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xx-vergil-xx · 19 days

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hey hi <3 loving the snippets of your original writing!! i'm intrigued by the strangely structured novel. can we see JOURNAL ENTRIES?

hope you're keeping well!

hello howdy!! thank u so much! and well wishes to you too friend <3

a bit from JOURNAL ENTRIES — i’m gonna link this post where i talk abt the structure some so u have like a modicum of context, but these are the journals of a lit. studies doctorate attempting to untangle an old book with a second hidden meaning under its facade

thanks very much for the ask my friend !! <3

FEB. 12

Was it like this before? Am having the dream again. R not helping much. Supposed to. Lark might have better. Wish he’d visit but also wish he wouldn’t. Get what I want and don’t get what I want. Ordering in is starting to rack up bills. Will have to foray into the world. Bodega has the good chips, the salsa verde ones. I will arm myself with two coats and dark glasses. Maybe they’ll think I’m famous. Need to finish this stupid fucking book. And then. And then?

FEB. 25

Today was a long day finished annotations on IV but at cost. Persistent cold spot at the small of my back. Called Lark he turned taciturn (thinking thinking dial-up almost audible) then recited the litany of sleep and sun which is the sort of uselessly useful advice that makes me loathe him sometimes.

MARCH 3

Peering in the [cloister] [class] [chamber] of boys and men what is it in this insular/sprawling world which is compelling? To want and to want to become are not so different love and assimilation and is love’s expression homogeneity or disparity? Witten becoming storyteller in imitation see there’s this pull towards pictures and senses is it because he’s trying to make and expel a lost voice or is it because that is how we see the world? Lover lover lover. Linguistics. Good word lover smooth in the mouth (river rocks) and a hum on the teeth and the lower lip does the shape of the word generate the sense of feeling rightness or does it feel right because of its meaning and signification back-influencing an understanding of the word whatever were my shoulders a little broader or my body a little narrower I could count myself king of infinite space. The complexity masquerading as simplicity? The object of feminine self has been so distressed with commodity it can’t just be? Thoughts crisp and clear but expression sloppy. That’s what Dr. K always said ‘you have it so inside but it doesn’t survive the crossing somethings what I see in your work is interiority struggling into the sun’ he was always such a fucking poet about it.

#writing #fiction #who knows!#i love writing this person because i just project madly onto her #and also there’s no constraints of writing something with the intent to be read?#like she’s writing in a diary and so there’s not the bordering force of other viewers (to her anyway)#so it’s very liberating kinda #vergil says hello #vergil says things #thanks for stopping by <3 #<3 <3 <3

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xx-vergil-xx · 19 days

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god Verg I love a Structure so much, it’s gonna be “despicite, dei, gaudete” for the WIP game & I would love to hear more about the said structure if you feel like sharing it!

hello!! an excuse to talk about my project? yes please thank you <3

so it’s three “layers” which are entangled (maybe laced is a better word — i’m still ironing out final structural presentation, but the core is there)

1. sopwith, a book published in 1950 about pilots in WWI — aiming for an american modernism style, steinbeck influences (god i love steinbeck) with a dash of the faintly surreal, though i wouldn’t call it experimental. presented in standard book style, not terribly long

2. the life of sopwith’s author, who was himself a pilot in the second war, discharged after a serious plane crash — sopwith is published after his stint in the air force and he spends the last six years of his life in a new york hotel (based on the chelsea) obsessively redrafting a second edition of sopwith and filling a horde of journals, which themselves are published 50 years later as an academic text (though the second edition of sopwith never sees the light of day). told in journal passages

3. the efforts of a lit studies doctorate to piece together what it was sopwith’s revised version (never published) was really trying to say while she struggles with her own psychiatric health and her relationship to literature and the world at large. told in footnotes on sopwith, journals, and letters to her brother.

