Stories within Stories within Stories within...

I'm sure that there's some specific literary term for stories that contain stories/narratives that contain narratives, but despite my long literary history, I have mostly failed at term-retention except for "hubris" which was one of my every English teachers' favorite words since freshman year of high school.

Anyway, in our Holiday Cookie, Krispy and I have boldly set forth to accomplish exactly that! No, not hubris, of which I'm sure I've plenty and probably Krispy has a healthy portion because we both lead tragic, tragic lives that incite fear and loathing in many and hey, every hero needs a tragic flaw—nay, but stories within stories! The Holiday Cookie has become the nesting ground for separate little tales contained within the larger narrative.

Why? Because I bullied Krispy into doing so. Our characters are finally at the dinner table and dinnertime conversation has drifted towards tale-telling. Also, it's a midwinter feast, and the grand tradition of Christmastime/wintertime ghost stories is a long and celebrated one—although, well, there haven't been any ghosts in the stories so far. Except for Krispy's, which had zombies. Zombies count.

One Thousand and One Arabian Nights is, of course, the most iconic example of stories within stories. Some crazy-nut of a king discovers that his wife is a bitch unfaithful and has her put to death, and then decides that he's going to marry a new virgin every day and have her put to death the next morning. Ah, the benefits of kinghood. This goes on for an unspecified but very loooong time, until eventually the daughter of one of the king's closest advisors decides to volunteer her pretty neck for the chopping block.

Nay, says her father, who loves her and incidentally does not relish the prospect of her imminent decapitation.

But Scheherazade is as clever as she is pretty! She has a plan! And so her father reluctantly yields to her will and she marries the king. That night she tells the king a fascinating story—but when the sun rises, like Battlestar Galactica, 24, and Heroes, Scheherazade ends the story on a cliffhanger, and the king decides to put off her execution until the next morning so he can hear the rest of the story. This gives her ample opportunity to continue weaving the tail of each tale into the next tale, until lo and behold, 1001 nights have passed and the king decides his earlier decision to execute his wives the morning after is bunk, and he keeps Scheherazade as his queen and they live happily ever after. Hooray.

Alice in Wonderland is a slightly different example more along the lines of what Krispy and I are doing. The novel is a novel, not a story collection with an initial story acting as a frame for the individual tales within; in Alice, the little mad tales of the Wonderland folk tend to be incidental rather than integral to the main narrative.

I know I've read quite a few other stories which incorporated further stories within their structure but for the life of me I cannot remember authors or titles except for Jane Yolen, who wrote at least two such short stories: "The Five Points of Roguery" and "Dream Weaver."

The first story contains the three much shorter and fairly clever anecdotal stories regarding the titular five points of roguery, including "One: The Eye," "Two: The Hand," "Three: The Voice," and the framing story which contains the other two points. The frame is essential for the final punch line.

The second story contains a blind dream-weaving woman who, for a coin, weaves visions and stories for passersby. The stories she weaves are fairytales and folktales ranging from humorous to dark to touching. In order, they are "Brother Hart," "Man of Rock, Man of Stone," "The Tree's Wife," "The Cat Bride," "The Boy Who Sang for Death," "Princess Heart O'Stone," and "The Pot Child." In this case, the frame is a little less essential compared to the other story; the individual tales can stand alone fairly well. The frame, however, pitches the stories in a deliberate context and allows for commentary and insight via the characters who receive the woven dreams. I daresay the stories are richer for the framework around them.

In the Holiday Cookie, well, the stories (there are four of them so far, each told by a different character, although two of them are actually the same story, just from different points of view) are nonessential. They don't have to be there, I suppose. Krispy and I started this whole shebang with a pretty basic premise—what happens if we throw all these people together for a dinner party?—and have been exploring and exploiting the situation for all that we're worth. Our stories within stories serve two basic functions: dinnertime conversation and personal entertainment.

Actually, the entire Cookie is for personal entertainment, ours and others'.

Upon such fragile sheets are monstrosities of literary confection half-baked.

Congratulations are in Order!

Like the title says, there are some congratulations to be made. Let's go chronologically backwards.

