Were there other titles to MASTER OF RODS AND STRINGS? Strings, Rods, Blood, and Bones was a previous title, and you can find that out on the internet for one contest—I submitted an excerpt. The earliest working title I discovered in a file recently was the rather silly “Day of the Puppets,” which was just a way of brainstorming some story details in notes before I wrote the first draft.
What is the date you began writing this piece of fiction and the date when you completely finished the piece of fiction? I started the story in August of 2013 (Bottom Left) and made some final edits in June of 2021 (Bottom Right) as the editor and I cleaned up the ARC for final publication.
Where did you do most of your writing for this fiction work? And please describe in detail. And can you please include a photo? The majority of the writing took place in my apartment in Bowling Green, Ohio when I was in the MFA Fiction Writing program from 2012-2014. I used my office on campus too.
What were your writing habits while writing this work- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? Most of the writing took place on a laptop, but I occasionally scratched a few ideas or bits of dialogue in a notebook. I often would have some tea or coffee around. Hours varied quite a bit, but usually I wrote later in the day or night once some focus was possible away from distractions.
Please include just one excerpt and include page numbers as reference. This one excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer. Excerpt from pages 13-14 of part I. I’ve made some inserted comments about what changed, and I have the deletions for question 7, but I don’t have a photo of the marked-up draft.
Why is this excerpt so emotional for you as a writer to write? And can you describe your own emotional experience of writing this specific excerpt? The emotional experience of Elias in this scene is fivefold: first, the depiction of a child who has unsuccessfully tried to revive his dead pet (the cat Sebastian); second, the destruction of a favorite toy—the puppet Giandjuja—by his father; third, the physical pain of the grief-wracked child who has been deprived of the company of his sister (away at an arcane school of puppetry) and now his cat; fourth, the suggestive moment that the favorite companionable toy—Gianduja— is an uncanny Other, which is a developed further after this part of the scene; and fifth, the artistic failure of Elias’s attempt to apply the craft of occult puppetry to his dead cat.
Thus, Elias is outraged by tyrannical parental authority, aggrieved by sibling separation and pet-death, humiliated by the lack of his technical success, and he’s about to be galvanized by this glimpse into the puppet’s numinous but sinister eyes, a revelation that something preternatural exists outside his experience and might forever change the course of his life.
As far as my own engagement, there’s some degree of autobiography: of course I’ve experienced the pain of a dead pet, as well as experienced the tumult of parents who have lost their temper in some way and taken it out on childhood belongings. And I’ve experienced the misery of failures of art and connection with loved ones. But I certainly haven’t done what Elias had just attempted in the scene prior nor have I experienced (as of yet) uncanny puppetry. Nevertheless, I know from both a literary context and lived experience the sensory resonance of being in a thunderstorm while you’re filled with grief, and the isolation of that grief, which may be especially pronounced for a child to whom the death of a pet can be even greater than an adult. I’ll skip going into full story spoilers but Elias’s desire to transcend death and isolation is a significant part of what brought him out to that field and the encounter that follows with the puppet.
Were there any deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? And can you please include a photo of your marked up rough drafts of this excerpt. One deletion I did for this excerpt was right before the first sentence of the last paragraph I had this description: “Crawling like some confused beetle harried by a child intent on enlarging the population of his bug zoo [. . .].” I thought the tone there became a bit too absurd and distant from the pain Elias is experiencing.
Also in that last paragraph, I removed some reflections that were rather retrospective on Elias’s part and thereby would disturb the reader from direct experience: “Had I been more lucid, educated, and articulate, I would have been cursing at my parents for their injustice, at God for his evil, at Uncle Pavan for his dismissal of my talents, and at things which looked down from some seat of amused contempt to leer and glare–things that I could not name that somehow had managed to kill my pet, ruined my puppet, and pulled my sister away. But lacking philosophy or any sense of perspective, my shrieks were not in words but jumbled in a garbling sob that rose up from my throat and burst out in a nausea of grief.” I thought this section interrupted the immediacy of Elias’s childhood trauma and chopped up the narrative too glibly.
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