No ugly stuff today, quite the contrary: dazzling beauty. Pity that I can't share much because there's not much on the Net. I've already introduced
here my novel about Italian Mediaeval painters Altichiero and Iacopo Avanzi. They have been nagging me for close to 13 years and now they want me to finish their novel, of course while I am writing ANOTHER novel, or it isn't fun enough. So now I have to juggle horses and dragons and kings and walls and I thought that dividing the journals could help. Yay, TWO literary journals totally impossible to understand for those who are not acquainted with my novels! This journal is my personal birthday present to myself; I recycled "The Words of Wyrd" (I'm good these days, I whine in the first person) and stuck those posts somewhere in 2005 in the "Heart" journal. I hope this gets me unstuck in other ways, so I'll get back to scribey stuff.
The Dragon is a massive work in progress, what with all the Ravenna stuff growing around it, and the continuing storyline even after the end of the novel itself, as I chart Aelfwine's life at the court. The Horse wants to be finished. A sort of closure. It's a novel about beauty and sorrow, detailing the last eight years of Iacopo's life. This is not a spoiler - well, it is, but there's no way I can tiptoe around this: yes, Iacopo dies in the end, he dies young of an incurable disease, and, what's worse, he knows it from the beginning. And he tells nobody. (I have to find a believable way for this to happen in a Mediaeval setting when medical knowledge was not very advanced.)
It sounds like a novel that nobody would want to touch with a barge pole. Actually, it's a story of the things that help Iacopo overcome this horror: love, friendship, beauty. And of the richness that he leaves behind in the hearts of those who knew him. I'm even toying with the idea of actually letting the reader know in the prologue (set a few years in the future) that Iacopo is long dead, so that the issue in the novel won't be to discover what his problem is, but to appreciate his life as it is.
I wonder whether I'm trying to say goodbye to the sad and desperate part of me by accepting that it gave me a lot of sorrow but it also was indeed a beloved and beautiful part of me. I don't have many other explanations for this story suddenly coming to the fore beside the complicated, political and after all optimistic Dragon. Aelfwine is me, contradictory, but alive and growing. Iacopo is me with my fears, wanting only to be left alone with lots of walls for his horses. I'm also thinking of tweaking the final scene. As it is now, Altichiero reflects that he has been incomplete after Iacopo's death. I'd like to emphasize that Iacopo became a part of him, making him complete in a different way. Even if his last works miss Iacopo's hand, their art will be forever fused together.
This is tough and requires a whole lot of research, even harder and different from the Dragon. So little is known about these painters, and so much has been said. If I manage to be ambiguous with the Dragon, because after all I describe a young Theodoric, far from the tragedies of the end of his reign, and so I can somehow refrain from passing judgement, here I must take a stand among all the critics who commented Altichiero and Avanzi's art. I hint at the fact that Altichiero considers Iacopo as better than he is; I choose to accept the theory that Iacopo died while painting the Lupi Chapel; I most certainly don't see them ultimately at odds as some theories go. But the very fact that there are so many hypotheses about them, who was the best, who was the most important in the workshop, who was whose master, who died when and why, who painted what (at least today there seems to be agreement on this). But that's just the point of it all: you cannot have one without the other... and that's exactly what my Iacopo wanted as a memorial.
