[novels] ongoing dialogues

As many regulars know, Sean of Omnium has been kind enough to cast a critical eye over the first book [I hope I can say "so far" but he's free to stop this whenever he wishes] and he's brought up some structural and also sundry minor problems which need resolution.

So I find myself heavily involved in rewriting and thus the blog has been suffering. It struck me that this process might be bloggable in itself and so I asked him if he'd mind me using the "structural part" of my last letter as a post in itself. So here it is:

Sean, thanks again. Your comments raise issues which need to be addressed and are excellent.

Characters with similar sounding names. Yesterday, I went through and changed all variants of Anya to Anya itself in all chapters, including in the second book. As for Moscow Anna, she remains as she is when Anya is involved but when it is clearly only Hugh and her in the action, then she drops back to Anna.

Ksenia/Ksusha [the latter a diminutive of the former] can be solved by a little dialogue near the beginning in which this is explained.

The "A" characters - Liya, Lisa, Aliya etc. You know, Sean, this is the actual dilemma over here. These are real names for girls I know - the things I write on the blog are only part of the real truth about girls in this town - it truly is a hedonist's paradise over here and one learns to be more circumspect about it. My only device can be to alter the names completely, once the book is done. Using those names while I was writing was necessary because their characters had to come through in the action.

Omniscience. Very great problem. Firstly, author omniscience. This is the trouble in the first five or six chapters because they were originally autobiographical and written in the first person - they were a log of what really had happened. Then I rewrote those chapters in the third person but the danger therewas that Hugh became a real Mary Sue and the author knew too much. Later, he doesn't.

I'll go back through and remove all the "and that was the last time they were together" type of comments, which should solve that. Allied to this is the device of the Afterword first. This Afterword is lifted straight from Chapter 20 and is intended to raise fears or expectations of an inevitable tragedy plus one other thing. The action in the first three or four chapters is slow and mundane - a man travelling to Russia, settling in and discovering new things.

This has been interesting to the Russians themselves who recognize what I'm writing about and want to know how a foreigner sees it but whether it's so interesting to a wider readership is a question. Was that sort of description interesting to you? The Afterword device is not new but it presupposes author omniscience.

Hugh's omniscience is a greater problem - he's annoying in that he knows so much but again, the difficulty is that he actually does, operating, as he does, in fields in which he has experience, which are many. Again, it's necessary to go back through and ascribe his knowledge to something he just read recently - he can be a sort of bookworm who comes up with facts or else one of the other characters can become the wise one and he consults her [or him] as some sort of oracle.

His knowledge of human nature is virtually unsolvable. He does have experience of life and his work has given him insight - plus he trusts no one. Again, to solve that raises the question of whether we wish to solve it. Do we want a character without ability or is he allowed expertise in some areas? He's not a great lover [he's only as good as any of us] and he never fights, nor does he know a way through - events carry him along plus he's not handsome. Perhaps that was the greater crime - not to make him handsome.

His weapons are therefore charm and knowledge of character. The latter can make people uncomfortable and we often don't warm to someone who knows and can see through us, hence the desire to prove him wrong, to say he's mistaken. This is problematic with Hugh in the first book but is solved in the second when he finds himself in unfamiliar surroundings where the women know far more than he does.

There's a lady I know here reading Book 2 first as Hugh is more at the mercy of the women in France [she is a French translator]. In Russia, it's the opposite problem and the reason why the Russian male is arrogant. It really is easy to dominate girls in this patriarchal society and I try not to but they almost invite me to. And they are beautiful too. Also, they don't have the western feministic superwoman motif yet so the society is still male-friendly.

Thank you so, so much for opening my eyes to the problems - I can't start to tell you how valuable this is. James