Well, to date I’ve been giving myself Sunday off for each week of the write-a-thon, and being sadly unproductive on Monday, at least during the last few weeks, but today, my mind was still deep into the question of geomantic warfare from where I left off last night, so I continued on today, and actually got to an ending I’m semi-confortable with… at least, it’s better than the ones I was working towards before today.
“Geomantic warfare” makes it sound like a story full of exploding volcanoes and earthquakes, but that’s not what I ended up writing. In fact, I have a feeling it’s perhaps too quiet, and it needs a little more excitement and shaking up. But, in any case, I can think that over later. Right now, I have finished a draft and I am going to give myself a little space from the story. The later version might end up being a redraft, or it might end up involving working in some more action. I’m happy to report that all of the action takes place in what is now my current neighborhood, in Bucheon, except that it’s set 113 years ago, in 1894, before Japan’s victory over China in the Sino-Japanese war was secure, and in an early stage of an early cartographic campaign by the Japanese to make accurate military maps of Korea, Manchuria, Taiwan, and parts of China.
The challenge of the story was:
(a) to envision a counterfactual history(*) in which the amusing claim made by some Koreans that iron spikes that the Japanese drove into the stone of various mountains was intended as a facet of geomantic warfare, a kind of “bad acupuncture” directed at the gi — for which we Westerners usually use the Chinese pronunciation of the same word, “chi”— of the Korean nation as a whole,
while:
(b) not writing a story that took for granted the kinds of flat, nationalist, and predictable stereotypes that are likely to appear in such a story, namely, “Korean=good, Japanese=evil.” While I don’t dispute that the Empire of Japan was indeed villanous for Korea at the time, and for the next fifty or so years, having individual characters who are mere extensions of this villany seems to me both boring and all too supportive of the kind of anti-Japanese sentiment that it seems to me is all too widespread in Korea today, crippling any non-negative discussion of Japan in public.
[(*) At least, if you don’t believe in geomancy, it’s a counterfactual history. Those who do believe in geomancy, however, would either regard this as an alternate history — not counterfactual, since they believe geomancy works in the story as well as in the real world, but is used for a slightly different result in this story — or, if they were insulted by it, as pro-Japanese propaganda, which it isn’t, but I’m not expecting people who believe in geomancy to be overly open-minded about nuanced depictions of Japanese characters in a historical Korean setting.
In fact, I like the way this story straddles counterfactual and alternate history. There’s nothing that explicitly demonstrates the geomancy actually works, even if most, or possibly all, of the characters involved happen to believe in it. In a sense, I feel like this is in some way a more science-fictional take on the idea of geomancy, from within a version of the belief system includes a belief in geomancy.]
Writing the ending was a killer — I still don’t feel it’s quite right, though it’s not the twistiness, but rather the execution of the last scene or two that I’m not sure about. There’s also a subplot about a mistake the main character made a long time ago, as a young man, which may be unnecessary or even just clutter, I’m not sure, though I like the plot and I hope I can make it stick.
Anyway, here are the stats:
“The Broken Path