My dinner with Pat

[pegkerr]

I got together with Pat Wrede last night at the Good Earth restaurant, which is our place for noodling books. She got a big plate of nachos with beans and cheese, and I got the black bean and yam ragout, and I handed her the five or so pages that I read at World Fantasy. She read them and made appreciative noises, and then we plunged to work. I took notes, but as often happens, they looked incoherent to me afterwards.

I explained the fish-winter birds-summer mosquito magic. "But I don't know what it does yet," I added glumly. I gave her some background on Solveig, Agnes, and Ingrid. Then we discussed Jack and the ice palace. I told her some of the snippets of scenes I've written so far, about other scenes that I've seen in my mind's eye but haven't written yet.

We talked about summer, autumn, fall, spring, and earth, water, air and fire. A certain amount of scribbling on paper followed, as we tried to figure out which elements corresponded to which seasons. I had mapped out the seasons in my notes as follows:

Air is hot and wet (spring)
Fire is hot and dry (summer)
Water is cold and wet (winter)
Earth is cold and dry (autumn)

Pat thought that instead the order should be
Air is hot and wet (summer)
Fire is hot and dry (autumn)
Water is cold and wet (spring)
Earth is cold and dry (winter)

But after we wrangled back and forth a bit, Pat sensibly pointed out that it didn't matter; all the elements must be in balance, and were in fact present in all four seasons. "That might be a mistake that someone (Solveig?) would make, to think only in terms of oppositions, when in fact everything must be in balance."

"Who's Jack?" she asked me, eating another nacho. "Is he human, or supernatural, or what?"

"I don't want him to be just an ordinary guy," I said slowly. "I see him as sort of a smart-ass. I'm not sure whether I can write a smart-ass effectively."

She waved my doubts aside. "Smart asses can be done. Just look at some of the Blake 7 shows."

"I've never watched Blake 7," I had to admit.

Her eyes widened. "You've never watched Blake 7."

I shook my head, sorry to disappoint her.

"Well, anyway. . . look at Han Solo. Or Steve Brust's Vlad."

"Anyway," I went on, "about Jack. He has powers . . . he can make people ignore it when he says or does something strange. I think he has unnaturally long life. Solveig sees a picture of someone helping to build the 1886 ice palace, and she thinks it must be a relative of his, because it looks exactly like him. Only later does she realize that the person in the photograph is really him. But I kind of want him to end up with Solveig at the end. And if he is the actual king of winter, and elemental, well, they might not have much of a future together."

She nodded. "Well, there are some questions you always need to ask: what's the magic for? What's the cost of using it? How does it affect people? And if you are hypothesizing magic in our everyday world, why is it not visible to a lot of people? Why aren't people using it all the time?"

"I'm . . . not sure." I thought a bit. "Maybe the magic has something to do with . . . blood? There are the mosquitoes, after all. And I'm hypothesizing that there's something special about the hunting of the birds and the fish. Ice fishing. Duck hunting. Maybe you have to kill the magical animals to get the magic."

Our discussion ranged far and wide, and I don't think I could reconstruct exactly which thoughts led to others. But here are some things we wrestled with:

Perhaps Jack is a magician, or a shaman or something. Someone who is using or taking the magic. What use do people make of magic? Pat suggested power or riches or long life.

Pat thought that I seemed to have several kinds of magic operating here. "This summer/winter/birds/fishes stuff sounds like a sort of natural world magic. Kind of like Native American shamanism. And the idea of the fish deep underneath the ice . . . lots of Native American stories of vision quests talk about going down into holes into the earth, sort of like the journey into the unconscious. And you might have magical animals to guide you."

I had told her about the idea of using the Lake Harriet Little Guy, and maybe a troll under Minnehaha Falls. "But that's a different kind of magic," she pointed out. "Magical creatures. Plus, there's also the problem of using Minnehaha Falls."

I knew what she meant. "I know," I said gloomily. "Emma already used it in War for the Oaks. It's kind of like it's already been taken."

"Then, if you have people using magic, like eating the Salmon or Pike of Wisdom, that's sort of a third kind of magic. That's where you add magicians or sorcerers. Is that what Jack's up to?"

"I don't know." I told her about ice fishing, that cutting a hole in the ice lets the magic out to fill an ice fishing shack. She hooted in appreciation. "So ice fishermen are really wizards or sorcerers or something."

"Uh huh. They are there to ask the fish questions."

"Or perhaps only the good ones do, and then they let them go. The bad, evil wizards catch the fish and eat them . . . sort of hoard the wisdom to themselves."

I explained that people who fell through the ice (like Solveig) do so because the fish are calling them. "But they took her father instead in the end. I don't know exactly why."

I described another scene or two to her, but she finally shook her head, cutting me off. "No, no, no," she said briskly. "You're letting yourself get bogged down at the detail level. I'm stepping back to look at the overall pattern."

"Well, that's exactly what I need to do," I said gratefully. "That's why I wanted to talk with you. What's the pattern here?"

"Well, is this a story of humans caught up in a quarrel between supernatural powers, kind of like Eddi with the fairy courts in War for the Oaks? Or is this a story of humans themselves quarreling over magical supernatural powers . . . do you see the difference?"

"I think I do. Well, maybe I should try the second. Emma's done the first."

She nodded. "So does Solveig redeem Jack, then?"

