On the screen: a Western Short-Horned Walkingstick (Parabacillus hesperus). Southern Calfornia.
Hi all,
I’ve been thinking a lot in the past several months about “bugs.”
Two reasons my brain got churning on this.
First: an essay about bugs in the book Animal Presences by the late Jungian psychologist James Hillman.
Dreams about creepy crawly things are pretty universal. I’ve long been puzzled by mine; lumping them all into the category of “another dream about something that’s bugging me” seems a bit too facile and non-granular to be particularly insightful. Lots of things bug me. So what?
So I’ve been mulling a lot on the question: what is it about bugs that bugs me so much?
That bug people so much?
Second: the news stories hitting the Interwebs lately about how scientists are getting pretty worried about bugs.
We may be witnessing a global insect extinction event.
Scientist Brad Lister returned to Puerto Rican rainforest after 35 years to find 98% of ground insects had vanished.
If true, that is some pretty bad news.
I’m doing some serious writing on this topic, but in the meantime I’m planning a series of (somewhat) lighter blog posts about some of the “bugs” I’ve seen and photographed in recent years.
Inaugural entry: a Western Short-Horned Walkingstick (Parabacillus hesperus).
Walkingsticks in general are pretty mind-blowing little critters. They have their own Order (Phasmatodea); there are at least 3000 different species; they are found on every continent except Antarctica.
What is cool about them is how they’ve taken the art of camouflage to such an extraordinary level. Body shape level: they’re shaped to look like twigs.
They hide by blending into the background. By almost becoming the background.
There’s no point in reproducing the Wiki I just linked, treasure trove of Walkingstick factoids, so let me just add a couple of my own thoughts so you can see where I’m going with this whole “bug” thing.
Insects have been around for a very long time–nearly half a billion years. Walkingsticks date to at least the Mesozoic (252-66m years ago).
Humans have been here an eye blink compared to insects.
Now I am by no means a people-hater. Nor do I even begin to pretend that I have any answers about how we’re supposed to share this planet with the critters that were here first, given how biologically successful we are (or have been so far). It’s complicated. (Understatement, of course. Even when we try to do something right, like rake up plastic garbage floating in the ocean, we end up causing extraordinary harm, possibly. Ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh.)
But I can suggest a humble starting point:
Pause for a minute. Sit with the feelings that lurk below our feelings about animals–including the ones, like Walkingsticks, that are utterly alien to us, that tend to trigger (hahahahaha) spontaneous feelings of revulsion.
Hillman loved to look at the etymology of words when he was sitting with dream images.
So how fitting that the insect subject of my inaugural post on bugs, the Walkingstick, bears the name of the tool we humans use to help steady us and strengthen us when we embark on our journeys.
We need walking sticks to help us make our way — particularly over rough terrain. And it seems very much like we’re about to enter a bit of rough terrain …
Maybe our grandfather, the insect Walkingstick, visits us for a reason …
Drawings of the markings on the backs of my scarab bracelet cabochons. They’re supposed to be hieroglyphs, but I’m not so sure …
One of the things I mentioned in my first post about scarab bracelets is that on many of the bracelets in my collection — which are typical examples of 20th century pop culture bracelets — the underside of the cabochons are marked. What I’d heard (chatting to antique store proprietors mostly, but you also see it online) is that the marks are “hieroglyphs.”
The stones are intended to function as charms; the inscriptions confer luck or blessings on the wearer.
There are 30,000 species of Scarab beetles worldwide. I came across these (deceased… RIP pretty green beetles!) Fig Eater beetles a few weeks ago on the sidewalk by my house.
There’s some merit to the idea. The scarab itself is symbolic of pretty powerful stuff, although it’s not quite as straightforward as “it’s the good luck beetle.” Per this paper published by UCLA,
The scarab was used by the ancient Egyptians as a symbol of the rising sun being pushed across the sky (just as the beetle pushes balls of dung across the sand), exemplifying the notion that the sun god can create his own means of rebirth.
Bit of a leap from a symbol of the god Khepri/divine self-regeneration to “hope you win the lotto/get laid/avoid catching the flu this winter.” But the general idea is there: Wear scarab! Can’t hurt. Might help?
So what about the inscriptions?
