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The fish, yoga, and vertigo
What has been different for me about this book is that I'm writing out of order and I am writing even when I don't know where the hell the story is going. A very different, unnerving sensation. A feeling of working without a net, much more so than when I wrote my other books: when writing those, I didn't attempt to start a scene until I knew how it ended.
The scene I was working on last November when my computer crashed and that I have resumed working on now is one of the last things that happens before the ice palace gets built. Jack and Solveig have Revealed All to each other and decided that they are allies, sort of (although Solveig still doesn't trust him entirely. And Jack hasn't quite decided whether he is, in fact, trustworthy). Without any explanation, Jack takes Solveig ice fishing; what he's really doing is taking her to talk to the fish. I had an interesting time trying to figure out how to do this, practically. When Solveig heard fish before, she was actually underwater. But that didn't seem particularly appealing in this scene. I mean, come on: it's December in Minnesota. So what I have them do is this: they catch a fish and put it into a bucket. Jack cuts Solveig's finger and has her put her hand in the bucket and swish it around so that her blood passes through the fish's gills. And he takes one of the fish's scales and puts it under her tongue.
I want to segue from Jack talking, explaining a bit about magic. I thought I'd go into the blood-salt-seawater business here: we have such strong temperature differentials here in Minnesota because we're about as far as you can get in all directions from the moderating effects of the oceans on temperature (the oceans are a heat sink). At the same time, the reason why Minnesota is strong in both winter and summer magic is because it's just about as far as you can get in all directions from the ocean, because the ocean is a giant reservoir of salt, and salt leeches away magic. (And you wondered why we put salt on the roads in the wintertime!) Blood is mystically linked to the ancient oceans, too. Anyway, as Jack is talking about all this, the magical effect he was trying to set up starts to work on Solveig, and she finds she is paying less and less attention because something is happening to her: she's becoming bonded to the fish. I don't know yet what the fish will say to her, but I knew I was ready to write up to that point: describing the dreamy half-state she achieves when she drifts from paying to attention to what Jack's saying into a state where she is present in the now and gradually the reader realizes she has fallen into the fish's point of view, a very alien mind set indeed. I had done some automatic writing from the fish's point of view, what it might say, and wanted to push the writing toward that, even if I don't yet know what the fish says specifically. In a way, what I'll be attempting to do here is quite similar to what I did in the first chapter of my first book, when Jena "fell" into Morgan's ring, imagining it to be like a deep well that was pulling her into dark water.
I was at yoga class on Tuesday. I am just a raw beginner, and I struggle not only with the poses but with achieving the state of mind necessary to do the practice. Synchronize the breathing with the movement, be present in the moment, ignore all the people around you, eliminate any competitiveness, and just be. It doesn't come naturally to me: the breathing, for example, is a particular difficulty. I feel as though I am struggling not to rush ahead to the next pose so that I can inhale, or that I am not exhaling enough, etc. At the end of the class, we lay on the floor and the instructor dimmed the lights and spoke to us about that state of mind. I nearly fell asleep because I was so tired. And as I drifted into that peculiar dreamstate between sleeping and wakefulness, I thought about my breath being suspended between what felt right because it was what my body needed at that moment, and the demands of something else out there (as when I'm trying to synchronize my breath with the rest of the class in time with the poses), and suddenly it felt like a blinding insight: my god, that's exactly what Solveig feels when she starts to fall in synch with the fish. It's this dreamlike state: and she's aware not only of her breath, but she's uncomfortable because she's synching with a being that breathes entirely differently, that in fact breathes underwater. When you think of it, fish would be sort of the ultimate Zen masters, always present in the Eternal Now. It is only when she enters that state that she can understand what the fish is saying to her. And she recognizes the state: she has touched it briefly in the past when she has tried to do yoga.
I still also like and want to use the vertigo idea. This is like Tim Powers' "bar time" idea in Expiration Date (where Pete and Sukie, characters who are magically attuned, realize that they are entering an area that is a magical zone when they experience the strange sensation that they can sense and react to stimuli before it actually occurs.) When Solveig is entering a state where she is attuned with her winter magic, she experiences vertigo. I've experienced vertigo; when you have it, you are dizzy, but more than that, you experience lines and angles around you as peculiarly emphasized, significant, and you waver back and forth between feeling that they are right or sometimes subtly "wrong." I think this would be particularly interesting for someone who is as visually attuned as an architect.
