the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to

[truepenny]

I'm having trouble with my hands, wrists, and forearms again, so I'm going to be unnaturally quiet for the next few days.

Have made small progress on dissertation, and smaller on emperor.

You may imagine me seething like a teakettle about to come to the boil.

And, of course, I keep reading about Henry James's incredible productivity and thinking bitterly, But didn't the bastard ever get hand-cramp?

Comments

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I wonder that about Asimov. No carpal tunnel, Isaac? 400 book-length manuscripts? umpteen shorts and articles? All on a manual typewriter?

*sigh*

alternatives to typing

[tamnonlinear.livejournal.com]

A famous pot-boiler detective-novel writer (whose name I cannot recall at present) was said to have written out lines and scenes for his stories, pinned them up to the wall, and written his novels by pacing around the room and dictating passages to an assistant as they (almost literally) caught his eye.

Wish I could be of help. I only have two talents in which I place any true confidance.

One is the ability to give a very good massage to whatever body part is in need of aide. Shoulders, scalps, feet, and hands a specialty. I am, alas, too distant to be of help in this present matter.

The other skill is the ability to wear hats well, which is unlikely to ever be of help to anyone other than myself in any case.

Will take your silence as part of the distillation process, and eagerly await your next words.

(maybe you could hold a pencil in your teeth? Nah, that would lead to neck strain....)

[calanthe-b.livejournal.com]

I'm having trouble with my hands, wrists, and forearms again

Much sympathy. They always go out as a unit, don't they?

You may imagine me seething like a teakettle about to come to the boil.

I know the feeling. I was seething, but then someone shifted me off the hob and I went flat...

[heresluck]

Let me know if you need some work done on the forearms; it seemed to help a bit last time, if I remember correctly.

[pameladean]

Very sorry about the arms etc.

You make me wonder if handwriting is somehow more ergonomic than typing. It seems wildly improbable. But really, yes, and what about Trollope?

Or Dumas, for heaven's sake?

Pamela

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Trollope got up at five and wrote until breakfast at nine, (which someone else made and brought to him and which caused him no hesitation until he had his knife in his hand) except on days when he went hunting. Then for the rest of the day he thought about what came next while engaging in a wide range of other stuff that probably exercised his hands usefully.

Dumas was running a Baen-esque story factory.

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

I believe, in his latter years at least, HJ dictated to an assistant. Barbara Cartland also did this and her productivity, if not the quality of her work, shot up accordingly.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I think he used a dictaphone and his secretary typed up from this. What is frightening is that the syntax of the later books gets ever more convoluted, so much for the theory that speaking something rather than writing conduces to simplicity and clarity. Apparently HJ did speak Jamesian even in ordinary routine interactions - there's an amusing story in, I think, Edith Wharton's memoirs about him asking a bewildered passerby for directions.

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, that makes sense. I found it diffcult to think of HJ striding up and down his study, declaiming.

Last time I went to Lamb House there was a manuscript on display; I think it was a sheet of notepaper folded down to maybe A5. Mostly, I remember PK poring over it and then suddenly announcing, 'that entire sheet of paper is covered with one sentence'. And by god he was right ... worse, it appeared to be the middle of the sentence.

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, that makes sense. I found it diffcult to think of HJ striding up and down his study, declaiming to a stenographer.

Last time I went to Lamb House there was a manuscript on display; I think it was a sheet of notepaper folded down to maybe A5. Mostly, I remember PK poring over it and then suddenly announcing, 'that entire sheet of paper is covered with one sentence'. And by god he was right ... worse, it appeared to be the middle of the sentence.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

The Henry James/Marcel Proust marathon sentence challenge match would have been worth seeing.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

A computer could write Barbara Cartland: simply search and replace names throughout. This is probably what her secretaries had to do manually - retype everything changing names, details of appearance (e.g. for dainty blonde read statuesque brunette) and possibly place names - and voila! yet another piece of Cartland product.

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

I will own to having not read any Cartland, so remain blissfully ignorant to detailed content, but I think I had probably guessed. What always fascinated me, though, was what she thought she was doing. I can never decide whether she was really so stupid as to think that she was producing new and original material each time, or whether she was so very, very cunning that she could appear to dissemble. Either way, I still treasure Lynda Lee-Potter's description of her as an 'animated meringue'.

Love on the Khyber?

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I think I've managed to avoid reading any Cartland except the extracts Germaine Greer put in The Female Eunuch, with one possible exception.

Many years ago a colleague of mine in a previous place of work dealt with an enquiry from her about train-routes in India (so I may have done her an injustice in implying that she didn't do any research) and in gratitude sent him a copy of an earlier work, which then remained knocking about our office and was doubtless still there when they moved out a few years ago. I may have glanced at it in some moment of boredom.

I think the book she was researching was to do with Romance on the North West Frontier: possibly appropriate, as when I was in Pakistan her presence in the English language sections of all the bookshops was very prominent.

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

Sounds like she had a very thorough grip of at least one of her markets.

Still, I shudder every time I think of seeing her on tv, and hearing her pronounce on what women want, or don't.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I think what she did (does?) was sit down and think of a name for a heroine, along the lines of Lavinia or Veronica, and hair/eye colour, and a defect -- like her golden hair being a trifle too curly, or (genuine one from one I read) a skin complaint that later in the book clears up in the tropic sun, or feared consumption, and she picks a setting, which she either already knows or researches, then she writes the same plot in different words, and lots and lots of people lap it up, because they don't want different, after all, they want Another Barbara Cartland.

Meringue, yes, goodness is it meringue.

I read a metric buttload of Cartland in 1975 and have felt no desire to read any more since, but when I wrote the story-telling card-game "Into the Dear Caress" a few years ago, I found the necessary cliches flowing out like babycham.

There's a sympathetic POV of a terrible character just like her in Peter Dickinson's _The Last Unicorn_.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

There's also a character who does the same sort of thing as Cartland (name of heroine changes, story is essentially similar, dictates to secretary), but is far more sympathetic, as a recurrent character in the Josephine Tey novels - Lavinia something?

I see the character in Death of a Unicorn as being more of an upper-class Catherine Cookson than a Cartland: a potboiling hack with an eye to the main chance yes, but minus the nauseous virginity fetish and desire to sermonise about True Womanhood. Plus her own story is absolute antithesis of Cartland heroine behaviour!

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Lavinia Fitch.

[persimmon.livejournal.com]

Would it be worth dictating some of the ideas on to tape, so that you don't lose track of them, and also freeing up mental holding space?

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Henry James' hands wouldn't DARE give him cramp.

Maybe you can try walking around outside if the weather is good, and allowing scenes to work out in your head. Which might make the desire to write worse, but might also save you some typing time, if you're lucky.

[libskrat]

Damn it. Stop it stop it stop it!

Whatever psychic connection we've made such that our hands go out at the same time, it needs to be severed immediately!

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes. Yes, it really does.

From what you said on CavLec, I think you're worse off than I am. Not that that's any kind of consolation for either of us.

Here's hoping we're both better soon.