that’s the simplest sort of breakdown — the lit. studies doctorate ends up living in the same hotel the author lived in while she’s working and enters a psychological spiral where she becomes entangled with those last years of the author’s life and the thing he was trying to excise via his book, so the lines get a little blurry as the whole thing progresses. there are lots of throughlines about doubling/communication/the effort of people to corral the world with the written word/etc — inspired a lot by jorge luis borges and also house of leaves. i’m still in the glorious haze of Throw It All On The Page so i expect there’ll be some. refinements? (please god)

despicite, dei, gaudete is the first thing the author ever wrote and published — it’s a novella about an odd family myth a grandmother is telling her grandson, but taking a borges tact what we read instead of the actual novella is the lit doctorate’s essay about it, an excerpt from the middle of which i shall offer you here :)

thanks much for the ask my friend <3 <3

The seemingly obvious moral is twofold: old gods are infinitely cruel, and splitting up in strange forests is a terrible idea (a fact any B-list horror film will readily remind us of). Little chou hears this story, and when the telling of it is over, we discover that chou is now an old man, telling the tale to his granddaughter, and we have been hearing the telling of a telling, itself impressed upon by dimly-recalled circumstance and the erosion of an old man’s memory. Now we see why the impressions of intermediate narrative — a family dinner, a bedtime, a certain firelit drawing room — are so loosely sketched, so half-filled and yet so elemental. They are the memories of a child.

Most take Despicite as Witten’s first establishment of in loco, absentia on the basis of the fact that the real narrative concealed within is the life of chou, understood to us by the particularity of the details he does remember: his mother’s hand vividly recalled, posed mid-stir over a soup pot, thought by many to imply both her early death and chou’s pursuit of the culinary arts; the flames in the hearth and the strange vision chou has of the stones blackened, suggesting at one time that the house burned down; chou’s exquisite ekphrasis of the ceiling in his childhood bedroom, so vivid one cannot help but think that this is where we find him now, perhaps confined to the same quarters he slept in as a child, an old man at the end of his life. Legion readers have pointed out the obvious Biblical influences, the echoes of Cain and Abel (raised as a Protestant in his hometown of Valentine, Nebraska, it’s no small wonder that Witten’s works tend to touch on Christian themes). The first brother, killed and then dismantled by the second, plays our ready Abel, and the second our more hapless Cain, whose inciting sin is perhaps his abandonment of his brother to the dark wood in pursuit of his own reckless belief. He then attempts to “hide” his sin by rectifying it, collecting his brother in an attempt to reverse his transformation into earth. It’s no great leap. Our Cain, of course, is not condemned to wander, but instead condemned to a miserable stasis, from which he similarly does not escape.

#writing #fiction #god only knows #i’m having so much fun writing all this nonsense and i expect it’ll carry me through the next several months #vergil says hello #vergil says things #thanks very much for stopping by and indulging me my friend <3 #<3 <3 <3 <3 <3

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xx-vergil-xx · 20 days

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as a huuuge fan of your fanfic, anything non-fannish you turn your hand to is gonna be spectacular 💚 intrigued and enticed by your wip list; particularly slaughterhouse 101 👀 -- luv, tumblr user monty whatifwekissedinthesawbathroom 💚

my guy right back at you ur style is sublime <3

slaughterhouse 101 asks the question: what if u had a one-sided codependent relationship with ur boss, who hit someone with a car? started this short story after watching just so much succession which i think will be blindingly obvious <3 it’s been thru so many rounds of edits and i still haven’t rounded it out tbh

“I need you to do this for me,” says Mercy. “Okay?”

She has some sort of small grain lodged between her right lateral incisor and her right canine. To regard Mercy’s physicality –– or really, any body’s lumbering, clammy insistence –– feels gauche. But when the waters of happenstance begin to tilt towards Charybdis, Russ finds it helpful. Such blunt truths –– lunch, loitering in the teeth –– are concrete bits of gravel to collect in his pockets, themselves immune to drowning. Like charms.

The sun sinks into its overblown tapestry of departure, its long and tawdry goodbye, red-eyed and bruising over the black tree line, and Mercy is unremitting, stood starkly on the double yellow lines of the road.

Russ has a knack for good graces, their securing and maintenance. The trick is to be the pipe cleaner, the mirror in an unobtrusive shirt. Distort and reflect until you are so indistinguishable from someone that their selfishness includes you by default –– that they’re as good to you as readily and unthinkingly as they might be good to themselves. Mercy sniffs out this quality in Russ early –– something about the heads on the pike comment must have clued her into his mind for homogeneity –– and now Russ is her unthreatening supply of extra limbs. Useful in the correct ways. So naturally a self-extension that her request, her demand, isn’t so much either of those things, but a line of executable, already executing, code.

It’s autumn, in the sense that the leaves are as painted up as the dusk, and it’s also some sort of corporate autumn, as Mercy has often implied. A post-harvest season of rising scarcity, in which phrases like “trim the fat” and “unsynced synergies” are exchanged. Russ looks at their current situation and wonders, sort of far off, how badly this might rank next to Watergate. If they might find themselves silverskin on the butcher’s block over something like this. The answer is obviously yes. The corollary: is it worth it?

