Made up the word shortfall, but didn’t go to the studio — did some errands instead. Serious ham sandwich craving in the evening — I was full on hungry, and hungry very specifically for a ham sandwich! Lucky the supermarket is just around the corner. I bought some partridge eggs while I was there. Deep fried partridge eggs on skewers with chilli sauce are a popular street food here. I think I’ll just try boiling them and making tiny little fried eggs.

700 words. 300 short — so I’ll try to make those up tomorrow, which is otherwise going to be a day off at the studio.

I cut a whole scene. However I played it I couldn’t get it to work. It wasn’t bad in itself; it just never felt right in the general flow. I find that more often than not, when a scene or a paragraph or a sentence isn’t working after I’ve fiddled and fiddled with it, it needs to be cut. Dumped, moved or redistributed — but taken out of where it is.

So now I have a few hundred words of plot material to be managed later, in conversation or flashback or mentioned in passing. Or not mentioned, if its absence won’t be noticed.

Well, I’ve nearly reached the end of a whole month of fairly healthy eating. My ankle’s good enough that I think I can get back to tai chi again, if I go easy on that foot. And I seem to have lost that kilo a second time — maybe a couple of its friends will follow it!

Anyway, making a daily report seemed to work so well that I think I’ll do it for Gunpowder Tea as well. The first 13,000 words are sitting there, still not where I want them to be. And they need to be where I want them to be, or I can’t finalise the bridging part that joins them to the second half, which was the first part that I wrote, before the plot came along, and with which I’m generally happy. It needs work, but I think I can see what kind of work, which is often not the case with the first half.

I’ve done a bit of liposuction and minor jiggling on the first part that I posted as a WIP. A couple of things I took out might get mentioned later, but it doesn’t really matter if there’s no room. I’m now looking at 11,000 words to work on. I want to panel beat 1000 words a day, with two days off or mostly off each week, which doesn’t sound like much, but I’m having enough trouble with this section that I doubt I can go more quickly. The point of a daily report will be to help me not get discouraged and skive off, as I’ve been tempted to do lately. It might also — this I really hope — galvanise my brain into working out some pace and sequence stuff. I need to look at some earlier drafts, from before I got deep into second guessing myself, and possibly use material from them.

Monday start, because it’s too weird to start a work thing on a Sunday, though I’ll probably do some work tomorrow anyway.

(ETA 21/8/11 — reloaded with changes.)

Before I change my mind. This is the first 2700 words, after a certain amount of culling. There are still bits that I could pull out, but I’m competely unable to choose which bits. Maybe nothing needs to go. If you read this and feel like you’re in William Morris wallpaper and not enjoying it, I wouldn’t mind knowing. Gwynn gets a fair bit of intro time; since it’s such a long piece I thought he might need it, but I could be wrong — when it’s finished I might find it doesn’t need so much at the beginning, or needs something different. The working title is Gunpowder Tea, but I’m also thinking of Leaves on the Tea Road. In any case, thank you for reading (if you do) and I hope there’s something to like in here!

GUNPOWDER TEA

1 – Soldier of Fortune

‘The mountain life is a life for a man –’ bawled Worth, with no tune but with brio – ‘who has doubts about the use of a retirement plan –’

Worth’s head, quite lividly grey, had suddenly poked out of the dimmer grey plane of the rock on Gwynn’s right, a few feet ahead of the horse, like a puffball bursting up in a road.

The tired horse plodded on without twitching an ear. Gwynn evaluated the apparition to be a measure of his own fatigue, perhaps acting in conjunction with his mind’s opinion that more should be visible than was.

The apparition said as he passed by it: ‘Home and hosed; once we’re at the Arkong we’re home and hosed, my dear.’

Gwynn looked away into the darkness. When he glanced back over his shoulder there was no Worth in the earth. He had gone back into the silence proper to one of his station. Gwynn looked once more to the shadows in front, a look of being taxed by circumstances somewhat marking his mien.

