Theodora Goss

I’m in the forest of deadlines. Not lost in it, because I have specific markers, specific tasks I need to accomplish that will lead me out of the forest. But I will be in the forest at least until the academic year ends. Here’s what that forest has looked like this month, and will look like for the rest of the year:

March 1: Revised second chapter of my dissertation due. This was the central, most important chapter, and I turned it in on time.

March 1: Folkroots column due. I had to ask for an extension on this, but with the extension and some revisions after that, I think the column turned out very well. It’s called “Fairies and Fairylands,” and it’s going to be in the June issue.

March 15: Story due. I’m not going to talk about this yet, but I’m really enjoying working on it.

April 1: Revised third chapter of my dissertation due. Once this chapter is revised, I will have a revised version of the entire dissertation.

April 15: Story due. Again, I’m not going to talk about this yet, except to say that it’s a companion piece to the story due on March 15th.

May 1: Revised first chapter of my dissertation due. Actually, I’ve already revised the first chapter, so I think this is when I’ll turn in the entire dissertation, revised. The whole thing all together. Right around this time, a few days before I believe, I have another Folkroots deadline. I think I know what I’m going to write about – and I think you’re going to like it! But I’m not telling just yet.

And that’s as far as I’m thinking, right now. But you can see, can’t you, what a forest it is? Although I love everything I’m doing – even the dissertation, mostly.

I’m writing all this to let you know how busy the rest of the academic year is going to be for me, because times like this make me curl into my shell somewhat, snail-like. It’s my natural introversion. What it means, practically, is that my posts here will probably be less general, more personal, reflecting the fact that I’m looking inward. Although honestly, I’m not sure how much of a difference you’ll see, since my idea of personal is to write about the sort of prose I love, that sort of thing.

It’s been such a strange year, and by year I always mean academic year, since for an academic a year is always September to August. Probably one of the most complicated and intense years of my life. But it’s taught me so much about who I am and what I want in that life (beach houses in North Carolina, for instance – and writing novels). It’s not over yet, and I think at the end of it, I will be a different person than I was at the beginning. But that’s a good thing. That means I’m living and changing, finding what I want to do in the world – as I ought to be.

But the introverted stage won’t last forever, only as long as the work is so intense. And after it’s done, there are all sorts of things I want to do that don’t involve sitting and going inside myself, which is what I’m doing now. I’ll give you an example. This is a trailer for Catherynne M. Valente’s new novel Deathless. I think it’s gorgeously done.

There are so many tools available to us now as writers. I want to make audio and video, perhaps in collaboration with others, related to my writing but also in addition to and complementing it. Modern technology allows me, simply sitting at my computer, to do so much. Why not take advantage of it? My first idea is a YouTube version of “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter.”

But that will come later. Right now, I’m in the forest of deadlines and I have to get through this year – or at least get through to the summer, when things will be easier. But I’ll make it. I always have before.

I’ve had a feeling today that I sometimes get when I’m tired, as though part of me were missing. It’s a Herbert the Alligator feeling, I suppose. As though I were incomplete.

What it makes me think of, since my mind tends in this direction, is the relationship between writers and readers. Writers sometimes think that the story is what they write, what’s on the page. But of course it’s not. The story is a collaboration between the writer and reader. It exists in the reader’s head, but is created by both: the words of the writer and the imagination of the reader.

Good writers realize that they’re collaborators, and they write out of that knowledge. Beginning writers will often describe everything. But that leaves nothing for the imagination of the reader to do. Good writers are aware of the reader. They know the reader is there to complete the story, will imagine the characters from pieces of information. So they work on providing the right pieces.

Here I was, trying to provide the right pieces yesterday, writing:

And writing:

And writing:

I think writing is partly a way to deal with that feeling of being incomplete. At least it is for me, right now. When I feel that way, I write. But honestly, I don’t think I can write today. I don’t know what it is. Nothing is coming out right.  I can’t seem to make the connection.

