THE LILY MAID: 6 days to go

With less than a week to go, I’m aiming to finish up my last revisions within Part III of THE LILY MAID. My aim for today is to add that key scene to flesh out a secondary character and to fine tune the climax of this section. It takes place on Christmas during a snow storm and is rather dramatic. However, my writing time today is rather truncated—Thea is home for spring break—so we’ll see how it goes.

In other semi-related news, a new portrait of Jane Morris by Dante Rossetti was recently unearthed! What surprises me is that she’s posed as Beatrice; usually Rossetti painted Elizabeth Siddal as Beatrice (though I can already think of an exception to this supposition). Still, I’m stunned that there’s new Rossetti art to be seen. Who knows what other stunners* by him are out there?

Since a major theme in THE LILY MAID is about artists’ muses, Jane Morris has a walk-on cameo. The above-mentioned Part III which I’m revising today takes place in Lechlade-on-Thames, the Cotswolds village near where William Morris had his summer house. My protagonist oversees Mrs. Morris in the village market:

My eyes were drawn to an older lady, as tall as a goddess with billowing waves of dark hair…. The woman looked like Dante’s Beatrice lost amidst the hubbub.

“Who is she?” I asked Annabelle, pointing to the dark-haired woman. As she haggled over apples, she appeared to be taking her interaction as seriously as if she was offering coins to Chiron. “She looks so familiar.”

“Oh, that’s Mrs. Jane Morris.” She waved across the square at her, more excited than I’d seen since our arrival at Applewood Grange. “I should speak to her—I didn’t know they were here for the holidays.”

I recalled where I’d seen Mrs. Morris before. When I was sixteen, my father had taken me to view Rossetti’s painting Prosperine at the Grosvenor Gallery. She’d  posed for it grasping a pomegranate, otherworldly in a shimmering turquoise dress. By now Mrs. Morris had moved—perhaps glided was a better word—onto the next merchant to purchase a bunch of onions, which she placed beside some red apples in a wicket basket.”

*Rossetti referred to his portraits of women as “stunners,” a term also used by the PreRaphaelites to indicate a beautiful woman.

• Filed under The Novel, the art world | No Comments

THE LILY MAID: 7 days to go….

Another surprise from my garden: we have cherry blossoms! It’s a very young tree, though, so I wasn’t expecting it to bloom yet. And speaking of surprises: I discovered a nascent plot thread which is insisting to be included in THE LILY MAID. It came to me in a flash last night, as I was mulling over a new scene added as a result of my protagonist’s new-and-improved sexual encounter. (Ah, the joys of pushing character development to the next level!)

As a novelist, I consider myself a combination pantser-plotter. Much as I try to plot my novels, when push comes to shove, my subconscious holds the best cards firmly in hand. This sort of by-the-seat-of-my-pants last minute plot development is, alas, very typical of me, much as I attempt otherwise. My critique partners have become accustomed to me sending “Wait, I’ve a better idea!” e-mails after declaring a chapter resolutely and definitively finished. Sigh.

The plot thread is about my protagonist being given a Kodak camera, which was the first “Brownie” professing to make photography accessible to the general public. It was first sold in 1888, the year the main action of my novel takes place. Advertisements bragged that the Kodak was “The latest and best outlet for amateurs.”

I’ve mixed emotions about including this new plot thread at this late stage of the game. On the “argh” side: With just a week to go, adding new material wasn’t what I expected—I’d planned to be down to the last details by now. On the “yay” side: this thread will allow me to tie together two important plot points, allow me to flesh out an underdeveloped secondary character, as well as give my protagonist an excellent reason to be in the right place at the right time.

Another good thing: much of this photography plot thread was included in the very first draft of THE LILY MAID. All I need to do is take what I’ve already written and weave back it in, which hopefully won’t take long. I deleted this photography thread when it seemed discursive—a case of “killing my darlings” for the novel’s greater good.

Or so I thought—turns out my subconscious knew best all along. And now I know why.

• Filed under The Novel, creativity, the world around me | No Comments

THE LILY MAID: 8 days to go….

Today is Easter, so not much time to write today. Today, instead, is a day for egg hunts, visiting with neighbors, smelling the lilacs, and cooking a yummy dinner to share with good friends. Still, I must admit that I’m anxious about the time away from finishing up THE LILY MAID. I think I’m at the stage where any break from the studio feels more disruptive than helpful—a sign that I’m hopefully very close to the end. I mean, what if my agent hates what I’ve written? What if it’s unsellable? Unlike nonfiction books, novels can only be sold to a publisher upon completion—a big leap of faith. What if my leap of faith was really a leap off a cliff?

To counter this, I tell myself that anxiety is just another form of energy. If I can channel this energy into excitement, then I’ll feel less paralyzed by fear. I’m also thinking about all the things I want to do once I’ve finished with this draft. For example, I want to paint furniture—I was very inspired by my last visit to the V & A. I even have a large wardrobe awaiting my attention. I’m starting to get glimmers of what my next novel may be. The next phase awaits.

——————–

Above is a sideboard cabinet painted by Edward Burne-Jones in 1860 the week before his wedding. It is on display at the V & A.

• Filed under The Novel, stuff I like, the world around me | No Comments

THE LILY MAID: 9 days to go….

Though it’s a holiday weekend, I’m still revising away here on THE LILY MAID. Even so, I took some time off last night for a family dinner and this morning to help Thea dye some Easter eggs. (We are decidedly ecumenical when it comes to holidays—we’ll also celebrate Passover and whatever other holiday coincides with spring. That’s life married to an anthropologist.)

Yesterday, I decided to go back into Part III to add a missing piece I suspected might be important. It’s a rather passionate love scene between my protagonist and a main character. I was on the fence about writing it since I questioned its necessity—I mean, wasn’t it enough to fade to black? We all know what’s going to happen, right? Was there any need for me to get into the mechanics of it all? But sure enough, once I wrote the scene, I realized why my conscience was prodding me to go there: their between-the-sheets interactions provided an important insight into motivation and character, allowing me to untangle an unresolved plot thread and character arc that had been nagging me from the beginning.

Now it all makes sense. Plus I got to throw in an excerpt from Tennyson’s poem “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal” to up the emotional ante.

So moral of story: if in doubt, make your characters have sex with each other. You’ll be amazed what you discover about your novel.

• Filed under The Novel, creativity | 3 Responses

THE LILY MAID: 10 days to go….

Now that I’m working on the last chapters of THE LILY MAID, the anxiety dreams have kicked in. In last night’s edition, I was attempting to print out the final pages and had printer malfunctions. First, I couldn’t get them to collate correctly. Then the fonts printed fuzzy and light. Finally, I cut out each section from each page to arrrange in the final order—a rather ragged pile of loose paragraphs. I assured my agent, “It’ll look better after I print out another draft.”

Symbolism much? This seems especially ironic since one of the plot threads I’ve been wrestling into place concerns dreams. Two characters suffer from intense, possibly precognitive, dreams and struggle to make sense of them. Bear in mind, though, that THE LILY MAID takes place in 1888—several years before Freud began work on THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS in 1895—so their culture doesn’t yet possess the same “skill set” for processing dreams we twenty-first century dreamers take for granted. However, my protagonist has been reading the latest science journals and was studying the new science of psychology before she fell on hard times. If anyone would be sensitive to the value of dreams, she would.

So it’s tricky: How far can I push this thread of dream symbolism before it starts to seem anachronistic?

• Filed under The Novel | No Comments