notes for cabinet particulier, part i

Maude Fealy, American actress, circa 1901

Dear Internet,
I spent most of last week working on my book by scraping most of my original notes, reworking some plot points, researching down rabbit holes, outlining the first six chapters, and taking copious new notes. I reactivated my Tumblr/Pinterest accounts for the book for inspiration and historical note taking as well as started a Pinboard bundle for other links of research/interest/do-not-forgets.
I am insanely curious of how other people approach their writing habits/research/thought process, even more so on topics of specific interest to me. When I come across these works of fictional interest and there is no research notes, thoughts, or the only comment is something along the lines of “well-researched/heavily researched,” I am suspicious. I am, at heart, a librarian after all and part of my job is to verify the authority of a work. Example: I was looking for other titles in my time period and came across a soon to be released YA title of interest by someone who lived in England for numerous years and showed horses/was a horse trainer. The book has nothing to do with horses, but is about a young girl who is breaks free from social ties to go to art school. Early reviews have been hugely favorable on the work and much of the commentary notes how heavily researched and accurate to the period the book is. Fabulous! Good to know! But where did this person get all their research from since the only bio background they provided was they trained horses and lived in England? Why is there not a bibliography page or something of note to let readers wander through related interests on their own, even on their website?
[Addendum: Krazy Kate, once when we got into a heated debate about Dan Brown, said the whole reason she adored Dan Brown was that he had a bibliography at the end of each book. I have to grudgingly give the man props.]
I purposefully made the conscious effort to keep track of all my research, online and off, for this specific complaint. It keeps me better organized and I know others are looking for the same research so why not keep make it freely available?
My specific interest for the book is 1890s – 1915 or thereabouts, with the main action to take place sometime between 1907-11 England. Depending on the geography, this period is referred to the Gilded Age (US), Edwardian (UK), or Belle Époque (France) with Art Nouveau and Modernism filling in the edges.
I love this period for its swift social, cultural, and technology changes. It was important to me to have a time that I could play with and bend to my will, that things my character do are not so far removed from modernity as we know it, but new enough to raise an eyebrow or two in the time the books are being written. Motor cars, electricity, telephones, indoor plumbing, bicycles, public transportation, portable photography –  the list goes on of the number of things that we take for granted every day but were all coming of age during this period. I wanted my main protagonist to have the latest and greatest but have it still have new enough that it would be considered. I wanted to specifically concentrate before the First World War or even before the Titanic sinks. I wanted the real world to still have a touch of innocence to her before all the chaos of the 20th century takes its hold.
My main protagonist is an American stage actress living in London who makes a modest living and occasionally gets close to being famous except for one thing: She has massive stage fright. She gets such anxiety over public speaking, which has gotten worse as she gets older, she’s barely able to support herself. She is beyond beautiful (Maude Fealy is one of my female inspirations), but she’s getting a little long in the tooth for this acting business and frankly, she’s a bit bored with it all. She has lived a bohemian life (married numerous times our girl has and also counts numerous women of note in her conquests), but she wants something more. She is bestowed a Kodak Brownie from one of her admirers and everything changes.
I wanted her to be “other” enough (American, living/working in England, going against societal rules) that some of her actions would not seem out of line with her personality but with enough toes in the formality of the period to not be rejected from “those who matter.” I imagine it would not be too difficult of a  stretch for her to have dinner with Arthur Conan Doyle, be escorted to a ball given by P.G. Wodehouse, or flirt with Henry James. The working title, Cabinet Particulier, is Edwardian slang to refer to a private rooms, usually in restaurants, where men would meet their mistresses. I liked the sly side wink of the context and the infinite possibilities of the suggestion.
When I got the idea of the book in the summer of 2012, I thought it would be a good idea to research everything from class and behaviour, to theater of the period, even make up and shopping . I also thought it might be a good idea to read authors written in the era and downloaded whatever I could from Amazon (or Project Gutenberg) of  works from G.K. Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling, P.G. Wodehouse, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and so on. Contemporary authors writing fiction in the period are slim, namely as many pick up with the First World War and go forward, or they skip over the Edwardian age by calling it high Victorian and wrap everything under a single bow. I’m half way through Sick of Shadows, the third book the M.C. Beaton Edwardian series, which has been great for research as I’ve been keeping tabs of slang, behaviours, and other things of interest. I’ve also started a list of future reads over at Amazon as I find them.
As always, any suggestions for authors / blogs / interest, please don’t hesitate to pass them along!
x0x0,
Lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe: 2011

