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truepennyFirst, although no one has actually asked this in the form of a question yet: if you think you spot an allusion, you're probably right. Poe, Lovecraft, Eliot, Samuel Daniel, Shakespeare, The Cat Came Back, Coppélia, Sayers, Milton, Dickens, Tolkien, various Brontës--basically, anything I've read or seen or heard has been treated as fair game if I could warp it into the appropriate shape.
Here's another question that's been asked more than once:
Q: Is there any way possible we could hope (possibly years from now) for more to the story, either a precursor dealing with younger versions of Felix & Mildmay or post-Corambis incarnations?
A: Anything's possible. By which I mean, if I get an idea for another story about Felix and Mildmay (or Mehitabel or Kay or anybody else), I'll write it. But I don't promise that I'll ever get more story ideas for them.
Q: Was there ever a time you intended to have Felix and Mildmay go any further than the tension you'd drawn out so delightfully?
A: No. Mildmay is straight, and he understands the difference between love and sex.
Q: How did you develop the Corambin/Caloxan way of speaking? Does it adhere to some other set of speech patterns (Jacobean, Elizabethan, something else) or was there more invention there?
A: The Caloxan dialect is--obviously--based on Early Modern English (i.e., Shakespeare's English). However, I realized very early on that if I actually wrote Kay's narrative in EME, very few modern readers would have the patience to wade through it. (EME prose is, um, stately at best. Also convoluted. And just plain difficult for modern readers to parse.) So I cast about for other ways to make Kay's voice sound strikingly different from Felix and Mildmay, and also archaic. The inverse-contraction thing (where he and other Caloxans drop subjects instead of contracting the verb) is an occasional feature of EME; I just extrapolated it out into a dialectical principle. So, yes, Caloxan is mostly EME, modified to suit my purposes.
Q: How much of the eventual plot twists, turns, and results in Corambis were already planned while you were writing the earlier novels? For instance, when you mention Mildmay's weakness to illness in Melusine, is that a deliberate setup for him to become very very sick later on?
A: One of the very very early things I knew about Felix's story arc was that he'd eventually turn back to prostitution in order to help somebody he loved, and I almost as quickly knew it would be for the money to pay a doctor. So, yes, I built that flaw into Mildmay on purpose.
Q: Is the lighthouse symbolic? I have strong emotional reactions to lighthouses in general, so I was wondering if I was projecting or if something is really there.
A: All the architecture is symbolic. So, yes. The lighthouse is symbolic. (It's also just too freaking cool not to use.)
Q: Why not bring Gideon back? I think the reason Felix gave - that he wouldn't be Gideon - was excellent & for the rest of book covered it in my mind. But then I started wondering why you didn't work that out. I probably miss Gideon more than Felix!
A: Because Gideon is dead.
I'm sorry; I just don't have a better answer than that. Gideon is dead, and there's no magic Felix can work that can change that. And Felix is at least smart enough to know that anything else would be a miserable, bitter sham.
Q: And why not Kay, or why no love interest at all for Felix (or Mildmay)? Was it just that you felt like he needed to show that he's not at a point in his life where he needs to be that involved with someone - for a change portraying Felix as trying to be an adult? Or was it just that you thought he needed a time of grieving for Gideon?
A: The wretchedly awful submission draft of Corambis did, in fact, have a romance between Felix and Kay. It was wrong. Believe me, it was completely, painfully, utterly, embarrassingly wrong. It was me thinking with my genre conventions, not paying attention to the characters: who they are and what they need to do. Felix needs time to grieve, and after the string of train-wrecks that has been his love life, he needs some time to figure out how not to be that person anymore before he tries again. And Kay's not even remotely ready to have a male lover anyway.
Q: In one of the previous Q&A's you talked extensively about accents and, in particular, Mildmay's. I've never had any trouble "hearing" him, but Felix eludes me despite your descriptions. Is there anyone his inflection is modeled after, or could you possibly point me in the direction of someone whose voice I could use as a jumping-off point to get the gist of how he sounds?