“Genuine” scarab amulets — meaning museum quality / ancient Egyptian — had inscriptions carved on the back. There are some images in that UCLA paper of some of them, with translations. One inscription commemorates the building of a lake. Others are names. Here’s an edited version of a translation of an inscription that conferred a blessing; the inscription is the
… throne name of Thutmose III … [and] “the good god Menkheperra,” and below this an anx sign, meaning “may he live.” Menkheperra can also be read cryptographically as the name Amen-ra (sun disk).
“May he live” is a solid blessing to carry in your pocket for sure.
Three of my scarab bracelets.
But fast forward to bracelets like the ones I own.
These aren’t ancient Egyptian amulets. They were made and sold in the 20th Century by costume jewelry makers.
People that bought them probably assumed that the markings on the back were hieroglyphs. But are they, really?
One of the things that seems pretty obvious, to my eye anyway, is that hieroglyphs are a completely different type of mark. They’re more pictorial, generally.
For example, here’s hieroglyphs from this online image next to my drawings of the marks on my bracelets. They really don’t look anything alike.
I combed through pages of Egyptian hieroglyphs. I didn’t find a single one that resembled the marks on my bracelets.
You’d expect, if the bracelet manufacturers were really trying, that they’d at least put an ankh on a couple of the stones, or an Eye of Horus. But nope.
Here’s another example, this one of cursive hieroglyphics from The Papyrus of Ani:
Arguably a little bit closer — but still a huge stretch to imagine any of the marks on any of my bracelets is a 1:1 for a mark on that piece of scroll.
In fact, to my eye, the marks on my bracelets look more like kanji (Chinese characters) than Egyptian hieroglyphs. Japanese kanji are the closest to my eye. Here’s an image of Japanese kanji that I found on this site. There’s a pretty strong resemblance between these words and the marks on my bracelets — or anyway, stronger resemblance than to hieroglyphs …
Which led me to Hypothesis #2:
Maybe the stones were sourced from Asia, and maybe the people that carved them inscribed messages in Chinese or Japanese!
Oooh!!!!
Well. As it turns out, there are tools galore online that let you draw kanji and then display the English translation.
Tell you what, go play, if you have a scarab bracelet and think maybe the marks are kanji. But for my part, by the time I was done messing around on those tools for an hour or so, I started to feel a little foolish.
I wondered if I should even blog about this. I wondered if people who read and write Japanese wouldn’t find it laughable.
“Really? You thought the marks on my bracelets might be real words???”
So let me go out on a limb, here, with Hypothesis #3:
The marks on the backs of these bracelets are nonsense symbols.
They are random marks carved by stone workers who mass produced cabochons for US costume jewelry makers. They made simple marks, because simple marks are easy, and these were being mass produced after all.
The same marks show up on jewelry from different makers because makers often sourced their stones from common suppliers.
If you see any holes in my logic — or know of any evidence that either supports or refutes my latest/greatest hypothesis — drop me a line or leave a note in the comments.
So I’m resigned to the fact that I will never be able to take really pretty food pictures. But this is what a typical breakfast looks like–just pretend it is has starbursts and stuff.
No, I am not jumping on a fad.
I already jumped–a year ago!
And before I jumped, I already had a nice foundation in place: I’d been doing intermittent fasting for 3 or 4 years before that …
Okay. Being a writer, I could spin out 6000 words on this topic without drawing a breath, so I’ll try to keep it short.
Here’s what happened.
Back in the late 90s/early 2000s I used low carb to slim back down after having a baby. But I thought of it, back then, as a way to lose weight, not as a way to improve other health markers. So after a few months I went back to eating the way I had before.
“The way I’d been eating before” wasn’t the so-called SAD (Standard American Diet) diet fwiw. I haven’t eaten that way since high school. I got on a “whole foods” kick in my early 20s and have been refining it ever since. But it did include quite a few carbs: grains with every meal, desserts (organic ice cream, that sort of thing). Lots of fruit.
But four or five years ago something happened that raised a red flag for me.
It was a busy Saturday. I was out running errands. I hadn’t eaten in several hours–one of those days when eating takes a back seat to other priorities.
I stopped at a Starbucks and ordered a mocha coffee–i.e. sugar laden high carb treat.
And a couple hours later, I crashed. Shaky, nauseous, weak, light-headed–I felt horribly sick.
It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling. I’d been a “grazer” for a long time, with good reason: I couldn’t go more than 3 or 4 hours without eating, or I’d start to feel those symptoms.
But the intensity of the experience shook me up.
