(TCWT) Research Fascination

Teens Can Write, Too! blog chain for May is on a topic I know well about: research into writing. As a steampunk writer, I have to delve into research for my alternate universe – but that’s only the tip of it.

“What are some of the coolest/weirdest/funniest/most disturbing things you’ve researched for a story?”

I’m a very physical researcher. I like to try out my ideas. It probably won’t get to the point where I need to punch someone to get the feel of it, but you see what I mean.

I once almost jumped from my bedroom window to our garden wall to calculate success rates – but then I realised that my house is bigger than Agnetha’s. I then went outside with a meter-rule. I’m a visual reader and writer. I need to see to understand.

Sometimes people give me strange looks due to my requests. A lot of the time, my ‘research’ is focused on interaction and gaze, the certain ways people might turn their hands in movement.

In fact, the most recent was literally two weeks ago when I asked a friend if she would lie on the floor and twist until she could read a clock I had drawn on the whiteboard. All that for one line of the first draft of WTCB’s sequel…

original drawings for Zara’s watch, November 2010

So, that’s the character and person watching done. I’m probably on the less strange scale of Googling – most of what I research would probably not worry the majority of people. Sure, you’ll see “the effects of cyanide” and “six-shooter pistol” on my Google history, but those are alongside the typical “flowers with thorns”, “diamond shapes and cuts”. (For the latter, I also took pictures of the diamond museum I went to in Belgium )

And certainly the most macabre of my Google searches was something along the lines of “how long does it take a body to decompose – in water? – in quicklime mortar?” A few days if exposed to large amounts of bacteria, and, indefinitely due to lack of exposure to air, respectively, I’ll have you know.

As much as I do enjoy researching the mysteries of death and – sadism aside – the biological acts of pain, I have a greater interest: that of fictional science. In an alternate universe of the steampunk kind, I have to think long and hard about my science. That’s writing time-travel for you.

I have spent much time reading the Wikipedia pages of, for instance, “aluminium-air batteries” (one I have personally bookmarked to understand how chemical energy works inside electric torches). I studied Physics last year, but that was not enough to fulfil my curiosities brought up by understanding the workings of the forces and, more importantly, quantum particle workings. But these particular little twists of knowledge cannot certainly be ignored in a world where I must have not electricity.

My problems must be better solved by research.

Time, as an entity, is much harder to research. On the other hand, this gives me so much freedom in my explorations. Worm-Hole Theory recently made an appearance, but the good thing is that I don’t necessarily have to correspond to its ideas exactly.

That’s the joy of research: it allows, but does not restrain.

And then there are the pictures: research is not limited to the facts; I have seen the best of inspiration for cogs and clockwork in my image researching. Which I do frequently, I might add.

There are so many more things that I love that I have included in my stories; by that, I mean that the research came first, the stories second. It doesn’t help that I have had dreams of being a character in the 1930s.

To be honest, I have done a lot of research about the 1930s, even in just my viewing habits. I think I could probably tell you enough about 30′s fashion and dress simply from what I have gleaned from, say, Poirot. Of course, Poirot is not the only 1930′s show I have watched/read, but it ranks as the most. Other questions boiled in my mind have been about the theatre in the 30s – A Game of Murder is not called that for nothing.

Knowledge is power: intellectus potentia est. Well, it’s specific terminology, in any case. With an interest in acting in general, it’s quite powerful for me to understand what they used to do with makeup and fake blood, for instance!

Well, that’s what I think. I could go on and on, but really – learning new snippets of knowledge delights me!

