The Thing in Cliff's Notes

Let's make this roll your own. Each poster supplies a bare-bones version of the sentence just posted in the story The Thing in the Library. Here's our #1:

Turner Page, a middle-aged well-to-do dabbler in decadence, gazed around his large library, full of rare books purchased with his inheritance from his uncle Adrian Borlsover, and began to daydream about the undead severed human hand that plagued Adrian into burning his own house down, when his doorbell was rung, probably by a canvasser, a local inspector or a telegram messenger.

The phrasing makes implicit but obvious reference to Marcel Proust and explicit reference to Henry James, whose long-winded style is being parodied. The Borlsovers are characters in the story The beast with five fingers and the protagonist's name is an obvious pun.

#2:

It is a telegram, reading, "Found Book."

Spelling out STOP was actually done sometimes, but mainly there is a stage cliché of reading periods aloud that way.

#1
I wish that all literary works supplied Cliff's notes along these lines. Whenever I catch a reference in a book, I start wondering how many others I've missed! I don't think I've read "The beast with five fingers." (Wasn't there a movie version?) I didn't recognize the name Borlsover.

#2
I can remember once sending a telegram, and using STOP. :-)

Can't wait to read more of the story.

(Hm, well #3 and #5 are pretty transparent, and #4 is editorial.)

#6 descriptively fills out the background about the book in question

(though refraining from saying what it is, and managing also to be non-committal about location - London, New York, Boston, Amsterdam...?), and unable to sustain the highbrow allusions to James and Proust, lurches to somewhere slightly southwest of G. K. Chesterton.

(The masterly #7 can hardly be summarized!)

You know that indulgent look that your spouse of almost thirty years gives you when you're explaining a joke, especially one of your own? Well, I'm going to press on even if some of you are giving me that look.

#8:

The book was owned by Aleister Crowley, then lost, then found in a London bookshop during WWII by a young Anglo-Indian.

Further suggestions that there is something occult about the book: Aleister Crowley, tantra, Helena Blavatsky and Koot Hoomi. Plays on “India Indian” vs. “red Indian”: “Bharat” is India; Christopher Columbus; Natty Bumppo is the hero of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales in which Chingachgook is the Last of the Mohicans; English schoolboys would get it slightly wrong. Mark Twain's essay Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences ridicules inappropriate style in romantic adventures; it is unfair to its subject but actually has good writing advice underneath – which we are evidently ignoring in this composition. We now have settled that we are in or near London: Stonyhurst is an English Jesuit public school; Cecil Court, like nearby Charing Cross Road, is known for antiquarian bookshops. Canadian is the mid-century cinema dodge for Americans that sound too British and vice versa. Kathleen because of the song; Kathleen O'Toole is a former Boston police commissioner. Lee Enfield rifle was standard issue. Azad Hind was the Axis Indian government-in-exile.

#1
I need another note.

OK. I'm not afraid to declare my ignorance. After visits to a couple of unabridged dictionaries, I'm still in the dark as to what "enfarcted" --- Brit spelling of infarcted? --- means in the context. I'd guess "stuffed," but it seems a stretch from the definitions (all medical) which I've found.

In our #9 The title Cogito ergo possum means "I think therefore I may be," and is a take-off on the famous Cogito ergo sum of Descartes. The only North American marsupial is the possum, Didelphis virginiana.

>6 myshelves: The story was launched in the expectation that later posters would notice its fin-de-siecle diction. The in- and en- prefixes are often interchanged, as in inclosed/enclosed.

(later) We forgt to mention that we took the joke from a cartoon by Sidney Harris.

Fogies,

Thanks. I'd figured en = in. But I'm still puzzled about the meaning of the word in this context. I'm used to seeing it in connection with arteries, but not libraries. An infarct is an area of dead tissue, according to the only definitions I can find. Am I being dense?

>8 myshelves: Not dense but misguided. You're approaching the problem as one of finding a whole synthetic English word in an English dictionary instead of, as in the older tradition, looking for the analytic roots of the word. Here we pretty clearly have the Latin verb farcire "to stuff" (which by the way is the source of the word farce "ridiculous comedy"), thus a meaning something like farctate, but we wanted a verb that clearly indicated not that it was simply full of books but that Turner Page had stuffed it with books.

I think contributors other than the original poster may have to fill in the synopsis if we're going to keep up.

#10 The book has a bibliographical history, but rather an obscure one.

#11 Turner Page meets his book agent in a small cafe. She is a not very sexy middle-aged lady of the highly-paid private secretary type in tweed (Dorothy L. Sayers fans might like to think of Miss Climpson), who has located the book in the collection of an unsavoury central European aristocrat with occult connections and a mysterious library.

H/T MyopicBookworm, who, as well as doing yeoman service in these notes, seems to be emerging as the best writer among us.

Let's step back and ask where the first few thousand words have taken us. First, who is the narrator? The voice seems to speak mainly in a donnish, old-fashioned tone, but is a trifle inconsistent. Are we being set up for the unreliable narrator ploy, which would break with a fairly firm tradition of this kind of story? If not, is the narrator omniscient or will we see the whole story from our present point of view? Is the narrator perhaps Turner's own unconscious?

Second, Turner himself. He has not been clearly established as either sympathetic or unsympathetic, villain or hero or observer, victim or predator, gay or straight*, intelligent or stupid, kind or cruel. We are obviously not dealing with a Roald Dahl character, deliberately made despicable to permit us to enjoy his sadistic comeuppance, but on the other hand the boundaries of our genre would be stretched a good bit if he turns out to be a John le Carre character, embodying the ethical ambivalence of the whole disillusioned universe.

Then, what of the story? The possibility of horrible supernatural entities has been plonkingly introduced in the first sentence, and even the title seems to hint at what can only be called a "thing." Are we channeling Algernon Blackwood or M.R. James, telling a straightforward ghost story, or will we perhaps take Edith Wharton's much more ambiguous attitude?

The book Cogito ergo possum being written in Latin seems to point to an author in the tradition of Linnaeus and late eighteenth or early nineteenth century publication, too early for Crowley to have been its original owner. What is it that makes those marginalia so sought-after, and who wrote them?

*Or perhaps simply not interested either way, as seems to have been the case with Henry James.

An aside: I am finding that the writing style called forth by our esteemed leaders, the Fogies, is not now and never can be mine. Therefore I may have to retire from all but the shortest and most transparent entries and simply watch in admiration.

#9
Ah! I did guess at "stuffed" (not thinking "clogged" very appropriate - grin) in #6.

Apparently the verb did clearly indicate the meaning to everyone else. But for some strange reason, my school offered Latin only to those sorted into a
"languages track." If I had known at the time that such nonsense would leave me at a disadvantage, I'd have picketed the place. For months I've been looking at two early and differing translations of a Monumental Inscription, and trying to find someone to tackle the original Latin. Through a chain of people, including 2 Latin teachers, it finally got to the head of a department of Classics, and he proclaimed it to be too much effort. Oh tempora, oh mores!

To keep us moving, I am assuming #12 is clear enough. Apologies if I get things out of order.

If this starts looking like it's turning into Robert Benchley's Shakespeare Explained, someone please do speak up. I'm trying to follow the editors' lead, but I may not be managing.

#13:

It is early 1968; Turner is an expert in some occult art known as television, which has nothing to do with television sets.

The first sentence established a period style; the sixth that it was some years after 1959.  It is now definitely settled that this is a period story for 1968 London.  Since Turner is an aristocrat, we expect his perspective to be somewhat behind the times.

Silly upper-class names: Terpsichore and the groaner public school nickname pun Recto Page.
Daffy and domineering aunts are a staple of P. G. Wodehouse.

Television is presumably an occult power like telekinesis, telepathy, and teleportation. Better all-Greek might be "tele-optics".

Everything else is to establish the period mood. Other than confirming Turner as old fashioned, it does not appear to advance the plot directly.
Baron Frederic Seebohm was Chairman of Barclays from 1965 to 1972.
Television licensing in the United Kingdom (historical).
Lord Mountbatten, last Viceroy of India.
Harold Wilson, Labour Party Prime Minister from 1964 to 1970.
The Plot Against Harold Wilson.
Devaluation of the pound in November 1967.
Warhol's Factory lasted until June.
Nico was actually German, but featured prominently in La Dolce Vita.
The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour made no sense when first aired in black and white.
Liverpool was in Lancashire until Metropolitan counties were created in 1974.

> 14

Is it a long inscription? There is a Latin group here, which probably doesn't have heads of departments, but might be more willing to help.

And there's always the Usenet sci.lang route. You'll have to wade through a lot of off-topic about Malayalam and outright flames. And Peter T. Daniels will give you a deliberately incomplete reference to a famous epigrapher that he shared a bagel with many years ago.

#13:
Fin-de-siecle in 1969 is behind the times even for aristocrats, let alone "minor landed gentry." :-)

>12 hailelib:
Hailelib- Please post anything you feel helps the story. The only rules, we remind you, are one sentence per post and no two posts in a row. We've already had some notable short posts.

A few of the five-worders have got their knickers in a twist over the length and ornate diction of some posts. Those qualities do have a purpose related to the subtext of the story, but there's no requirement that all posters write like that. If you consider some of it showoffery, what of it? It's a game. Not every player on a team can or should be a hotdog, but all help to boost the score.

The title y'all chose just about has to be taken as that of a horror story, and that pretty well requires the style we have chosen. Why? Because better writers, Aickman and those more recent, are too good for the likes of us to imitate, and others are too bad to be worth imitating (Steven King didn't get rich by overestimating the taste of the American public.)

We're not inviting anyone to go all Mickey Spillane on us. But if you see a way to move the story ahead, please post it. And if you want to indulge yourself in a bit of fustian, here's the place.

out of order but I want to move on
!8 switch to first person narrative here.
19 I will edit this to maintain first person narrative.
skelfy,
Like a splinter in the flesh, a small annoying person. derived from skelfy

Dariaux, author of Elegance a book that inspired another book also called Elegance

The colour out of space, a story by Lovecraft,

#18,

>A few of the five-worders have got their knickers in a twist over the length and ornate diction of some posts.

Some of us don't really care. We just find such sentences boring and hard to follow. A lack of interest does not equal knicker-twisted-ness, either. I have no doubt they are fun to create.