Back on Valentine's Day, Feb. 14, it was our dear Val's birthday. Val is sort of the reason for the name of this blog and he is a character in the novel Alz and I have been discussing (though not recently because we've been sidetracked by a random side-project and the ever nefarious Real Life). He is sweet and a little bit of a pushover and he is entirely too easily overwhelmed for the task he has been assigned, but it's okay! We believe in you, Val! You will rise to the challenge! (or gloriously combust with the effort...) He was created more or less on Valentine's Day one year ago, which also accounts for his name. However, Val is not short for Valentine.

Now to go further back. On Feb. 5, Alz got her first paid acceptance for publication! The story will be in the 4th Jabberwocky anthology. So CONGRATS! to her. :)

Savory Scenes: Food where?!

I promised more posting for the New Year, yet here I am lagging. Anyway, I'm here to make up for it with a post about food and writing.

When you think of some of your favorite memories or best experiences, what do you think of? What makes up your recollection of that dreamy trip to France, that exciting cross-country road trip, or that amazing study abroad in China? What did you enjoy most at your last birthday party, Christmas, that family trip to wherever?

There are lots of things that come to mind I bet. The sights and sounds – the Eiffel Tower at night, singing 90s pop songs with nothing but road stretching ahead, laughing at your baby cousin playing the drum set in Rock Band even though she can't reach the foot pedal and barely knows what's going on.

Okay, but seriously, did you think of food?

No doubt you are thinking up some memorable Food Moments right about now. Some of my best memories are food-pervasive, and indeed, there are lots of holiday/family/socio-cultural traditions and behaviors that are at the very least held down by the kind of food served. What's Thanksgiving without turkey? In my family, that's the only time of year we EVER by a turkey and a huge slab of honey-baked ham. It just wouldn't be the same without those things present. For Lunar New Year (which started on January 26 this year), there are a number of "lucky" foods you're supposed to eat for good fortune and health in the coming year. One of the dishes should be a whole fish, and you aren't supposed to eat all of it so that you have leftovers, signifying an abundance of wisdom/wealth/fortune/etc. for the new year. My memory of this most recent Lunar New Year? PIZZA. 3 delicious creations I made at home with my sister and friend.

And when you leave a foreign country or different state/province/city after you've stayed, played, and eaten there, what do you miss? Honestly, I miss the food (if it's good, needless to say). I spent the past four years of my life at Berkeley, and yes, I miss my friends, the campus, bits of college life, but I also really miss the food – chicken tikki masala at Curry House, Lion King rolls at Sushi House, pizza from Cheeseboard, Chai Lattes and fluffy foccia-bread sandwiches from Sufficient Grounds, freaking love-of-my-college-life Bianca Mochas from Café Strada. They were part of what defined my experience at Cal, and I capped off my graduation with dinner at ritzy Chez Panisse with my roommate of four years.



Two months in Taiwan this past summer and among the many amazing things I experienced, I miss the abundance of cheap and delicious foods, especially snack foods. But especially, especially, snowflake shaved ice. There are so many Taiwanese people around where I live, but why is there no snowflake shaved ice?!



So the point here wasn't to make you drool (and if you are, watch your keyboards!). It's to show that food is an integral part of our experience, sometimes a definitive part. It's obviously necessary to our survival but it's also in our psychology, our societies, our cultures, and thus in our literature. It comes as something of a surprise to me then that I find very little time spared on food in my earlier writings and even now in my "serious" projects (there's tons of food in silly things I write). When food is mentioned, it's mentioned in passing as an environmental detail or note on perhaps the direness of a situation where characters find food scarce. On a somewhat higher level, it might be used as a personality quirk/indicator for a character. Basically though, where there is food, its use is very functional.



But as we discussed, food can be and actually is so much more. It's evocative, romantic, metaphoric, sentimental, and culturally significant: tea and tea traditions in various parts of the world (e.g. UK, Japan), everything about chocolate, the pomegranate that sealed Persephone's fate, the famed Apple of Eve's eye. So, I wonder why I'm having a hard time thinking of creative uses in fiction for food, especially in speculative fiction where all sorts of crazy magical things happen, but what? No food? In SciFi/Fantasy, off the top of my head, I can only think of the drink klah from the Dragons of Pern series, and lambas bread from LotR but honestly, I haven't read all of the LoTR trilogy and only remember that from rather hilarious outtakes/fandom crack from the movie franchise.

Of course, this ignorance may be due to my own limited reading and imperfect memory, but food and food traditions seems to be an underused part of world/character-building.