"Maybe." I frowned. "If so, I suppose it's sort of like Star Wars then, in the last movie, isn't it? 'Father . . . please.' And Darth Vadar chucks the Emperor into the abyss and sides with Luke. But I want it to be primarily Solveig's story, not Jack's."

"Well, it can be both their stories. She has to redeem herself, in order to redeem him."

All this, we agreed, seemed to imply that there was someone else acting as a villain. Human sorcerers act to unbalance the natural order. Perhaps this unknown villain wants something of Solveig, or from her. And it involves the ice palace.

"Do you have some sort of Tam Lin solution in mind, Solveig holding on to Jack, and they're both getting cold as the villain threatens to freeze them both? And Solveig says no, I'm still warm, damn you. Warm enough to stay human, and to save Jack, too."

"Maybe she could do that with Ingrid," I remarked. "I've seen a version of the Tam Lin story called The Magic Well, where it's a mother saving a daughter from the fairy queen." I thought some more. "I've had inklings that Ingrid might disappear partway through the story," I said. Karen (minnehaha) told me about the Gates Ajar at the State Fair, which is a giant staircase leading to nowhere, made up of flowers and plants. I get a mental flash of someone luring Ingrid away from Solveig at the State Fair. Solveig sees this mysterious someone leading Ingrid up the steps . . . and then she vanishes. She's been taken into a magical dimension."

"Well, that could work," Pat said. "Then you have a kid-in-jeopardy tale. Unless the villain is after Solveig, not Ingrid. Then he's using Ingrid as bait." She pondered, as she ate another nacho. "This family seems to be drawing the attention of a lot of the magic," she remarked. "Are they all magically powerful? After all, the fish called Solveig, but they took her father. And if the villain took Ingrid . . ."

And then an inspiration popped into my brain: "The villain is Ingrid's father!" The more we discussed the idea, the more we liked it. He was trying to use Solveig, maybe to tap the magical power she acquired when she fell through the ice, power she doesn't even know she has. (I think Pat had something in mind rather like the epicyclical spell from Sorcery and Cecelia). But his plans were foiled because he got Solveig pregnant! And when he went into a tirade about her becoming pregnant, she thought he was just being a jerk, but the real reason he was so angry was because the pregnancy had ruined his plans. In fact, she (and perhaps Ingrid) drew some of his power out of him. He disappears from her life. He can't do anything to her now. But he still needs what she has . . . and so he sends Jack, who is his journeyman villain-in-training, hoping that he can get from Solveig what the villain wants. Except that Jack doesn't entirely understand what the villain is up to, either.

"It has to do with the ice palace," Pat said. "That climactic scene in the ice palace. . . science is the human magic, so to speak. The villain wants to use the ice palace for his own purposes, but he only thinks of it in magical terms. But that ice palace belongs to Solveig. She designed it. She understands it, in a way that the villain doesn't. She sees it scientifically . . . and Jack teaches her to see it magically, as well.

The restaurant was closing up around us, and I was yawning nonstop, so we finally wound the conversation to a close. "You're not really ready to write yet," Pat told me. "You need to do some more reading, to feed stuff to your back brain, and some more figuring stuff out. I've ruined books for myself before when I've tried to start writing too early."

I nodded, a little discouraged, but her assessment felt right to me. "But I can still write those disconnected scenes, don't you think? The Mirror-of-Galadriel ones: 'Things that were, and things that are, and things that have not yet come to pass.'"

"Yep, you can do those, as long as you don't try to apply structure prematurely. But start reading fairy tales. Norse and Russian. And maybe some Native American ones."

"This is different than any book I've done before," I told her, "because I seem to want to write all over the book at once. That's how kijjohnson does it, writing scenes and then stitching them together, like a patchwork quilt."

"Talk to pameladean," she suggested. "That's how she works, too. Maybe she might have some other practical suggestions."

"But is is a book, isn't it?" I asked her anxiously. "There really is a book here somewhere, isn't there?"

"Oh, yes," she said confidently. "There really is something taking shape here. I think it's going to be a fine book."

There you have it. My mentor has spoken. It's going to be a fine book.

I must remember that, when I'm stuck in the miserable middle. Pat says it's going to be a fine book.

Cheers,
Peg

Comments

Re: Your novel

[peacockharpy.livejournal.com]

Gee, this sounds familiar...

I, too, got my M.A. in English Literature. My story's a little different -- I'd gotten my B.A. in a nice liberal-arts-focused school, and went to a very critical-theory-focused school for my M.A., and it didn't take long for me to see that arguing in circles about theories of literature that didn't seem to take the actual LITERATURE into account was not for me. (Not all the professors were like that -- my Old English professor said she'd take a broadaxe to anyone who tried to deconstruct Beowulf -- but most were firmly in the critical theory camp.) And there is that pesky 600 applicants for every teaching position thing, the crumbling of tenure, etc., etc. So I got my M.A. and now I write and edit proposals for an IT services company. It pays the bills; I get to go home and write.

That's why I loved the panel at WFC on "Writing Fantasy as a Second Career." As much as I love the dream of being a full-time writer, I know that it's not precisely realistic to do that -- yet. :) I cling to the hope, though. I found it interesting that they recommended having a job that DOESN'T work with words. I do find that editing/writing all day means that, come evening, I have a strong disinclination to write... but again, bills get paid, so I guess that's the trade-off.