i‘m trying to seep myself in the speech of Leicester.  In the story as it’s shaping up to be, speech is a counterpoint, a counter-theme if you will, to the heft and weight of money.  Not a heavy-handed one, I hope, and not anything more than a few notes.  And so I’m reading, and listening, and thinking.

This lead me to D.H. Lawrence’s dialect poems.  I read them aloud, not that my accent is any good, but because I wanted to try to catch the rhythm of it.  And I tried to hear it with my heroine’s ears, tried to think what it would make her feel, brainstorm what she would think of the sound of it all:

Tha come ter say good-bye ter me,
Tha wert frit o’ summat.
Tha come ter ha’ finished an’ done wi’ me
An’ off to a gel as wor younger than me,
An’ fresh and more nicer for marryin’ wi’—
Yi, but tha’rt frit o’ summat.

Isn’t that lovely?  That poem–The Drained Cup–is actually a bit racy.

  And there’s tons more.

This book almost frightens me.  A few days ago, I thought I knew basically what happened in it.  And most of that . . . still happens.  But it’s turned into something completely different.  When I’m driving in the car, I start imagining scenes, and suddenly they’re full-blown in my head, and I can see it all, see how it connects, see that yes, that’s exactly what has to happen after that.  And my hands feel like they’re burning, and nothing will do but that I get to a computer and start writing in a frenzy.  It’s absolutely insane.  It’s like the whole thing is in there, just clamoring to come out, and if I just had the time to do it, if I didn’t have to sleep or eat or do work or any of that, it would write itself.  Except for the fact that I like sleeping and eating, it almost would.

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