A: My two best models for Felix--David Bowie and Jeremy Brett--happen to be English, and I suspect it's very easy (especially for Americans?) to hear Felix with a British accent, because we associate that with snotty upper-class intellectualism of the kind Felix specializes in. But he doesn't sound British. None of them sound British. If you've listened to my podcasts, in them I'm "doing" Felix as best I can, given that my voice is the wrong register. So if you can imagine Jeremy Brett doing an American accent--American as spoken by the dominant culture in the Midwestern states, with occasional undertones of the mid-South--that's what Felix sounds like.
And one more, because it's connected to an earlier question in this post:
Q: If you recall this post, in #3, you mention a scene which is psychologically true, and so on. I was intensely curious about this at the time, and now, having read the book, I still am. Does this scene still exist? What /is/ it? (I suspect, if it still exists, that I know which scene it is, but I'm often wrong.)
A: The scene I'm referring to there is the gang rape. As I said in response to that earlier question, I knew from very early on that Felix was going to turn back to prostitution to get the money for a doctor for someone he loved (I knew this was going to happen before I knew Mildmay existed), and I knew that he was going to end up in a situation that was completely out of his control and that hurt him badly. Because Felix is reckless and self-destructive and because under all his vanity, he doesn't think he's worth protecting. And because it is a kind of answering horror to his being raped by Malkar at the beginning of Mélusine. And because he needed something that would force him to confront these issues--force him to see that he doesn't deserve to be abused--and it had to be something superlatively unbearable if it was going to get through to him, because Felix has way too much experience at ignoring his own pain.
But knowing all that, knowing that it had to happen, did not in fact make it any easier to work into the structure of the novel.
[Ask your question(s) here.]
Here's another question that's been asked more than once:
Q: Is there any way possible we could hope (possibly years from now) for more to the story, either a precursor dealing with younger versions of Felix & Mildmay or post-Corambis incarnations?
A: Anything's possible. By which I mean, if I get an idea for another story about Felix and Mildmay (or Mehitabel or Kay or anybody else), I'll write it. But I don't promise that I'll ever get more story ideas for them.
Q: Was there ever a time you intended to have Felix and Mildmay go any further than the tension you'd drawn out so delightfully?
A: No. Mildmay is straight, and he understands the difference between love and sex.
Q: How did you develop the Corambin/Caloxan way of speaking? Does it adhere to some other set of speech patterns (Jacobean, Elizabethan, something else) or was there more invention there?
A: The Caloxan dialect is--obviously--based on Early Modern English (i.e., Shakespeare's English). However, I realized very early on that if I actually wrote Kay's narrative in EME, very few modern readers would have the patience to wade through it. (EME prose is, um, stately at best. Also convoluted. And just plain difficult for modern readers to parse.) So I cast about for other ways to make Kay's voice sound strikingly different from Felix and Mildmay, and also archaic. The inverse-contraction thing (where he and other Caloxans drop subjects instead of contracting the verb) is an occasional feature of EME; I just extrapolated it out into a dialectical principle. So, yes, Caloxan is mostly EME, modified to suit my purposes.
Q: How much of the eventual plot twists, turns, and results in Corambis were already planned while you were writing the earlier novels? For instance, when you mention Mildmay's weakness to illness in Melusine, is that a deliberate setup for him to become very very sick later on?
A: One of the very very early things I knew about Felix's story arc was that he'd eventually turn back to prostitution in order to help somebody he loved, and I almost as quickly knew it would be for the money to pay a doctor. So, yes, I built that flaw into Mildmay on purpose.
Q: Is the lighthouse symbolic? I have strong emotional reactions to lighthouses in general, so I was wondering if I was projecting or if something is really there.
A: All the architecture is symbolic. So, yes. The lighthouse is symbolic. (It's also just too freaking cool not to use.)
Q: Why not bring Gideon back? I think the reason Felix gave - that he wouldn't be Gideon - was excellent & for the rest of book covered it in my mind. But then I started wondering why you didn't work that out. I probably miss Gideon more than Felix!
A: Because Gideon is dead.
I'm sorry; I just don't have a better answer than that. Gideon is dead, and there's no magic Felix can work that can change that. And Felix is at least smart enough to know that anything else would be a miserable, bitter sham.