Under other circumstances, he would have sunk his soul into the soaring and plunging choreography of the cloven crags and pinnacled cliffs whose contours hemmed the gorge. To his injured eyes, however, there was nothing more to the scenic banquet of wild rocks and vertical peaks than a few lumps and bumps in a plenum of linty gloom that was keeping his face cold above the fur collar he had turned up. The last several days it had snowed, and now and then he made out the pale mark of a drift against the off-black background. The precipice on his left was marked by a separation of dark tones between the trail ahead and the empty air. The rhubarb-rhubarb of the river was boxed in subfusc obscurity than which the rubbery sky was hardly less sub or fusc.

The horse navigated the rather informal trail with head hanging. It had last eaten well a week ago, when a monastery had provided a rare night under shelter. He could all but feel the urge to mutiny struggling for expression in its obedient brain.

He might well have hung his own head – still decorated with silver combs, looted from the boudoir of a titled lady, in what not everyone would have called a display of good taste. Had he been given to self-criticism, he might have damned the bloodymindedness with which he had set out chasing a rumour in the multitudinous mountains between Usk and Maghia, at the onset of winter, with an idiot for a companion, when he was going blind.

Either he had not correctly followed the directions he had obtained at the monastery or they had been wrong to start with. His only human encounter in the intervening days had been with a band of incompetent dacoits. The difficulty of viewing them had made the occasion into more than target practice, and his sight had worsened appreciably since then. Within three or four days, at his best guess, absolute night would have him bagged like a rabbit in a sack.

The joke of it all was that he would soon be a sightless and mountain-vanished rich man.

Two years ago, having had enough of the Teleute Shelf, he had taken a steamer to Sarban with the intention of fulfilling an old ambition to see the East. The attractions of the city were not to be found fault with: it was only the prisons that let the place down.

Having escaped captivity, and hearing of hills south of Kourbakhary where empty palaces of great beauty stood for anyone to walk through, he had taken that road and found a couple of villas of no special account, with the chisel-marked evidence of looted statuary everywhere. Yet with the wolves baying and the sunset fingering flowers whose names he did not know, the atmosphere was such that he felt he had not wasted his time, and he was glad that he had come.

But money concerned him. Getting wind that Baba Denard was in Usk, he had reached the border at the end of the year. He saw the black streets of the fort piled with snow, and the new battlements and the iron doors. He smelled the burnt offerings and heard the eerie blast of the horn called the ghoam from the towers and felt his blood quicken agreeably. An amused but obviously pleased Denard had shown off the recently built shrine to himself, effigy and all.

With the pelf he had amassed in the service of the old warlord-for-hire he might have bought himself a life filled with luxuries to compensate for the loss of a view.

Instead, naturally, he had made a bizarre and colossal wager, betting on the turn of a card that could hardly be hoped to exist in the pack. He was too accustomed, he realised with hindsight, to gambling with his life. Yet it had been the stylish thing to do and could not be regretted.

He fed his morale with the latter thought and with the promise that the veiled surroundings would yield up, at the very least, some person of whom he might make inquiries concerning the individual he sought. (A minor demon, firmly incapable of leaving certain temptations alone, would like to play with the image of the veil, calling it for charm’s sake the gauze blindfold inaugurating some elaborate bedchamberal epic: every day, the dingy binding is more solid and serious, the elaborations more onerous and demoralising. Perhaps the excuse would be that the veil should symbolise man in bondage to history, or something of similar public interest: a deliberately bad excuse for meetings of passion, in rooms consecrated to those nerves which are old and humble natives of the night and have one end in the luscious body of dreams, which knows nothing about time. No doubt the demon should be dismissed out of hand, but, all the same, it will try to have its say.)

The sound of daily life, when it came, was a gunshot that pounced out of the depths of rhubarb below.

