Peg Kerr's Journal

She sat perched on the edge of the chair, fidgeting a little, in the well-appointed anteroom, which was decorated with tasteful paintings on the wall and an aquarium stocked with colorful tropical fish. She knew that the fish were there to keep people from becoming nervous, but even knowing that didn't help enough. After a short wait, she was ushered into his office. A junior flunky politely offered her a choice of soda or water or coffee, but she refused. She didn't think she could have raised the cup to her lips without the trembling in her fingers becoming totally obvious.

There were pleasantries at first. She expected that, and did her best to sound natural as she replied to his polite inquiries about the day job, the family, a recent vacation. Perhaps if she just pretended to be confident, she could finesse this interview without getting too embarrassed. The trouble was, she didn't think that she could convincingly assume an air of insouciance, particularly when all she felt was sheer terror at having to face him and admit the truth. Then he leaned forward a little, looking at the papers on the desk in front of him, and she felt a frisson of dread.

"I was so pleased with your progress the last time we visited," he told her. "The Wild Swans was--well, it made me very proud." And she believed him. That, perversely, was what made facing him now so awful. He paused, looking at her expectantly, and she realized he was giving her a chance to respond. She murmured a rather disjointed thanks, something to the effect that she was quite proud of it, too. She hoped he wouldn't think she sounded like a ninny. She also hoped he wouldn't see how wretched admitting this made her feel now.

"So tell me," he said, picking up an elegant fountain pen and holding it poised over the papers in front of him. "What have you been working on since our last meeting?"

She looked down at her hands, clenched together tightly in her lap. "I was--I had started another novel. About--about an ice palace. The St. Paul Winter Carnival ice palace, you know. The central character is the architect designing it. And it's--well. Well. About--about summer and winter magic." She cursed herself inwardly for her own stammering.

He waited, but she volunteered nothing more. "That sounds promising. It could be quite interesting, indeed." Another pause. "But you are not finished with it yet?"

Slowly, she shook her head. "No, I'm not." She heard the leather of his seat creak as he sat back, looking at her. She couldn't bring herself to look up to meet his eyes as she added faintly, "I--I don't think I'm going to finish it."

The pause that followed was very long indeed. "I see," he said. Was he angry, she wondered anxiously? Was he surprised? She couldn't tell. She could feel her palms starting to sweat. "Then--what are you working on now, Ms. Kerr?"

She could hear the faint ticking of the elegant clock on his desk. How was it possible to hear that over the thundering of her own heartbeat? Couldn't she just keel over out of sheer nerves and end the agony of this interview that way? She took a deep breath. "I'm not working on anything right now," she said, surprising herself with the steadiness of her own voice. Fleetingly, with an enormous effort, she finally raised her gaze to meet his. "I don't think I'm going to write any more novels, sir." Inwardly, she cringed. There. She had said it.

"No more novels?" Slowly, he turned the pen over in his fingers. Tap. Tap. "May I ask why you do not think you will be writing any more novels?"

She opened her mouth and closed it again as a wave of shame swept over her. Tears prickled the corners of her eyes. Oh, no. No. I swore I would not cry. "It's--it's just so hard. It's very difficult." She cleared her throat.

"Difficult." The very flatness of his voice made the inadequacy of the excuse clear.

"I'm just--well, I'm just so busy. Ferrying the girls around. Keeping up with everything. And I try to write--I try to write, and nothing comes." There were other reasons, of course. The frittering away of her time on the internet. The time spent reading junk. Why mention it? She already looked stupid enough as it was.

"But you try."

"Well. I did. I did, for a long time. Eventually--eventually, I stopped trying, you see."

Tap. Tap. "If you do not write your novels, Ms. Kerr," he said with infinite gentleness, "no one else will write them for you."

His very gentleness made her feel even worse. I will not cry. "I know that, sir," she ground out through gritted teeth.

He pulled the calendar before him forward and named a future date. "I will see you for your next report then."

"But--but I won't have anything to report," she said desperately. "I told you. I've stopped writing novels."