Oops. Yes, I had to redraft my first couple of contributions before submitting them, after realizing that I had switched to first-person narration (I think it was the effect of reading The Haunted Soda in parallel). I had not spotted that I had done it again in #20 (duh!). It might be easier to edit #18 and #20-22 back into third-person narration.

So, are you still with the plot? Mlle Balzoff, a thin, shadowy Russian given to gasping, may #15-#19 have aroused a teensy bit of feminine jealousy in Miss P: I guess her presence and flustered state may be explained at some point.

#20 The book has apparently fallen into the clutches of a secret society, possibly by way of a bookshop murder (another potential link to India and Blavatsky's theosophy here?); the Count's castle and library have a sinister reputation;

#21 Turner is distracted
#22 but the readers want to get on with the story
#23 so Miss P sketches the next move.

How many interruptions there may be to Turner's progress towards Liechtenstein via Paris only the writers can determine. I'm not sure I can manage anything as postmodern as some of the suggestions (thing as narrator, subconscious as narrator, etc.); as to Turner's sexuality, contributors of a romantic turn of mind may wonder whether the purely Platonic and professional relationship which the book-obsessed Turner has with Miss Clio P may turn to romance under the pressure of shared adversity. This seems a very LibraryThing question to pose: can a woman's love distract a dedicated book collector from his pursuit? Or will he succumb to the Incubus of the Library, as Miss Palimpsest and Miss Balzoff reveal their secret Lesbian partnership?

SimonW11 is raising intertextual reference to a baroque art-form: I am not well read enough in the genre to keep up!

I am not well read enough in the genre to keep up!

That is because I am skipping genres:^), for bonus points I have only encountered the word skelfy in one book, any idea which? Anyone?

>21 MyopicBookworm: MyopicBookworm You're right, we shouldn't get fancy on all fronts at once. Let's keep it in the third person. We've posted this in the story thread topic: We would like to suggest that it's too much to ask the reader to accept such an abrupt shift in viewpoint this early in the story, especially with so much front-loaded exposition to absorb and so many words to look up in dictionaries. So we'd like to ask posters who've switched from third-person to first-person narrative to switch back again, please.

>23 Fogies: I was just about to post a (fairly short) sentence that resolved all this. Do you still think the new rule should hold? I'll obey if so.

post away! And we can decide then.

Okay. I know that this is the last refuge of bad fantasy writers, but I wanted to stay true to the rule of consistency with everything prior. And as the Fogies point out, we've kinda painted ourselves into a corner. So deus ex machina temporale it is.

I am prepared to be voted down with no regrets, I should say.

As a very interested reader, I could see no point to the shift to first person. I preferred the omniscient narrator --- who had already made some comments about Turner that Turner himself would be most unlikely to make.

>16 MMcM:

*shudder* I didn't realise LT had any of his writings catalogued. Unfortunately his name triggers a particular response in me after years of encountering him online.

Now I'm intrigued as to your Usenet identity. sci.lang and alt.usage.english crossover often enough that if you are a regular there I may well 'know' you there.

27> Yes I must say I agree, Sorry MMcM but an omniscient narrator gives us far more flexibility.

The following is all subject to the new "resolution" being completely thrown out, in which case we either ignore the shift in a few sentences or allow editing them retroactively back to third person.

#25:

Now aboard the train to Liechetenstein, the narrator hopes to be reuinited with his body and returned to his own time, from which he was sent to the 1960's by H. G. Wells.

The narrator is evidently disembodied as a result of the time travel discovery / invention, which was stolen from him in late Victorian times and then used against him. It does not send the body, but just the consciousness. He may also sometimes share Turner's body with Turner's own mind. He only speaks directly when very excited, at which times he can understandably confuse himself with Turner, and otherwise just tells the story from an independent perspective. This also explains why he writes anachronistically.

atman is soul; deha is body.

H. G. Wells wrote The Time Machine and The Outline of History, the latter using the former.

Steven Hawking of A Brief History of Time (and in his mid twenties) is also there and may turn out to be hero or villain or neither.

>28 BoPeep:

No secret identity. Same as here. Same as everywhere.

I don't post very often, because, well you know.

>29 SimonW11:

No need to apologize. I'm just trying to play the game. If the ref stops it, comes in, and cleans things up, that's okay with me.

MMcM:

Wow! I didn't catch what you were doing. That's a pretty ingenious way of getting around the date and narrator problems. Kudos.

WRT the 1st-person/3rd-person conflict, we are willing to go either way but we do powerfully sympathise with the desire of myshelves and SimonW11 to keep the narrative line understandable. MMcM's solution has the virtue of allowing both our protagonist and our narrator to be firmly rooted in the gaslight era, and yet also allows posting by writers more familiar with the late 20thC than the late 19th. But if you consider how much trouble it has been for us to do a simple thing like co-ordinate our narrator's viewpoint, the Fogies reluctantly express our own vote against MMcM's brilliant resolution on the grounds that the rest of us don't think either that quickly or that constructively. Let's have a straw poll on whether we should stick to 3rd person narrator (omniscient or not can wait till later) and restrict our complications to what we can introduce within that framework. As the Pooka McPhellimey says, "A second thought is never an odd thought."

My apologies to all for those two little words ("to me") which started the POV mess. Simon alerted me to it this morning, but I was already at work, oblivious to my mistake, and to your discussion of how to proceed...
Consider me chastened and self-slapped.

>34 jjlong: No apologies needed; a minor slipup like that is the kind of thing that happens to us all every day.

But it does illustrate why it would be nearly impossible to implement MMcM's brilliant plot twist. All of LT is elegible to post here whereas the sort of split viewpoint the time-machine McGuffin requires is really only controllable by the firm hand of a single author.

Keeping to the third person now doesn't preclude a switch to first person later, at some major juncture of the story, where it would be obvious what happened--it just means we promise each other to try to avoid switching inadvertently.

Since I readily admit that my proposal was essentially, if not solely, motivated by strict adherence to the rules (if I were setting you up for it all along, I'd have had Connecticut Yankees with Twain and iracible men with recorders on the new TV), I am finding myself persuaded by the Fogies' arguments.

So I vote for third person, preferably omniscient, with each author allowed to edit or delete in turn starting with where it went wonky. This will introduce a new (and I believe fun) twist, because depending on how extensive the editing is (including to nothing), the subsequent entries may need corresponding rework.

For the record, returning to a simple narrative line in the third person would require slight modifications to posts #19, #21 and #22 and the deletion of post #25.

We think we have reached the point at which a rough manuscript version ought to be provided for the information of those who join us downstream from here. New topic: The Thing in the Manuscript.

I have amended My entry.If someone fails to change theirs I vote we give The Fogies minor editorial rights in the manuscript edition.

Meantime I will ignore 25 and continue it with my normal morning post. MMcM if you intend to replace rather than just delete your post let me know and I will make whatever changes you need to accommodate it.

Simon

#26 As they continue the meal Miss Balzoff enters with a companion and is addressed as Mrs Susan Hill.

Alice B. Toklas accidently included a friend, Brion Gysin's recipe for "Hashisch Fudge" in her work The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook It has never gone out of print. The Woman in Black is of course a ghost story written by Susan Hill

I'm happy to revert to third-person narrative. The sewn-together Thing in the Manuscript looks useful too: I wonder if it could be edited to amend typographical and punctuational slips: or is that too intrusive/presumptuous?

#28 Turner speculates as to the identity and motives of the Woman in Black.

The interminable ballad is of course "Hey Jude" (UK No. 1, late summer - early autumn 1968).

>33 Fogies: "MMcM's solution has the virtue of allowing both our protagonist and our narrator to be firmly rooted in the gaslight era, and yet also allows posting by writers more familiar with the late 20thC than the late 19th"

This could be more simply reconciled by assuming an alternate-history setting, in which not all of the historical developments of the mid 20th century have taken place.

>38 SimonW11: Not to make a thing of it, but the Fogies have minor editorial rights. What we'd need a vote for is major editorial rights.

>40 MyopicBookworm: "if it could be edited to amend typographical and punctuational slips" We intend to do just that after the ship is steady on course. Post any requests or suggestions in this thread.

#29

Reminded that they need to get started on the trip to attempt a view of the Count's library, Turner thinks of others who also prefer their own home comforts to travel.

Anyone care to express an opinion on whether the manuscript should follow the British convention of punctuating, in which commas and full-stops follow closing quotation marks, or the US convention that puts them inside? Absent vociferation, the Fogies will follow their native US convention.

Since we're doing the editing in Word, when it's all wrapped up we could make a PDF version to e-mail to anyone who wanted it.

(later) And for consistency we'll adopt the US spelling of color, honor, etc., although we will NOT replace Brit words with US ones, eg railway sleepers will not become railroad ties.

I'm not sure I have an opinion on whether the manuscript should follow the British or US convention, but I have the British system hard-wired into my consciousness, and if I were to attempt to adjust, the result would probably be the literary equivalent of a "dented fender" from driving on the wrong side of the road. Given the already wayward spelling, grammar, and comma-usage, I should think the working text can bear the variation. To quote a relevant source: "Do as thou wilt" (Aleister Crowley). If a publisher wants to take it when we're through, we can edit it to conform to house style :-)

>44 MyopicBookworm: We mentioned that we're using Word because it has powerful mass search-and-replace functions that make it matter of a few keystrokes to get uniform spelling & punctuation in a whole document at once. Having written for academic journals all our lives, we too have hard-wired subroutines, and one is to vet the puncs.

And serial comma? I consciously tried to follow British conventions once the locale seemed to be established, even though the browser's spell checker told me I was making mistakes, but I have no real preference.

Personally I prefer as more logical the british convention for the punctuation of quotations and would also like to stay flexible as to the use of the oxford comma, but my own writing is so inconsistant as to render my opinion pretty irrelevent. Just don't start following the Chicago manual of style it won't work.

No preference as long as the style is internally consistent in the final version. And as long as we can do our usual thing in the interim.

Maybe the most reasonable choice is to wait and see whether the end result sounds more like a British or a US narrator, and spell and punctuate accordingly.

#49
That sounds logical!

>46 MMcM: We prefer the elision of that comma: Up, up and away! You may have noted in our #1 that in imitating HJ's style we went so far as to observe his custom of eliding all commas from a series of adjectives (eg "middle-aged unmarried well-to-do minor landed gentry" or "sinuous sinewy vowels").