2 – Landscape with Figures

From The Book of Tea:

Early man’s first impression of a world other than this one surely came from his gazing into still waters; the reflections therein planting in the creature’s growing faculty of imagination the idea of a realm lying both within and apart from his own. His first notion of another self must then have been suggested by the reflection of his own face, presenting him with a paradoxical being who was at once himself and a stranger. It is to these primitive experiences that our mysteries hearken – and perhaps even owe their origin – the liquid in the bowl recreating, in miniature theatre, the enchanted mirror of the ancient waterhole. – 9th Master of the Plains School

Although geist may be encountered anywhere at all on the Tea Road, often they are found near water or in damp places. It has been inferred that moisture acts as a generator, a preservative, or both. – Mother Anne Greenbaum

The time of harvesting is to be chosen with care, as the influence of diurnal and seasonal powers and the arrangements of the heavens affect all living things at the time of their death as much as at their birth. – Beginning Principles

The path up the rocks above the rapids was putting the tea master’s legs and lungs to a hard test. The tea master, whose name was Osen and whose age could be guessed by the white hairs dangling around the southern hemisphere of his head, on the bald northern half of which a rabbit fur cap sat like an egg cosy, had found himself once more obliged to stop and wheeze for breath. His students, meanwhile, two fair-haired Uskites who were merely middle-aged, had climbed well ahead towards their destination, a cave under an overhang to which the path, hewn into the almost perpendicular bedding planes, wound slenderly up.

The hem of a purple silk robe, appropriate for the season and his rank, lay between the dark red quilted caftan that was the tea master’s outer garment and the black robe underneath. He was further insulated by woollen leggings and sheepskin gaiters. The path was too steep for the mule on which he had ridden most of the way to the gorge, and he had gone from feeling chilly at the start of the climb to perspiring after half an hour of upwards foot slogging. He went so far as to take his cap off, and in an instant his head was cold again. Replacing the cap with haste, he checked the pocket watch with which he was confirming his interior sense of time, there being no telling the sun’s position in the whitish bog of cloud above.

It was a little early still.

The tea master made an expedition to the upper gorge of the Arkong river at least once a month. The mighty limestone cliffs, nearly espousing across the white water, in conjunction with the vigorous torrent of the river, supplied a rich elemental nourishment to the tough plants of rock ledge and boulder cleft. At this time of year there was not much to be picked, cut, scraped, or otherwise harvested; however, a helpful moss and lichen or two grew on the doorstep of winter; and the medicine planet happened to be spending the early weeks of the season in the constellation of the Ox, imprinting living things with that sign’s steady and compliant qualities, and so disposing material gathered under its influence towards reliable and by-the-book behaviour.

In the cliffs there were several caves large enough to be suitable for a ceremony. Why he had chosen this particular cave, high above the river and more difficult of access than others that would have done just as well, was a matter he had not shared with his disciples, a tall fellow named Muir and a nuggety little man called Lannick, who had now climbed out of his sight beyond a fin-shaped prominence in a wall of mounting precipices upholstered skimpily in conifers and leafless whitebeam. A little snow lay in the gouges and gullies that scored the weathered rock.

If the state of a soul was a landscape – which, as the poet of disquiet had proposed, was better than calling a landscape a state of soul – what sort of psychic condition might manifest as those lofty walls of the gorge, the two sides all but falling upon one another, yet holding apart? Was it a failure or refusal to engage (in intimacy, in war, in what risk or duty?), and who could say what the outcome would have been? Was it an immense and dignified hesitation, hesitation raised to its own abstract perfection, framed on its own without cause or consequence? Was it the almost formal gap of desire, or merely the inevitable distance between persons? Or was it grief, loss, the solace of touch prevented by the prophylactic river, a miserable sundered state so near yet so far? Was it that? It would be cheating to rule it out.

Before starting to climb again, he found himself making a mental sojourn back to a pattern on the very edge of his memory, one in which instead of the mountains there had been mere hills, planted with crops and orchards and pleasant woods, enclosing the meanders of tame rivers and crossed by roads made for the motor traffic that still occasionally rolled through his dreams. Few of the figures in that pattern had expressed a belief in spirits either of the earth or beyond it; in contrast to which this pattern’s human element was characterised by its warm embrace of superstition. Amongst its opinions, a mountain was unquestionably the home of a god, a cave a portal to fairy halls, the trees on the rocks the unpolished court of the river king.

Opinion, however, was not enough for his needs.