#writing #fiction #again not a clue re: tags #thanks for the ask friend <3 #vergil says things #vergil says hello

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xx-vergil-xx · 20 days

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Gardenia please!

howdy friend !!

i recently read stephen king’s on writing (a supremely practical book with genuine advice on constructive writing practices — highly recommend) and in it there’s a fairly basic prompt which i wanted to take a whack at for the sake of the exercise. it’s a very short story about a psychologically perilous relationship between an architect and his bon vivant wife, both of whom are exceedingly mediocre people

“Deadlines on deadlines,” said Saul. On his own plate lay an identical filet of salmon, one he had yet to bring himself to tear apart. “You know the drill.

“Do I,” said Connolly. This was enough to draw out a story about a friend at P&P who evidently fell over dead from a coronary after a legendary 60-hour brokerage negotiation, the great irony being he had closed a tidy profit of twenty million, not a cent of which he could enjoy. Saul half-listened to Connolly’s weaving voice, thinking instead about how best to walk in the door. Not too loud. If he went too gingerly, too slowly, she would accuse him of mincing. Or perhaps trying deliberately to make her feel like some sort of ogre. And how best to offer the perfume bottle, too, there was strategy there — casual, but intentional, and with a few spare sincere words so she would know he loved her and at the same time demanded from her no returned apology. Simplicity appealed to her. She needed simplicity. When she became cluttered then nights like the one before happened and Saul wandered around very empty sidewalks and endured the humiliation of the maid service sopping wine stains out of the carpet, the tinny sound of the miniscule chips of green glass going up the vacuum hoses. He stayed home when the maids came because Gardenia swore they were stealing.

“Pretty funny, right?”

“Right,” said Saul, a second late. “Hah.”

He had jammed the edge of his shin on the edge of the coffee table ducking out of the trajectory of the bottle. He almost hadn’t — he had been caught by the perfect round red circle on Gardenia’s thigh, the spot where her calves had met while she sat on the sofa with her legs crossed. Now he had a blue bruise in near about the same place on his own calf, and when he propped one leg over the opposite knee it spoke.

#writing #fiction #god knows how to tag this #thanks for the ask pell <3 #vergil says hello #vergil says things

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xx-vergil-xx · 20 days

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writing wip game

tagged by the brilliant @whatifwekissedinthesawbathroom xoxo

RULES: make a new post with the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous. let people send you an ask with the title that most intrigues them, and then post a little snippet or tell them something about it! and then tag as many people as you have WIPs.

i’m gonna be straight up w u folks i am not at the moment writing anything of the fanfic nature — however! i am working on a lot of other fiction, including some short stories and a partial translation project and a novel with an odd structure that has resulted in me splitting it into a thousand documents so here are those titles (i put a * on the connected stuff)

gardenia

slaughterhouse 101

sopwith*

sopwith [2nd ed.]*

the fifteen lifetimes*

letters to joan/letters to lark*

JOURNAL ENTRIES*

despicite, dei, gaudete*

AENEID BK I

thanks kindly for the tag! sending this off to some local geniuses: @moorishflower, @pellaaearien, @wordsinhaled, @landwriter, @fishfingersandscarves, @menthol-drops — ofc no pressure just for the vibes if u feel like it

#idk how to tag this #tag game #writing #fiction #man i dunno #thanks for the tag homie

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xx-vergil-xx · 23 days

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Can I ask what pushed you to end Hounds the way you did? It's a fantastic ending, but I'm curious. I expected the Fates to revive Dream, or allow him to inhabit a new form (such as one made by Daniel, so that Dream becomes a dreamthing), etc. But instead, his death is made to have never happened. Which makes it partly feels like Hob's whole road trip journey was for nothing since he lost all those memories and connections with Matthew, the Corinthian, Delirium, Despair, Desire, Death, etc. (thank god he kept the farmhouse). But it's almost like he traded all those memories and connections for Dream. Unless I missed something while reading (I was crying very hard).