 

The rest of the May chain:

5^th – http://theloonyteenwriter.wordpress.com/

6^th – http://deborahrocheleau.wordpress.com/

7^th – http://bloodoverithaca.wordpress.com/

8^th – http://charleyrobson.blogspot.com/

9^th – http://musingsfromnevillesnavel.wordpress.com/

10^th – http://nonconformistwriter.blogspot.com/

11^th – http://dearsaul.wordpress.com/

12^th – http://missalexandrinabrant.wordpress.com/ [you are here]

13^th – http://insideliamsbrain.wordpress.com/

14^th – http://cinderscoria.blogspot.com/

15^th – http://emilyvaneaton.wordpress.com/

16^th – http://www.brookeharrison.com/

17^th – http://thespasticwriter.blogspot.com/

18^th – http://veewhoa.wordpress.com/

19^th – http://www.mandilynn.com/

20^th – http://theteenagewriter.wordpress.com/

21^st – http://avonsbabbles.wordpress.com/

22^nd – http://realityisimaginary.blogspot.com

23^rd – http://miriamjoywrites.wordpress.com/

24^th – http://anomalous93.blogspot.com/

25^th – http://thelittleenginethatcouldnt.wordpress.com/

26^th – http://ktlemonhead.wordpress.com/

27^th – http://dreamerheadquarters.wordpress.com/

28^th – http://paulinaczarnecki.wordpress.com/

29^th – http://www.lilyjenness.blogspot.com/

30th – http://teenscanwritetoo.wordpress.com/ (We’ll announce the topic for next month’s chain)

Study Leave By Name…

Hello, blog associates (!),

Today I’m wearing an orange jumpsuit that trails beyond even my heels – and has led to me tripping up a fair number of times. Not that I truly mind that. The outline of a dead body is marked next the staff room, invoking in me memories of the beginning of OJAP. After putting away my guitar at the music block, I notice my face on a wanted poster.

I think I would worry the casual observer. Yet, schools all over the country have these sorts of things happen to them on days like this. I happen to know that an ‘insane infection’ has swept out neighbouring girl’s school! Why? Well, it’s my last official day of lessons at school EVER! *Scared face* That’s crazy and I can’t believe so much time has passed.

My study leave will start at four. Study Leave in England is the official time we get off school to stay home (or go to school, if one wishes) to revise – there are no lessons to attend, and the only time necessary to be in school is for exams.

As such, though, I will also be taking a leave of study from this blog so that I can concentrate fully on my revision. My first exam is a double on the 6th of June; my last is my Latin Prose paper on the 24th.

Well. I can promise you that I will have come up with many new ideas by the time I get around to my schedule again (and before it is interrupted once more…but more on that closer the time). I’m on the school ball committee and running the Leaver’s Mass, so expect I will babble on about those two huge events, at least.

I can’t say that I will take the entire month off – in fact, I don’t think I will be able to resist blogging when I get an idea. And, especially as I have no exams on Tuesdays or Wednesdays (well…), Monday’s Photo of the Week will be as frequent as ever. I also hope to continue the Characters as Flowers series, perhaps branching out to the Female protagonists of my other novels beyond the Time, Stopped Trilogy.

And maybe the men. I can imagine that Lucas has a flower, and maybe Phillip, but it’s more difficult to cast a shapely and delicate plant for the men in my novels. It’s not them, it’s me!

Anyway, that’s me, thinking.

Ciao, blogosphere. I’ll see you when I do.

Alexandrina

Not a Post

After the nice fluffiness of last week’s birthday week, I’ve not been having a very fortuitous week this week. After a particularly down day today and getting my last chapter polished for my Critique Partner, I have no energy for the Wednesday post (though, that’s not to say that I don’t have ideas and half-material).

Instead, here is an extract of the Continental Almanac I’m working on for background to the setting of my WTCB trilogy:

1983

Andrew Costello is born.

First successful train journey not ending in engine failure. The first families to travel include the Costello brood, the Villante heirs, and the Montgomery family, mother to whom is heavily-pregnant Anastacia, an Upper with mild skin-tone and gingery hair.

 

1984

Aimee Montgomery is born.

The first feminism rally recorded to allow women equal access to education is interrupted by higher-class ministers. However, the ladies catch the attention of lower-class workers and servants. Percival believes he cannot trust his father’s servants, so fires them and replaces them with a skeleton household of a cook and a butler, Tomas Richards. Richards’ wife occasionally serves as a wet nurse for the children when Octavia hosts.

The train is regarded as a highly-expensive mechanism. It is no longer used for short journeys, but for cross-Continent journeys.

 

1985

Percival Costello announces to ten-year-old Stuart that he will marry a woman chosen by his parents. To the boy, this seems entirely natural.

