Stuff Josh Likes: Period Pieces

As the title suggests, I enjoy period pieces. It's no coincidence that my two Lonesome October stories The Great and Groovy Game and Mother of Monsters  are both period pieces, being set in 1974 and 1955. (Single White Necromancer is set in 2001, but there is nothing really to indicate this beyond the days of the week).

I was watching Mad Men recently, and I don't think I'd like it nearly as much as I do if it were set in modern times. 

I also like the movies Jet Li did back before he came to Hollywood, the crazy colonial China martial arts epics. I suppose a big part of the fun is discovering things about the past ("The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.") Period pieces seem richer in meaning somehow, because everything has a meaning. I always like discovering new things, and there is always ample opportunity. For instance, Mad Men had a throwaway line about a Unitarian Minster who was killed in Selma. That was enough information to find James Reeb, a figure in American history of whom I would have otherwise been ignorant.

It also enables tricks you can't play with contemporary stories, like in Shada, when the Doctor brings a cassette of Bonnie Tyler's greatest hits back to 1974,  

In general, period pieces tend to be crafted with fussy, meticulous care, which is something I like in a story, and which is why I give them an edge of their non-period counterparts. 

Some notes on the characters from Single White Necromancer

Just a couple random notes about the characters in my story. I'll probably expand on this, and eventually give it its own page.

No real spoilers here.

Genevieve: I originally envisioned her as someone who would wear Ren Faire blouses and suchlike. That aspect got dropped early in the process, but the name stuck. I like it. Distinctive, but not so much as to be distracting

I like Genevieve a great deal. She shares a great number as a great number of my traits and personality flaws. Endless pedantry and the inability to avoid blurting out random trivia or wisecracks at inappropriate times, for starters. I liked writing her voice, oscillating, as it did, between lengthy exposition (the story does have a lot of Genevieve explaining things, but I hope she was engaging enough to make it entertaining) and sudden enthusiasms.

As the story went on, her condition increasingly became a metaphor for depression. I didn't set out to write an allegory, but that's what it became.

Charon: It's pronounced CARE-on, like the moon or the Boatman. I'd like to think that she's more interesting than she appears in the story, where she exists primarily as a foil for Genevieve. She's so perfect, she's boring. I do like the idea of a family of Necromancers, however. I imagine them along the lines of Ray Bradbury's Elliot family. Think of them as the Addams family, but played straight.

In the beginning of the story, they don't know to what extent they can trust each other, so they exchange fake names, "Karen" and "Jenny".  know two sets of Karens and Jens who are friends with each other, (which is to say I know a Jen and a Karen who are friends with each other, and another Jen and another Karen, who are also friends with each other) and while neither character is expressly based on any one person, their relationship was informed in part by the interaction between Jen Lyon (the Jen who so generously provided the cover photo) and Giraffe Karen.

Also, if you like the cover photo, she has plenty of others like it for sale at Fine Art America.

Another influence was the old movie, the Truth about Cats and Dogs, with Janeane Garofalo. and Uma Thurman. I could imagine Genevieve being played by Garofalo, though I don't think Thurman is right for Charon

Melinoe: The name comes from a Daughter of Hades (or possibly Zeus, who may have come to Persephone either in an Underworld aspect or wearing the guise of Hades, Mythological relationships being funny like that.

From Wikipedia: According to the hymn, she brings night terrors to mortals by manifesting in strange forms, "now plain to the eye, now shadowy, now shining in the darkness," and can drive mortals insane.

I like her. She was my favorite character to write, after Genevieve. Too smart for her own good.

At  one point, Genevieve calls her Mercredi, which is French for "Wednesday".

On the writing of Single White Necromancer

CFC asked me how long Single White Necromancer took to write, and I told him it was about a year, and also that I'd reply in greater detail in a post, so that's what I'm doing here.

I couldn't even estimate a number of hours spent on it. The Word file the contains the final draft says 1080 minutes of editing time, except, I would often work on the story when I was away from my computer, and would write a bit, email it to myself and then paste it into the file, so that number doesn't come close to answering the question.

The best answer I can give is that it was written in fits and starts over the course of a year. I thought of the title first, which is unusual for me, as it's usually the very last thing I come up with, occasionally well after the story is written. I think it's the perfect title for the story, and a lot of the elements present spin out of that.

It started out as a Lonesome October story that I intended for the Lovecraftzine's Lonesome October issue, but it was already over 12000 words (and growing) and it that it was just too long to be feasible. That was June or July 2013. So I shelved it and wrote something else for the zine. That turned out to be Mother of Monsters.

There is a Roger Zelazny tribute anthology in the works. I submitted a Roadmarks story to it, but it's so specifically a Roadmarks story that there is no way to rework it into something else without rewriting the thing entirely. Too many plot points hinged on too many elements specific to the setting, leaving me with an unsellable story, as I don't own the rights and it's not like I can just resubmit it to the other Roger Zelazny tribute anthology in town.

I learned my lesson from that, and kept the story somewhat modular, in that, if I had to remove the ANITLO elements, I could do it without breaking the story.  That's what I did when I returned to it at the beginning of this year. So, while it certainly shows its pedigree, it also works as more general "Crazy Cultists want to open the way for their Mad Gods" story.

That said, Zelazny has been a huge influence on my writing, and there are number of nods to his work in the story, but I don't think it contains any specifically ANITLO elements beyond a broad similarity in the plot. (Another factor he influenced was the length of the piece. It's about 33,000 words. Something I truly enjoy about Zelazny's work is that his stories are only as long as they need to be. I think the novella is the perfect length for telling a story, and that's reflected here.)

I forget who said it, but a professional writer mentioned that he wrote 500 words a day. Some time he only got 500, and other times, what he was writing caught fire, and he got much more than that. I followed those guidelines. I had an ending in March, I shelved it again. Transferred the file to a tablet and did some final editing on a camping trip at the end of May, and poked and prodded it on and off until I finally published it.

However, I think drew more on the atmosphere of Nick Pollatta's Bureau 13 novels than anything written by Zelazny. Funny books, and while absurd, not quite comedy.

All right. More on this later. If anyone has any questions about any aspects of the book, I'm more than happy to answer them here.

Single White Necromancer Seeks Same

So, I published an e-book. I'm very happy with both the title and the cover. And the story, too, I guess. Judge for yourself at the Amazon page.