In other genres of fiction, I can think of more interesting or at least more prominent roles for food. There's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, where the setting and candy are practically characters themselves, and there's Chocolat, which I'm going to admit now, I've never read but I loved the movie. The chocolate in that story was used both in the literal sense and as a metaphor for passion and the richness of life. Jhumpa Lahiri uses the specific ingredients and process of making Indian food to help characterize her protagonist in a short story (the title of which escapes me) from Interpreter of Maladies; the smells of the spices is a key part of how the young boy in the story remembers her. The food not only speaks of the woman's past and culture, but it draws parallels to the scope of her life and is indicative of gender roles.

This under-use of food seems at least kind of related to how taste is less used than sight or sound in descriptive writing. Taste is just kind of hard to describe, but food isn't and I think all our worlds would be richer if there was just a little bit more of it. After all, our memories and experiences certainly benefit from the presence of food.

What are your best memories of food? What are other examples of great food/taste usage in fiction? When have you creatively written about food or used it to enrich a character/world? I'd love to hear about it because I'm a big fan, and I'm sure you are too.

Momentum

Personally, I find that collaboration helps a great deal with regards to actually producing writing. I work better when there's a deadline, and I also work better when there's a little judicious prodding going on in the background. While we have not set a deadline for ourselves, Krispy and I sufficiently prod each other every day for our daily dose of delicious cookieness. Partnership! Tasty indeed.

This is the longest collaboration we've ever done. F'realz. I mean, technically speaking, I suppose that our neglected Penny Drabble is the longest as in we worked on it over a longer period of time (months—maybe even a couple of years?) but really, this Holiday Cookie trumps all both in terms of length and intensity of production. We've written far more of our Holiday Cookie than of our Penny Drabble, and within a much shorter span of time, practically all at once. One or the other of us has been cookie-ing practically every day as we roll out the wordage dough between us and stamp it over and over again with our own character-shaped cutters. That was a bizarre metaphor and I don't care.

I daresay that I'm particularly happy with this cookie because it means that Krispy has been writing a lot more than she normally does and I'm a greedy bastard who will take all that I can get and if getting more necessitates incessant nagging, then nag I shall! Krispy understands this because she reciprocates in kind. Thankfully we've got our momentum going good and strong and the cookie is ever mounting in size, and the nagging is at a minimum for the both of us. We blasted through the latter half of December and have not plugged through January so much as frolicked, and with determination and high spirits I'm sure we will be just as frolicsome going into February.

We are familiar enough with each other's characters to write them pretty well, we know what we're doing or at least appear to know what we're doing, and if ever there are doubts or uncertainties, there's this marvelous feat of technology known as instant messaging that facilitates consultation. We're going strong. We cannot be stopped. We are invincible! We're a two-person army, are Krispy and I. We're like the Spartans only instead of 300 of us it's just 2. Three hundred might seem like a more dramatic number, but really, what if only two held off the Persian army? How's your drama then, eh? Eh? Silly, you say, too silly? Not as far as Greek mythology goes. What was I talking about again?

Ah yes.

Are we getting anywhere?

Yep.

Slowly?

Maybe.

Entertainingly?

I think so.

With a minimum of bloodshed?

Well, now that I think about it, I do believe there has been no bloodshed at all. So far. Although this is, of course, subject to change as whim and passing fancy dictate. Which is basically how this entire cookie is proceeding, although we do have a vague plan for the future to which we shall adhere: The setting is a dinner party and a dear friend of ours has graciously provided us with a simply superb menu, and so there will be, in the very near future, without qualm or question, food.

And lots of it.

Cookies and Collaboration

Long has it been since Krispy and I have paid attention to our sorely neglected co-novel baby. We are bad, bad parents.

However, we have been collaborating on a Holiday Cookie these past couple of weeks, and it's going quite well if I do say so myself. We've collaborated before on a sack of pennies as well as numerous other bits and bobs, cookies and crumbs, and cracktastic alternate universe high school melodramas. (Just kidding about that last—that was with another friend, although still containing Krispy's characters.)

But in our defense (as though something were attacking us besides our parental consciences), some of our co-novel characters appear in this Holiday Cookie, and by some, I mean one, and that one is a member of our novel's supporting cast. (Incidentally, this same character also appears in Krispy's Nanowrimo story, playing a slightly bigger role than in our novel.) So what if our current cookie endeavor is a multiple-world-crossover of questionable alternate universality? At least we're getting to know someone a little better, and see how he reacts under pressure and behaves in general. Chronologically speaking, this takes place a good many years decades centuries after the events in our co-novel and while I suppose that a few hundred years might make a difference in one's character and personality, I'm going to ignore that thought right now.

