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Not a bad day, considering. I took Emma to the DMV, took the dog for two walks, washed the dishes, painted a cabinet, and wrote some stuff and mailed some stuff and helped Emma with scholarship applications.
She's doing a yeoman job on it, I think. She just wrote this essay on why Congress should pass the Employee Free Choice Act (not open shop, as I thought before, but quicker, more honest elections for certifying unions and more penalties for employer abuses in the election and contract negotiation process).
I read soime more in the immense farmworker book, too. There's something here about slavery. A while back, a participant in rasfc, Wildepad, was trying to argue that slavery wasn't all that bad. I was thinking about him as I was reading about the Indians in the missions -- it was both like and not like the system of slavery in the antebellum South. Not like, in that the padres' primary purpose for being there was to save souls, and all the brutal things they did to the Indians were in service of that. Which makes the whole brutality and cruelty thing bizarre. But like, in that the Indians' work was bought and sold by others than themselves and they had no right of free passage. And like in that they rarely rebelled but frequently ran away.
Some of it is grim reading. But there are parts which are merely fascinating -- the primitive agricultural technology, for example. Generally, the missions' grain was ground by hand, on metates, rather than by mill, and when it was a mill, it was a primitive burro-driven mill and not a water mill. Other things were done by hand which in other parts of the world were done by machine or animal, or by hand with more sophisticated tools. The Spanish even yoked their oxen wroing -- they lashed a pole to the poor things' heads! Soime of all this was due to the backwardness of Spanish agronomy and social organization at the time, and some of it was due to the expressed desire of the padres to fill the "neophytes'" lives with labor so that they didn't have time to get drunk and horny or wander off back to their pagan homes. And that was what the brutality was too. Partly it was the routine way to treat farmworkers in Spain and partly it was a purposeful strategy to drive the Indians to religion and away from behavior the padres thought would send them to Hell.
I've gotten to the break up of the missions, and how that transition was handled in the worst possible way, managing to land the Indians in even worse straits than they were in before.
The rest of the week, among the other things I'm doing, I will finish and mail this Washington story and the new query for Esperanza Highway. I also intend to get a third of what's left of this chapter in Afterwardone.
Another thing I have realized in the last week or so is that I can and ought to cut out the last vignette. This means that the book ends with the scene of the man without a country accepting the teenaged mother and her baby as his family. But it also means I don't have to spread the vignette material so thin.
For every discipline in writing, there is a counter discipline. Some time back I came to the conclusion that all other things being equal a longer book was better than a shorter book because it had more room for richness, complexity, and precise pacing. But now I'm working on more streamlined stuff. I think, for example, a story I have tried to write four or five times -- one about the men who turn into wolves at Advent and fight the forces of evil to preserve the fertility of the earth -- originally I was trying to write it night by night as one person uncovers the mystery of another person's participation in this. Now I think the pacing will work best if I write it as two nights: the second to the last night and the last night. Everything that could be accomplished with the series of nights could be accomplished in the one (second to the last) night, and the climactic scene won't have so much weight behind it, allowing it to be climactic instead of it being kind of a watershed after which the reader expects the real climax.
Which means, I think, that I may have figured out how to write shorter, sort of in general, or at least more than before.
She's doing a yeoman job on it, I think. She just wrote this essay on why Congress should pass the Employee Free Choice Act (not open shop, as I thought before, but quicker, more honest elections for certifying unions and more penalties for employer abuses in the election and contract negotiation process).
I read soime more in the immense farmworker book, too. There's something here about slavery. A while back, a participant in rasfc, Wildepad, was trying to argue that slavery wasn't all that bad. I was thinking about him as I was reading about the Indians in the missions -- it was both like and not like the system of slavery in the antebellum South. Not like, in that the padres' primary purpose for being there was to save souls, and all the brutal things they did to the Indians were in service of that. Which makes the whole brutality and cruelty thing bizarre. But like, in that the Indians' work was bought and sold by others than themselves and they had no right of free passage. And like in that they rarely rebelled but frequently ran away.
Some of it is grim reading. But there are parts which are merely fascinating -- the primitive agricultural technology, for example. Generally, the missions' grain was ground by hand, on metates, rather than by mill, and when it was a mill, it was a primitive burro-driven mill and not a water mill. Other things were done by hand which in other parts of the world were done by machine or animal, or by hand with more sophisticated tools. The Spanish even yoked their oxen wroing -- they lashed a pole to the poor things' heads! Soime of all this was due to the backwardness of Spanish agronomy and social organization at the time, and some of it was due to the expressed desire of the padres to fill the "neophytes'" lives with labor so that they didn't have time to get drunk and horny or wander off back to their pagan homes. And that was what the brutality was too. Partly it was the routine way to treat farmworkers in Spain and partly it was a purposeful strategy to drive the Indians to religion and away from behavior the padres thought would send them to Hell.
I've gotten to the break up of the missions, and how that transition was handled in the worst possible way, managing to land the Indians in even worse straits than they were in before.
The rest of the week, among the other things I'm doing, I will finish and mail this Washington story and the new query for Esperanza Highway. I also intend to get a third of what's left of this chapter in Afterwardone.
Another thing I have realized in the last week or so is that I can and ought to cut out the last vignette. This means that the book ends with the scene of the man without a country accepting the teenaged mother and her baby as his family. But it also means I don't have to spread the vignette material so thin.
For every discipline in writing, there is a counter discipline. Some time back I came to the conclusion that all other things being equal a longer book was better than a shorter book because it had more room for richness, complexity, and precise pacing. But now I'm working on more streamlined stuff. I think, for example, a story I have tried to write four or five times -- one about the men who turn into wolves at Advent and fight the forces of evil to preserve the fertility of the earth -- originally I was trying to write it night by night as one person uncovers the mystery of another person's participation in this. Now I think the pacing will work best if I write it as two nights: the second to the last night and the last night. Everything that could be accomplished with the series of nights could be accomplished in the one (second to the last) night, and the climactic scene won't have so much weight behind it, allowing it to be climactic instead of it being kind of a watershed after which the reader expects the real climax.
Which means, I think, that I may have figured out how to write shorter, sort of in general, or at least more than before.
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