This Creature is Lore

I recently finished the ~114,000 word thing that started my Tolkienverse madness, and I spent a good deal of today re-parsing the chapters in a more sensible and digestible manner. This involved getting to think of significant (and, where possible, double-edged) subtitles for certain chronologically contiguous sections that have been teased out into separate chapters. I love naming things (rather like the first men/elves/beings/whatever of many myths).

I was kind of surprised when I ended a chapter last week and suddenly was visited with the realization: "Hey. This s*** is finished."

Ostensibly. Some stuff at the beginning no longer makes sense and it will require a lot of tweaking, particularly of characters who evolved along the way. Plus it's the first of a projected three thingies. x__x

It needs a title. x____x

While a fitting image on which to close the sprawling angst and moral ambiguity that is Ch 10 has yet to be found, I find instead my audition piece for next year's Shakespeare Festival!

It took numerous bouts searching, pacing, reading, and debates with the stopwatch app over the past 8 months, but at last I've settled it. Richard III, I.1.

Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the king
In deadly hate the one against the other...

I can't seem to get the Hobbit trailer to play. %^@$&@%$@ Quicktime. Hopefully it's up on Youtube, but I'm supposed to be going to choir practice, not watching the Hobbit trailer, anyway.

I am dubiously pleased to report that being sick the past couple days and being forced to rest up has resulted in my -finally- reworking Ch 10 of Epic Fic is Epic. The old Ch 10 sucked and was stalling me on any progress for about four months. The new chapter 10 is a huge freaking dramafest. (All is right with the world.)

It's kind of important that these things be reworked, because other, more manageable stuff I write is currently at the same chronological point. The Draugluin story and Epic Fic is Epic have entered into a fun feedback loop, some of the same events from different viewpoints, & c.

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Also, I completely don't understand whether today or tomorrow is the Winter Solstice. This is what comes of being dead to the world for two days.

I derived inordinate amusement from this:
'I write like..'

I gave it some essays from the last few semesters, and it usually gave me Lovecraft as a result. (Once it gave me Tolkien, for a somewhat less formal and more memoir-styled essay called "Meditations on a Spider"...why do I want to think it was the word "spider" that did it?)

I would have thought my fiction might be nearer to Lovecraft than my academic writing. Evidently not. It usually told me my fiction was Arthur C. Clarke, a fellow I have yet to read. I'm given to understand he was a fan of Lewis, which raises my hackles perhaps meritlessly...My dislike of Lewis is fairly intense, but that's a story for another day.

The best thing about this was that it gave me Mary Shelley for my Ainulindalë chapter. "It's alive...aliiive...Eäää..."
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Three weeks of no classes, coinciding with the groups and committees I'm in not doing anything, and my three whole social circles not doing anything = lots of time to introspect, indulge my growing penchant for pre-Rings fic reading, and working on my own crap. In a little over a week, things are going to spin into overdrive with a full plate in the autumn, so I better get this out of my system while I can.

Things have finally reached a pass where I've been needing to write skirmishes and battles. I've never really had to do this before. Now I finally get why books tend to ramble on about this crap and bore the life out of me: it takes a long time to describe this stuff, it's complex. It's not that I'm adverse to violence and gore, but usually when that pops up in my work, it's on a more interpersonal basis, not some action-packed dramatic-music-laced scene. This whole tale has gotten exceedingly gory the past few chapters. I think it's going to clam down again next chapter, and we can return to the regularly scheduled brooding and philosophizing.