Update from Amsterdam
Sep. 17th, 2009 11:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unforthWell, I'm sitting in a room in Amsterdam that HAS FREE INTERNET! Woot!! So, I can finally do some justice to this trip by putting together another post about it. :) Unfortunately, this internet runs rather pathetically, so I can't do much in the way of, for example, cross referencing (or, really, anything that requires that I engage in the vain hope of potentially opening another link) so instead, I'm gonna wing it from memory.
After my last post, I believe I left off before we went to the Musee d'Orsay, on the 8th, the day before leaving Paris. Mom and I headed out early and walked there, shopping as we went, though I didn't end up getting much of anything. The museum itself was about as I remembered it, and houses the French nation's collection of art from the 19th century to the early 20th century (more or less, and then the most recent stuff is in the Pompadou center, where I had no interest in going). Due to a variety of timing issues, I ended up getting to do frustrating little of the Musee d'Orsay, just enough to whet the appetite but not really anything more. Still, I got to see some Corot and Courbet and a few of the other artists of those time periods that I like, and in the end it was still a nice visit.
The following morning, Pop and I set out very early in an effort to get to the Louvre before we had to get to our 1 PM train to London. Pop hadn't yet gotten to see the Venus d'Milo, which he very much wanted to, so we aimed to get to the museum right when it opened at 9 AM. This proved to be a pretty awesome plan. Thanks to the wheel chair, we were able to bypass the line of people who were waiting to get in, and bypass the ticket lines, because handicapped folks plus their, er, keeper, are allowed in for free, so the result was that we waltzed in literally the moment they opened the doors. We went more or less directly to the Venus, and I think that we were the first people to see it that day, with no one else around. Considering that it's usually mobbed with people, I considered this a real victory. After that, we did a few other exhibits, until we were foiled by the presence of random, inexplicable stairs (surprisingly common in this old buildings) and it was about time to go.
The less said about our boarding of Eurostar, the better. We didn't end up really leaving enough time to get on the train, and the result was that it was very stressful, and in the end, I didn't get to sit down in my seat until after the train had already started to move. Pop had always wanted to take the Chunnel, apparently, so that's exactly what we did. It's a damn nice, simple, fast train ride (at least in theory) and it was pretty easy to destress once we were actually on board. We pulled into London at around 3 local time at St. Pancras station, took a cab to our hotel - the Novotel London City South, which was just over Southwark Bridge on Southwark Bridge Road, and spent the evening settling in for the most part.
On the 10th, we mostly wandered around the area of the Thames outside of our hotel, did some exploring, and ended up going down past Parliament. While on the trip, we agreed that the time had come to find a seat for Pop's wheel chair, and I decided that I would try to get to the BM for a little bit because of their late night. Both of these efforts were ultimately successful, though I didn't actually end up staying late, finding I was more tired than I'd anticipated. The British Museum reins in my mind as one of the greatest museums of antiquities in the world (it aughta be after all the various parts of the world that the Brit's robbed shamelessly), and I spent about an hour that evening going through the exhibit that they've installed in the old library reading room, which is dedicated to a discussion in how the approach to knowledge changed during the Enlightenment, with a particular emphasis on the collectors whose collections ended up forming the core of the BM's collection. It was quite interesting, especially since it ends up relating to a point in time before there was really a separation between science and the arts in the discipline known as philosophy, and how the collecting of items from both spheres often coincided, so while it was ostensibly about art and antiquities, it ended up feeling like it pertained strongly to the history of science as well.
In another nearby room, they had a small display of the oldest artifacts in the museum, all of which were over a hundred thousand years old; the very oldest was a 1.5 million year old axe which some ancestral species of ours honed. It was pretty neat.