I wasn’t obese. I was working out (weight training) twice a week. But I was carrying probably 10 or 15 extra pounds. That, combined with my sugar crash, was a wake-up call. If I was having this kind of a reaction to sugar now, what was I facing in 5 years, or 10, or 15? Were the extra pounds I had put on as I aged affecting me in ways that were slowly undermining my health? Was my diet really the best diet for me?
I’m a regular reader of the “primal living” health blog at Mark’s Daily Apple, so by then I’d come across a term Mark Sisson coined: “fat-burning beast.” The basic idea is one that keto fans will find familiar. You can train your body to burn fat for energy instead of glucose, and when you do, you break your dependency on carbs. You won’t experience sugar crashes any more. You won’t have to eat all the time any more.
This was before Keto diets were all the rage, but I knew that day that I needed to become a fat-burning beast.
I started intermittent fasting.
There are a lot of different ways to do intermittent fasting. The approach I picked was to fast for 24 hours, breakfast to breakfast, twice a week.
It was really hard at first. More than once I’d hit a wall about 2 in the after noon. My body temp would drop, my energy levels would plummet. I’d have to crawl into bed under the covers to warm up and sleep just to get through it. (Working from home helps!)
But after a few months, my body adapted and holy smokes, what a revelation.
I was no longer dependent on food!
Guys, you know I’m a golfer. I used to have to pack food with me when I golfed so that I could get through a 4-5 hour round without wanting to pass out. Now, all of a sudden, it didn’t matter. I could go out in the morning without eating breakfast and play a round without the slightest discomfort.
And needless to say, no more sugar crashes. And I lost a few pounds which felt good.
Then came the Keto thing. Sisson started blogging about it. He announced he had a book coming out.
I didn’t hesitate. I pre-ordered the book and as soon as it arrived started planning a 6-week Keto clean-out.
That was a year ago. This week, my sweetheart and I are doing the 6-week thing for the second time :)
To me, Keto delivers the same effects as fasting. Energy levels that are both high and steady; clear mind; body gets that lovely, compact feeling (versus the bloated feeling I get when I’ve been eating too many carbs).
We also found that the effects of a six-week Keto clean-out last–really for the whole rest of the year. I still fast from time to time but it’s more of a touch-point now. Being “keto-adapted,” I don’t ever need to eat (freedom!!!) Going 24 or even 48 hours without eating doesn’t faze me. I energizer bunny right through :)
It also kind of pulled our diet in a keto direction even though we didn’t bother staying in “strict keto” once the six weeks was up. If I was at a restaurant and they put out fresh Italian bread with olive oil, I’d eat a slice and enjoy it. OTOH if I was hungry for a burger I’d order it without a bun. I.e. I didn’t seek out carbs, but I didn’t shun them.
Keto is definitely a fad today, with all the hoopla you get with diet fads. People denouncing it as dangerous, blah blah blah. Or defining keto erroneously (“you eat pounds of meat every day! and no veggies!” yeah right…) and then clapping themselves on the back for knocking their straw man over.
Silly. Not even going to bother engaging on that stuff. Go read Sisson if you want thoughtful, in-depth, science-based considerations of dietary arguments.
What I also see a lot of is people who–let me put this nicely–need a bit of help understanding how to do it.
Actually, let me amend that: if you are thinking about doing keto for the first time, just go buy the book.
Because it’s about preparing yourself for keto. And you owe it to yourself to build a foundation if you’re new to keto–and especially if you are like I was: the sort of person who needs to eat every couple of hours to keep your energy levels steady.
Going keto “cold turkey” can make you feel like crap. Just like I felt that day years ago when I sugar crashed from my mocha coffee.
But if you prepare your body, things will be easier. And if you have a framework–a little bit of the science–you’ll understand what you’re doing and how to do it right.
Plus the book has a bunch of recipes and we found most of them to be absolutely delicious. So there’s that, too–you can plan your menus without having to hunt for ideas.
If you’ve read my online serial novel The French Emerald, keep going.
If you haven’t, this might spoil things for you, so if you are at all fond of #chicklit or light readin’ fiction in general, click here to read the novel first (it won’t take long, it’s really more of a novella) then come back :) Continue reading →
He’s her worst enemy–and he’s got a drug that controls her. Now he can do his worst. Dark Chemistry. Because evil can take the shape of love.
I admit it. I made a mistake.
When I first released Dark Chemisty, I let myself be seduced by the cliche that “sex sells.”
