dr_pretentious | Like a Sonnet, Only Bigger

I always used to write them backward. The last line would come to me and rattle around in my empty little head for days or weeks, while the rest of the poem shifted above it on the imagined page.

The last chapter was the first part of the Stisele project that tried to tell itself in words, rather than in full immersive hypnagogic witnessing, so that's the part I wrote. When everything that wanted to go into the last chapter was on the screen, I stopped. I started writing at midnight, and it took about 40 minutes. I had imagined it would be longer and take longer, but for now that last chapter feels complete, so no more tinkering tonight.

The book's structured in long chapters of narrative from Stisele's POV (war! betrayal! true love! revolution! redemption!), interwoven with very short interludes from the POV of an historian 200 years later. Those of you who've been reading Hands of Beltresa know the historian well as one of the second-tier characters in that book. Laurebes is addicted to breaking taboos, first and foremost the taboo against the study of Beltresin history by commoners. He's always iconoclastic, occasionally brilliant, and often laughably wrong. Many, many times, the reader will have the pleasure of catching Laurebes in glaring errors, because his interludes know both more and less about the truth than Stisele's chapters do.

When Dan asked me how Stisele's story ended--in tragedy, of course--he asked the very astute question, "How is that a happy ending for the reader?" Fortunately, Laurebes and I already had an answer worked out. Stisele remakes the world in her own image, makes the impossible possible and the unthinkable thinkable, for centuries after a death she accepted with her eyes open as the price of living her conscience.

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In the morning, when I'm fresh, I'll tackle one of the long Stisele chapters.

[The lj spellchecker correctly discerned that I had misspelled "hypnagogic," but proposed "spongecake" as an alternative. Now I wish I had spongecake.]