OK, back with the plot:
#29 some more literary allusions on the part of the narrator
#30 meanwhile in Zugzwang's dungeon, Eustace's hand, not destroyed in the fire, is caressed by his (?one of his) former lovers, now miserably aged and changed
#31 and it is hinted that Eustace himself, studying "cogito ergo possum" and its marginalia, may have been supernaturally transformed into some kind of monstrous were-marsupial, and was eliminated by the Brotherhood (I like the little vignette: perhaps it could be set off in the coherent text with a change of typeface or something)
#32 Page and Miss Palimpsest confirm their travel arrangement, but are overheard by Balzoff/Hill, who clearly intends to follow them.

I thought her melodramatic statement at the end of #32 was splendid enough to stand as a chapter ending, so #33 begins chapter ii on the train to Dover, reintroducing a character from #27 that I had almost overlooked (gender and function as yet unknown).

PS I'm hoping they'll not move too fast, so that when they reach the Gard du Nord, I can show off my minuscule knowledge of Paris, and those who remember Paris in '68 can introduce some more of those period touches!

#32 The collector from Roumania should be familar to readers of The Historian

#33 The rats in the wall another Lovecraft reference.

(Woo, this plot has more turns than a helter-skelter!) So, the creature in the cellar, lover of old Eustace B. and guardian of the hand, is the real Mrs Susan Hill, and the woman in black, ex-mistress of Reginald B., is only using that name for some devious reason of her own.
The process is curiously exhilarating: I could never have come up with some of the excellent ideas now surging about in this story. As may be apparent, my chief amusement (other than limbering up for the challenge of writing a sentence longer than the Fogies monumental #1) is trying to weave as many as possible of them into a plot with some semblance of coherence. I have an idea of how I would like the plot to resolve, but of course, I have no control over whether it ever gets anywhere near that point! I am torn between wanting to collaborate over the plot, and wanting to see what unexpected development awaits....

"At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where" is from Essay on Man by Alexander Pope.

Auslander Buchstab is quite a different sort of book hunter from Clio Palimpsest. Turner uses many agents to find books.

MMcM has been having software trouble, but expects to return soon. With Bookworm, Simon & quartzite in full spate, and hailelib providing nice smooth transition sentences, the story has developed to a point at which the Fogies feel a need to print it out and edit hard copy with a red pencil. That will happen tonight, and tomorrow the cleaned-up manuscript will be reposted.

Mysteriorum Libri Quinque
or, Five Books of Mystery by Dr.John Dee
An Angelic Revelation of Kabbalistic Magic and other Mysteries Occult and Divine
revealed to Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelly.

Bit of a place holder this as I wait for inspiration to strike.

Here's Wikipedia on elementals:

"In modern occultism the word "elemental" can also be used to mean any simple or only partly sentient spiritual entity. These entities can be entirely natural (for instance, the spirit of a group of trees) or can be created by magicians or sorcerers to perform a task for them. The latter type are called servitors. This kind of "subservient" or "man-made" elemental can be found mentioned in the works of Austin Osman Spare or Aleister Crowley. They are a vital concept in modern Chaos Magic.

Theosophy and Anthroposophy are also known to have knowledge of elementals. In Theosophy, a "Seventh Ray" occultist works with elementals. (See Seven Rays). It is believed that elementals can be observed when the third eye (etheric sight) is activated.

John Brunner's stories about the Traveler in Black involve a number of elementals, each named, some associated with classical elements and some not.These elementals had been created during the first era (the reign of eternity and chaos). Enchanters sought to manipulate elementals, using chaos for their own ends. In the later era (the reign of time, memory, and reason), these elementals lost much of their power, much to the detriment of would-be wizards. (The decline in the power of magic is a common theme in fantasy literature. It is seen in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings epic, and in Jack Vance's Dying Earth novels."

And on Haroun:

"Hārūn is widely considered the greatest of the Abbasid caliphs, presiding over the Arab Empire at its political and cultural peak. Consequently, Islamic literature (the work of ibn Kather, for example) has raised him to the level of an ideal figure, a great military and intellectual leader, even a paragon for future rulers to emulate. His best-known portrayal in the West, in the stories of the Thousand and One Nights, has little basis in historical fact, but does show the mythic stature he has attained over time."

If it was he whose binding conjuration of this spirit was unwittingly removed by Turner, the elemental has been imprisoned for over a thousand years.

I confess that the English Wikipedia is the only place that I can find the Lisez moins, vivez plus quote. (Other than cribs from it, including a few student works.) I'm suspicious, because the French version has a similar list without this one. But I found it just too good to resist given the direction the story had taken while I was busy elsewhere. And it does sound plausibly situationist.

I note here that I'm unsure what time of year it is (an overcoat was mentioned) and don't feel justifying in forcing the point myself. But as you can see from the article, all the heavy stuff happens in late spring. The English barely manages to mention that de Gaulle is out of town, but the French correctly points out that he's in Romania (! -- visiting Ceaușescu, then a hero in the West -- ha!).

(Yes, I know, I could fix it myself.)

>59 MMcM: Recall that the elemental is moved to escape the unwonted cold in Turner's house.

I'm getting really confused...

>61 MyopicBookworm: MyopicBookworm If you could be more specific, maybe we can sort it out.

Pierre is the little lemuroid bloke at Paris station who has now tracked our hero to the library. Pierre is also the name uttered by the restive creature in the underground prison down the limestone steps, though whether it is directed at the keeper (the guy in the dungarees) or at someone else is not clear. And is S'zawm's lair the same limestone dungeon in which Mrs Susan Hill caresses the hand (in which case the two languishing prisoners may or may not be one and the same, but the dungeons must be in Liechtenstein), or (if the prison-keeper is Pierre), is it a different dungeon in Paris, and does more than one funny little man bear the name of Pierre (maybe there is a whole tribe of them), or is the elemental's vision of an event taking place at a different point in time? My favoured theory at present is that there is one dungeon (I reserve judgement on how many prisoners) and one Pierre, who scampers between Paris and Liechtenstein by exploiting L-space, which presumably operated before its discovery by Pratchett, and offers our protagonist a way of getting to Zugzwang castle without traipsing laboriously around the railways of Europe. It took me a while to figure how Turner could acquire a sudden realization about an elemental in London from meeting a little man in Paris, and I still can't work out how an elemental who has been shut in a book for a thousand years can have anything to do with either the early 20th century sorcery of Eustace Borlsover or Aleister Crowley, or with anything involving "Cogito ergo possum", which if it is about marsupials must postdate the European discovery of America. And if the elemental wants to get warm, where does it go? Ah, of course: the old British Library, where it can squirm through the dimensions and catch up with Turner (for whom, as its liberator, it may turn out to have positive feelings).

>60 Fogies:

Good point. Sounds like February, then; first time below freezing for several years. Central heating and automation wouldn't have been a given even this late, but we can imagine why he was predisposed against domestics.

63> the elemental at Turner's was recalling its last interaction with Pierre who is currently in Paris, as I think my latest post makes clear.
Is S'zawn the eleme Or did the encounter just take place in S'zawn's Lair, It that where Susan Hill has been trapped for the past seven years?

Time maybe to start thinking about a Dramatis Persona

I've been working on a Dramatis Personae file which I can post when I get home, but that won't be until (5 hours after the time of this message).

If the elemental has been immobilized since the time of Haroun al Raschid (#35), and has been hiding in Page's library "all these many years", then explaining a former interaction between the elemental and Pierre (in which the "restive creature" is clearly not immobile) will take some impressive fancy footwork, unless Pierre is a thousand years old (or time-travelling). I don't know whether the creature in S'zawn's lair is S'zawn, or is just something else imprisoned there by Pierre seven years ago in connection with some attempt to bind a familiar spirit in a corporeal form, interrupted by Turner (perhaps coincidence that this is also the time that Susan Hill has been incarcarated at Zugzwang, or perhaps not); but I don't think the thing in S'zawn's lair can be this elemental, which must surely be a re-emerging entity from much longer ago.

The Elememtal has been trapped in a book since the time of Haroun or a thousand years. the book has been moved in living memory, when it was flown from Dar-es-Salaam by Auslander Buchstab.
see #34

I have amend my latest posting, but Why would Auslander seize the spirit(in S'zaums presumably) then ship it to Turner via Dar-es-Salaam, keeping Turner i ignorance of all this? No doubt all will become more confused.

Simon

>65 SimonW11:,67 If we accept the birthdate we have been given (remember, we have yet to decide if the narrator is omniscient and/or reliable) then 1944 would be a reasonable guess as to when Buchstab first made contact with Turner, offering to provide rare books to feed his already established appetite for them. That would be the year in which he attained his majority and thus took control of the Borlsover legacy. The books had been in Egypt, it may be, for a long time, perhaps already hundreds of years before Haroun, and may have been translated from ancient Egyptian. If they were shipped in summer of 44 from Dar by air (or perhaps on a Royal Navy warship returning from duty in the Red Sea--we may assume Buchstab has a wide array of fiddles and tricks at his disposal) then February in England with the house unheated may well have been its first experience of serious penetrating cold. (The wartime austerity would not have prevented Turner from keeping a fire going in his library, already valuable enough to be worth protecting from damp).

Dramatis Personae

Provisional: comments and contradictions welcome ... well, comments welcome,
contradictions tolerated... :-)

Turner Page: our protagonist and chief narrative focalizer; born 1923 (so 45 at the time of the narrative, 1968), to Booker T. Page and Sardjini Bihar (d. 1963), probably illegitimately, and recipient of a large legacy from his (legally presumed) maternal uncle Adrian Borlsover; "middle-aged unmarried well-to-do minor landed gentry lightly yet persistently inclined to dilettantish esoteric experimentation";
he appears to have done War Service in the Navy, and to have inherited the occult interests of ...

Great-Uncle Eustace Borlsover (deceased): marital state unknown (no surviving children, as his nephew Adrian inherited his wealth), though he had as lover one Mrs Susan Hill (see below); a student of occult works which are said to have "overcome his humanity", though he died "physician-attended and certificate-attested" leaving a severed hand which wrote manically before precipitating its own apparent destruction and the death by fire of his nephew and heir ...

Uncle Adrian Borlsover (deceased): giver of boring houseparties;

Miss Clio Palimpsest: Turner's paid book-search agent; prim, tending to dress in tweed and silk scarves, discreet (though occasionally given to addressing Turner in a manner more appropriate to a bedroom companion: perhaps this is ironic, or just narrative inconsistency, or perhaps they have a very curious relationship), shrewd, and confident enough to bandy words with booksellers who have powerful friends. At the end of Chapter Two, revealed to be an adept and an evil agent of Count Zugzwang and the Brotherhood of the Unsquared Circle, and to have had previous dealings with...