Octavia finds herself pregnant again. At first, she sets plans to make this her last, but she ‘knows’ the child will not be. During her first trimester, she begins having frightening dreams of the future and a black-haired girl with loose curls. She lies to Percival that the first dream was also the last.

Phillip Costello is born. Octavia adores her youngest, but retreats from society’s eye when the dreams continue, though now infrequent, leaving her weak and uncertain. She stops inviting Costello cousins to dine. When questioned, medical experts claim she has post-partum depression.

Maximillian Folster is born to Kenneth and Genevieve Folster. Their involvement with the servants and middle-class found them in the press. Now, the Folsters have survived, but tentatively.

 

1987

Venetia Costello, sent to a Service Home and already out of the public eye, dies.

Kian Costello steps in to look after the maturing family when Percival is called away to war. However, after making a pass at Octavia, he is banned from the house. Kian and Percival’s once-close friendship begins to deteriorate.

Octavia becomes more wary, and slips on a sharper edge. When Jodrell Masters comes to paint the family, she snaps and sends him away.

Photo of the Week: Ends

A pair of Highland cow bookends I received for my birthday. Ten centimetres high and covered with fluffy fur, these were made to be adored! Just look at that sewn pattern! They’re quite heavy because they are filled with beans, but they make the handsome subject.

Turning Eighteen

Yesterday, I went into a pub and ordered a drink. No, it’s not the beginning of a joke. It’s the beginning of this post. And I suck at jokes.

Almost a week has passed since I became eighteen – and finally legal to order my own drinks at the bar. As my birthday fell on a Monday, a dreaded schoolday, apparently, I had a meal but did no more, though a friend had already organised our going out Saturday evening.

So, in effect, it was yesterday that I turned eighteen. I suppose I confused people by wearing a golden sash suggesting that my birthday was actually the Saturday. Not that it actually said so.

But I could argue that the sense of maturity came then, not whilst at school, doing what I have always done for the last billion Mondays.

The first drink I ordered legally was a Sidecar – cognac, liqueur and lemon juice. Yummy! – coincidently, the first thing that caught my eye on the menu. This is also exciting, as the Sidecar is the drink that Donna orders at the beginning of the Unicorn and the Wasp Doctor Who episode (in case you’re wondering: The Doctor orders a lime soda). I am also partial to the gin sour version of the drink, called a Chelsea Sidecar amongst other names. The Paris Ritz claims to have been the first to serve the drink, but there are many variations on the story (this was the 20s, so little evidence has kept). My favourite story is that the Sidecar is named after the sidecar vehicle that the American Army captain who created the drink used to travel about in.

Sidecar!

Anyway, I could say that made a difference to my birthday – well, compared to the other numbers.

People always ask: “has anything changed?” or they go ahead and suppose that it has. In Psychology, we were revising patterns of sleep for a question that might ask use about age-related changes in sleep. Thus, in the midst of many boxes were two: ‘aged 12-16’ (adolescence) and ‘aged 18-30’ (young adult – I realise how ironic this is for the writer in me, who screams “but YA is the previous age group, and 18-30 category is New Adult. NEW!” I just nodded and carried on). My teacher, being the charming woman she is, asked me if my jumping boxes had changed anything. I replied no. Really, nothing has changed, not even in that. I’m just as sleepy as I was the day before.

Of course, as we went on to discuss, how someone sleeps is not defined by their age alone.

Neither is how someone may behave. I think that’s the biggest reason that being eighteen makes very little difference for me. It simply makes it easier to spend time with my friends without being in a place made claustrophobic by its familiarity.

It’s ironic, really; a year ago, I clung to familiarity. I suppose this change comes from the fact that I have stopped relying on my school. The place has changed so much more in the last year than it ever did in six; I face an alien home every weekday. But I am subjective – and the world has changed as I have, too. As I said, age is behaviour, not a number.

Being honest, I don’t expect change, though. The biggest changes come for me in the summer when I move to university. I think it will be then when I realise that I have become an adult. But I don’t mind. For now, I’ll use my age as authority!

 

Confession Time About a Character!

