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Nested Stories
I had to get it out of my system.
I got the idea for Marcie And The Amazons very near the end of writing What Maisie Knew. I'd already started mapping out the next Marcie story, which deals (in part) with Maisie being stuck in California with her father, and what Marcie does to free her.
However... some other ideas came running in to mess up my plans.
At different points in What Maisie Knew, some readers pointed out that Mrs. Donner was not always the best of mothers — a point that I wasn't ready to accept. I liked all my characters, and when people started pointing out Mrs. Donner's shortcomings, I got irritated. I argued with my readers, and got pretty angry. It seemed like people didn't like most of the adults in my story, and at last I finally said,
In my next Marcie story, there will be no adults at all. It will be a kind of sitcom based loosely on Lord of the Flies... for girls.
I didn't really mean it. I only said it because I was upset.
But then... the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. By that evening, the setting of the story was clear to me. At first, because of Lord of the Flies, the Amazon's manager was called Piggy, which gave me the idea for all the other terrible nicknames. But to call a girl "Piggy" is just too too mean (though I'm sure it happens), and — remembering a high-school friend named Hedwig — I softened the name to Wiggy.
Next came research: I got reading. Lord of the Flies came first. What an awful little book! It's so badly written I had to read some scenes five times before I had any clear picture of what had happened.
The Wikipedia article on Lord of the Flies says the book was intended as a rebuttal to R.M. Ballantyne The Coral Island, which I then read and liked much better, except for the end, which is quite boring. I borrowed a good many things from that book. I also read Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky and Ransome's Swallows and Amazons, which are in the same family of story... children marooned without adults. I didn't take anything from those books, aside from the name Captain Blackett.
After that reading I had a lot of scraps, but not much of a story. It needed something else. Plus, I had a big problem. What Maisie Knew ends on Christmas. The next Marcie story (The Madonna of the Future), which was pretty well planned, starts on New Years Day. How could a South Sea Island adventure fit into the week between the two holidays?
If the story was "only a dream" it would work, but that sort of thing just antagonizes readers. You get emotionally involved in a story, and just when it gets interesting... "She woke up and it was only a dream." I didn't want to do that. I don't know how many stories actually make it work. I think Alice in Wonderland does... and after a bit two other examples came to me.
Way back in 1974 I went to see Pasolini's film The Arabian Nights. At one point the man behind me whispered to his date, "Do you realize that we're five levels down?" She responded with a puzzled, "Huh?" but in a flash I understood what he meant.
If you know the story, the book, the movie, the idea — it's a mass of nested stories. Someone in a story tells a story, and someone in *that* story tells a story, and so on and so on... You, the reader, the person in the audience, get so engrossed in the current story that you forget that it's "just a story" until it's over and poof! you're back in the previous story, one you nearly forgot about.
It keeps going on like that, but you don't care how many stories "down" you are in the story-in-a-story-in-a-story. You just want to know how this story ends.
A few months ago I happened to read The Manuscript Found In Saragossa. It's also a set of stories-in-stories and you wonder at times what is real and what's fiction. When I finished reading it, I said to myself, "I wish I could write a book like that!"
That's when it hit me: Marcie And The Amazons could be that book! It could be my Arabian Nights, my Manuscript Found In Saragossa.
It was an ambitious idea. The girls would stay on the island for months... there would be stories inside stories, and I wanted the inner stories to be so engrossing that you'd forget it wasn't the real story.
I was going to cram it full of stories, in fact. I was going to have Wiggy tell a story on the plane, and Ding-Dong tell a story in the cave. I wanted to show Mirina's dream about a boy on the island.
As I mapped things out, I kind of forgot the huge ambitious plan. I didn't have stories to fill all those spots anyway, and the confusion readers felt over the Marcie Auburn episodes unnerved me.
The point of the Marcie Auburn business was to throw you off... so you wouldn't realize that the business with the Amazons was only a fever dream as well.
It was a lot more difficult to write than I thought it would be, in part because the plan was so ambitious, but also because there was so much research I had to do. I knew nothing about Bora Bora, or even Hawaii. I've never been to the tropics, let alone a tropical island. And though I once spent a week in a sailboat, I know very little about sailing. In fact, I still have no idea how much space there is below decks on the Seward.
