R&R, Chapter Three

[swan_tower]

I used to blog my progress through writing novel drafts, back when it was the Onyx Court books. Fell out of it with the Memoirs, and I’m not sure why. But I was remembering that I used to log three things with each post: the current word count, Authorial Sadism, and the LBR quota, i.e. “love, blood, and rhetoric.” Since Alyc and I announced Sekrit Projekt R&R yesterday, and moreover it is very much an LBR kind of book, I think I’ll take another crack at progress-blogging!

Current word count: ~26000
LBR quota: With our first fight scene and our first dead body (not, as it happens, produced by the fight scene), you would think blood would win out this week. But I think that in hindsight this chapter will be more memorable for love, non-obvious though it is. 🙂
Authorial sadism: Somebody got what was coming to him, but that’s more just desserts than sadism. I’m going to award this week’s laurel to a different character really regretting their choice of priorities. And also “I can’t sleep” being a line worthy of your creepier class of Doctor Who episodes.

Next week is likely to be a whole lotta rhetoric, as that’s the category I used to put politics into during the Onyx Court days. But also some love, again more visible in hindsight than fore.

Mirrored from Swan Tower.

Comments

[sovay]

Next week is likely to be a whole lotta rhetoric, as that’s the category I used to put politics into during the Onyx Court days.

I feel like politics can also be love and blood.

[swan_tower]

Oh, definitely. And love can be blood, too -- they all blur into each other. But we're early enough in the story that we're definitely at the civilized end of its politics for the time being.

[sovay]

And love can be blood, too -- they all blur into each other.

Okay: a Venn diagram rather than rock-paper-scissors.

But we're early enough in the story that we're definitely at the civilized end of its politics for the time being.

You don't think there's love in politics from the start?

[swan_tower]

You don't think there's love in politics from the start?

There's a reason the original post said "But also some love, again more visible in hindsight than fore." . . .

[sovay]

There's a reason the original post said "But also some love, again more visible in hindsight than fore." . . .

Fair enough.

Aaden Friday's "We Cannot, Must Not Empathize with Hate" was re-linked on my friendlist around the same time I saw the double interview with Derek Black and Matthew Stevenson" and I have been thinking about the interplay, including how people can be genuinely, not disingenuously surprised when their actions are characterized as hate instead instead of love. I don't give that credence to anyone in our government right now, but it is a factor of some conversations I am watching my parents have with people.

[swan_tower]

Understood.

I basically have two interpretations I give to the whole "blood, love, and rhetoric thing," when I use it as a categorization system for narrative elements. The first has blood as conflict, love as characters and emotion, and rhetoric as ideas/themes/etc. The second -- which is what I tend to mean when I'm progress-blogging -- is that blood is confrontation (violent or otherwise), love is relationships (romantic or otherwise), and rhetoric is ideology and politics, because this version got started when I was writing the Onyx Court books and that was the feel those stories had. (Even if I'd kept up progress-blogging for the Memoirs, I don't think I would have commented on LBR ratios there, because those stories had a different vibe. This book is much more Onyx Court-y.)

In either case there's overlap and intersection between the categories, e.g. with rhetoric swinging toward blood when the politics in question involve confrontations with antagonists and toward love when they involve alliances and building support (second system), or swinging toward blood when different themes come into conflict or toward love when characters have emotional epiphanies about those themes (first system). But in neither case am I suggesting that politics are somehow neutral and disinterested and not entangled with either conflict or emotion.

[sovay]

But in neither case am I suggesting that politics are somehow neutral and disinterested and not entangled with either conflict or emotion.

I don't think you are. But I appreciate the distinguishing of the two interpretations. Neither of them is a way I think about dividing up stories, so it is both interesting and useful to see both of them explained.

[swan_tower]

In a way, it isn't really how I think about dividing up stories, either. (I more often default to textile metaphors and waving my hands in the air like that's going to make sense to anybody but me. :-P) But the post I linked to stems from me thinking, "huh, if blood is compulsory, then what could I interpret that as being, and what would the other two be?," and then the version I used for progress-blogging speaks more to the general feel of what I was writing then, and what I'm writing now. It's close kin to, but not the same thing as, the TV genre I once saw a blog post memorably dub "blood, tits, and scowling" -- your typical cable drama, probably historical, full of amoral characters and violence and abundant sex. What Alyc and I are doing feels like the less cynical and performatively grimdark cousin of that. So while in actual craft terms I'm thinking more about things like "this lays the groundwork for a reveal later on, and here we're setting up the early dynamic between these two characters so it has time to grow and change, and this here is going to be a running motif, and oh shit we need to get some exposition in here or readers will be so confused" -- except probably via textile metaphor -- when I think about how it feels in my head . . . it's blood, love, and rhetoric.

(And a lot of lying. Oh my god so much lying. Liars all the way down, and then a few more past that. Some of them are at least lying for noble reasons?)