Blog

In Chapter 10 (The Indian Gentleman) we see that Sara is regaining her balance in the way that she starts inventing “pretends” about the world around her once more. First, it was turning her garret into the Bastille. Now she watches the other people in the neighborhood of Miss Minchin’s school and starts telling herself romantic stories about them.

In particular, she begins inventing fanciful romantic names for the members of one rather large family (known sometimes as The Large Family). One might imagine that she feels envious of the eight children who--in addition to living in comfortable circumstances--are obviously loved. But there doesn’t seem to be anything of envy in her thoughts, only an appreciation of how happy they are.

What Sara hasn’t accounted for is that even as she’s telling stories about The Large Family, they’re telling stories to themselves about her. In particular, the little boy she calls Guy Clarence tells himself a story about how Sara is a poor, hungry beggar-girl for whom the gift of his Christmas sixpence will represent a fortune sufficient to turn her life around. This is a mortifying shock to Sara. Intellectually, she knew that strangers were reacting to her much differently than they had before her fall. But she had never been forced to confront the fact so blatantly.

Once again, a turning point in her life hangs on her willingness to put other people’s needs ahead of her own. Because rather than simply refusing the gift, she gives Guy Clarence the gift of accepting it. That action (along with her upper-class speech mannerisms) makes Sara memorable to the whole Large Family clan. While this fact isn’t completely essential to her later fate, it will certainly smooth her way.

One of the repeating themes that I find both utterly believable and discomfiting is how Sara’s polite and confident demeanor communicates to others that she doesn’t really belong to the working-class life she’s been thrust into.  Believable: because the reflexes and behaviors you’ve been trained into by your upbringing are impossible to shed entirely. The best you might manage is to learn to act out a different role convincingly. I know that I have reflexes and behaviors that derive from spending my entire life with the sure and certain knowledge that I don’t have to worry about my next meal, or where I’m sleeping, or whether my medical needs will be met, or what to do if an unexpected expense comes out of nowhere. (That “sure and certain knowledge” could become wrong overnight if the right conjunction of circumstances happened. But I retain those reflexes because it’s never been wrong yet.) But at the same time, this theme is discomfiting because it’s presented with a flavor of essentialism. That is, one gets the impression that Sara has these reflexes not as learned behavior due to her environment, but because she simply is, deep down and through and through, a genteel person, in the same way as she has gray-green eyes. Her behavior doesn’t simply signal that she has known a better life than she now leads, it signals that she deserves a better life because she is a better person than someone who didn’t have her history.

And one of those reflexes? Sara turns the sixpence into something of a lucky charm, making a hole in it and wearing it as a pendant. She is never tempted to spend it, even when she fantasizes about finding money in the street to buy bread with. Because if she spent it--and especially if she spent it on bread--then she would be the beggar-girl she’d been taken for.

Although we begin to see glimpses of the old Sara returning, there are still dark days. And that’s what the next installment will cover.

As previously noted, last Thursday I e-mailed off the manuscript of Mother of Souls to the publisher. So I should have a brief relaxing break before plunging into my next writing project. Somehow that never quite works out for me. In one of those peculiar conversations that started out on facebook and then jumped over to Twitter, I found myself being inspired by a Starbucks Coffee shopping back to write a fluffly little short story about mermaids. And Nantucket Island. And lonely early 18th century Quaker ladies. Tentative title: "Light in the Water".

And so (as you do) I found myself pulling up old maps of Nantucket that showed settlement distributions, researching types of small watercraft appropriate to the era, and devising an internally-consistent social ecology of mer-people. (Did you know that the two-tailed form featured on the Starbucks label and known in heraldry as a melusine is actually the sexually mature form of the species that has the more familiar single tail only in the juvenile form? What's that you say? "Heather, you just made that up!" Well, yes. Yes, I did.) I'm not sure I'm capable of writing a historically-based story without plunging into some sort of research project. Fortunately I could poke around for an appropriate (human) character name in my own genealogical records.

When I got hit by an attack story back in January after finishing the first draft of Mother of Souls, I put it up as a free e-story. But I think I'll hold on to this one and see if I can find a market for it. Probably not. It's too much of a fluffy romance for a fantasy market, and not "spicy" enough for the usual LesFic markets. But hope springs eternal.

The deadline for getting Mother of Souls off to the publisher made a hash of my usual blogging schedule this week. So to get back on track, we get Sara Crewe on Saturday rather than Wednesday.

Chapter 9 (Melchisedec) is all about how Sara’s compulsive empathy and drive to do things for other people (and creatures) turns her attitude around. Lottie (who I’ve noted before seems frozen in a state of emotional immaturity and neediness) asks Sara a lot of tactless questions about her new status, trapping her between the desire to be kind and the desire not to get into trouble with Miss Minchin. Lottie--incapable of taking a hint--persues Sara up to her attic room and is on the verge of making a scene out of her own unhappiness at what she finds, that would largely fall on Sara’s head.

Sara distracts her by trying to find all the positive things that can be said about her garret, including showing Lottie the little skylight where she can look at the sky and watch the sparrows. This is a key foreshadowing for the importance of the skylight as a portal to a magical world. For now, her dreams are limited to the possibility that another little girl might someday live in the attic opposite and they could become friends.

Lottie is encouraged to feed the sparrows with a bit of bun she has in her pocket (a return of the “largesse” theme) and Sara seems to have entirely forgotten Becky’s warning about being careful about crumbs due to the rats. That is, she forgets until Lottie has left and she is sitting quietly thinking about the contrasts in her life, and a rat comes right out into the middle of the room to examine them.

Once again, Sara’s reflex to empathize with everything around her takes over. The rat is given a name and a personality (and an implausibly anthropomorphic family life) and becomes part of the fantasy framing Sara is creating to pad the sharp corners of her new life.  This new “pretend” -- the Prisoners in the Bastille -- is explained to Ermengarde when she, too, sneaks up to the attic. And in that scene, we can see that Sara’s sprits have significantly recovered. She is telling stories, and making new friends, and supporting her existing friends, and drawing all of them together into a world of imagination. And by that, we know she is ready for the next step in her adventure.

About half an hour ago, I hit "send" on the e-mail with the finished manuscript of Mother of Souls. Now I get to relax for a few days before I tackle my next project. Hmm, will it be the Skinsinger collection, the next Alpennia novel, or the grinding heartbreak of starting to try to line up publicity for Mother of Souls? Or maybe I'll clean the house.