Collaboration this time is a wee bit different than how we wrote (and should still be writing, if only Krispy would freakin' write the next drabble) our Penny Drabble, wherein we took turns writing a section at a time, taking things in random directions to see where the other would run with it. For our Holiday Cookie, we've been writing different scenes simultaneously (and said scenes are more or less happening around the same time), consulting each other as necessary for information concerning settings, character whereabouts and interactions, etc.

Perhaps by the time we actually finish planning and plotting our novel, we will have smoothed out a few of the kinks, ironed some of the wrinkles, and sandpapered away the most awkward bumps of figuring out how to actually write it. I have the feeling (take no bets, please, for my feelings are as fleeting as they are fickle) that our novel will require a combination of both Penny Drabbles and Holiday Cookie techniques along with inventing some brand spanking new co-authorial anything-goes literary kung fu.

We will be co-author kung fu masters by the time we're through. Masters.

Here's 2009!

Hey all! We'd like apologize for disappearing again, but you know how the holidays get. In any case, HAPPY NEW YEAR!

We're resolving to be better bloggers in 2009. :)

Fairy Tales

I absolutely adore fairy tales like how I absolutely adore classical mythology. I know this isn't one of my best openings, but I've been procrastinating on this post and I figured I should just out with it. It's a new thing I'm trying: thwarting my self-thwarting.

Back on topic though, fairy tales hold a special place in my heart. They were probably my first introduction to fantasy and magic both in picture book form and in movie form (thank you Disney). RANDOM ASIDE: Not going to lie, I'm something of a Disney junkie. If you're ever visiting Disneyland, drop me a line. I will get you your one-day pass' worth of Disneyland fun. Also, one-day does mean FULL day. You can't do a Disneyland run properly in half a day, and considering ticket prices, it wouldn't be worth it. Yes, I know where practically everything is. Yes, that's without a map. And yes, that's how many times I've been there. They were, shall we say, the earliest seeds placed in my undeveloped imagination, and as such heavily influence what I like to write and what I like to read.

This pertains to me particularly so at this moment because my NaNo novel was a reboot of something I only vaguely started in the last year or two, and it is based on a fairy tale. I also put myself through the torture of writing my own fairy tale for the novel, which meant I went and read/researched a bunch of fairy tales to get the cadence and style down. (Again, Surlalune for fairy tales plug. Why didn't I find this site sooner?!) Even so, my novel-verse fairy tale still doesn't sit well with me and I'll probably have to revise at least the second half of it. Mostly, what I want is for the entire novel to have a sort of fairy tale tonality to it. I want magic to be embedded into the story, but I want it to feel precariously paradoxical. I want the presence of magic in the world to feel eerie. That's not really happening at the moment, but it's nice to have goals, right?

While the collaborative work that Alz and I really should work on again (now that NaNo is over) is not of the fairy tale ilk, it does in turn draw from various mythologies and legends.


As for my reading tastes, I think the specific appeal of fairy tales for me lies in its ability to walk the line between charming and eerie, and they bring magic into otherwise seemingly ordinary worlds: children run errands for their parents, but then they meet a talking animal or a witch in the woods; peasant girls marry into better lives, but find their husbands ask them to fulfill extraordinary and impossible tasks; shoemakers try to make ends meet, and while they sleep, helpful elves come to answer their prayers. The settings and situations are often mundane enough, but magic is an acceptable intrusion. The world of fairy tales is liminal - real and imagined, enchanting and frightening, sweet and also grotesque, bittersweet.

They represent a type of story and reading experience that I particularly enjoy. I love The Last Unicorn so much because it's told with that sort of "fairy tale" voice, though dressed up to be more lyrical. Also, I just finished reading Susanna Clarke's The Ladies of Grace Adieu and other stories, which is a collection of, well, fairy tales - some retold and others newly wrought. (Haven't read her novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell yet, but I have it.) The lovely part about the stories is that magical occurrences aren't always spelled out for you (very classic fairy tale-like); you're given just enough to draw conclusions but are left with a sense of wonder. It's that eeriness again, the sort of haunting quality the stranger fairy tales have. I suppose it's that feeling that magic could be "just around the corner."