Maybe it’s just tiredness, I don’t know. Maybe it’s working on a writing project that’s taking up a great deal of my time. Maybe it’s that tonight, I feel as though part of me were missing, and I don’t have whatever it takes to write through that, despite that.

This is a short blog post, isn’t it? Well, so be it.

I’ve written before about writing a thousand words a day, every day. (Yes, any sort of writing will do. A thousand words of anything, as long as it really is writing. Do tweets count? I’m not sure tweets count.)

Someone, I’m not sure whom, commented that if I wrote every day, and writing was a pleasure, then I was doing something that gave me pleasure every day, and I thought – more than that. And my thoughts went back to some passages in Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.

I’ve had an interesting and difficult relationship with that book. I love what Frankl has to say about life in general, about how our central driving force is the search for meaning. The difficulty is that I can’t seem to get through the first part of the book, where he describes being in a concentration camp. It’s not that the section is horrific – quite the opposite. It’s so ordinary, and I have a difficult time with the idea that one person can treat another person that way, or one group of people can treat another group of people that way, and it can become ordinary. I find that a profoundly painful, although very important, realization.

The second part of the book, which is theoretical, is much easier to read, and I think that’s a sort of failure on my part, that I can take the theory but not the practical experience on which it was founded.

But there are parts of the theory that are important to me. Frankl essentially states that the search for meaning is our most important drive, and that we can endure almost anything if we can find a meaning in it. But also that meaning, searching for it and finding it, is what leads to fulfillment, to joy.

More specifically, he writes,

“For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.”

And,

“One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.”

And,

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In other words, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”

What I get from this is that I have to find the meaning of my life, and that the process of finding it will be something I continue to do (there is no endpoint), and that the meaning will alter depending on where I am in my life and my circumstances. And I am the one who is asked to find that particular meaning. It is my meaning, not necessarily anyone else’s.

And this comes from elsewhere in Frankl, I think, but it’s important for me to realize that I am called to find that meaning, whether that call emanates from within me or comes from outside. Either way, it’s a call and I need to answer it, to respond. To be responsible is to be the one who responds – not by fulfilling anyone else’s meaning, not by doing what anyone else tells me to do, but by doing what I am called to do.

Frankl also writes, and this I find to be very important,

“We can discover this meaning in life three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.”

I’m not going to talk about (3) because that’s the territory of concentration camps and chronic diseases, and I have no right to talk about that. I have never experienced unavoidable suffering. Frankl does say, and this is important to me, that suffering is not itself ennobling, and should be avoided whenever possible. There is no point to seeking out suffering. But if it truly is unavoidable, one can experience it in such a way that one retains meaning, and therefore a reason to continue on, to live. And one can even die with meaning.

Writing falls, fairly obviously I think, under (1), which Frankl calls “the way of achievement or accomplishment.” I think I would rather call it the way of work. Because for me, the meaning of writing is not in achieving or accomplishing something, which implies that meaning arises when the work is done, but in the activity itself. I find meaning in the act of writing, in the creation.

So, by writing a thousand words a day, I’m not just giving myself pleasure. I’m also creating meaning in my life. And that’s even more important, I think. If meaning is the aim of life, our fundamental drive, then every day I’m working toward that aim. I’m responding to that call.

Frankl says, “The second way of finding a meaning in life,” meaning (2) above, “is by experiencing something – such as goodness, truth and beauty – by experiencing nature and culture or, last but not least, by experiencing another human being in his very uniqueness – by loving him.”

I know I’m not doing the experiencing enough. I’m not getting out into the natural world enough (well, it’s winter, and I hate the cold), or the museum enough, which would give me my dose of beauty. And that last bit, I wrote about in my blog post “Thoughts on Love,” which was about experiencing another human being in his or her uniqueness. I’m not sure you can experience another human being in any other way. If you want to change another human being, to make him or her into something different, you lose the uniqueness, you lose the human being. I suppose what Frankl means, in a sense, is that the other human being will have his or her own meaning, his or her own response. And you have to respect that.