While reminiscence got an airing in his head, he became aware of a supernumerary person, a melancholy personality which had made its most recent appearance earlier in the morning. He had asked it to leave and it had seemed to obey, dissolving into the waxen light upon the rocks. But the discontented figure had returned, evidently having only been biding its time. He lacked a precise memory, but a familiar quality about the experience told him that he had experienced a visit of this sort when approaching corners prior to this one.

By the time he had made his way around the fin, beyond which the wall curved inwards, he expected Muir and Lannick to have reached the cave and gone in ahead of him. However, they had halted and were waiting for him about fifty feet below the dark wedge of the cave mouth – concerned, or concerned to give the impression of concern. With a negating wave of his hand he indicated that he needed no assistance.

He had hardly climbed another yard when the cave suddenly disgorged a human shape. Two more followed, carrying rifles and bounding down the path after their leader, stopping not far above the trapped figures of his students.

A demand for money was barked in coarse idiom, carrying pungently over the rumble of the water.

The evidence pointed to the trio not being fairies of the otherworld.

Osen’s knees went weak. He grabbed and clung to a branch of a young pine tree growing handily in a crevice as he heard Muir, who was inclined to be argumentative, bleat something back. The leader of the trio fired a pistol in the air. Birds burst out of the trees in the vicinity in a feathered volley of their own.

The tea master found himself gripping the branch with all his strength, as if it might save him from human hostility. He had room to feel, in the midst of shock, the apprehension of more than the outwardly obvious difficulty in the situation. It seemed possible that the party he had seen in the Corner Mirror, his meeting with whom, at this cave at midday, was to signal his turning onto the new pattern, had manifested in the inconvenient form of a bandit.

It tickled his thoughts that perhaps he had mixed another tea of vision and that at any moment he would see the furnishings of his teahouse in place of the rocks and water.

It was all rather solid and detailed for a vision, however; and he focused on the branch he was gripping to find out whether he could convince it by application of his will to turn into something else, as would be possible if a vision it really was.

He had just begun to make the mental effort when a horse fell out of the sky.

Still trying to organise lots of little points in the first third (or quarter…) of the tea master story. It occurs to me that the writing is getting in the way. I’ve reworked this so often that I’ve accumulated a lot of ornamental sentences and paragraphs. With them all in there, it’s like William Morris wallpaper — too thickly patterned all over for such a long piece of writing. There isn’t enough whitespace. I need to clear some. Then maybe there’ll be room for the material I have to fit in. This is Etched City world, so it’s with some reluctance that I strip ornament off it — but I’ve got so much that I doubt I need to worry. Ok, sharpen that blade…

In this draft I’m trying to nail down actions and conversations and basically everything to do with the plot, so that it’s all exactly where it needs to be. And also to write well enough to see the story’s face more clearly. I’m pretty sure there won’t be room for all the stuff I want to keep, but I don’t know what to throw out yet. I just put back something I liked but had cut for logistical reasons, but I thought of a way to get it back in. However, by the time I’m done with this draft I only want the ‘keep or cut’ questions to be about basically ornamental material.

This first third (or quarter, gulp) has quite a lot of ‘what goes where’ and ‘now or later’ to work out. Now that I know everything that happens, it feels like time to try to put all the muscles on the skeleton in the right places. I’m kind of hankering to post a WIP extract, but I’ve told myself I don’t get to do that until I’ve got 10,000 words of this draft.

I’ve got a cold. My sinuses are all blocked up. We got sick pretty much as soon as we got back. I’m inclined to blame planes and airports, but maybe it’s just Bangkok. Plus, I fell out of bed a couple of nights ago — or rather, to be precise, kind of missed most of the bed as I flung myself upon it in the dark of night — and hit my head on the wall. I don’t know if it’s because of that or the cold or both, but I feel pretty lethargic and groggy.

Man, that forest hideaway in the west of Ireland was so wholesome. Clean and green and quiet, fresh fish, homemade bread, pure water out of the tap… I walked and rode a bike for miles each day and still had energy to write at night. I seldom feel perky in Bangkok, even when I don’t have a cold or a bump on the head.

