Finishing

Say, I haven't put any updates on here in a while, have I? I think it's time to rectify that.

Song of a Peacebringer -- FINISHED, finally. People died, people got married, people generally reflected on the whole story. It was interesting. Now I have absolutely no idea what to do with myself. You can read the whole thing, all 33 chapters, HERE.

The Hunting of the Sue -- Up and running at FF.net, and receiving generally complimentary reviews. You can read it HERE. The Summary:

Harry's stories may be over, but his adventures continue, no longer as leader in the fight against the Dark Lord, but as a Jurisfiction agent fighting alongside Thursday Next to defeat one of the most terrifying demons known to the BookWorld -The MarySue. A Thursday Next/ Harry Potter Crossover, produced in conjunction with the BookWorld in storycode WebBook1.0

I found out after posting this that Jasper Fforde does not condone fanfiction in any genre or style, so I assume that's the reason there's so precious little of it floating about the 'net. I wrote this because I wish he'd hurry up and finish One of Our Thursdays is Missing, and I'm not making any profit off of it at all, so there. And I combined it with Harry Potter, so his absolute dislike of fanfiction and Rowling's acceptence of it should make it only mildly bad, I think.

The Untitled Cranford Fic -- As yet unpublished Cranford fic (not a whole lot of them floating around, either) I thought I would post here to get some initial feedback from my Cranford fans in the crowd. (Mom, Dad, Helen, this means you.)


Imagine, if you think you can, a small village in Cheshire preparing, as it always does, for the end of summer. Carts of laborers going out to the fields, the market lane bustling with the comings and goings of the village folk. They are a simple people, unconcerned with the wars that fill their newspapers or the gossip about Queen and crown that is filling everyone else’s heads. If you are imagining, pray do not trouble yourself any longer, for the people and the town they inhabit are very real, and their comings and goings are much the same as yours or mine. The town is Cranford, and the year is 1854. If you are acquainted with the place (as I know some are) it is probably ten years since you have seen the place, but fear not; in its usual Cranfordian fashion nothing much has changed. True, some of the less colorful inhabitants have died or moved on to better climes (though what climate could be better or more healthful than Cranford’s the town’s greatest minds are still undecided) but some who have left are returning, names and faces who were once long associated with the town and the niceties of manner and speech that are still practiced here though they have quite left the rest of England.

See, here is one of them now – that young man there, in the lane, astride the bay mare. Do you see him? Topcoat tails soiled as if from a lengthy journey, trousers tucked inside equally stained riding boots, his body is well-formed and his seat on his mare is good, though he does not carry off the air of having ridden his whole life. His clothes are tailored by a professional hand and everything about him, from the shoes of his horse to the slight jauntiness in his top hat, suggests a young gentlemen home from school. This is of course the case, and the school (or rather the college, he is quite older than school) is Saint John’s College in Cambridge, a long way off in Cranford terms. Yes, this is Harry Gregson, once nothing more than a poacher’s son and sometime street urchin, now come back to his hometown a scholar of serious repertoire, well versed in Latin, Greek, the smallest of smatterings in Hebrew and of course his mother-tongue, which he speaks now with an upper-class city air.

He has learned mathematics, economics, and a hint of law, and – though he never admits to this – some of the other vices common to boys of a certain class: a regard for good company and a fine face, and a desire, however latent, to marry such a face and perhaps retain such comfortable circumstances as permit the fine face to shine even finer...

The Created Nature of History

Coming home after being up at school for three months has taught me something I have never previously noticed-- I can't stand public libraries.

It's not the general work environment, or the people who work there, or the noise level. It's nothing anyone else would notice, but in going inside four different public libraries in the past week I've realized that I can't stand the lack of academic history books in the general collection. I wanted another book on the history of Persia, and all I found were coffee table, New York Times best seller list, highly readable but heavily slanted quasi history books about why the middle east is the way it is and the history of modern Iran. I didn't want modern Iran, I wanted classical Iran!