But what I wanted to do, here, was talk about writing a thousand words a day. If I do that, I give myself pleasure, but more than that, I provide myself with a way to both generate and discover the meaning of my life, at this particular moment. One blog post at a time.

Today, I had a particularly writerly day.

As you probably remember, I had turned in my Folkroots column earlier in the week. It’s a column called “Fairies and Fairylands,” and it should appear in the June issue of Realms of Fantasy. Yesterday, Doug Cohen had emailed me about the column, asking whether it was accurate to identify J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan stories as Victorian, since they had been published in the early twentieth century. He was right, of course. I should have identified them as Edwardian, or perhaps early Modern. That’s what a great editor does: alert you to your mistakes, so you can make your column as accurate and informative as it can possibly be. I’m always grateful for good editing. As I was reading through the manuscript, I found some other changes I wanted to make. One paragraph was too long, so I deleted a description of Lord Dunsany’s “Kith of the Elf-Folk.” It hadn’t really fit into the paragraph. And I was missing a general paragraph on what to do when you encounter fairies, how to behave. I thought that was necessary. Because what if you do? It’s important to know, isn’t it? So I spent the morning revising.

Before I could send off the revised manuscript, I had to rush to Harvard Square to have lunch with Niall Harrison, the Editor-in-Chief of Strange Horizons, and Matt Denault, who is one of the Strange Horizons reviewers. Niall lives in Oxford, and was in Boston for a week. Today was his last day here, so I’m glad I was able to meet him. We went to a Thai restaurant, where I had shumai and tom yum, and then to Bob Slate’s. I’m so sad that Bob Slate’s is closing. It’s been in Harvard Square for so long, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s the best stationary store in the world. I write in notebooks from Bob Slate’s. I bought seven of them, narrow ruled, with heavy paper. I hope they last me several years. Here are Niall and Matt in front of the store:

Then we went to Burdick’s, the chocolate shop. We had the hot chocolate, and although I only had a small cup, I have to admit that I’m still feeling its effects. I’m not sure how well I’ll sleep tonight. (I know, it’s silly, but I respond to both coffee and chocolate that way. They keep me up.) Here is the chocolate shop:

Niall and Matt went off to Pandemonium, the science fiction and fantasy bookstore. I needed to return home, because I still had a column to send out. But I had half an hour before I needed to get on the T to meet my ride home, so I went to some of the old places I remember from when I was a law student at Harvard. The first was the Brattle Square Florist, where I used to buy myself flowers:

The second was Colonial Drug, where I used to buy my favorite perfume, Balenciaga’s Prelude. It’s such an unprepossessing entrance, but the store carries all the great perfumes, from the couture houses. That perfume was discontinued years go, but as I looked at the perfumes in the glass case, I saw a bottle! I asked the price. Of course, it was incredibly expensive: $130. Prelude is now a cult classic, a collector’s item. I’m so sad it was discontinued. And to think I used to scent letters with it! Here is that store:

I’m sad that all the old stores are disappearing from Harvard Square.  They used to give it such character, and now it looks like any other expensive urban space, with Anthropologie and American Apparel.

I returned home, finished my column, and sent it to Doug. It was late, I was tired, so I looked at some friends’ blogs, and on one of them I found this:

Can you see what it is? It’s a video of the Mythpunk panel from Boskone! I’m on YouTube! Of course I had to watch the whole thing, the whole hour. And you know what? It was fun to watch! I thought I did pretty well, considering that I was on a panel with brilliant writers and speakers. I noticed that I use my hands a lot when I talk, and you know, I rather like that. It’s me, what I do.

If you’ve never seen me on a panel, this is a good example of how I speak.  I’m like this, well, pretty much all the time.  And I always talk with my hands.

I’m rather proud of being on YouTube . . .

And I thought, if this is what a writerly day looks like, I’m in. The writing, the revising, the meeting and interacting with editors and reviewers. The watching and evaluating your own performance on a panel. There’s a whole lot more that goes into being a writer, of course. A whole lot more writing than I did today, in particular. But that’s also a pleasure.

