![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Bella and Chain. To remember (back from Point Reyes)
Last night around midnight I woke from a vivid narrative dream. I have these a lot, but I remember them only sometimes. This time I was convinced when I woke up that I had been dreaming a novel for the last several days or weeks and that this was just the first time I remembered it. I was sure -- I am still sure -- that there is agood novel there, when I understand it better, so I got up, stumbled around the hotel room looking for my purse and notebook, and wrote for almost an hour to get everything down. So I don't really have to put it all here, but I have a tendency to misplace my notebooks when I need them (like, where in hell are my Afterwar notebooks? I really could use them now so I don't have to reconstruct everything from scratch and I could be sure I was using the best names for things!), so it doesn't hurt to have some redundancy.
The story revolves around a young woman named Bella, who looks more or less like Jeanine Garofolo, small and dark haired with large intelligent vulnerable eyes, and who is a student? graduate student? lumpen intelligentsia? living in San Francisco? or a city much like it but denser and taller?. She is plagued with unsavory people trying to get her to acquire dark-arts skills, knowledge, curiosa, etc., to get her to perform small acts in themselves not wicked or significant but which play out bits of prophecy or trigger bits of reaction or unlock bits of power that would devolve on to her, kind of like she was their pawn in a cosmic game of scavenger hunt, or she was their representative in a quest for Girl Scout badges . . . she doesn't know what's going on, but bits of it become revealed to her as she goes along. Some of the things she resists easily, others she does by accident or is seduced into doing. Some of the things are good to have done, for some reason that I will have to discover. There's more than one faction involved: at least one of these is one she trusts more than the others, who advises her not to do most of the things and helps her not to do them. There is some secret, some surprise about him, but I don't think it's that he's actually evil. I don't think it's actually about a Christian heaven versus hell, but I think there is spiritual sleaziness, spiritual existential heroism, and there are things which are evil, things which are good, and a whole lot of things which partake of both but which cannot be easily sorted out into a comprehensible continuum.
Another character is her boyfriend whose name is Chain. Not Chaim or Shane, Chain. He's a lot like Buffy's Zander in that he is a normal guy whose perspective does not shift out of recognition when he comes to know things through Bella's experiences. He also doesn't think Bella is crazy, though he sometimes thinks that she's mistaken as to what is happening to her. She turns to him for venting, for comfort, for advice, and I suppose eventually for physical protection though at the moment I don't know from what.
This is the kind of thing that happens to Bella:
Moving through a dense crowd at the edge of a shopping mall parking lot, where apparently a crafts fair or a community fair is going on with booths and tables, she is accosted. One time she is accosted by a large, amiable, greasy and sulfurous fellow who asks her to pray for his vehicle so he can win an upcoming race "for his master." The vehicle is a hot rod or a chopper, I'm not sure which, and has entirely banal flames-and-skulls type of decoration on it, the standard stuff perfectly ordinary family-man bikers use, and that's what he looks like: an ordinary family-man biker, goatee, denim jacket with the sleeves cut off. But this request to pray for his vehicle sets off alarm bells for Bella, it resonates with something her friend (whose name I do not know yet) has warned her about, and she's positively nauseated by terror when he asks her -- he's amiable, friendly, not at all threatening, but there's just something -- that sulfurous smell perhaps -- that's alarming.
Another person who accosts her has a board, painted over with yellowish resin, with little cups attached to it in which are mounted sample of things she's supposed to be collecting to advance his faction. He's quite smug because she's inadvertently collected a lot of them. The things are pretty ordinary in and of themselves, wgat makes them special is only something about the time and place and manner and order in which she has "acquired" them (which I am not sure is exactly the same as getting them in her very own possession. He shows her that the next thing, for example, is a bright red, glossy, soft substance of a slightly thicker, more solid consistency than oil paint, and that it is labelled "FDC Red 5, Tartrazine." And for some reason for a few seconds there Bella is convinced she should collect this thing, it will be easy and a triumph for . . . who? And I think it's that her thoughts go this way that she recoils. And I think that this makes something clear to her about it, which she wants, needs, to discuss with Chain, and she starts to talk to him and she realizes that this street fair or whatever it is is a terrible place to talk about it, and she needs to take CHain to some place which is the antithesis of this, some place where none of the factions involved would ever go.
Unfortunately for Bella, and for me, the place that comes to mind is a place called Blum's, a little pink tea-icecream-candy-and pastries shop with little wire chairs and tables which used to be in or near the old City of Paris department store on Union Square. Honestly, Bella could not have been born before Blym's closed.
Anyway, there is a novel there, which I will figure out with my hindbrain while I finish Afterwar and write Hope Street, and then I will write this Bella and Chain thing, whose name I do not know.
I took 96 pictures at Point Reyes, of which maybe half or a third are keepers. Many are of turkey vultures and ravens flying and roosting, and I took lots of those so I could have a few that wopuld be good. I think it will be days before I get them posted, or the pictures of the many many cute little wildflowers, most of which I still have to identify. It was definitely spring at Point Reyes, though. We got up a week or two too late, or a month and a half too early, to see the whales, though.