But anyway... now it's out of my system. The next Marcie story will be more run-of-the-mill. No alternate realities, no ghosts, no question of what is real.
Just regular old Marcie.
Comments
You Go Girl!
Kaleigh; The only thing about dreams you never find out what happens to the others from that dream, you can only dream good things happen to them. I've followed this story from the begining and I'm waiting for the next chapter you write and I've loved it so far. The only problem I got several authors on this site have got me hook on their stories and when the next chapter comes it's hard not to wait till I have proper time to read them. Richard
Richard
It really doesn't wash.
I read Coral Island when I was about 10 I should think and that's so long ago I can only vaguely remember it but I read 'Lord of the Flies' rather more recently. It has a huge edge on 'Marcie and the Amazons' because not only because it reveals the true nature of small boys (I attended an all-male grammar school in the 50s) but because it purports actually to have happened. I don't recall any problems understanding either the writing or appreciating the horror of the scenario which so much echoed and amplified my own life experiences (ie how boys are likely to behave). Golding doesn't need to cover holes in his story by throwing his hands up and saying 'It was all a dream.' As I've said before, using the excuse of positing a dream to get out of plot inconsistencies is a cop out at best and downright cheating at worst.
I'm really annoyed that I spent so much time reading 'Marcie and the Amazons'. I'm not very keen on stories involving children but the plot was so interesting and the writing good that I put aside my usual prejudices and soldiered on. It's a mistake I hope to avoid in future.
I realise my complaint is largely unjustified. I paid nothing to read the story and Kayleigh gave the many hours she must have spent writing with no thought to financial recompense. However I still feel that even writers of fiction on a site such as this owe their readers a small dutyof honesty in their stories.
I'm just wondering how fans would feel if Angharad brought 'Bike' to a close by having Charlie wake up in hospital having been in a coma for several months after being knocked off his bike a ditzy nurse and finding all his experiences of being Cathy were a dream.
Sorry Kayleigh.
Geoff
Sorry, Geoff
Kaleigh signaled many times that things were not what they seemed, both in and outside the story. It was discussed over and over in the comments. To claim that this ending was equivalent to "Bike" ending in an UNEXPECTED dream reveal is just not true. If it wasn't expected by anyone then they weren't reading the same story I was.
To claim that the dream was an excuse to get out of plot inconsistencies is to ignore the whole story. The dreams were the plot.
You didn't like it. Okay. But I'd like to see a criticism from you that actually spoke to what might be real weaknesses, not your complaining that this story is like some hypothetical cheat which it does not resemble at all.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
She did so signal.
But that was open to interpretation. What the story seemed to be was a dream, so my reading of comments like that were that it wasn't. If I'd thought for a moment the deus ex machina would be the simple device of a dream then I'd have read no further. What appealed was how the story would avoid the very device that was so clearly signalled. What is so annoying about the 'dream' device is that it's so easy to use; it really avoids the need to make a story be consistent within itself.
Plot inconsistencies? The chances of a young girl, inexperienced at navigation, successfully rowing a small open boat in open water and finding an island she couldn't even see without knowing what currents to allow for are so slim as to be almost suicidal. I've sailed small boats (12'-14') only a couple of miles off shore when the swell was so big you could see nothing but water - frightening, except that we were racing and there was rescue at hand.
Where did the adults go? A yacht of the size they were sailing in (50' + at least considering the number on board) and carrying paying passengers would need to have lots of equipment on board (a radio at the very least and possibly a transponder) to enable them to call for assistance (heck even single handed sailors get rescued in the Roaring 40s).
No responsible skipper would ever have allowed the girls to be alone. Particularly as they were so inexperienced.
The island was strangely well-equipped. It was obviously in use by someone quite regularly - possibly local fishermen.
The last place a sailor heads in a blow is towards an unknown shore - particularly one that's downwind. What you look for is sea room. Most well-found yachts will stay afloat in even very adverse conditions. The rule is - stay with with biggest floating bit as long as necessary.
I kept quiet about most of that because I realised (well, thought) that Kayleigh wanted to get the girls on the island for fun and games, which is what actually appeared to happen. The plot wasn't so outlandish that I couldn't accept the above and suspend disbelief. In fact, right up to the penultimate chapter it all appeared to be a 'normal' adventure story, then suddenly it's dream. Why? Alice's adventures in Wonderland were clearly out of the ordinary so the revelation that it was a dream isn't so much a shock and let's face it, Carrol's wild imagination carries it off in a way few writers could even hope to emulate.