The 11th, Friday, we went to the Tate Modern, which was very close to our hotel. Though I'd walked by it before, I'd never gone inside, and though it's an impressive feat of architecture and a fascinating environment for a museum, I can't say that I'd feel any particular inclination to go again. I feel like it never hurts to look at art and see if you see with new eyes, but as it is, turns out I still don't have any interest at all in modern art. Thus, aside from a few individual pieces (a surprising couple of Pollacks, a few Cubist and Surrealist pieces) I found basically nothing that spoke to me amidst the bastract art, found item stuff, and strange strings of old pieces of soap (okay, there were only two of those, but still, it was memorable. Old soap. Really.)
One of the things that we discovered more or less immediately upon arrival was that our visit was, awesomely enough, going to coincide with the Mayor's Thames Festival, and that, even more awesomely, the festival's eastern extreme was at Southwark Bridge, and it extended west and south at least to Parliament. The festival was on Saturday and Sunday, and that ended up being pretty much all that we did on either day. (okay, that's not quite true, we went back to the BM on Saturday morning and spent some time there) There was a fair amount of shopping involved, a lot of looking, a fair amount of eating, and a ton of other people. I got myself a really awesome leather purse that I love, and a few skirts - it's about time that I start to dress more nicely again, I've been thinking a lot about how to overall my wardrobe) and I even managed to get a few gifts for folks (though I still haven't sent out the postcards - I've at least written a couple of them...). Going to the festival seemed to eat a surprising amount of times on the days that we went. Among the most fun parts...well, they were mostly the food parts. There was this "fudge" that was strawberries and cream flavored, and it was AMAZING and totally addictive. They must have made it with drugs. I ended up eating a lot of really unhealthy stuff over those two days.
I got to burn at least some of the calories on Sunday night, though. Sunday was a cold and overcast day, but that couldn't deter us from one of the few things that we planned in advance for this trip: we had tickets to go see "Yeoman of the Guard," by Gilbert and Sullivan. Simple enough? Well, it was an outdoor performance, staged as part of the Continental Airlines Tower Festival (not to be confused with the Thames Festival, which shot of fireworks half way through the performance). Indeed, the Tower in question is actually the Tower of London, and the performance took place on a stage assembled in the moat of the Tower. It's a rather mediocre script, but it definitely gained something by being staged in the place it was originally meant for - since the show was originally written in honor of the opening of the Tower to the general public in 1888 by Queen Victoria. It was a wonderful production, but the night was very cold - I didn't end up feeling warmed up until the next morning - still, I'm very glad I did it. It was a very unique experience.
Monday, we went over to the Victoria and Albert, which is a truly amazing museum of the applied art, and though we were disappointed to discover that the exhibits that would have most interested us were in fact the ones currently closed for refurbishment, still we had a nice time wandering through some halls of British applied arts, and I was very glad to discover that they allow the taking of pictures, which guarantees that I will be returning there for a very long visit at some time in the future. From there, we walked over to Harrods where we took in afternoon tea, and I ate more scones that should have been possible. It is my considered opinion that afternoon tea is one of the finest, most relaxing institutions the world over, and Harrods was nice enough to potentially (though the jury is still out) dethrone my favorite tea spot - the reining title holder up to now has been the Peninsula Hotel in Kowloong in Hong Kong, an Imperialist holdover if ever there was one. This one....was probably better. All of the sandwiches and pastries were excellent, and the scones were to die for, and there was this Rose Petal Jelly stuff that was unbelievably yummy....I ate so much I skipped dinner. :)
Just as we were finishing, I got a call from the bank with some good news about my mortgage. They needed a few pieces of paperwork from me (a copy of my gift letter, proof that I've paid my last twelve months rent, and...er...something else that I sent...right, the canceled check for my earnest money) but in exchange they had sent out my commitment letter. As soon as I got back to the hotel, I paid the massive fee to get myself internet access in the room, and wrote the following glowing lead in to a post that I didn't end up finishing:
