Muchness and Light

If it ain't Alice, it ain't dead.

In December I was really struggling with the first part of my fiction project.  I wasn't sure where I was going with the story.  I had plans and character sketches and outlines, but I was really second-guessing myself.  I didn't know if I was going to stay that course or move on to a less cumbersome path. 

When I was in the midst of my crisis of confidence, I compared it to Alice facing the Jabberwocky in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland.  She isn't sure she'll be able to face her fears and do what needs to be done, to do what has been foretold in the Oraculum.  In the midst of convincing herself her tribulations are all a dream, Alice is informed by Bayard that the Mad Hatter has been imprisoned by the Red Queen.  She's determined to free her friend:

        "We're going to rescue him."

        The bloodhound shook his head.  "That is not foretold."

        "I don't care!" said Alice.  "He wouldn't be there if it weren't for me."

        Bayard stood up, his fur standing on end as he shivered anxiously.  "The Frabjous Day is almost upon us.  You must prepare to meet the Jabberwocky."

        "From the moment I fell down that rabbit hole, I've been told what I must do and who I must be.  I've been shrunk, stretched, scratched, and stuffed into a teapot.  I've been accused of being Alice and of not being Alice.  But this is my dream!  I'll decide where it goes from here."

        Bayard's claws dug into the ground.  "If you diverge from the path--"

        "I make the path!" Alice shouted.

Alice does her best to help her friend by infiltrating Salazen Grum, the castle of the Red Queen.  Unpredictability ensues, and eventually Alice takes refuge at Marmoreal, the castle of the White Queen.  She's overcome with self-doubt (as she's wont to do), and Absolem helps her remember who she is and what she needs to do.

I took a moment to quiet myself and my fears, thanks in part to the encouraging comments of friends and readers.  (And also to an ego-boosting phone chat with Absolem.)  In the stillness, I was able to listen to the characters and let them tell me where they wanted to go.  I stayed on the tangled, difficult path, but I threw the map away.  I knew there were landmarks to pass, certainly, and I managed to stay on track to those destinations.  I was pleasantly surprised to realize that I didn't have to let the journey be as complicated as I had originally envisioned.  I wasn't finding these characters; I was creating them.  Their whispers in my mind were really my own, reminding me that I knew how to do this.

I finished the first, rough draft last night.  127,381 words.  All mine, with the exception of a couple hundred that are quoted song lyrics.  (It'll all make sense when you read it.  I promise.)  Today I got the first printed and spiral-bounded mark-up copy to start editing.  I've read and reread most of it on my laptop screen several times now, but I need a hard copy to peruse and illuminate.  I was taught how to be an active reader, and I'm trying to be an active writer, as well. 

I still have a lot of work to do, both on this piece and on the rest of the project.  But I feel elated to have accomplished this milestone.  The Jabberwocky's head has definitely rolled to the side.  I think I'm going to keep the armor for a little while longer and keep slaying while I can.  I'd rather be polishing my Vorpal sword than drinking tea at a boring old garden party anyway.

 

I'll tell you all my ideas about Looking-glass House.

I'm pleased to say that I've had a really productive few days, writing-wise.  Iceapalooza 2011 forced me to spend some time working.  I managed a few blog posts, a few smaller pieces, and 11,000 words on my big fiction project.  (I'm at 111,268, which translates to 207 formatted pages in Word.)  Unfortunately, I've picked up a cold and haven't slept very well, between the coughing and just being keyed up from the cold meds. 

My restless mind woke up this morning, debating about my next blog topic.  I realized I haven't really delved into Through the Looking-Glass yet.   Let's take a little trip, shall we?

Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There opens on a wintery afternoon.  Alice is warm by the fire at home in the drawing room, watching her cat Dinah and two of her kittens, one black and one white.  Dinah is busy bathing the patient white kitten, Snowball, while the little black one, Kitty, is playing and making kitten mischief.  When Kitty demolishes on a ball of yarn that Alice has been rolling, Alice scoops her up and chides her for being a "wicked wicked little thing."

Alice lists the kitten's crimes of drinking her sister's milk and mewing while Dinah cleaned her.  Alice remarks that Kitty would look exactly like Red Queen from her chess board, if only the kitten would sit up and fold its arms.  Of course the kitten isn't cooperative in Alice's little game of "Let's Pretend."  (What cat ever is?) 