So it’s been a good day, and I’m feeling all writerly myself. Which feels good.

I’ve been worried about Herbert.

You see, I left him hanging from the ceiling in Professor Mandragora’s laboratory, looking sad. Herbert was originally not going to be a character at all. He was just a literary reference. But as soon as he reacted to something, as soon as he showed that he was responding to the world around him, I had to go back and write his story.

I can make characters wicked, or selfish, all sorts of awful things. And that’s all right, as long as they still have agency. But I can’t trap a character.

So I decided that Herbert had to have a story of his own.

First, I had to look up where alligators come from, because I’d forgotten. The answer is Florida. (Obvious, I know, but I always mix them up with crocodiles. I should remember: crocodile, Nile.)

Herbert originally came from Florida. But by the time Professor Mandragora bought him, from her usual taxidermy shop, he had been taxidermed for more than fifty years. He was an old specimen that the taxidermist had bought on sale, somewhat the worse for wear. Professor Mandragora bought him for only twenty-five dollars.

She always went to the taxidermy shop on Thursdays, to see what the taxidermist had in stock. She brought birds and squirrels and foxes back to her laboratory. There, she took the bodies apart, added mechanical elements, and created something that was part animal, part machine. Then she added magic, to make them go. They were toys, really. Mechanical toys that allowed her to experiment, to practice her skills.

That’s what she did to Herbert. But with Herbert, something happened.

What is a soul? You probably haven’t thought about that question lately. And I can’t give you a firm, solid answer. (Any more than the soul is something firm and solid.) The soul is the self. Everything living has one, and when it dies, that soul goes back where it came from, to become part of the soul of creation itself. The soul is part of that great soul, but also separate from it. That is a paradox, but the soul is also a paradox, infinitely small but larger than a universe. And not even witches understand it fully.

What happened was this. When Herbert had died, his soul had merged back into the soul of creation. Professor Mandragora’s mechanical creations were not alive, and had no souls. But when she reanimated Herbert, a part of his soul must somehow have sensed that his old body was available again, was animate, not alive but capable of motion. And it came back.

She had given him a clockwork heart, and eyes that moved mechanically. She had inserted an entire mechanical apparatus, a metal spine that allowed him to move. She had patched parts of him with thin copper plates. And then, since she did not actually have room for an alligator in her laboratory, she had hung him from the ceiling, where he occasionally swung his head or swished his tail.

The expression of sadness on his alligator face, on the day Thea, Matilda, Emma, and Mouse visited, was the first sign that a part of his soul had returned. That afternoon, when Professor Mandragora returned to the laboratory, she immediately knew that something had happened. She took Herbert down, inserted a box made of metal plates and thin metal wires into his throat, and said, “All right, Herbert. What’s wrong?”

It took him a moment. Remember, he had never spoken before. But he had always been a particularly bright alligator.

“I – don’t know,” he said. He swished his tail, startled by the sound of his own voice, and almost brought down a large stack of books.

“I diagnose an existential crisis,” said Professor Mandragora. “It will pass, you know. As soon as you find the rest of your soul. It’s probably still in Florida, in the swamp where you were shot.”

“Florida?” said Herbert. His voice had an odd, but not unpleasant, whirring sound.

“How are we going to get you to Florida?” asked Professor Mandragora. “It’s the middle of the semester, and I can’t leave my students or my research. You’ll need to get yourself down there. But how?”

For Professor Mandragora, this was a rhetorical question, a way of focusing her energy rather than actually asking. She knew how.

She gave him wings. They were made of copper, and would weather but not rust. They were large but light, and she hammered the magic right into them. (She had majored in Magical Physics at MIT.)

On a cold but sunny day (all days in Boston are cold, but not all days are sunny), she said goodbye to Herbert, and told him to take good care of himself. Then he rose into the air with more grace than you might expect from a taxidermed alligator (he had been practicing for several weeks). And he flew south. She saw him silhouetted against the sky, looking like an awkward dragon, and very much hoped that she had done the right thing. But even a taxidermed alligator deserves to find his soul, she thought. And I agree.