"Today is the first day that I've broken down and shelled out for the internet in our hotel room. Up to now, I've been managing with 20 minutes snippets on a public use terminal in the lobby where I couldn't do a lot of things, but a phone call today decided me that at least for one 24 hour chunk, I would pay the 14.99 pound fee. So right now I'm using my own computer, watching a baseball game that I already know the results of (and that we win, the only game in the past week that the Mets didn't lose, I believe), beginning the process of uploading pics to Flickr, thinking about what to type in this post, and dealing with housing stuff. There's been enough that's gone right today to counteract what's gone, wrong, though, so at least at the moment I'm in a pretty good mood. :)"
This good mood lasted approximately long enough for me to find out just what a stressful mess things could actually get. I forwarded the letter to my housing broker, who was thrilled and informed me that the Co-op Board was next meeting on 9/16. I then proceeded to have two very stressful hours of attempting to figure out just whether or not I should do what ever it took to get to that meeting. I looked up plane tickets, consulted family members, checked some facts with the broker and my lawyer, and in the end...I decided to wait until the next meeting. However, it's still good news: though the underwriting approval is still pending, I've got a commitment letter, I'll be meeting with the Board on the 30th of September, and things are moving along. If all goes well, I'll close in mid- to late October. If all goes slightly less well, my closing will get set for the week during which I'm supposed to be in Indiana. With how this entire process has gone thus far? That seems pretty likely. Fingers crossed that I'm wrong...
After that stressful evening, I watched some more baseball and uploaded all of the pictures I'd thus far taken onto Flickr. The 15th dawned to a ton of rain and the second of our pre-planned activities - another set of theater tickets. Much like the first, this was a theater activity that would have benefited greatly from fine weather, and we could take heart that despite the sometimes pouring rain, it at least wasn't cold, for we were to see a production of As You Like It, done by the Royal Shakespeare Company on the outdoor stage of the reconstructed Globe Theater. This is a theater in the round, and a large part of it is open air; I gather it's also the only thatch roofed building to be constructed in London since the Great Fire in 1666.
Even the rain couldn't dampen this experience, which I'd say is the highlight of this entire trip. It was a wonderful performance, first of all, of a play I had never seen (didn't even realize that this was where the All the world's a stage soliloquy was from...). Second, the rain actually added to the humor of the production, as there were several nods to the terrible weather. There were also nods to things like when planes passing overhead made it difficult to hear the non-microphoned actors. I'd say it's as close to the original as we're likely to get (short of casting boys as the female parts, which I'd rather wished they would) - it was very physical, done of a group in the round, with a lot of humor being drawn up, and it sounded like nothing so much as people actually talking, which was amazing given that it was Shakespearean. Indeed, there was once or twice that I wondered if they were off script (and a couple times I'm certain they were) - all in all, it was a really marvelous thing to do - next time I'm in London, I'm definitely doing it again; I almost decided to go to their Wednesday evening production of Troilus and Cressida...but, well, it was Troilus and Cressida, so I stayed home.
After the matinee, I had another interesting experience. Just across the street from our hotel was a place that offered floats. Since M and K had had them before, and liked them, we decided to go. A float, for the record, is an shaped chamber half filled with salt water. One lies in the water, closes the egg, with the idea being that one gets to relax in this sensory depravation environment for one hour. I was a little leary of this - I've never been claustrophobic, but I have been phobic of the dark, but one didn't have to close the top or turn off the light. And I had a compelling reason to want to try it - because the main character of my novel, in later bits of story, will come to the conclusion that sensory deprivation chambers are just about her favorite things ever, which made me think that it was worth while to give this experience a try for myself.
I'm glad I did. While I'm not sure that I'd feel at all compelled to repeat the experience - I didn't find it particular relaxing (though I didn't find it not-relaxing, either, it was mostly just neutral in that regard) still it was fascinating. I did spend the entire float with the egg closed, and I kept the light off for pretty much the whole thing, and it wasn't scary, really...it was mostly just...kind of odd. I spent most of the time mentally wandering - the hour past far faster than I would have anticipated - and though I'd hoped to have some major revelation while I was in the float, that didn't end up happening...