I’m finding it hard to think right now. I can’t write. But while I was on holiday I did some redrafting of the tea master story and I’m happier with the pacing now. The first 3/4 or so is at the point where what it really wants is a visit from the red pen, a bit of reorganising, and a lot of little nuts and bolts tightened — quite a bit of work still, actually, but no drastic changes. And no way I can do it while I’ve got this brain fog. It wants focus. As for the end, I’ve got two or three possibilities and I need to choose one. I’ve drafted an ending, but I’m not sure it’s what I want. I’ll probably have to roughly draft the other options before I’ll know which one I think is best. And the ending I choose might affect how I tweak the rest. Anyway, I’ve been working pretty obsessively on this story and I finally feel like I can take a break — or that I won’t get it finished without a break first. I think about a month will do — but maybe I’ll be itching to get back to it in a week.

In the meantime, there’s The Floating World to be getting on with, and I also want to try to get healthier. I seem to get sick a lot, and I know I’m not as fit as I used to be. And it’s hard to stay fit when you keep getting sick, and it turns into a sort of vicious circle of feeling too crap to exercise or bother cooking, and living on microwave dumplings and such, and getting sick due to not being very healthy anyway, maybe. Or something. I haven’t put on weight, but I think I have more fat and less muscle than I used to. It couldn’t hurt to be in better shape. The last few days I’ve been trying to remember to eat things like bananas and steamed fish and salad, and to take vitamin pills. And since I like ice cream, I splashed out on Ben & Jerry’s rather than the shit from the 7-11. But I need to exercise — I need to do more than Tai Chi, or if I only do Tai Chi, I need to do it for long enough to get a cardio workout. Trouble is, whenever I exercise strenuously, I seem to get sick. So I don’t really know what to do. Exercising out in the heat is not on — I used to, but couldn’t now — and I don’t like gyms. So maybe an exercise bike or a rowing machine would be the answer; then I could work out in front of the telly. Hmm…

I will get Tea Master finished. It will work. I can make it work. I have the power.

Just giving myself a pep talk!

It’s 30,000 words now, without the end. That means this draft is likely to hit 40,000 after all.

It needs a lot of work still. Not so much in terms of plot, but how the plot is presented — who says what to whom, and when, and how I juggle POV.

And characterisation. Usually that’s the one thing I don’t have to worry about. My characters tend to write themselves. If they don’t, the story, if it gets off the ground at all, doesn’t land. But I’ve had to push characters around in this and decide things for them. Now they have to get comfortable in their roles, and I have to get comfortable with them in those roles, and they and I have to work on presentation — conversation, interior dialogue, mood.

There are also scenes that half belong to older drafts that I haven’t rewritten much, if at all, because there’ll be no point doing that until I’ve got some other things sorted out.

I pulled out (for the 3rd or 4th time!) the plot element that I thought I was finally going to leave in. It was working in some ways, but not in others. It’s one story with it and a different story without it, for one of the characters; it doesn’t significantly change the story as a whole. It needs a supporting bit to hold it up, which I thought turned out to be quite a cool thing in itself, and added to the story — but it (the main thing, not the support) also brought logistic problems and made characterisation harder. I’m still not sure what I’ll do about it. (ETA: I may just have worked out a way around the logistic problem. Or not. Maybe there’s a catch…)

I so wanted to have this finished by now, and honestly, it’s still not that close. And I’m feeling tired. I probably need a breather, but don’t really want to take one. I want to be sitting and writing and feeling things clicking into place as I write. I’m bloodymindedly sure that they will click, because I refuse to have put this much effort into something that isn’t going to work. And there are parts of it that I love, and parts of it that are fine. There are just a couple of biggish locks to pick, as it were.

In the meantime, I am going to have a break, because we’re off to Ireland next week. Although I’ll be taking the laptop and probably doing some work, I hate writing on that tiny screen. I can’t see the little itty bitty words, when I make the font bigger I can’t see enough of the story (having finally got a proper monitor I can’t believe I went for years without one), and I’m not that good at working in a room where I’m not on my own. So I’m not expecting to get vast amounts done. What I’ll probably do is reread, make notes, think, move things around, get a better sense for what’s lacking and what’s overdone, and only do serious rewriting if inspired.

