Tsarry Night

Good progress yesterday. I got the opening “crystal mist” scene done, and a second scene that has paved the way to the ballroom scene I plan to write this morning. Discovering a ballroom scene was an unexpected delight. I love to write about parties; they’re loaded with pocket dramas and now that I’m getting familiar with the characters, there’s potential for all sorts of fun and games.

A few blanks have been filled in, as well. Without offering any spoilers, Andrei’s younger brother is named Yuri. I can’t yet tell if he’s a good guy or a bad guy, but he’s a snappy dresser so maybe that’s a hint. There’s something dark about him, though it could be nothing more than sibling rivalry. If not for an accident of birth, he might have been the Tsar.

That’s another thing. The story’s working title is “The King’s Man”, but it turns out that the piece is set in a period styled after Imperial Russia. Dress swords and military braid, empire waists and lots of fur. I don’t know much about Russian history (so where is this coming from???) except that the head cheese was known as the Tsar rather than the King. I could change the title to “The Tsar’s Man”, but it doesn’t sound quite right. “Tsarry Night” sounds worse. The title stays as is for now, as telling the story is more important.

Of equal import, however, are the writerly accoutrements. My sense is that Imperial Russia calls for black tea, but I don’t drink black tea while I’m actually writing. Black tea is reserved for my afternoon break. Drat. Good thing I’ve topped up my stash of gyokuro imperial green—hey, it’s got the word “imperial” in its name, so maybe it applies after all!

I’m writing to the “Ritual” CD by cellist/composer Adam Hurst. The first track blew me right into the middle of a Russian winter, which has set the tone nicely. If I can wait out the city works truck that’s growling and banging outside my window, I’m hoping for as successful a session today as I had yesterday.

Since I’m also on vacation, I’m taking this afternoon off to stroll into the village for pistachios, “Passages” and a paleta—the pistachios are part of an energy bar that Ter asked me to get for her, “Passages” is a movie that Boy Sister asked me to view so we can discuss at our next Philosophy Quest, and paletas are simply artisan Popsicles (“paleta” is Spanish for “on a stick”) that are made in town and so freaking good that I dream about them. I can grab one at the local market and enjoy it on the walk home.

I almost always feel incredibly fortunate. Today I feel it a thousandfold. My quantum physics test is working in my favour—but that’s another post. Right now, I’d better blend up my smoothie and get to work.

From pseudo-Russia with love,

Preamble

It’s nice to finish something. When you write novels and your short stories run about 40 pages apiece, it’s hard to feel like you’ve accomplished anything after a writing weekend, whether you write during every day of it or not. I love my novel and I’m learning to shorten up the stories, though not enough to make a single post of anything. The blog is helping a bit; while I never considered myself a writer of personal non-fiction, trying to keep my posts of readable length has kind of forced me into the genre.

But my forte is still fiction (I think). My preference is certainly fiction. I love to write about other people, yet, as I say, it can be darned demoralizing when it takes for-frikking-ever to get anything finished. It gets even worse when a new voice pops into mind and starts making demands. I begin to think Iʼll never get anything done so why bother starting?

Then there are days when that new voice gets so insistent that I start seeing pictures and overhearing conversations from a story I havenʼt conceived of yet. I can feel my right brain swelling with content. It isnʼt painful in the conventional sense, but it is definitely distracting. I literally have to set everything else aside just to get it out of my head.

A couple of months back, I put up a blurb called Café Nuit that was inspired by Adam Hurstʼs cello piece The Midnight Waltz. It was short, fairly sweet, and got pretty good reviews from the faithful. I guess the heroine of the piece was gratified because she came back to me this weekend and bugged me into writing an extension of her story. Granted, it took me a few hours to get it out in first draft. Iʼd hoped to do it in half the time, but it didnʼt need much tweaking so Iʼll take it.

Best of all, it isnʼt that long, so I can put it into a single post! Watch this space – it goes up tomorrow.

Enjoy.

Anise in Wonderland

Music can inspire me to visions of Russian winters and Arabian nights, but once in a while, I hear something that throws me down a rabbit hole and into a scene so vivid that I must recreate it.

That’s how “Cafe de Nuit” came to be.

This week I was introduced to the music of Adam Hurst, a musician out of Portland who has so much credibility that I can’t do him any sort of justice here except to plug in a link to his website (click on his name to go there). A friend had posted a link to a couple of absolutely gorgeous tracks that sent Ter straight for the iTunes Store. The album is called “Ritual”, and I’m pretty sure it won’t be the lone Hurst album in our collection.

As each track played, I found myself slipping into fiction – picturing images, hearing bits of conversation, sensing raw emotion, that sort of thing. The music was dreamy enough to lull me into my angels’ world ... but then the last track started and everything changed.

The piece is called “Midnight Waltz” (hear here). From the first note, I was drinking absinthe with the Impressionists at that Parisian cafe. I smelled the cigarette smoke and heard the glasses tinkling, the voices murmuring; I felt the night air on my skin and the idle promise of something deeply, delightfully sensual to come. The scene was so strong, so overwhelming, that I had to write it all down before it would let me sleep.

It emerged as the blurb I posted on July 16. It’s both curious and thrilling how that sole piece of music was able to transport me to another time and place. That’s the magic of creativity, of writing and music and imagination. One begets another and art is born.

But is “Cafe de Nuit” art? Or is it a fragmental memory of another life?