It does, of course–but it was a bad idea for this book. Dark Chemistry is a plot-driven novel, but it’s also got a bit of concept to it. Putting a woman in a bustier on the cover didn’t really reflect the experience I’m trying to create with this novel.
(This business takes a lot of work to figure out…)
Anyway, I’m working through all my titles to do new covers, and my hunt led me to Jennie Rawlings, who agreed to do a new cover for Dark Chemistry–and I LOVE what she did.
As I said on Twitter, I finally feel like my book has a face that fits :)
But now I have a question and you can help. I’ve got two different drafts of teaser copy, one for the Kindle version, one for the print version.
Which do you like best?
Here they are — and please scroll down to the survey below so you can let me know your choice. Thank you!!!
KINDLE VERSION
She’s been drugged.
She doesn’t know.
It feels so good. Like love.
But it’s a trick. He plans to control her. Rob her. Maybe kill her.
A web of evil.
Will Haley realize that her feelings are not her TRUE feelings?
Does Donavon have the strength left to fight for the woman he loves?
Will the two of them uncover Gerad’s plot to use powerful synthetic pheromones to enslave the world?
And even if they do – can they stop it?
PRINT VERSION
If Haley Dubose wants to inherit her father’s fortune, she has no choice. She has to leave sunny Southern California for a little backwater town in Upstate New York, and run a chemical manufacturing company he founded — for two whole years.
But Haley soon wishes her only problems were of the spoiled-rich-girl variety.
She finds herself entangled in a web of evil, spun by men who use powerful, synthetic chemicals to manipulate people.
If you know me, you know I grew up in a small town.
What a blessing it was.
I saw so many people this weekend who I haven’t seen in years–30, 40 years in some cases.
I’ve been trying for a couple days to put words around something … trying to articulate how people can be so altered and at the same time even more themselves.
Then this morning it came to me: “tempered.” We’ve been tempered.
The things that have happened to us that burned so hot–
By which I mean not only the painful (losing the loved one, the marriage that went bad, that tore up, tore us up) but anything extraordinary. The day you look at your kid and it strikes you, this person here, this extraordinary person who is part of you but not, the center of your life but free to go and then one day gone but never really gone. That heat, also.
The decisions we make. (I’m moving away. I’m moving back. I’ll take this job. I’ll quit. I’m going to fight this thing. I’m done fighting …)
Tempered by the heat of the extraordinary, and the extraordinary is anything that heats the heart.
It burns off what doesn’t matter and leaves what does. And you can see what’s left in peoples’ faces, in how they stand. It doesn’t even take words.
This “thing” started because my mom gave me a bracelet and because of a dream.
In the dream, I purchased a gold-filled bracelet with semi-precious stones.
I grew up in a part of the country where the pre-Columbian inhabitants were Iroquois peoples, and as you may know they had a special relationship with dreams: they would act them out. Such a striking thing, this idea that you should deliberately carry over something from that world to this, the dreaming world to the waking. Interweave them, make the dream into something solid, “objective.”
I don’t make it practice to act out my dreams but in this case I didn’t hesitate. I immediately started shopping for a scarab bracelet like the one in my dream. Ebay, antique marts. I subsequently bought several. I’ll post pictures.
I didn’t spend a lot of money on this little collection. There are 14K gold versions. I stuck to 12K golf-filled. I rarely spent more than about $30.
I also became very curious about them–but interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of information lying about on the interwebs about this particular category of bracelet.
By which I mean: costume jewelry that was made/sold in the mid-20th century.
Are they “real” hieroglyphics? Inquiring minds want to know…
Scarab jewelry, more broadly, has been popular–on and off, wildly popular–at various times in recent history. The discovery of King Tut’s tomb in 1922 set off the first of the wildly popular periods. You can find pieces from this period which feature scarabs as well as many other Egyptian motifs. Some of it is very beautiful, with such a lovely 20’s feel, some a little styled as Art Deco. My sense of this jewelry is that it tends to feature single scarabs; much has a heavier “museum piece” sort of feel.
What’s less clear is what happened a bit later, in the 50s or so, when this new sort of bracelet became popular.
(And by the way: if you were in the jewelry business back then and know anything about this, please contact me! I’ve tried to find someone who was there at the time and have struck out, so far.)
I deduce from the enormous number of the bracelets floating around on ebay and the like that a LOT of them were made.
