![]() ![]() “Take up together”) and it’s fractal in that the unnamed large concept hosts details that imply it. Well, here’s a simple literary fractal: naming a part or an aspect of something to denote the whole, such as “wheels” for a vehicle, “Washington” for the Federal Government, or “suits” for businessmen. I had applied fractal geometry to cartography in my academic days 1, but what would fractal prose look like, and was I up to that? The new book might share that pattern, but why stop there? One pattern in Meander, fractals, particularly seized my imagination. Throughout the story, action ebbed and flowed between tense and tranquil scenes. In retrospect, I realized that Turkey Shoot exhibited at least one of Alison’s patterns, wavelets. I left Mahmoud to soliloquize from limbo and propelled Katrina (having reclaimed her given name, Anna) into motherhood and an adventure as an amateur sleuth without a clue of how I would script her into action. So, I started the story with my heroine giving birth and winged it, hoping that Alison’s aesthetics would ease my labor pains. Reading Meander, Spiral, Explode helped me to escape my creative limbo and feel my way forward. I knew I had to make things right for my characters in another book, but I had only vague ideas about what it should be. Anyone who finished Turkey Shoot had to be sad for them.Įver after forcing myself to write that dismal denouement, I was dogged by remorse over what I’d done to them. For his Swiss lover and comrade Katrina, limbo was immeasurable sorrow, guilt for precipitating his demise, and a suspicion she was carrying his child. For pious Iraqi renegade Mahmoud, limbo was just that he died but only got part way to Paradise. A few months earlier, I had published my first one, an alt-conspiracy thriller whose tragic ending left the two main protagonists in limbo. When Catapult Press published Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative in 2018, I felt it could inspire me and promptly devoured it as fodder for my second novel. A word cloud generated from the text of this essay ![]()
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