(Possibly) have the protagonist's name
Sep. 29th, 2002 10:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pegkerrI'm thinking about either "Solveig" or "Siri" for my protagonist's name. Probably Solveig.
"Agnes" is the name for the grandmother (the ex-Princess Kay of the Milky Way). Solveig calls her "Bestamor," which is the Norwegian word for "grandmother." (I like "Mormor" better, actually, which is the term used for the maternal grandmother, but Agnes is the paternal grandmother.)
Solveig's father's name is Lars (the one who died trying to save her when she fell through the ice, if I keep that idea).
Good long talk with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kijjohnson. I read her the snippets of stuff I'd written, about what the fish have to say, and Jack and Solveig on the ice, and she liked it. Whew. The fish, interestingly enough, sound a great deal like Eleanor Arnason. Laconic, stripped down prose with occasional flashes of very dry humor. Kij assured me that this is very similar to the sort of stuff she does when she starts out a book. This feels very strange. As I've said, this is entirely a new method for me, the patchwork method. My last two books were written with the chug-straight-through from beginning to end method. Kij says that things have really fallen into place as she's finishing her current book (her third), and we hypothesized that That's What You Do with third novels. You figure out how to do this Write a Novel thing . . . reliably. I guess I'll be the test case for her theory. We'll see!
The office is marginally cleaner--I got Rob to clean his papers off my desk, and at least I can put one or two of the candles on the desk.
I called up an old college friend tonight, Ruth Sylte, who is heavily into Norwegian culture, to pump her for information. She gave me some good leads, telling me to get a copy of Asbjornsen and Moe's collection of fairy tales; they're sort of the Norwegian equivalent of the Brothers Grimm. (They had another collection, she tells me that is wildly popular in Norway, which includes all the erotic Norwegian tales that they left out of the children's collection. I am agog with curiosity, but Ruth doesn't think it has been translated into English.)
She gave me other interesting tidbits of folklore which intrigued me (trolls under waterfalls for example--imagine a troll under Minnehaha Falls!), and we agreed that we'll try to get together, after she gets back from an out-of-town trip that will last about a week.
Another idea I've been toying with a bit: why not make Solveig a single parent? One of my pet peeves about fantasy -- a lot of fiction in general -- is the assumption that after you've fallen in love and marry and maybe have a child or two, everything interesting about you stops. There's no point in telling a story about a person in the middle of their life, coping with parenthood. Well, I don't believe it. Maybe writing about the young falling in love is easy, because that's the age that you're talking about identity issues. But people in their thirties and forties who are dealing with children can fall in love and have interesting identity issues, too. That's one thing I liked the best about Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring: the protagonist had a very young baby, and through all the events of that story, she had to bring the baby along, diaper it, feed it, and figure out who she could leave it with when she went off to do something. It made this fantastical story seem very grounded in real life. I probably wouldn't give Solveig a child that young. Maybe one about six, Delia's age. Young enough so that she can't entirely ignore it, and so that she would worry about it, but old enough to have interesting things to say. Over the years, a number of people have remarked (reading the periodic e-mails I send out about my kids) that I have a knack for writing from the parent's point of view. Why not use that? It could be a good way to explore the heart of stone/heart of flesh angle: if Solveig got hurt in a relationship, then that might be another reason she might be rather "frozen" inside.
Plus, I can see Jack coming off initially as a real sonafabitch . . . but she could see another side of him when he gets into a snowball fight or something with the kid.
(Goes off to think some more).
Peg
"Agnes" is the name for the grandmother (the ex-Princess Kay of the Milky Way). Solveig calls her "Bestamor," which is the Norwegian word for "grandmother." (I like "Mormor" better, actually, which is the term used for the maternal grandmother, but Agnes is the paternal grandmother.)
Solveig's father's name is Lars (the one who died trying to save her when she fell through the ice, if I keep that idea).
