In the process of trying to persuade my various software – including my hacked version of iTunes (I’m still running OS8.6) – to play MIDI files, I came across my collection of music associated with my current WIP: working title, Graveyards of Nereis:

• Sir Michael Tippett, A Child of Our Time
• The soundtrack from Gladiator
• The soundtrack from Alexander Nevsky, especially the alto solo “Field of the Dead”
• The “Dona nobis” from the recent Henry V

My original conception of the novel was both darker and more heroic than the way it is turning out. I am at the “sculpture under tension” phase – bits of it springing free and thwacking me – where I am trying to force into a shape and it is resisting. Whether I am pushing against something fundamental in its structure, trying to force the story (and, even more, the characters’ final destinies) athwart itself (themselves), or whether I simply do not have my technique right, is something I can only trust will become clear after the first draft. It would be a more powerful story if I let it become a tragedy. But I cannot yet see how to prevent the tragedy from bringing about a closure that would distort the rest of the story I want to tell.