On Wednesday, Ben, Mom and Kirsten headed out to Cambridge to visit a friend of M and K's, while I stayed in London with Pop. We headed over to the National Gallery, which I still remembered very well from last year, and spent a pretty relaxing day of it wandering around the Medieval and 16th century art wings, and then we got afternoon tea again. I love afternoon tea...
This morning saw us up bright and early, and out trip to the London City Airport went much more smoothly than our efforts to board Eurostar. The trip to Amsterdam was about as uneventful as possible - which is everything that I'd want - where we checked in to the Grand Hotel Amrath, which has been built in a completely refurbished old shipping building which is filled with beautiful architectural details - one of the nicer hotels I've been in recent memory.
While being in the float didn't induce any particular revelations at the time, I'm not certain that it didn't ultimately do me some good anyway. My writing overall took an interesting turn while in London. Up to then, I'd been editing away, and though I'd been thinking about meta-structural issues, I'd sort of shoved them under the rug and decided not to worry about them. However, a couple days after arriving in London, I decided that I'd really, really lost sight of the forest for the trees, and so I decided to take a step back and just re-read the rest of the novel (about 60% of it is still unedited, maybe a bit more), and while I was doing so I'd ponder - what do I need? Why do I need it?
The novel is WAY over length, and I've been cutting, it hasn't been close to the amounts that I need (I was on track to maybe eliminate 25,000 - 30,000 words - where I was hoping to eliminate more like double that!!). Throughout the re-read, I started to scrawl down some overarching issues and questions that I was noticing. After the float, I had a sudden insight: rather than worrying about better integrating this one plot, why don't I just remove it?
However, thinking about it, I realized that would leave me with some major problems. So I had a second realization: why not reimagine it into something far more useful to me? With that in mind, I've decided to make what had been an unrelated subplot into a facet of a metaplot which will tie in both of the main plots and the side plot into one, over arching, omg evil dude's work. Since this omg evil dude was already my intended villain for the sequel, it all ties together very nicely, and enables me to have a reason to include some stuff that I'd been starting to convince myself was utterly superfluous, yet unsure how to eliminate if I wanted to lay the ground work for the sequel, which I did want to lay. None of this helps me shorten the manuscript, but at it does help me bring everything together in a very useful way, and really, it's more important to me to put together a strong story than to obsess about word count. I'll save the obsessing about word count for when I'm farther along in the process and some agent or editor tells me that it's good but much to long. :)
I finished the re-read yesterday, and felt kind of overwhelmed by the amount of work that might be necessitated by the previous days revelation. I decided to let it simmer a little bit, and decided today whether or not to try to integrate those changes into the current edit run, or wait until the next draft that I know I'm going to have to write.
See, there's one other serious problem in the book, and I've talked about it kind of extensively in previous posts - the use of the Dreamlands, yoinked entirely from HP Lovecraft. The existence of this aspect of the plot is essential in some form, and rather than worrying about how to re-imagine it in this draft, I'd already decided that I'd do that after I finished what I'm currently doing.
That is, until I was lying in bed last night and had one of the flashes of insight that should have been incredibly obvious all along yet somehow wasn't. For the first time, I can say with confidence that I know what I'm going to do instead, I'm starting to know how it will work, I think it actually makes MORE sense given the metaphysics of the universe that I'm writing in, and all in all I feel very good about it.
But now I have a slightly different problem. See, I feel SO good about it that now I'm sorely tempted to run on ahead and just DO it, but that would mean first re-editing some sections I've already completed, and ripping the guts out of several sections, and trying to do extensive rewriting. I had really hoped to put a "done" stamp on the current version of the story while it still contained events by and large "how they originally happened" in the game that the book is based on, before I started ripping it to pieces, but now that I've got a solution that I like, that I REALLY like...I find I'm rather loath to wait. Which means I don't really know what to do. I may let it stew for another day before making up my mind...but I may not.