And this lead me back to a subject that we talked a lot about in Post-Colonial Literature, about the created nature of history. The powerful always decide how to slant a story, what words to use to make them appear in a favorable light. I didn't have to read the books on the shelf to know what values the librarians at these libraries were holding up -- it was the absence of books about other subjects, like Arabic poetry or the history of the medieval middle east, that told me a lot about what these people consider valuable. Never mind that there was a whole bookcase of volumes on the medieval European world. Apparently nothing west of the Caucus mattered until the Europeans got there and 'discovered' it.

My friend and co-conspirator on MechKnight, Simon, had an interesting request for me several weeks ago, one that ties very much in with this 'created history' subject. He was beginning a new story in the MechKnight canon and wanted a saint to be a filler character that the main narrator, Monica, could write letters to:

Initially, I was going to pick a saint pretty much at random - I fancied using the name "Catherine" and having Monica not really remember WHICH Catherine. Or, maybe Saint Monica herself - but that might have been confusing. And then I had a very cool idea.

Saint Audemande of Vinceaux.

The impression I got from Jane's words was that she was a woman who might appeal to a young girl as a suitable role model [ed-- I included Aude as a random self-referential bit in This Blessed Plot]
The questions (finally!) I had were;

i) Is she the sort of person who would be canonized by the Church? That is, is her life an example of holiness? She doesn't have to be perfect or an uber example of it in Song of a Peacebringer - because that story is the REAL tale and, as both you and I know, the pious traditions and the actual truth of the lives of Saints are often at odds. But is she a good woman trying to do good things and be holy?

I told him, of course, that Aude doesn't turn out to be a very holy person, or at least the sort of person that the church is in the habit of canonizing (getting married to Muslim, forsaking her faith and all that) but I brought this created history bit into the story. Depending on who's telling her story she can be different things to different people -- One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist.

"What will we be remembered as, do you think? As great lovers? Lalya and Majun come again?" Aude proposed, wondering aloud.

"No...though we will have been so," her husband promised in a mischievous, promissory tone. Aude decided then and there she loved that tone. "History seldom stops to take such details down. I have written much of history -- nothing was ever exactly as I wrote it. You... you will be remembered as a great beauty -- which you were, of course,” he added. Aude chuckled. “And I will be remembered as a poet, a historian, a leader of men. But our stories will never be told together exactly as they were. Among your people yours will be a tragic, cautionary tale, a beautiful maiden stolen away by a vicious Saracen lord to be his concubine. Captured in battle, perhaps -- a spoil of war until your death.”

“Of grief, of course,” she added. “When I was too young to die.”

"Of course. And my people...” Nasir considered this closely. “To the Muslims you will be a wicked enchantress, who used her magic to ensnare me, and unman the great leader of armies. You will steal me away from my duties in stories, lead me astray...and then perhaps poison me in my sleep. Or stab me in the heart after I attempt to rebel; the authors are still deciding," he said with a smile. Aude gave him a playful jab in the ribs, smiling herself.

Aude and Nasir, being the historians and storytellers that they are, realize and recognize the created nature of history, and also recognize that their story will be different from the actual events regardless of who's telling it.

I hadn't written this last part when Simon asked me this question, so, theoretically, Aude could be the saint Monica wants to write to. She could be the martyred Christian maiden carried off by the vicious and lacivious Arabs that makes such a great Church story.

I guess it all depends on what book you're reading. And clearly, my library doesn't have a copy of the text that reads the story the opposite way.

Inspiration, or Lack Thereof

Some days, writing is easy. You sit down, and by some act of god or the alignment of the cosmos or the fact that you're just having an awesome day, the words come. My inspiration has a lot to do with weather, and when it's about thirty degrees outside and then you get a new full blanket of snow (and then, of course, a snow day in which you would like nothing better than to write all day), trying to write a scene that takes place in a desert becomes a lot harder than you would think.

