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cyphomandraThis year I wrote Mistaken for Strangers, which is a short story set in Connie Willis' Oxford Time Travel universe (The Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog, and at least one short story – Fire Watch – with two more novels due out next year). Basically, a short sequel to To Say Nothing of the Dog (the lighthearted Victorian time-travelling romp one, rather the middle ages plus plague one) from Verity's point of view.
I've written for Yuletide for four years now. This is the first year I've actually been in the same country that I normally live in when the stories go up, and I've had more time to make comments/respond etc. The first year I also got my own email address wrong at a crucial point and didn't actually get any emailed comments until I'd sorted it out; naturally, this was also my most popular story, although it took me a while to work out anyone had actually read it! I haven't yet been able to re-read this one (An Unwilling Heart - in Diane Duane's Young Wizards universe), although I might give it a go when the old stories transfer over to the new archive. In my head there's a knotted bit at the end of the second act, where I needed to twist the plot again and for reasons of time and lack of inspiration instead ended up patching it together. It is entirely possible that this is not evident to anyone else, especially as I tend to fixate on plot at the best of times, and I do like the rest of it; largely, I'm not reading it because it's still too close.
In my second year I matched for Robin McKinley's Damar series, and discovered that I am incredibly bad at writing in other people's secondary world fantasies – I felt like I kept tearing through a really thin backdrop into a gaping void (I remember being frustrated by discovering priests at one point in The Blue Sword, but no other mention of religion). I was trying to write plotty quest fantasy involving Senay reconciling with the Northeners and charging around on horseback, but could not get it to work at all – and, in addition, to reading the McKinleys over and over in an increasingly grumpy frame of mind, read a bunch of nonfiction books about the British in India and the hill tribes of the Hindu Kush as well as half of The Far Pavilions before reluctantly admitting that this was not the way to write short. With four days to deadline I went through the 6000 or so words I had, yanked the only bit that felt like a story, and wrote a critique of colonialism around it (here). My feelings for The Blue Sword have not entirely survived this process – the close reading, the deadline, and the thinking about colonialism in the novel – but I still love The Hero and the Crown.
The third year I matched for David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Just to explain the matching – to sign up for Yuletide, you must commit to writing at least three of the nominated source works, either for specific characters or for all, and request three or four yourself. I usually offer 6-12 book sources that I think I write like, and any characters. I signed up very close to deadline late at night and, obviously, at the time was convinced I could write like David Mitchell, which was certainly no longer the case by the time I received the assignment (Cloud Atlas is an amazing book, but also an extremely technical one). Fortunately, my recipient did not want me to write either early Victorian sailing journals or post-apocalyptic English, and my fretting about writing Frobisher's highly referential and elliptical style was alleviated considerably when I coincidentally read Christopher Isherwood's Prater Violet and realised where Mitchell had got the voice from in the first place (it's not cited, but there are hints in the text – the school Frobisher attends is Isherwood's old one, for example – and targeted googling established he'd mentioned it in at least one interview). I read quite a bit of Isherwood's diaries as well as his autobiographical novel, Lions and Shadows, for the voice, and then worked out a mini-structure for the story.
This is probably the most densely researched story I've ever written, to the extent where it's more of a game of references in some parts (as is the original), and also the only one I've ever written with no fantasy or sf elements. I still don't think I got the school story voice right – I wanted to do it more EF Benson style, like his David Blaize, but I couldn't without making it feel like a parody. On the other hand, the Corsica section – which I wrote last – felt like it actually got across a particular emotional tone I've had trouble reaching before. Least popular story I've done (probably because of a lack of familiarity with source – the framing sequence, particularly, is unhelpful if you don’t know the book), but probably my most successful technically. And the summary for this story (visible here) is my favourite.