Well, that's about all I've got to say for now. It's amazing how quickly I've gotten out of the habit of typing, my wrist hurts after just this little post!! ;)
After my last post, I believe I left off before we went to the Musee d'Orsay, on the 8th, the day before leaving Paris. Mom and I headed out early and walked there, shopping as we went, though I didn't end up getting much of anything. The museum itself was about as I remembered it, and houses the French nation's collection of art from the 19th century to the early 20th century (more or less, and then the most recent stuff is in the Pompadou center, where I had no interest in going). Due to a variety of timing issues, I ended up getting to do frustrating little of the Musee d'Orsay, just enough to whet the appetite but not really anything more. Still, I got to see some Corot and Courbet and a few of the other artists of those time periods that I like, and in the end it was still a nice visit.
The following morning, Pop and I set out very early in an effort to get to the Louvre before we had to get to our 1 PM train to London. Pop hadn't yet gotten to see the Venus d'Milo, which he very much wanted to, so we aimed to get to the museum right when it opened at 9 AM. This proved to be a pretty awesome plan. Thanks to the wheel chair, we were able to bypass the line of people who were waiting to get in, and bypass the ticket lines, because handicapped folks plus their, er, keeper, are allowed in for free, so the result was that we waltzed in literally the moment they opened the doors. We went more or less directly to the Venus, and I think that we were the first people to see it that day, with no one else around. Considering that it's usually mobbed with people, I considered this a real victory. After that, we did a few other exhibits, until we were foiled by the presence of random, inexplicable stairs (surprisingly common in this old buildings) and it was about time to go.
The less said about our boarding of Eurostar, the better. We didn't end up really leaving enough time to get on the train, and the result was that it was very stressful, and in the end, I didn't get to sit down in my seat until after the train had already started to move. Pop had always wanted to take the Chunnel, apparently, so that's exactly what we did. It's a damn nice, simple, fast train ride (at least in theory) and it was pretty easy to destress once we were actually on board. We pulled into London at around 3 local time at St. Pancras station, took a cab to our hotel - the Novotel London City South, which was just over Southwark Bridge on Southwark Bridge Road, and spent the evening settling in for the most part.
On the 10th, we mostly wandered around the area of the Thames outside of our hotel, did some exploring, and ended up going down past Parliament. While on the trip, we agreed that the time had come to find a seat for Pop's wheel chair, and I decided that I would try to get to the BM for a little bit because of their late night. Both of these efforts were ultimately successful, though I didn't actually end up staying late, finding I was more tired than I'd anticipated. The British Museum reins in my mind as one of the greatest museums of antiquities in the world (it aughta be after all the various parts of the world that the Brit's robbed shamelessly), and I spent about an hour that evening going through the exhibit that they've installed in the old library reading room, which is dedicated to a discussion in how the approach to knowledge changed during the Enlightenment, with a particular emphasis on the collectors whose collections ended up forming the core of the BM's collection. It was quite interesting, especially since it ends up relating to a point in time before there was really a separation between science and the arts in the discipline known as philosophy, and how the collecting of items from both spheres often coincided, so while it was ostensibly about art and antiquities, it ended up feeling like it pertained strongly to the history of science as well.
In another nearby room, they had a small display of the oldest artifacts in the museum, all of which were over a hundred thousand years old; the very oldest was a 1.5 million year old axe which some ancestral species of ours honed. It was pretty neat.
The 11th, Friday, we went to the Tate Modern, which was very close to our hotel. Though I'd walked by it before, I'd never gone inside, and though it's an impressive feat of architecture and a fascinating environment for a museum, I can't say that I'd feel any particular inclination to go again. I feel like it never hurts to look at art and see if you see with new eyes, but as it is, turns out I still don't have any interest at all in modern art. Thus, aside from a few individual pieces (a surprising couple of Pollacks, a few Cubist and Surrealist pieces) I found basically nothing that spoke to me amidst the bastract art, found item stuff, and strange strings of old pieces of soap (okay, there were only two of those, but still, it was memorable. Old soap. Really.)
