Story Notes for Retcon #4
Some chat and whatnot about "While Unbeknownst to the Rest, the Woman in the Yellow Dress Was Also a Time Traveler"
I would like to think that if you’re reading this, you know about Retcon: the series of short stories I am publishing concurrently with these essays and blog posts. Honestly, the simultaneity has caused more confusion than I would have expected: there are two sets of writing, nonfiction and fiction; the nonfiction appears here, online (and, if you subscribe, in your email too); the fiction is being published as ebooks. The nonfiction is free; the fiction costs money (but less than $1 a story). And so on.
And I am also using this newsletter—particularly in the off-weeks (the weeks in which I publish bricolage posts and the like, and not the more substantial essays I put out in the on weeks)—to talk about, and promote, the fiction.
So today I am going to talk a bit about and around the fourth story in my story mosaic, which just came out six days ago, and is titled "While Unbeknownst to the Rest, the Woman in the Yellow Dress Was Also a Time Traveler". There aren’t a lot of spoilers in this post, but if you want make sure not to be spoiled, you should go read the story first. It’s available at my web page, and also at Amazon, Amazon UK, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and Smashwords. So get it, read it, and then we’ll talk about it.
Everyone back? Great. Let’s go.
Lupine Inspirations
Let me start with the title. As people who know me know, I am a huge fan of Gene Wolfe,1 who wrote brilliant SF which is often enriched, and occasionally even organized around, puzzles and mysteries. I won’t say that this is my Gene Wolfe story (as Wolfe himself said that “St. Brandon” was his R. A. Lafferty story)—in too many ways it isn’t like him at all (tone, subject matter, etc). But the puzzles, which I usually keep to a minimum, raise their head here, and I think that is Wolfe’s influence.
Well, years ago I thought of writing a wolvish story in which one of the puzzles was bannered in the title, without being explicitly solved in the text. I wrote down a title almost identical to the one I ended up using (the original version was “While Of Course the Woman in the Blue Dress Was Also a Time Traveler”). This was, to be clear, years before I began gathering the various threads that have become Retcon into one single cord. And when I was laying out the structure for Retcon’s first movement, I realized that if I were ever going to write such a story, the time was now.2 And I’m glad I decided to do this: the existence of the title, and the mystery it implied, pushed me off the easy path which the first three stories could easily have led to, and took me to a richer place. The series is better for it.
There is one other sign of a lupine influence in the story: the epigraph.
A man named C. R. L. Fletcher wrote a book called A School History of England (1911), for which Rudyard Kipling wrote a series of 22 poems included in the text. (It is, apparently, precisely as imperialistic as one might expect such a book to be.) One of those poems is called “The Dawn Wind” and is subtitled “The Fifteenth Century”; it comes at the end of Chapter 6, called “The End of the Middle Ages: Richard II to Richard III, 1377–1485”. The poem goes like this:
At two o'clock in the morning, if you open your window and listen, You will hear the feet of the Wind that is going to call the sun. And the trees in the shadow rustle and the trees in the moonlight glisten, And though it is deep, dark night, you feel that the night is done. So do the cows in the field. They graze for an hour and lie down, Dozing and chewing the cud; or a bird in the ivy wakes, Chirrups one note and is still, and the restless Wind strays on, Fidgeting far down the road, till, softly, the darkness breaks. Back comes the Wind full strength with a blow like an angel's wing, Gentle but waking the world, as he shouts: "The Sun! The Sun!" And the light floods over the fields and the birds begin to sing, And the Wind dies down in the grass. It is day and his work is done. So when the world is asleep, and there seems no hope of her waking Out of some long, bad dream that makes her mutter and moan, Suddenly, all men arise to the noise of fetters breaking, And every one smiles at his neighbour and tells him his soul is his own!
In context, not too subtle a metaphor, although the historical/nationalist interpretation would hardly be obvious if it were published on its own.
