Spaghetti Supper of DOOOOOOOOOOM

[mrissa]

Chapter 11 of The True Tale of Carter Hall just will. Not. End. And I don't mean that I don't know how to end it. This is not the "staring glumly at the screen" problem. No, because if I was having that problem, I would go on to another chapter and come back later.

No, this is the "the prose keeps flowing and the events that keep flowing from each other keep making sense so I just keep writing them down, except it's all taking place in one everlastingly long evening and am I sure this damn spaghetti supper has not slipped into the Underhill or some other time-dilational sort of place because how many things can happen with the winds and the Canada goose brothers and Janet's gran and aaaaaaaagh."

I'll bet many of you didn't know that the San Mateo Bridge (over the San Francisco Bay) is infinite, but it is. Particularly when you are driving east over it at dawn because you have already dropped markgritter off at SFO before dawn, so you're really exhausted and the sun is really bright. It just goes on, and on and on and on. I remain convinced that there is a tiny piece of me that got trapped there, and remains, and will be driving east over the San Mateo Bridge at dawn for the rest of time. Civilizations will rise and fall, the Sun will eat the Earth as it dies, and there will still, in some metaphysical sense, be a bit of me driving east over the San Mateo Bridge at dawn.

I am beginning to feel this way about Chapter 11 of The True Tale of Carter Hall as well.

On the other hand, the stuff really still does make sense, and there's no rule that says I can't revise it in the draft so that it's Chapters 11 through 42 or whatever it turns out to be, instead of just 11, if it still makes sense and is interesting later. In the meantime it's creating a heck of a lot of fictional bad coffee, though.

Comments

[songwind.livejournal.com]

It's like the tunnel chapters in The Stand!!!

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I was thinking "We have to think of them as forever bailing", myself.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's how I feel about plane flights and tooth cleanings. Every time I do them a bit of my soul is trapped doing them forever. The San Mateo bridge, not so much, although those lights are kind of hypnotic...last time we passed over it we saw the zeppelin, though. Whee!

Hang in there.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

When you say "spaghetti supper" I'm honestly not sure whether this is your term-of-art for a particularly convoluted segment of the plot, or whether it refers to an actual supper at which spaghetti is served.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

No, there is an actual spaghetti supper at the Presby church in this part of the book. Reluctant teens pressed into service handing out pieces of garlic bread. Etc.

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

I'm trying not to squeal in delight here, I really am, and I was dealing with characters who would not shut up and let me move on to the next chapter in the not-too-distant past, so it's not that I'm unsympathetic, but it's more Carter Hall, and, well, that makes me so happy just knowing that that's brewing (along with all that bad coffee), even though I have a feeling I ought to duck right around now to avoid a dark green cylinder of powdered Parmesan suddenly propelling itself over my cubicle wall.

But, but, but -- *glee*!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

No, no, your alter ego is not at the spaghetti supper. Your alter ego is on e-mail only.

[brooksmoses]

Aha! I have something appropriate for this in my quotesfile:

I've written five chapters in the last month. Unfortunately, all of them were Chapter 11. --Patricia Wrede, rec.arts.sf.composition, 2007-04-13.

Must be something about the number.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have to say that "Chapter 11" is a phrase filled with ill omen and woe in our culture.