Notes (V)

I was looking through the update threads for Life Among The Lorrums, and I realized something.

Life Among The Lorrums is a great story. Jenny’s eye for subtleties of character is undoubtedly superior to Salby’s, and she takes her worldbuilding more seriously than Salby took his, or seriously in a different way, at least. Salby’s worldbuilding is entirely consistent on the level of logic, but has an uneasy relationship with plausibility. When he stipulates something, it remains true forever—but he feels free to stipulate absolutely anything he wishes. Especially in the later Chesscourt novels, one feels one is only allowed to use rules of inference made legitimate by Salbian fiat, rather than those imported from everyday life. Whereas Jenny took Salby’s motley, whimsical stipulations about Lorrum society—their matriarchal twist on animal dominance hierarchies; their heavily ritualized and significance-invested “bonding” which takes the place of both friendship and romance; their quasi-religious fetishism or idolatry towards machines and technological “progress”; and so forth—Jenny took these scraps and wove them into a coherent tapestry which produced harmony and unrest, lives well-led and lives of desperation, eager suggestions of reform and low murmurs of revolution. Were this fic to achieve some sort of wide readership—oh, I can just picture the Masters’ theses!

Life Among The Lorrums is also around 800 pages long.

People are going to read about Spelunk 04!. What I want to do is seal all information about it in an underground chamber and make any interested party read the entirety of Chesscourt, Life Among The Lorrums, Seeking Continuity, and much else besides before gaining entry. This is, of course, impossible.

People are going to read about Spelunk 04!.

I am living in a fantasy. The fantasy says that if only I can prepare people, carefully, elaborately, with every nuance of the experience subject to my absolute control, that I can make them see everything I saw. Which is also, of course, impossible. Even if I write the best of all possible reports—even if I employ the subtlest stratagems, make my readers drunk on my rhetoric, before granting them access to the secret lair where the mundane truths of Spelunk 04! lie sealed—people are going to just skip to the juicy bits at the end. And there is nothing I can do about that.

What I need is not an ideal aperitif, but a meal good enough that no aperitif is required. I need to just tell the story, the fucking story, and do it well, tell it from the perspective of myself as sympathetic character (present self as sane, sensitive). Tell the story so that no one needs thousands of pages of deep-background reading to understand it.

I have been avoiding this because it seems, well, impossible. Unfortunately, there are no alternatives. This is my duty. I am a Salbian, and so I will execute my duty.

I am going to try to begin talking in a way that circles closer to the actual narrative and it is not going to be good enough, but it will be a start, and I can always revise. This is not the report.

What happened at Spelunk 04!, in those five days we spent at Marsh’s house in Miami?

We opened the set of boxes containing Salby’s documents. We sat around Marsh’s spacious living room table, surrounded by evening half-light and cozy bookshelves whose contents made us feel instantly at home. We pored over the messy if colorful pencilled diagrams, the plan of the mansion and the map of the Plains, the scribbled studies of Cherubim in front view and profile. We gawked at the thick stack of typed pages, bound in string, whose first line read “THE NORTHERN CAVES: A CHESSCOURT STORY.” We opened old books and were assaulted by the dust they contained. We learned that Salby’s taste in reading material was oddly unilluminating. I paged for a minute or two through Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, wondering if there was anything about Chesscourt to be gleaned therein.

We beheld each other awkwardly, of course. We found each others’ voices surprising. Jenny’s was nerdier, more halting than I’d expected; Marsh’s, smoother and more articulate. Kelsey was very shy, at least at first. Only Aaron fit my expectations: large if not exactly fat, cheerful, dressed in full geek regalia (comedy t-shirt, jeans, a hat of some sort), possessed of a voice that made every word out of his mouth feel professorial, explanatory, even if he were merely asking for the location of the bathroom.

He was nicer than I expected, though. I think they all were. Aaron and Marsh got along well from the very start, which was a great relief.

In one of the boxes, we found a tall stack of ratty spiral-bound journals. These were the prize. They went back to 1980, and continued all the way into ’95. Many of the entries, of course, were uninteresting: low-detail accounts of low mood (very common), remarks on the weather (why?), notes on how many pages he expected to write in a given day and how many he in fact wrote.

It was Marsh who found the bomb that broke everything apart. We were passing the journals around, in a mood of high cheer, a festive slumber-party mood, that of children staying up past bedtime and doing something naughty. Marsh happened to receive the journal dedicated to (I think it was?) July to October 1988. I remember exactly the words he said, every banal one of them:

“Guys, this is really interesting. Can I just read a bit of this?”

Of course he could. Anyone could do anything, in this wonderful carnival, this night unlike any other night. So Marsh began to read.

I have the journal with me here, of course. We’ve scanned it, along with all the others. I am almost completely sure that the entry he first read to us was the one for July 17 1988. It’s the one that begins—now these words are burned into my brain, after all—

“Am filled w energy today. Have thus begun on the obverse part of Chscrt. Had worried that I was tiring and my task would be left half incomplete. But oh the Mundum has given me a lucky break today. Must now state some things clear to me but not yet written down about Mundum etc., for peace of mind mainly so that they are out of my head and can work even more clearly than I have been.”

Is any of this usable? I’m not even sure it’s a good first draft. I’ll have to remove the part about Aaron’s appearance, for instance. But still—there’s something to this framing? I can see it as a sort of long-form magazine article, beginning in medias res: the story starts with the meeting, tension between online selves and IRL selves used as initial human interest point, etc. Good as first draft at least? Weave in materials as needed. But write the damn story.