One of the things that we discovered more or less immediately upon arrival was that our visit was, awesomely enough, going to coincide with the Mayor's Thames Festival, and that, even more awesomely, the festival's eastern extreme was at Southwark Bridge, and it extended west and south at least to Parliament. The festival was on Saturday and Sunday, and that ended up being pretty much all that we did on either day. (okay, that's not quite true, we went back to the BM on Saturday morning and spent some time there) There was a fair amount of shopping involved, a lot of looking, a fair amount of eating, and a ton of other people. I got myself a really awesome leather purse that I love, and a few skirts - it's about time that I start to dress more nicely again, I've been thinking a lot about how to overall my wardrobe) and I even managed to get a few gifts for folks (though I still haven't sent out the postcards - I've at least written a couple of them...). Going to the festival seemed to eat a surprising amount of times on the days that we went. Among the most fun parts...well, they were mostly the food parts. There was this "fudge" that was strawberries and cream flavored, and it was AMAZING and totally addictive. They must have made it with drugs. I ended up eating a lot of really unhealthy stuff over those two days.
I got to burn at least some of the calories on Sunday night, though. Sunday was a cold and overcast day, but that couldn't deter us from one of the few things that we planned in advance for this trip: we had tickets to go see "Yeoman of the Guard," by Gilbert and Sullivan. Simple enough? Well, it was an outdoor performance, staged as part of the Continental Airlines Tower Festival (not to be confused with the Thames Festival, which shot of fireworks half way through the performance). Indeed, the Tower in question is actually the Tower of London, and the performance took place on a stage assembled in the moat of the Tower. It's a rather mediocre script, but it definitely gained something by being staged in the place it was originally meant for - since the show was originally written in honor of the opening of the Tower to the general public in 1888 by Queen Victoria. It was a wonderful production, but the night was very cold - I didn't end up feeling warmed up until the next morning - still, I'm very glad I did it. It was a very unique experience.
Monday, we went over to the Victoria and Albert, which is a truly amazing museum of the applied art, and though we were disappointed to discover that the exhibits that would have most interested us were in fact the ones currently closed for refurbishment, still we had a nice time wandering through some halls of British applied arts, and I was very glad to discover that they allow the taking of pictures, which guarantees that I will be returning there for a very long visit at some time in the future. From there, we walked over to Harrods where we took in afternoon tea, and I ate more scones that should have been possible. It is my considered opinion that afternoon tea is one of the finest, most relaxing institutions the world over, and Harrods was nice enough to potentially (though the jury is still out) dethrone my favorite tea spot - the reining title holder up to now has been the Peninsula Hotel in Kowloong in Hong Kong, an Imperialist holdover if ever there was one. This one....was probably better. All of the sandwiches and pastries were excellent, and the scones were to die for, and there was this Rose Petal Jelly stuff that was unbelievably yummy....I ate so much I skipped dinner. :)
Just as we were finishing, I got a call from the bank with some good news about my mortgage. They needed a few pieces of paperwork from me (a copy of my gift letter, proof that I've paid my last twelve months rent, and...er...something else that I sent...right, the canceled check for my earnest money) but in exchange they had sent out my commitment letter. As soon as I got back to the hotel, I paid the massive fee to get myself internet access in the room, and wrote the following glowing lead in to a post that I didn't end up finishing:
"Today is the first day that I've broken down and shelled out for the internet in our hotel room. Up to now, I've been managing with 20 minutes snippets on a public use terminal in the lobby where I couldn't do a lot of things, but a phone call today decided me that at least for one 24 hour chunk, I would pay the 14.99 pound fee. So right now I'm using my own computer, watching a baseball game that I already know the results of (and that we win, the only game in the past week that the Mets didn't lose, I believe), beginning the process of uploading pics to Flickr, thinking about what to type in this post, and dealing with housing stuff. There's been enough that's gone right today to counteract what's gone, wrong, though, so at least at the moment I'm in a pretty good mood. :)"
This good mood lasted approximately long enough for me to find out just what a stressful mess things could actually get. I forwarded the letter to my housing broker, who was thrilled and informed me that the Co-op Board was next meeting on 9/16. I then proceeded to have two very stressful hours of attempting to figure out just whether or not I should do what ever it took to get to that meeting. I looked up plane tickets, consulted family members, checked some facts with the broker and my lawyer, and in the end...I decided to wait until the next meeting. However, it's still good news: though the underwriting approval is still pending, I've got a commitment letter, I'll be meeting with the Board on the 30th of September, and things are moving along. If all goes well, I'll close in mid- to late October. If all goes slightly less well, my closing will get set for the week during which I'm supposed to be in Indiana. With how this entire process has gone thus far? That seems pretty likely. Fingers crossed that I'm wrong...