This wasn't any snow, either -- it was wet snow, the kind skiers hate because it clumps and sticks to everything and slows you down. I would know -- I went out and snowshoed in it. Powder, the light, airy kind of snow, behaves like sand -- it drifts, forms snow dunes. Looking at wind swept powder looks a lot like looking at a desert. Looking at wet snow...looks like looking at a winterscape. Not helpful at all.

I have a new chapter due this Friday (I use the word 'due' as an indication that I am giving myself deadlines, one new chapter a week, to make sure this story goes faster.) and I haven't edited it yet. Tomorrow I go to a conference on Medieval History in the Twin cities at the University of Minnesota. Topics being lectured on will include the following:

10:15am - Introduction to Exhibit of Medieval Books
10:30am - On the Road with the Crusades
11:15am - Food, Feasting & Fasting
1:15pm - Beowulf: Fact, Fiction, & Film
2:00pm - Exploring a Medieval City
2:45pm - Readers’ Theatre: The Chase: Harts & Hearts

Needless to say, I'm terribly excited, because most of these speakers (with the exception of Beowulf) have something to do with Song of a Peacebringer. I'm also the only CSB/SJU student going with someone from the HMML, who sent out a free range invitation to the entire history department. I'm the only one who responded, and I'm not even part of the history department! Hopefully more inspiration will strike after the conference is over.

Editing -- An elephant, only with more punctuation.

Editing. Everyone hates to do it, but it's the elephant-in-the-room of the writing world -- something that cannot be ignored despite the fact that everyone wants to.

And I'm not talking about the cross your Ts and dot your Is editing, either. I'm talking about the redirect the last forty pages of your story editing, which I am getting a crash course in this week as I try to do that in addition to juggling a host of other things, not the least of which is beginning my prep work for my study abroad experience this fall. (Galway, Ireland? Anyone? Anyone?)

Was it necessary for me to abruptly decide to uproot the ending and take it in a completely different direction? No. But one of my reviewers suggested it, and after much thoughtful consideration, I decided that her suggestion had a lot of merit, and it would pose new and interesting challenges for me as well as a different (and more thought-provoking) message for the reader.

Last Friday I posted the first chapter in this new and revised ending sequence, and it felt a bit like pushing the button to initiate a countdown sequence on a bomb. A very large, imposing, life-in-the-world-as-we-know-it-altering kind of bomb. Well, now it's several days later, and I still don't feel any better about it, mainly because of the three people who I can generally count on to review only one has actually gone and done it.

But I'm still having fun researching and adding new elements to my story, one of which I am shamelessly borrowing from the Arabian Nights -- the character of Scheherazade, the great storyteller who sets the fantastic and elaborate tales of the one thousand and one nights in motion. I'm not actually putting her in the story, per se, but instead I'm borrowing the concept of so skilled a storyteller and applying her to my main character, herself something of a storyteller. Her new love interest refers to her by this long and strange name, and Aude asks her tutor where the name comes from. The tutor explains the story of Scheherazade and Sharyar, and Audemande realizes what a great compliment this is coming from her love interest.

As I was sitting in the library reading The Arabian Nights and Orientalism: Perspectives from East and West in between my math class and Shakespeare, I realized something very interesting about Song of a Peacebringer in relationship to the Arabian Nights. The Nights are well known for their use of a frame story (Scheherazade having to tell stories in order to be spared execution) and for their subsequent deepening levels of narrative within the narrative -- Much like Hamlet's 'play-within-a-play' plot device, some of Scheherazade's stories have in themselves more people telling stories, embedding a story within a story within a story.

Song of a Peacebringer, then has an 'intertext' or 'narrative quilt' five layers deep, something I certainly didn't plan on but was kind of pleased to discover. Let me explain:

First there's
ME, Mercury Gray, the author, telling a story about
AUDEMANDE, who is in turn listening to a story about
SCHEHERAZADE, who is telling Sharyar a story about
A PRINCESS IN A FAR AWAY LAND who is telling a story to her children about
AN ENCHANTED CASTLE.

and Voila! Intertext five layers thick. Needless to say this discovery made me feel very talented this morning.