Brevis in longo

Dear Internet,
Apparently, I’m pretty prolific. In addition to upping my writing here, I’ve also been writing every day in DayOne, which I mentioned here, and also actually working on my fiction. There is one thing to be said for a humanities scholar: We know how to crank out verbiage like no one’s business. Between the three, and this is including the re-writes of public blog entires and the fiction, I’m cranking out about 5,000 words a day. And that is being conservative. Now how much of that is “good” writing? Hard to say, really. My writing in the public sphere tends to be tighter since I obsess over the editing, the writing on the private journal has better readability (because I an writing more freely and more about the minutia of my life), while the fiction writing is still uneven in a deckled edged way. Some of what I produce for the fiction side is dreck and other times, it’s pure gold.
(Also, I decided to style myself as a modern day Samuel Pepys, at least in my head.)
I think one of the reasons why this is becoming a lot easier is that I have finally figured out a system that works for me to keep all of this organized which was so problematic for me for years. I know, it’s crazy considering that I organize shit for a living, but I couldn’t organize my writing to really work for me until now. Finding the Day One app was probably the tipping point, and also being a heavy user of Evernote and Scrivener also helped.
Here’s the status of my current projects, and which will find it’s way to Readers. The main landing page for my writing will also have all posts about this topic on the page, and if a project has their own landing page, those too will have posts updated on their landing page. Thus, if you’re hot into Edwardian good times but not Viking gore, you can skip directly to the landing page for the Edwardian projet instead of slogging through all the posts about Vikings and everything else.

Books

Project Name: Cabinet Particulier
Status: Research
Details of the project on its own page, so I won’t repost them here. I started collecting the research in July and currently haven’t moved forward yet other than doing the readings. Ideally, I see this as a pretty big project (read book series) so I want to get it off to a good start and I have a vague idea of how the first book will go, I want to dig deeper into her world before I begin writing.
Project name: Unnamed Medieval project
Status: Idea formation and preliminary research
Details: At this point I know it’s going to concern a woman, possibly in Scotland, sometime before 1066. Possibly containing Vikings.

Short Fiction

Title: PETITIONS OF THE GODS
Status: 80% finished
Summary: From my notes: Anonymous protagonist gives background on the invitation, a brief history of the Althing, and beginning of the world creation.Our protagonist is losing power and she knows this. The struggle with her, and with others like her, is how to remain relevant in a world when less number of people are believing in them. What would you do to stay relevant?
The beginning and ending are strong, but I’m floundering in the middle. It’s already at 2500 words with some heavy revision in the last week, so much so that the outtakes have their own folder in Scrivener. TheHusband read one of the first drafts and liked a lot of the clever uses for explanation of things but I can’t unstick the sticky at the moment. While I think this is at 80%, I would not be surprised if I end up ripping it entirely apart and restructuring all of it.
Title: AD LIBITUM
Status: 80% finished
Summary: What happens inside the Sistine chapel when no one is looking? Answer: Sex, drugs, and disco.
Idea sparked a “what if” when reading an article tonight about Russia’s Golden Ring and the author wrote eloquently about the medieval cathedrals and churches they were visiting. The line, “Jesus jumped off the cross, stretched, and went to light a cigarette.”, which sparked the idea of what in the hell happens in a cathedral at night when no one is around? Within minutes, I found this gorgeous virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel and the story started writing itself.

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So far, I have nearly a dozen people signed up for Readers, which is awesome. I haven’t decided if I should close the request at this point or keep it open. I had planned on start pushing some of my older stuff through the list to get those cleaned up and publishable, but after reading through many of them decided not to. They are that wretched or I am not into the genre as much anymore or the story just doesn’t appeal to me. So they will stay buried in the digital trunk.
I’m so motivated to be creating again but I keep thinking what do I want to do with the stuff that I create? I definitely want it to be read by the world, but how to go about that is tap dancing in the back of my brain. Having been a bookseller for many years, I work now as a librarian, and then throw in all the writers, literary agents, artists, booksellers, and other people in the publishing world I either know personally or stalk online, I feel pretty grounded on the back end o the industry. I just want to make sure that I do the right thing by my work.
I was pretty thrilled to discover Duotrope yesterday in my quest to sort out submission organization for at least the short pieces because my librarian-fu was actually failing me looking for a comprehensive source for magazines, literary zines, and other such publications to submit my work to. At the very least, I know this is the path I want to take with my shorter fiction. I’m also thinking of some kind of crowdsourcing shenanigans might also be in place too. This is going to be amazing.
TTFN,
Lisa

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