A Season in Hell: December 10-17, 2022
Of eccentric writers, Roman mines and older women
A Season in Hell is a series of journal entries I wrote in 2022-23, chronicling the last few torturous months I spent working on my novel The Bright Sword—going from stuck to unstuck. If you want to take it from the top, start here.
December 10
I feel the temptation to mope about my book and generally act like an aesthete in Patience—but I don’t want to be an eccentric writer. My dad was an eccentric writer, and it was a pain. When he was in the throes of writing he moped and brooded and went silent at unexpected moments and stared into space. On family expeditions he often had the affect of some deep sea creature whom we had involuntarily dredged up from the depths.
Not me. I’m going to look pleasant about my dredging. My dredging is strictly voluntary.
December 12
I finished Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light. How must it feel to write like that, with such clarity, such feeling, such a perfect touch? Did she have someone whose prose she looked, as I look at hers, and then said, mine is rubbish? I think probably not.
December 15
It is time for the TKs. When I was a magazine journalist, and I needed a fact that I didn’t have, and I also didn’t have time to go and get it right that second, I just wrote TK and kept on writing. (This is a common practice among magazine writers; it has been argued that TK stands for To Kome.) TK is a useful two-letter sequence that rarely occurs anywhere else in English, so when I got to the end of the piece I could go back and search for all the TKs and see all the bits I still had to fill in.
In a novel I use it for the same thing—missing bits of research. What color are Sir Bedivere’s eyes? Don’t remember. TK. What did a Roman lead-mining operation look like? What would the ruins of a Roman lead-mining operation look like? TK. What’s the bit of armor called that covers your armpit? TK. (It’s a pauldron.) And so on. I have a couple hundred of them.
The TKs creep into other bits too. Sometimes my insight into my own characters fails, and I have to TK it. What did Sir Collum say, after the battle, when Sir Bedivere asked him how he felt? Good? Bad? Don’t want to talk about it? Fine, and you? I don’t know yet. I don’t know Collum well enough yet, or battles, or both. TK.
December 17
Very belatedly I have created a master timeline, not just of the events in the novel but of the whole lives of all the major characters, extending beyond the actual span of time narrated in the book, to see if everything actually fits together the way I’ve been assuming it does. The timeline starts with the birth of King Uther and goes forward through Arthur’s death.
I’m not being a stickler—as with space, time is pretty elastic in the Arthurverse. But there are limits, and predictably it turns out that several important events aren’t actually possible as written, and require adjustment. It also forces me to realize that there are several couples where the woman is significantly older than the man. But how much is significant, really? How much is enough that the other characters in the book would comment on it? I used to go out with a woman who was 8 years older than me. Did people comment on it? Actually they did.
Some of the women in question are enchantresses. They could alter their appearances if necessary. But I don’t think it should come to that.