This year (2009) I was extremely happy with my assignment, apart from the bit where a) everything else I was working on took much longer than I had planned and b) close reading of Connie Willis, much to my dismay, made me see her as a much more conservative writer than I'd realised. All those screwball romantic comedies have a lot of heteronormativity in them, and there's quite a bit of complaining about political correctness by pushing it too far that is funny on the surface, but more about policing a "traditional" view of normal underneath (the short stories particularly). On the other hand, the Tossie/Baine pairing does question British class systems. And there are two nonwhite characters – Badri Chaudhuri and TJ Lewis – but they don't get to travel ("the first two-thirds of Twentieth Century and all of Nineteenth are a ten for blacks and therefore off-limits", TJ says – and in contrast to the other history department staff in both books, TJ and Badri always get referred to by first rather than last names). My attempts to find a way into a story by looking at film history therefore got distracted by reading about the South East Asian experience in London, and then jolted in a more helpful fashion by finding my copy of Tom Phillips' collection of postcard portraits, as 1904 (the latest I could go before Tossie canonically starts keeping diaries again) was a bit early for film as an industry.
In a fashion somewhat similar to my experience with Robin McKinley, I ended up critiquing Willis' representation of an academic history department and the whole concept of being able to bring things back through time, as well as sending Badri on a drop and attempting to give him some sort of personality quirk. I really did run out of time on this one – I sent it for critique 36 hours before deadline with the ending missing – and the London section is the least grounded part of the story, but basically I hoped the plot would pull people through. Also, by this stage I had read People of the Abyss (see below) and I had to keep cutting out my bits of polemic about oppression of the London working classes in order to support the stereotypical Victorian lifestyle as it wasn't helping the tone. If I'd had more time I might have snuck some of them back – Verity, for example, ends up staying in Bow because at the time she was chasing the Bishop's Bird Stump it was the scene of the Match Girls' Strike, hugely important in British working safety and unionism, and subsequently it becomes the headquarters of part of the suffragette movement. On the lighter side, I suspect fire buckets were supposed to be filled with sand (The Phoenix and the Carpet, published in 1904, was unhelpful in its theatre fire scene) and I'm not sure they were selling ice-creams then either. Anyway. I think this is one of my better beginnings, and I do like the pace.
Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog. The bits I really like in this are Ned being time-lagged and put upon by all and sundry, and my favourite line is still probably, "One has not lived until one has carried a sixty-pound dog down a sweeping flight of stairs at half-past V in the morning". Having read this multiple times plus the relevant bits of The Doomsday Book I am still baffled as to how the net works, why historians trying to get to critical periods can't just arrive earlier and stay on, and why there are no time travellers from the future (there is a nice story about this in Yuletide as well this year here), but hopefully I can let go of this between now and when Blackout/All Clear come out.
Connie Willis, Uncharted Territory. One long and two short stories. The long has some very problematic assumptions about those clever native aliens and how they exploit our government's politically correct desire to compensate them for the inconvenience of taking over their land and resources, plus a gender plot-line that, again, works well until you look at what it's reinforcing. Fire Watch and Even the Queen I still like – there's still a bit of that mocking edge in Even the Queen, but it's such a brilliant example of world-building and story in such a small space that I find it difficult to get as exercised over it.
Jack London, People of the Abyss. On-line here. Yes, the Call of the Wild Jack London. In 1902 he disguised himself as a down-at-heels American sailor (a return to his past) and spent time exploring and documenting the lives of the poor in East End London. This book (which inspired Orwell, later) is a fiercely angry description of his time there, where the average life expectancy is 30 years and over half the children die before the age of five. It is both a recording of lives otherwise disregarded and a ferocious indictment of the society that created them through capitalism, and industrialisation. He moves between individuals (who he often buys meals for) and statistics to portray the living conditions; overcrowding (rooms rented in shifts of eight hours each, or space rented underbeds), ill-health, endless queues for workhouse beds that shut before you get there, being unable to sleep in the streets because of police patrols, and so sleeping during the day in parks to the scorn of the wealthier public, shortage of food, perpetual mistreatment of women; the slow grinding down of existence.