A confession, of sorts.

So I think it's been determined that I'm an Orientalist. Edward Said would be ashamed of me. Professor Mitra will be ashamed of me. Professor Steve will be ashamed of me.

After a review last week from Axel Blaze, my original character Audemade from my Kingdom of Heaven story up and decided she didn't want to marry a Frankish knight, go back to France, and have five lovely children. No, she wanted to marry Nasir Imad al-Din al-Isfahani and make my life difficult.

I'm sure the august personages mentioned at the beginning of this blog post would chalk this sudden change of heart up to Audemande's creator's weakness for Arabic love poetry and an ongoing love affair with the image of a world that has never existed, and they'd be very right. If Post Colonial Lit is teaching me anything, it's that I'm very much an Orientalist. I love to read about "the mystic east," about Mughal India and pre-Meiji Restoration Japan and the Middle East under the Ayubbid caliphate. "Latticework, caravanserai, fountains," to quote Nazim Hikmet, the Turkish poet. "This is the Orient the French poet sees. This is the Orient of the books that come out of the press at the rate of a million a minute. But yesterday today or tomorrow an Orient like this never existed and never will."

So true, Mr. Hikmet. I'm sure you wouldn't approve of this turn either. It involves a franj woman falling in love with a poem-composing Syrian general. Somewhere everyone who fought against the image of the lacivious Arab is turning over in his or her grave. Hopefully I won't rouse too many ghosts -- this is going to be a relationship built on mutual appreciation. And I'm well aware I'm going into dangerous territory here -- now it's not just my own religious history I'm fiddling with, but someone else's. But what is art besides taking chances?

So, in response to this turn of events in my Kingdom of Heaven story, the readingand research list for this week looks like this:

Music of a Distant Drum. An anthology of classical Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew poems. I read this today. Those 9th century arab poets really knew how to turn a phrase. Some of the best love poetry I think I've ever read.

Arabic Script. A book on the art of Arab calligraphy. Beautiful work. It's making me want to learn calligraphy in any language.

Becoming Muslim: Western Women's Conversions to Islam. Because the contents of this book may become necessary to the direction of the story. I still have to look into this.

EDIT: Success! Apparently Aude doesn't need to convert at the end of the story! Women in Islam, by Wiebke Walther, tells me that Muslim men may marry non-Muslim women, but Geraldine Brooks' Nine Parts of Desire (which I own, by the way -- wonderful text) only mentions women who converted and my hasty scanning of the Qu'ran online seems to indicate otherwise. I think I need to find out which theology professor teaches the Islamic studies course here...

Islamic Art and Archaeology of Palestine. I get to design Nasir's house, and I needed suggestions. I at least know they weren't all zenanas and flowering gardens.

Night and Heros and The Desert: An anthology of Classical Arabic Literature. More poetry. I am a glutton.

Di'bil b. 'Ali. A poet of the Ayubbid period, so someone who would have been Nasir's contemporary. I need him for stylistic purposes. 12th century arabic poetry has a very set form, and I have a feeling I'm not talented enough to recreate that in translation, because of course I will be composing thier love poems in English.

The Transformation of Islamic Art during the Sunni Revival. Fascinating book -- started some of it last night at dinner. The Author mentioned Orientalism in the introduction.


Yes, it's going to be an interesting next few weeks.

Celebration!

Last weekend I posted my 40th fanfiction over at FF.net. As of this past October, I have been a member of that site for nearly five years, since the 8th grade, when I bravely ventured out from my floppy-disk bound writing endeavors into the big wide world of public critique.

Let's see how times have changed, shall we?

First off, I no longer save my stories on floppy disks. In fact, the computer on which I now save my stories no longer has a space for floppy disks. My first public story was a Lord of the Rings parody of Wierd Al's Phantom Menace, written with some help from my friend Katie on the way between her house and mine for an occasion that has gone beyond memory. My 40th story was a Kingdom of Heaven fic explaining a minor incident in my Song of a Peacebringer fic (I think we could start calling it a fanfiction novella at this point -- it's 114 pages long...)