The other thing that is interesting is that–to my eye at least–the stones have a kind of mass-produced look to them. By which I mean, you can find bracelets that were made and sold by different designers, but the stones appear to be very similar. So there must have been some sort of supplier/supply chain aspect to this. Jewelry designers were sourcing stones from somewhere … but where?
In most cases, the stones are oval cabochons. The dome is carved (etched?) with markings to show it’s a scarab: the ponotrum, the elytral suture (line between the elytra, the hard covering over a beetle’s flying wings). The underside almost always has carvings on it as well, which are supposed to be hieroglyphics that confer luck or blessings. I’ve not had a lot of success–yet–finding out exactly what the symbols are or what they mean, or are supposed to mean.
If you pay any attention to mythology you know the scarab beetle has a long history of mythological associations. I won’t reproduce it all here, since a google search will do a better job than I can, but suffice to say it’s associated with transformation and rebirth; with death giving birth to life; with immortality; and with the sun (including the sun as Ra).
I’ll post more about these as I figure more out. But in the meantime, here are my bracelets, with a little bit about them :)
#1. This pastel bracelet is the one my mom gave me. She had it as a girl/teen so it is most definitely 1950s vintage.
I’m no jewelry or manufacturing expert, but these cabochons are plastic, so I assume they were molded. There are no hieroglyphics on the backs. There’s some blueish corrosion on the metal–this isn’t “fine jewelry”! But I love it because it’s light and … I just realized when I tool all my pics I should have put something in the photo for scale. Sorry :/
For this bracelet, the cabochons are very small (about 7/8ths of an inch each), so the bracelet is lightweight, which is so nice for wearing, and the pastel colors pair perfectly when you’re wearing pastel colors.
Thanks, Mom, I love this and love that you had it as a girl :)
#2. The cabochons on this second bracelet are even smaller than the ones on my mom’s bracelet. But these are “real” stones. They have hieroglyphics on the backs.
It’s marked that it’s 12K gf on the clasp.
Many of these bracelets have a safety link, which I find utterly endearing. This sense that it’s something precious, so you need a bit of extra protection to ensure it doesn’t fall off your wrist and get lost.
#3. This is one of the first bracelets I purchased and one of my favorites to wear, because the cabochons are smaller/lighter, making it a nice piece of everyday sort of jewelry.
The cabochons are more elongated than you usually see on these bracelets, so it’s not really a typical shape.
There’s a mark on the clasp that may be a designer mark, but I have to research it a bit more, so I’ll post an update (hopefully) at some point. The mark is a bit off the edge which makes it hard to be sure of the letters. It looks like BUJAN or 8UJAN maybe?
#4. This is the first bracelet I bought after my dream, and is what I think of as the classic ’50s scarab costume bracelet.
It’s got a mark so I’ll come back later with what I can dig up about the designer.
One thing I didn’t notice when I bought this (:/) is that the pink stone has some internal fractures that, in some light, give it a cracked/damaged appearance. I think I read somewhere that this can happen to some of the softer stones. But the stone is intact and as you may have gathered, I use these bracelets for everyday wear, so I don’t mind the cracks. Much.
#5. This is sometimes my favorite bracelet of the collection. It’s a bit more hefty than the ones I’ve pictured so far–the cabochons are a bit more than a half-inch long each. So when you wear it, you really notice it–you feel like you’re wearing jewelry. But at the same time, it’s not hugely flashy. And because there are so many colors, it pairs with just about anything.
It’s got a mark.
I also love how the safety chain is so small and delicate relative to the rest of the bracelet. I wear this one a lot :)
#6. This bracelet doesn’t have a safety chain at all. And the stones are larger–the largest of any of my scarab bracelets. About 3/4 inch each. So with the size of the stones, there are only 5 versus 6 in the previous bracelet. Needless to say it’s also the second heaviest bracelet of this little collection.
It’s got that nice bright blue lapis stone which is wonderful, and I also love the translucent two-toned stone (quartz?) on the right, and the way the designer aligned it so that the darker band is across the beetle’s “head.”
It doesn’t seem to have a mark.
#7. This is the heaviest of my scarab bracelets. Each individual stone isn’t that large (the same length as the stones in #4) but there are seven of them, and they are deeper/thicker than any of the other bracelet stones.
It’s got a mark so I’ll be back on this one.
The stones on this one are particularly lovely, aren’t they?
