Prologue, Introduction, Justification ... you know, that bit at the beginning

I’ve been wanting to write this story – these stories – for years, ever since receiving the first kernel of the story of Abélard and Héloïse. I resisted, reckoning that love as subject matter was little more than seriously overblown cliché. I mean, how do you avoid the cheesiness? How do you say something that hasn’t already been said?

Maybe you don’t. Maybe you never do.

•••••

Nevertheless, i held out on writing what is today Abélard & Helena, divesting energy into post-apocalyptic science-fiction novels (o, you’ll be seeing that one soon enough), rewriting post-apocalyptic dramatic works for the stage, and crafting many a column on American football and European basketball.

Inspiration comes more slowly as age creeps into your brain, but it does arrive; you can milk it if you’re listening above the relentless brain of noisy information all around. Maybe it takes a perfect storm.

Further back than i care to remember or admit i imagined a writing method called “spontaneous plot.” In graduate school, my classmates and i were taught about “emotional form.” Newspapers, print media, the beloved novel today are all taking economic hits, with fewer and fewer reading serious works. And then, there’s the internet.

•••••

Inspiration: To write a serialized novel – you know, like Charles Dickens and some of those 19th-century Russian scribes – online, offering me the opportunity to craft these lonely ideas into pleasing prose. With links and pictures! All of it with the implied deadline of a hungry readership (that’s you) wanting a daily fix.

Plus, the online form is perfect for those so so many who feel they have no time to devote to sitting and reading a bit of proper novel. Whether the writing’s good or bad, the readership (that’s you) can’t say you don’t have the time...

•••••

Some parts of Abélard & Helena claim a genesis ten years old; at least one fragment germinated twenty years ago, but everything you read herein (hereon?) is new material. Despite the freedom allowed within the domain of Spontaneous Plot – to be explained in these pages, probably around chapter 31 – the entire storyline has been planned. There will be no “I’m just writing it, i don’t know where it’s going” from this writer.

If you’d like to comment either just to let me know you’re out there or if you find some egregious error in text, please write me at Abelard@37.com. Alternatively, if you’re down with Blog.com already, you can comment on these webpages. Though i won’t undertake any major rewriting until the entire novel is finished, i’ll correct typos and the occasional matter of fact (hey, it is fiction, after all) in previous entries.

•••••

Abélard & Helena is about love. It’s also about philosophy and God and passing your prime and conservative talk radio and sex and Mark Twain and Woody Allen and et cetera, but mostly i hope it’s a good novel.

Love,

Os Davis