My first contributions to FF.net were in the Lord of the Rings archive, centered on Boromir, my first real literary crush. My first large piece of work was The Meaning and Mystery of the Rose, a Lord of the Rings story I affectionately called 'My Baby' for a long time because it was the longest thing I'd ever written. I wrote each chapter in a separate document, so it's difficult to say how many pages long it actually was, but FF.net puts the word count at around 53,821 words, including, of course, the Author's Notes that were regrettably common in those days. Song of a Peacebringer (which is being composed in a single document and parsed out into separate chapters) is, at the time of this blogging, some 55,178 words long. And it's not quite done, either.

Goodness, how times have changed -- I'm still verbose and still writing obscenely long fanfic.

Today my high school friend Catroux interviewed me for a paper she's writing on fanfiction and identity in teenagers -- hopefully, if she says yes, I'll post an edited (for continuity) copy of that interview up for you to read and learn a little bit about me and my journey as a fanfiction writer. And hopefully she'll post some of her paper, too...

Speaking of papers, I don't know if I ever told you all that my own paper on fanfiction (the one mentioned here, here, and here on this blog) is going to be presented by yours truely at Scholarship and Creativity day! Not everyone gets to do that, you know. You've got to special. Ground-breaking.

So, share around the balloons, have a slice of CAKE


-- and celebrate this milestone with me! What milestone, you ask?

The milestone of being thought important and authoritative enough to interview!

A very Shakespeare Themed day

Yesterday was a very Shakespeare themed day. Which isn't surprising, considering I started my Shakespeare class this semester and so far it rocks. We're reading Shakespeare's later plays, beginning with Twelfth Night (which is my favorite Shakespearean Comedy ever) and yesterday I decided I wanted to watch the movie. Not knowing if there was one, I looked on YouTube first...and found the whole version of the 1996 version with Toby Smith as Duke Orsino, Helen Bonham Carter as Countess Olivia, Imogen Stubbs as Viola/Cesario, ben Kingsley as Feste and Imelda Staunton as Maria. Let me tell you, Shakespeare is awesome on his own, but put together a bunch of actors who really know how to do what they do, set the play in this Victorian-esque background, and then let what you will happen, it becomes a beautiful, beautiful thing.

After I finished my movie, I went to dinner, then read a book on the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and how it could be considered a colonial extension of Europe (this was an interesting direction for me to read in because I have Post-Colonial Lit this semester too) and after that went to go find the posse and watch a movie. We ended up watching Shakespeare in Love (another excellent film) which, as many learned men know, has in it a lot of references to Twelfth Night and, again, a lot of actors who know very well what they are about.

After that we watched Twilight, which, after following so much Shakespeare, fell farther and flatter on its face than it probably would have done if we had watched something a little less awesome beforehand. We talked through the whole movie and related why it was terrible and what was wrong with the characters (We have a theory now that Edward should be called nothing but Eddy C for the sake of his mind-altering coolness, and all were agreed that Bella is a Mary Sue.) and it was fun.

But I was still thinking alot about Shakespeare when I went to bed, including one of the discussion questions our professor is having us ruminate on, the idea of whether Cesario is a real person or not. If you haven't read Twelfth Night, here's a little summary for you: A pair of twins, brother and sister, are separated during a storm. One of them, Viola, washes up on a beach in a foriegn country. She dresses like a man to keep her options open and her safety in check, goes to serve the local duke, and ends up trying to woo the woman he's in love with for him. She falls in love with Viola/Cesario instead. Meanwhile, her brother, Sebastian, has also come ashore, and is looking for the Duke to also go into service with him. Sebastian is confused for Viola, vice-versa, and then it all seems to work out at the end. (If you want a more detailed plot summary, try CliffNotes.)

