Well, a lot has happened to Ella, inside my feeble little mind. But not much has gotten written.
However, the experiment of trying to post a new chapter of Ella’s story once every two or three weeks has made a point: Writing fiction on deadline is extremely difficult.
I did have some copy that I’d drafted to post here. Yesterday I pulled up the file (after three days without my computer, four days of doing battle with Apple techs, six hours of driving back and forth to the Apple store…) and took a look at the current work in progress, figuring to finish off the episode and stick it up on Plain & Simple Press.
Looked at it. And looked at it.
And thought holy shit but this stuff is awful!
Yes. Awful. Full of clichés. Full of mystifications. Full of amateurisms — the “Tom said swiftly” kind of bêtises committed by beginning writers who have no ear for language and no skill with putting language on paper. Or in little glowing lights in the Internet.
Seriously: I couldn’t believe I’d written that stuff.
So out it goes. When I get a few minutes, I’ll have to try to write that scene in grown-up terms. But no such minutes are in sight: In half an hour I have to start driving again: 45 minutes to the dermatologist’s office; then however long it takes to carve the current growths off my sun-scorched body; then 45 minutes plus however long it takes to stop at a Home Depot to pick up a needed tool. Probably about three hours excised from the day…and three hours’ worth of energy and patience excised from my mental state. Will I rewrite that scene today? Probably not. I haven’t eaten. I haven’t taken the dog for a walk. I haven’t done battle with DropBox trying to get it back online after the Apple techs in Scottsdale dorked it up. I haven’t written a Funny about Money post. And most of all, most urgently of all, I haven’t done one lick of work over the past several days on the indexing project that I should be almost done with by now.
Therein lies the problem: life is one interruption after another. And writing does not lend itself to interruption. Not well, anyway.
And therein lies another question: How did prominent 19th-century writers, like Twain and Poe and Dickens, manage to crank out serialized novel after serialized novel, sending along monthly installments to their customer periodicals on a regular basis?
Well, in the first place I expect Mark Twain was one hell of a lot better writer than I am.
Second, of course, we can imagine that life was slower-paced in the late 1800s than it is today. At least for reasonably affluent men, it would have been. If you didn’t have to work as a laborer, you wouldn’t have had anything like as many distractions and interruptions as we do. Today, distraction and interruption and hassle are part of our dreadfui, gestalt existence. Much of the time you can’t even complete a thought, much less sit down and focus on creating an imaginary world full of imaginary characters and putting it on paper.
I don’t believe that was true for women. Unless a woman or her family was pretty affluent, her work was very much more demanding and very much more time-consuming than a moderately affluent man’s work. Housework itself was laborious, and with no truly effective way to avoid a succession of pregnancies, most women would find their time and their creativity absorbed by child care.
Male or female, a 19th-century writer would not have had to resist the constant, unceasing distraction of the Internet. Mail came once a day — if that often. It did not bleep you or blip you every few minutes with urgent announcements of its presence. News was delivered to you in print packets called “newspapers,” which you usually read over breakfast. It did not lurk in an infinite number of websites tempting you to take a break and cruise on over to the latest lurid report or the latest outrage in national politics. or the latest sweet or Facebook blat. It did not interrupt what you are doing right this minute to announce ROYAL PALM BLOCK WATCH: COMMUNITY GARDEN GRAND OPENING!!!!!
Telephones were largely absent; after they were invented, they did not ring a dozen times a day (literally: that is the case here, even with NoMoRobo engaged) to bring you the latest scam and spam.
In the absence of cars, errands were either delegated to the woman or to a servant or bunched together so that you didn’t have to run out almost every day to get this or that item or perform this or that chore.
Thus you could have maintained your focus for quite some time without distraction.
If my phone rings only twice in a given day, that is a good day. Most days, my concentration is broken by ten or twelve scamming robocalls. NoMoRobo does block them, but not without letting the first ring jangle me out of whatever reverie I happen to be engaged in.
