Diagramming Babel (Part 16)

Diagram 16. We have reached the end of Will’s adventures underground. Once again (though, uncharacteristically, Will himself does not recognize the pattern) all others are scattered and he goes on alone.

From top to bottom:

All is panic & rout

10

E

Hjördis

g

LE

Annotations:

Of “All is panic and rout,” I can only say: Truer words were never spoken.

The “10 ”at the top refers to Chapter 10, from which all the people and events in Chapter 11 come pouring out, like a train from a tunnel.

Hjördis is of course Hjördis, and “LE” is almost certainly an earlier iteration of Lord Weary. But I have no idea who E and g are. Perhaps they represent earlier names for the characters who became Tatterwag and Jenny Jumpup. Perhaps not.

Diagramming Babel (Part 10)

(I've been posting these every Wednesday for the last couple of months, but yesterday Blogger had trouble uploading the scan for some reason, so I added a different post. Now we're back to normal again.)

Diagram 10. At the top of the diagram are the headings "Ch. 4" and “Across Faerie Minor” –In the novel, Faerie Minor became Fäerie Minor. The umlaut in Fäerie was Susanna Clarke’s invention, used in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, among other works. At this point, I very much wanted to use her device, but very carefully didn't, because I hadn't obtained her permission yet.

From left to right, beneath the two headings:

Could there be so many cars in a [single] train? There could in a dream.

3 Witches

materialized in the last car

MOTION/STILLNESS

Dragon trail (looks away)

Will, dreaming

A hair-like fracture in the sky [arrow] Vision of Babel

Jack-of-Many-Names

Babel End of chapter

Annotations:

Weirdly enough “Crossing Fäerie Minor” (as the chapter ended up being remonickered) was actually chapter 6, not 4. How could I have not known that at such a late date?

“The witches materialized in the last car.” After which they head forward, looking for Will. The plot is pretty much in control at this point. Will is caught in the simplest and straightest maze of them all and has to find a way to evade his pursuers. Since I know how that will be accomplished, the rest of the diagram is simply to assure that I get the central images in the right places.

The “hair-like fracture in the sky” is the only glimpse that Will ever gets of Babel whole. The train is heading toward Babel, so the only time he has a chance of seeing anything is on long curves. The next he’ll see of the city is a wall that fills his vision as the train plunges into the mouth of a tunnel.

Jack-of-Many-Names is of course Nat Whilk. Though he never goes by that name in the novel.

"From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled . . ."

Who can explain the transient enthusiasms that grip a working writer? I vividly remember the time several years ago when I was working on three separate stories at once and suddenly realized that all three stories featured a protagonist who was already dead by the time the story began.

That was a creepy moment. It seemed like my subconscious was trying to tell me something. But if so, I still haven't figured out what.

Similarly, but in a less threatening vein, I seem to have something happening with the Tower of Babel these days. It features prominently in The Dragons of Babel, which for those coming in late is my forthcoming novel and the reason for this blog. And the cover story in this month's Fantasy & Science Fiction (the October/November 2007 issue) is "Urdumheim," which is a creation myth for that dread Tower, such as might be told by the characters in my novel (though it doesn't appear in it). And just now I've dropped into the mail to Asimov's the corrected proofs for "From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled . . ." Which has nothing to do with either of the other two works. It's a science fiction story set on the planet Gehenna, dealing with the aftermath of the destruction of a gigantic tower-city inhabited by intelligent giant millipedes.

Another telegram from the hindbrain. But the message is in a language I do not speak, coded in letters such as I've never seen before.

But take a look at the cluster of alien "speech" above. The millies have trilateral symmetry and a signed language, so that a single thought or statement transcribed into what I think of as an ergoglyph looks something like a verbal snowflake.

You have no idea how much fun that was to write.