What happened to Herbert? There were storms, and high winds, and once he was almost lost at sea. But at last he came to the Everglades, and there he found his soul, among the roots of a cypress. It was pleased to have a body again, and for the first time in his brief afterlife, Herbert felt a sense of peace, a sense as though he was no longer missing a part of himself.

Soon after, he met a girl named Alice. She was sixteen, and she had never owned a pair of shoes. Despite what seemed like unprepossessing circumstances, Alice wanted to go to college and study ecology. But she had no money, had never had any money, and they don’t let you into college for a faded dress and an old baseball cap.

I think it was Alice’s idea. At least, she wrote the sign: See the Flying Alligator! Only $5!

And you know, if you put up a sign that like, people will actually want to see the flying alligator, sometimes twice in a row. Especially after a feature on the local PBS station, which was broadcast to other PBS stations so that all the way up in Boston, Professor Mandragora saw it and said, “Good work, Herbert!”

It was the Herbert stuffed alligators that allowed Alice to go to college, and then to graduate school. Herbert went with her, and eventually her roommates got used to him. Today, Alice is an ecologist (Dr. Alice, the locals call her), and Herbert lives with her in a house at the edge of the Everglades. The house is filled with plants, tanks of fish, birds undergoing rehabilitation.

And the last time I visited, they were very happy.

I’ve decided that every Friday, I’m going to write part of the Shadowlands serial. If you want to read parts that I’ve already written, go to Serial. There, you can read all about Thea Graves, Matilda Tillinghast, Emma Gaunt, and Mouse, from the beginning.

I’m not sure I’ve looked out of the window today.

Although I’m pretty sure it looks the same as it did yesterday, out there. Snow on the ground, melting too slowly.

But all day, I’ve been staring at the computer screen, revising my Folkroots column. (I mentioned that it was due on the 1st, right? And today is the 3rd. How I hate having to ask for extra time! Because I know it’s important to get things in by the deadline, in publishing. Especially magazine publishing. I’m revealing my lateness to you only because, you know, you and I can talk about these things. Because we’re writers, or whatever it is we are. But if I’m going to be honest about my process here, I have to tell you about when I’m not doing as well as I would like, don’t I?)

I did the research a long time ago, and I meant to finish the column a long time ago as well. But I had something come up, an academic deadline I had to meet. It took all my time to meet it, and so the column was put aside for a couple of weeks, and then there was the end of the month, and I only had a few days to complete it. No matter how much you already have, producing a final manuscript always takes time and effort. Especially when it involves research, as the Folkroots columns do.

(But I learned so much! I had no idea that fairies were so complicated. There’s quite a lot I haven’t been able to get into the column because I simply don’t have the space. For example, did you know that during the witch trials, in the 16th and17th centuries, witches were often associated with fairies? Consorting with the Queen of Fairies was a common confession at the witch trials. Fairies were essentially seen as demons, and agents of the Devil.)

I suppose this is a blog post about being the kind of writer I am, which is the kind that writes a regular column, and is regularly asked to submit stories for anthologies, and so has to meet deadlines. Once I send this column in later tonight, I will have one more deadline this month, for a project that I can’t talk about yet but am incredibly excited about. It was another assignment I started some time ago that was interrupted by that academic deadline, and I’m so looking forward to getting back to it. What does it take to be that kind of writer? Well, organization for one. The ability to look at a deadline and determine how many words I need to write by when. And second, the ability to sit down and write and not get up again until the assignment is done. You know, the “butt in chair” principle. I think I learned that as a lawyer.

But this is so much more fun than being a lawyer. All the writing I do, all the creative writing (the column, the stories, eventually the novels) give me such joy. Perhaps the real benefit to having been a corporate lawyer is that in comparison, everything else is wonderful. And I don’t have to do it in high heels! If you could see me now: black t-shirt, black yoga pants, black socks. Sitting in my chair in a sort of half lotus position, because I’m not flexible enough to do a full lotus. Listening to Seanan McGuire singing “Cartography“:

“I know you; I met you
A long, long time ago.
But you’re still a stranger,
There’s so much I don’t know.