The scene I was working on last November when my computer crashed and that I have resumed working on now is one of the last things that happens before the ice palace gets built. Jack and Solveig have Revealed All to each other and decided that they are allies, sort of (although Solveig still doesn't trust him entirely. And Jack hasn't quite decided whether he is, in fact, trustworthy). Without any explanation, Jack takes Solveig ice fishing; what he's really doing is taking her to talk to the fish. I had an interesting time trying to figure out how to do this, practically. When Solveig heard fish before, she was actually underwater. But that didn't seem particularly appealing in this scene. I mean, come on: it's December in Minnesota. So what I have them do is this: they catch a fish and put it into a bucket. Jack cuts Solveig's finger and has her put her hand in the bucket and swish it around so that her blood passes through the fish's gills. And he takes one of the fish's scales and puts it under her tongue.
I want to segue from Jack talking, explaining a bit about magic. I thought I'd go into the blood-salt-seawater business here: we have such strong temperature differentials here in Minnesota because we're about as far as you can get in all directions from the moderating effects of the oceans on temperature (the oceans are a heat sink). At the same time, the reason why Minnesota is strong in both winter and summer magic is because it's just about as far as you can get in all directions from the ocean, because the ocean is a giant reservoir of salt, and salt leeches away magic. (And you wondered why we put salt on the roads in the wintertime!) Blood is mystically linked to the ancient oceans, too. Anyway, as Jack is talking about all this, the magical effect he was trying to set up starts to work on Solveig, and she finds she is paying less and less attention because something is happening to her: she's becoming bonded to the fish. I don't know yet what the fish will say to her, but I knew I was ready to write up to that point: describing the dreamy half-state she achieves when she drifts from paying to attention to what Jack's saying into a state where she is present in the now and gradually the reader realizes she has fallen into the fish's point of view, a very alien mind set indeed. I had done some automatic writing from the fish's point of view, what it might say, and wanted to push the writing toward that, even if I don't yet know what the fish says specifically. In a way, what I'll be attempting to do here is quite similar to what I did in the first chapter of my first book, when Jena "fell" into Morgan's ring, imagining it to be like a deep well that was pulling her into dark water.
I was at yoga class on Tuesday. I am just a raw beginner, and I struggle not only with the poses but with achieving the state of mind necessary to do the practice. Synchronize the breathing with the movement, be present in the moment, ignore all the people around you, eliminate any competitiveness, and just be. It doesn't come naturally to me: the breathing, for example, is a particular difficulty. I feel as though I am struggling not to rush ahead to the next pose so that I can inhale, or that I am not exhaling enough, etc. At the end of the class, we lay on the floor and the instructor dimmed the lights and spoke to us about that state of mind. I nearly fell asleep because I was so tired. And as I drifted into that peculiar dreamstate between sleeping and wakefulness, I thought about my breath being suspended between what felt right because it was what my body needed at that moment, and the demands of something else out there (as when I'm trying to synchronize my breath with the rest of the class in time with the poses), and suddenly it felt like a blinding insight: my god, that's exactly what Solveig feels when she starts to fall in synch with the fish. It's this dreamlike state: and she's aware not only of her breath, but she's uncomfortable because she's synching with a being that breathes entirely differently, that in fact breathes underwater. When you think of it, fish would be sort of the ultimate Zen masters, always present in the Eternal Now. It is only when she enters that state that she can understand what the fish is saying to her. And she recognizes the state: she has touched it briefly in the past when she has tried to do yoga.
I still also like and want to use the vertigo idea. This is like Tim Powers' "bar time" idea in Expiration Date (where Pete and Sukie, characters who are magically attuned, realize that they are entering an area that is a magical zone when they experience the strange sensation that they can sense and react to stimuli before it actually occurs.) When Solveig is entering a state where she is attuned with her winter magic, she experiences vertigo. I've experienced vertigo; when you have it, you are dizzy, but more than that, you experience lines and angles around you as peculiarly emphasized, significant, and you waver back and forth between feeling that they are right or sometimes subtly "wrong." I think this would be particularly interesting for someone who is as visually attuned as an architect.