Gene Wolfe, in his aforementioned3 masterpiece The Book of the New Sun, used an epigraph for each of the four volumes. (None of them are by him, although he did not ascribe the first two; the reason for this can be found in an essay titled “Hands and Feet”, where he expresses his dismay that readers assumed he wrote them.) And the epigraph to the fourth and final4 volume is the first stanza of “The Dawn Wind”, which I’ll requote in case you’re one of those people (of whom I too am sometimes one) who tend to skim over longer block quotes:
At two o'clock in the morning, if you open your window and listen, You will hear the feet of the Wind that is going to call the sun. And the trees in the shadow rustle and the trees in the moonlight glisten, And though it is deep, dark night, you feel that the night is done.
But I tend to have a somewhat cynical mind, and some time ago—like the title, this was long before I had begun to gather the various ideas and impulses5 that became Retcon into a single (by which I mean multiple) work—I wrote what I originally thought of as an answer-poem, or perhaps a parody, to Kipling’s stanza. When I decided it would fit well as the epigraph to "While Unbeknownst to the Rest, the Woman in the Yellow Dress Was Also a Time Traveler", I thought it over, and decided it was best understood as a corollary. So here is the epigraph of my story:
At two in the afternoon, if you still your running and listen, You can hear the hiss of the wind that is blowing away the sun. And the trees in the harsh glare wither, and the eyes of the predators glisten, And though it is hot and bright, you feel that the night has come. — Corollary to Kipling
And while the direct nod is to Kipling, the epigraph is also meant as an indirect nod to Wolfe.
Additional Illustrations
I have, of course, been creating the covers for my stories—the cover images have been their own little artistic side-project which I have enjoyed doing, and which I will probably write about later. But for the first time I strongly considered using images within the story too. Neither were necessary—at most they were suggestive, and mostly they were just a bit of decoration. Which is why, in the end, when I thought of a reason not to use them, I decided not to.
The reason why, incidentally, was copyright. I find it hard to understand reprinting them as anything but fair use, and am dubious about the copyright status of them at all; but I was afraid that publisher’s automatic systems would flag the book as a possible copyright violator if I included them, and since they weren’t that important, I took them out.
So I’ll show you here.
The first image is simply a placemat, which used to be found in nearly every Chinese restaurant (in America) that one would go to. So of course in 1979, when the story takes place, they’re in use, and the characters mention them briefly. The placemats aren’t in as widespread use today as they once were, but I imagine that Boomers and GenXers, and possibly older millennials, will remember them well. And they are easy enough to google, it turns out. Here it is:
I thought it would be a nice touch to drop it into the story, but, alas, felt compelled to change my mind. If you want, imagine it as coming right after the section called “Of Course She Was Really a Monkey”.
The second image, or set of images, I thought of using were images of fortune cookies. I, of course, included fortune cookies in the story; what is a Chinese restaurant meal without fortune cookies?6 So I thought that I could use an automatic meme-maker over the various fortunes given in the story, and include them all at the end—as a back cover image, more or less.
One problem here was that while there are a lot of images of fortune cookies that sites will crudely impose text on (i.e. on the image, but not on the slip of paper) only one does anything like a halfway decent job of putting it on the paper in the image. And, of course, there was the copyright issue. Still, here are three samples I thought of using:
Honestly, I am not entirely sorry I didn’t get to use them. While I like the idea of instantiating the fortunes with the images of actual slips of the familiar paper, and placing them among the crumbles of cookies—I think it would give the story a nice little grounding—those images are not quite what I would want. My last idea, in fact, was not to use all of those, but simply to use only one of the final four as a closing image. It was that that was canceled by copyright concerns. If I had the time, I would print up actual slips of paper, buy some cookies, and make a still life that would seem more realistic than the automated outputs of repetitious memes. But I did not find the time, and so have let it go.7
I don’t know that any of the images would have made a huge difference, but in the ideal version they might be in there. You are encouraged, at any rate, to imagine them in, if it improves the story for you.