The story revolves around a young woman named Bella, who looks more or less like Jeanine Garofolo, small and dark haired with large intelligent vulnerable eyes, and who is a student? graduate student? lumpen intelligentsia? living in San Francisco? or a city much like it but denser and taller?. She is plagued with unsavory people trying to get her to acquire dark-arts skills, knowledge, curiosa, etc., to get her to perform small acts in themselves not wicked or significant but which play out bits of prophecy or trigger bits of reaction or unlock bits of power that would devolve on to her, kind of like she was their pawn in a cosmic game of scavenger hunt, or she was their representative in a quest for Girl Scout badges . . . she doesn't know what's going on, but bits of it become revealed to her as she goes along. Some of the things she resists easily, others she does by accident or is seduced into doing. Some of the things are good to have done, for some reason that I will have to discover. There's more than one faction involved: at least one of these is one she trusts more than the others, who advises her not to do most of the things and helps her not to do them. There is some secret, some surprise about him, but I don't think it's that he's actually evil. I don't think it's actually about a Christian heaven versus hell, but I think there is spiritual sleaziness, spiritual existential heroism, and there are things which are evil, things which are good, and a whole lot of things which partake of both but which cannot be easily sorted out into a comprehensible continuum.
Another character is her boyfriend whose name is Chain. Not Chaim or Shane, Chain. He's a lot like Buffy's Zander in that he is a normal guy whose perspective does not shift out of recognition when he comes to know things through Bella's experiences. He also doesn't think Bella is crazy, though he sometimes thinks that she's mistaken as to what is happening to her. She turns to him for venting, for comfort, for advice, and I suppose eventually for physical protection though at the moment I don't know from what.
This is the kind of thing that happens to Bella:
Moving through a dense crowd at the edge of a shopping mall parking lot, where apparently a crafts fair or a community fair is going on with booths and tables, she is accosted. One time she is accosted by a large, amiable, greasy and sulfurous fellow who asks her to pray for his vehicle so he can win an upcoming race "for his master." The vehicle is a hot rod or a chopper, I'm not sure which, and has entirely banal flames-and-skulls type of decoration on it, the standard stuff perfectly ordinary family-man bikers use, and that's what he looks like: an ordinary family-man biker, goatee, denim jacket with the sleeves cut off. But this request to pray for his vehicle sets off alarm bells for Bella, it resonates with something her friend (whose name I do not know yet) has warned her about, and she's positively nauseated by terror when he asks her -- he's amiable, friendly, not at all threatening, but there's just something -- that sulfurous smell perhaps -- that's alarming.
Another person who accosts her has a board, painted over with yellowish resin, with little cups attached to it in which are mounted sample of things she's supposed to be collecting to advance his faction. He's quite smug because she's inadvertently collected a lot of them. The things are pretty ordinary in and of themselves, wgat makes them special is only something about the time and place and manner and order in which she has "acquired" them (which I am not sure is exactly the same as getting them in her very own possession. He shows her that the next thing, for example, is a bright red, glossy, soft substance of a slightly thicker, more solid consistency than oil paint, and that it is labelled "FDC Red 5, Tartrazine." And for some reason for a few seconds there Bella is convinced she should collect this thing, it will be easy and a triumph for . . . who? And I think it's that her thoughts go this way that she recoils. And I think that this makes something clear to her about it, which she wants, needs, to discuss with Chain, and she starts to talk to him and she realizes that this street fair or whatever it is is a terrible place to talk about it, and she needs to take CHain to some place which is the antithesis of this, some place where none of the factions involved would ever go.
Unfortunately for Bella, and for me, the place that comes to mind is a place called Blum's, a little pink tea-icecream-candy-and pastries shop with little wire chairs and tables which used to be in or near the old City of Paris department store on Union Square. Honestly, Bella could not have been born before Blym's closed.
Anyway, there is a novel there, which I will figure out with my hindbrain while I finish Afterwar and write Hope Street, and then I will write this Bella and Chain thing, whose name I do not know.
I took 96 pictures at Point Reyes, of which maybe half or a third are keepers. Many are of turkey vultures and ravens flying and roosting, and I took lots of those so I could have a few that wopuld be good. I think it will be days before I get them posted, or the pictures of the many many cute little wildflowers, most of which I still have to identify. It was definitely spring at Point Reyes, though. We got up a week or two too late, or a month and a half too early, to see the whales, though.
no subject
no subject
As for the place, there are dream places I visit frequently. One of them is this city, which in places is exactly like San Francisco (where I spent my adolescence) and in other places has elements of other cities I have lived or visited (Philadelphia: Pittsburgh, PA, where I spent four days at a very impressionable point in my childhood: Oakland: Portland: New York: San Jose: Los Angeles: Sacramento: and a few beach towns) There's an intersection in the dream city I saw before I experienced it in real life in Pittsburgh. So the place already existed in my dream landscape before I had the dream. I don't know whether in the writing I will bend the dream city to better fit San Francisco, or whether I will let it be the dream city itself.