The annoying thing is (and this why I'm writing all this) is that I did like the story. I think Kayleigh is a fine writer. If I'd hated the story and thought the writing was clumsy and stilted with rotten grammar the fact that I'm disappointed in the way it ultimately ended wouldn't arise because I wouldn't have persevered with reading. I only ever comment on stories I either admire or simply like. I just think Kayleigh can do better then this. In fact I know she can.
Geoff
Much better
That was more like real criticism. Thanks.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Give the writer a break, grouchy old British person - snicker -
I understand now what the writer intended, very ambitious by the way, then realized it was more than they could manage and found a way out.
Oh, the *Bobby Ewing* -- see the 70/80s Dallas series -- shower "It' was only a dream" cop-out complaint might apply BUT dreams can be very disorienting. And as the psyche said, she's been under tremendous stress the last few months in addition to the hormonal changes since the breast growing *tea*, accidental castration and the HRT. Add severe food poisoning and I’m amazed she didn’t dream of purple dragons climbing the walls and the Milwaukee Brewers winning the World Series.
This is a place for learning and growing as writers and as TG or those with an interest in the subject. From their own comments, the author would not do this story the way they did if they knew then what they know now but that’s half the fun of this place. Plus even the *bad*, if there were any, episodes of this story are better than many posted here. Maybe we just have our hopes set so high by the quality of some of the chapters we have unreasonable expectations.
John in Wauwatosa
John in Wauwatosa
Seawomanship...
Actually, for an amateur sailor (by which I kindly mean someone with little or no actual experience), the story isn't at all unreasonable, although minor obsessive/compulsive critiques can be made of the lack of an EPIRB (Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacon), which may well have been useless in any case, since the old 121.5 MegaHertz beacons aren't slated to be useless until February 1st of next year, and the "footprint" of a signal from the old beacons is something like 5000 square kilometres, an awful lot of ocean to search when one doesn't have a vessel to look for, Even if it had been triggered and functioning, they might still be waiting for rescue. Rewrite the story slightly to include a working beacon and it's entirely possible for the story to logically and reasonably proceed in the exact manner it did.
The new 406 MHz beacons are expensive, and many yachts don't have them yet because they're hoping that *someone* will rescue them and prevent the need to junk millions of the older units with no upgrade path. The new units cost around US$900, or more for the units which incorporate a GPS receiver that will allow the unit to transmit the exact co-ordinates of the crew with a working beacon. This change was mandated by the good old USA, which operates the rescue satellites, without much consideration for sailors on limited budgets. Typical. Those who can't afford to pay the best part of a thousand dollars for safety might just as well drown, in the new world order. The well-found yacht, of course, must have several such units, at least one for a spare and one for each lifeboat.
I believe the radio was described as having been incapacitated during the storm, and such things do happen from time to time. In fact, a general rule of thumb at sea is that anything can go wrong at any time and one had better have Plans B and C ready to hand when they do. The girls wound up marooned through just such a Plan C, or maybe D, as the Captain and Crew tried to save their home and livelihood and keep the children safe at the same time. Their mysterious disappearance mirrors the actual experience of actual yachts, many of which have been found drifting without their crews over the years.
As for navigation, there are few places in the South Seas these days in which it's not possible to navigate very handily using the contrails of overflying passenger jets. Some years ago, there was a rather famous case in which the US Coast Guard boarded a vessel at sea and attempted to cite the owner for having no navigation equipment or charts aboard. He prevailed in an administrative hearing because he was able to show that at that particular time of year, contrails were every bit as reliable as old-fashioned sextant and chronometer navigation for a voyage from San Francisco to Hawai'i.