But he was already writing her name down on the paper, and he raised an eyebrow. "We shall see, Ms. Kerr. We shall see."

Most of my thinking about what's going on in the blog commentary about Rowling's remarks on Dumbledore is filtered through my experience in writing The Wild Swans, and particularly the difficulties and uncertainties I experienced in writing about a minority community when I'm not of that minority myself.

As I've told several people, I nearly stopped writing the book several times because I was so troubled about whether I could handle the material properly. (And let's face it, a book about sexuality, marriage, death and religion is just fated to include difficult, fraught and explosive material.) No writer should ever hold out for universal popularity, that's clear, and some people have been kind enough to say that I handled it well. But I was immensely troubled by the same issue that I believe a lot of people have latched onto when thinking about how Rowling handled Dumbledore. And yes, I did get some flack about it.

Specifically, I wrote a book where the gay character's story ended in death and tragedy, and the heterosexual character's story ended in rescue, love and redemption. Given the facts of the AIDS epidemic and the structure of the fairy tale I was basing the book upon, there wasn't much way around that, but it really REALLY bothered me, to the point that it almost made me abandon the book entirely. Because I absolutely didn't want that to be the message that people took away from The Wild Swans, that somehow gay relationships were doomed to tragedy, whereas heterosexual ones were not. I don't believe that it true about these relationships in real life.

sistermagpie has posted about this aspect specifically in complaining about Rowling's remarks about Dumbledore, although she has since locked the entry so that I can't see it.

How did I reconcile this in my mind? Well, I didn't ever manage solve it entirely to my satisfaction, really. I tried to show that Elias and Sean's relationship was the most loving one in the book, even more so than Eliza and Jonathan's, really: although Sean did indeed infect Elias, he didn't turn on him and betray him emotionally the way Jonathan turned on Eliza. And I wanted the ending, at the Quilt, to convey at least some hope, to get across the idea that there still might be a chance to save Elias, if we worked hard enough to break the curse (raising money to fight AIDS, medical treatments, etc.)

( Spoilers for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows here )

Here's my Brazen Shameless Hussy moment: bookworms_inc is going to be discussing The Wild Swans for the month of March. Join the community and have it read by March 15, and the second half of the month people will discuss it. See entry here. I'm happy to answer any questions people may have.

that The Wild Swans had a new customer review on Amazon. It's pretty disparaging, too.

If you ever wondered, yeah, authors do read their reviews on Amazon. At least I do. But I couldn't bring myself to read the latest one through all the way.

Bad reviews suck, and there's no point in reading something that would make me feel so bad. I just thought I'd mention that.

Edited to add: You know what I gotta do. I gotta write another book.

vanityfair wrote an entry about trying to convince her mom to read The Wild Swans. Her mom did not want to do so. The conversation did not go well.

It's an extremely peculiar sensation to learn that someone is afraid to read your work. After all, I don't consider myself to be a particularly scary person! (Well, that's a guess on my part, judging from the reaction Aja described. But that's what it sounds like to me.)

I find it sad that the interaction didn't work for Aja, too, because I had hoped that The Wild Swans would work exactly as she tried to use it, as something to prompt honest reach-across-the-barrier conversations.

Eh well, maybe Aja's mom will read it yet. Or if not, another book that accomplishes the same purpose.

Peg

I have been prowling the Wiscon parties. It's late, and I'm tired, and I'm going to one of the "living rooms" discussions at 10:00 a.m. that Pat Murphy is leading tomorrow, on being a mid-career writer (limited to 25. Other participants include Louise Marley, Terri Windling, Delia Sherman, Ellen Kushner, Midori Snyder, etc. Oy.) However, I'm restless, and not quite ready to go to bed. kijjohnson disappeared part way through the evening, and I'm wondering where she is. Had long great talks with a number of people. Debbie Notkin and I grabbed a moment to re-connect. I told her that when I saw her, I felt a terrible pang, and she said immediately, "I know exactly what you're talking about. You're thinking of Jenna Felice."