So Olivia falls in love with Cesario. Orsino finds a bosom buddy in Cesario. Sir Andrew and Sir Toby have a bone to pick with Cesario. But Cesario isn't really a person -- he's a constructed identity. I realized after class on Thursday that Cesario sounds a lot like Caesarion (as in Caesarion birth or C-section) and his role in the play bears a lot on that. His birth or creation is forced, just like a c-section is, and it is done out of necessity, when all the other options are given up on.

And it occured to me (because I am self centered, and the chain of events lent itself to it) that Cesario and Audemande have something in common. Neither one of them becomes who they are, essentially, until they are removed to this far, foriegn place. Cesario offers himself to the duke as a performer because he doesn't have any other talents. Audemande culitvates her skill at telling stories so she becomes useful to Baldwin and Sybilla. If Viola had stayed in Messaline, she never would have married Orsino. If Aude had stayed in Poitou, she never would have met and befriended all the people that she does. Both women occupy traditionally male places, as public members of a ruling party's retinue, and both are very close to their soveriegns. Is Audemande a constructed identity, too, then? I say no, because she remains who she is throughout the story. She adapts her manners and her skills to her situation, but she doesn't usurp who she is for the sake of the people who control her life.

That's about where the comparisions end (Spoiler for the end of Song of a Peacebringer -- Aude and Baldwin do NOT get hitched.) but it was still really interesting to me. Here's a play I really enjoy watching and a story I really enjoy writing, and they're remarkably similiar.

So that was my very shakespeare themed day. I hope everyone else's Friday was just as fun and exciting.

All I want for Christmas...

...is a Templar plushie!

Is that or is that not one of the cutest things ever? Completely pointless, and not what I really want for Christmas (Wellington boots, for those of you family members who occasionally check this blog, MOM) but worth mentioning.

If you actually want to buy one, and this woman's work is amazing (Plushie Viking, anyone?) you should check out her blog here --

http://herzensart.blogspot.com/

And while we're in the business of discussing Templars, I should at some point this weekend update Song of a Peacebringer. It's finals week in two weeks and my schoolwork is slowly determined to crush the life out of me, one ten page paper at a time.

Updates!

And, after a nightmarish two weeks of school work piled on top of school work, piled on top of the Minnesota weather beginning to act like the minnesota weather and making it really hard for me to type some days, we have LE UPDATE.

We have, in no particular order,

New chapter from Mercury Gray,

Category: Kingdom of Heaven
Title: Song of a Peacebringer
Chapter: 13
Chapter Title: Chapter 13
Genre: Drama/Adventure
Rating: Fiction Rated: T
Summary: Trying to escape a life with no prospects, a young woman sets sail for the Holy Land not knowing what she will find there. Armed with her brother Gregory's advice and a modicum of courage, Audemande of Vinceaux tries to make the most of Jerusalem.

URL: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4400318/13/

and a new story! I've been working on this one for a while, and I finally finished it this weekend.

New story from Mercury Gray,

Category: Kingdom of Heaven
Title: Gardens of Paradise
Genre: Drama/Spiritual
Rating: Fiction Rated: K+
Summary: While in Jerusalem, Nasir Imad Al Din meets a fellow poet in the gardens of the Citadel of David, and has a lengthy discussion about gardening, poetry, and God.

URL: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4656923/1/

and another new story, too -- this one is a Grey's Anatomy fanfic -- new territory for me! check it out and see what you think!

New story from Mercury Gray,

Category: Grey's Anatomy
Title: The Small Matter of Teaching
Genre: Drama/Humor
Rating: Fiction Rated: K+
Summary: After Chief Webber notices Christina's non-existent teaching skills, everyone's favorite perfectionist gets a wake-up call from a patient of hers on how exactly to deal with the small matter of teaching.
URL: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4656438/1/

Now, after that massive outpouring of creative energy, I have to go work and attempt to write a four to five double spaced page essay on the impact the Bible and the Printing press have had on the evolution of English. Ah, Linguistics class, I love you so.

But really? Really?