WIP Wednesday #1 - Invisible Parties - DUMAINE

Do you know Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities? It's a fabulist travelogue in which Kublai Kahn asks Marco Polo to tell him about his empire, which has grown too vast for the emperor to know. Marco Polo tells the emperor about the wonders of his empire through eloquent descriptions of cities and patterns, each and every one a poetic and thought provoking riddle.

I love this book — I first read it the first time I traveled across Europe, and really alone, for six months in 2009 while learning blacksmithing — it left an impression. (The topic also came back around a few years ago when my friend Julian K. Jarboe published Inscrutable Cities, a fabulist travel journaling game, also available in possibly an expanded edition(?) through Possum Creek Games.)

That's the important preamble to this work in progress, which began on the 1st of November!

I was discussing leaving a Halloween party with a friend and she said something about how she left when "conversations become circular," and this triggered an immediate creative impulse that I had to grab and I started writing Invisible Parties, a series of short fabulist visions of parties as a parody(?) / filk(?) / fan fiction (?). Calvino uses female names for all his cities, so I imagined that my parties are hosted by or the venue is run by the people who they're named after.

I've got six parties nicely drafted, and another half-dozen plus that are much rougher. I don't know what I'm going to do with it or where it's going. Maybe get it edited at some point, submit to a magazine, I'm open for suggestions, because I don't really know. Right now it's just something fun to tool around with and work the writing muscle an hour here and an hour there. Plus, it makes me giggle to myself! It is, on some level, a very silly and project. It's not related to the Witches or actual play in any way, but sometimes you have to follow where the creative spirit brings you.

Here's a teaser :)

Invisible Parties

1.

Revelers seek out Dumaine when they are filled-to-overflowing with banal mundanity, the tedious monotony and numbing repetition of their day-to-day lives. At this party, in the press of bodies, the drops of sweat, the shifting lights, the effervescent melodies of voices chiming together, things like obligation and duty fall away and the mind becomes clear until one feels empty of requirement, free of burden, ready to be filled with new impressions.

Entering the front room of Dumaine alone...

The rest of the passage and an audio recording of me reading it are available to paid supporters!