After that stressful evening, I watched some more baseball and uploaded all of the pictures I'd thus far taken onto Flickr. The 15th dawned to a ton of rain and the second of our pre-planned activities - another set of theater tickets. Much like the first, this was a theater activity that would have benefited greatly from fine weather, and we could take heart that despite the sometimes pouring rain, it at least wasn't cold, for we were to see a production of As You Like It, done by the Royal Shakespeare Company on the outdoor stage of the reconstructed Globe Theater. This is a theater in the round, and a large part of it is open air; I gather it's also the only thatch roofed building to be constructed in London since the Great Fire in 1666.
Even the rain couldn't dampen this experience, which I'd say is the highlight of this entire trip. It was a wonderful performance, first of all, of a play I had never seen (didn't even realize that this was where the All the world's a stage soliloquy was from...). Second, the rain actually added to the humor of the production, as there were several nods to the terrible weather. There were also nods to things like when planes passing overhead made it difficult to hear the non-microphoned actors. I'd say it's as close to the original as we're likely to get (short of casting boys as the female parts, which I'd rather wished they would) - it was very physical, done of a group in the round, with a lot of humor being drawn up, and it sounded like nothing so much as people actually talking, which was amazing given that it was Shakespearean. Indeed, there was once or twice that I wondered if they were off script (and a couple times I'm certain they were) - all in all, it was a really marvelous thing to do - next time I'm in London, I'm definitely doing it again; I almost decided to go to their Wednesday evening production of Troilus and Cressida...but, well, it was Troilus and Cressida, so I stayed home.
After the matinee, I had another interesting experience. Just across the street from our hotel was a place that offered floats. Since M and K had had them before, and liked them, we decided to go. A float, for the record, is an shaped chamber half filled with salt water. One lies in the water, closes the egg, with the idea being that one gets to relax in this sensory depravation environment for one hour. I was a little leary of this - I've never been claustrophobic, but I have been phobic of the dark, but one didn't have to close the top or turn off the light. And I had a compelling reason to want to try it - because the main character of my novel, in later bits of story, will come to the conclusion that sensory deprivation chambers are just about her favorite things ever, which made me think that it was worth while to give this experience a try for myself.
I'm glad I did. While I'm not sure that I'd feel at all compelled to repeat the experience - I didn't find it particular relaxing (though I didn't find it not-relaxing, either, it was mostly just neutral in that regard) still it was fascinating. I did spend the entire float with the egg closed, and I kept the light off for pretty much the whole thing, and it wasn't scary, really...it was mostly just...kind of odd. I spent most of the time mentally wandering - the hour past far faster than I would have anticipated - and though I'd hoped to have some major revelation while I was in the float, that didn't end up happening...
On Wednesday, Ben, Mom and Kirsten headed out to Cambridge to visit a friend of M and K's, while I stayed in London with Pop. We headed over to the National Gallery, which I still remembered very well from last year, and spent a pretty relaxing day of it wandering around the Medieval and 16th century art wings, and then we got afternoon tea again. I love afternoon tea...