What I will do, between now and then, is properly write the end, or an end. It’s partly written; it just needs some steady jogging-pace writing to make it more of a finished product. I’ve got time to do it, and you never know, the end might help with the middle!

Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul has got himself into the papers lately with a put-down — not his first — of female authors.

I don’t know if it’s worth taking time out of my day to write down my thoughts about this. Probably not, though I’ve done it now. This is a good response from writer Christophee Wunderlee.

I haven’t read any of Naipaul’s work — yeah, I know, he’s one of those writers you’re meant to read, but I haven’t. And now I won’t. I’m not interested in what someone with a mind like that might have to say about the human condition, the world at large, or, indeed, so much as how to fry an egg. Defective. Out with the trash. I’d rather read Twilight.

All the same, when a writer of Naipaul’s stature makes statements like that — ill-informed, one-eyed, and nonsensical ( “inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing”…?? … Jane Austen is sentimental ..??? ) — is it enough just to laugh and shrug at a silly old fool?

When a commentator, even if only in the Telegraph, writes something as gormless as “Naipaul’s putting down of potential rivals and extravagant praising of himself was fully in keeping with a literary tradition that goes back to the time of Shakespeare and Marlowe. The self-regard of an author is to be expected.” — does one just chuckle and say, “Oh, those men, they’re at it again — and let’s forgive Polanski while we’re at it — because men’s genius, and men’s egos, are more precious than anything?” If a woman is not a complete master, of a house or anything else, and it happens to come over in her writing, is that any worse than the egoism of a man who feels he is master of the fucking universe showing through in his writing?

I hope no woman reading Naipaul’s words feels discouraged from doing her best and being her greatest (or from taking up space and time with her words at all!), or gets the idea that “greatest” means “most like famous and successful men” — or, on the other hand, that “her greatest” can only mean greatest on a small scale; that she should never attempt a big, bold project about nations and the sweep of history, because they are reserved for men. And I hope no man reading them feels his dick get bigger.

Yesterday I wrote 3000 words, which is a lot for me. It’s a part of Tea Master that I had only written a skimpy, really crap draft of. I put it in first person in this draft and the character talked my ear off! It’ll need redrafting, but the basics are there. Finding a garrulous character is like hitting a vein of gold.

Since I wrote so much yesterday I feel like I don’t have to write at all today. I can catch up on email and do a bit of extra planning for the Ireland/UK trip and restore myself after last night’s party at the studio, from which I returned at 1 am, intending to sleep till 8 or so — but I was woken up by some person next door playing video games at 6:30, chiz.

Also, Pan and Gary are off to the foundry. I should be getting hard wax models that I can then play more with if I want to. The tips of Pan’s horns broke off, so I had to fix them with superglue, then patch them a bit with soft wax-clay – and I can’t see if I’ve done a good enough job, but I should be able to see when he’s all in one material — at the moment he’s three different colours. One ear broke, too, and I ended up making a new one. I’m not so thrilled with that plastilina stuff now — it cracks, at least the hard one does.

I also had to fill in some spaces around Pan’s ears to help prevent them getting snapped off at the hard wax stage. As I understand it, if he were bigger it wouldn’t be such a problem. Much as I like the idea of having small pieces to hopefully sell, it’s very fiddly to work at that scale — and as I’m learning you also have issues with the fragility of small protuberant bits. You can cast them separately and weld them on — but all in all I think I’d rather try working larger, so I’m going with my teacher’s idea to do a full-figure Pan. I think I’ll make him about 2 feet high — big enough to put in a garden! I’ve got ideas for two different Pans — one for a youthful, lissome version, and a more conceptual one for a mature Pan a la The Wind in the Willows.

Which means legs — thinking about the arrangement of those goat legs so that they work visually from all angles. And it means scultping a male torso and getting it right. Which means spending some time in London making drawings of classical sculpture as a start.