Q: And why not Kay, or why no love interest at all for Felix (or Mildmay)? Was it just that you felt like he needed to show that he's not at a point in his life where he needs to be that involved with someone - for a change portraying Felix as trying to be an adult? Or was it just that you thought he needed a time of grieving for Gideon?
A: The wretchedly awful submission draft of Corambis did, in fact, have a romance between Felix and Kay. It was wrong. Believe me, it was completely, painfully, utterly, embarrassingly wrong. It was me thinking with my genre conventions, not paying attention to the characters: who they are and what they need to do. Felix needs time to grieve, and after the string of train-wrecks that has been his love life, he needs some time to figure out how not to be that person anymore before he tries again. And Kay's not even remotely ready to have a male lover anyway.
Q: In one of the previous Q&A's you talked extensively about accents and, in particular, Mildmay's. I've never had any trouble "hearing" him, but Felix eludes me despite your descriptions. Is there anyone his inflection is modeled after, or could you possibly point me in the direction of someone whose voice I could use as a jumping-off point to get the gist of how he sounds?
A: My two best models for Felix--David Bowie and Jeremy Brett--happen to be English, and I suspect it's very easy (especially for Americans?) to hear Felix with a British accent, because we associate that with snotty upper-class intellectualism of the kind Felix specializes in. But he doesn't sound British. None of them sound British. If you've listened to my podcasts, in them I'm "doing" Felix as best I can, given that my voice is the wrong register. So if you can imagine Jeremy Brett doing an American accent--American as spoken by the dominant culture in the Midwestern states, with occasional undertones of the mid-South--that's what Felix sounds like.
And one more, because it's connected to an earlier question in this post:
Q: If you recall this post, in #3, you mention a scene which is psychologically true, and so on. I was intensely curious about this at the time, and now, having read the book, I still am. Does this scene still exist? What /is/ it? (I suspect, if it still exists, that I know which scene it is, but I'm often wrong.)
A: The scene I'm referring to there is the gang rape. As I said in response to that earlier question, I knew from very early on that Felix was going to turn back to prostitution to get the money for a doctor for someone he loved (I knew this was going to happen before I knew Mildmay existed), and I knew that he was going to end up in a situation that was completely out of his control and that hurt him badly. Because Felix is reckless and self-destructive and because under all his vanity, he doesn't think he's worth protecting. And because it is a kind of answering horror to his being raped by Malkar at the beginning of Mélusine. And because he needed something that would force him to confront these issues--force him to see that he doesn't deserve to be abused--and it had to be something superlatively unbearable if it was going to get through to him, because Felix has way too much experience at ignoring his own pain.
But knowing all that, knowing that it had to happen, did not in fact make it any easier to work into the structure of the novel.
[Ask your question(s) here.]
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no subject
Date: 2009-04-10 04:33 pm (UTC)Heh. I was so very, very afraid, from the first two chapters, that it was _going_ to go there, and I would have hated it like fire [*], and I was so relieved that it didn't and there was no hint of it whatsoever. (I realize that there will be a cottage industry of post-series Felix/Kay, which, you know, whatever floats your boat, but there would have to be so _much_ fill-in along the way . . . )
[*] There is practically no instance I can think of where a story has a sympathetic love affair, which ends by one party's death, and then concludes triumphally with the survivor finding True Love Again, But Even Better!, that doesn't make me think that the first dead lover was just ultimately an obstacle in the path of the ultimate destined true love. Which drives me crazy. I recognize that I may not be entirely rational about this.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-10 04:36 pm (UTC)(And of course, at the time, I was fighting bitterly with
no subject
Date: 2009-04-10 05:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-14 07:46 pm (UTC)And, reading this post, I just realized why the lighthouse is so good. The Mirador is a big tower with no windows, right? (I ask because for the longest time, I was convinced it was underground.) But people do use it as a landmark to navigate around Melusine. But, unlike a lighthouse, which is a symbol of (as well as a literal source of) safety and benign guidance, the Mirador is a symbol of and source of danger, in the form of witch-hunts, persecution, scary hocuses, and so forth--in other words, it's a darkhouse. So the quadrilogy as a whole is a story of Felix's journey from being a darkhouse-keeper to a lighthouse-keeper. I like that.