The identification of the stones is worth a whole separate post as well, btw …
#8. I didn’t start wearing this one until recently. I bought it at an antique shop in the Finger Lakes, back east, and for a long time I think I sort of avoided it because it’s not gold. But recently I’ve realize that I really, really like it, and it’s become one of my favorite bracelets to wear. I love how the stone colors are so cool. It pairs so well with anything blue or navy. I also love that there are those pretty links between the stones.
#9. Last one! And the most atypical of them all, right? The cabochons are perfectly round–they almost don’t even look like scarabs, although the carvings on the stones adhere to the motif, without question.
It’s got no hieroglyphics on the back.
I wear this one the least … in fact, I don’t know as I’ve ever worn it. It’s a bit too … bright. I feel like it kind of crosses the line from a kind of funky cultural relic into something that someone would have tried to pass off as almost-fine. Like: the cool kids were all wearing scarab stone bracelets, now here’s a version for grandma.
If I do wear it, it will be on a night when I truly dress up. And I won’t be thinking of it as a scarab bracelet but as a scarab-like bracelet ;)
So that’s my scarab bracelet collection. You can find similar examples all over ebay and etsy. Just don’t think you have to pay a lot of money for the 12K gold fill ones–I’ve seen people list them at very high prices ($80 and up) but if you shop around you’ll find very nice bracelets for under $30. Obviously the 24K versions are more expensive but I was never interested in owning one in that category. I wear these as everyday, casual jewelry. I don’t want something that I have to worry about when I’m wearing it.
I’ll be back with some more posts to delve into these a bit more. There was a whole niche industry dedicated to churning these things out in the 1950s-70s. There has to be someone around who can shed some light into it. Where were the stones sourced? Why were they so popular in this particular period (Elizabeth Taylor/Cleopatra may have had something to do with it!)? Were there any costume jewelry designers who were “known” for scarab bracelets?
Please contact me if you have any inside info–I’d love to interview for a future post!
Serial novel. Sweet, funny, fast-paced — perfect to read with a cup of coffee (or glass of wine!)
My serial novel, The French Emerald, launched on March 4th.
I am enjoying this project so much. I love that my readers are enjoying it. I love it when I get emails saying, “help, I missed a week, where’s the link again?” I love finding new readers who read through all the past chapters to catch up :)
I am writing a beautiful tale about corpses. Very seasonable weather for it.
–Evelyn Waugh
Here’s the problem with self-publishing: no one cares about your book. That’s it in a nutshell. There are somewhere between 600,000 and 1,000,000 books published every year in the US alone, depending on which stats you believe. Many of those – perhaps as many as half or even more – are self-published. On average, they sell less than 250 copies each. Your book won’t stand out. Hilary Clinton’s will. Yours won’t.
If you’ve ever written, or have tried to write, or hope to write a novel, I suppose you sometimes think thoughts like the ones I’m thinking today.
Why am I doing this?
What am I trying to do, exactly?
I know I left that novel idea around here, somewhere. And yes, I’m a loon.
I’m a decent writer. Above average, perhaps. But in this sea of writers — this sea of millions and millions of books — all that being “above average” means is that my head bobs up above the surface once in a while.
Just long enough for me to suck in a quick gasp of air before I disappear again.
I am also, arguably, a confused writer.
I’m envious of writers who live and breathe genre, because if you’re a passionate fan of genre, and then you decide to write genre, a big chunk of the “why” question is automatically answered. You’re writing to contribute to the genre. Genre readers are always looking for more genre to read. What you’re doing is participatory — reciprocal.
I like genre. I’ve read a fair share of genre. But I have never honestly felt completely at home in any genre community.
And look. Here’s what someone posted in a new review on my novel, Can Job:
Really 3.5 stars because it’s solid, but it never makes up its mind about what genre it wants to be.
You get a sense that this is going to be a romantic chick-lit romp from the cover and some of the scenes, but the majority of it reads like an attempt at big business satire.
Is it “art” if you look like you don’t know what you’re doing?
A totally fair critique, I’m sure. From someone who obviously reads a lot and who doesn’t know me, and so isn’t even subconsciously inclined to just “go along with it” when I color, awkwardly, outside the lines.
And the thing is, it’s intentional. I’m doing this to myself, on purpose.
Sigh.
So I’m working on another novel, one of 3 or 4 WIPs in various stages of done-ness. And wrestling with the same kinds of questions.
Faust is the arrogant guy who renounces Christianity and trades his soul in exchange for, basically, magical powers.
Peel that back and the story asks the questions: what is good? what is evil? what is truly most important and why are some people foolish enough to trade the most important away?