We've already been told that Wiggy is an amazing and fearless sailor, very skilled in rowing and confident of her abilities. If she can see the nearby island, however dimly, and has a map, even cursory observation and knowledge of the local swells, readily seen from the top of the mountain, would give her a good target to aim for, and the flight of sea birds in the evening would supplement that knowledge with more exact directions, not to mention the sky at night, which has been guiding mariners for thousands of years, long before chronometers and sextants were invented. The sea horizon is roughly three miles away for a girl of Wiggy's size at sea level, but a distant island might be seen at as much as forty or fifty miles if mountainous. This is not an unreasonable distance to row. A friend of our family, one Roy Schaeffer, was a commercial dory fisherman in my youth and rowed well out to sea each night, into the dark sea swells, and then back again each morning to sell his catch by the Newport Pier. These days, they use outboard motors, but not back then. Strangely, he made his living in this manner without the benefit of EPIRBs, radios, marine radios, and any gear besides his oars, fishing tackle, and a sturdy knife until he grew too old and then sat on the beach wishing he was out on the water. But he rowed in good weather and bad, always setting out into total darkness, and didn't die.
We mustn't forget that Captain William Bligh and the small crew of loyal sailors who were set adrift by the mutineers in the South Pacific managed to sail three thousand miles to a safe landfall, so I might well have been tempted, in my younger days, to do exactly the same thing as the fictional Wiggy did and am not a fool. These days, arthritis and asthma would preclude such a long pull, but I'm not so easily cowed as to shy away from a difficult task if I thought that people's lives might depend on me.
I grew up on and around the sea, the daughter of a sailor, and am not overly enamoured of the latest gadgets, which have a tendency to go wonky when thoroughly wet and knocked about. Lose your electrics, as I believe the Amazon did, and everything modern disappears into vague regrets. Real sailors don't need them (although I must admit they're sometimes handy) and can do very well without them. Many "modern" sailors panic and/or swoon when they run out of batteries.
As for the gear and cave, who knows? There are a lot of islands in the South Pacific too small to eke out a living upon, but plenty big enough to live on if one has supplies. The island might quite plausibly have been a WWII clandestine observation station, most of which were quite deliberately set up to be unobtrusive and were located on uninhabited islands to avoid detection by local sailors and patrol boats. There's no particular reason anyone within the story would know this.
And finally, although others may not be aware of this, the Swallows and Amazons stories which featured the original Nancy (actually Ruth) Blackett, Captain of the Amazons, included two books with vaguely similar plot points, We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea, and Missee Lee. The latter, set in the South China Sea, had the children set adrift with one adult, who is captured by pirates at one point, and managed a reasonable rescue despite their youth and lack of any particular resources other than grit and determination.
I said this before, but this story was a tour de force, juggling many threads quite competently, and offering sufficient references, parallels, and metaphors as to be quite comprehensible to those able to grasp them. I congratulate the author for a superb effort on behalf of her readership.
Further, armchair authors are just as guilty as armchair sailors of offering learned critiques without the slightest ability to produce anything half so good, half so enjoyable, half so ambitious, or half so courageous.
Let them as can, do.
Let them as can't, be silent,
Puddin'
-------------------------------
We are tied to the ocean.
And when we go back to the sea,
whether it is to sail or to
watch - we are going back from
whence we came...
--- John Fitzgerald Kennedy
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
yes!
In a word, bravo, puddintane.
Kaleigh, excellently well done.
For the record, I despise "and then she woke up" endings, but I don't see that in this story. I think that the danger in dream sequences is that an author is effectively testing the contract with the reader, the "voluntary suspension of disbelief." Ha-ha, fooled you. That's not what I read in Marcie and the Amazons; when the snap-back happened from the Marcie Auburn episode, I thought "ah, this is all dreamery", and Kaleigh provided the lovely device of Princess Marcelline to indicate whether we were in dream or reality (not that we spent much time in reality (for values of 'reality' that have little to do with reality (although arguably 'reality' inside an author's head is a reality of a sort, but this sort of convoluted distinction between the play and the play within the play and the dream within the play within the play and the story told by the visiting fisherman in the dream in the play within the play is one of the reasons that dream sequences can feel a bit of a cheat (although I would argue that most of the reason for that is that as you go progressively deeper in 'levels' the detail tends to disappear, particularly in terms of tying up loose ends in the plot (gods, does [i]anyone[/i] remember how many parens I have open at this point? it may be time to invoke the lisp dialect that used a single square brace to close all the currently open round braces, regardless of number))))). By the time that the therapist was discussing with Marcie the difference between dream and reality, I thought that it was pretty clear what was going on (and I thought that Kaleigh did a lovely job of suggesting why Marcie might have been dreaming what she had been dreaming, made even more elegant by Marcie's nearly out-of-hand rejection of the therapist's analysis).