Also, in another Q&A (I'm working my way through them backwards), you mentioned what Mildmay might end up doing for a job. About halfway through the book--shortly before Miss Whatsername suggests that he teach a class about Melusine--I realized that in my head, he's a folklorist, and maybe eventually does a book of Melusian stories. So I'm glad that my idea isn't contradicted by Word of God.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-14 07:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-15 04:14 am (UTC)Now I'm a bit worried that the Mildmay-as-folklorist thing I said in the first comment reads as kind of an asshole move--because, you know, I don't get to pick. I was imagining a conversation with him in my head about the difference between a quest story and a picaresque (I think I got there because there was something that reminded me of the "well then I'll go to hell" moment in Huck Finn, although now I can't remember what it was exactly, although it strikes me now that all four books are essentially an extended "well then I'll go to hell" moment) and it seemed like something he would dig, and then I thought, "Oh, yeah, that's something he could do when he isn't busy following Felix around." Anyway, when my sweet but exceedingly dim Pointer Daisy gets her leash tangled around something, she just keeps pulling and pulling at it until she makes her situation worse, and it occurs to me that that's what I'm doing right now, so I'll stop.
In other news, I posted that rec I was talking about on my LJ, but you might not want to look at it--it's not very articulate.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-15 04:25 am (UTC)Now I'm a bit worried that the Mildmay-as-folklorist thing I said in the first comment reads as kind of an asshole move--because, you know, I don't get to pick. I was imagining a conversation with him in my head about the difference between a quest story and a picaresque (I think I got there because there was something that reminded me of the "well then I'll go to hell" moment in Huck Finn, although now I can't remember what it was exactly, although it strikes me now that all four books are essentially an extended "well then I'll go to hell" moment) and it seemed like something he would dig, and then I thought, "Oh, yeah, that's something he could do when he isn't busy following Felix around." Anyway, when my sweet but exceedingly dim Pointer Daisy gets her leash tangled around something, she just keeps pulling and pulling at it until she makes her situation worse, and it occurs to me that that's what I'm doing right now, so I'll stop.
In other news, I posted that rec I was talking about on my LJ, but you might not want to look at it--it's not very articulate.
While I'm babbling, I should mention, I was relieved to see the posts where you say that Mildmay's accent is eastern Tennessee. Because I couldn't manage to hear his supposedly-impenetrable accent in my head--he just talks the way people talk. And now it all makes sense, because my mother is from eastern Tennessee--he's literally speaking my mother tongue. (Once my sister and I were watching this episode of 20/20, or one of those shows, about poor people in Appalachia, and we were just shitting ourselves laughing that the TV people felt like they had to put up *subtitles* when the hillbillies were talking in *perfectly normal English*. We both grew up in the north, and are college-educated besides, so we don't actually talk that way, but it certainly didn't strike either of us as something that a normal person of average sensibilities would need subtitles for.)
from the Language Nerd Club
Date: 2009-04-10 05:35 pm (UTC)Re: from the Language Nerd Club
Date: 2009-04-10 05:41 pm (UTC)And, sorry, my recall isn't good enough for specific examples. I just know it's something I've seen more than once. Possibly Shakesepeare's sonnets? Marlowe?
Re: from the Language Nerd Club
Date: 2009-04-10 05:56 pm (UTC)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-drop_language
Re: from the Language Nerd Club
Date: 2009-04-10 06:03 pm (UTC)Re: from the Language Nerd Club
Date: 2009-04-10 07:33 pm (UTC)Woo't drink up esill? eat a crocodile?
no subject
Date: 2009-04-10 09:32 pm (UTC)I hadn't realized until I read your answer that that was the question I was trying to ask.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-11 12:06 am (UTC)Kay and the Caloxian speech patterns initially reminded me a little of Yorkshire accents.
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Date: 2009-04-11 07:48 am (UTC)And thank you as well for answering my question. I think it very wonderful of you to do so for your readers.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-12 05:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-08 04:02 am (UTC)