Again, fantastic ending, and I'm also glad it's a happy ending. But I'm curious as to why you didn't go in the other direction

howdy! thanks very much for the ask — an excellent query, one which i’m happy to answer

(verg of the future: this answer ended up long! there’s a short form at the top here and at the end <3)

in brief: he did make that trade you described! but not strictly for dream — it was the price of swapping genres!

an explanation:

what i had in mind while planning and writing was less the idea of erasure of prior narrative action and more a subversion of the expected genre, in particular the genre tropes that follow dream in the original arc of the comics, where his story is very classically tragic (with the understood weaving of hob into that tragedy, this being a dream/hob telling and all)

for reference, i also drew a lot of inspiration for hob’s road trip odyssey from the aeneid, an epic that is, yes, about the founding of rome but also (at least to my reading) a fundamental tragedy — the cost of founding rome is aeneas’ home, many of his friends, much of his core family, and the very end of the story is not some victorious depiction of the glory of rome to be (which we do get earlier in the book, with the ekphrasis on his shield) but aeneas, overcome with fury and loss, killing a man who begs his mercy. i’ve always felt that the aeneid, while certainly stepped in the expected amount of roman nationalism, is centrally about a single man and his singular suffering as an instrument of higher destiny.

i wanted to model hob’s arc around the aeneid (minus, y’know, some of the chunks that are strictly battle sequences <3) both because intertextuality is a huge part of how i wanted to handle hounds (story about stories, made of other stories, etc), but also because hob and aeneas are fundamentally parallel characters — nomads with exceptional ordinances, permanently displaced by the passing whims of higher powers, men who are made to reckon with both extraordinary wonder and extraordinary tragedy regularly while still, at their core, just being human. that’s what makes aeneas so compelling — he’s just a man. and so is our beloved hob — that’s his whole thing, his whole narrative function and his whole central ideal, humanity

so then, approaching hounds with both the thought of the sandman’s original tragic contours (see: the whole lead-in to daniel. christ above is the way that goes devastating to read) and the man vs fate core of the aeneid, i was considering a lot of things about how to mess around with both notions without gutting them entirely. i tend to dislike tragedies that become un-tragic without some sort of Serious Payment For It (not to say i don’t like happy stories because i very much do! but i get ticked off when high stakes get deflated too quickly) and i didn’t want to undermine the very real fact that the Fates are typically not versed in notions of empathy and/or leniency, and that dream and hob and those around them did experience and endure devastation and loss, and that death is a fact typically immune to argument.

the world of sandman is not one with easy answers, and to my mind there’s no such thing as a bargain with the Fates where you break even. for hob to get what he wanted, something had to be given, something dear and vital and real. there’s more to what hob actually gives the Fates than he verbally stipulates, which i tried to address largely via the corinthian and his perception of the situation, especially those last conversations with dream in the “swamp”. i have a lot of options about the corinthian in his function as “dark mirror” having a blistering clarity of understanding much of the time, which is why i foisted the onus of those complexities onto his dialogue, rather than hob, who (and i say this with love) is a creature of bias and often blinded to greater repercussions of his actions insofar as they extend beyond his immediate objectives/enjoyments, or dream, who can see the bigger picture but i think often really keeps himself from doing so when it comes to anything at all that’s personal (king of stories has a blindspot for his own). what hob gives the Fates actually costs him almost nothing, in the long run, if we operate with the idea that he cannot remember, nor is there any lasting effect from, his 600-ish heavily-relived years. there’s narrative and symbolic weight, of course — he gives them love as an oath and as nostalgia (sidebar: his driving force is an almost pre-nostalgia, a continual love of the moment as the moment is passing, but anyway) (cuff links), he gives them in a captured moment the lovely discomfort and simultaneous brilliance of being alive (the hook, the finger prick the blood), and he gives them a rich and complicated experience of humanity (those 600 years). but practically, what is actually taken from him that he doesn’t just get back?

only those few months — and in them, a web of real and known connections, all of which matter, and all of which change his understanding of and relationship to things like grief, and loneliness, and fear, and forgiveness. those are important changes, real changes, that would affect how he operates in the world going forward. that development is gone. he returns instead to the (of course, fought-for and hard-won) stasis of what was, which becomes what will always be. in making the Fates and their judgement more complex, he has actually made his own life less complex. now, i’m not going to sit here and argue that “suffering has inherent value” or some shit like that because i think that’s bullshit! pain is just pain. but he does lose experiences which would have shaped him in new ways, and, i think, good ways. even important ways

and he may well be shaped towards similar courses with dream (especially re: learning that lesson about loneliness — i think hob suffers from the curse of always, ultimately, being alone (immortality etc there’s so much discourse about this), and the road trip was in part about him learning that though it is the simplest path it is neither the sole nor the best path), but he certainly doesn’t learn them the same way, with the same faces, with the same acuity and clarity and intensity.