And, always, the way these people exist as workers. The precariousness of employment, and the way pay barely exceeds outgoings; dangerous trades, like linen work (dust diseases, and the cold exposure required for flax preparation), white lead industries (again, mostly women) and the physical jobs on docks or in chemical works. The necessity for child labour for families to earn enough ("When 514,000 workers oppose a resolution prohibiting child-labor under fifteen, it is evident that a less-than-living wage is being paid to an immense number of the adult workers of the country"), and the complete unhelpfulness of those who "try to help" by preaching thrift and telling workers how they should cope without ever sharing their actual lives.
"As some one has said, they do everything for the poor except get off their backs. The very money they dribble out in their child's schemes has been wrung from the poor. They come from a race of successful and predatory bipeds who stand between the worker and his wages, and they try to tell the worker what he shall do with the pitiful balance left to him. Of what use, in the name of God, is it to establish nurseries for women workers, in which, for instance, a child is taken while the mother makes violets in Islington at three farthings a gross, when more children and violet-makers than they can cope with are being born right along? […]They do nothing for her, these dabblers; and what they do not do for the mother, undoes at night, when the child comes home, all that they have done for the child in the day.
[…]
"To be thrifty means for a worker to spend less than his income--in other words, to live on less. This is equivalent to a lowering of the standard of living. In the competition for a chance to work, the man with a lower standard of living will underbid the man with a higher standard. And a small group of such thrifty workers in any overcrowded industry will permanently lower the wages of that industry. And the thrifty ones will no longer be thrifty, for their income will have been reduced till it balances their expenditure."
I've quoted so much of this because I found it very powerful, and because it's not the past – maybe in London, but only because the search for cheap labour has gone elsewhere, primarily to East Asia. I've been checking country of origin on goods for some years now, but I'm not very confrontational (I make complimentary noises if I'm buying something because it's made in NZ, but the last time I asked if a sportswear line saying made in Thailand was made by workers who weren't children and were treated in accordance with internationally accepted standards on pay and working conditions the sales assistant came out in a stress rash). I gather there are economists who think sweatshops are a great way to boost a country's economy and a necessary part of developing. Oddly, none of them appear to have worked in one.
I've written for Yuletide for four years now. This is the first year I've actually been in the same country that I normally live in when the stories go up, and I've had more time to make comments/respond etc. The first year I also got my own email address wrong at a crucial point and didn't actually get any emailed comments until I'd sorted it out; naturally, this was also my most popular story, although it took me a while to work out anyone had actually read it! I haven't yet been able to re-read this one (An Unwilling Heart - in Diane Duane's Young Wizards universe), although I might give it a go when the old stories transfer over to the new archive. In my head there's a knotted bit at the end of the second act, where I needed to twist the plot again and for reasons of time and lack of inspiration instead ended up patching it together. It is entirely possible that this is not evident to anyone else, especially as I tend to fixate on plot at the best of times, and I do like the rest of it; largely, I'm not reading it because it's still too close.
In my second year I matched for Robin McKinley's Damar series, and discovered that I am incredibly bad at writing in other people's secondary world fantasies – I felt like I kept tearing through a really thin backdrop into a gaping void (I remember being frustrated by discovering priests at one point in The Blue Sword, but no other mention of religion). I was trying to write plotty quest fantasy involving Senay reconciling with the Northeners and charging around on horseback, but could not get it to work at all – and, in addition, to reading the McKinleys over and over in an increasingly grumpy frame of mind, read a bunch of nonfiction books about the British in India and the hill tribes of the Hindu Kush as well as half of The Far Pavilions before reluctantly admitting that this was not the way to write short. With four days to deadline I went through the 6000 or so words I had, yanked the only bit that felt like a story, and wrote a critique of colonialism around it (here). My feelings for The Blue Sword have not entirely survived this process – the close reading, the deadline, and the thinking about colonialism in the novel – but I still love The Hero and the Crown.