Rhys Bedortha, assassin and adept of dark arts, who had first appeared as a shadowy, brown-clad associate of Nora Balzoff alias Susan Hill, both being initiates (at dfferent degrees) of the Rites of Thon, but is this is revealed to have been a ploy, now discarded.

Uncle Reginald "Recto" Page (deceased): presumed brother of Turner's late father, Booker T. Page, husband of Terpsichore (Aunt Tess); died in some shady, possibly scandalous circumstances; the last of his mistresses was ...

Nora Balzoff: "notorious Russian Anarcho-Trotskyite agitator, rumor-monger, gossip-spreader, propagandist and agent of influence", dresses in black and is for reasons still obscure, known to some by the name of "Mrs Susan Hill"; Turner has been warned of a woman called "Susan" attempting to gain the attention of both Uncle Reginald Page and Uncle Adrian Borlsover; now revealed to be an adept seeking to foil the plotting of Zugzwang and Palimpsest, though herself used by Rhys Bedortha to further her own ends, and with her own seven-year quest relating to the dungeons of Zugzwang.

Mrs Susan Hill: former lover of Great Uncle Eustace, now possessed of Eustace's undead hand, and confined for seven years in a dungeon by ...

Count Alois Zugzwang: (as yet off-stage) owner of a castle in Liechtenstein, presumed collector of esoterica and member of the occult Brotherhood of the Unsquared Circle; reputed holder of the book "Cogito ergo possum".

Bharat Mookerjee: an Anglo-Indian student of theosophy who spotted Aleister Crowley's bookplate in "Cogito ergo sum " in a London bookshop in around 1944.

Auslander Buchstab: a roving European book-hunter who some years ago shipped Turner some Oriental books which contained (deliberately or otherwise)...

an unnamed elemental: immobilized for a thousand years, and hidden in Turner's library for some years until he inadvertently released it recently, and now mobilized by the cold in Turner's unheated residence and subject to some currently inexplicable visions.

S’zawn the undying: a non-human creature which lives, apparently in captivity under the power of the symbols and crystals of Thon, in another of Zugzwang's dungeons, and has a mystic affinity with Susan Hill, forged in an arcane rite seven years ago.

Pierre: a "small man, lemur-like both in stature and in facial appearance" who accosts and follows Turner in Paris; identified as a library researcher once met by Turner in Cardiff, and as a sidekick of the Brotherhood. Generally presumed to be the same as the "Pierre" whose name is spoken by S'zawn in a vision (of uncertain time-frame) by the elemental, apparently addressing its keeper, "a small giddy, mercurial man; large of hand and small of mind, naked except for a tattered pair of Lee relaxed fit dungarees and purple flip-flops".

Tentative Timeline

Bold dates are either estabished in the current text, or are real-world dates. The former may be adjusted retrospectively by contributors; the latter are presumably non-negotiable.

circa AD 800: Harun al-Rashid sets a charm of immobility on an elemental, for some reason {#35}. At some point in the ensuing centuries, it ends up in Dar-es-Salaam (Tanzania){#35}, perhaps via Muslim India and the trade route to Zanzibar.

1613: first English description of the American possum.

?18th-19th century: Publication of "Cogito ergo possum" (literally "I think, therefore I can", or possibly "I think, therefore I am a possum"), overtly a book in Latin on marsupials, though perhaps in fact an esoteric work on the magical power of the will, judging from the importance of its marginalia, perhaps two sets, by its original author {#9} and by Crowley (active in occultism from 1897). {#8}

1916: Booker T. Page graduates from Balliol. {#44}
1923: Turner V. Page born in Hertfordshire. {#44}

1929: "Cogito ergo sum" is borrowed from the London Bibliophile Club by a circumlocutionist and never returned {#6}. Possibly it finds its way into the hands of an Anglo-Indian academic (retired by 1968, so too old to be Mookerjee, young in 1944 {Notes#5} but it could be his once ne'er-do-well father) who dies in mysterious circumstances some time later{#20}.

1931: Booker Page vanishes on a fishing trip. {#44}

? Death of Great Uncle Eustace, except for his hand {#1}, at the hands of the Brotherhood, after initiating some sort of marsupial transformation, and apparently leaving a lover {#31} named Susan Hill {#34}.

? Death of Adrian Borlsover in a fire {#1}. Given that Turner is still somewhat gloating over the legacy in 1968 {#1}, and that a woman named Susan was trying to get access to the hand probably quite recently {#28}, I think this may be rather later, maybe c.1961.

1941: Turner turns 18, and is called up for war service: he serves as a Naval wireless officer {#44}.

c1944: Mookerjee spots "Cogito ergo Sum" in a London bookshop" {#8}.

1945: Turner leaves the Navy and starts collecting occult books seriously, supplied by Buchstab among others. He unknowingly acquires an elemental in a package of books {#35}.

1947: death of Aleister Crowley, English occultist, penniless in Hastings, Kent; his copy of "Cogito ergo possum" had been sold some years before, and was spotted in a bookshop circa 1944 by the Anglo-Indian theosophist Bharat Mookerjee.

1945-8: Mountbatten serves as Viceroy, and then Governor-General of India, with Reginald Page on his staff {#13}. If Reginald then retired at 60, that implies he was born c.1888.

At some point before Adrian's demise, Turner Page encounters the writings of Eustace's hand at a house party, and learns of the Brotherhood of the Unsquared Circle {#11}.

c1958: Turner begins to search for "Cogito ergo sum" {#3}

(At some point: Page casually reads out a spell of unbinding and releases the elemental, which remains inactive until he leaves the heating off. {#35})

1961: Susan Hill is imprisoned in Zugzwang{#34}, in a dungeon not far from S'zawn's lair {#52}. Perhaps this is a consequence of the fire at Uncle Adrian's, since she has ended up with the hand; this implies that Turner has only had the Borlsover money for 7 years, though it doesn't stop him having had a serious collection for some years before that, including Buchstab's Arabic books.

1963: death of Page's confusingly named Indian mother {#44}

1967: The pound sterling is devalued in November under Harold Wilson's government; Uncle Reginald Page promptly expires of apoplexy aged c.79, leaving a widow (Terpsichore Page, who can't have spent long in mourning if she was returning from New York by Christmas) {#13} and a rather younger Russian mistress (Nora Balzoff) {#14}.

?early 1968: Palimpsest informs Page that the book is at Zugzwang {#11}; on the way through Paris, pursued by Balzoff, they are ensnared by Pierre, who has at least at some time been the keeper of S'zawn, and Page becomes aware of the active elemental.

The Tangled Web, alias The Plot So Far

Turner Page is currently facing the following predicament:
(a) the occult book he wants appears to be at Zugzwang Castle;
(b) or, at least, so he has been told by Clio Palimpsest (CP);
(c) so he has gone to Paris with CP;
(d) followed (unknown to him, but known to CP) by a woman in black (WIB) going by the name of "Susan Hill" but formerly Uncle Reginald's mistress under the name of Nora Balzoff;
(e) and another spindly brown figure (SBF) who has been seen in the bistro in company with WIB;
(f) meanwhile, the real Susan Hill - presumably of an older generation since she is a former lover of Great Uncle Eustace - is now a pathetic wreck in a dungeon at Zugzwang, and has in her possession her ex-lover's severed hand.
(g) Apparently independently of this book-quest, Turner has unwittingly unleashed an elemental that has been hidden for some years in his own library.
(h) He is now being pursued by a small lemuroid man whom CP addressed as "Pierre" (this might have been a generic term of address by a contemptuous Brit for a Frenchman, but in fact...)
(i) we apparently glimpsed "Pierre" (through the vision of the elemental) in dungarees and flip-flops, holding a mysterious hungry creature in S'zawn's lair under a power associated with the name of Thon, whose crystals are invigorated by living souls.
(j) The elemental has sensed "a hideous crime committed by forces stronger and older than itself", and the associated "images of a brutal mission by agents of uncertainty" include a vision of Pierre and S'zawn;
(k) Turner has now spotted Pierre, and somehow recognized him as portending the release of the elemental.
(l) Pierre has been tracking Turner through a psychic connection to his silver cigarette case, and has now ensnared Turner and Clio for purpoes unknown in the basement of the French National Library.

It was (k) that I struggled to make sense of. What has the elemental, so long immobile, to do with Pierre and his monstrous charge, and why should Turner so readily leap to make this
connection? For that matter, how is it that Clio Palimpsest appeared to know Pierre's name? (Does she know more about him than she has let on to Turner?)

And what does Pierre really want?

Minor inconsistency: if Adrian Borlsover was Turner Page's uncle, but did not share his surname, the natural assumption is that he was brother to Page's mother, and that Page's maternal family are the Borlsovers; but (if I have parsed the relevant section correctly) we have been told that she was an Indian called Bihar. I don't think it
matters much.

>71 MyopicBookworm: Turner is a bastard? Bihar is his biological mother and Borlsover his father's wife?

If my suspicions prove correct Turner Did not aqquire the book until 1961. Ithink I know who or what S'zawn's is and how this relates to the elemental and Pierre and Susan Hill I also I think the link between Susan Hill and Nora Balzoff is Buchstab. who had a pivitol role in events.

Who's Mistress was Nora BTW.

I appreciaete the Timeline I was just about to start mapping one out of my own, I you could Bold dates confirmed in the text that would help.

I Will post to story thread post later. Time for someone else to contribute dont worry to much about stepping on my toes there are plenty more plots in the sea.

Different theory of background on Turner Page.

Iif we accept a birth year of 1923 then in September 1939 he was at school, say maybe at Twytie Manor, a private school whose extreme distinction was exceeded only by its obscurity. Twytie Manor boys (inevitably, of course, called "Twits") looked down their noses at Etonians and Harrovians, who in turn affected to have never bloody well heard of Twytie Manor. When Chamberlain declared war the entire Twytie Manor OTC volunteered en masse, but Turner, at 16, was among those too young to be eligible. He tried to enlist under an assumed name, but was rejected for three trifling physical defects that hindered him not at all in civilian life: a minor deformation of the foot bones, a slight deficit of hearing and near-sightedness. In 1941 he would have been accepted for service but by then he was in an exempt civilian job at the Admiralty, where he had shown a remarkable talent for working with secret codes.

