Log 1986-2011

Table of Completion.

This is a lifelong writing project (inspired by Tolkien's legendarium), started in 1993.

I actually got the original idea for the story in '86 or '87, as a Jules Vernes-style science fiction romance about a voyage on a Moon that actually had oceans where the maria are. It went through a long period of note-making, during which it evolved into the double-storied, David Lindsay-style psychological fantasy I'm now working on.

The first part of this story takes place in Amercia, an imaginational continent of an imaginational Earth. Sometime during the note-making period, it occurred to me to write the first part as a series of letters and journal entries, as a way to "trick" this character into having some life I'm incapable of giving him, and that possibly the experimental nature of the story doesn't call for . This has the problem that the character fictionally writing them knows and takes for granted a lot of strange stuff that's different in this imaginational world, so a lot of what he says will be annoyingly incomprehensible. I finally managed to get him to explain some of it in the St. Alice section.

The rest of the story takes place on the way to, and on, the Planet Of Blue Roses, the inhabitable Moon of the original concept, but much changed also (e.g., the oceans have become harmonic resonance fields produced by Silence-chanting Selenes). This is actually the conceptual heart of the story, but the first part's gotten very involved, what with Trixie and all. But I'm writing the whole thing simultaneously, so to speak, so there are many "filled out" sections, and many places that are still just one- or two-sentence outlines of the projected story.

But I consider even the filled out parts as the first draft. In the interest of getting something down, I've left out detailed descriptions of a lot of places, and there are inconsistencies of style and content due to having written different parts of it at different times (e.g., Steven has a sort of stuffy, pedantic tone in the early texts). So I plan to systematically revise and expand the whole thing after the entire first draft process has happened.

I've lately (2011) become aware that the nature, the structure, the feel, of this story is that of a dream. Dreams appear in writing, but usually as part of a waking-life story. I think PBR is entirely a dream, a dream that I'm "having" by writing it.