Portrait of the artist as a very startled goose

[truepenny]

icetome reviews Mélusine and The Virtu and generally thinks I don't know what I'm doing.

Lighthearted Librarian has some advice about reading The Doctrine of Labyrinths.

jess_ka thinks Bear and I together are greater than the sum of our parts (A Companion to Wolves).

2ce also likes the wolf book. (Favorite line from the review: "you need to show up to the party prepared for the viking gang bang.")

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I know, I promised to shut up, didn't I? But, see, something happened* this morning, and I need to give it time to settle.

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," the Queen remarked.

I've had the experience more than once while writing these books of putting something in, basically because it seemed like a good idea at the time, and only much later, like a book or two later, finding out what it was for. Today that happened with something in the first book. In the first fifty pages of the first book, no less.

Yeah. Three books later, I know why I did that and what it means.

This is a completely unnerving thing to have happen, even while at the same time it is tremendously cool and shiny. Because it gives me the heebie-jeebies. What if I'd taken that thing in book one out? (I almost did take out something in book one that turned out to be incredibly important in book three and is going to come back again in book four. I needed to cut a hell of a lot of words, and my editor said, "This scene doesn't seem to be doing anything." And I stood my ground, even though at the time, she was completely right.) What about all the things I did take out (because they didn't seem to be doing anything)? In other words, this is a part of the creative process that not only does my rational mind not control, it doesn't even know about it except as a fait accompli.

I'm not at all a fan of mysticizing creativity--in fact, quite the reverse. I don't think the Romantics did any of us any favors in trying to divorce art from craft, or in suggesting that artists are like geese who lay golden eggs and any attempt on their part to examine what they do or think critically about how they do it will only kill the goose. But, honest to Pete, as far as I'm concerned, my mind has just done a magic trick. I don't know how it works. I don't know what just happened.

But here it is, a golden egg and a very startled goose.

And now that I know what I'm doing, I need to pause and think about how to do it better.


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*Events that take place entirely in thought also "happen," even if it feels weird to describe them as such.