These chalk hills will rot my bones.
May. 10th, 2009 12:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
leahbobet(This is the new official icon for The Enchanted Generation posts. One day you all may find out why. I hope to have that ready for you inside five years.)
I finished up Goodbye to All That this week, and so this afternoon, after ordering some more WWI books (Vile Bodies, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age -- thank you,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jsridler -- and Letters From a Lost Generation) I started on Bright Young People. We may remember this as the pretty book I was squeeing over back in January or February. I have saved it for after some of the war memoirs, because you know, it helps to understand what the 1920s crowd was reacting against.
(Also, it is very odd when you realize that, like SFF, the poets working after WWI in Britain were like, the same fifty guys and went drinking together on Saturdays. Everyone else was a non-player character. And then you find their pictures, and after listening to them talk about each other and describe each other from those overlapping points of view, it starts feeling like you too were in the bar with them at the next table over, eavesdropping. That they grew old and died, or did not grow old and just died instead, starts feeling small and of little consequence.)
Taylor's book is drier than the memoirs, probably out of necessity; personal memoirs about very personal things are personal. But not as dry as The Long Week-end, which I keep taking running starts at, so we'll stick with it for now. Also, it does have that critical element, which is helpful. It was, I think, a chance comment about mirrors and their imagery in 1920s fiction that sent me diving for my file to make notes.
So I made some notes. And a big chunk of overplot fell into place. I now have something like 2000 words of notes and 150 words of, well, words at this point. I am not yet fully committing to writing this book next, because I know the second I do that it'll get all closemouthed and coy. But well. I have 3/4 of the structure, and I'm not sure if the other quarter is really something that's there or something my brain thinks is there and is really unnecessary. And I have the first line:
It was six-o-clock when he came home. I recall it six-o-clock because the light was coming from the west, and Lilli had just broken Mother's last good china teacup.
(Well, guess you didn't have to wait after all.)
I finished up Goodbye to All That this week, and so this afternoon, after ordering some more WWI books (Vile Bodies, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age -- thank you,
jsridler -- and Letters From a Lost Generation) I started on Bright Young People. We may remember this as the pretty book I was squeeing over back in January or February. I have saved it for after some of the war memoirs, because you know, it helps to understand what the 1920s crowd was reacting against.(Also, it is very odd when you realize that, like SFF, the poets working after WWI in Britain were like, the same fifty guys and went drinking together on Saturdays. Everyone else was a non-player character. And then you find their pictures, and after listening to them talk about each other and describe each other from those overlapping points of view, it starts feeling like you too were in the bar with them at the next table over, eavesdropping. That they grew old and died, or did not grow old and just died instead, starts feeling small and of little consequence.)
Taylor's book is drier than the memoirs, probably out of necessity; personal memoirs about very personal things are personal. But not as dry as The Long Week-end, which I keep taking running starts at, so we'll stick with it for now. Also, it does have that critical element, which is helpful. It was, I think, a chance comment about mirrors and their imagery in 1920s fiction that sent me diving for my file to make notes.
So I made some notes. And a big chunk of overplot fell into place. I now have something like 2000 words of notes and 150 words of, well, words at this point. I am not yet fully committing to writing this book next, because I know the second I do that it'll get all closemouthed and coy. But well. I have 3/4 of the structure, and I'm not sure if the other quarter is really something that's there or something my brain thinks is there and is really unnecessary. And I have the first line:
It was six-o-clock when he came home. I recall it six-o-clock because the light was coming from the west, and Lilli had just broken Mother's last good china teacup.
(Well, guess you didn't have to wait after all.)