I really [i]was[/i] just going to thank puddin' and second that lovely response. The tangents seduced me ....
Amy!
Sounds too much like work to me though
as I am a computer programmer so I understand the concept of recursion. But even programmers hate to use recursion unless you absolutely must use it as it can get confusing. Not to mention it is sorta a bus man's holiday :).
I am glad Kaleigh did not go too far into the dream within a dream within a dream within a dream etc, thing, and popped back up to reality promptly.
I for one cannot wait until the next story pops up.
Kim
Recursion...
Well, I'm a computer programmer, systems analyst, and network engineer and I love recursive algorithms when faced with recursive data structures, and most of the world is recursive.
Iteration, supposedly "simple", is usually the obsessive approach and is not at all flexible when faced with unbounded data sets.
Modern compilers can usually detect simple recursion and turn it into iteration, if it can be done efficiently, but that's not the way most of us actually think.
We think recursively.
The whole act of interaction with another human being involves our brains constructing a simulacrum of that person inside our brains. We observe people doing things and our own brains duplicate the inner state of the person observed. That's how we learn, one brain recreating itself within an other through centuries, millennia, eons, back though humanity, the australopithecines, proto-chimpanzees, our thoughts projecting themselves out of the past, extending into the future, recursively. Our ancestry, the history of human thought and knowledge, is superficially tree-like, but actually more like an undirected graph, and essentially infinite, recursive by nature and with no practical limit on the potential connexions between any node.
Green butterflies ponder the randomly cyclical nature of erudite toads. There's a sentence very likely never to have been written before, but it makes a sort of sense, may create odd images on our minds, and seamlessly insinuates itself into "reality," You could make a story out of it, think about butterflies and toads you've seen or touched and wonder what a butterfly might think of, what it means to be a learned toad. Our brains are infinitely resourceful, having created the entire universe from scratch within the space of a few years.
There's a wonderful lithograph by M. C. Escher, Drawing Hands, which wonderfully captures this web for me, although it's greatly simplified.
http://tinyurl.com/6eyaux
In it, we see two hands in the process of drawing themselves, at the same time working invisibly within our own brains to make us feel the pens, the paper, and see the image rise from the printed page and take on three dimensions, possibly four, entirely within the space of our skulls.
You can't do that iteratively.
Storytelling is a similar art, recursively reaching into our minds and pulling out whatever thoughts lie there, recreating feelings and images from deep within us, from within other stories held in complex data structures in our brains and making something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and a silver sixpence in our shoe...
Whatever lies inside us can be unearthed by a story, and Kaleigh's story turns rich dirt in mine, the well-remembered Swallows and Amazons stories from my childhood, when Captain Nancy was my idol, my memories of other islands, finding a baby harbour seal on an island beach, its fur still mottled white, it's mother swimming offshore, distressed by my presence, exploring an abandoned cement works on that same island, the ruined rooms filled with the ghostly presence of the men who worked there, memories of my girlfriends, riding bicycles out on the streets at night, sailing with my father, hanging onto the mast of a motor whaleboat heading out toward Bodega Bay across the rough waters of Potato Patch Shoal, returning in heavy fog, the troubled insouciance of youth, there's no limit, really, the web expanding across years and leagues into half-memories of other people's stories, dreams, and lives.
http://tinyurl.com/5dmex7
Cheers,
Puddin'
---------------------------
There was a time when you were not a slave,
remember that. You walked alone, full of
laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say
you have lost all recollection of it, remember
... You say there are no words to describe
this time, you say it does not exist. But
remember. Make an effort to remember.
Or, failing that, invent."
--- Monique Wittig
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
I appreciate I'm late coming
I appreciate I'm late coming to this topic, only spotted while re-reading the first part of the Marcy Donner Story... ;)
"And finally, although others may not be aware of this, the Swallows and Amazons stories which featured the original Nancy (actually Ruth) Blackett, Captain of the Amazons, included two books with vaguely similar plot points, We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea, and Missee Lee. The latter, set in the South China Sea, had the children set adrift with one adult, who is captured by pirates at one point, and managed a reasonable rescue despite their youth and lack of any particular resources other than grit and determination."