Except for a brief stint as an ARP warden, the war asked nothing more of him. His already well-developed inclination to pamper himself was not cramped by food rationing, since he could afford to take most of his meals at clubs and restaurants that were not rationed. Neither he nor his house was touched by the blitz. The only negative effect the war had on him was that, as a young male civilian in wartime London, he couldn't get a pretty girl to take a second look at him. That may partly account for his remaining single into middle age.

Of course he might have been doing something else entirely. Will we find out?

The name Vanderbook could conceivably be that of a family of Hudson valley patroons, perhaps distant cousins of the Rensselaers, but what the connection might be between New York squirearchy and its English equivalent remains to be shown.

Edited to give the school name a more U spelling.

I don't know how obsessively we must accept as canonical anything in the text as it stands (unless the original authors are willing to re-edit), but we have been told that Turner Page was serving as a wireless officer in the Navy off the Vestmanna Isles (where are they? Vestmanna is a town in the Faroe Isles) during WWII.

I can go with Turner as acknowedged son of Booker Page, not by his wife (nee Borlsover) but by Bihar. His wealth is described as a legacy, which implies deliberate intention of Adrian Borlsover to bequeath to an illegitimate relative the estate which he would have inherited by right if legitimate.

If the New England Vanderbooks were an old colonial family from the Low Countries, they may have had Huguenot relatives in East Anglia, so Vanderbook could be the family name of Booker T. Page's mother.

I don't know obsessively we must accept as canonical anything in the text as it stands ...

This is just my opinion, but I recognize several choices:

(1) Respect everything written previously as an integral rule of the game of group composition.

(2) Allow for revision, presumably in some controlled way.

(3) Introduce a sufficiently compelling meta-narrative that explains how some of the information given is contradictory, as an integral part of the work and not just as continuity mistakes.

When (3) arises on The Simpsons, whose fans' devotion to (1) is well-known, it's sometimes elaborate and other times they just hang a lantern on it, like "We agree never to speak of this again."

For the same reasons the Fogies doubted the feasibility of a split POV, we also doubt the possibility of an entirely consistent story line. It's a romp--let's all do our own steps while trying conscientiously not to knock each other around, poke each others' eyes out etc. All we can do short of a major rewriting--which would have to be the work of a single editor--is to keep reminding each other of the context new posts should fit into, and devising more complicated stage settings if that reminder is grossly ignored.

And speaking of editors, it turns out the Fogies are not going to be able to give the internets much attention for the next week or so. If MyopicBookworm could take over posting to the manuscript for a few days, we'd all appreciate it.

Could Bihar have been adopted?

Yes, I'll happily do a conflation once there are a couple more contributions to collect.
Is there any interest in exchanging thoughts about the future plot, or does everyone enjoy beavering away in the dark (possibly in opposite directions!)?
(My theory as to the connection between Nora and Susan Hill, and my assessment of Nora's real motives, is undoubtedly quite different.)

>73 SimonW11: If Nora was Buchstab's mistress (suggested above) as well as Reginald's (stated in the text), she must have had a busy life!

(PS I'm tweaking the plot summary as we go: I've just noticed a problem with the date! We state quite clearly near the beginning that it was ten years ago that Turner first conceived a desire for the book, after discovering that it had vanished from the library in 1959. This implies that "now" is later than 1969, and probably some time later. In my early sentences, I assumed that the fin-de-siecle diction was merely fin-de-20eme-siecle archaism, and was mentally placing the narrative within the last couple of decades or so. I could get round this by changing "1959" to "1929", which gives it time to have got lost by the time Mookerjee spots the bookplate.)

As I said I am easy we can plot ahead if you want but I feel confident than we can remain somwhat coherent without doing more than we are at present. No posts from me for a few days I am off on a dance weekend.

Might we resolve the Borsolver/Bihar conundrum by assuming that Great Uncle Eustace was a sibling of a maternal grandparent, and that his nephew Adrian was not a true "Uncle" to Turner but a second cousin, with the courtesy title of Uncle as he belonged to the generation of Turner's parents--perhaps Sardijini's mother was sister to Eustace? living in the Raj and making a slightly scandalous marriage to minor Indian royalty?

Ren Ying an acupuncture point also known as Stomach nine. Western anatomist know this as the place where the blood pressure regulator for the brain is found. Pressure here affects the heart rate. While a knife would cut the artery that supplies the blood.

I did not realize we had a back-page analysis going on in regards to events of our collaborative story. You all have cleared up some of the plot threads; and myopicbookworms analysis, character list and chronology have all been very useful. I see I may have been to Lovecraftian (as subtle as a brick tossed into a Fenton showroom), and not as psychological and literary (ie. the school of James, Henry and M.R.). My Ecoistic (as in Umberto) fascination with conspiracies and cults runs a bit hot too; I actually wanted to connect the Unsquared Circle with Kennedy's assassination, having J. Edgar Hoover as a main co-conspirator with Nora Balzoff as the Femme Fatale-dark assassin, possible Thon double agent type, but in a collaborative effort such as this, with only me knowing what connections I've visualized, it quickly exceeds any ability at continuity. I see this as an alternate reality-history (ala PKD, maybe the Allies did lose, or worse, The Beatles never happened, etc, etc.) As a game, this is all very interesting but it may not be wanted by the rest of the collaborators; or maybe that does'nt matter either. Anyway, I am having a great time and am amazed at how quickly things change in our plot. I see now that the women in brown will be having a say as to where we are going from here. Bravo! Look forward to all yor postings.

Rhys? why has she got a mans name? is it an american thing? or is something stranger going on?

It's a male pseudonym, adopted in order to infiltrate one of the more secretive orders of Druids. I have assumed that "Dora" is merely the name of Nora Balzoff, as pronounced by someone with a speech impediment. I am interested that Rhys, as well as Nora, is carrying a runic dagger, since I had a very specific function in mind for Nora's, relating to the Susan Hill/S'zawn thread.
>79 SimonW11: Hope the dance weekend was enjoyable (what kind of dance?).
>82 jayqq1953: US politics doesn't interest me, conspiratorial or not, and US presidents seem small fry when you've got creatures like S'zawn the Undying in your menagerie.

Im not Sure Dora is Nora Rhys reffered to Nora as Susan in the Preious sentence. But then I hae not read your latest contribution.

Well, it's just been decided a different way: I'd assumed that since Nora was Dora, the reference to Susan was actually to the Susan in the dungeon, a reference understood by Nora, though not by Turner.

I went with Clio as Dora since Rhys was looking at at Clio when she addressed Dora.

OH BTW the dance weekend was Gloucester international Cajun and Zydeco Festival

Sorry for the confusion regarding the use of Rhys as a female name. I was going for Reece (as in Witherspoon) and thought that the native Welsh form was Rhys. Should I change Rhys to Reece? Or leave it so that someone can carry the plot in another direction as in pseudonymn, androgynous, sex change, etc? Nora/Dora was a typo, but I like the idea of Cliodora. Again, sorry if I've caused to much confusion. I will also stop the conspiracy ideas involving U.S. presidents, as noted, we've got much bigger fish to fry.

The Tangled Web II, alias the Plot So Far

After the turmoil of the last few messages, I have taken the liberty of ending Chapter Two.

Moving on from the Plot Summary at 71 above, Turner Page is currently facing the following predicament:
(a) Nora Balzoff (NB, a.k.a. Susan Hill) turns out to be a secret adept who has unmasked Clio Palimpsest (CP) as an agent of the Brotherhood;
(b) his journey to Liechtenstein in search of an occult book appears to have been engineered as a plot to lure him to Zugzwang;
(c) NB's erstwhile companion (a.k.a. SBF) is discovered to be Rhys Bedortha, an adept and assassin, who has just left the Paris Library with a scroll, apparently under the impression that it is the one she went in for.
(d) The real Susan Hill, in her dungeon at Zugzwang, with Eustace's hand, believes herself to have been "separated" from S'zawn through a conjuration by Zugzwang, who subsequently failed to unite them.
(e) Pierre has a "deep binding" with S'zawn, and is subject to ectoplasmic manifestations involving green tendrils - and has just disappeared, along with CP.

So we know now how Clio could recognize Pierre at the station, and inadvertently let slip this fact by calling him by name.

But there are still plenty of loose ends, involving such things as the elemental in Turner's London flat, its unexplained connection with Pierre, whether or not Zugzwang actually has the book or not, and why jayqq1953 associates the smell of camphor with the occult world... :-)

Don't worry about Rhys It obviously is an american thing:^)

From the menu the bistro appears to be
Chez L'Ami Louis. both dishes are seasonal if the ortlands are coming to an end then it must be october duck liver is not available until the 15th an continues throughout the winter.
source Paris Bistro Cookery By Alexander Watt

No, I think you've lost me now (at message #72). I could conceive of a plausible scenario in which Clio can attempt to re-establish her credibility with Page, but not so soon, and in the presence of the woman who has just accused her of conspiracy on a monumental scale. It's as though Gandalf, having fallen into the pit locked in mortal combat with the Balrog, had then reappeared ten minutes later, calmly dusting his robe and apologizing for the slight delay.

It does seem unlikely I would happily change my entry if quartzite wants to change 72.

I am not sure this is the direction we want to go, but at least, with tongue in cheek, it may explain Clio's sudden reappearance and the previous antics as a way of recruiting, controlling, disorienting Turner. It connects the missing father into the plot (and lets not forget that hand). If there is disagreement I will glady delete (or edit) and go back to any point in the thread that there is agreement.

I'll stand by my post. Clio's reappearance hardly can be the most difficult thing to swallow in this story. I am sure she is fully tough enough to confront her accuser face to face.

I suddenly recalled that Nora was once a lover of Reginald brother of Booker father of Turner making this a very immoral family and delving into late Roman style decadence ala Nero etc. etc. Unless someone thinks they can rescue me from such a blatant and stupid move, I will delete what I thought was a brilliant twist of plotting and let others un-twist this twisted web we weave.

#96 There's a difference between swallowing fantastic story-elements and coping with narrative inconsistency. Previous swerves of plot have, by virtue of some effort, remained largely consistent with the foregoing narrative. I think I can work round the notion that Clio and Nora are old acquaintances and in some way rivals in attempting to coerce Turner into a hidden plot, and that Nora has upped the ante by "outing" Clio. I haven't yet worked out how to untangle the knotted family tree which threatens to strangle Turner in a web of illegitimate and incestuous cousinry.
Actually one of the hardest sections to work in is #38, which might imply Clio's ignorance of any deeper plotting.