The answers are based on the assumed 16th century virtues of obedience and faith. Faust, like Lucifer in the Historia’s tale-within-a-tale of that angel’s fall, “rose up in insolence and vanity.” He thought he was too (good? smart? something) to heed the guidance of the Church.
Goethe’s Faust, written some 300 years later, asks the same questions but frames them completely differently.
Romanticism, suddenly aware of dynamic (even irrational) principles underlying both man and nature, took striving–tentative progression and development, and pure endeavor–and made it the defining quality of mankind.
From “Masterpieces of Romanticism,” edited by Howard E. Hugo, in The Continental Edition of World Masterpieces.
A being of searchings and questionings, living a life of constant aspiration towards goals but dimly seen–this, as described by God, is the being He has created in His own image.
And of the devil’s pact with Goethe’s Faust:
Here is no simple temptation to be naughty …
If Mephistopholes can destroy Faust’s sense of aspiration, if Faust can say of any single moment in time that this is complete fulfillment of desire–then the devil wins, and God and man are defeated.
I.e. “evil” is the cessation of striving toward something.
That something is still God. But it’s not obedience to God in the narrow sense articulated by the first Faust chapbooks. To Goethe, to be “good” is to be an active participant in God’s plan–to actively fulfill your part in God’s plan for humanity.
Obviously we see, here, the ideas of Progressivism in its modern/political sense, stirring in the minds of 19th Century Romantics. Or anyway, in a 1956 essay on Romanticism by an English professor at Berkeley ;)
So two final things and then I hit “publish.”
First, here I am in 2018 pondering two versions of Faust, one of which was published 450 years ago, and the other 200-ish.
And the ideas communicated by these two works are effing immense. You almost can’t get your head around them, they’re so big. Poke at them and they start to rattle you.
And part of me wonders, what is the point of writing a novel that is any less than this — that is any smaller?
Second: what kind of mind could possibly wrap itself around these same questions today?
Set aside that I wouldn’t dare to suggest I am personally capable of such a feat. I’m not that smart, and my world–including my intellectual world–is far too parochial. Pains me to know this, but I know this.
The fact is, it’s quite possible nobody could pull off a new Faust today. We’re drowning in noise–and we’re so fractured by social technology that no one mind can hope to bridge us.
And yet, I keep writing, and I keep thinking there’s no other novel that’s really worth writing, except a novel that tries …
Serial novel. Sweet, funny, fast-paced — perfect to read with a cup of coffee (or glass of wine!)
Six weeks.
Hard to believe!
But that’s how long it’s been since the release of Chapter 1 of my new serial novel, The French Emerald.
It’s been an interesting experiment. I’ve been pushing notifications of new chapters out to my email list and on the Tuesday Serial Linky aggregator here. The book is also running in some regional newspapers (please say “hi” in the comments if you found me that way!)
The most unexpected aspect of doing all this? How complicated it is to set up all the files.
Mind you, I completed the entire novel before I published the first chapter. There are 43 chapters in all — and each chapter has a reminder of last week’s chapter and a teaser for the next week. So even before I put the first one out, I was dealing privately with questions about managing 43 files in a way that would let me tee them up for week-by-week release–not to mention help me keep them all straight =0
That, it turns out, was the easy part. Year 2018 and it’s still a PIA, if I may be blunt! to transfer formatted text across apps. I wrote the book in Word, and it’s impossible to paste it into WordPress without having to re-do the formatting. (Maybe if you use localized formatting it would work, but I use Styles, because in theory that will make it easier later to import the book into InDesign for print. So my Word files come over to WP with zero formatting.) For my email version (using Mailchimp for that) I have to copy/paste and reformat again.
Then there’s the links, since all the chapters in every version have to be cross linked so people can move from one chapter to the next. I just now realized some of the links in the first few chapters of the website version were broken. Sorry if you ran into that — fixed now :/
And then there’s the scheduling! It’s a lot easier to write a post, like this one, and hit “publish.” With the serial novel, I’m prepping chapters in batches and scheduling their release. So I live in terror* of accidentally releasing chapters out of order, or tweeting a chapter link before it’s officially published.
All the same, I’m enjoying it.
And I believe the serialized novel is poised for a resurgence. Microfiction, baby. Let’s do this thing.
*Well, okay, maybe not terror, exactly. More a state of being resigned to constant low-level anxiety. hahahahahaha
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