A while back, I blogged about what I call ‘the Writer Phenomenon’, including where writers subconsciously use ideas of their world around them to shape their stories – it’s that idea that a story is never new.

I have no objection to this. If I found that a reader of my stories was inspired by a character of mine to (consciously or not) replicate them into a story of their own, I would beam.

However, my Writer Phenomenon has come to bite me. I picked up my favourite Jacqueline Wilson book yesterday (read so often it has a crease in the spine), to read through just because I could: Love Lessons. It’s quick and quirky, just as most Wilson books are, with a homeschoolled protagonist not fitting into her first school, but finding friendship in unusual places. And, whilst it’s a tad unrealistic (one page she’s wondering what it’s like to “fall so headily, instantly in love”; two or three chapters later she is able to describe the love interest in romantic, pictorial detail), it, on the other hand, makes perfect sense of that sudden, unrelenting love that takes siege of one.

So far so good. Until I was lying in bed trying to get to sleep and thinking about the characters. That’s when it hit me. I had lifted one of Triangle’s love interests almost straight from the pages. I must have been reading Love Lessons at one point when I began thinking about Triangle. Indeed, I know I was inspired to give Keith a goatee because the man in Wilson’s book did.

I guess it was just logical that he had dark, curly hair, too. And brown eyes “the colour of field-mud”, according to my protagonist.

But, as I thought about it last night, I realised something that I hadn’t bargained for. Keith. That is, the name. At first, it sounds strange that I didn’t recognise that my protagonist shared his name, too, but Wilson’s character uses the nickname Rax, from his surname ‘Raxberry’, and this is what the protagonist calls him for most of the book.

This is my confession: I may well have stolen her character and inserted him into my novel.

Of course, it’s not that simple. My Keith is, effectively, the bad guy, not sweet like young Rax – he has a sharp temper and does not forgive easily without dwelling on things he cannot change. In one section of the first draft, he becomes obsessive…

I don’t think my Keith would have found Wilson’s Keith very good company. He would remind him of his rival too much. They don’t share the same interests or fashion sense; they are heaps different in motive and personality. They just happen to share a first name and a dark goatee.

Still, my subconscious was a little cruel in being so exact, and it leaves me with the dilemma of whether to alter a character I have had formed in my conscious mind for over three years. Of course they are not the same person – and I continue to protest that – but the similarities are currently causing me annoyance. Hmm, I’ll keep thinking on the matter.

Sometimes I’m just too good.

Until next time. Alex.

Character Flowers: Zara

Zara rubbed her face. She stood still. But Aidelle noticed her hand sneak up to the handle. “From the idea. From us. We are here and we keep moving. X exists.” The last bore the tone of a suggestion. Zara turned her big eyes onto Aidelle’s, asking for any affirmation of the idea that X was both hope and hope’s goal.

As portrayed in my head by Lucy Hale

Zara is an abstract, a work-in-progress. Not as a character: no, I know all about her – but as a persona.

There’s always been something quite mysterious about Zara beyond her not-supposed-to-exist-ence (!); even as an actual character whose perspective we get a glimpse of at the end of WTCB book 1, she is deliberately evasive of the readers. In addition, she becomes the protagonist of the next two books, which slips her into centre stage with ambiguous meaning.

As she is towards Aidelle. Thus, I put my mind to thinking of a flower that had elements of secrecy and mystery – of a darkness behind, but a possibility in front. I already had a few ideas from this.

To begin with it was colours. As I’m not a flower-expert (learning of new flowers is one of the things I already enjoy from this series), I Googled “small purple flowers”. I think, if Zara had a definite favourite colour, it would be around the colour of purple; she’s not a girl who delights in colours that are light and ‘airy’. The direct fact that she dresses in trousers not only contrasts Aidelle’s feminine side and concern with fashion – of which she would have said trousers are not fashion – but also emphasises the future she holds within her.

“Just because something has potentiality, doesn’t mean it necessarily has actuality. Existence is not a predicate. You may return home, you may not.”

Zara gave her a sceptical look. “I don’t aim for home.”