It’s almost impossible for me to focus on what I’m doing without my attention wandering off to the news of the day (or the minute).
We have, in a word, so much maddening distraction that it is almost impossible to focus on an optional activity that requires sustained attention.
Speaking of the which, now I must get up and start driving, driving, driving…
And so, to steal a catch-term from Mr. Pepys, away!
Cassie died, two weeks and a day ago, of adrenal cancer. Or possibly of 
Sigi, the personification of common sense, bent over the big table in the downstairs kitchen and eating hall, where she had spread out her draft plans for the proposed new clinic. Her short ebony hair, lit by the dining hall’s light-walls and lanterns, glowed with a shine that spoke of her robust health and energy. Dorin and Darl, uniformed like Sigi and all the kitchen and scullery crew in the Kaïna’s aqua-blue liveries, studied the sheet she had unrolled across the tabletop.
Ella slid onto a bench near the cluster around Sigi. As if by magic, a grey mug appeared at her elbow. Tabit poured steamy tea into it.
“Well… You need to realize that these people are not like…say, some paramedic on Samdela. A town attached to a Varn aristrocrat’s estate is not so much a town as a village. The inmates are pretty rural.”
Of course. They had passkeys, only legitimately. “I’ll be right down there, Yia. Get the women in their bunks and don’t let them out. Unless one of the Suits asks you to. Understood?”
…for every one step forward, eh?
“Make yourself comfortable, dear.” Vighdi gestured to one of the large stuffed chairs and started a built-in device near the broad table making hot drinks. Ella watched her brew and pour a couple mugsful of the dense rust-red tisane she favored – Ella was not asked what she would like, if anything. Eventually Vighdi set a steaming cup on the table beside her and alit in the other chair.
“Uhm…” Surprised, Ella wasn’t sure what to say. But…yes, she surely would. “I wouldn’t mind something to drink,” she said tentatively. Her preference was for soft candies spiked with white powder, a specialty of Samdela’s southern mountainsides. But…while those in service were allowed some alcohol ration, in moderate amounts, most other entertainments were off limits.
“Yeah…if it doesn’t take all night.” Tabs was a board game that involved moving silver or glass stones around according to an involved strategy. Some variants could occupy hours. Some could run through in a few minutes. A short-game used a six- by six-square playing board – a printed roll-up mat, actually. Vighdi pulled a mat and a box of stones from a drawer in the table between the two chairs, laid it out, and let Ella choose her color.
Ella sat up stock-straight. An adrenaline rush set her blood to roaring in her ears. Vighdi, very still, gazed expressionlessly at Yiadwene.
After her shift one evening she wandered over to the lounge where the great arm of the galaxy sparkled through the clear domed roof. She’d missed the chow line’s last full meal of the “day,” but she could get a hearty snack at the lounge’s food bar. If she wanted an alcoholic drink, which she did, she’d have to pay for it from the pennies she was given for consistent good work, but that was fine. She had quite a few such pennies.
“I guess. This wall,” she indicated the long stretch of dirt-gray paneling that held a bank of cabinets and shelves, “backs onto the men’s quarters. If we had an entrance somewhere along about here,” she waved vaguely toward one end, “some people could come in without having to go out into the weather. Or…hmmm…” She stepped over to the door and looked out. “We could build a covered breezeway along the front. It would shade the front wall—that would be good—and people could come out through the servant house’s east entrance and pass along here, under cover if it was raining.”
Ella recalled her own astonishment at seeing her young mistress, barely more than a child, address the crowds of citizens who already had gathered below the ministry’s façade. That day…that day: it was hard for her to think about that day, though every minute remained vivid in her memory. Everyone on the staff had been called in off their jobs and confined to the servants’ house, though it had taken awhile for some who were working in the city to get back out to Skyhill. A few of those had been detained by blacksuits as they were trying to make their way home, but most got back inside the gates within an hour or two.