                So to punish it, she held it up to the Looking-glass, that it might see how sulky it was, "--and if you're not good directly," she added, "I'll put you through into Looking-glass House.  How would you like that?"

Alice goes on to describe Looking-glass House, which looks exactly like her own house,
in mirrored reverse.  She explains to Kitty how everything there is the same but different, how the Looking-glass House milk is perhaps not good to drink, and how she would like to explore the tiny bit of passage she can see at the back of the parlor there.    As Alice admonishes Kitty to play Let's Pretend and journey through the looking glass, the glass of the giant hearth mirror begins to "melt away, just like a bright silvery mist."

                In another moment, Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room.  The very first thing she did was to look whether there was a fire in the fireplace, and she was quite pleased to find that there was a real one, blazing away as brightly as the one she had left behind.  "So I shall be as warm as I was in the old room," thought Alice: "warmer, in fact, because there'll be no one here to scold me away from the fire.  Oh, what fun it'll be, when they see me through the glass in here, and ca'n't get at me!"

Everything Alice sees after she steps into Looking-glass House is very different from the "quite common and uninteresting" things she can see in the old room.  The chess board is askew, and the pieces are walking about the board and talking.  When Alice tries to intercede helpfully in the game, the pieces can't hear or see her and are frightened by being moved around by a huge, invisible force.  She sees a book and finds all the words are written backwards, in mirror text, of course.  The poem is "Jabberwocky", which she doesn't understand at all. 

(In the entire Alice universe, we'll see the Jabberwocky years later, if Tim Burton has anything to do with it.  And if I stand by the premise that the Jabberwocky is later representative of the physical embodiment of Alice's battle with her own self-doubt, it's interesting that it's utter nonsense to the childhood Alice.  All she understands is that "somebody killed something.")

Alice reminds herself to explore the rest of the house before she has to go back through the Looking-glass, and she decides to see the garden.  She finds that she doesn't have to walk to get down the stairs, that she can float, and must grab onto the door-post to stop herself from floating away. 

                She was getting a little giddy with so much floating in the air, and was rather glad to find herself walking again in the natural way.

She goes out to the garden but is shocked to find that the paths don't work like she expects.  They' twist and turn "more like a corkscrew than a path!"  The paths don't lead in the direction she wants to go, and she spends a long time getting turned around, but she always ends up back at the house.  She encounters the talking flowers, which are beautiful but argumentative--both with each other and with Alice.  They're judgmental and difficult, not at all what Alice assumed flowers would be like, you know, if they could talk. 

Alice is suddenly confronted by the Red Queen from the chess board, who is the same size as Alice now.  In anticipated Carroll style, the story just changes and moves on.  There's rarely any resolution to the immediacy of the situation, but that style of storytelling lends itself well to the dream-like state of Wonderland, as perceived by Alice.  She goes on through a series of loosely-connected events until she wakes and returns to her normal drawing room, with Dinah and Snowball and Kitty.

The Looking-glass House isn't all Alice thinks it's cracked up to be.  It's not an exact opposite, it's a mirror. 

For a quick refresher, mirrors work by reversing all asymmetrical objects, meaning objects that aren't superposable on their mirror images.  (Left-right reversal is a recurring theme in both of Carroll's Alice stories and nonsense writing.)  Corkscrews also come up again and again in Through the Looking-glass.  Corkscrews are helices, asymmetric three-dimensional curves that spiral in reverse in the mirror. 

So even when it seems that Alice has compensated for the visual reversal, everything still moves differently.  Except Alice.  Her right and left still function like they're supposed to; she still moves to and fro mostly as she expects her body to move, even when the world around her is in complete juxtaposition to herself. 

I think everyone wonders from time to time what it would be like to step through the Looking-glass into the giant mirror-image of our own lives, to see what it would be like to live as a slightly different version of our selves.   I also think we'd be surprised, like Alice, to find that things aren't as oppositely perfect as we'd imagined.  It would be incredibly hard to function in that place where everything is backwards while you, yourself, are forwards.  So much oppositional concurrence would be unnerving and distracting after a while.