At times, Zara is savage. Not in the way Aidelle is with raw fury, but with a cruel trickery that she unveils to people occasionally. She is stubborn and willing to work for what she wants. In my hunt for symbolism, I kept my eyes out for flowers that not only looked so, but also had a spikiness within their pasts, too.

Zara is a Purple Pansy. From the French word for ‘thought’, pensée, the Pansy could be said to be a telepathic link between lovers – and what a link indeed is Zara between Aidelle and her fiancé. It is Zara who first alerts Aidelle to her time-trapped situation, and Zara who guides Aidelle, even when her own life is sapped away.

I was happy to find out that, in Italy, the Pansy can be known as ‘flammola’ – little flame. This suits Zara for her youth (she is one of the youngest characters in book 1) and for her sharp of tongue.

“When you came here, Zara, you brought me to life. Your fiery heart will flame on and on and on.” (an actual quote from Aidelle)

I chose to stick with the small purple-coloured head because, visually, it has a sharp demeanour whilst being beautiful. In my opinion, although small in size, the Pansy is not a fragile flower. Just as, though Zara’s upper-middle class roots and flowing black locks means she can quickly attract, she chooses to dampen her desirability by becoming a mechanic.

Too, the pansy often has a bright ‘eye’, a bright centre; this I believe links to the intelligence of both Aidelle and Zara.

Finally, purple symbolises memories – an apt match considering that Zara holds a lot of memories within her, a lot of abstract substance that she alone keeps solid. With Zara’s disappearance goes the family held in her memories.

The beautiful dark red pansy.

Poirot and the Pretend Mystery

I like to have a murder mystery on the background when I’m writing a first draft, as it provides enough of a distraction for me to ignore some of my inner editor. On Friday, it was the return (amongst a Murder, She Wrote – another weakness of mine) of The Tragedy at Marsden Manor, another of those old series including Philip Jackson as Japp and Hugh Fraser as Hastings.

I liked its introduction, the introduction in which Poirot is transported to a foreign village for a very superficial reason, but ends up being tightly involved in another deadly game.

Mr. Norton runs a hotel and writes mysteries under the name ‘Clarissa’. When he gets stumped on one plot, he asks Poirot to come – and solve the fictitious mystery for him!

And that, Mr. Norton, is why you either write the ending first (a habit I have fallen into) or choose your murderer right from the beginning.

Anyway, it was this little diversion that reminded me (and fondly, I add) of A Game of Murder. I ought to edit that story soon, otherwise it will spend its time rotting in my brain! As the title suggests, A Game begins focused on the fictitious mystery the protagonist’s mistress organises for her own childish amusement.

Things spiral out of control in, as usual, her choice of companions for the afternoon, who all have their own secrets and motives for coming.

Whilst the whole idea of the game of murder is a main plot-device in spurring on the real mystery elements, this is not always the case, as shown by a couple of TV mysteries.

More often it’s only a prelude – or a link to the real mystery that is or will go on. I, personally, like this certain use of foreshadow, even when it does not touch on the real mystery. On the other hand, this…faintly tangible connection does puzzle me. If you are going to include a plot-device that quite mirrors your story, why not carry it through and link it so much more deeply?

Two Poirots? Not likely…

I guess I’m plugging my own story here by backing up my point with an example from A Game! For instance, the false game coops all the suspects together; it provides the opportunity for three separate thieves to carry out their plans, and eventually leads to a revelation of external police affairs, too.

Then again, I’m a big fan of linking and foreshadow. I bet you can tell that!

I don’t mind that lack of connection, though. The Poirot was effective with the comedy role of Mr. Norton. I think what we mystery writers enjoy is the chance to poke fun at our own genre. It’s not in thriller writing, but in the cosy, suspects-in-a-room mystery writing that likes to perpetuate itself with jocund imitations. Christie herself created the murder mystery writers in imitation of herself – and how she was never herself a big fan of her creation Poirot!

That way, the mystery writer cracks subtly away their own fourth-wall-structure: mysteries within mysteries.

The board-game cover. Appropriate, eh? I wish the British version cover was as wickedly delicious as this.

Have you ever read mysteries within mysteries, however facetious? What do you think? Apart from a sort of breaking the fourth wall, does it add to a piece of writing, or merely distract from it?