ooooo noooooo ~ structural concerns abound ~

i should be writing, but after suffering through class all day and carrying on fun discourse with faynudibranch on the subject of silly Looey, i just want to eat ice cream and be mindless for an hour in order to decompress.

some quick notes: was playing around with titles and came up with An American Terrorist: A novel of the King Villain of Them All ~ or something of that sort of bloated ilk. it's timely ~ that's for sure.

i also thought about restructuring the book using Poppet's summation as the framework on which to hang the rest of the story. this for two reasons: it's a long freakin' summation. it would be hard to edit because it's pretty carefully crafted, and it would sorta be a shame to chop it anyway. no chance of me "adapting" it, i don't think. that would be heresy.

so i don't think that'll work except in a very pontillist way. and even there that's problematic because not everything Poppet says is necessarily 100% accurate and i'd like to make a point that Poppet's construct is not historical truth (and i'm not belittling Poppet ~ he had little to go on and was trying to make a point ~ all's fair in life and death court cases).

i was trying to (reinvent the wheel as usual) come up with a structure that could serve as some sort of weird parallel text format in which we have the summation running alongside the events of the trial and maybe the events of the day of the execution (can anyone say triptych?). i don't really know what that would "look" like, but it sounds fabulous in my head.

i also solved the problem with Rev. Razor's sermon by just hacking it to pieces. I mean the point is to get at the condemnatory things he says about the assassination, so all the rest of his warbling is just filler really and i dunna need it.

and so the writing: i want to be very careful about making stuff up. much as i am so tempted to write a scene in which Eckert (formerly Mr. Eck) and Dana (formerly Scully) "interrogate" the prisoner with a brickbat, the truth is we have no idea what happened behind closed doors. i feel i have to be more fair than to overtly villify anybody in this. if Eckert says he questioned the prisoner, then he can question him (and maybe i can twist that a little to offer the suggestion of the threat of violence), but i'd prefer not to be overt about it. i mean, half the fun of conspiracy theory is conjecturing about what in the world is going on! this stuff wouldn't fascinate us as much if all the questions were answered ~ and that would be a nice experience for the reader, i think: to let them draw their own conclusions.

and lastly, a few words about pennsylvania dutch: i always wanted lewis fletcher's wife amy (who is from bedford county, pennsylvania) to have a slight pennsylvania dutch accent. but trying to give her that dialect proved to be too hard (too much a caricature ~ for some reason i dinna feel comfortable with it). giving lewis a strange sort of mid-atlantic inclination was somehow a lot easier.

well now i'm faced with Mr. Hanty's accent and we know two things about it historically: it was apparently pretty bad and he was apparently self-conscious of it. as a result he didn't like public speaking (pretty funny for someone who served two terms as governor).

suddenly Hanty becomes unintentional comic relief. especially when you add to this that he was a very tall man (a virtual loomer) and tended to skeer the bejeesus out of people ~ particularly Annie, who fainted in the hallway afer one court session. knowing she was completely terrified by him, Hanty asked H.K. Douglas (who was then technically a prisoner himself) to carry her into another room. it's a funny incident (under unfunny circumstances), but says a lot about Hanty's softer side. i am totally endeared to Douglas for the way he tells it.*

anyway, i am tempted to make Hanty's accent a source of teasing betwixt him and maybe Colonel McCall, but that feels like maybe it's taking too many liberties. i need to read some "real" historical fiction and see how writers handle this sort of thing in a way that i can stomach.



Thomas T. Eckert, compatriot of Charles Dana.
Czar NastyOwlFace kept him from going
to Ford's the night of the shooting,
which has led to endless speculation.
anyway i look at it, it's weird and this
guy strikes me as a bruiser and a liar
(so much for objectivity, huh?).

* what makes this incident even more touching is the letter Annie later wrote to Hanty thanking him for his kindness when everyone else had been so horrible to her throughout the ordeal. powerful stuff, that.