano and give me a few measures in there–you know.” She was behaving somewhat like a cyclone now, and while she wrenched open drawers and closet doors, Ottenburg got to the piano as quickly as possible and began to herald the reappearance of the Volsung pair, trusting to memory.

In a few moments Thea came out enveloped in her long fur coat with a scarf over her head and knitted woolen gloves on her hands. Her glassy eye took in the fact that Fred was playing from memory, and even in her distracted state, a faint smile flickered over her colorless lips. She stretched out a woolly hand. “The score, please. Behind you, there.”

Dr. Archie followed with a canvas box and a satchel. As they went through the hall, the men caught up their hats and coats. They left the music-room, Fred noticed, just seven minutes after the telephone message….

******

So what makes this scene work?

First, we have a nicely intimate gathering of three long-term friends, relaxed after a meal. Then…the call. We have the conflict of time and preparation.

But. Thea does not immediately spring up and get started. Cather points out three times that Thea does not move right away. Yet she’s aware of what her time to get there and be dressed will take–for a part she has only rehearsed, not sung. She observes that she can’t remember the part she has to sing at that moment. But when she does move, she knows exactly what she needs. Dr. Archie is to get a specific wig. Fred is to call a taxi, pack some shoes, then play appropriate music from the opera. The entire process takes seven minutes…and without saying so, due to the careful staging and presentation of details, you as the reader know that Thea has thought over exactly what she would need to do should this opportunity fall into her lap. Even though she’s somewhat startled by it, she takes the time to think through what is needed and to be there for the chance of a lifetime. Quickly.

There’s also the little character-building elements, even though this is toward the end of the book. Thea is clearly someone who notices everything. She knows the timing of her travel and the length of the opera. She opens and closes her hands while thinking, a detail that points to her tension. When she does act, she moves quickly and decisively. But she is not so wrapped up in herself that she fails to notice that Fred is playing the piano from memory.

And within a few hundred words, we have slow-fast-slow pacing occurring. After this snippet, Fred and Dr. Archie put Thea in a cab, where she studies the score with the light on as the cabbie races her to the theater. Fred explains to Dr. Archie–and us–while they follow in another taxi just how and why this moment could be the making of Thea’s singing career.

For me, it’s the mix of pacing and the small elements that make this work so well. The slow-fast-slow pacing of that moment of realization that the make-or-break moment is HERE. And we see that Our Heroine has been preparing for just that sort of lucky lightning strike so that she can take advantage of it, in an economy of words.

It’s those three moments where Cather observes that Thea does not immediately get up that really make the scene.

She doesn’t move, but calculates the time needed for her to arrive and be ready.

She doesn’t move, but she opens and closes her hands rapidly while reassuring Fred (and probably herself) that she knows the part.

She doesn’t move, but she tells Dr. Archie that she’s temporarily forgotten what comes next. And that her maid (who would have known exactly what she needed) has been dismissed for the evening.

But she does know what to do, so that when she does move, she does so quickly, in under seven minutes.

When I first read this passage, the craft involved sucked me back into reading and rereading it.

That doesn’t happen very often.

 

On January 4^th I wrote a process post about the new Goddess’s Honor trilogy I plan to be working on during 2021. While high fantasy, it is going to be pretty darn political as it deals with a successor picking up the pieces of a failing empire in the face of a bigger threat.

Um.

I was working on worldbuilding the morning of January 6^th, and not following the news or social media. I stopped a little bit before noon to start a Zoom meeting I was hosting for my local Soroptimist chapter. I was greeted with the blare of someone’s TV and the news that there was a violent assault happening on the US Capitol, apparently with the intent to stop the certification of the results of the 2020 election.

That put paid to doing any work on the trilogy for that day—and, to be honest, I still can’t get back to it. Writing the aftermath of necessary but horrendous regime change is still just a little bit raw.

But I wrote a long essay about Writing the Revolution, which is available over on my political Substack (https://joyce14d.substack.com/p/writing-the-revolution). I brought forward a project I’ve been musing about for some time now, which was to transcribe and post two term papers I wrote while working in politics and getting my Political Science degree. In addition, I have a pile of clippings and giveaway literature from the ‘80s and ‘90s that focus on the rise of the then-titled New Christian Right. The process of sorting and analyzing that literature, then writing about it, is going to be one of my side projects throughout 2021, along with republishing political work I wrote during the ‘90s.

For years I’ve been saying that we were going to have major political problems in the ‘20s. This material is the basis for those assertions.

But what about fiction?

Sooner or later I’ll get back to the new Goddess’s Honor trilogy, which still needs a title. I haven’t liked a lot of the suggestions but it may end up becoming Goddess’s Oath or Goddess’s Vow. Burden was suggested but it isn’t quite right. It should still be on track for release in late 2021 or early 2022, nonetheless. I just can’t focus on it until things settle down a bit on the political front.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing fiction. I have…but the only character who’s speaking to me right now is Gabriel Martiniere. The Martiniere Legacy trilogy is Ruby’s story, just as The Heritage of Michael Martiniere is Mike’s—but Gabe has things to say, especially about those years between getting together with Ruby up to the opening of Inheritance.

It’s not going to be a big book (ha! I said that about Heritage as well. We shall see). First Christmas Together will be part of it, and between other pieces and the one I wrote about the birth of Gabe’s son Brandon this week, I’ve got about half the material I need already.

It will include what happened during Gabe and Ruby’s divorce. Early days at Moondance and Gabe’s relationship with his second wife Rachel. The formative elements which forged him into the man who could effectively stand up to Philip Martiniere, remarry Ruby, become the Martiniere, and speak out as an advocate for the elimination of indentured servitude.

I’m looking at a possible April/May publication date for Broken Angel: The Lost Years of Gabriel Martiniere. So yes, there will be a fifth Martiniere Legacy book.

Justine is slinking around scheming about her book as well, but we shall see how quickly she decides to speak up after Gabe’s book comes out. She may decide to stay silent.

We shall see.