9/19/01

I don't know if you've been paying as much attention to my life as I have been, but if you had, you might have notice that I drop many, many comments as to the existence of a novel-in-progress, without any definite proof of there being such a thing.

And Leslie asked me point-blank about it, and I dodged the question. No doubt I do spend the odd moment on it, but odd moments are few and far between.... And sometimes I try to justify the sheer amount of energy I put into it, and if I were a reasonable person I would have given the nonsense up years ago. As it is, I can't.

I'm taking a yoga class, and at the end we meditate. And the point of meditation is to think of nothing. This for me is the limit (as in calculus, silly, one approaches the limit, but can't reach it) I'm having trouble even approaching. My mind is in constant turmoil, and the only way I know to rest, to sleep, is not to silence those voices (for that is impossible), but to distract them. Therefore my novels, for there have been many, are a progression of my only recourse, my only method of sleeping at night... written down only to progress the plot, for if they're not recorded, it ends up being the same scene acted over and over again... Or at least that's how it started. But I do it all the time, waiting out centrifuge runs, developing film, walking to the bus stop or to work, on the bus, eating breakfast, brushing my teeth... I have this deep internal stuff going on all the time, so much that often I can't even hear people talking to me.

So, I can't meditate. The whole perverted "don't think of elephants" trick.

Don't think of anything.

But I was trying, and reflecting later on the issue, I came to a realization, in light of recent events.

The novel before this one (were you wondering where I was going with this, or what?) was tossed over twice, that is, I was working on it, I dropped it for another novel, and then I went back to it, and a few months ago I dropped it again for the present work in progress. The first time was over technical difficulties, and a brilliant new idea for a brilliant new work. The second time also involved a brilliant new idea, but the difficulty wasn't technical so much as ideological.

The problem was that at the end of the book a whole world had to be destroyed. The cycle of life had to be completed so that the soul of one woman would be free. For one person, a whole world... And I guess, it wasn't so much that, for the world wasn't exactly a real place (though one imagines it was to those who lived there...) but that the avatar of destruction was a teenage girl who would have to personally oversee the slaughter of millions, starting with her mother's ex-boyfriend and ending with her own friends, her steed, and then the gods themselves. It was all very dramatically appropriate, and the only ending possible. And the reason I gave it up was that I thought one day, in the bathroom (which is the only place I truly feel safe to think on such things at work, apart from the dark room of course), that I didn't think the world needed such a book.

I mean, really, look at it:

Part One: the disappearance of three people
Part Two: the attempted rescue fails, one person reappears, one more disappears
Part Three: the world is ripped apart... and one of the disappeared reappears.

That's a fairly poor message indeed. Though I haven't told you the whole truth, that Janie was trained to end the world because it was the only way to get her father back.

Okay, maybe I should back up. The technical difficulty that halted the story once wasn't fixed, it was ignored. There aren't any details on how any of this is possible, but here goes:

Part the First: the company creates a world, but it's somehow real. they send an expeditionary force of two, and one of the two is missing (actually, he's sort of dead), then Janie's mother disappears, and finally the company's CEO.

Part the Second: Janie and her father go out to seek her mother, but instead they meet a god. Two more people follow, and by-and-by they find out that Janie's father cannot leave while the world exists, but they rescue the CEO. and Janie, because she's destined to be the apocalypse, is expelled from the world until the time is right for her return.

Part the Third: years later, Janie returns and the world is ended with much blood and tears and poetic waxings. her mother is never seen again (actually, though she has been much discussed in both worlds, after her abduction in part one, nothing has been seen of her). only Janie's father returns with her to the real world.

I hope you see my point. I couldn't go on with that, in part because I couldn't do it justice. I'm a frivolous girl, and I won't admit to more, but to level the universe, to strip it until there is nothing but the very rocks and the water, and the weather, with no animal, no plant, no bacteria left, it is not something I can treat in a manner as it would deserve. But perhaps more importantly it is not a thing which I want to contemplate before I go to bed. I don't want the world to end, even if it is just a little fictive thing, even if it's the dream within a dream. I don't want to propagate the idea that it would be alright to do so in some circumstances, because circumstances can be widened. And then no world would be safe.

But at least I know she wept as she unsheathed her sword.

Kisses and good wishes,

Cecily
AIM: astormorray

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