( Jenna Felice )

She was too damn young.

Here's a memorial page for Jenna.

Peg

Okay, so this one made me cry.

Thanks, musewhipped. And thanks, vanityfair, for leading her to the book in the first place.

Peg

Interesting: I'm not the only person to see the structural similarities between The Wild Swans and the Glass Harmonica by Louise Marley (see my discussion of The Glass Harmonica in last June's book list). According to ( this reader, )The Wild Swans did not come off very well by comparison.

Peg

I mentioned in a comment to my last entry that I sometimes will "imprint" on real people when creating a character, and that I actually went back to take a picture of a waiter once because he was Elias. sundancekid asked if I still had those pictures.

I tried to download these pictures from the files section of the Yahoo group that was set up about The Wild Swans, but readers of my LiveJournal can't see those pictures unless they're already members of that group, I think. I'll try to figure out a way around it, but at any rate, for now you can see the pictures by going to the Yahoo group and joining it, and then you can view the pictures in the files section. The discussion in this Yahoo Group has been pretty quiescent for a while now, but you might join it just to look at all the old messages where I talked about the process of writing it, if you're interested.

Peg

I still have not figured out my next book. But I think I have figured out the book AFTER my next book.

My sister-in-law Tricia, a professor of French literature at University of Wisconsin Eau Claire, was burbling to me recently about the fascinating life of Madam Tussaud (of the wax museum fame). She was sort of the Forrest Gump of the French Revolution: she made the death masks of Louis the XVI, Marie Antoinette, Marat, Robespierre. She was an artist at the Court of Versailles, and then she was in thick with the revolutionaries. Finally, she went to England, where as a single mother, she built a hugely successful business. . .

I thought about Tim Powers' The Stress of Her Regard, which made a fantasy novel out of the stranger-than-fiction lives of Keats, Byron, and Shelley. Why not do something like that, making a fantasy novel out of the life of M. Tussaud? So I called Tricia to pump her for more details. I asked her if she would mind if I took the material and did something with it. She said, no, not really, "although I'd love to do something with you." I have a collaboration going with kijjohnson already, on hold at the moment. I think I want my next novel to be something I write entirely by myself--I have to remember how to DO that. But Tricia's right: this is good material. Judging from Tricia's description, Madame T. was an extremely determined and strong woman, just the kind of juicy character I'd like to play with, and I also think it would be a great experience to collaborate with Tricia. I like Tricia a lot; it would be fun for us to work together, and having someone who knows a helluva lot more than I do about French history (not to mention the French language, although I can speak it a little) would certainly make everything easier.

That made the decision easy: we will certainly consider doing it together, as a collaboration--after I write my next novel by myself.

So . . . uh . . . that still leaves the question of what my next novel should be. Hmm.

I looked at more Grimm Fairy Tales tonight, and browsed through Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment. Nothing quite leaps out at me. I think I need to check out some different fairy tale collections, maybe looking at some more obscure ones. There's also the possibility of expanding upon a ballad; kijjohnson suggested checking out The Oxford Collection of Narrative Poetry.

Mmm . . .

I do quite admire Powers' work. He likes to take the strange events of history and ask, "Okay, what was really going on here?" and come up with a fantastical explanation, but one which still fits the historical events.

But if I do try to do something like that--well, I did discover one big difference for the writer in writing a book like my first and one like my second: My first novel was in my own made up world. But my second was based on real historical events. If you're dealing with our world's history, even alternate history, it can take a huge amount of effort to get those historical details right. That can be fun, but it can also be anxiety-producing, and a real time sink. With The Wild Swans I also could compare the experience of writing the 17th century section with writing the 20th century section. The 20th century section was much more nerve-wracking, because I knew there were people who were alive who had LIVED through it, and if I didn't try really really hard to get it right, they would throw the book across the room, saying, "No, no, it didn't happen that way at all!"

So: older history is less stressful, and a made up world is less stressful still.

(Or maybe I was just less fussy with my first book???)

Peg, still thinking