As I've talked about before, the mirror is not always my greatest ally.  To rely on a backwards, superficial image of myself to define who I am is screwy enough, but to be forced to take the perceived imperfections with me, the ones that stare back at me so glaringly, would kind of defeat the purpose of trying somewhere new. 

Plus, I'd be afraid of what I couldn't see in the mirror.  All of the little things hiding behind the big things.  It's scary enough to live in a world where I can anticipate how the unexpected might move, but to be constantly blind-sided by complete chaos would send me down my own corkscrewing path.

There's a certain enjoyment in wondering how my life would be different on the other side of the mirror.  Ultimately I find that I'd rather stay in my own parlor, curled up by the fire, and watch my kittens creating mischief their own mischief, while I ready my yarn for creating something new.

 

No other slayer, no-how.

So I'm having a crisis of confidence today.  I'm in the middle of writing a fiction piece that's been brewing for a long time.  I'd let it sit for ages, busy with life, I guess.  I was a productive member of society, but I wasn't really working on anything for me.  Until this past October.

For my birthday (August 27th, for future reference), Dear Hubby bought me tickets to see the Gracious Few in Atlanta at the Masquerade.  I have been a LIVE fan since 1994 and had seen them dozens and dozens of times, under all kinds of circumstances.  The official announcement of their hiatus (read, "break-up") in 2009 wasn't surprising in the least, but it was painful.  All those years of built-up groupie energy were just... gone.  At the end of their time together, the Gracious Few was born, made up of Chad Gracey, Chad Taylor, and Patrick Dahlheimer of LIVE, plus Kevin Martin and Sean Hennesy of Candlebox.  (I was also a Candlebox fan, though not nearly to the same extent.  Kevin was too much of a pretty boy for me (in the 1990's anyway, compared to Ed Kowalczyk and his shaved head).

So, anyway, the Gracious Few CD came out September 14th, and it sat on my desk for nearly two weeks before I could bear to open it.  It was like meeting Dad's new girlfriend for the first time.  I wasn't really sure I would tolerate it, let alone like it.  What if she was a total strumpet?  Where would I be then?  When I finally did give it a listen, I fell head-over-heels in love.  It's a really fantastic rock album.  It's not alternative, it's not adult contemporary, just balls-to-the-walls rock.  And it's really good.  (Try it!  You'll like it!)  It's one of a handful of albums I have ever immersed myself in for weeks on end.  My poor boys were subjected to it three and four times a day.  Three months later, it's still my favorite playlist for working out--it makes me want to sweat!

   DH and I went to the Masquerade, sat in the will-call line, made it inside.  Six Shot Revival was surprisingly good and had some hard core fans in the audience.  American Bang was fun.  Then the Gracious Few came on.  There were maybe 150 people there (based on what I saw when I turned around from the

front), nothing like the thousands upon thousands both LIVE and Candlebox have traditionally entertained.  (Interestingly, TGF was playing in the Hell theater.  GWAR was upstairs in Heaven.  Their fake blood ended up dripping through the ceiling in Hell before the show was over.  It was fucking weird.)  I could go on ad infinitum (read, "ad nauseum") about why I loved that show and that music and that band.  That was the first night I got to sing with Kevin Martin from stage.  (Though I haven't seen the video or pictures, I grasp desperately to the hope that it didn't suck like it did in Chicago in November.) 

Something happened for me after that night, though, that kicked my ass into gear.  I went home and started writing again, working on this story that had been stagnating for two or three years.  This all happened to be timed with the realization that I'd lost my muchness.  DH let me check out of my life for a couple of days, and I went to Birmingham to see TGF again.  I had a remarkable time hanging out with them the night before the show, just talking about anything and nothing.  I holed up in my hotel for most of my two days in Birmingham and wrote.  And wrote and wrote and wrote.

I realized I had some verisimilitude issues.  I needed some details that I couldn't really research online, and I certainly didn't have the experiential knowledge to fill in the gaps I was finding.  I took a shot in the dark and emailed Mr. Martin and asked if he would be willing to chat with me in Chicago, before yet another TGF show.  I openly admitted that I didn't necessarily expect a response, let alone willing participation, but I was in a "nothing ventured, nothing gained" mood.  To my delighted surprise, he agreed to meet with me.  We met at the venue and talked for about an hour, the evening before the show.  I had tons of questions, and he had unexpected answers for me.  My brain churned for days, I emailed him more questions, and I was writing even more.