“Can I walk across your borders?
Will your guardsmen let me through?
I have empty hands and pockets.
I intend no harm to you.

“So tell me your stories
And I might tell you mine;
We’re both getting closer
To once upon a time.”

I think it’s my third favorite song on Wicked Girls, after “The Snow Queen Dreams” and “Wicked Girls”:

“So trust me; believe me
When I say I’ll take care.
I can’t come the whole way;
I’ll meet you halfway there.

“Come and wander through my cities,
Meet the people I have been.
I have left my gates unguarded.
You are welcome, please, come in.”

It’s a love song, of course. Sort of a love song with cartography. And this is my favorite stanza:

“We are each of us an island,
With our separate rocky shores,
But an island’s not a prison –
That’s what men make bridges for.”

We are not each solipsistically imprisoned in the self, are we? We are capable of reaching out, of building bridges. Of understanding one another . . .  (We are none of us meant to be, or feel, alone.)

And I have glasses on, and my hair is a complete mess. And I’m eating a formerly-frozen organic vegetable tamale with black beans. And later I will be eating cherry amaretto coconut milk ice cream.

It’s as though I’ve created a cocoon around myself, made up of all sorts of things I love, and I’m doing the work I love, and that’s wonderful and gives me a sense of joy, even though at the moment I’m completely exhausted and really should be doing yoga for my back rather than typing this.

But I think this is the writing life, isn’t it? It’s spending a lot of time in front of a computer and writing. And you know, I love it. So, so much.

I am tired and sad, and so I think I’ll write about what I want to happen in the next year.

First, I want to finish the academic work I’m doing.

Second, I want to create a life for myself in which I can do the things I love, spend time with the people I love. I have this image in my mind of going down to North Carolina, renting a house on the beach, asking my best writer friend to come stay with me so we can both write there. It’s always nicer to share something with someone, whether ice cream or an experience. And I specify my best writer friend because I can’t imagine anything better than sharing both the ocean and writing.

Imagine waking up, taking a long walk on the beach, collecting shells. I haven’t been to the ocean in a long time, but I still remember how the sand feels beneath my feet, how the water curls around my ankles. In North Carolina, the beaches are lined with old houses, faded from sun and salt, sitting behind the dunes. And there are pelicans drifting overhead. And the wind in the sea oats makes a particular sort of sound, a shushing that you can hear all night, together with the shush of the waves.

Imagine having breakfast and then getting to work, spending the morning writing. Lunch, and then talking about what was accomplished that morning, about how the novels are going. (These are to be novels, of course.) Reading sections aloud. Troubleshooting.

A nap in the afternoon, curled up in that warm air.

Dinner would be seafood of some sort, fish or crab. I still remember the crabs we ate when we went to the ocean, when I was a child. Directly off the brown paper spread on the table, using a mallet to break the shells. The simplest foods are always the best.

And then perhaps sitting on the beach, talking in the darkness. About all sorts of things, talk as rambling as one of the beach roads, as comfortable as an old quilt.  I still remember how moonlight looked on the waves, and the stars overhead.  So many stars!

And finally, sleeping. There is nothing like sleeping near the ocean, listening to the waves all night long. It’s like being rocked by the earth itself. I have always slept well, by the beach.

I have thought, from time to time, of doing something like this with a group of friends, of inviting a group of writer friends to come to the ocean with me and just write. But first perhaps with one person, whom I know and whose writing I know well. (And yes I’m thinking of someone specific, and yes you know who you are, and yes this is code for get working on that novel, because I want to read it!  And critique it.  By the ocean.)

Tonight I am tired and sad, and I want to rent a house on the beach in North Carolina, and I want to start working on a novel. For now, the fantasy of it will have to do, because there’s work to be done. But eventually, after my academic work is finished – then, it will be time for the real thing. (And I’ll probably get a sunburn on my nose. But that’s all right.)