Actually quick point on that, having done a fair amount of reading of both Ransome and associated biograpies I can add a direct correlation to the topic at hand here. The Swallows and Amazons books contain three stories within stories, the first being Peter Duck which is in effect a retelling of Treasure Island; the second being Missee Lee and the last - arguably - being The Great Northern? (which is said by some to be in the same mold while others say it was a real adventure...) or something... In fact prior to reading Puddintane's comment this was what my comment was going to be about... stories within stories and how fitting that Nancy was used as an example in Marcie and The Amazons.
Miss E Lee (IIRC) was a real person though not a pirate, someone Ransome met while being a journalist in China during one of Britain's 'adventures' over there (I forget the exact details) but the story in the context of the whole series was a story told by the children who themselves are a story... Another thing about this is that We Didn't Mean to go to Sea is also apparently based on real events. And a voyage even in a small boat by inexperienced sailors in the 1930's Channel/North Sea is not really a good comparison to the sort of conditions and difficulties such a group would have had in any open ocean.
For me I hated the dream sections of the story, by which I mean the fact that it got to the point where you couldn't be sure what was a dream and what wasn't. Re-write it without all that and it could be a fun adventure story in which the glaring errors like lack of radio/transponders/GPS/etc/etc.../etc wouldn't have been so glaring...
Sorry for sounding off.
LN
The Legendary Lost Ninja
Rewrites?
I'm not going to rewrite it. The story is fine as it stands.
indeed
yes, yes it is. far too many people reading this are focused on the destination, instead of the journey.
one of my favorite novelists is david mitchell. black swan green and ghostwritten (while very different) have pretty unsatisfactory endings - and you should read the amazon comments from people outraged about ghostwritten in particular, they make the criticisms of marcie and the amazons look tame.
mitchell is a great, great novelist, because the journey through his stories is so much more important than where he ends up with them.
and so it is with this. thank you.
not as think as i smart i am
Have You Read...
Mark Twain's unfinished The Great Dark (in the Letters from the Earth anthology)? It's not a kids-lost-on-an-island story, but it does describe people stranded (and dying) on an endless ocean voyage with no land in sight and charts that don't fit. Actually, the narrator has fallen asleep while looking at a slide through a microscope, with heat and light shining on part of it and the rest in shadow, and has imagined himself traveling through there on a sailing ship. Developments in his dream make him lose track of dream vs reality, and in the end when his wife awakens him for dinner, he thinks he's dreaming about happier times that probably never existed.
(What's published there is more editor Bernard DeVoto's notes than story -- Twain tried to take the story in about three different directions before deciding on psychological tragedy, and never succeeded in putting it all together -- but it's what came to my mind after your entry here -- especially the point in the dream where he's comparing life before the voyage with his wife (on the ship, within the dream) and finds that their memories coincide in only three anecdotes out of ten -- leading him to conclude that their previous life together probably didn't happen.)
Eric
Absurdity...
MR. SMITH: A conscientious doctor must die with his patient if they can't get well together. The captain of a ship goes down with his ship into the briny deep, he does not survive alone.
MRS. SMITH: One cannot compare a patient with a ship.
MR. SMITH: Why not? A ship has its diseases too moreover, your doctor is as hale as a ship; that's why he should have perished at the same time as his patient, like the captain and his ship.
MRS. SMITH: Ah! I hadn't thought of that... Perhaps it is true... And then, what conclusion do you draw from this?
MR. SMITH: All doctors are quacks. And all patients too. Only the Royal Navy is honest in England.
MRS. SMITH: But not sailors.
....
MR. MARTIN: How bizarre, curious, strange! Then, madam, we live in the same room and we sleep in the same bed, dear lady. It is perhaps there that we have met!
MRS. MARTIN: How curious it is and what a coincidence! It is indeed possible that we have met there, and perhaps even last night. But I do not recall it, dear sir!
MR. MARTIN: I have a little girl, my little daughter, she lives with me, dear lady. She is two years old, she's blonde, she has a white eye and a red eye, she is very pretty, her name is Alice, dear lady.
MRS. MARTIN: What a bizarre coincidence! I, too, have a little girl. She is two years old, has a white eye and a red eye, she is very pretty, and her name is Alice, too, dear sir!
MR. MARTIN [in the same drawling monotonous voice]: How curious it is and what a coincidence! And bizarre! Perhaps they are the same, dear lady!
MRS. MARTIN: How curious it is! It is indeed possible, dear sir. [A rather long moment of silence. The clock strikes 29 times.]