This morning saw us up bright and early, and out trip to the London City Airport went much more smoothly than our efforts to board Eurostar. The trip to Amsterdam was about as uneventful as possible - which is everything that I'd want - where we checked in to the Grand Hotel Amrath, which has been built in a completely refurbished old shipping building which is filled with beautiful architectural details - one of the nicer hotels I've been in recent memory.
While being in the float didn't induce any particular revelations at the time, I'm not certain that it didn't ultimately do me some good anyway. My writing overall took an interesting turn while in London. Up to then, I'd been editing away, and though I'd been thinking about meta-structural issues, I'd sort of shoved them under the rug and decided not to worry about them. However, a couple days after arriving in London, I decided that I'd really, really lost sight of the forest for the trees, and so I decided to take a step back and just re-read the rest of the novel (about 60% of it is still unedited, maybe a bit more), and while I was doing so I'd ponder - what do I need? Why do I need it?
The novel is WAY over length, and I've been cutting, it hasn't been close to the amounts that I need (I was on track to maybe eliminate 25,000 - 30,000 words - where I was hoping to eliminate more like double that!!). Throughout the re-read, I started to scrawl down some overarching issues and questions that I was noticing. After the float, I had a sudden insight: rather than worrying about better integrating this one plot, why don't I just remove it?
However, thinking about it, I realized that would leave me with some major problems. So I had a second realization: why not reimagine it into something far more useful to me? With that in mind, I've decided to make what had been an unrelated subplot into a facet of a metaplot which will tie in both of the main plots and the side plot into one, over arching, omg evil dude's work. Since this omg evil dude was already my intended villain for the sequel, it all ties together very nicely, and enables me to have a reason to include some stuff that I'd been starting to convince myself was utterly superfluous, yet unsure how to eliminate if I wanted to lay the ground work for the sequel, which I did want to lay. None of this helps me shorten the manuscript, but at it does help me bring everything together in a very useful way, and really, it's more important to me to put together a strong story than to obsess about word count. I'll save the obsessing about word count for when I'm farther along in the process and some agent or editor tells me that it's good but much to long. :)
I finished the re-read yesterday, and felt kind of overwhelmed by the amount of work that might be necessitated by the previous days revelation. I decided to let it simmer a little bit, and decided today whether or not to try to integrate those changes into the current edit run, or wait until the next draft that I know I'm going to have to write.
See, there's one other serious problem in the book, and I've talked about it kind of extensively in previous posts - the use of the Dreamlands, yoinked entirely from HP Lovecraft. The existence of this aspect of the plot is essential in some form, and rather than worrying about how to re-imagine it in this draft, I'd already decided that I'd do that after I finished what I'm currently doing.
That is, until I was lying in bed last night and had one of the flashes of insight that should have been incredibly obvious all along yet somehow wasn't. For the first time, I can say with confidence that I know what I'm going to do instead, I'm starting to know how it will work, I think it actually makes MORE sense given the metaphysics of the universe that I'm writing in, and all in all I feel very good about it.
But now I have a slightly different problem. See, I feel SO good about it that now I'm sorely tempted to run on ahead and just DO it, but that would mean first re-editing some sections I've already completed, and ripping the guts out of several sections, and trying to do extensive rewriting. I had really hoped to put a "done" stamp on the current version of the story while it still contained events by and large "how they originally happened" in the game that the book is based on, before I started ripping it to pieces, but now that I've got a solution that I like, that I REALLY like...I find I'm rather loath to wait. Which means I don't really know what to do. I may let it stew for another day before making up my mind...but I may not.
Well, that's about all I've got to say for now. It's amazing how quickly I've gotten out of the habit of typing, my wrist hurts after just this little post!! ;)
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Date: 2009-09-23 04:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-23 11:28 am (UTC)Beatles Rock Band would be AWESOME!! :)
Wanna get together sometime next week? My Co-op Board meeting is Wednesday night, but otherwise I'm free...
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Date: 2009-09-24 02:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-24 01:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-25 03:40 am (UTC)