the thing with the Fates (to me anyway) is that you don’t ever just win. maybe you can get what you want, but it’s not easy (it make take a thousand repetitions of your lifetime until friction and the touch of your hands wears the sisyphean boulder down to a pebble — like the parable of the bird scraping its beak on the mountain), and it’s sure not free.

so yes, those months are lost. that’s a big part of the price. and we don’t know, at the end, how much of that thing he really gave ultimately comes back — his new relationship depths with deanna or cori or the other endless, those things aren’t seen. the main arc is resolved — hob and dream — but there are still pieces missing. he loses a piece of his human experience, he gets tossed back around through the wringer of his life (which is often distinctly not pleasant), and he is, as he ever was, a character with a path whose impetus and dictation rest heavily on external forces. even in attempting to channel his life elsewhere, he still has to bargain, and is still subject to the choices of the fates, and in some ways the story remains irrevocably a tragedy, in that one way or another it has loss in a central place. in the latter half of hounds hob really became my attempted version of an aeneas type — a man with a quest and a fated directive, a deeply human and flawed individual, who can alter the path and even irrevocably change the genre of his own narrative, but only at cost.

of course let’s be clear! some of all the actual rendering of this ended up as it did partly because i am not always a clean writer, and for that i apologize! but i did genuinely want that sense of gaps — of faces and voices given over to the gravitational well of the principal narrative arc of hob/dream versus the Fates. i think those things are gone. the narrative is forcibly re-centered around hob and dream, and in doing this — in shifting the story genre — other ties and bonds are not just cut, but unwoven entirely. when you change the kind of story you’re telling, the change is done at the expense of something else. kind of like how there’s a fixed amount of matter in the universe? you can’t create or destroy matter — to make something new you have to take from another place. (sidebar: wow i’m realizing something about my fundamental storytelling beliefs right now! laws of physics! anon your ask has really got my cylinders firing, and most sincerely thank you <3)

still, they might come back. though i didn’t write it as fully as i could have (i will freely admit there was a great deal of burnout at play towards the end there), i had a lot of thoughts re: repetition and density, namely that if you stack a thousand repetitions of a lifetime against each other it’s the equivalent of writing a word over and over and over on a page. when you erase it, the channels remain. language flows most naturally in the direction once etched for it. maybe hob learns those same lessons and knows the same people in the same way — maybe he and the corinthian find that odd patch of common ground, maybe he takes a long drive with delirium through rural maryland. maybe there are echoes. maybe even if it is gone what was still shapes the topography. maybe a kindness or a word exchanged still ring out when you can’t see them or remember them. while the milestones of our lives rippled the most visibly, i think we’re shaped a thousandfold ways by accumulations of small things we can’t distinctly remember. only a feeling of a thing, or the negative space it leaves.

well. tl;dr — i didn’t want to let hob get away without actually giving anything up, nor without his choice to bargain affecting others besides himself in equally irrevocable ways (sidebar: at his core is a selfishness that is both charming and ignoble — he wants to do a good thing for dream but also he makes a call that changes a plenitude of lives other than his own, and i don’t think he really asks, he just does — grey areas are his whole gig to me), because nobody makes a deal with the Fates for free, and changing genre has a price tag. it was my effort to make the tone of the whole beast more authentically sandman-esque, since sandman does a lot of that sort of water-muddying, especially when using understood narrative models/archetypes/etc etc

i am. sorry this was as long as it is! jesus! but i’m sending it off all the same. anyways, anon, thanks very much not only for your lovely kind words and the high honor of your tears (no pulitzer could mean more to me than knowing a thing i wrote really moved someone, seriously thank you) but also for giving me a blank check to go buck wild and ramble about my own damn writing and Things I Just Think <3 i hope you have a lovely day/morning/noon/night, and thanks a bunch for dropping by <3 <3 <3

#the sandman #hob gadling #dream of the endless #dreamling #hounds #vergil says hello #vergil says way more than fuckin hello tbh #vergil writes a manifesto woukd be a better line for this #anon has given me the greatest gift: License To Monologue #fingers crossed any of that actually answered the question at hand #thanks for saying hi and asking things because i love both experiences immensely #<3 <3 <3 <3 <3

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