I was at less than 12,000 words at the first of October, leftovers from when this process had originally begun.  As of yesterday, I'm up to 95,973, and I'm about two-thirds of the way through the story, I think.  Here's the rub:

I can either continue on this path that I have laid out for myself and these characters, or I can backtrack and change direction all together.  To go forward is new, but based on a concrete past determined by the choices I have already made, both in the story and in pre-production notes.  The subject matter at this point is emotionally challenging and will continue to be so for a while.  There will eventually be a good resolution; this is ultimately a love story.  This path was planned long, long ago.  The original snippets of story were written based on these ideas and this plan.  But it's hard.

Or, I can go back and undo the harshest parts of the story and still continue on to the resolution.  It would be easier, less likely to be judged harshly by the third-party eyes that will eventually be laid on it. 

Do I want to paint the white roses red?

All day, I've been going back to the Jabberwocky.  Tim Burton's version of the Jabberwocky, mind you, slain by Alice on Frabjous Day.  The Jabberwocky is definitely the embodiment of my crisis of confidence, as it was for Alice.  Her path to slaying the Red Queen's pet with the Vorpal Sword has been laid out in the Oraculum.  Her path seems to have been decided by choices made in the concrete past.

                Alice stared at the picture of the horrible monster that was winging its way toward them.  She saw her golden hair flying as she wielded the Vorpal Sword, but she still couldn't imagine how it would feel--the thunk of the blade slicing into flesh, the scrape of its long sharp claws against her pale skin.  She was not a killer.  How could she kill anything...let alone Underland's most dreaded creature?

                Overwhelmed, Alice turned and ran out of the courtyard.  She bolted through the castle and out into the gardens until she found the hedge maze, where she threw herself onto a garden bench and wept.

                "Nothing was ever accomplished with tears," observed a voice.  Alice lifted her tear-streaked face and looked around.

                "Absolem?"

Absolem, the Blue Caterpillar, is spinning himself a chrysalis to transform into a butterfly.  Alice begs him not to go:

                "I need your help.  I don't know what to do!"

                "I can't help you if you don't even know who you are, stupid girl."

But Alice does know.  She tells Absolem, and reminds herself, of all the wonderful ways in which she is Alice Kingsleigh.  She draws upon the power of that epiphany and straps on the armor and sword of the White Queen's champion.  Alice steps up to slay the Jabberwocky.  She comments to the Mad Hatter that it's an impossible task, but then she reminds herself that she sometimes believes "as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

The Jabberwocky doesn't see Alice as his enemy, though; that's the Vorpal Sword.  Absolem tells Alice, "Remember, the Vorpal Sword knows what it wants.  All you have to do is hold on to it."  As Alice fights, she remembers the six impossible things she has learned while in Underland.  And while she's working through her own issues of self-confidence, the Vorpal Sword continues to battle the Jabberwocky, seemingly of its own accord.  Alice jumps in the air and slices the Jabberwocky's head off.

                Alice was too exhausted to speak, but the dead creature's head seemed to say everything.

Alice always had the choice to not fight.  The events detailed in the Oraculum weren't guaranteed to come true until they had actually happened.  Even though she had the support of her talking animal friends, ultimately it was Alice's decision, as she learns before her battle:

                "Alice," said the White Queen, "you cannot live your life to please others.  The choice must be yours because when you step out to face that creature, you will step out alone."

I have the choice to not follow the illustrations of my Oraculum, to ignore the character sketches and story outlines that were decided so long ago, based on some inspiration that I may or may not remember.  I don't have someone else to be my champion now.  Perhaps I let my Vorpal Sword, my thoughts and words, run of their own volition and finish this battle.  Can I believe my own impossibilities and let myself slay these misgivings?   

This choice is solely and squarely on my shoulders.  How I wish I could run to a hedge maze and cry!  I'm sure my Absolem would remind me to not be stupid and to know who I am, were he not tangled in his own gilded chrysalis.