I've deleted my last posting. I agree with #98, too convoluted and forced. If the parentage of Turner is also a thorn in our side I can edit #44 if needed. (Get rid of references to Hoover and Kennedy, make Turner's mother a Bolsover to stabilize his heritage, basically rid our hero of the narrative baggage I placed there so that it might free us up for a more flexible and plausible plot. I would rather change things than have everyone give up on the story. It seems we are down to only four participants (what happened to fogies?) I am having to much of a good time to be protective of my concepts of what is going on.

I think the Fogies are on vacation. Perhaps we should wait for their return to mediate as they are the initiators. I think deleting or going back to edit makes things more complicated and that part of the game is rolling with the punches, whatever they may be. I had thought that a solution to the last post might be to reveal Nora as an inveterate liar who delights in sowing confusion and putting people off-balance......

I think the Fogies are dealing with something more serious than vacation, so it may be hard to count on their return at any particular time.

I've been caught up with work myself. I've been just about to add something a couple of times, but I didn't want to add yet another hand to the mess until some of these issues got a little more settled. In particular, the narrative looked to be just about to lay out genealogy that others have worked so hard on untangling.

OK, after a bit of brain-racking during a boring car journey, I have come up with something which I hope may lead us forward a bit. I have absolutely no idea what it is about Turner's parents that could be so interesting, but I've left it hanging: please someone get it out in the open so we can get on with it! And please make it consistent with what we already have: having one deceitful character is straightforward; having practically all the characters lying to each other is manageable, if tiring to keep track of; but if the information from the omniscient narrator is untrustworthy then there's no hope of coherence: the enterprise will end up in the same disconnected hallucinogenic morass that it has taken such hard work to extract the "Haunted Soda" from.

I have no thoughts about Turner's ancestry. Anyone?

Well done BTW MyopicBookworm. It is I think important that we allow alliances to form rather than undercut them for instant plot twists. And I speak as someone who loves to insert a plot twist.

There is nothing inherently interesting about Turner's family tree unless someone wants to make it so. My feeling is that the more details are inserted, the more flexible the plot elements can be. Who would have thought that a tidy book-scout and a gasping Russian would evolve into who they have, or that Pierre would have become so active, while Zugzwang, the hand, Bharat Mookerjee have been ignored. It seems the original posts had plenty of frosting while waiting for a plot to develop. I think it is a good thing to have a detailed world to work with. It was my thought that Turner's parents may have shed light on why his role is central in the drama. Why would a book collecting minor occultist be suddenly thrust into the center of a power struggle (is he , like Frodo, an innocent and less corruptible, or naive and malleable to either cause?) Maybe we don't want a Lovecraftian, Tolkenesque struggle, but a manuscript yarn ala Borges, or a psychological ghost story, Victorian and suggestive rather than a blatant struggle between cosmic forces. But, all in all, this is a game, nd one of the joys is in trying to work out suprises, blemishes and contradictions. I think everyone has contributed to an interesting, even compelling plot with fascinating characters. So as far as I'm concerned the question now is why Clio would return so quickly after the confrontation in the library basement? It is not an insurmountable problem, only unexpected.

yes It is I think a mistake to worry about the dotting of an i or the crossing of a t.the point is to keep the impetus.

At this stage momentum and gusto may help prevent stasis. The more we stir things up, the more the bits and pieces will congeal, evolve, synthesize.

Glad we're heading somewhere. I'm on holiday, so I won't be contributing for the next few days. Then if the Fogies aren't back I'll post another coherentified thread on Sunday or Monday.

Post 83: Just came across something in the book I am reading about Crowley and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and couldn't resist throwing it in. Apparently William Butler Yeats and Algernon Blackwood were also members.

Yes, but in the taxi who is speaking to Turner first, Clio or Nora? Or does it matter?

Clio was speaking and then took over from herself. could you turn turn your Clio into Nora quartzite BTW some one mentioned a Norah a sentence or two back could this be corrected thanks?

Oops! fixed that.

Tongue in cheek fork in the road; Pierre may be insane, or the only truly sane one! I'll be in Gettysburg, Pa for the week and will not be posting. I look forward to getting back and seeing where this has all gone.

"Sticks and witches" Both zulu's and the welsh use this expression to describe heavy rain.

Rollright stones: a british megalithic complex

Edited for excessive punctuation. I wrote two sentences instead of one a schoolboy error.

Transeamus Latin for "let us go across"

you know some times I wonder if people take this entirely seriously.

The term ichor is often misused in fantasy contexts by authors trying to find a different word for "blood" or "ooze", to the point that it has become cliché. Author Ursula LeGuin, in "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie", calls the term “the infallible touchstone of the seventh-rate.
Wikipedia

Chtorr aliens in books by David Gerrold

>116 SimonW11: I know what you mean. I think the problem is that some people are taking it more seriously than others. As I have, on occasion, spent a matter of hours trying to work out how to proceed, I'm probably taking it too seriously; but it is hard to keep going on a coherent occult thriller when it keeps getting plastered with facetious references or knotted into near-inconsistency. Some people presumably don't 'get' the allusive, literary style of humour implicit in the pastiche form. Others are writing to a completely different agenda, veering off into science fiction or Mills and Boon romance. But actually, if you're taking it "entirely seriously", then you probably need to get a life: at least, that's what I'm telling myself. I'm also wondering whether I can spare the time to start writing a novel myself, using the kind of self-consciously verbose style which this group has evoked, and retaining the plot elements that I like while chucking out the ones I don't....

>116 SimonW11:, 118 I would think this would be hard to take seriously considering that 5 or 6 people who do not know one another are attempting to pull off a coherent tale without much collaboration or discussion. I for one think it is a place to explore lots of ideas, options, styles, genres, points of view, etc, the postings weeding out what is irrelevant to the others. Myopicbookworm, you have a definite talent for writing as you say a "self-consciously verbose style", a pastiche of the occult-literary form, and encourage you to explore this completly (I would certainly love to read it!). I have a penchant for Simmons and Philip K Dick; and even more so for A.E. van Vogt whose plot twists were capable of causing a type of vertigo in the reader, so I may be tossing in too much "pulp trash." I think the Hybrid we've created is at least fun to be a part of even if it may be full of references some of us may not be privy too. (Thats were the cliff notes help me the most.) If we want to collaborate here in the cliff notes on the plot as we write it that may clear up some flip-flop of plot; or we could team up, some of us writing the bad guys, the other the good. Personally, I like what we are doing and find the chaos stimulating. Are we writing a novel?, or are we brainstorming, exploring, bouncing ideas around, playing a game of sorts? By the way, who are "Mills and Boon"? If they write anything like what we are doing here I would love to look into it. I am impressed with all of you and hope you stick with this little jaunt into an alternate fictional world. Serious...no! Fun, creative, stimulating, frustrating, inspiring, confusing, complicated and sort of addictive! Long live Turner, Clio, Dora and the others. Please excuse my grammar, punctuation and spelling. Atrocious!

Mills and Boon the British equivalent of Harlequin Romance and nowadays owned by the same people. even now they have reputation for not writing "below the nipple line".

Its not that I dislike The Thing In The Library it keeps me on my toes but I feel like i am herding cats. I think that multiple writers add enough plot twists as of themslelves and try to only to produce them I know where they are going. what was it Van Vogt said "introduce a plot twist every thousand words" we are averaging one every three sentences. at the moment for instance as for giving the good guys to one side and the bad to another does any one know which are which?
Personally I am trying to add twist only when I see them as leeding towards a conclusion. Anyway the thing awaits lets keep this beast moving.

>120 SimonW11: you are correct about the plot changing every few sentences; although with these long convoluted sentences it seems like complete paragraphs at times. I find it hard to stay focused and thus I probably say far more than needs to be said in one posting. I will try to reign in my dash to the left-dash to the right style and let things evolve more slowly, but I agree keeping things from becoming static is important too. It seems to me that the Turner, Clio, Dora triumverate (sp?) is gravitating toward the good guys who may/maynot save the universe as they know it. There are elements in the story that have potential (the hand of Eustace, Pierre, Rhys the assassin, S'zwan, Susan Hill, the elemental)) that may be dropped into oblivion or may come roaring back with gusto. Again, I have no great fondness for my own ideas except that they spawn other ideas. I'll try to slow down and smell the roses (camphor), but if I am spoiling the goods let me know. I do find this to be obsessively fun and hope it lasts for pages and pages!

More discussion might be helpful. I'm beginning to feel the need of a chart indicating who's doing what and where they are doing it! This is, however, a very interesting diversion.

I'll probably be out of touch for a few days and am anticipating a few surprises when I return.

So what happened to the spindly brown woman?

>123 SimonW11: I believe she evolved into the assassin Rhys,(aka the walrus). Than again, who knows for certain. She wandered off thinking she had acquired the manuscript with the changing script, (of which I believe, Clio has in her possession.)
>118 MyopicBookworm: Myopicbookworm, which plot elements bother you the most; maybe we can agree on avoiding or lessening those elements. My impression is that Zugzwang is the central dark figure that is the focus of all this occult-fantasy-thriller-literary fabulation. He is the Sauron of our story; off stage and evil. I am more than willing to stop plotting and drift with the tide untill things gain a solid footing. Lets see if we can't collaborate our way toward coherence.
SimonW11, I am interested in Dora's sister, (she died in the pursuit of the book?) Tell me more.

Hmmm... well one should not say too much at once, anticipation and foreshadowing. are what makes pacing.
BTW I was not picking on whoever introduced marmite into the plot. When I said some people were not taking it seriously I said it because it made me laugh, personally when I am at a loss, waiting for an idea or an opportunity to put words into the right characters mouth, I try and step away from the magical, and describe the mundane, one of the things that I like about this is the sense of period. marmite does this. as does being able to identify the bistro by its menu.

i Wonder though was the marmite there for a reason? Have I carelessly crushed someones carefully planned storyline about the invasion of Burton-on-Trent to gain control of the brewers vat that produces the magic ingredient?
I might never know OTOH there will no doubt be later chances to introduce the theme and lo and behold the marmite scene will be revealed as foreshadowing.