Inside Jokes
When I was putting together the ebook of the first story in Retcon, I put in, as is standard practice, the note that “This is a work of fiction. Names, characters and events are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.” (I wish I knew to whom to credit that overused—and often flat-out false—bit of prose.) I felt I ought to include it, for tradition’s sake if nothing else, but I felt silly, as I always do when using official language or filling out official forms. The first thing I did was to add several things to the “names, characters, and events”, but I had seen that done before. So I then added something else at the end:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, incidents, minerals, and mysterious physics are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Er, except for the tea being cold. That was taken straight from real life, dammit.
Once I had done one, of course, it became a tradition, or a sub-tradition, or at any rate my own spin on one. So the one on "While Unbeknownst to the Rest, the Woman in the Yellow Dress Was Also a Time Traveler" reads as follows:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, incidents, minerals, and restaurants are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Except for the throwing of the salt and pepper shakers, which is either real, or at the very least is a real family legend.
And that last sentence is, in fact, true.
The final bit of paratext that I am trying to play around with in Retcon are the “About the Author” photos. These I may say more of later, so I will simply note that they are all self-portraits, and that I am changing them in each installment. This is the one I used in the fourth ebook:
I don’t know if they add anything—I am a better writer, I think, than photographer, although I do enjoy the latter—but they are fun, and since the photos are traditional, I figured I might as well play with them a bit.
I hope all this has whetted your appetite—at least for some Kung Pao Chicken if not (hopefully) for the story. I have deliberately not said much about the story itself—just the bits and pieces that surround (or, in the case of the images, don’t surround) it. But I hope you will give the story a try. After all, you can’t live on just appetizers. The scallion pancakes may be tasty, but you really ought to try the main dish.
Once again, the story is available at my web page, and also at Amazon, Amazon UK, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and Smashwords.
For anyone who’s not read Gene Wolfe, there are two starting places I’d recommend: if you want just a taste, get The Best of Gene Wolfe, a superb collection (with the added benefit that the second story was expanded into another one of his best books, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, so if you like the Best-Of collection you can go finish that one; or, if you want to dive in head first, go straight to his masterpiece, The Book of the New Sun (of which the first half is collected as Shadow & Claw.
It’s not unusual for me to start with a title. I wrote a historical novel (which is completed, and which I hope to publish some day) which began with the title: The Nobody’s Wife’s Daughter’s Apprentice’s Tale.
Well, “aforementioned” if you’re reading the footnotes. Have you been reading the footnotes? Well, obviously yes, since you’re here reading this. (But have you forgotten the suspenders?)
Of the novel The Book of the New Sun, that is. The book has a sequel, The Urth of the New Sun, with its own epigraph.
“…even a very short story normally requires more than a single idea; and that anything longer (say, over 25,000 words) is almost certain to fail unless it stands upon at least two impulses, or inspirations, or whatever you want to call them.” —Gene Wolfe, “Helioscope” (reprinted in The Castle of the Otter, reprinted in Castle of Days).
What would they be? Actually Chinese, that’s what. Fortune cookies are an American thing—see Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune-Cookie Chronicles. There is an amusing anecdote about the translation of Douglas Hofstatder’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach into Chinese, and finding it really hard to even find a Chinese term for fortune cookie, as is recounted in David Moser’s article “Sze-chuan Pepper and Coca-Cola: The Translation of Gödel, Escher, Bach into Chinese”:
A bigger problem was finding the term for 'fortune cookie' in Chinese — none of the translators knew it. The person to ask would be a waiter or waitress in a Chinese restaurant in, say, San Francisco's Chinatown, but the word they would give us would most likely be in Cantonese, not Mandarin. We ultimately found out the answer — qianyûbîng 签语饼, 'written-words cookie' — by asking someone who had worked for a time in a Chinese restaurant in America.
Moser adds a footnote saying “A woman named Nancy Anderson is now marketing 'Genuine American Fortune Cookies' in Hong Kong and is apparently doing a good business. The Chinese, she says, eat the cookie first and then look at the fortune — exactly the opposite of the American way.”
Specifically, I suppose, I have let it go here.)