The third year I matched for David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Just to explain the matching – to sign up for Yuletide, you must commit to writing at least three of the nominated source works, either for specific characters or for all, and request three or four yourself. I usually offer 6-12 book sources that I think I write like, and any characters. I signed up very close to deadline late at night and, obviously, at the time was convinced I could write like David Mitchell, which was certainly no longer the case by the time I received the assignment (Cloud Atlas is an amazing book, but also an extremely technical one). Fortunately, my recipient did not want me to write either early Victorian sailing journals or post-apocalyptic English, and my fretting about writing Frobisher's highly referential and elliptical style was alleviated considerably when I coincidentally read Christopher Isherwood's Prater Violet and realised where Mitchell had got the voice from in the first place (it's not cited, but there are hints in the text – the school Frobisher attends is Isherwood's old one, for example – and targeted googling established he'd mentioned it in at least one interview). I read quite a bit of Isherwood's diaries as well as his autobiographical novel, Lions and Shadows, for the voice, and then worked out a mini-structure for the story.
This is probably the most densely researched story I've ever written, to the extent where it's more of a game of references in some parts (as is the original), and also the only one I've ever written with no fantasy or sf elements. I still don't think I got the school story voice right – I wanted to do it more EF Benson style, like his David Blaize, but I couldn't without making it feel like a parody. On the other hand, the Corsica section – which I wrote last – felt like it actually got across a particular emotional tone I've had trouble reaching before. Least popular story I've done (probably because of a lack of familiarity with source – the framing sequence, particularly, is unhelpful if you don’t know the book), but probably my most successful technically. And the summary for this story (visible here) is my favourite.
This year (2009) I was extremely happy with my assignment, apart from the bit where a) everything else I was working on took much longer than I had planned and b) close reading of Connie Willis, much to my dismay, made me see her as a much more conservative writer than I'd realised. All those screwball romantic comedies have a lot of heteronormativity in them, and there's quite a bit of complaining about political correctness by pushing it too far that is funny on the surface, but more about policing a "traditional" view of normal underneath (the short stories particularly). On the other hand, the Tossie/Baine pairing does question British class systems. And there are two nonwhite characters – Badri Chaudhuri and TJ Lewis – but they don't get to travel ("the first two-thirds of Twentieth Century and all of Nineteenth are a ten for blacks and therefore off-limits", TJ says – and in contrast to the other history department staff in both books, TJ and Badri always get referred to by first rather than last names). My attempts to find a way into a story by looking at film history therefore got distracted by reading about the South East Asian experience in London, and then jolted in a more helpful fashion by finding my copy of Tom Phillips' collection of postcard portraits, as 1904 (the latest I could go before Tossie canonically starts keeping diaries again) was a bit early for film as an industry.
In a fashion somewhat similar to my experience with Robin McKinley, I ended up critiquing Willis' representation of an academic history department and the whole concept of being able to bring things back through time, as well as sending Badri on a drop and attempting to give him some sort of personality quirk. I really did run out of time on this one – I sent it for critique 36 hours before deadline with the ending missing – and the London section is the least grounded part of the story, but basically I hoped the plot would pull people through. Also, by this stage I had read People of the Abyss (see below) and I had to keep cutting out my bits of polemic about oppression of the London working classes in order to support the stereotypical Victorian lifestyle as it wasn't helping the tone. If I'd had more time I might have snuck some of them back – Verity, for example, ends up staying in Bow because at the time she was chasing the Bishop's Bird Stump it was the scene of the Match Girls' Strike, hugely important in British working safety and unionism, and subsequently it becomes the headquarters of part of the suffragette movement. On the lighter side, I suspect fire buckets were supposed to be filled with sand (The Phoenix and the Carpet, published in 1904, was unhelpful in its theatre fire scene) and I'm not sure they were selling ice-creams then either. Anyway. I think this is one of my better beginnings, and I do like the pace.
Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog. The bits I really like in this are Ned being time-lagged and put upon by all and sundry, and my favourite line is still probably, "One has not lived until one has carried a sixty-pound dog down a sweeping flight of stairs at half-past V in the morning". Having read this multiple times plus the relevant bits of The Doomsday Book I am still baffled as to how the net works, why historians trying to get to critical periods can't just arrive earlier and stay on, and why there are no time travellers from the future (there is a nice story about this in Yuletide as well this year here), but hopefully I can let go of this between now and when Blackout/All Clear come out.
Connie Willis, Uncharted Territory. One long and two short stories. The long has some very problematic assumptions about those clever native aliens and how they exploit our government's politically correct desire to compensate them for the inconvenience of taking over their land and resources, plus a gender plot-line that, again, works well until you look at what it's reinforcing. Fire Watch and Even the Queen I still like – there's still a bit of that mocking edge in Even the Queen, but it's such a brilliant example of world-building and story in such a small space that I find it difficult to get as exercised over it.
Jack London, People of the Abyss. On-line here. Yes, the Call of the Wild Jack London. In 1902 he disguised himself as a down-at-heels American sailor (a return to his past) and spent time exploring and documenting the lives of the poor in East End London. This book (which inspired Orwell, later) is a fiercely angry description of his time there, where the average life expectancy is 30 years and over half the children die before the age of five. It is both a recording of lives otherwise disregarded and a ferocious indictment of the society that created them through capitalism, and industrialisation. He moves between individuals (who he often buys meals for) and statistics to portray the living conditions; overcrowding (rooms rented in shifts of eight hours each, or space rented underbeds), ill-health, endless queues for workhouse beds that shut before you get there, being unable to sleep in the streets because of police patrols, and so sleeping during the day in parks to the scorn of the wealthier public, shortage of food, perpetual mistreatment of women; the slow grinding down of existence.
And, always, the way these people exist as workers. The precariousness of employment, and the way pay barely exceeds outgoings; dangerous trades, like linen work (dust diseases, and the cold exposure required for flax preparation), white lead industries (again, mostly women) and the physical jobs on docks or in chemical works. The necessity for child labour for families to earn enough ("When 514,000 workers oppose a resolution prohibiting child-labor under fifteen, it is evident that a less-than-living wage is being paid to an immense number of the adult workers of the country"), and the complete unhelpfulness of those who "try to help" by preaching thrift and telling workers how they should cope without ever sharing their actual lives.
"As some one has said, they do everything for the poor except get off their backs. The very money they dribble out in their child's schemes has been wrung from the poor. They come from a race of successful and predatory bipeds who stand between the worker and his wages, and they try to tell the worker what he shall do with the pitiful balance left to him. Of what use, in the name of God, is it to establish nurseries for women workers, in which, for instance, a child is taken while the mother makes violets in Islington at three farthings a gross, when more children and violet-makers than they can cope with are being born right along? […]They do nothing for her, these dabblers; and what they do not do for the mother, undoes at night, when the child comes home, all that they have done for the child in the day.
[…]
"To be thrifty means for a worker to spend less than his income--in other words, to live on less. This is equivalent to a lowering of the standard of living. In the competition for a chance to work, the man with a lower standard of living will underbid the man with a higher standard. And a small group of such thrifty workers in any overcrowded industry will permanently lower the wages of that industry. And the thrifty ones will no longer be thrifty, for their income will have been reduced till it balances their expenditure."
I've quoted so much of this because I found it very powerful, and because it's not the past – maybe in London, but only because the search for cheap labour has gone elsewhere, primarily to East Asia. I've been checking country of origin on goods for some years now, but I'm not very confrontational (I make complimentary noises if I'm buying something because it's made in NZ, but the last time I asked if a sportswear line saying made in Thailand was made by workers who weren't children and were treated in accordance with internationally accepted standards on pay and working conditions the sales assistant came out in a stress rash). I gather there are economists who think sweatshops are a great way to boost a country's economy and a necessary part of developing. Oddly, none of them appear to have worked in one.
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Date: 2010-01-11 06:03 am (UTC)And the Jack London book sounds very interesting...