Dramatis Personae II

(for earlier part please see #69)

Turner Page: our protagonist and chief narrative focalizer; a London book-collector with an interest in the occult, who through the machinations of his book-search agent, Clio Palimpsest, has been entangled in a monstrously complex network of interlocking plots, mainly relating to a powerful non-human creature called S'zawn the Undying, its own attempts to regain mortality, and the attempts to control it by a mystical cabal called The Brotherhood of the Unsquared Circle, led by Count Alois von Zugzwang. Currently in a Mediterranean landscape in some other plane, with Clio and Nora.

Great-Uncle Eustace Borlsover (deceased): a student of occult works which are said to have "overcome his humanity", though he died "physician-attended and certificate-attested" leaving a severed hand which wrote manically before precipitating its own apparent destruction and the death by fire of his nephew and heir, Uncle Adrian Borlsover. In fact, his hand is still extant, in the possession of Susan Hill, prisoner in the dungeons of Castle Zugzwang.

Miss Cliodora ('Clio') Palimpsest: book-search agent and adept of the occult arts. Tempting Turner with the apparent location of a rare book with marginalia by Aleister Crowley, she enticed him to Paris (pursued by a woman in black and a woman in brown), and then revealed that there was more to it, and that she was in fact in league with Nora Balzoff (the woman in black), both of them working in concert to deceive Rhys Bedortha (the woman in brown). She has removed a scroll with moving glyphs from the Paris Bibliotheque, and she and Nora have now taken Turner through a Portal into another place, in search of a Took.

Nora Balzoff: "notorious Russian Anarcho-Trotskyite agitator, rumor-monger, gossip-spreader, propagandist and agent of influence", dresses in black and is for reasons still obscure, known to some by the name of "Mrs Susan Hill". She was formerly mistress of Turner's Uncle Reginald, in an attempt to infiltrate Eustace Borlsover's occult collection. She has her own seven-year quest relating to the dungeons of Castle Zugzwang. For reasons, it would seem of mutual deceit and exploitation, she formed a temporary association with Bedortha, now dissolved.

'Rhys' Bedortha, assassin and adept of dark arts, initiate of the New Temple of Bastet (the Egyptian cat-goddess), a thin woman (also known, presumably ironically, as "the Walrus"), who dresses in brown, and has now discarded her earlier association with Nora and disappeared in Paris with a scroll which she tok from the Bibiotheque thinking it was the one with moving glyphs.

S’zawn the undying: a non-human creature (currently female, though possibly not so originally) who, some millennia ago, achieved some form of immortality, perhaps by exchanging its own mortality with the immortality of an elemental at the fall of Atlantis, but now seeks to return to mortality, possibly through exchanging its immortality with another being (which it may previously have attempted, or even succeeded but then had the exchange reversed somehow); currently lives, apparently in captivity under the power of the symbols and crystals of Thon, in another of Zugzwang's dungeons, and has a mystic affinity with one Susan Hill, forged in an arcane rite seven years ago. Now identified as a Took, a sterile hybrid of human and Thon, which according to Zugzawng should be attracted to the ichor of chtorr (which is actually Marmite).

Mrs Susan Hill: former lover of Great Uncle (currently possessing Eustace's undead hand) and of Count von Zugzwang, who deceived her into participating in some sort of sorcerous attempt to deal with S'zawn; she and Buchstab interrupted the ritual to steal away the book-bound elemental; she is currently confined for seven years in a dungeon by ...

Count Alois Zugzwang: (as yet off-stage) owner of a castle in Liechtenstein, presumed collector of esoterica and member of the occult Brotherhood of the Unsquared Circle; reputed holder of the book "Cogito ergo possum", and imprisoner of S'zawn the Undying and Susan Hill. He (and/or Susan Hill) may believe (wrongly) that he somehow conjured S'zawn out of or through Susan Hill's subconscious, but whatever this link is, it is more complicated than that. He appears to be the originator of the theory (presented by Nora) that the Thon are a race of non-human beings, who bred with humans to produce the Tooks, who (according to Zugzwang's theory) can slow time, and of whom S'zawn is one (and whom Turner had previously supposed to be merely legendary).

Bharat Mookerjee: an Anglo-Indian student of theosophy who spotted Aleister Crowley's bookplate in "Cogito ergo sum" in a London bookshop in around 1944. Has currently vanished from the plot.

an unnamed elemental of fire: immobilized for a thousand years, since S'zawn's last attempt at mortality, and hidden in Turner's library for some years until he inadvertently released it recently (a fact known to him but not to Nora and Clio), and mobilized by the cold in Turner's unheated residence to seek for heat (resulting in a fire which has just destroyed Turner's library). It seems that S'zawn will seek the intervention of the elemental in regaining mortality once more, and that the Brotherhood have realized this, and seek Turner because they have discovered that elemental is supposed to be in his library, sent there (for safekeeping) by...

Auslander Buchstab: a roving European book-hunter who, with Susan Hill, interrupted S'zwan's ritual and stole away the book containing the elemental, sending it to Turner in a shipment of Oriental books.

Pierre: devotee and agent of S'zawn, and apparently of great longevity, as he appears to have been as associate of John Dee (the Elizabethan astrologer) and Crowley (the early 20th century occultist). It is not clear whether he has been appointed by Zugzwang as S'zawn's jailer, or is visiting her secretly, but he has collected for her hairs from the heads of Turner, Clio, and Nora.

Booker T. Page (deceased): Turner Page's father: a hobbyist intrested in fringe science, who disappeared when Turner was 8.

Sardjini Bihar (deceased): Turner's mother, whom he never knew, except through her journal on matters mystical and occult.

Hi folks. Please keep a grip!! Confronted with "Dora" as a typo, we obliged ourselves to recognize it as an alternative name for Clio (aka Cliodora): please don't get her muddled with Nora.

S’zawn the undying: I am not sure if S'zwan is female or male, It may be that sex only has meaning to the mortal,or it may be that S'zawn is not the original, that S'zawn the undying is the name taken by whoever currently possess the trait of imortality.maybe nowadays S'zawn the undying is a being that was once say Haroun. or if female haroun's wife. hmm this seems unlikely if the theory that the ritual triggers a major catastophe is true.

Thanks for all the work MyopicBookworm.

We have been told that Tooks are sterile. Plausibly, S'zawn has no inherent sex, but takes on the gender of the last being with whom he/she/it managed to do a mortality swop. Or failed to do one: perhaps S'zawn is currently 'female' because of the interrupted rite seven years ago involving some kind of bonding/association/mind-meld with Susan Hill.

that was supposed to be a surprise!

>126 MyopicBookworm: MyopicBookworm, thanks for the time and effort it took to put together the Dramatis Personae II; you have been able to take a complex plot and present it with interconectivity.
>129 MyopicBookworm: I agree that S'zwan's femaleness is due to the failed association/disassociation with Susan Hill by the Count's manipulations.
How should our trio travel in this realm from place to place? Walk, animal transport (real or fantastical), teleportation, kidnapping and taken as hostages? I favor a portal approach since the space-time architecture is likeley to be askew and our travelers have already used one. It could be that Clio (who I get the feeling has been here before) knows where other portals may be located. Walking is fine with me (more to be seen), but I am open to any method.
'Purl' was a beer infused with Wormwood that Pepys mentions in his his diary.
The burning down of Turner's library is a blatant statement that you can't go home again. Experience changes us forever. When our tale is finished (if ever) it may be that the world Turner knew will no longer exist.

Sorry,

I have been out of the loop for several days due to the vagaries of third world internet connections. I didn't mean to be irreverant with the Marmite post--I was just casting around for something with which to lure tooks, and had rejected chocolate and orange marmalade when Marmite popped into my head (perhaps due to the marm-- association of marmalade) and for some reason it seemed just the thing.

ah of course, orange marmalade would have been totally wrong, you made the right descision as always
usual.
Simon

>132 quartzite: Marmite sounds great, with the added chance it may be dangerous to use ( with the 'ite' as in dynamite).
It is getting to the point that these cliff notes are as interesting as the story itself.

(In case anyone is wondering, the trick to avoiding repeated self-edits and gratuitous mistypings is to write your contribution in a flat file editor such as Notepad, and then cut-and-paste it into the "post a message" window.)

You have never tasted marmite have you jayqq1953?

>135 MyopicBookworm: thanks for the tip. I am not computer savy and that little trick should help me alot with editing my entries.
>136 SimonW11: have not tried marmite and should have googled it to see exactly what it was. I thought it was a make believe thing. Being a good ol' American southern boy (ie. redneck) has gotten me in trouble in this story more than once. Brown and gooey yeast based spread? Sounds the perfect bait for a Took. Does the idea of 'grits' have the same effect on the British psyche?
Someone once said it is better to be thought a fool than to open one's mouth (or to write postings in a public forum) and prove it! Thanks for the tips and my new knowledge of Marmite.

they have individiual portions in the canteen at work let me have your snail mail address and you will be able to find out first hand how it compares to ichor of the chtorr.

Simon

>137 jayqq1953: All descriptions of Marmite I've read sound like something I have no desire to actually taste. Although born and raised in the Mid-South, I never had any grits until I was in my twenties and while I have now acquired a taste for them, my first reaction to grits was 'Why would anyone eat this?'.

well as the ads say marmite you either love it or you hate it.
It has the strongest taste of all the yeast extacts i know and none of those exactly weak. there are some countries though where the local formulation is weaker than the Vegimite.

Vast legions of people tasted far to much marmite the first time they tried it and reacted just like they would if they tasted a spoonfull of say, hoisin or worcestershire sauce. by rejecting it. It has to be spread thin. If any of you want to try it then drop me your addy in a private comment and I will send you a portion. far better to assume that the individual pack is for three slices of toast rather than for one until you know what your doing and don't put any in your mouth that is not spread on something.

I am afraid that sending Marmite by mail to the U.S., in todays climate, could be construed as a chemical attack by agents of Uncertainty. There is a pub here in town called 'Penny Lane' that claims to have a few samples under lock and key, but they are for very special preferred customers. Maybe a bribe would work.

I'm stalling here. I have no idea why Clio and Nora want to attract a Took.
Poems from the Greek Anthology is a collection of texts and translations from classical Greek (not the drama collection which came up when I simply touchstoned "Greek Anthology"). Kalamata olives are big brown ones from the Peloponnese. The "ergotic tincture" is an oblique reference to LSD.