Good long talk with
kijjohnson. I read her the snippets of stuff I'd written, about what the fish have to say, and Jack and Solveig on the ice, and she liked it. Whew. The fish, interestingly enough, sound a great deal like Eleanor Arnason. Laconic, stripped down prose with occasional flashes of very dry humor. Kij assured me that this is very similar to the sort of stuff she does when she starts out a book. This feels very strange. As I've said, this is entirely a new method for me, the patchwork method. My last two books were written with the chug-straight-through from beginning to end method. Kij says that things have really fallen into place as she's finishing her current book (her third), and we hypothesized that That's What You Do with third novels. You figure out how to do this Write a Novel thing . . . reliably. I guess I'll be the test case for her theory. We'll see!The office is marginally cleaner--I got Rob to clean his papers off my desk, and at least I can put one or two of the candles on the desk.
I called up an old college friend tonight, Ruth Sylte, who is heavily into Norwegian culture, to pump her for information. She gave me some good leads, telling me to get a copy of Asbjornsen and Moe's collection of fairy tales; they're sort of the Norwegian equivalent of the Brothers Grimm. (They had another collection, she tells me that is wildly popular in Norway, which includes all the erotic Norwegian tales that they left out of the children's collection. I am agog with curiosity, but Ruth doesn't think it has been translated into English.)
She gave me other interesting tidbits of folklore which intrigued me (trolls under waterfalls for example--imagine a troll under Minnehaha Falls!), and we agreed that we'll try to get together, after she gets back from an out-of-town trip that will last about a week.
Another idea I've been toying with a bit: why not make Solveig a single parent? One of my pet peeves about fantasy -- a lot of fiction in general -- is the assumption that after you've fallen in love and marry and maybe have a child or two, everything interesting about you stops. There's no point in telling a story about a person in the middle of their life, coping with parenthood. Well, I don't believe it. Maybe writing about the young falling in love is easy, because that's the age that you're talking about identity issues. But people in their thirties and forties who are dealing with children can fall in love and have interesting identity issues, too. That's one thing I liked the best about Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring: the protagonist had a very young baby, and through all the events of that story, she had to bring the baby along, diaper it, feed it, and figure out who she could leave it with when she went off to do something. It made this fantastical story seem very grounded in real life. I probably wouldn't give Solveig a child that young. Maybe one about six, Delia's age. Young enough so that she can't entirely ignore it, and so that she would worry about it, but old enough to have interesting things to say. Over the years, a number of people have remarked (reading the periodic e-mails I send out about my kids) that I have a knack for writing from the parent's point of view. Why not use that? It could be a good way to explore the heart of stone/heart of flesh angle: if Solveig got hurt in a relationship, then that might be another reason she might be rather "frozen" inside.
Plus, I can see Jack coming off initially as a real sonafabitch . . . but she could see another side of him when he gets into a snowball fight or something with the kid.
(Goes off to think some more).
Peg
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2002-09-29 08:51 pm (UTC)Anyway, this is all fascinating. I like the name Solveig - does it mean anything in particular? And I think the idea of making her a single parent is great - I certainly haven't run across many fantasy novels dealing with the parent-age crowd.
Thanks for sharing!
Allison, who ought to be doing her homework
(no subject)
Date: 2002-09-30 03:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2002-09-30 05:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2002-09-30 09:10 am (UTC)K. [or no recent ones. Baby care takes a long time to seep out of the brain, and does cause permanent staining in many cases]
(no subject)
Date: 2002-09-30 11:29 am (UTC)And the idea of carrying a child around reminds me of how schools have been attempting to train their students to caring for children - giving them an egg (or a 5 pound bag of flour) as a substitute child for a week. At least they don't whine!
Good idea to ground reality into the fantasy, though.
(no subject)
Date: 2002-09-30 02:40 pm (UTC)Or there are children, but they're weirdly precocious and talented, like little adults only with special Mythic Innocent Resonance. That's worse.
I saw a presentation once on "innovative methods of teaching developmental psychology." One of the guys assigned Ender's Game and asked his students to pick out and explain all the unrealistic portrayals of children's cognitive and social development. I guess that for extra credit they could try to search out one or two realistic portrayals, but that would obviously be a lot harder.
(no subject)
Date: 2002-09-30 08:35 pm (UTC)