MR. MARTIN [after having reflected at length, gets up slowly and, unhurriedly, moves toward Mrs. Martin, who, surprised by his solemn air, has also gotten up very quietly. Mr. Martin, in the same flat, monotonous voice, slightly singsong]: Then, dear lady, I believe that there can be no doubt about it, we have seen each other before and you are my own wife... Elizabeth, I have found you again!
[Mr.. Martin approaches Mr. Martin without haste. They embrace without expression. The clock strikes once, very loud. This striking of the clock must be so loud that it makes the audience jump. The Martins do not hear it.]
MRS. MARTIN: Donald, it's you, darling!
[They sit together in the same armchair, their arms around each other, and fall asleep. The clock strikes several more times. Mary, on tiptoe, a finger to her lips, enters quietly and addresses the audience.]
--- Eugene Ionesco, The Bald Soprano
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
About the adults, etc.
As far as what happened to the adults: in The Coral Island we never find out what happened to the rest of the crew. After a while we forget, and the boys suppose and hope that they washed up on one of the other islands.
So there at least I have a precedent.
Also, if anyone doesn't like the story, feels fooled or cheated, I have NO problem with their saying so. All along readers have complained and protested, and said, "Please don't let this be a dream."
I knew there was that danger from the start, but this idea was too attractive to me NOT to do it. And I do think I've done something new at the end. Usually in an it's-all-a-dream story, the person just wakes up and says, "Oh my" and that's it. I think Marcie's disturbed feelings and the fact that she goes so far as to write a perfect stranger (me) show that she is more upset than any reader.
And I think that when Marcie finally wakes at the end, no one was *really* sure that it wasn't just another dream.
Also, I HIGHLY recommend reading The Manuscript Found In Saragossa. It is a very old book, but could have been written yesterday. At times it's hysterically funny, but the what-is-real aspect is so mind-bending, it makes what I've done seem quite ordinary.
In this case
I don't fully understand all the complaints over the 'dream' ending. Frankly, any other ending would have added so many complications to the storyline I'm sure it would have become a chore both to read and write- I mean, did we REALLY want to have the story bogged down by more reporters, legal issues, and drama or do we want the next fantastic Marcie adventure?
Kaleigh, if I recall the story you mentioned earlier with the passports was part of the 'Nena' series, correct?
I think you did a wonderful job.
Yeppers -- Nena
Yes. I love Maddy Bell's writing, and had a hard time stopping when I read the Gaby stories, so I don't like to complain about something Maddy wrote.
The Nena stories are great, but there is one that ends up being just a dream. It was still a good story, but I was disappointed when Chris woke up.
And thanks for the compliment.
To confuse or not
Kayleigh,
After having read the final parts of your third "Marcie" story, a lot of reader comments and your own additional information, I'm still unsure how I feel about this third episode.
Without a doubt, you have a lot of talent writing stories. Despite the high level of frustration I experienced while reading "Marcie and the Amazons", I simply could not stop reading it. The end might not be entirely satisfactory for me, but I'm certainly not sorry I read it.
An author needs a challenge from time to time and I understand you've taken on this story as a result of a self imposed challenge. You mention that you had to reduce the complexity you originally planned, but I believe the end result is a success in meeting that challenge.
The main problem as I see it, is the choice you made of working out this experiment in a story that's part of an established series. The first two "Marcie" stories have created a (quite large) readers public for you and those readers mostly expect further stories in the series to be in the same writing style they've come to like so much. If you had written this as a separate story, then you would have had 'positive' comments about your daring new style and 'negative' comments saying they liked your Marcie stories better. I'm afraid that by making the story a part of the Marcie series, you might have lost some readers who did not like this new style. I understand from your postscript that the fourth story will be back in the "old" style, but I fear some people might never know that because they stopped reading the entire series because of episode three. I know: it's their loss.
Short summary: I think it's best to limit writing experiments to standalone stories (or new series) and to refrain from making major changes in style to ongoing series, especially if those are very popular. This is not only about Marcie. For example: "Tuck" is written is a very distinctive style. Some people might not like that style, but those who're still reading it after all the chapters that are already published clearly do like it enough. So it would be a mistake in my opinion if Ellen would suddenly change that style.
Hugs,
Kimby
Hugs,
Kimby