I thought Tooks were a figment of the counts imagination.

i promise to post tommorrow. sorry I feel its my fault we lost momentum. thanks for picking up the slack.

>143 SimonW11: I haven't exactly worked out which parts of Zugzwang's stated theory are true and which might be false, but Clio seems to have stated that Tooks are real, and that Zugzwang believes them to be attracted to ichor/Marmite. I may have misread that, if you meant to imply that Zugzwang believes Tooks to be real but Clio doesn't: but in that case, why would she be waving a jar of Marmite? And Zugzwang has certainly got something unhuman in his dungeon, though he may be mistaken as to its racial origins, or to the exact nature of the properties/talents of Tooks (if they exist).
(Has someone been reading Philip Pullman? The scenario has apparently lurched in the direction of His Dark Materials!)

I thought she was waving the jar of marmite because Zugzwang believed in Tooks and she was using this to gain entry. I did not think Marmite was effective as a Took lure.
Hmm I had the impression that to be consistent a narrative in which Tooks existed would mean that the the thing in the cellar was a took. And I thought that Narrative consistency also implied that S’zawn the undying was the thing in the cellar. and Since Tooks are creatures from another dimension and S’zawn has earthly origins these are not compatible. Time to Go and separate reported speech from the narrators voice with some care I think or we are going to end up with a David Lynch script.

In answer to Turner's question "Tooks exist?" (#94) Clio firmly states that they do (#95).
We are told that Zugzwang believes in Tooks (#93): in this he is therefore correct. We are told that he thinks they are attracted by the the ichor of the chtorr (#96), though Clio knows that Marmite can be used as a substitute, though "much worse" (in what way?). Clio also says quite clearly (#93) "here we may find an ally... let us look for a Took". So clearly Clio believes that Tooks exist and are attracted by Marmite. (I don't see how Marmite could "gain entry" to anywhere (>146 SimonW11:), unless there is some mechanism whereby having a Took with you may allow you passage somewhere.)
As for the origins of S'zawn, Nora has placed them in ancient Atlantis (#82); Pierre's internal monologue (#84) seems to corroborate this, but also to suggest that the Count may be unaware of S'zawn's true origins.
This is hard to reconcile with #93, in which the Count is stated to have brought a Took called S'zawn to our plane, although sleight of hand may allow this to be a false belief of the Count's. It seems hard to ascribe coherent motivation to the Count if he is seriously mistaken about the nature of S'zawn.
I therefore think it established that (a) Tooks do exist; (b) Clio believes them to be attracted to Marmite; (c) since Marmite is "much worse" than the ichor of chtorr, the ichor may also exist; (d) at least according to Nora's account, the Count thinks that S'zawn is a Took; but it seems that he must be mistaken; (e) Clio thinks that a Took may be an ally against the Count.
A remaining question: if the Count thinks S'zawn is a Took, what does he want from it? If he doesn't know S'zawn's origins, what was he attempting with Susan Hill?
It is getting a bit complicated if there are now two explanations of what is going on with S'zawn, one based on the Count's partly false beliefs about Tooks, and the other based on the reportedly true tale of mortal/immortal origins. I think people are still not reading carefully enough the existing plot structures before launching out on further and potentially inconsistent "explanations".

PS It is just about possible to force consistency by assuming that Tooks (even if the Count is wrong about their origin) exist and mingled (known or unrecognized) among the population of Atlantis, perhaps as a caste of magic-workers, and that one of them (S'zawn) then performed the rite which endowed it with the recurrent immortality problem, but also transformed it into a more bestial form. It then moved between planes, and was lured or forced back to our own world by the Count. Possibly Great Uncle Eustace (remember him?) was attempting the same transformation as S'zawn, before he was eliminated by the Brotherhood, either because he stepped out of line, or because the experiment went horribly wrong. I had assumed that the Count's aim (either in league with the Brotherhood, or as a deception of which they are unaware) was to gain S'zawn's immortality for himself, but this would not be plausible if he was ignorant of its true origins and merely thought that S'zawn was a time-slowing alien (in which case, what does the Count want?).

because Clio says things doses not make it so she is not the narrator. she can be wrong or can she can lie. besides i modified that yes with an "or so the count believes." casting doubt on her entire utterance.
but that marmite is much worse than any imaginary substance is a firm belief of a large portion of the British population. and says nothing about existence of either Tooks or Chtorr.

but things move on Tooks exist.time to lay into the only thread that counts.

Under the influence of Joyce Cary, Rabelais and Lovecraft, but not Pullman who I have not yet read. I am trying to be descriptive of place and less helter-skelter with plot ideas.
>146 SimonW11: I am thinking that Tooks are not from another dimension, but are the sterile offspring of a Thon and a Human and have the ability to move between realities and slow time. The Count is interested in how Took's do this (I was thinking meditation with aid of Thon crystals or maybe even an out of body experience like a shaman.) S'zwan (if a Took, and I think it is) would be of earthly origins but capable of dimensional travel and time slowing. Pierre seems to think she/it was possibly worshipped as a goddess/queen/priestess (probably in Atlantean times) and came to grief either from the Thon angry at her exalted relations with humans, or as a result of her misuse of dimensional travel for devilish purposes.
>147 MyopicBookworm: I think that Pierre is afraid that the Count does know the true origin of S'zawn, but Pierre is more afraid of Rhys the Walrus because she is working for someone who wants to close the portals that are being used by the Thon. Pierre thinks these things because I am thinking he was told this by S'zawn (who may be lying).
>149 SimonW11: Here is my thought, confusing as it is... S'zawn is a Took as old as the Atlantean age when it may have been exalted by Humans as a female diety of sorts. Pierre has been told this by S'zawn. The Count knows S'zawn is a Took because of his esoteric studies and somehow, maybe because of things Eustace and Susan Hill had learned in their studies. I am not sure what to do with the Susan Hill character. I am rambling because I am trying to tie it into a neat package and can't yet do it. But I agree, Tooks are real. Whether or not S'zawn is one is still up for grabs.
It could be the ally that clio wants is not the Took. The Took may be the key to the ally; maybe a Thon is what she is after. Marmite gets Took, Took gets Thon. Or, if Thons like to mate with humans, maybe Clio has Nora along for some unknown purpose. It seems like we are getting closer to a cohesive structure that will work for everyone.

Ouch! The elemental has freed the Took before Clio and Nora could get their hands on it. I bet they are dazed and confused. Time to sit down and have some Marmite on toast (or better yet, a Black and Tan).
It seems the Elemental has got our attention now-it was tired of the periphery-and is working to prevent Clio and Dora from accomplishing their task (whatever that is). Enjoy the weekend everyone.

>150 jayqq1953: Don't worry about not having a neat package: it would be unlikely to survive the development of the plot. I think the main thing is to have some general explanation in mind for each step of the plot (even if you haven't made it clear to the rest of us what that explanation is), but not to tie it down to so much detail that it will hamper the development of the story by those who don't have access to your background scenario. I had some neat packages, but they've gone down the tubes (for example, setting up Turner and Nora as allies against Clio acting for the Count, or a clear set of motivations for the Count based on the immortality of S'zawn). The Took thread takes a very different line from where I thought I/we were going, but we've got it now, so I'll try and go with it.

I am not clear on whether or not the Thon crystals were destroyed or left behind by the release of the Took. I believe they are sitting on the ground, but I don't want to have someone pick them up only to find they don't exist any longer.

They were left them behind. Isn't it clear? sorry.

>154 SimonW11: thanks. I am a bit gun shy about throwing any more wrenches into the works (the Tooks pushed things a bit; A nod to Peregrine Took from LOTR). I thought possibly the crystals were destroyed and I did not want to embarass myself by having one of our characters scoop them up. (They could be damaged though?).

The stranger was about to scoop them up and run but I was cut off mid edit by LT so I leave their fate to you.

Leamus/ from The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

I confess I have been reading a graphic novel, "The Incal" which has quite a bit of spider imagery and symbolism. It seemed like a way to keep the Thon crystals out of the hands of our heroes (at least for awhile). I was thinking something as vital as these crystals (whatever they are for?) might be worth a scruffle or two over, what with a unbound elemental on the loose and other what-nots acreep; and how does it know what is going on in this plane? Telepathy, visions, sixth sense, informant?
How badly hurt is Nora? Does Clio need to get aid for her and then look for Turner? My mind goes in a thousand directions at once (I may need medication!)

Well, splitting up the main characters is a good, bold stroke, and will require more precise mental gymnastics from the authorial cooperative.

By the way, I thought Turner's disappearance sufficiently dramatic to merit the conclusion of Chapter Three in the coherent version (The Thing in the Manuscript). Perhaps hailelib would consider adding:

Chapter Four

at the head of #112?

Has anyone thought of a really good place for Turner to have disappeared to?

Hmm the narrative has abandoned Turner for the girls, intersting.

Re: 159

I inserted 'Chapter Four', but...

Is this also a good place to start a new thread or should we continue on for a while?

new thread at about message 200 I think thats about when the dial up people start to notice delays earlier if we get illustrations:^)

Actually I'm already seeing a slight delay. By about 150 (if there continue to be a number of long sentences) the delay will be quite noticable.

Then go for it.

OK. Further contributions should be posted in "Part Two", but as the coherent thread "The Thing in the Manuscript" has only reached 11 messages, I'll continue compiling the text there unless anyone thinks there will be a technical problem with the size.

any idea what time of day it is late evening?

Late evening sounds good. It has been a long tough day for our ladies (and for Turner too.) Does anyone have any idea how many days since our parable started? I am thinking this could be the end of day 4 but I may be missing ques in the script that gives a more definite time frame. (for all I know I could be way off and a week or two has gone by, or maybe only 24 hours.)

How much time did they spend traveling? And is time the same in that other plane? Anyhow they must be nearing the end of a really eventful 'day'.

>50 myshelves: in the story thread. Pierre found Turner via the "psychic strand" he had linked to Turner's silver cigarette case. I have assumed Turner still has this case with him and Pierre has found him on the boat thus. I am also assuming that Pierre has some way of traveling hither and yon quickly (maybe a trick or two he has learned from S'zawn?)... hailelib, thanks for giving the good luck charm to Turner. He needs it.

Was it something I said?

Nahh sorry Busy few days

Yeah, me too: life has been manic.

Happy Spring Break, Passover, Easter to all!

We'll be back eventually. Meanwhile, is it time for Notes, Volume II?

If only I could get internet access for longer than 15 minutes at a time....